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137: A Barometer of Twitter

 

00:00:00   Okay, I'm all set.

00:00:01   Oh, let me just grab something real quick, one second.

00:00:03   No rush.

00:00:04   All right.

00:00:06   What'd you grab?

00:00:06   Vanilla Coke.

00:00:08   Oh, sorry, I just realized I need to grab something. Hold on.

00:00:10   Okay.

00:00:16   What did you grab?

00:00:17   I grabbed a vanilla huel.

00:00:19   Oh, that's the food thing, right?

00:00:21   Yeah, it's the meal replacement thing.

00:00:22   I was getting ready, I forgot to grab something, I knew it was something,

00:00:25   and then it's like, "Oh, vanilla, thank you for triggering it in my brain."

00:00:28   What do you think of vanilla Huel?

00:00:30   Uh, it's the best Huel.

00:00:31   Okay, but are we grading on a curve here?

00:00:33   Like it's not as good as a vanilla shake, if that's what you're asking.

00:00:36   Yeah.

00:00:36   It tastes vanilla.

00:00:37   It is a totally adequate meal replacement.

00:00:41   Is there a competitor? I forget the other one.

00:00:43   Soylent?

00:00:43   Soylent, yes.

00:00:46   It's definitely better than Soylent, I would say.

00:00:48   I think there's some weird thing with Soylent not being able to be sold in the UK anymore.

00:00:53   It seems like Huel is everywhere and Soylent has disappeared.

00:00:56   Is this one of the ones I can't have? Like is it full of nuts?

00:01:00   Is it full of nuts? I don't know.

00:01:02   Just like with Soylent, I feel like the really unfortunate names is like Soylent.

00:01:09   What's Soylent made out of? People. It's like Huell. What's Huell? Human fuel.

00:01:13   Human fuel. It's made of humans.

00:01:15   It's made of humans. Like guys, why are you picking these names? These are terrible names.

00:01:19   Like looking at their website, it doesn't say it's got nuts in it, but they might have nuts in it.

00:01:25   How are you with peas? Are peas okay?

00:01:28   - I don't know. - Yeah, peas are great.

00:01:30   Peas are awesome.

00:01:31   It says on here, like just an image,

00:01:33   I don't know why it's just an image.

00:01:35   Tapioca, sunflower seeds, coconut, pea protein,

00:01:38   flax seed and hemp seed protein.

00:01:40   I think I should be good with that.

00:01:42   Yeah, I'm not seeing anything on the one that I'm drinking

00:01:44   that looks like nuts.

00:01:45   Did Soylent have a lot of nuts?

00:01:47   No, but a lot of like protein bars.

00:01:50   It's all nuts.

00:01:52   It's just all nuts.

00:01:53   no matter what it tells you the flavor is, right?

00:01:55   It's like chocolate chip, but like 70% peanuts.

00:01:58   (laughing)

00:02:00   It's always funny to me when I see like chocolate chip

00:02:02   and then like peanut chocolate chip,

00:02:04   it's always peanut anyway.

00:02:06   So like, you know, but I found, I don't remember,

00:02:09   but years ago, like I found a company

00:02:12   that that was their thing.

00:02:14   Like we make protein bars without nuts in them.

00:02:18   So the Huel, right?

00:02:19   Does it fill you up?

00:02:20   - It totally acts as a meal replacement.

00:02:23   I think the biggest disadvantage is it's higher in carbs than I would like.

00:02:27   26 carbohydrates per individual little drink.

00:02:32   It's a bit high on the carb side if you're trying to do something that's keto to have more than one in a day.

00:02:39   But this is, shall we say, transitioning out of holiday eating mode.

00:02:43   I have never eaten so much during the holiday break before.

00:02:47   So we build a gingerbread house.

00:02:49   Idina and I build a gingerbread house every year.

00:02:51   I basically ate the entire gingerbread house,

00:02:53   which is like not a thing that I do.

00:02:55   - Wow.

00:02:56   - Usually it's like it's there,

00:02:58   and then we'll eat a little bit of it and it's gone.

00:03:00   But like over the course of like a week,

00:03:02   I ate most of the gingerbread house.

00:03:05   'Cause it was just like in the kitchen.

00:03:07   And like every time I walked past it,

00:03:08   I was like, well, I'll have another piece

00:03:09   of gingerbread house.

00:03:10   Like I was like Godzilla walking around the kitchen.

00:03:12   You know what I mean?

00:03:14   The poor villagers must have been terrified of me.

00:03:17   - Well, I'm glad you were enjoying yourself.

00:03:19   You know, that's very much the like,

00:03:21   Thanksgiving to New Year's season.

00:03:23   It's like, well, when can I physically not eat anymore?

00:03:27   Again, like I would love for the carbs to be like half

00:03:31   of what they currently have,

00:03:32   but compared to eating gigantic bowls of pasta for dinner,

00:03:37   it's very, you know, it's like, oh, we're already way ahead.

00:03:40   It was like, oh, how many carbs per meal three weeks ago?

00:03:44   I don't know, 100, 200 carbs per meal?

00:03:47   It's like, okay, so 26 is a great improvement.

00:03:50   - I like to make a recommendation for you

00:03:52   for like a thing that I like,

00:03:54   which is kind of in this vein.

00:03:56   It's a cereal called Magic Spoon.

00:03:59   - Magic Spoon, okay.

00:04:00   - Yeah, they do, it's great.

00:04:02   What I like about Magic Spoon is they do cereal

00:04:06   that is like kids cereal for adults.

00:04:10   No sugar, low carbs, high protein.

00:04:13   - I'll investigate it.

00:04:14   - And genuinely it's really good.

00:04:16   Now like all of these things,

00:04:18   it has like something weird about it.

00:04:20   Like it's got like a little chalkiness to it sometimes,

00:04:23   but the flavors are great.

00:04:25   And of all of the stuff that I've tried,

00:04:28   which is like, all of this for me is lunch replacement.

00:04:32   That's always what I'm looking for

00:04:34   because lunch is the most dangerous meal of the day for me,

00:04:37   for sure.

00:04:38   And Magic Spoon has been my favorite

00:04:40   of these that I've found.

00:04:41   I might try these Hyul things.

00:04:43   I might get one of their sampler packs and give it a go.

00:04:46   'Cause this would be the perfect kind of thing

00:04:48   for me to have in the studio.

00:04:49   I have a little fridge in the studio, right?

00:04:51   And I could just stock these up

00:04:52   and maybe a couple of days a week,

00:04:54   this is my lunch or whatever.

00:04:57   - Yeah, if you're looking for a lunch replacement,

00:04:59   for that, I highly recommend it.

00:05:01   - Okay.

00:05:02   What I don't like about these kinds of things is like,

00:05:04   why is it version 1.0, version 2.0?

00:05:07   (laughing)

00:05:09   - I'm just gonna speculate that gives you some insight

00:05:12   into the background of the founders of the company.

00:05:15   That's what that comes from.

00:05:16   Like, oh, they probably came from tech/software.

00:05:19   - All right, I'm gonna take a look.

00:05:21   - Yeah, no, this is all part of the rollover

00:05:23   from the theme of like, oh, there's two parts.

00:05:25   And one of them is work on your health.

00:05:27   And this is definitely the like, work on your health.

00:05:29   Like let's transition out of just terrible holiday eating

00:05:32   and like so far so good.

00:05:33   - How is your theme going?

00:05:36   It's probably worth setting the stage by the way,

00:05:40   that we set our themes eight weeks ago

00:05:43   by the time we're recording.

00:05:44   - Yeah. (laughs)

00:05:45   So like I have been living the year of the weekend for two months, even though it's January.

00:05:51   I was pausing there for a second when you asked me because we do have this very strange

00:05:55   time delay between when we last spoke and especially because we recorded the theme

00:06:00   episode earlier this year. Way in advance. Way in advance.

00:06:03   We recorded it like before I went on vacation in November. It was recorded a really long time ago

00:06:09   because we wanted to make sure it was done. I didn't want to record it on vacation again

00:06:14   this time like I did in 2022, the beginning of 2022.

00:06:19   - Yeah, that was the day where you were going to Disney

00:06:21   after you were done, I hated that, right?

00:06:23   Like I was nervous.

00:06:25   - It was way too much stress for me.

00:06:27   - I was like, no, no, no, we will never do this again.

00:06:29   Like I can't live with the pressure

00:06:31   that like Myke has to go to Disney.

00:06:33   So like we need to finish, like it was awful.

00:06:35   I was like, I can't delay that man going to Disney.

00:06:37   That was awful.

00:06:38   - That was just, it was a bad idea.

00:06:39   'Cause then I was like, it was on my mind that I had to edit

00:06:42   and I started editing it in the airport on the way home.

00:06:45   It was just like a bad, bad time.

00:06:46   So like this time, and I think we'll always do this,

00:06:49   get it done before the holidays.

00:06:51   For us, it's just a case of like planning.

00:06:54   So like we're still running our themes for 12 months,

00:06:56   but they're from like November to November

00:06:58   rather than January to January or whatever, you know?

00:07:01   - Yeah, yeah.

00:07:02   I think also part of the reason I was kind of hesitating

00:07:03   is I feel like ideally December/January,

00:07:10   Some period in there is like a vague transition from the previous year to the next year.

00:07:16   And that's how I feel like it's gone for me is it's a bit like, oh, we did record forever ago,

00:07:24   but I feel like mostly I've actually just started with the theme stuff two weeks ago,

00:07:30   because I was in a kind of transition period. Sort of a good way to finish the last year/also

00:07:37   start the year of work was I ended up doing a writing retreat. I'm fortunate enough to be

00:07:43   invited to these things sometimes. And so those are always just like incredibly successful

00:07:48   work periods. You're there with other people, you're focused on one thing, everybody just ends

00:07:54   up talking about whatever they're working on. And you sort of keep an eye on everybody else. I'm

00:07:59   like, "Hey, what are you doing over there? Shouldn't you be working and not just sitting around?"

00:08:04   So there's really great, really focused period of time.

00:08:07   It's just like gentle bullying.

00:08:08   Yeah, it is. It's like friendly work bullying.

00:08:11   But it's good though, yeah. I like that.

00:08:14   Something that was different this year, which ended up being a great idea,

00:08:17   was that we were all kind of, you know, like I always talk about in units,

00:08:20   of like doing units of work, kind of got everybody to be centrally tracking like

00:08:26   units of work done per day, basically right above the coffee machine,

00:08:29   which is where everybody was going all the time.

00:08:32   So that was also like a very nice gentle pressure on everybody.

00:08:35   It's like you could see where other people were in their day towards finishing however many units of work they wanted to get done.

00:08:42   It was also a nice test of some of the stuff that I'd been thinking about how I want to pick and select topics.

00:08:49   Some of the things I was working on were correctly constrained in terms of like how big can this project get,

00:08:55   or like how many things am I working on at once.

00:08:57   So it was really good and that's why that trip really felt like a big transition.

00:09:03   It's like, oh that was partly last year but it was also the beginning of this year.

00:09:06   The people on these writing retreats, are they all YouTubers or are they across different fields?

00:09:10   It's different fields, not everybody's a YouTuber.

00:09:13   I think that's good.

00:09:13   Yeah, yeah.

00:09:14   I think that makes the most sense or something like that if you can get a mix of professions.

00:09:18   Yeah, the trick to those things working well is

00:09:21   it matters that everybody does the same kind of thing

00:09:26   but it doesn't matter that you're doing it in the same medium.

00:09:30   Writing is writing, right?

00:09:31   Whether you're writing a YouTube video or a TV show or a movie or a book,

00:09:35   like, you're still writing.

00:09:36   When I get invited to these things, I do try to say yes, they always end up being

00:09:40   just very productive periods of time, but they're also just incredibly draining

00:09:44   because you can't maintain like the 10 days of just constant focus on the one

00:09:49   thing at this high level for forever.

00:09:52   But that's why it was nicely planned right before my Christmas break.

00:09:56   And flying home, the whole airport was like a plague zone.

00:10:02   I don't know what was going on this year, but coming through that airport, I felt

00:10:06   like I was in a horror film everywhere I listened, it was like coughs and sneezes.

00:10:11   It's like Flumageddon, man.

00:10:12   It's been like, this holiday season seems to have been a bit of a nightmare.

00:10:16   I feel pretty fortunate that I have escaped any kind of like even just

00:10:20   sniffles because just it feels like everyone's sick with something.

00:10:25   Yeah.

00:10:26   It's bad.

00:10:27   Yeah, it was real bad.

00:10:29   And I was in the airport of like, "I'm not getting out of here alive."

00:10:31   There's no way.

00:10:34   And sure enough, 24 hours after getting home, I was like terribly sick for a couple of weeks

00:10:39   with like a low grade flu, which I'm choosing to interpret as a final last thing from 2022.

00:10:44   And that like closes the book on the terrible year of health.

00:10:48   It's like, oh, one final thing is Christmas and New Year's was kind of very low-key from

00:10:54   being super sick.

00:10:55   But yeah, so that aside, I'm pretty happy because I've been slow to getting back into

00:11:01   work, but I've been, now that the holidays are officially over and I'm back to regular

00:11:05   normal health, I've been sort of pushing hard on the like "work on your health" part of

00:11:10   the theme, and that's partly why I was drinking the Huel now.

00:11:14   like already lost a bunch of weight. I've been back into doing regular exercises, put

00:11:20   on some muscle. And so like so far it's actually quite a good start to the year and I'm gonna

00:11:25   now like now that that has gotten started gonna slowly start ramping up the work side

00:11:30   of things as well. So that's kind of my main report from the theme. But oh actually one

00:11:35   of the little thing happened which made me kind of think about how I think it's really

00:11:40   good to have a theme to help guide your decisions.

00:11:44   And I just had a moment happen a couple of hours

00:11:47   before we started recording,

00:11:49   which is that I got an invitation to a conference.

00:11:52   And it's funny 'cause it's a conference

00:11:55   that I had constantly been encouraging the runners up

00:11:59   to be like, "Hey, you guys need to do that again.

00:12:02   That was great.

00:12:02   And let me know if you're ever thinking of doing it again."

00:12:05   And so today I got that email like,

00:12:07   "Hey, we're gonna do it again."

00:12:08   And for a moment I was like,

00:12:10   "Oh man, I really want to go to this thing."

00:12:12   And I felt kind of conflicted,

00:12:14   but the theme came into my mind and it was like,

00:12:17   "Hey, is this going to materially help you

00:12:20   "with the theme of year of work,

00:12:22   "or is this actually going to be a hindrance

00:12:25   "in the year of work?"

00:12:26   And in that framing, it's like,

00:12:27   "Man, this decision is a no-brainer."

00:12:30   Sure, I've been wanting to go to this thing for years,

00:12:32   but it just doesn't make sense,

00:12:34   and it actually becomes really easy

00:12:36   to make that decision of like,

00:12:37   "Oh, I'm gonna have to turn down this invitation,

00:12:39   like I'm very sorry."

00:12:41   But yeah, so I don't know, it felt like the theme

00:12:44   has already saved me some time sort of going forward

00:12:47   and making some decisions much easier about.

00:12:50   Now you have to turn down more invitations

00:12:52   than you did last year,

00:12:53   you have to limit the amount of travel,

00:12:54   and so yeah, this is the theme helping to guide decisions.

00:12:58   I'm still not gonna say no to all invitations.

00:13:01   I was trying to think of like a rough rule,

00:13:04   and I think my rule might be something like,

00:13:06   If I have to change time zones,

00:13:10   that's probably like a near automatic no.

