Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► Did you buy an iMac Pro?

00:00:02 ◼   ► Uh, why do you ask Myke?

00:00:03 ◼   ► I just wanna know.

00:00:04 ◼   ► I did buy an iMac Pro.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Are you using it right now?

00:00:07 ◼   ► No. I'm not.

00:00:09 ◼   ► I'm not using it right now.

00:00:11 ◼   ► Do you have it?

00:00:12 ◼   ► I do have it.

00:00:13 ◼   ► Okay.

00:00:14 ◼   ► It's a complicated story Myke.

00:00:15 ◼   ► Have you ever used it?

00:00:19 ◼   ► I can't understand where you would put it.

00:00:21 ◼   ► 'Cause I assume you're at home right now.

00:00:23 ◼   ► I mean you never know where I am when I'm recording.

00:00:26 ◼   ► I never really know where you are, that is true.

00:00:29 ◼   ► I am often surprised wherever you are.

00:00:32 ◼   ► We have a topic that will lead into this in some sense, but now I do have an iMac Pro.

00:00:38 ◼   ► I have used the iMac Pro.

00:00:40 ◼   ► I am in London recording with you, but I am not currently using that iMac Pro.

00:00:47 ◼   ► So it is elsewhere at this moment.

00:00:49 ◼   ► Do you like the iMac Pro?

00:00:50 ◼   ► But it's pretty great!

00:00:51 ◼   ► Oh, okay, you really like it.

00:00:52 ◼   ► It's pretty great!

00:00:53 ◼   ► Okay.

00:00:54 ◼   ► It is nice to have a computer that's super fast and it's also nice to, because when we

00:01:03 ◼   ► were in that valley of darkness with Apple for a while, I had this feeling of like, "Oh

00:01:08 ◼   ► Apple, let me just throw some money at you so I can get a faster computer.

00:01:12 ◼   ► You name a number and I'll write you a check, Apple.

00:01:14 ◼   ► I just need a faster computer."

00:01:16 ◼   ► And it is nice that now with the iMac Pro, in a way, Apple has called the bluff on like,

00:01:21 ◼   ► write a check because it's like, "Apple can ask for a check that I am not willing to write."

00:01:26 ◼   ► It's really nice that there exists a computer where you have to make decisions about what is it that you actually want out of this machine

00:01:34 ◼   ► because it means that the theoretical maximum computing threshold is beyond you.

00:01:41 ◼   ► It's not where you currently are right now.

00:01:44 ◼   ► I really hated that feeling of, "I have the fastest computer, there's no faster computer that I can possibly buy,

00:01:50 ◼   ► and it's not fast enough.

00:01:52 ◼   ► So yeah, the iMac Pro is very fast.

00:01:55 ◼   ► There are some crazy configurations out there

00:01:58 ◼   ► that make it super expensive.

00:02:00 ◼   ► I did not go for the super crazy expensive

00:02:03 ◼   ► iMac Pro configurations, but I got a good one

00:02:06 ◼   ► and it is very impressive.

00:02:10 ◼   ► I really like it.

00:02:11 ◼   ► And of course, when you get a new computer,

00:02:15 ◼   ► how do you test it out?

00:02:16 ◼   ► Well, you gotta load up a game and see how the game plays.

00:02:20 ◼   ► And so of course, as soon as the computer was set up,

00:02:24 ◼   ► the very first thing that I put on it

00:02:27 ◼   ► was American Truck Simulator,

00:02:29 ◼   ► so I could get a real sense of how it was.

00:02:31 ◼   ► - And how did it run?

00:02:32 ◼   ► Did it run good?

00:02:33 ◼   ► - It was beautiful, Myke.

00:02:34 ◼   ► - Oh, yeah.

00:02:35 ◼   ► - It was absolutely beautiful.

00:02:37 ◼   ► - So I was just thinking about like,

00:02:39 ◼   ► what do you use it for, right?

00:02:41 ◼   ► Like what is your use for such a powerful machine?