00:13:14   With the slight asterisk of,

00:13:16   if it can work out that I can stay on gray master time

00:13:19   while moving, like maybe that's still a yes.

00:13:21   But yeah, so anyway, that's how I'm just thinking

00:13:23   about stuff as the year started.

00:13:25   - It is funny where it's like, you should do this again.

00:13:27   You should do this again, come on, you should do it again.

00:13:29   Okay, well I'm not coming.

00:13:31   - I know.

00:13:31   - But you should do it.

00:13:32   - I know.

00:13:35   Like, I genuinely feel bad about that.

00:13:37   I'm sure I've even said words like,

00:13:40   "Oh, if you do this again, I guarantee that I will go."

00:13:42   Right, and it's like, oh.

00:13:44   (laughs)

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00:16:14   - How's your theme going so far, Myke?

00:16:17   - You know what?

00:16:18   Very happy.

00:16:18   I feel like I have so far picked

00:16:21   the perfect theme for me this year.

00:16:23   - Oh yeah?

00:16:24   - Well, one thing that happened,

00:16:25   I guess since we last recorded,

00:16:27   is I suffered two injuries, which is,

00:16:30   I mean, really I look at it as kind of hilarious and--

00:16:32   - Injuries are not hilarious, Myke.

00:16:34   - Well, I mean, it's like one of those things

00:16:36   where you look back and it's just like,

00:16:37   I can't believe this happened to me kind of thing.

00:16:39   - It's retroactively hilarious.

00:16:41   - I sprained my ankle pretty bad a couple of days

00:16:43   before we took that vacation that I was talking about,

00:16:45   which was very upsetting because it felt like

00:16:47   that was finally my reward for what was overall

00:16:51   a very bad year.

00:16:53   And that just added onto it.

00:16:55   But through the help of my wife and a mindset change

00:16:58   and thinking about weekend,

00:17:00   I had the best vacation I've ever had.

00:17:03   - Oh, fantastic, great.

00:17:04   - Because I ended up prioritizing relaxation and recovery.

00:17:09   - Oh, good, good.

00:17:12   - And so we just basically did really nothing,

00:17:14   just like really just relaxed, enjoyed ourselves,

00:17:18   sat by the pool, ate good food, like that kind of thing,

00:17:20   which was, it was so needed and so wonderful.

00:17:23   So that felt really good.

00:17:25   Then because of the ankle sprain, I wasn't working out.

00:17:30   And then I think that weakened and exacerbated

00:17:32   an existing injury that I have in my back

00:17:35   because I went back to the gym

00:17:37   and immediately threw my back out

00:17:38   like three days before Christmas,

00:17:40   which is a thing I'm still dealing with now.

00:17:43   and I think is gonna be around for a while.

00:17:47   But in these situations, they are very frustrating.

00:17:50   But the idea of the year of weekend is about,

00:17:54   like rest is like a big element of it.

00:17:57   And so this mindset is helping me take the rest

00:18:02   that I've needed in certain areas

00:18:04   to pull me through emotionally

00:18:07   to very frustrating things that have occurred.

00:18:09   So that was like just good to have that in my mind.

00:18:13   So I was honestly very happy about

00:18:14   when we recorded the episode,

00:18:15   'cause it was like perfect.

00:18:16   It was like two days before I did,

00:18:19   I ended up spraining my ankle.

00:18:20   But me and you were texting over the break a bit

00:18:22   because I had found out you were sick

00:18:25   and you had found out about my back through our wives.

00:18:29   And I think I texted you on Christmas day

00:18:31   and was said like, I feel bad for you,

00:18:33   but at least it's like one last thing into 2022

00:18:37   about being sick before 23 starts, right?

00:18:39   That's what we were talking about,

00:18:40   which is just kind of like a funny way to look at it.

00:18:42   Just tuck it all in to 2022 and forget about it.

00:18:47   - Yeah, yeah, it all counts as 2022.

00:18:49   And now that's the past.

00:18:51   - That's the past.

00:18:52   - The past doesn't exist.

00:18:53   The past isn't real.

00:18:54   So it's, you know, poof, away it went.

00:18:57   On to 2023.

00:18:59   - So my fitness for 2023 is gonna change a little bit

00:19:02   as I'm now like having to think about

00:19:05   the midterm of the back recovery.

00:19:09   And I've seen a specialist

00:19:10   and gone through that whole thing

00:19:12   and that's just a thing I'm now gonna have

00:19:15   to start dealing with again, which is fine.

00:19:16   I've done it before, I'll work on it.

00:19:19   But I've already started making lots of decisions

00:19:22   about the way that I'm spending time,

00:19:24   and it's lots of small decisions

00:19:26   that I think add up to bigger effect.

00:19:29   So one is I leave for the studio

00:19:32   a little later in the morning.

00:19:33   A lot of this is about getting rid of wasting time.

00:19:38   So even if it is the case, it's just like,

00:19:40   I stay home and hang out, you know,

00:19:42   I stay home and play video games,

00:19:43   but just there being more time at home,

00:19:46   less time at work and kind of like further trying

00:19:49   to separate those things and create that structure.

00:19:52   And then similarly, when I'm done for the day, leaving.

00:19:56   Like not just like hanging around

00:19:58   and finding other little things to do.

00:20:00   And this is also in conjunction with scheduling changes

00:20:04   and trying to group more things together.

00:20:08   So it's less of one thing at the studio days, you know?

00:20:13   If I've got one thing, I'll make sure

00:20:15   that if I've got something else coming up,

00:20:17   I'm also gonna slot it in that day.

00:20:19   Not perfect on this yet, and it's gonna take work,

00:20:21   persistence, and difficult decisions.

00:20:24   There are gonna be things that I'll turn down,

00:20:26   or I will need to be difficult with people,

00:20:29   that kind of thing.

00:20:31   And one of the things that I'm starting to realize

00:20:35   and I'm working through is like,

00:20:38   most of the people that I work with,

00:20:39   the difficulty can be harder on me because of time.

00:20:44   An afternoon recording for one of my American co-hosts

00:20:47   is an evening recording for me.

00:20:49   - Yeah, yeah.

00:20:50   - And that is harder for me than it would be

00:20:52   if I could record it in the afternoon, right?

00:20:54   So I'm needing to kind of try and be real with myself

00:20:57   about some of the things that I'm taking on,

00:20:59   that it is more difficult

00:21:01   and I don't like working late anymore.

00:21:04   So like, this is part of why I'm needing to be

00:21:07   a little bit more tricky about some of the things

00:21:09   that I'm saying yes to.

00:21:11   You know, the key of the year of the weekend

00:21:13   is taking weekends.

00:21:15   And I have been making very conscious choices

00:21:17   about how I spend them.

00:21:19   Like I have a task and to-do list every Thursday,

00:21:22   that's like, what's your weekend?

00:21:24   Do you have a full Saturday and Sunday?

00:21:27   Are you gonna be working on one of those days?

00:21:29   If you are, what will you be doing next week

00:21:32   to make up for that time?

00:21:33   That's been really good,

00:21:34   'cause it's just making me think about it.

00:21:36   And the whole thinking about it thing

00:21:38   is like the mindset change has been really great.

00:21:40   So I'm valuing my rest time more,

00:21:43   considering it as a important thing

00:21:46   because it is part of my themes.

00:21:47   Like I should be doing this.

00:21:48   This is the year of the weekend.

00:21:50   - Right, right.

00:21:51   - Like this is the same mindset as with the year structure

00:21:54   where it was about having structure

00:21:57   to allow for unstructured time.

00:21:59   So like playing video games instead of just like hanging out

00:22:03   at my desk and not really doing anything was a good thing.

00:22:06   And that reframing was great for me.

00:22:09   And this is a similar thing.

00:22:10   Not working on the weekend is what I'm supposed to be doing.

00:22:15   So it's a tick in the column where previously it had been,

00:22:18   "Oh, I should probably get some work done

00:22:20   if I'm just gonna be hanging out."

00:22:22   So it's like rearrange, for me,

00:22:24   it's like rearranging what's most important.

00:22:27   And so that's been good.

00:22:28   So yeah, I've been pretty,

00:22:31   I've been feeling pretty good about it.

00:22:32   I'm excited for the rest of the year under this kind of banner, but I'm aware that, kind

00:22:38   of like you, it's going to take a lot of decision making all the time to make it stick, but

00:22:44   I'm happy with the results so far.

00:22:45   - One thing I've added to my little checklist, which I don't know if this works for you,

00:22:50   because we do have these weirdly aligned themes, just in opposite ways, but the day before

00:22:57   one of my weekend days, I've added a little checklist item now, which is just to think

00:23:02   about what the weekend might be tomorrow. This is to try to increase the probability

00:23:08   of the wife outside time. If we think about it the day before what we might do, it wildly

00:23:16   increases the chance of thing actually happens on day. And so already we've we've like gone

00:23:23   out more so far than we have in the past just with weekends of like thinking about, okay,

00:23:30   what might be a thing that we do that counts as outside time? And it's also funny, I know

00:23:36   like what I mentioned sometimes about like time tracking with my wife and like wife outside

00:23:40   time, people always want to know they're like, what does your wife think about that? And

00:23:44   I'll tell you, she loves the idea of wife outside time. Like she's totally thrilled

00:23:49   and on board with like, "Oh, hey, how can we make this timer tick up?" Right? So I think

00:23:54   sometimes people have actually like, "Oh, God, that sounds so horrible." But it's actually,

00:23:58   it's the reverse. It's a way to like express importance from my perspective of like, "No,

00:24:03   this is important. I should look at the timer and see that this timer has been going up

00:24:08   relative to other things." But yeah, so like, how do you turn that into an actionable item?

00:24:14   And this is one of my little things is there's like, just on the checklist, just think about

00:24:18   it for a second and even just that gentle reminder makes it way more likely like, "Oh,

00:24:22   okay, we're going to go outside today to some place," or even just like, "Oh, there's some

00:24:26   couple errand that we need to run. Let's just do that tomorrow," instead of what can very

00:24:31   easily happen on the weekends. You just kind of wake up and the day slowly slides past

00:24:37   from both of you. That's the attempt to try to decrease the number of times that occurs.

00:24:41   Yeah, I think I could maybe add this into my Thursday thing.

00:24:44   It's a little bit sooner, but like, you know, not just like, are you taking the weekend,

00:24:50   but what are you going to do with it?

00:24:51   Yeah, I find that framing is somehow more helpful than just like, oh, it's the weekends.

00:24:58   It is that framing of like, what might happen tomorrow?

00:25:01   Or what do you plan on having happen tomorrow?

00:25:03   At least so far slightly changes it in my brain.

00:25:05   As with all this stuff with like health stuff and everything else, it is always kind of

00:25:08   easier in the beginning of the year, but it's just a question of like, okay, what works

00:25:12   and what can stick and what helps remind you of different things. Do you have any idea

00:25:15   of the kinds of things that you want to do with your weekends this year?

00:25:18   Well, I mean, there is the house stuff, right? So like that's...

00:25:21   Oh God, the house!

00:25:22   On projects, a part of it.

00:25:24   That can suck up a year.

00:25:26   I think for me, especially on the non-weekend weekend days, I think would be good times

00:25:34   to arrange activities with friends, especially those friends that I have that have more flexible

00:25:39   working times, which I do. But even then it's like, because one of my biggest issues is,

00:25:44   for my friends that have regular jobs here, they do nine to fives, I never have evenings free.

00:25:51   So like if we want to go out and get a drink or a meal or whatever, I'm always,

00:25:55   "Oh, I can't do it." And like, so that's something else I've been thinking about in these days that

00:26:00   that I'm taking as weekend days,

00:26:01   it's not just the regular daytime,

00:26:04   it also means that evening could be free as well.

00:26:07   So this is something that I,

00:26:10   this is gonna take a lot of work and focus from me

00:26:13   on like doing this and I want to be for,

00:26:16   you know, in a lot of my friends situations,

00:26:18   someone who is pushing and like making the plans happen,

00:26:23   but that's something I'm not naturally good at.

00:26:27   So that is a muscle I need to strengthen.

00:26:30   - Yeah, I have no ability to help you there.

00:26:33   - Oh, I know.

00:26:35   Why me and you so seldom see each other

00:26:38   is because we are both very bad at this.

00:26:40   - Yeah, we're really bad at this.

00:26:42   But so your idea is you wanna try to be more proactive

00:26:44   about that for like you be the person

00:26:47   who causes things to happen.

00:26:48   - That's the hope.

00:26:49   - Yeah.

00:26:50   I don't know if this is really true,

00:26:51   but I do have the perception

00:26:52   that a lot of social groups exist

00:26:54   because there is just one person who is the person

00:26:57   who makes the thing happen.

00:26:59   - Yeah.

00:26:59   - That often really seems to be the case.

00:27:01   So like there's a person who is the driving person

00:27:04   behind each little social group.

00:27:06   If you have any tips and tricks in that area,

00:27:09   do you let me know, Myke?

00:27:10   - For being a friend.

00:27:12   - Yeah, for being a friend, you know.

00:27:13   - I'll let you know.

00:27:14   When I work it out, I'll let you know.

00:27:16   (laughing)

00:27:18   (chime)

00:27:19   Got a bunch of follow up.

00:27:20   Lot of little things have been happening.

00:27:23   - It's been two months.

00:27:23   course there's gonna be a lot to talk about. Lots of little things and I want

00:27:27   to talk to you about them. One is got an awesome new Roomba. Ooh new Roomba! Yeah

00:27:30   it's like the Roomba of my dreams. Okay let me check it out. It's called the Roomba

00:27:35   combo. Roomba combo okay. It vacuums and mops. Oh intriguing. Now it is not as

00:27:44   advanced as their like, because iRobot, the Roomba company, have a mopping robot

00:27:50   I don't know if you've seen it.

00:27:51   It's like a full on, sprays water out,

00:27:55   cleans up after itself.

00:27:56   Like this, the Roomba combo has a mopping pad

00:28:01   that follows the Roomba basically.

00:28:03   Like it's behind it as it's moving around.

00:28:05   But it has liquid in it.

00:28:08   So the Roomba will vacuum, but as it's moving forward,

00:28:12   leaves a trail of liquid behind it

00:28:13   and then mops it up afterwards.

00:28:15   And you can put like a cleaning solution in it.

00:28:18   But what makes this Roomba combo so good,

00:28:21   and I was watching some reviews of these things,

00:28:24   there's a great YouTube channel called,

00:28:26   I think it's called Vacuum Wars.

00:28:28   (laughing)

00:28:29   It's so good.

00:28:30   My friend Tom, like Tom and Studio Neat turned me on to this.

00:28:33   It's like, it is an incredible YouTube channel.

00:28:35   The guy just reviews all the vacuums.

00:28:38   It's just like very good.

00:28:40   - As always, like my first reaction is like,

00:28:42   how can that possibly be?

00:28:43   And then it's like, ah, the pen show, right?

00:28:45   Every everything is a world unto itself.

00:28:48   - I mean, Vacuum Wars has 266,000 subscribers.

00:28:53   (laughing)

00:28:54   And gets between 10 to 200,000 views on videos.

00:28:57   'Cause it's like-- - I love it, I love it.

00:28:59   - This is the person who knows all the vacuums.

00:29:02   They have all these testing environments that they set up.

00:29:05   They have these boxes, and he sprays different types

00:29:08   of food down and watches them, it's very good.

00:29:11   But the Roomba combo, one of the things

00:29:14   that makes the Roomba combo good,

00:29:15   'cause there are other robots that do this,

00:29:17   like joint thing, is the mopping pad

00:29:22   can be lifted and lowered for when there's carpets or rugs.

00:29:27   And this is combined with,

00:29:29   Gray, I don't know how old your Roomba is now.

00:29:32   My Roomba's pretty old.

00:29:33   My Roomba is like five years old or whatever.

00:29:35   - Yeah, no, my Roomba is due for a sole transfer soon.

00:29:38   So I've got my eye on these things, yeah.

00:29:41   - Roombas have gotten so good,

00:29:43   'cause now they have cameras in them.

00:29:45   And this camera, and it has a light on it too,

00:29:50   so it lights its way.

00:29:51   - I was like, it has a little flashlight, I just saw that.

00:29:53   - Yep, it lights its way and goes out,

00:29:55   and they have brains in them now, right?

00:29:57   And one of the things that I'm so impressed with,

00:30:00   I have a bunch of things I'm impressed with.

00:30:02   So one, it detects the rugs and knows what the rugs are,

00:30:05   so it won't mop the rug.

00:30:06   It does not bump into stuff as much.

00:30:09   One of the things that was always so funny

00:30:11   as our old Roomba, Robbie,

00:30:14   when cleaning around the dining table,

00:30:16   it was just a nightmare.

00:30:17   Bang, bang, bang, bang, every chair, everything.

00:30:20   Rambo, the new Roomba, doesn't bump into the table.

00:30:25   'Cause he knows it's there.

00:30:27   And it also does all this stuff where, like again,

00:30:30   Robbie expected that all the rooms never changed.

00:30:34   And if anything changed, he'd get a bit confused.

00:30:38   where Rambo expects things to change.

00:30:42   And so like has the map,

00:30:44   but is willing to see what's going on.

00:30:47   And like, if something changes in the room,

00:30:49   it's not like if it doesn't clean that area,

00:30:51   like he can see something's changed in the room

00:30:53   and we'll go around and clean it.

00:30:55   And now as well, when he finishes the job,

00:30:59   sends you a report and the report has pictures in it

00:31:02   of like, what is this obstacle?

00:31:04   Like, is this a permanent obstacle?

00:31:06   - Oh, I see.

00:31:07   - Okay, so it's asking you, like, "Yeah, I ran into a thing. What is this thing?" Interesting.

00:31:12   - Including cables. So Rambo does not chew up cables like Robby used to.

00:31:17   - Yeah.

00:31:18   - And, like, recognizes the cables and is like, "What's going on here?" Also something...

00:31:24   This might be good for you, I don't know, probably you wouldn't need it, but it's the pet people.

00:31:28   They've seemed to have done so much work on detecting animal droppings.

00:31:32   - None of the dogs who stay with us do any of that. - I know that in the grey household this could never be a problem.

00:31:37   that and ever how that works.

00:31:39   They are very well trained.

00:31:42   We clean their paws before they can come back in the house.

00:31:45   It's a whole routine.

00:31:46   Cleanest dogs in England.

00:31:48   - I've seen the cleaning.

00:31:49   I've seen the dog cleaning off the walks.

00:31:51   It's very intense.

00:31:53   But these Roombas empty themselves, which is so good.

00:31:57   Old Roomba, old Robbie, we had to empty him.

00:31:59   But they have these bases,

00:32:01   which have an extra vacuum in them, right?

00:32:03   And apparently it can do like six,

00:32:06   it can like empty it like 60 times or something

00:32:08   before you would need to empty the base,

00:32:11   which is also very good.

00:32:13   And then you can also do the,

00:32:15   you know, it will do a map of the floor plan.

00:32:17   And then in the app, you can delineate rooms,

00:32:20   even if it's an open floor plan, like make zones,

00:32:24   and name those zones. - Oh, nice.

00:32:25   - So then you could say, go and clean the kitchen.

00:32:28   You know, drive out, clean the kitchen, go back.

00:32:31   I can't believe how much better these products

00:32:34   have gotten in the last five years or whatever.

00:32:36   It's kind of incredible, like the leaps.

00:32:39   The difference between Rambo and, like I love Robbie,

00:32:42   you know, he's part of the family.

00:32:43   Robbie's not going anywhere, he's gonna go upstairs, right?

00:32:45   And Robbie's gonna do upstairs.

00:32:47   (laughing)

00:32:48   But Rambo is like, he's got a big brain going on in there.

00:32:52   He's a smart guy.

00:32:53   - Yeah, no, it looks interesting.

00:32:55   I think the test that I would wanna do is,

00:32:57   we don't really have to worry about the pet accidents,

00:33:00   but the pet toys are the big problem.

00:33:02   And like one of our dog guests was very sad

00:33:05   because his bone had disappeared the other day

00:33:06   and it's like, oh, I found it in Roomba, right?

00:33:09   It's like Roomba had sucked it up.

00:33:11   Oh, this is where your bone went.

00:33:12   I'm so sorry, here's a brand new one.

00:33:14   - Yeah, I've seen it in the "Vacuum Wars" video.

00:33:17   Like it's not perfect, right?

00:33:19   Like it will grab things, but it seemed very good.

00:33:22   Like he was doing it with toys and stuff.

00:33:24   And most of the time it's like going around them.

00:33:27   - Yeah, that's what I'm curious about.

00:33:29   Yeah, I don't know.

00:33:30   I have to put this on the consider list.

00:33:32   - I think that base for us is a little bit tricky

00:33:34   because we don't have a great spot for base.

00:33:36   - You don't have to do that.

00:33:37   - Oh, is that optional?

00:33:38   - Yeah, it's optional.

00:33:39   It's an optional additional purchase.

00:33:42   - Oh, okay, I thought that,

00:33:44   'cause whatever it was their last one had a base,

00:33:45   but it wasn't optional.

00:33:47   It had to work with it.

00:33:49   But if there's a not base option,

00:33:51   then we might consider that.

00:33:52   - Yeah, I believe you can get one

00:33:55   that's just a regular charging base,

00:33:57   not the big vacuum charging base.

00:34:00   One of the things we absolutely love is when it's Rumpus time to vacuum.

00:34:05   We have ours just perfectly hidden right under this little cabinet in the kitchen that is

00:34:09   just barely taller than he is.

00:34:12   And so like it is so cute to watch him like back up and come out and be and then like

00:34:16   go back in after he's done.

00:34:18   It is never not funny to watch like we just you know can't not look at it for a second.

00:34:23   But that's partly just a space constraint that we just don't have anywhere to put a

00:34:27   real base like that in the house.

00:34:29   So yeah that's interesting.

00:34:30   So the one I have is the J7 combo, but the difference is one has the bass and one doesn't.

00:34:37   Ah, I've got to think about it. It might be time for a Roomba upgrade. This looks very interesting.

00:34:43   I wanted to ask you if you had played around with Obsidian Canvas?

00:34:49   Oh no. So I saw that this came out. I think this is, for anybody who's listening and uses Obsidian, this might be an interesting tool to try.

00:34:59   This looks a bit like some of the tools that you use sometimes, of just like, you have a more flexible workspace where you can connect a bunch of different text boxes and images with lines.

00:35:11   It's just like a digital whiteboard is the way it looks like.

00:35:13   But what I like about the look of this, so I've been eyeing this Gray, this is the first time...

00:35:18   No, wait, wait a minute, what do you mean you've been eyeing this?

00:35:21   This is the first time I have ever looked at Obsidian and could see myself there.

00:35:26   - Oh my God, that's, no way, really?

00:35:29   - Because what I like about it is you can have

00:35:33   all of your notes as you do, right,

00:35:35   and they can be whatever, but then you can create

00:35:38   these boards that are visual representations of things,

00:35:42   which could include web pages and images and videos,

00:35:45   but also the notes embedded in the page.

00:35:49   And there's just something about that where I'm like,

00:35:52   that works how my brain works.

00:35:55   So I've had the webpage open for a while

00:35:57   and I have yet to dive in,

00:35:59   but I've been wondering if like this

00:36:02   could be something for me.

00:36:03   This could do what I'm using craft for, right?

00:36:07   Anyway.

00:36:07   - Yeah, yeah.

00:36:08   - But could also give me this additional thing,

00:36:11   which is this like,

00:36:12   rather than having like a folder of notes.

00:36:16   So let me give you an example, right?

00:36:17   So one of the things that I will do is,

00:36:20   so like say with the theme system journal, right?

00:36:22   I have a whole folder of notes for the journal.

00:36:25   But if I'm planning something new, right,

00:36:28   like let's imagine that when I did the new layout,

00:36:30   the 2.0 layout, right, which is what's in there now,

00:36:33   I had my drawings,

00:36:36   and then I had manufacturer's information,

00:36:40   then I had pricing information, and all that kind of stuff.

00:36:43   Now I could imagine having a 2.0 board

00:36:48   that had all of that just visible in one place,

00:36:51   And I like that instead of looking at just like a list of notes in a folder, I could

00:36:56   just see them all.

00:36:57   So like I could need one piece of information.

00:36:59   I got it here.

00:37:00   I got another piece of information there.

00:37:03   Like it seems really intriguing to me.

00:37:05   I mean, I'll just also just point out that presuming that it works in Dropbox, which

00:37:09   I imagine it does, you could have limited sharing with somebody else for some of these

00:37:14   if that's the thing that you wanted to do.

00:37:15   Yeah, it's funny.

00:37:16   I didn't really think about you using it.

00:37:18   I looked at it and I thought about you just in the sense of, "Oh, this is like the tool

00:37:23   that Myke likes to use."

00:37:25   A kind of virtual whiteboard.

00:37:27   And I can 100% see why lots of people are interested in this.

00:37:31   Which is why if you've heard me talk about Obsidian, I think it might be interesting

00:37:34   for anyone to just go look at this tool and see if it might be something that you want

00:37:37   to use.

00:37:38   But I literally haven't opened it or tried it on my Obsidian install because this kind

00:37:44   of thing just isn't for me.

00:37:46   is not the way my brain wants to organize information. I'm much more like the thing

00:37:51   that I want and I think the maximum version of this which Obsidian does but it's like

00:37:56   the Rome research version of this where you have a kind of everything is a bullet point

00:38:01   in a list and you can like indent, out dent or like open and close different levels of

00:38:06   that bullet pointed list. That's what I use Obsidian for and that's always kind of the

00:38:10   my brain works is like I want to have this and the arranging things in arbitrary space

00:38:16   on a whiteboard. It just has never really worked for me. But I do think it's a very

00:38:20   smart move by the Obsidian developers to add this other tool. Oh, now they must capture

00:38:27   like 95% of the way people want to organize random notes. You fall into these two camps.

00:38:33   Do you want it more visual? Or do you want it more just purely text based? I mean, look,

00:38:38   I'll just say, Myke, if you ever want to play around with Obsidian, I am more than happy

00:38:43   to help you get set up with it, if that's a thing that you want to do.

00:38:46   Myke: Maybe actually, because I, the only reason, because it's been out for a while

00:38:50   in the beta at least, I think it might be in the shipping version now, since I first

00:38:54   looked at it.

00:38:55   Brian: It is in the shipping version now, it's released in the shipping version now.

00:38:57   Myke; Because this went in, again, how long has it been, this went into my show notes

00:39:00   document when they had it in like their first kind of open preview of it.

00:39:05   Yeah, I only found out about it through the changelog updates to the shipping version.

00:39:10   And with Obsidian, I'm like, please give me the stable only branch.

00:39:14   This is not the time to use your beta software.

00:39:17   But like, I'm just, I feel quite intimidated about starting.

00:39:21   Yeah, you're not wrong to because Obsidian is like a real big thing to just open and

00:39:28   go look at just a ton of those options.

00:39:30   So I'm happy to hold your hand through the Obsidian setup and guide you to just the relevant

00:39:36   things to whatever it is you're trying to accomplish.

00:39:39   That is a very intriguing prospect to me.

00:39:41   I'm gonna put a pin in that one, I wanna come back to that.

00:39:44   Because I need a guide and then I'll be fine.

00:39:48   I will be your Obsidian guide.

00:39:51   This episode is brought to you by Fitbod.

00:39:53   Hey, it's a new year, typically a time many of us are thinking about changing up our fitness

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00:42:00   show and relay FM.

00:42:03   We had mentioned the pens that we collaborate with the aforementioned Studio Ne on the Mark

00:42:08   1 pens.

00:42:09   Oh yeah yeah.

00:42:10   We mentioned them before they weren't in stock. They are in stock now so if you go to cortexmerch.com

00:42:14   we have a small number and we're ordering more.

00:42:16   I'm hoping to try and keep them more in stock now.

00:42:18   So if you heard us mention it,

00:42:20   and you heard us say we don't have any, none to sell you,

00:42:23   we do currently have some to sell you.

00:42:25   So go to cortexmerch.com and you can see it there.

00:42:27   Well, you should be able to.

00:42:28   Again, the numbers are always limited,

00:42:30   but as of right now, we have them.

00:42:32   - I was just trying to remember like,

00:42:34   wait, why did we mention that we have pens

00:42:36   that you couldn't buy at the time,

00:42:38   but it was the theme episode.

00:42:39   We were reviewing like what had been going on

00:42:42   and talking about, oh, we have this product

00:42:43   that we never talk about because it's very hard to keep it in stock.

00:42:47   We're just having that as part of the theme review of the year.

00:42:50   But yes, I love these pens and we definitely still are in that difficult to keep in stock

00:42:56   phase with it, a bit like we were with the journal years ago.

00:42:59   So go check it out right now at cortexmerch.com.

00:43:03   Limited numbers, hopefully slightly less limited this time, but yeah, we'll see how it goes.

00:43:08   I have some scripts for you.

00:43:10   What do you mean you have a script for me?

00:43:12   I have asked ChatGPT to write three cold opens for the show.

00:43:19   I mean, Myke, how can you just jump into something like this?

00:43:26   You don't even want to tell the people what ChatGPT is?

00:43:30   I can't, right?

00:43:31   I don't think I have the ability to do that.

00:43:34   I don't have the words.

00:43:35   Maybe you have the words.

00:43:36   I don't have them.

00:43:37   Okay, wait.

00:43:38   Before you talk about the script, I went back and I listened to the last sort of in-time

00:43:45   episode we did, which is two episodes ago, before the themes episode, before the state

00:43:50   of the apps, when we were just having a regular Cortex and talking in October.

00:43:55   We both made a joke at the end about how we had two episodes about AI art in a row and

00:44:02   like how fast and suddenly all of this thing was coming online.

00:44:06   And at the end of that episode, we realized, "Oh, we won't be able to have an in-time episode

00:44:10   until January."

00:44:11   And we were like, "Oh my god, what on earth is gonna happen between now and January?"

00:44:17   And I feel like, man, we did not have any idea what was gonna happen.

00:44:22   I literally think what happened was like day zero for the whole of the internet suddenly

00:44:30   becoming aware that AI is really a thing.

00:44:34   It was early December, this tool called ChatGPT was released, which is like an AI chatbot

00:44:41   that you can talk to.

00:44:44   And this is the thing that I'd said it many times during our AI Art episodes, where I

00:44:49   kept talking about how like the AI art is cool, the language models are scary.

00:44:55   But it was always kind of hard, like I was just saying a thing, because I had seen private

00:45:00   demos behind the scenes about some of this stuff.

00:45:03   And it's a bit hard in that scenario to like try to convince people, but it's like, "Oh

00:45:08   no!"

00:45:09   Like the language models are now very public and people can play with them and talk to

00:45:14   them and see what they can do.

00:45:17   And I happened to be at home with my parents the day it came out.

00:45:20   Boy, was that an interesting day on the internet.