00:02:44 ◼   ► And I was gonna make a joke about like,

00:02:47 ◼   ► what are you, some kind of pro video producer,

00:02:49 ◼   ► having completely forgot that you make YouTube videos,

00:02:52 ◼   ► for a moment was like, what do you need it for?

00:02:56 ◼   ► You just edit podcasts.

00:02:57 ◼   ► What do you, and you don't even do all the editing.

00:03:00 ◼   ► What do you need it for?

00:03:02 ◼   ► Seriously, I was gonna make a joke about you being MKBHD

00:03:05 ◼   ► or something making YouTube videos.

00:03:07 ◼   ► Turns out you do make YouTube videos,

00:03:10 ◼   ► so I understand why you might want it,

00:03:11 ◼   ► because I know that like a lot of the stuff

00:03:15 ◼   ► that you do in video,

00:03:15 ◼   ► you can always throw more power at it, right?

00:03:18 ◼   ► And I would assume that's why one of the reasons you bought the machine was because it can

00:03:22 ◼   ► just make your video process a lot nicer.

00:03:25 ◼   ► Because it turns out you do make those YouTube videos.

00:03:27 ◼   ► Yeah, I do make YouTube videos.

00:03:30 ◼   ► There are a number of... it's easy to forget.

00:03:32 ◼   ► I mean there are so many things that I do, Myke.

00:03:35 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:03:36 ◼   ► My professional biography is long.

00:03:38 ◼   ► Very long.

00:03:39 ◼   ► And includes very many things.

00:03:40 ◼   ► Full of projects of secret and public nature.

00:03:43 ◼   ► Yeah, many things.

00:03:44 ◼   ► But Faster Computer is great and with YouTube videos and with lots of other stuff.

00:03:51 ◼   ► The increased power makes a real difference.

00:03:55 ◼   ► Even for things just like if I'm making the YouTube videos for podcasts that are being

00:04:00 ◼   ► uploaded, like you're uploading a two and a half hour video, like exporting that kind

00:04:05 ◼   ► of thing takes a long time.

00:04:06 ◼   ► It takes a very long time.

00:04:07 ◼   ► I am always surprised at one, how long it is and two, how big the files are when it's

00:04:13 ◼   ► just like a static image and two hours of audio. It's like oh here's here is a

00:04:20 ◼   ► nine gigabyte file and it's like uh Final Cut what are you doing? But I guess

00:04:25 ◼   ► that's it is what it is right? Yeah it is it is what it is but I've got to say

00:04:32 ◼   ► it's it's really it's a really impressive machine and it does run

00:04:35 ◼   ► American Truck Simulator pretty great on there. I put on the little steam overlay

00:04:40 ◼   ► to see how many frames per second I was getting and it was very impressive but

00:04:43 ◼   ► But on a more practical level, I loaded up one of the files I've made reference to a few times on the show,

00:04:50 ◼   ► like these multi-terabyte Final Cut Pro projects that I have.

00:04:55 ◼   ► And the thing that I wanted to--

00:04:58 ◼   ► So Final Cut has this feature where it does background rendering when you open up a project,

00:05:03 ◼   ► and that is always a thing that takes absolutely forever.

00:05:07 ◼   ► But Final Cut has been updated to take advantage of multi-core machines.

00:05:12 ◼   ► And so I uploaded the biggest Final Cut project I could find on my computer

00:05:17 ◼   ► and I just wanted to see how it handled it.

00:05:19 ◼   ► And it was just astounding to see these multiple cores just tear through the background rendering like it was nothing.

00:05:27 ◼   ► And I was like, "Whoa! This is really impressive!"

00:05:31 ◼   ► And it is one of these cases where the machine makes you very aware of

00:05:36 ◼   ► What programs take advantage of multiple cores and what programs do not take advantage of multiple cores?

00:05:42 ◼   ► Because the things that have been written to take advantage of multiple cores

00:05:45 ◼   ► It's just it's such an incredible increase in speed

00:05:50 ◼   ► That it's it's really just fantastic. So I love the machine. It is great

00:05:55 ◼   ► I'm glad that Apple has made a like a real top-end computer again

00:06:00 ◼   ► So I'm really pleased with it and it comes in space gray. It looks great. Looks looks great

00:06:06 ◼   ► No more stupid aluminum.