00:45:23   And I like I was showing my parents this kind of tech demo of like, "Look, there's this

00:45:27   This thing you can talk to and it will respond in very smart ways that you wouldn't expect.

00:45:34   You can ask questions of it and it can give you answers.

00:45:38   You can ask it to do all sorts of tasks and it can complete them.

00:45:42   So yeah, ChatGPT is like the first public-facing, actually useful in some circumstances, language

00:45:50   model that people can play and test with and see.

00:45:54   So that's the background just in case someone hasn't heard about it and hasn't messed around

00:45:59   with it.

00:46:00   So now tell me, what did you ask ChantGPT to do in terms of a script?

00:46:05   What I wanted it to do was to give us a cold open intro for the episode, so the thing that

00:46:11   happens before the "doodling," you know?

00:46:14   Which very frequently in the show's history has had some kind of conversation about microphone

00:46:19   issues.

00:46:20   Well yeah.

00:46:21   asked it for prompts in these areas.

00:46:24   One of them was write a cold open intro for the Cortex

00:46:27   podcast featuring CGP Grey and Myke Hurley.

00:46:29   Ensure there is some conversation about issues

00:46:32   with microphone setups.

00:46:34   That was the first one.

00:46:36   I had to-- like this is-- well, this wasn't the first one.

00:46:38   I asked it a couple of things before,

00:46:39   and it kept talking about brains.

00:46:41   So I had to kind of like bring it around again.

00:46:45   Do you want to read through these

00:46:47   as the AI has written them?

00:46:48   Well, I don't know, because I feel

00:46:50   like the one I'm looking at that you have in the show notes is just not very good because

00:46:55   that's what I that's why so I have three I think these three differ in their goodness

00:47:02   okay so here's here's the first one so Myke and I will be performing our roles as written

00:47:06   for us by GPT begin scene hey everyone welcome back to another episode of Cortex I'm CGP

00:47:15   Grey and with me as always is Myke Hurley hey there happy to be here as always but

00:47:20   But man, I had a bit of a nightmare setting up my microphone today.

00:47:24   My computer seemed to be having some issues and I wasn't getting any sound on my end.

00:47:28   Oh no, that sounds frustrating.

00:47:30   I know I've had my fair share of microphone issues in the past.

00:47:33   It's always a bit of a hassle to get everything right.

00:47:36   Yeah, it can be a real pain.

00:47:38   But we're finally all set up and ready to go.

00:47:40   So let's dive into today's topic.

00:47:42   Sounds good to me.

00:47:43   Let's get started.

00:47:44   Intro music fades out.

00:47:46   End scene.

00:47:48   That's bad because it's just extremely generic.

00:47:52   Extremely generic.

00:47:53   Well one thing, ChatGPT doesn't know who would be most likely to have the issues.

00:47:57   In ChatGPT's world, I have a problem, which never happens.

00:48:02   Never happens Myke?

00:48:03   Never happens.

00:48:04   Tell me when it happened.

00:48:05   I feel like it happened off microphone.

00:48:08   We just never have been able to capture it live.

00:48:10   That's why we're having this memory.

00:48:12   I think that's the way it works.

00:48:13   Also we'll just pause here for a second because, well maybe we'll talk about it later, but

00:48:17   But ChatGPT has some weird limitations on it.

00:48:23   And one of these things is like, they limited how much it knows about the current world.

00:48:29   And I think there's just an interesting question of like, does it know what the Cortex podcast

00:48:34   even is?

00:48:36   So that's why I feel like this is a hard one, because it might not have any concept of the

00:48:40   Cortex podcast.

00:48:41   It does.

00:48:42   There's been some ways that I asked this question, they just weren't very interesting.

00:48:47   They were using words from our show description and episode descriptions to talk about what

00:48:55   Cortex was.

00:48:56   So like, "productivity show" we're gonna actually one of them does have it so like

00:49:01   you'll hear it in the third example.

00:49:04   Okay.

00:49:05   That you know it feels like it's just googled Cortex but like at least it is aware of it

00:49:10   enough.

00:49:11   Okay, all right so do you want to run through the second one?

00:49:13   Yeah.

00:49:14   Okay.

00:49:15   Begin scene.

00:49:16   The sound of static and muffled voices can be heard as the episode begins.

00:49:20   Myke, what's going on with the microphones?

00:49:24   Just a sec.

00:49:25   Let me check the connections.

00:49:27   It's always something with these microphones.

00:49:30   Welcome to the Cortex Podcast, where technical difficulties are just another part of the

00:49:34   show.

00:49:35   I guess you're right.

00:49:36   Alright, we're good to go.

00:49:38   Let's get started.

00:49:39   Today, we're going to talk about the latest advancements in neural networks and how they're

00:49:43   changing the way we think about AI.

00:49:46   And we'll also be discussing some of the ethical implications of these developments.

00:49:50   It's going to be a great episode, so let's dive in.

00:49:54   The sound of intro music begins to play as the episode officially starts.

00:49:57   So there's also stage directions in this one, which just threw me in the middle of

00:50:02   it.

00:50:03   I didn't read them out loud, but it's like more static and muffling.

00:50:06   The sound of the microphones being adjusted can be heard.

00:50:09   It's also telling us to laugh, which is also weird.

00:50:12   - Yeah, so it's giving us emotional instructions

00:50:15   like CGP Grey colon brackets frustrated.

00:50:18   Myke, what's going on with these microphones?

00:50:20   Myke Hurley, calmly, just a sec,

00:50:22   let's check the connections.

00:50:24   So this again is like,

00:50:26   I think we need to just pause here for a moment

00:50:29   because even this is kind of mind blowing

00:50:33   when you start playing around with it

00:50:34   to realize like, oh, I can type into a machine,

00:50:37   give me a script for a podcast,

00:50:41   And it does spit out like this is as stage directions or more like closed captions, right?

00:50:46   Here's the person, here's the sound that's taking place in the background.

00:50:50   Here's what they're saying, like alternating the dialogue between these two people.

00:50:53   Even here, just a little bit, one of the bigger deals that you can see is it

00:51:00   understands the previous state of things, which was always a limit with the older

00:51:05   tools like GPT-3, which is why they were never very impressive, is it would just

00:51:10   like respond to the previous sentence and tell you something and that was it.

00:51:15   Whereas here you can just be like, just keep writing a conversation and it will keep track

00:51:20   of the state of the conversation.

00:51:22   Like the conversation can progress and respond to itself in all sorts of ways that it couldn't

00:51:27   before.

00:51:28   So do you want to go through the third conversation here?

00:51:31   Yeah, I think this is the best one.

00:51:32   I gave it a little bit more.

00:51:34   Okay.

00:51:35   My prompt was write a cold open for the Cortex podcast of CGP Grey and Myke Hurley.

00:51:39   They are having microphone issues as always.

00:51:42   At the end, they say levels, levels.

00:51:44   - Oh, okay, all right.

00:51:45   Okay, begin scene.

00:51:48   Sound of microphone feedback.

00:51:51   Oh, here we go again.

00:51:52   - Yep, it's just another day at the Cortex office.

00:51:55   - Can you hear me now?

00:51:56   - Not really, no.

00:51:58   - All right, let me adjust the levels here.

00:52:00   - Yeah, levels.

00:52:01   Levels are key.

00:52:02   - Okay, I think we're good now.

00:52:04   - Finally.

00:52:05   - Welcome to Cortex.

00:52:06   I'm CGP Grey, and with me as always is Myke Hurley.

00:52:09   - Yep, and we are having microphone issues, as always.

00:52:12   - Yep, but we're here to talk about all things

00:52:15   productivity, creativity, and technology.

00:52:18   - Levels, levels.

00:52:19   - Levels, levels, let's get started.

00:52:21   - That's the best one, I think.

00:52:24   - I still feel like it's a little generic,

00:52:26   but it's interesting that with the greater direction,

00:52:29   you can push it.

00:52:30   - You can force it.

00:52:31   - More towards creating what it is that you wanna create.

00:52:34   I think this kind of thing would be much better

00:52:36   if you used examples of vastly more well-known people that it would have databases of. Like,

00:52:44   I think that's why you end up getting this, like, genericness, is it just doesn't really know very

00:52:50   much about us. But if you pick to, like, celebrities or well-known politicians,

00:52:55   people for whom there's a large corpus of them talking, having played around with ChatGPT,

00:53:00   you can get some absolutely frighteningly impressive examples of whatever it is you're

00:53:07   looking for. It's particularly good at poetry. Yeah, they use that example a lot. Like for

00:53:12   example, I was trying to get some of these, because the first one I did ages ago, and the

00:53:17   two most recent ones, I actually got those today, because for the past few days I've been trying to

00:53:22   access chatgpt and it's been down because of load issues or whatever, and on their kind of like

00:53:28   waiting screen as such? They just generate poetry?

00:53:31   Uh yeah I was just loading up it now and it's yeah I'm getting the same thing of like

00:53:34   chatgpt is at capacity right now. Probably because the whole world is trying to use it.

00:53:40   The thing that of course I wanted to see just straight away was when I first got a chance to

00:53:47   try it hands-on was I asked it basically sort of generic school homework essay type questions.

00:53:55   So here's the thing that you can do, right? You can say, "I need a book report about the themes

00:54:02   in Lord of the Flies as they relate to modern politics in Germany, written as though I was

00:54:11   a 10th grader in Germany." And it will do that, right? Like it'll boom boom boom boom,

00:54:16   like totally spit out a very good seven paragraph essay that will do that kind of thing.

00:54:25   and the ability to even tweak it to be like, "Don't make it too good, right? I'm just in

00:54:30   12th grade or I'm in fourth grade." My dad had a really good one where he asked it something along

00:54:36   the lines of, "I'm a fourth grader and need to do a presentation on grasshoppers or something,

00:54:44   like some kind of insect, and please write the script for me for what I need to say in front

00:54:48   of the class as a fourth grader." Oh my god, this was unbelievably good for like, this is exactly

00:54:54   what a fourth grader would would do and say if they were writing a report on some bug.

00:54:58   I did the Lord of the Flies one as you were talking.

00:55:00   It's good.

00:55:02   Oh, did you get through?

00:55:03   Yeah.

00:55:04   Yeah, my first take on this was, "Oh, this is the death of homework."

00:55:08   Yeah.

00:55:11   Why do you say, "Yeah, I like that."

00:55:12   Well, okay, so I, for homework, maybe it will fly because by and large, right, like I'm imagining,

00:55:21   you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm imagining most homework essays read similarly from kids,

00:55:28   like there isn't a lot of like variation, except for I expect in some outstanding students or

00:55:33   whatever might be able to turn something in which is genuinely different in some way, right?

00:55:37   But like what I feel like I've seen a lot with chat GPT is people saying like,

00:55:44   "This is gonna change marketing because of this." And then they, you know, they will

00:55:49   give a prompt and they'll have some kind of response.

00:55:51   And the response is they just feel like somebody went

00:55:54   to Google and typed in the question

00:55:56   and then copy and pasted the answers.

00:55:58   'Cause that is, I feel like ultimately at the moment,

00:56:01   a lot of what is going on here, right?

00:56:04   It's like this information exists somewhere online.

00:56:08   This model that they are using has sucked

00:56:10   in all this information and can interpret it.

00:56:12   But what that means is, at least to me it feels like,

00:56:16   a lot of the stuff is written like that.

00:56:19   Like somebody went to Google and Wikipedia

00:56:22   and did some research and wrote something about it.

00:56:25   Like that doesn't feel like a lot of originality,

00:56:27   at least in some of these things that I've seen

00:56:29   which tend to be along the lines of like,

00:56:32   "Oh, watch out for your job."

00:56:35   And again, this is whatever version it is, right?

00:56:39   But it's effectively to the public version one.

00:56:42   It is already very impressive here,

00:56:44   But I just don't know if I would be ready to say, like, this is the end of every type

00:56:48   of thinking work because ChatGPT can just do it for us.

00:56:51   Yeah, I want to be clear here.

00:56:53   I'm not saying it's the end of every kind of thinking work, right?

00:56:56   That's not what ChatGPT is.

00:56:58   No way.

00:56:59   But it's what a lot of people are saying, right?

00:57:01   You know, like, I feel like a lot of the conversation is just like, "Wow, this is it now."

00:57:06   Well, yeah, so even though I have definitely been the AI doom and gloom person, ChatGPT

00:57:12   its current form I don't think is that. There's a reason there's a reason that I picked homework

00:57:18   in particular. Yeah because homework to me is just I mean so much of it is just obvious

00:57:24   bullsh*t work and it's it's like not really I mean like I'm just I'm trying to think about

00:57:30   how to express some ideas. One of the things with a lot of questions that like you as a

00:57:36   As a teacher, you actually kind of want very low variance in the essays you get back from

00:57:43   students because it makes them way easier to mark.

00:57:46   So like if you're a student and you've ever had your school teach you something of like,

00:57:51   "Oh hey, if you're writing a little essay that needs to argue for a point, it needs

00:57:55   to follow this five paragraph structure."

00:57:58   It's like, "You introduce the idea with 'and here is your thesis' and then you have like

00:58:04   three paragraphs about it and then you summarize why that was great in the end or whatever.

00:58:09   Like different schools have different versions of this.

00:58:12   You're not being given that because it's a great way to write a convincing essay.

00:58:16   You're given that because it's real easy to mark.

00:58:19   That's why you are given that.

00:58:22   Is like, oh, if I have to spend less of my marks and thinking time on the actual essay

00:58:29   and can instead be evaluating structure of things, that dramatically reduces the workload

00:58:35   in marking an essay. Like that might not be obvious, but like schools don't teach you

00:58:41   how to write convincingly. They're optimizing for a teacher has to mark a 100 or 200 or 300

00:58:48   of these things. And so having them all be in a format. As a student for written homework

00:58:55   questions and like book reports and all kinds of things. There's a weird way in which you're kind

00:59:02   of punished for thinking very creatively or doing something different. You need to have something

00:59:08   that just like fits in the pipeline and in many ways you're kind of optimizing for not catching

00:59:15   the teacher's attention. And that's why I think like ChatGPT is like, "Oh my god, it's the most

00:59:21   perfect tool for this. That's what's going on here.

00:59:24   The fourth grade of grasshopper thing by the way is awesome.

00:59:26   Oh, okay. Can you, you want to read this little sample? I still can't get through.

00:59:30   Hi everyone. Today I'm going to talk to you about grasshoppers. Grasshoppers are really

00:59:34   cool bugs that you might see in your backyard or at the park. They're green and have big legs,

00:59:39   so they can jump really far. Grasshoppers eat plants and leaves and they have big jaws that

00:59:44   help them chew up their food. They also have big eyes so they can see where they're going when they

00:59:48   they jump. This is my favorite part though. Grasshoppers lay their eggs in the ground

00:59:51   and when they hatch they look like little mini grasshoppers. They grow bigger and bigger

00:59:55   until they become adults. That's it for my presentation about grasshoppers. I hope you

01:00:00   learn something new and cool about these bugs. Thanks for listening.

01:00:03   That's great. That really is like a fourth grader.

01:00:05   It's great, right? Like including the "Hi everyone!" Like, it's great.

01:00:09   Do they look like mini grasshoppers or do they look like larvae? I don't actually

01:00:12   know. But that seems like something a kid would

01:00:13   say, right? Totally. Yeah, yeah. That's a perfect kid

01:00:16   And like you totally, you totally can get really creative things out of this.

01:00:23   Okay.

01:00:24   So one of the, one of, here's one of the issues that I've had with what's

01:00:26   happened with ChatGPT when it came out is if anyone's listening to this show now,

01:00:31   and they're like, "Oh, I haven't heard of this thing before, let me go try it."

01:00:34   The version that you're going to try is almost certainly less interesting

01:00:40   than the version right now that Myke and I are talking about.

01:00:44   about and it's definitely less interesting than the one that went out on launch day because

01:00:50   I have a feeling that the people behind chatgpt were quite surprised by like the entirety

01:00:58   of the internet trying to get this thing to do everything on one day and it became very

01:01:06   clear that they were like live coding in more and more restrictions on what it would do

01:01:12   do, or what it wouldn't do, or what it would say, or what it would not say.

01:01:17   And so it was very fun to be on the internet on launch day where you could like, where

01:01:21   people were doing all sorts of things to like trick it or try to get around its restrictions,

01:01:28   and it was super interesting that first day, and I've been using it since, and it's

01:01:33   clearly become less interesting and much more formulaic with a lot of stuff.

01:01:37   I mean, it was also a little bit more depressing too, right?

01:01:41   Because there was so many biases

01:01:44   because based on what the internet was pulling in.

01:01:46   - Yeah, but like what these systems are is they're,

01:01:53   they're like, here's my problem.

01:01:58   So when people describe how these things work,

01:01:59   you talk about, oh, it's kind of producing

01:02:02   like a statistically likely output

01:02:06   based on the input of text.

01:02:08   And I think that both kind of over

01:02:11   and under sells the thing.

01:02:14   Like there's a way in which people use that to dismiss it,

01:02:18   where they go, well, there's no thinking that's happening.

01:02:20   It's just, you fed it a bunch of text

01:02:22   and it's just giving you back what's in the text.

01:02:25   It's like, yes, that's true.

01:02:27   But I also kind of think that's what a lot

01:02:29   of people are doing.

01:02:30   Like I really think a lot of people are very chat GPT like,

01:02:34   where it's like, when you talk to someone, I don't know, sometimes you could feel more

01:02:38   and more like, "Oh, I'm just talking with a thing that's giving me like the most probable

01:02:41   answers in this conversation."

01:02:43   I mean, or sometimes like, I'm talking with the Facebook algorithm. Like, I can feel that

01:02:47   in talking to you. I can see where you get your news and I can see where what is affecting

01:02:52   you. And I, you know, like, I feel like I am talking to a news algorithm in a person.

01:02:59   Yeah, it's funny that you bring that up because...

01:03:03   So if anyone listening to this show ever does the thing that I have often suggested, which

01:03:08   is like pulling back from news in very many ways or like try or like I've done, you take

01:03:13   major breaks from the internet.

01:03:15   There totally is what you've just said, Myke, this weird thing that becomes much more obvious

01:03:22   is like how ideas are spread and how ideas get into people and you can like you were

01:03:32   aware of it before but when you're really distant from things it becomes very clear

01:03:37   like oh I'm not talking to a person I'm talking to this news channel and like that's

01:03:42   everything that's in that person's head or like you said oh this is like I know

01:03:45   what corner of the internet this person exists in and I'm talking to that corner of the

01:03:51   internet. And so yeah, like, I think that's actually a really good way to describe the

01:03:56   way ChatGPT works in person form. And yeah, we can know that experience. So, so this is

01:04:04   why I think it's funny when people use this to like undersell what ChatGPT is doing and

01:04:09   they're like, ah, it can't be very interesting. It's just going to reflect whatever it's

01:04:12   been fed. Yeah. But also I think that's how brains work. Like they reflect what they

01:04:18   have been fed? So like this is not the the slam-dunk argument against this system being

01:04:24   able to do things?

01:04:25   Well I do have a counterpoint on that which is if we like you know for the type of person

01:04:31   that believes that this is like the future of everything right of which there are definitely

01:04:35   a subset of people if chat gbt just works by what it is ingested if we assume that all

01:04:42   great thought will come from these AI robots in the future where are they going to get

01:04:47   the new from? Like if they end up just like cycling through all of the stuff that other

01:04:52   AI has generated. Like that's the thing that I don't know if I know the answer to that,

01:04:56   right? Like if these things work by ingesting a bunch of stuff, where does the new come

01:05:02   in?

01:05:03   I mean, look, we can't possibly do this because it would just take too long. I think to have

01:05:06   a complete conversation about what is occurring with AI and where can it go is a question

01:05:15   that really has to dive quite deeply down into what do you think thinking is and that,

01:05:24   like many things, ultimately dives down to the very bottom of the universe, atoms and

01:05:30   electromagnetic fields interacting with each other. And like I've had that conversation

01:05:35   with people but that's just like it's too much to talk about in a podcast. Like it just

01:05:39   takes forever. Like my summary on it is my like my perspective is that what we are doing

01:05:47   in metal and software is not fundamentally different than what is being done with meat

01:05:53   and neurons firing. I think yeah, like these things will eventually get better and better.

01:05:59   And so the question of like does something new come out of that? I really think it's

01:06:04   a metaphor just like a like a human brain. Human brains are just like ingesting the world

01:06:10   that's around them but they do still produce things that we think are new in some way but

01:06:17   like as of right now human brains are just way bigger than these or I should rephrase

01:06:23   that it's not that they're bigger I think the neuron numbers might actually be comparable

01:06:27   but they're significantly more interconnected than these systems are.

01:06:32   I don't think it's impossible, but I don't think what I'm seeing right now tells me that it's possible.

01:06:39   If that makes sense.

01:06:40   Yeah.

01:06:41   What I'm seeing right now is interesting. It does not tell me.

01:06:44   I do not feel like I can draw a very clear line to original thought.

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01:08:45   their support of this show and Relay FM. So okay, this might be a little long for the podcast,

01:08:50   but I want to give you what was my best response with ChatGPT.

01:08:56   Okay.

01:08:56   And this was on day one.

01:08:58   Okay.

01:08:58   Here is the prompt.

01:08:59   I said, "Write a fictional story about coffee beans."

01:09:04   So here was the story.

01:09:05   "Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived a group of magical coffee beans.

01:09:11   These beans were not like the ordinary coffee beans that you might find in your local grocery store.

01:09:16   No, these beans were special, each with its own unique personality and characteristics.

01:09:22   There was the bold and brash Robusta bean, who always wanted to be the center of attention.

01:09:28   He loved to boast about his high caffeine content and his strong full-bodied flavor.

01:09:33   But his boastfulness often got him into trouble, and he often found himself being ground up

01:09:38   and brewed into strong, bitter cups of coffee that no one wanted to drink.

01:09:44   First there was the delicate and refined Arabia bean.

01:09:47   She was the most popular of all the coffee beans, with a delicate floral aroma and a

01:09:51   smooth sweet flavor.

01:09:53   She was often sought after by the finest coffee shops and restaurants, and she was always

01:09:58   in demand.

01:09:59   But she was also very sensitive, and she didn't like being roasted too dark or brewed too

01:10:03   strong lest she lose her delicate flavor.

01:10:07   Then there was the exotic and mysterious mocha bean, who hailed from the distant land of

01:10:12   Yemen.

01:10:13   He was a rare and valuable bean with a deep, rich flavor and a hint of chocolatey sweetness.

01:10:19   But he was also very fickle and could only be grown in certain conditions, making him

01:10:23   difficult to cultivate and harvest.

01:10:25   Finally, there was the jolly and cheerful espresso bean, who always wanted to be in

01:10:30   a good mood.

01:10:31   He was a small but mighty bean with an intense, concentrated flavor that could give anyone

01:10:36   a kick of energy.

01:10:38   But he could also be a bit of a hothead, and if he was brewed too long, he could become

01:10:42   bitter, and burnt tasting.

01:10:44   All of the coffee beans lived together in harmony, each with their own unique flavor

01:10:48   and personality.

01:10:49   But one day, disaster struck when a group of evil scientists decided to create a Frankenbean,

01:10:56   a monstrous hybrid of all the different coffee beans.

01:10:59   The Frankenbean was huge and powerful, with the caffeine content of a Robusta, the smoothness

01:11:05   of the Arabia, the richness of a Mocha, and the intensity of an Espresso.

01:11:10   But the Frankenbean quickly turned on its creators, rampaging through the land and destroying

01:11:15   everything in its path.

01:11:17   The other coffee beans were terrified, and they didn't know what to do.

01:11:21   But just when all hope seemed lost, the bold and brash Robusta Bean stepped forward, bravely

01:11:27   facing down the Frankenbean and using his high caffeine content to defeat it once and

01:11:32   for all.

01:11:34   And so the coffee beans lived happily ever after, each enjoying their own unique flavor

01:11:39   and personality, and never forgetting the brave Robusta Bean who saved them all. The

01:11:45   end.

01:11:46   - Didn't stick the landing, but everything else was great.

01:11:50   - That's pretty good.

01:11:51   - Oh it was great. It was very entertaining. I thought it was very funny too. It was a

01:11:55   good story.

01:11:56   - I think that's a great example of pulling from things that exist, but also creating

01:12:04   something new, that was much better than I was expecting for the prompt "write a fictional

01:12:10   story about coffee beans." Now, I am very convinced that they have wildly turned down

01:12:17   the ability of the thing since then, because I have not been getting similar kinds of responses

01:12:21   when I use ChatGPT now, but this was like the day one, you know, hour six, while I imagine

01:12:27   all the engineers were panicking, like "everyone's trying to break our AI system out of the box,

01:12:32   what are we gonna do? So yeah, anyway, I feel like that could basically be a children's

01:12:40   illustrated story as it exists. Like you said, it doesn't quite stick the landing, but I

01:12:45   feel like it's there. I could totally see that as like a kids' illustrated storybook,

01:12:50   100%. That's the best result that I got out of ChatGPT when I was playing around with

01:12:55   it on day one. And I think these things are only getting better, so I fully expect it's

01:13:00   going to increase. One of the things that was very interesting was watching my father

01:13:03   play around with it. And he got into a little loop of asking it for movie scripts around

01:13:10   various topics. Write a script where Indiana Jones prevents a diamond heist, you know,

01:13:15   that it would just like boom boom boom put out whatever. And he was genuinely enthralled

01:13:21   by reading them again on like the very first day and so much so I could see like he just

01:13:25   kept typing in like different movie scripts and he's like, "Wow, it'll just like write

01:13:28   the movie that I wanted to write? This is unbelievable. I think it is already there

01:13:33   for some level of new creativity. It might not be amazingly new creativity, but I think

01:13:42   it's doing something that's more than just more than just like a kind of Google copy

01:13:47   and paste. That's what I think it's already doing.

01:13:50   I can't express my feelings as such, but I feel differently to this than the image

01:13:56   generation and I don't really know why.

01:13:58   What do you mean? Do you feel like the image generation is more creative?

01:14:03   No, it's about like, you know, like I've, you know, I've spoken many times and still

01:14:08   try to get my feelings out on this and it's complicated about like what it is to be human

01:14:13   and human creativity and stuff like that. Where I feel like these models, it's really

01:14:18   hard. It's like these models what they're doing is it's less impressive to me. It

01:14:25   It feels more what anyone could do in a sense of like, not like that story is a standout,

01:14:33   right?

01:14:34   But like a lot of the things that I've seen myself and other examples that I've seen around

01:14:38   again they feel very much like spend an hour on Google and you could probably come out

01:14:43   with something like this yourself, right?

01:14:45   Like there is that kind of feeling to it.

01:14:48   But like something like Dali, same companies by the way in case you don't know, it's all

01:14:52   from OpenAI, these two, Dali and ChatGPT come from one company called OpenAI.

01:14:58   What Dali is doing is something that the average person could not do.

01:15:03   But what ChatGPT is doing I think the average person could do with the same input, right?

01:15:12   You could look at a thousand images and could not paint a painting to the skill of Dali,

01:15:17   but you could read a thousand articles and could probably turn something out that's close

01:15:21   to what ChatGPT can do. I don't know how that makes me feel, but that's just how I feel

01:15:26   in looking at them. But I can't really express why I don't have this existential dread feeling

01:15:33   about ChatGPT like I do about Dali, but I don't know why that is the case.

01:15:38   Well, I suggest like a thing to think about that people underrate in economic change.

01:15:47   So I think ChatGPT is currently in the phase of people are doing the thing where they overestimate

01:15:54   the change in the short term, but they underestimate the change in the long term, which is just

01:15:58   a general phenomenon that always happens.

01:16:00   Everybody does that, like I do that.

01:16:02   When you see a new tech demo, I think one of the questions to often ask about how impactful

01:16:10   will this be?" is the question of if it makes something significantly faster or cheaper,

01:16:17   not necessarily like does it do a new thing. And if it does an existing thing much faster

01:16:24   and cheaper, you can like rate higher in your mind the chance that this is going to have

01:16:29   a big impact. And so when you keep saying like, "Oh, this is what a person could do

01:16:33   by reading a bunch of articles on Google and writing something up," I don't disagree with

01:16:37   you that for tons of stuff that is totally true but the the game changer here is that

01:16:43   it's so much faster.

01:16:44   Yeah but it ain't cheaper.

01:16:46   Well it's not cheaper for open AI to be running but it's cheaper for people to use.

01:16:51   And I still think it's cheaper at scale like even if you I mean just based on some of the

01:16:57   AI art stuff like signing up for those paid services it's still like much cheaper at scale

01:17:03   even if the cost of running the servers for the individual company is quite large.

01:17:07   But so this is just where like when I think of the death of homework, the big deal of this is that,

01:17:12   you know, ChatGPT can do 80% of your work in seconds, and then you can spend an hour

01:17:20   tidying up all of your homework assignments, right, instead of

01:17:23   spending, you know, many hours working on all of them. Or I had the interesting phenomenon of

01:17:30   coming across, I was on Hacker News,

01:17:33   just like reading a bunch of the articles that were linked.

01:17:35   It's a discussion site like Reddit.

01:17:37   And there was an article that was kind of weird.

01:17:40   And I went back into the chat and it's like,

01:17:43   oh, this was an article that was written by ChatGPT.

01:17:47   It's like the first time that it happened

01:17:49   where I came across like some website, you know,

01:17:51   that like contracts out articles,

01:17:53   had one that was written by ChatGPT.

01:17:56   And what I thought was very funny and very weird

01:17:59   was that the author showed up in the comments and was like,

01:18:03   "Oh, hey, yeah, I'm the guy who wrote this article.

01:18:06   Yes, I used ChatGPT, but all of the ideas were mine.

01:18:11   I just prompted ChatGPT to get the words right."

01:18:16   It was very strange.

01:18:18   I thought like, "Oh, it's the first time

01:18:19   I've come across this.

01:18:20   Like, here's an article that's written by ChatGPT,

01:18:23   and I'm gonna disagree with the person

01:18:26   that they wrote that article."

01:18:27   I think the very concept of like the ideas in the article are mine, but I didn't write

01:18:31   it is hilarious.

01:18:33   But nonetheless, that person could have a huge output of articles in like a much faster

01:18:40   time scale with the with the assistance of something like chat GPT, even if they're going

01:18:45   through and like editing it afterwards.

01:18:46   So

01:18:47   I think it's the CNET, right?

01:18:48   I saw some headlines about this.

01:18:50   So so that's like one area that's quite interesting.

01:18:55   One of the other things that I'm going to be curious to see what happens with this is,

01:19:00   when I had been talking to some people behind the scenes who were working on systems like this, like language model systems,

01:19:06   one of the things I was really surprised to hear is the number of people who said that they were using this as their search engine,

01:19:14   that they had given up using Google and instead were using their own language models as a kind of Google.