00:06:08 ◼   ► Well, it's still aluminum.

00:06:10 ◼   ► Or aluminium.

00:06:12 ◼   ► Yeah, but not the aluminum colour.

00:06:14 ◼   ► Gosh, I can't believe I said that.

00:06:16 ◼   ► Seems like you spend too much time

00:06:18 ◼   ► podcasting with Americans.

00:06:20 ◼   ► Yeah, something like that.

00:06:22 ◼   ► I presume that you are not going to get one of the iMac Pros?

00:06:26 ◼   ► No, no, I don't need it.

00:06:28 ◼   ► I don't need it and I don't particularly want it.

00:06:31 ◼   ► It's more computer than I require

00:06:34 ◼   ► require for what I'm doing.

00:06:37 ◼   ► It would make some things quicker,

00:06:38 ◼   ► but honestly I don't do a lot of that stuff very often.

00:06:41 ◼   ► Like noise removal and they're like some of the most

00:06:46 ◼   ► intensive tasks that you can do in audio editing

00:06:48 ◼   ► is like doing something to improve the quality of the audio.

00:06:51 ◼   ► But by and large, the majority of people that I record with

00:06:56 ◼   ► are in stable environments that don't really require

00:06:58 ◼   ► a lot of work to be done to them.

00:07:00 ◼   ► So honestly, I'm good.

00:07:03 ◼   ► and all of my wait time,

00:07:05 ◼   ► my workflow is pretty optimized at this point,

00:07:08 ◼   ► so that if I'm waiting for something to export,

00:07:11 ◼   ► I'm doing something else, like I'm not twiddling my thumbs.

00:07:14 ◼   ► I've got, you know, I publish so many podcasts now

00:07:17 ◼   ► that I have my routine, and I'm never sitting

00:07:21 ◼   ► and waiting for my iMac to do something.

00:07:24 ◼   ► - Yeah. - So the iMac Pro

00:07:26 ◼   ► doesn't make sense to me.

00:07:26 ◼   ► I am personally holding out to see

00:07:30 ◼   ► whatever the Mac Pro looks like.

00:07:32 ◼   ► the purpose of buying a machine that will last me 10 years.

00:07:37 ◼   ► If the Mac Pro is as modular as I hope it's going to be,

00:07:42 ◼   ► that you will truly be able to replace and upgrade parts

00:07:46 ◼   ► over a long period of time,

00:07:47 ◼   ► if that seems like that is a possibility,

00:07:49 ◼   ► that may be the next machine that I buy.

00:07:52 ◼   ► I'm just less interested in exciting Macs now, right?

00:07:57 ◼   ► Like, a mic of like five years ago

00:08:00 ◼   ► probably would have bought the iMac Pro

00:08:02 ◼   ► because it's the newest and most exciting Mac.

00:08:04 ◼   ► I don't really have that feeling anymore.

00:08:06 ◼   ► Obviously, the iOS is where my excitement is.

00:08:10 ◼   ► So I am keen to own a machine that I can upgrade

00:08:15 ◼   ► over a long period of time for a smaller amount of money

00:08:19 ◼   ► than buying a new computer every three years

00:08:21 ◼   ► to try and keep up with the latest and greatest.

00:08:24 ◼   ► So that's kind of where my attention

00:08:26 ◼   ► is a little bit more now,

00:08:27 ◼   ► is seeing what the Mac Pro looks like.

00:08:30 ◼   ► But I have no desire or need to do anything about my Mac setup right now

00:08:37 ◼   ► because I have a iMac 5K which I've had for like

00:08:40 ◼   ► maybe like 18 months or something like that

00:08:42 ◼   ► and it feels as fast to me as the day I bought it.

00:08:46 ◼   ► Like I have no problem with this machine.

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00:10:49 ◼   ► Okay, Myke, so you want to know where the iMac Pro is.

00:10:54 ◼   ► And this gets us straight to the heart of the first topic that I wanted to talk about,

00:11:01 ◼   ► which is I wanted to give a little bit of an update on the year of order and how that's going.

00:11:09 ◼   ► You need to put more... I feel like I need to add a sound effect every time you say it.

00:11:15 ◼   ► like a thunderclap or like you know like modulate the voice a little bit

00:11:20 ◼   ► no just leave it just leave it on mic there's no need for that i think i think people can hear like

00:11:25 ◼   ► the capital o in order i think that i think that comes across they can hear that in their mind

00:11:29 ◼   ► there's no need for it of course there's no need for it right but you know it might be nice yeah so

00:11:36 ◼   ► um so i i have an i have an idea with the show this year to check in a little bit more regularly

00:11:44 ◼   ► about what's going on with the Year of Order.

00:11:46 ◼   ► And that's partly because I was really aware last year

00:11:51 ◼   ► that we didn't touch in very often on what was going with the Year of Redirection/Chaos.

00:11:57 ◼   ► And that was partly because a lot of the things that were going on there

00:12:00 ◼   ► it didn't make sense to talk about on the podcast.

00:12:02 ◼   ► It was chaos. I mean, how do you check in on chaos?

00:12:04 ◼   ► Yeah, and that was the other thing. It was chaos.

00:12:07 ◼   ► It wouldn't have been very hard at any particular point

00:12:09 ◼   ► to have a meaningful conversation about what was going on during that.

00:12:13 ◼   ► because it was just less structured.

00:12:15 ◼   ► But the year of order lends itself to that.

00:12:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think we spent more time

00:12:20 ◼   ► talking about my year theme, right?

00:12:21 ◼   ► Because there was stuff going on,

00:12:24 ◼   ► like hiring people.

00:12:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, it made more sense.

00:12:27 ◼   ► - Handing over tasks, right?

00:12:28 ◼   ► There were things that I could kind of point to

00:12:30 ◼   ► as a thing to make a difference in my year,

00:12:32 ◼   ► where yours was a little bit more ad hoc, I think,

00:12:35 ◼   ► as it was going through. - Yeah, without a doubt.

00:12:38 ◼   ► And so I like the idea of checking in more regularly.

00:12:41 ◼   ► I also like the idea that to go along with the theme itself,

00:12:44 ◼   ► knowing that we'll check in regularly on the podcast

00:12:47 ◼   ► is a kind of structure,

00:12:48 ◼   ► and structures belong in the year of order.

00:12:51 ◼   ► - Would you say a structure is kind of like a schedule?

00:12:53 ◼   ► - (laughs)

00:12:54 ◼   ► It's kind of like a schedule,

00:12:56 ◼   ► but schedules are a different sort of thing, Myke.

00:12:59 ◼   ► I don't like schedules.

00:13:00 ◼   ► - You like structure. - Structure.

00:13:02 ◼   ► Structure I like. - Not schedules.

00:13:03 ◼   ► - Structure, routine, these are good things.

00:13:06 ◼   ► - Wait, routine?

00:13:07 ◼   ► - Schedules, deadlines, no.

00:13:10 ◼   ► - Thumbs down. - Routine, yes, yes.

00:13:12 ◼   ► - It's highly different, like.

00:13:15 ◼   ► - I like due dates, not deadlines.

00:13:19 ◼   ► - Yeah. (laughing)

00:13:21 ◼   ► It's subtle, you know, it's like a subtle difference

00:13:23 ◼   ► of flavor, but it's there, you know,

00:13:25 ◼   ► when you're really highly attuned to these sorts of things.

00:13:29 ◼   ► So here's my idea for this first check-in, which is,

00:13:34 ◼   ► I have this real feeling like the year of order

00:13:37 ◼   ► is going to be a very big, intensive, long project

00:13:41 ◼   ► 'cause there's a lot of stuff that I wanna do.

00:13:43 ◼   ► And I'm already sort of breaking it down.

00:13:47 ◼   ► And the first part of this that I realize works out

00:13:52 ◼   ► really well in the beginning of the year

00:13:55 ◼   ► for a bunch of things is the idea of

00:13:59 ◼   ► setting up my physical space.