01:19:21   And that's why I think one of the constraints that OpenAI has put on ChatGPT is they're like,

01:19:27   "It can't know anything about the way that the world currently exists. It doesn't know

01:19:31   anything about what's happened since like 2020 or whatever." Like, they've really limited any

01:19:36   concept for it of like what the world currently is. Of course, that is the public-facing side,

01:19:43   you know, back when it was first launched, people could totally trick it of like, "Oh no,

01:19:46   you know, for open AI, 100% knows about the current world.

01:19:50   They're just not letting people play with that.

01:19:52   But yeah, like this kind of stuff could be super useful

01:19:55   in search engines.

01:19:56   And like, I was very surprised when I was talking to people

01:19:59   to hear that they were using it as a search engine.

01:20:02   But having played around with it a bit,

01:20:04   it won't replace my Google, I think, for right now.

01:20:07   But there's definitely been a couple of times

01:20:09   where I've had questions that I would put in the variety of,

01:20:13   I'm not exactly sure what I'm asking,

01:20:16   but can you direct me down the right path here?

01:20:19   Or like, I just don't have any of the words for this thing,

01:20:23   but if I can just describe the situation,

01:20:25   can you tell me what the words are

01:20:27   that I should be Googling for?

01:20:28   And ChatGPT is already really good at that.

01:20:32   And I just saw the headline, but apparently Microsoft

01:20:34   is looking to do some kind of $10 billion investment,

01:20:38   perhaps, in ChatGPT to incorporate it into Bing

01:20:42   so that they can have that as a search engine thing.

01:20:44   And that's another area where I think,

01:20:46   man, on the short term, if that happens,

01:20:49   it could be quite useful as a tool.

01:20:51   For kind of helping people use search engines

01:20:54   the way they want to use search engines,

01:20:57   I think people want to use search engines

01:20:59   like it's a very knowledgeable reference librarian.

01:21:02   Like, "Hey, I'm looking for a thing about this.

01:21:04   Can you help me out with that?"

01:21:05   And ChatGPT can totally do that right now.

01:21:08   So we'll see where this stuff goes.

01:21:10   - The Microsoft thing's really interesting,

01:21:12   because OpenAI is using Azure, I think.

01:21:16   And this deal, apparently that's going around

01:21:21   as we're recording this,

01:21:23   it ends up with Microsoft would end up eventually owning

01:21:27   a large chunk of OpenAI if they go through with it.

01:21:30   It's really intriguing.

01:21:33   I mean, it's clearly Microsoft are like,

01:21:35   we would like Bing to be better.

01:21:38   There is also apparently rumblings,

01:21:39   around Silicon Valley that Google believes

01:21:42   that it has better tools,

01:21:44   but it's too scared to put them out.

01:21:46   Like of both image generation and text generation,

01:21:50   which I 100% believe that they would.

01:21:53   Like if anyone's going to be able to do this,

01:21:56   Google should be the company in theory, right?

01:21:59   With like the immense data sets that they have

01:22:03   and the human trained effectively AI

01:22:07   that they've generated over time, right?

01:22:08   where you search for the thing and click on the thing

01:22:11   that you want.

01:22:12   That is positive training for Google.

01:22:16   But apparently, Google is concerned

01:22:18   about the public perception of the quality of their tools.

01:22:25   For this similar thing, what you're talking about,

01:22:27   what OpenAI did is we need to put some barriers

01:22:31   around this thing.

01:22:33   That's Google's concern.

01:22:35   Yeah, I mean, I would say even I found that first day

01:22:39   with OpenAI, I was a bit like, this feels reckless.

01:22:45   This feels like a bad decision.

01:22:48   I don't know, I was just really kind of wondering,

01:22:51   what's going on over there?

01:22:52   What was the conversation?

01:22:55   But there was some real wacky stuff

01:22:57   when people were really trying to break around the system

01:23:00   where you could see little parts of it.

01:23:02   I think the most alarming one that I came across

01:23:04   was people found that you could prompt it to be able to express the idea of working

01:23:10   with Amazon Web Services. So I was like, "Oh, ChatGPT knows the correct code for interfacing

01:23:18   with Amazon Web Services?" I was like, "Oh, I don't like that at all." That seems like,

01:23:23   "Oh, please not. Let's not have an AI system that knows how to do that. That's a real bad

01:23:30   idea guys.

01:23:31   I mean, look, I'm just if I had to place money on it, I would for sure place money on Google

01:23:36   has the best system, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have the most public facing system.

01:23:41   It would be quite a surprise if someone else was able to be doing better than Google was.

01:23:45   Like you said, given the just absurd amount of computing power and data that they have

01:23:51   at their hands, it would I feel like Google would have had to drop the ball quite badly

01:23:56   do not internally have something that's doing really well on this front. But yeah,

01:24:03   I think a lot has happened since October. I think this may be…

01:24:08   Myke: I don't even really know how I feel about this stuff anymore. Like, I think I'm

01:24:12   being like ground down now over time.

01:24:15   Bailin: I'm sorry Myke, I have ground you down with the AI stuff. I do apologize for

01:24:21   that.

01:24:22   It's the internet.

01:24:24   Or like, I didn't need to have these conversations with you

01:24:27   to know this stuff was happening.

01:24:28   You know what I mean?

01:24:29   - Yeah, we started talking about it

01:24:31   because it was just bubbling up

01:24:32   and becoming impossible not to notice.

01:24:34   And it was just the timing of everything exploded.

01:24:37   And I think that the most explosive thing

01:24:39   that could possibly have happened

01:24:40   between the last time we spoke and now did happen,

01:24:43   which was a massive public demonstration

01:24:46   of look at what language models can do,

01:24:48   just like the AI art stuff.

01:24:50   this is only going one way, which is better and better.

01:24:53   One day, Myke, we'll have to have the conversation

01:24:55   that goes all the way down to the atoms of AI.

01:24:58   [BEEP]

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01:26:37   I spent a little bit of time recently revamping my personal website MykeHurley.net which is

01:26:42   on Squarespace because I wanted to make sure that I had a really good landing page where

01:26:45   people could come to, they could see all the things that I'm working on, the podcasts,

01:26:49   the projects, that kind of stuff. Super easy to do, I just say "oh I want to do this"

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01:27:16   and you will get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the show.

01:27:19   A thanks to Squarespace for their continued support of Cortex and Relay FM.

01:27:23   So another pretty big thing since we last spoke is that I have left Twitter.

01:27:28   Left left? What does left mean, Myke?

01:27:32   My account exists.

01:27:34   Okay.

01:27:35   I don't look at it. I don't look at the timeline. I don't look at my replies.

01:27:38   I'm logged out of everywhere, apps deleted and everything.

01:27:42   Does your... Do you still post stuff?

01:27:45   Nope.

01:27:45   Is there like... Okay.

01:27:47   The only posting that I do manually is to the Cortex account.

01:27:52   - Okay, I can't load Twitter on this computer.

01:27:56   Did you have a dramatic, I left Twitter tweet

01:27:58   as your final tweet or?

01:28:00   - Kind of.

01:28:01   - Okay.

01:28:01   - But I don't think it was dramatic.

01:28:03   Let me read it to you,

01:28:03   'cause I was actually pretty proud of it.

01:28:06   I just, what did I say?

01:28:07   It's time for me to put my attention elsewhere,

01:28:09   like find my shows, find my products,

01:28:11   streaming, Instagram links.

01:28:13   I said, or wherever you get your podcasts.

01:28:16   - Or wherever you get your podcasts, I like that.

01:28:18   That is good.

01:28:19   - Right, 'cause that's the joke, right?

01:28:20   Like, find us wherever you get your podcasts.

01:28:22   So I just thought that that would be me.

01:28:24   And then that's it, that was my last tweet.

01:28:26   - I like that, that's a very good last tweet.

01:28:27   I think you're right to be proud of that.

01:28:29   - I didn't wanna make it like a whole big thing,

01:28:31   like a whole big political thing,

01:28:32   but I wanted to be able to pin a tweet

01:28:35   which had all of my places, right?

01:28:38   So that was what I did.

01:28:39   And yeah, it's been a month.

01:28:40   - Okay, so this is very interesting to me.

01:28:46   What are your reasons for leaving?

01:28:48   Like what was the, I don't know if this is correct to say,

01:28:52   but I feel like you've had a on-again, off-again

01:28:55   relationship with Twitter over the years.

01:28:57   Pinning that tweet feels more definitive

01:29:02   than things in the past.

01:29:04   So I'm just kind of curious, like what motivated this?

01:29:08   Like what was your reasoning for doing this?

01:29:09   - Well realistically, my on-again, off-again

01:29:12   has only been in my feelings.

01:29:13   Like I've never changed my approach to it as such.

01:29:17   - Yeah, that is what I meant.

01:29:19   When I talk to you about things,

01:29:22   what's the barometer of Twitter in Myke's brain right now?

01:29:27   Has not been a consistent reading over the years.

01:29:30   - No, I feel like that there has been a downward trend.

01:29:33   My reasons are threefold for why now.

01:29:36   So one, since Elon Musk took over the service

01:29:39   is taking a nose dive in things that frustrate me.

01:29:43   I think a lot of the product decisions are weird.

01:29:46   I don't like some of the advertising changes.

01:29:48   I don't like this sense of like,

01:29:51   extortion that I feel like is taking over on Twitter.

01:29:56   It's like, you've been verified for a long time

01:29:58   for whatever reason,

01:29:59   and now we want to start charging you for it.

01:30:01   It's that little things like that have been grating on me.

01:30:03   Like that's part one.

01:30:05   That wouldn't have been enough

01:30:07   if it wasn't for the other things, I feel like.

01:30:10   So, well also I don't like some of the policy decisions

01:30:13   that have been made for people

01:30:14   that are being brought back onto the service,

01:30:16   but I don't really need to get into that

01:30:18   more than that point.

01:30:20   I am frustrated, actually point one, two,

01:30:24   is like, it's just annoying to be on Twitter

01:30:27   and like was annoying to me being on Twitter

01:30:28   and all anyone wanted to talk about was Elon Musk,

01:30:30   like I just found that frustrating.

01:30:32   Like, it just wasn't fun, it was just really annoying

01:30:36   and all anyone wanted to talk about was Twitter

01:30:39   Elon Musk and it's just like I don't I'm not really interested in that like and it was

01:30:43   frustrating to me.

01:30:44   Twitter is at its worst when it turns its eye upon itself and then just wants to talk

01:30:50   about Twitter.

01:30:50   And this is the longest I've ever seen that happen.

01:30:53   It's just been constant and it's just annoying and like I don't need that in my life right.

01:31:00   Yeah it's really it strikes me as really tiresomely self-involved like yeah yeah.

01:31:07   Point two, so many of my friends, people whose work I enjoy as well have left Twitter.

01:31:14   So if I sign in, my timeline wouldn't be as fun anyway. So like what was happening is I was

01:31:22   feeling these things of point one of like this isn't fun to be on anymore. I don't agree with

01:31:27   the decisions they're making. I don't agree with the moderation changes they're making.

01:31:31   Like that stuff was grating on me. But I was like, but this is a community, right? Like

01:31:37   I'm part of this community, I'm separating the platform from the people, and it's the people that I want to read.

01:31:43   Well then they all started leaving.

01:31:45   So it's like, alright, I've got a lot to hold on to here.

01:31:48   But then point three is the biggest one for me.

01:31:51   I have wanted to do this for years.

01:31:54   For my own mental health.

01:31:56   And I've finally done it.

01:31:58   Like, point one and two gave me the cover to do the thing that I've wanted to do,

01:32:05   which is leave Twitter.

01:32:07   Hilariously for me, this is the first theme in years

01:32:11   where I did not try and shoehorn this in as a part of it,

01:32:13   and it's the one that I actually did it on.

01:32:15   You know, I've had these things of like,

01:32:17   changing my approach to the internet

01:32:19   and all that kind of stuff.

01:32:20   And a lot of it was for getting away from Twitter.

01:32:23   And there's a couple of reasons for this.

01:32:24   One, Twitter's timeline is like,

01:32:28   typically a not fun place to be,

01:32:32   because it's full of people being angry about things

01:32:36   all the time.

01:32:37   And whether that anger is warranted or not

01:32:39   is not the point.

01:32:41   It's like, how much of my day do I want to spend

01:32:45   ingesting the anger of people, right?

01:32:49   That had an overall negative effect on me.

01:32:52   Where it was like, surprise!

01:32:55   I'm going on Twitter for whatever reason

01:32:58   and surprise, atrocity.

01:33:00   Like that wasn't necessarily what I was going for at that moment.

01:33:03   Similarly,

01:33:05   the way that people react,

01:33:10   like the way that people can be to people online.

01:33:13   So like I would sometimes be on Twitter and then someone would just start being

01:33:18   randomly nasty to me for like seemingly no reason.

01:33:21   And I don't,

01:33:22   and it's like a similar thing of like that didn't play well for me of like the

01:33:27   surprise of it, you know?

01:33:29   And that surprise over time morphed into dread.

01:33:34   So like I would open the Twitter app and be like,

01:33:37   "All right, here we go."

01:33:38   Even if there was nothing happening.

01:33:40   So like these behaviors ended up creating this cycle

01:33:44   of expecting it and being surprised by it.

01:33:48   And like, that's just wasn't good for me.

01:33:50   So time to leave it behind.

01:33:54   This is why like reason three is why,

01:33:56   unlike many people, I am not replacing my Twitter usage with Mastodon or any other service

01:34:02   like that. So this kind of social media for me, this like text based short posting social

01:34:08   media where people, anyone in the world can get in touch with me or I can get in touch

01:34:13   with anyone in the world like send them messages or read what anyone's got to say, that's gone.

01:34:18   I want to see what my life is like without this endless stream of thoughts and opinions

01:34:24   and news all the time from everywhere.

01:34:27   So that's where I am.

01:34:29   When you say that the first two points about the current changes with Twitter, how they're

01:34:34   acting as cover for the actual thing, point three about your mental health, what do you

01:34:39   mean by that?

01:34:40   What do you mean by cover?

01:34:41   So there's two things going on.

01:34:44   One is I needed something to push me, like I needed an excuse to do it, right?

01:34:50   Because nothing was changing.

01:34:51   It had to be me that all of a sudden made that change all on my own, right?

01:34:56   Which was not easy for me to do.

01:34:59   And the other was, well, I always felt like my community expected me to be there.

01:35:05   Like listeners expected me to be there.

01:35:08   So I didn't want to be like, "Oh, it's time for me to leave everyone."

01:35:12   You know, like, you know, the blue.

01:35:15   I felt like, and we're going to get, I want to talk about this a little bit more in general,

01:35:19   I would have felt like I was like better than everyone else.

01:35:24   It was like this feeling of like,

01:35:25   no, I'm leaving Twitter now.

01:35:27   Like this service, it would have felt weird to me.

01:35:31   I can't explain it fully.

01:35:32   There's like this relevance thing that's bubbling around

01:35:35   in my brain anyway that I want to talk about.

01:35:37   But like, I feel like if I would have just left Twitter,

01:35:40   it would have kind of been a sign

01:35:43   that I didn't want to hear from people at all.

01:35:47   - Do you mean that in the sense that

01:35:49   you think that's how people would have interpreted it?

01:35:52   - Yes. - Okay.

01:35:53   - Yeah, I was worried that people

01:35:55   would have thought of me that way.

01:35:56   - Right, not that it's actually the case.