00:14:04 ◼   ► That there's a lot, when I think about,

00:14:06 ◼   ► how do I work, what are the environments in which I work, that over the last year, again, were sort of thrown into chaos for a variety of reasons.

00:14:15 ◼   ► And because of a bunch of my thoughts about the ways people work or how people can work effectively,

00:14:25 ◼   ► I really think that the environment in which you work is this real foundation upon which everything else rests.

00:14:36 ◼   ► And so here I mean the physical environment that you are in.

00:14:40 ◼   ► So I've decided that this is, as the winter season draws to a close, this is my focus.

00:14:47 ◼   ► Like, before winter ends, I want to have redone the physical spaces in which I work.

00:14:55 ◼   ► So this is like project one for the Year of Order.

00:14:58 ◼   ► And it happens to work out well that this is the first thing that I want to do,

00:15:01 ◼   ► because while ultimately I want to be really back into a solid working routine,

00:15:07 ◼   ► there's still some stuff in my life right now that's like left over from the previous year of Redirection/Chaos

00:15:14 ◼   ► that's going to be with me for a while.

00:15:15 ◼   ► So it's like, I can't start on the really heavy routine stuff just yet, so I'm going

00:15:20 ◼   ► to be working on this foundational part at the beginning.

00:15:24 ◼   ► So, which physical space are we talking about?

00:15:27 ◼   ► Which of your many offices are we talking about here?

00:15:32 ◼   ► Or all of them?

00:15:33 ◼   ► Okay, Myke.

00:15:34 ◼   ► I have a diagram for you.

00:15:35 ◼   ► I'm going to send you a little diagram to take a look at.

00:15:38 ◼   ► Okay.

00:15:39 ◼   ► Okay.

00:15:40 ◼   ► Oh, my.

00:15:41 ◼   ► This is very messy.

00:15:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:44 ◼   ► Just to be clear.

00:15:45 ◼   ► And I'm happy to put this in the show notes.

00:15:47 ◼   ► Just yesterday, I was having multiple flights in the same day, which is always great.

00:15:55 ◼   ► Many more travel, racking up those airline miles, you know, keep my golden ticket.

00:16:00 ◼   ► [HUMMING]

00:16:02 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

00:16:06 ◼   ► Just as fun.

00:16:07 ◼   ► So while I was on the flight, I was trying to use that time well,

00:16:11 ◼   ► because airplane time is a strange time.

00:16:14 ◼   ► And one of the things that I do find is useful to do with that time is

00:16:19 ◼   ► thinking about stuff on a like a higher level or just

00:16:23 ◼   ► brainstorming or doing those sorts of things. So what I did was I brought my iPad with me on the trip and

00:16:28 ◼   ► opened up good old GoodNotes and

00:16:31 ◼   ► what I decided to do was a thing that I had mentioned I think related to one of the Ask Cortex questions last time

00:16:37 ◼   ► which was I started to

00:16:40 ◼   ► draw out

00:16:42 ◼   ► What are the different devices in my life, and what do I want to use them for?

00:16:47 ◼   ► And then this ended up becoming much more along the ideas of, okay, how am I going to

00:16:54 ◼   ► set up the physical spaces in my life? So,

00:16:58 ◼   ► there's two things in this very messy diagram, but I have the idea of, there are some devices.

00:17:06 ◼   ► So it's like, I have my iPhone.

00:17:09 ◼   ► I have the new iMac Pro.

00:17:11 ◼   ► I have a laptop.

00:17:12 ◼   ► I have iPads.

00:17:14 ◼   ► Like, I have machines.

00:17:15 ◼   ► Like, what are each of these machines for?

00:17:19 ◼   ► And then also trying to overlap that with the idea of...

00:17:23 ◼   ► I have different physical spaces in which I can be.

00:17:27 ◼   ► Which devices belong where?

00:17:30 ◼   ► Right, which devices go where?

00:17:32 ◼   ► So the main thing here is, I feel like there's three spaces.