01:35:58   That's how you're worried people wouldn't,

01:36:00   oh, okay, all right, I was like,

01:36:02   who on earth ever thinks that someone's like,

01:36:04   oh, I'm better than you by leaving Twitter?

01:36:05   But that's your concern, is that that's how the audience

01:36:09   might react to something like that.

01:36:12   - That like, because I had always been

01:36:14   and was always very proud of,

01:36:17   especially all around in my career,

01:36:18   about being approachable and like,

01:36:20   it is something that's important to me.

01:36:22   And I always loved that that was something that I could do,

01:36:25   that like people could ask me questions

01:36:26   and I could answer them and stuff like that.

01:36:29   But the problem was in doing that, as the world changed,

01:36:34   the type of things that would be sent to me changed

01:36:36   and the tone was different and things could get weird

01:36:40   and it just ended up being not as nice as it used to be.

01:36:44   It was kind of like whether people would feel that way,

01:36:47   it wouldn't feel that way, it wasn't the thing,

01:36:48   It was like a thing in my brain.

01:36:50   I didn't want to come off as being

01:36:52   this like unapproachable person.

01:36:54   Or like, I didn't want to come off as being like,

01:36:56   oh, like you can't, no,

01:36:58   you can't get in touch with me on Twitter.

01:37:00   So I'm just going to leave.

01:37:02   But in so many people leaving,

01:37:04   it's given me the opportunity to try this.

01:37:08   Because I feel like enough people understand

01:37:10   the halfway point now.

01:37:12   Which is, I've left Twitter like so many people have, right?

01:37:16   But what I'm not doing is replacing it with something else,

01:37:20   because I want to try and live my life without this thing.

01:37:25   - Yeah, it doesn't matter now,

01:37:27   but this is one of those cases where I just wonder

01:37:30   how much that worry of the audience interpretation

01:37:35   of your actions would have been a real thing or not.

01:37:41   But I get what you mean that if this is a move

01:37:44   you have been eyeing up now is an excellent time to make that move because you're not going to get

01:37:51   pushback. Because I feel like people can understand at least part of it, right? Even if they don't get

01:37:56   all of it. There would have been two parts before of like, "Why do you want to leave Twitter and why

01:38:00   don't you want to be on this social media?" Well now it's just, "Why don't you want to be on this

01:38:04   social media?" Which is half of the thing, right? It's like it feels like there is... It's easy to

01:38:10   understand why I don't want to be on Twitter. Like a lot of people in our community understand that

01:38:14   now. Not everyone and that's fine and like I'm not judging other people right like this is not

01:38:19   a yardstick for everyone even my fellow creators right like if you if this is a thing that's good

01:38:27   for you and like mentally go for it for me it isn't like it's just not it is bad on my mental

01:38:36   health to and it's not even like that I was like being barraged by haters constantly right no no

01:38:42   But like I'm totally on board with this right to me that this lines up with a lot of my

01:38:48   feelings always about like the news right which even now like the very concept of what is bounded

01:38:55   within those two words has wildly changed since we started talking on this podcast years ago

01:38:59   because like twitter is functionally a news feed in a way that it like sort of wasn't at the dawn

01:39:06   But it's the same thing of, there's a variance in the interruption of your day,

01:39:12   and why would you want that? Or like, you need a really good positive upside if there's a thing

01:39:20   that can just derail your day randomly at any moment.

01:39:26   - That's it. - Yeah, and like, this is something

01:39:29   that I am aware of with people who really follow the news,

01:39:33   where you can see that like something in the news has totally derailed them in a way that just

01:39:40   doesn't make sense to the scale of its impact on their life. And it's just, you know, as an

01:39:46   outside observer, it's a bit like, you know, you don't have to do that. You don't have to roll the

01:39:53   dice randomly for you're going to get derailed for a thing that either doesn't affect you or that you

01:40:01   are unable to affect in many ways. So like when you just said there of you started to get the

01:40:08   feeling of opening Twitter and you're like, "All right, you know, what's it going to be today?

01:40:13   Am I going to find out some horrible piece of news or like I'm just going to get swept up in

01:40:18   whatever the internet is angry about right now?" And, you know, like with 24-hour news where it's

01:40:24   it's a bit like, "Oh, how mysterious! There's always news 24 hours a day." It's like, on Twitter,

01:40:32   there's some standard amount of anger and it's like, sometimes that anger is focused on very

01:40:39   just things. But it's like, there needs to be a certain level of anger always, and if there's

01:40:46   nothing just to get angry about, it'll be something ridiculous that people will just like, "Everyone's

01:40:52   angry about this right now." And so you can easily get swept up in whatever the current angry thing

01:40:58   is. And then also, being a person on the internet, you do have the issue of just running into

01:41:06   "someone is really angry at you about something." And again, maybe they have a good reason,

01:41:13   maybe they don't, but you're just rolling the dice every time you open up Twitter. So I'm totally

01:41:20   on board with all of those as like very excellent reasons to want to leave the service like

01:41:27   you're not you're not going to get any pushback from me about it's not you that I'm worried

01:41:31   about right oh you were it wasn't me that you were concerned was going to berate you

01:41:36   on the podcast I felt like if there's one person in the world that knows it's you because

01:41:41   you did it right you did it in the most extreme way there is a feeling that I have which it's

01:41:50   is expanding in different directions than I'm working on is being out of touch.

01:41:54   I was literally about to make the joke like, "But Myke, aren't you worried about being

01:41:59   out of touch?" Because that's what everybody says and I always find that kind of hilarious.

01:42:04   That is what I'm worried about and it comes in a few directions. It comes in one, people

01:42:08   hear me say these things and they're like, "Oh, you're better than everyone else, huh?"

01:42:12   I still feel like that's a weird thing in your head. I just can't imagine any reasonable

01:42:16   person having that kind of response but I don't know.

01:42:19   - But it's not, but yeah, I agree with you.

01:42:22   Right, but this is the thing is like,

01:42:24   the people that were making things difficult for me

01:42:28   were the unreasonable people anyway, right?

01:42:30   - Yeah, by definition, yeah.

01:42:32   - Reasonable people weren't the people

01:42:34   that made it difficult for me to go onto Twitter sometimes.

01:42:38   Because you know, a handful of times a month,

01:42:40   I'd be dealing with an unreasonable person,

01:42:42   and that would destroy a day for me, you know?

01:42:46   Like someone would decide that they wanted to make fun

01:42:48   of the way I pronounce words in a day.

01:42:50   And that will stick in my mind for weeks, right?

01:42:54   And I don't want that when I don't need to have that.

01:42:58   And I don't need Twitter, so it's an easy thing for me

01:43:02   to just get rid of, right?

01:43:03   This is where I ended up going.

01:43:05   But the concern that I have is people are like, oh, you're--

01:43:09   well, you're so-- is it better than us, right?

01:43:13   But that's one part.

01:43:14   Whatever, I'll deal with that.

01:43:16   I don't need to appease two unreasonable people.

01:43:19   The thing that I'm more worried about is that

01:43:22   either I will lose track of the things

01:43:29   that people were talking about

01:43:30   or people will think I have.

01:43:34   So I will use, say for example,

01:43:37   I'll use my Apple focus shows, right, for this.

01:43:40   - Yeah, yeah.

01:43:41   - Because they're more news focused, what's going on,

01:43:43   what's the conversation of the day,

01:43:45   what are people focusing on, right?

01:43:47   That is more of a concern for me.

01:43:48   They either A, I'm not in tune

01:43:51   with what the Apple community is thinking and talking about,

01:43:54   or people think that I'm not

01:43:56   because I have a differing opinion and I'm not on Mastodon.

01:44:00   When if I was on Mastodon,

01:44:02   they may just think I have a differing opinion,

01:44:04   but I'm still informed.

01:44:06   Now the perception part,

01:44:09   I kind of can't do anything about that, right?

01:44:11   Just like people are gonna think that about me or not.

01:44:14   The actually staying in touch part, I am working on that.

01:44:19   So I've increased the amount of websites and blogs

01:44:23   that are in my RSS,

01:44:25   so I'm able to bring in more opinions.

01:44:27   And I've also got a few people who I think are tastemakers

01:44:32   or some of the louder voices in the community,

01:44:36   I have put their Mastodon feeds into my RSS reader.

01:44:41   So if I ever want, and they're in a folder called vibe check.

01:44:45   So if I ever want to see what the vibe is,

01:44:47   I feel like I can go to this folder

01:44:50   and can have a quick scan through it.

01:44:52   But I don't read that like I would read Twitter.

01:44:54   It's like a way to inform,

01:44:55   like there's a big, there's like a bunch of news coming out.

01:44:59   Let me go and check the vibe check folder and reader

01:45:02   and see like what are people kind of saying about this?

01:45:07   So this is kind of a thing that I'm trying to do

01:45:10   to balance it right now.

01:45:12   (sighs)

01:45:16   - I have a lot of thoughts,

01:45:18   but it's hard to articulate.

01:45:20   So you're in an interesting position

01:45:24   where you have many shows in which you are talking

01:45:28   much more about topical things

01:45:29   or what is currently happening.

01:45:32   And I feel like the problem of staying informed is,

01:45:40   I feel like it's barely a problem.

01:45:41   The whole thing with the modern world is like selection.

01:45:47   It's not about finding a thing.

01:45:53   So, you know,

01:45:54   I think it's always been the case that a person

01:46:00   with some well-selected RSS feeds

01:46:03   can be very adequately up to date on anything they care to,

01:46:08   because some RSS feeds are already a million times better

01:46:13   than technology's word for trying to like keep in touch

01:46:18   with what's going on.

01:46:19   So I just like, I just don't perceive the problem of like,

01:46:22   oh, I need to stay in touch as an actual problem.

01:46:25   I think what people are worried about is

01:46:28   a kind of confusion with volume of consumption

01:46:35   as proportional to amount of staying in touch.

01:46:38   And I just don't think that that's the case.

01:46:40   I think that's a, like a perception problem.

01:46:42   You're not more in touch if you've heard about a thing seven times.

01:46:47   You're just as in touch as if you heard about it once,

01:46:50   like through one cleverly selected RSS feed.

01:46:53   So I just, I can't conceive that you will actually lose touch in any way.

01:46:59   And it's really funny because you having a folder called Vibe Check,

01:47:03   to me it's like, "Oh, that feels like Myke is still too in touch."

01:47:07   [laughs]

01:47:08   Like, that's kind of my initial response to that.

01:47:11   It's like, "Oh, I would prefer a mic who was more out of touch and didn't feel the

01:47:14   need to have, like, a vibe check folder."

01:47:16   But I can totally understand that as a transition away from Twitter.

01:47:20   Like, "Oh, maybe what's a Twitter or…"

01:47:22   I was gonna say a Twitter-like thing, but it's actually different.

01:47:26   It's more like, "What is a way to extract what you think is the value in Twitter without

01:47:32   having that as a tool?"

01:47:33   I'm kind of using it like they're like micro blogs really because I don't ever read what people are saying in response to these tweets

01:47:41   I don't see in this the responses people send these are purely the tweet

01:47:47   But they call them toots which I just think is ridiculous toots. Oh my I know toots to their audiences

01:47:53   There's a lot about Mastodon that just doesn't vibe with me as well like

01:48:00   That which is part of why it was so easy for me not to move

01:48:03   But I think it I don't care how many videos there are. I find it confusing that the overall structure of it

01:48:09   That I find the URLs complicated like there's a lot of it that I don't like

01:48:15   There's also something which is really funny to me that a lot of people left Twitter because they don't like this one guy who's controlling it

01:48:21   But Mastodon inherently like the way is built as Mastodon is one person's decision about the way that the service

01:48:28   It's just all very funny to me, but I'm just not interested in it.

01:48:31   Also, I know literally nothing about Mastodon, but just the very fact that they want to call

01:48:37   them "toots" is like, "Oh my god, you guys are setting up roadblocks for yourself.

01:48:41   You don't need to for mass adoption of this thing."

01:48:45   Don't pick unappealing words just because you think they're funny.

01:48:49   Tweet was bad enough.

01:48:50   Yeah, Tweet at least, Tweet had the advantage of being cute and conceptually aligned with

01:48:58   "it's a bird" and "what do birds do? They tweet."

01:49:01   Is Mastodon's toot? Okay.

01:49:06   I think the idea is it's meant to be like the sound they would make from their trunks,

01:49:10   right? But like, it's not how it sounds, it's not how people think about it. And I actually

01:49:14   I don't think, I believe it was originally pitched as a joke,

01:49:19   but then was adopted as the official nomenclature

01:49:21   for the service.

01:49:22   - Wow, that's really regrettable Mastodon.

01:49:25   Bad decision. - I mean, honestly, Gray,

01:49:26   I think a lot of the decisions about Mastodon

01:49:28   are regrettable personally, but I'm happy that like,

01:49:33   the tech community has found a new home for itself.

01:49:38   - Yeah. - Right?

01:49:39   Like I am very pleased that there is something

01:49:41   that people are excited about and are going ahead and using.

01:49:46   Because it would have been really sad for me

01:49:49   if people didn't want to be on Twitter anymore

01:49:52   but had nowhere to go.

01:49:53   And I'm happy that people have somewhere to go.

01:49:56   I've just decided that I don't want to go to it right now.

01:50:00   And there are things that are helping me.

01:50:03   I don't feel like I need it so much

01:50:04   'cause I use Discord so much now.

01:50:07   Private Discords, public Discords,

01:50:09   That is a much better place for me

01:50:12   and for what I'm looking for

01:50:14   and the types of communication and conversations

01:50:16   that I'm having.

01:50:17   Also, what I didn't wanna do from this is

01:50:20   I don't wanna make it that I've completely shut down

01:50:24   any type of free feedback to me or the shows, right?

01:50:29   That people can't send in questions to me anymore,

01:50:32   they can't send in general follow-up.

01:50:36   And so, because you know, a lot of that stuff

01:50:39   can come in through our members Discord,

01:50:40   but I didn't want to make that the only way

01:50:43   that people could send stuff in.

01:50:44   So there is now, on the Relay FM website,

01:50:47   there is a feedback button,

01:50:48   and people can get it from this show,

01:50:51   or they can go to cortexfeedback.com

01:50:53   and they can send in questions.

01:50:54   So like, ask cortex questions can come in that way,

01:50:56   for example.

01:50:57   So that's on our website now, we built that.

01:51:00   It goes into our own CMS.

01:51:02   It's like a tool that we're building

01:51:04   so we can collect follow-up and feedback.

01:51:06   - Oh, I didn't know that.

01:51:07   - We just put it live like a couple of weeks ago.

01:51:09   It's an early version of what we will want this to be

01:51:13   because as well, my co-founder Steven

01:51:15   has also left Twitter and he's also not on Mastodon.

01:51:18   So like--

01:51:19   - Oh, I didn't know that.

01:51:20   - Yeah, and so we're very much like, all right,

01:51:23   we need to work something out

01:51:25   because I was starting to realize that like, you know,

01:51:28   submissions of questions and stuff,

01:51:30   there's always, there's been a thing on this show

01:51:32   and many shows and I don't want it to be

01:51:35   that the only way you can get in contact with us

01:51:37   is to become a member.

01:51:39   Like, there's just something wrong about that.

01:51:41   So this is now like free, open feedback form

01:51:44   that anyone can put their info in.

01:51:46   And so far, it's been live for a couple of weeks

01:51:48   on some shows, I'm very happy with this as a system.

01:51:52   It works great.

01:51:53   - So I presume the format is the same for all the shows,

01:51:56   so it's relay.fm/showname/feedback?

01:52:00   - Yeah.

01:52:01   - Is that like just a generic thing for all the shows?

01:52:02   That's a really good idea.

01:52:03   - For the shows that I've opted in,

01:52:04   is an opt-in thing for each show.

01:52:06   - Ah, okay, okay that makes sense.

01:52:08   - Some people are just still very active on Mastodon,

01:52:10   so they don't need or want this,

01:52:11   and they want their stuff on Mastodon

01:52:12   or Twitter or whatever.

01:52:14   - Yeah.

01:52:15   - But this is something, 'cause as well,

01:52:16   what's great about this is it's not email,

01:52:17   so it's going into a specific place,

01:52:20   and it's character limited.

01:52:21   - Oh, I see, right.

01:52:22   - So this is the type of way that I want my feedback

01:52:25   for my shows, and honestly, so far,

01:52:29   the feedback is high quality and good and helpful,

01:52:33   and this is the kind of stuff that I want.

01:52:35   Because as well, it's like,

01:52:36   feedback I would get by email while too long,

01:52:39   even if someone was mad at me,

01:52:40   it was always better than a tweet.

01:52:42   - Yeah, well, before you mentioned

01:52:44   that you built this system for Relay,

01:52:46   which I think is great,

01:52:47   I was gonna say this again,

01:52:49   the concept of being out of touch

01:52:51   or the concept of not being able to get feedback,

01:52:54   which is like, emails existed for a really long time.

01:52:57   That's totally a thing that you can do.

01:52:59   And there's a weird way in which email,

01:53:04   which used to be the low effort way to get in touch,

01:53:07   has now become the higher effort way to get in touch

01:53:10   compared to things like Twitter.

01:53:12   And I do think, even with the feedback forms on Relay,

01:53:17   I think there's a big advantage in putting up a very small,

01:53:21   but not zero, hurdle for people to get in touch.

01:53:25   And when you say Twitter has changed

01:53:29   like change the way that you felt about it over time. It's totally a function of just

01:53:35   absolutely everybody has gone there and it's just such a such a low effort way to respond

01:53:42   to people and so well yeah of course like it's a kind of selection effect if you massively

01:53:47   increase the number of people who are there and also never increase the difficulty of

01:53:54   getting in touch with anyone, well of course the average content is going to go down. I

01:54:00   feel like this is the lesson that older me would try to impart on younger me when he

01:54:07   just never considered the selection effect of like, "Oh hey, hey kid, the internet

01:54:14   seems like utopia because it's just a very small number of people who are here, but like

01:54:20   think through what's gonna happen when everyone shows up and like really internalize what

01:54:27   everyone means. It's like it's not gonna seem so great then, like, you know, what what happens

01:54:32   with huge groups of people. And that's kind of like the Twitter effect. It's just as it's

01:54:37   gotten larger and larger, the average quality has gone way down. So I'm hugely in favor

01:54:42   of this kind of thing of like, you still want feedback from people who listen to your shows?

01:54:47   them like relay.fm/cortex/feedback. Like that's a great place to send feedback.

01:54:52   Or even better is cortexfeedback.com. Goes to the same place.

01:54:56   Cortexfeedback.com.

01:54:57   Just a nice domain.

01:54:58   Yeah, that is a nice domain. And that's great. And it's just a little bit of hesitation where

01:55:06   someone who just is having a bad day and like wants to be mean on Twitter can do that

01:55:12   real easy when they just see you tweet anything and they're on Twitter and it's like takes two

01:55:17   seconds, whereas this is more intentional. And I would expect that it increases the quality

01:55:23   of the positive and the negative feedback. Like the negative feedback, kind of like you

01:55:28   were just saying about how it's been higher quality negative feedback through email than

01:55:33   compared to Twitter. So I don't see any kind of stay in touch problem at all, Myke.

01:55:38   I will say, I mean, you are maybe not the right person to judge that.

01:55:41   I am 100% the right person to judge this.

01:55:44   I think I can make it work, right?

01:55:46   Like I believe I can handle my part, which is like, I think I can stay in touch.

01:55:52   I can consume the information that I need to form the opinions that I want to be

01:55:57   able to effectively create good content.

01:55:59   Like I am very confident in that.

01:56:01   My only wonder is like, is if it changes people's feelings or reactions to me and

01:56:09   all my shows. But I am taking what I think is the best path for me, and I am hoping that

01:56:18   people will come along on that with that in mind. Just assume that maybe my opinions are

01:56:25   based on the same information, not on the fact that I'm not on Mastodon. You know what

01:56:28   I mean?

01:56:29   Yeah. I don't know. I'm just trying to express an idea here. I'm just mentally flipping through

01:56:38   through the people I think have interesting opinions or write interesting things or say

01:56:44   interesting things like who do you follow in the world and I'm trying to like plot this

01:56:49   out on a graph of like interestingness versus connectedness and I feel like it's something

01:56:56   like a bell curve slightly weighed towards the less connected side of things so people

01:57:04   who have absolutely no connection in a real way, not the like "oh I'm not on Twitter" kind of way,

01:57:09   in the "oh I've lived in a cabin for two years and haven't read anything in the last 10 years

01:57:16   and I just have no idea what's going on" like that tends to not be very interesting. And then

01:57:22   as you increase connections, people can be interesting, but there's totally a diminishing

01:57:28   returns and a rapidly diminishing turns for increased connectedness.

01:57:34   And sort of like we were saying before, the most connected people, when I talk to them,

01:57:41   feel the most like talking to chat GPT.

01:57:43   Like, oh, you're not a person anymore.

01:57:45   You're just like a reflection of all the things that you're connected to.

01:57:50   And there's no one here.

01:57:52   Because if you're just connected all the time, there's no space for you to develop anything.

01:58:00   And so it's kind of why I frowned a little bit when you told me about the vibe check

01:58:05   thing, because in my—I know this would never really happen, but in my fantasy world, it's

01:58:10   like, I want to hear what Myke Hurley thinks about a thing before the vibe check.

01:58:15   That's the most interesting moment.

01:58:17   By and large, that is the case.

01:58:19   I'm not checking that a lot.

01:58:21   - See, one of the things that I think I'm a little,

01:58:24   that is a sticking point for me is I think

01:58:26   quite a lot of things in tech, I could be a bit contrarian.

01:58:31   And that's where I have a concern,

01:58:33   where people are gonna forget

01:58:34   that maybe I've always been that way.

01:58:36   That then if I don't reference the thing

01:58:38   that everyone's talking about,

01:58:39   that must mean that the only reason

01:58:41   I think differently to other people

01:58:43   is because I'm not like up on the news, right?

01:58:48   - Yeah, I mean, here's the thing.

01:58:50   - You will get that kind of feedback for sure.

01:58:53   I know because I have publicly talked about being

01:58:58   more disconnected than the average person.

01:59:01   I totally get that feedback where people leave these

01:59:04   comments of like, "Oh, Gray's so uninformed

01:59:06   "because he doesn't know anything."

01:59:08   That's just a natural thing that's going to happen.

01:59:11   - Okay, so spoiler, that's why I'm worried about this

01:59:13   'cause I see these things too about you.

01:59:15   (laughs)

01:59:16   - Okay, so that's the reason you're worried

01:59:19   is that you see people like,

01:59:20   oh, Gray doesn't know anything comments, right?

01:59:21   - Sid's Gray took his year away from the internet,

01:59:24   he doesn't know what he's talking about anymore, right?

01:59:26   Like I see these things.

01:59:27   - Yeah, but like, I mean, this is a bigger conversation

01:59:31   about negative feedback in general,

01:59:33   but my take on those comments is that

01:59:35   they're almost always wrong.

01:59:38   Like the person is just over assuming lack of knowledge

01:59:43   on my part because of disagreements,

01:59:46   like that's really what's occurring.

01:59:47   So they're running some kind of mental filter of like,

01:59:50   oh, if they only knew more,

01:59:52   they would agree with the opinion that I have,

01:59:54   but they don't agree with my opinion.

01:59:56   So that must mean they're lacking in information.

01:59:59   I mean, again, my thoughts on negative feedback are just,

02:00:01   if you don't agree with it,

02:00:03   it's like you can dismiss it relatively easily.

02:00:07   The negative feedback that matters

02:00:08   is the negative feedback that you agree with,

02:00:10   where you're like, oh, that person's right.

02:00:12   But yeah, you are in a bit of a different position

02:00:15   because you are in a place where you have to be talking about more current things on

02:00:23   a much more frequent basis. But the reality of the situation is you're still going to

02:00:32   be connected to things. That's why you've set up the vibe check. That's why you've set

02:00:37   up the RSS feeds.

02:00:38   Again, my issue is not my feeling about how I am going to be.

02:00:42   But that's exactly, like, that's where I'm walking this through is like, that's the reality.

02:00:48   If anything, like, you know, in my ideal world, I would, I would reach through the computer and

02:00:52   turn the dial down on your openness a little further. But you know, but I totally understand

02:00:58   why you don't want to do that. I'm not even suggesting that you should. That's just what

02:01:01   I would do if I had the power. I expect I will. And like, that is my goal is to not need that.

02:01:07   And it's why, like, at the moment, there's like 10 people in this folder.

02:01:11   And so like, it's a handful of toots a day, at most.

02:01:16   And my hope is that, because I'm keeping this in my mind,

02:01:20   because the idea... I want to get rid of that,

02:01:21   because I don't particularly want it, but I'm seeing if I need it.

02:01:25   And at the moment, I don't.

02:01:27   I want to get through a big Apple news cycle and see how I feel after that.

02:01:32   - I think that's great.

02:01:33   That's actually really good to have a specific moment to think about.

02:01:36   like a thing we can re-evaluate at the end of the year in the theme section. So yeah, that's,

02:01:41   I'm actually really glad to hear that. But just to finish the thought is, so if you're doing this,

02:01:46   and you know that you are adequately in touch, and then people are leaving comments, be like,

02:01:53   "Ugh, I can't believe, like, said the thing on the show. He's an out of touch fool." It's like,

02:02:00   "Oh, but you know that's not true. Like, you know you read the things about whatever the topic is."

02:02:04   - Yeah, but you see, I think that's where me and you differ.

02:02:08   And like part of why I needed to leave this part

02:02:12   of social media is I frequently do not have

02:02:16   that faith in myself.

02:02:17   You ask me on any given day if I'm good at my job,

02:02:19   I'll tell you I am.

02:02:21   If you ask me on any given day like what my skills are,

02:02:25   I believe I can tell you them.

02:02:26   And like I can tell you that I think I'm good

02:02:28   at coming up with content and et cetera, et cetera.

02:02:31   But if someone tells me you're bad at this,

02:02:34   you're bad at this, you're bad at this.

02:02:35   And then you ask me that question,

02:02:37   I'm not gonna give you the same answers.

02:02:39   - Right.

02:02:40   - But this is part of that.

02:02:43   I have to be able to start from this place of like,

02:02:46   I believe I'm good at what I do, straight up, right?

02:02:49   That I don't have to rely on other people's opinions

02:02:54   to be able to form my own.

02:02:56   The only way I can do this is I have to be able

02:02:58   to start there, and I feel like now in 2023,

02:03:02   I'm able to start there.

02:03:04   But I am still susceptible to the doubt piece, which is the other part of why I can do it.

02:03:08   Right? So like, I believe I can leave now because I'm good enough at what I do.

02:03:12   I also want to leave now, so I don't have to be ground down.

02:03:17   - I guess what I'm just trying to walk through here is the acknowledgement that comments about

02:03:25   you being out of touch are inevitable, and that's fine. In some ways, I look at that as a price

02:03:32   for increased interestingness.

02:03:36   That's why I was thinking about this graph before.

02:03:40   There's some sweet spot about turning down the dial

02:03:43   and turning up the dial for where do you want to be

02:03:48   if you do this kind of work.

02:03:50   But everything in life is a trade-off.

02:03:53   And this is one of those moments of this

02:03:55   is a trade-off for a net positive increase

02:04:01   in a bunch of things.

02:04:02   net positive increase in making yourself less chat GPT like when you talk about conversations.

02:04:09   That's like a side effect of decreasing connectedness. It's a net gain in decrease in random derailments,

02:04:16   but you don't get net gains without some kind of negative. And I just feel like this negative

02:04:23   is relatively minor because it is only a negative. I don't want to say in perception, but I guess

02:04:31   it's a negative from your perception that you just know that you have a harder time

02:04:35   with those kinds of comments. So that's why I was just trying to say like, "Oh, but it's

02:04:39   not true!" And so you can kind of dismiss those sorts of comments if you know like,

02:04:44   "Oh no, but I did read up on that topic. Like I know more than this person thought I did.

02:04:48   They're just assuming that I know nothing." That's sort of trying to express my thoughts

02:04:53   on this, but like I'm very pro-you doing this move. I just feel like you can't do anything

02:05:00   on the internet when you're at any size of audience without having some people be

02:05:05   really mad about it. Of course there's gonna inevitably be negative feedback. You

02:05:11   know, some of it hurts because it's accurate and it's like, "Ah, they got me in my

02:05:15   secret heart! Like, they knew!" Or like, "Yeah, that was that was real bad." But

02:05:19   some of it is just like totally baseless and you have to learn to mentally divide those

02:05:26   two things as two fundamentally different kinds of things. The negative feedback that

02:05:33   is baseless or that you don't agree with, and the negative feedback that you do agree

02:05:37   with. And they're just like, they're almost like two unrelated categories and you have

02:05:42   to kind of train yourself to think about them in that way.

02:05:45   Yeah, and I think I have gotten better at this.

02:05:48   Oh, for sure, for sure.

02:05:50   You, you've known me for a long time and you've seen a lot of change in me. But it's like,

02:05:56   I still, like, I believe I am able to separate those things, but I haven't gotten to the point where they still don't make me annoyed, though.

02:06:05   Yeah, and that may never go away, because that can just be a human reflex for "ugh," like it's this kind of thing again.

02:06:13   And the annoyance can come from the fact of knowing, "Well, this will just be inevitable forever."

02:06:18   [laughs]

02:06:20   Now that you have spoken about leaving Twitter, it's like, "Oh, inevitably forever, there's

02:06:24   gonna be the 'mikes out of touch' comments."

02:06:26   And that's just a thing.

02:06:28   That's just like a negative cost for all of the positive upside.

02:06:32   But again, if it couldn't be more clear, number one, I am the best person to judge this, and

02:06:37   I think it's a great decision.

02:06:39   Number two, I think it's a great decision.

02:06:40   Like I'm glad to hear that you've done this.

02:06:42   I hadn't really thought about the situation kind of giving you cover, but you're right.

02:06:47   Like it's perfect.

02:06:48   Like if you're going to do this, this is the lowest friction way to step away from Twitter.

02:06:57   Like I'm happy that you've taken advantage of the, shall we say, unique moment in Twitter's

02:07:02   history and like this can be some real upside for you.

02:07:07   And I'm also just really glad to hear that you, you know, you haven't played the migration

02:07:12   game that everybody plays like, "Oh, now we're all going to go over to this thing."

02:07:16   That game never ends, which is why it's interesting to hear from you even just a little bit like,

02:07:21   "Oh, Mastodon already intrinsically has the things that we can just set our watches and

02:07:26   wait until the time when everybody decides that Mastodon is terrible and we're all gonna

02:07:30   go over to some other place."

02:07:32   So I'm like, "I'm glad to hear that you're not having this in your life in any way."

02:07:38   And yeah, RSS.

02:07:40   It's great.

02:07:41   It's back.

02:07:42   It's back again.

02:07:43   Who would have ever thought like 2023 is the year of RSS, but it totally is.