00:17:38 ◼   ► I have a home office, which is where I am right now in my apartment.

00:17:43 ◼   ► I have the glass cube that we have discussed previously,

00:17:48 ◼   ► which is in a separate building from where I am now.

00:17:51 ◼   ► And then I think of... it doesn't quite make sense maybe to people,

00:17:56 ◼   ► But I do think of my phone as a kind of omnipresent space.

00:18:04 ◼   ► That this is a device and a space that is just with me all of the time wherever I am.

00:18:09 ◼   ► So it has like overlap with other areas.

00:18:13 ◼   ► So this is the division.

00:18:15 ◼   ► Like thinking about how is my phone going to work,

00:18:18 ◼   ► and then thinking about what is going to happen in my home office,

00:18:22 ◼   ► what is going to happen in the glass cube,

00:18:26 ◼   ► and then also because I was on a plane thinking about,

00:18:30 ◼   ► since my travel does not seem to be decreasing

00:18:34 ◼   ► over the next year, thinking a little bit about

00:18:37 ◼   ► what does my mobile working space look like

00:18:41 ◼   ► and trying to draw out what devices do what where.

00:18:46 ◼   ► How does this diagram look to you, Myke?

00:18:48 ◼   ► - I have a lot of questions about this diagram.

00:18:51 ◼   ► Okay, why don't you start with some questions because otherwise I will just talk forever in a vague way

00:18:56 ◼   ► So let me know what is confusing to you about this diagram. Yeah, I want to go down from the top

00:19:01 ◼   ► So we have the phone morning and afternoon. Are they the same device? Just want to just double check or is that they're two different devices

00:19:08 ◼   ► Yes, I have one phone one phone using my iPhone X

00:19:12 ◼   ► But I made I made a little division about the device is

00:19:17 ◼   ► different in the morning and it's different in the afternoon about what

00:19:21 ◼   ► what should it do or what should I be doing with the device at these times.

00:19:26 ◼   ► But there isn't anything that you're doing to really restrict what the device does

00:19:30 ◼   ► right because you kind of can't do that this is more of a mental thing.

00:19:35 ◼   ► There's two parts here it is a bit of a mental thing because Apple's notification

00:19:39 ◼   ► system is terrible and is not very good compared to the competition but there is

00:19:44 ◼   ► a physical thing that is happening that I'm still using the system we've

00:19:47 ◼   ► we've discussed before where I have two different Apple watches and this is my way of...

00:19:52 ◼   ► That's what the S2 and the S3 is. That's my next question.

00:19:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:56 ◼   ► That's Apple Watch Series 2 and Apple Watch Series 3. Okay.

00:19:59 ◼   ► Correct. You can with two watches kind of fake or trick the iPhone into having different

00:20:07 ◼   ► sorts of behaviors.

00:20:08 ◼   ► Because you can turn on different notifications for different applications on each watch independently,

00:20:14 ◼   ► right?

00:20:15 ◼   ► That's correct. So the idea is in the morning with my series to watch the only kinds of

00:20:21 ◼   ► notifications that we'll get through are notifications

00:20:24 ◼   ► from myself to myself.

00:20:27 ◼   ► So these are things like I have started a timer and I want a notification about when that timer ends or

00:20:33 ◼   ► if there's a calendar event that I put on the calendar previously that I will have forgotten about in that morning

00:20:39 ◼   ► or things like alerts from task managers, right? Those are the only sorts of things

00:20:44 ◼   ► that should get through the device through my phone in the morning and the

00:20:50 ◼   ► only way I can do it is to say that the phone is totally silent, the phone does

00:20:55 ◼   ► no notifications, but the Series 2 watch is configured to just allow notifications

00:21:01 ◼   ► from those three classes of device. Okay and then I can see the afternoon is when

00:21:09 ◼   ► and you allow people to contact you,

00:21:12 ◼   ► you've got iMessage and Slack,

00:21:14 ◼   ► but still no email, outgoing email only,

00:21:18 ◼   ► is, and I get that, I get that, I understand.

00:21:20 ◼   ► I mean, sure, I couldn't work and would never work that way,

00:21:23 ◼   ► but I know that you have in the past,

00:21:24 ◼   ► so I understand, I get that, like I get what's going on here.

00:21:28 ◼   ► - Your business, I think many people's businesses

00:21:30 ◼   ► would totally fall apart

00:21:31 ◼   ► without more frequent contact with email.

00:21:33 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:21:34 ◼   ► - But yeah, for me, by far and away,

00:21:37 ◼   ► the two biggest things that disrupt my life,

00:21:40 ◼   ► but that I still do need to pay attention to

00:21:43 ◼   ► are iMessage and Slack.

00:21:44 ◼   ► And those are the things where it's like, man,

00:21:47 ◼   ► if I get a Slack message in the morning,

00:21:49 ◼   ► it can really derail the day

00:21:51 ◼   ► where I start thinking about a thing

00:21:52 ◼   ► that doesn't really need to be thought about now.

00:21:55 ◼   ► But so in the afternoon when I swap watches,

00:21:59 ◼   ► then the messages from iMessage and Slack can get through.

00:22:04 ◼   ► And it is just, it is simply,

00:22:07 ◼   ► I did try for a little while to not even have Slack on my phone, but that crosses a line

00:22:13 ◼   ► of like, the convenience of having all of my business-related messaging on the phone

00:22:20 ◼   ► is just too great to remove it from the phone.

00:22:24 ◼   ► Because removing it from the phone then turns me into an incredible bottleneck where lots

00:22:30 ◼   ► of things that just require my approval or like one sentence of input, like then this

00:22:35 ◼   ► suddenly becomes a multi-day process about like, when have I opened up Slack on my computer?

00:22:40 ◼   ► So I have it as this case of like in the afternoons, that's when I'm going to get notifications

00:22:47 ◼   ► from my message and from Slack and I'm managing that by swapping out the watches.

00:22:50 ◼   ► Matt F: Slack is too important. Like you make it that, right? Like I know I have, I know

00:22:56 ◼   ► you have, we spoke about it in the past, right? You end up eventually, cause you think it's

00:23:00 ◼   ► great, right? Like it's great. It's a great system. You end up putting too much stuff

00:23:03 ◼   ► into it and therefore you make it too important and you've just moved the stuff.

00:23:07 ◼   ► Still better than email, but it still just becomes a big bucket of responsibilities.

00:23:13 ◼   ► Yeah, I definitely still have very conflicted feelings about Slack in a way that I didn't

00:23:18 ◼   ► when I first started it, but the big difference there is like for my company's Slack and the

00:23:24 ◼   ► Slacks of other companies that I'm involved with, fundamentally they're still invitation-only

00:23:32 ◼   ► systems.

00:23:33 ◼   ► So unlike email, where anybody in the whole world can be sending messages and stuff can

00:23:38 ◼   ► come in from all over the place, sure, Slack is still kind of an overwhelming mess, but

00:23:44 ◼   ► at least it has a clearly defined perimeter.

00:23:48 ◼   ► It's like people you know you want to hear from before you've heard from them.

00:23:52 ◼   ► Exactly, yeah.

00:23:54 ◼   ► That's what's happening there.

00:23:55 ◼   ► And it is also, again, like a more limited section of people I have frequent work contact

00:24:01 ◼   ► with as well, whereas as email is just it's just too expansive and so yeah as as you can see from

00:24:07 ◼   ► my note there I do have it set up on on my phone I have a special email account that just allows

00:24:12 ◼   ► me to send messages out if for some reason I need to send a message from my phone. It's a Gmail

00:24:17 ◼   ► account that I set up and all that Gmail account has is a single rule that all messages it receives

00:24:24 ◼   ► it forwards on to my real email account so I can deal with them at like a my desktop computer but

00:24:30 ◼   ► but I can still send a message from an email address that's like, "Gray is just using his

00:24:35 ◼   ► phone and won't actually be able to reply from this email address at gmail.com."

00:24:41 ◼   ► Right, like that's the email address.

00:24:42 ◼   ► And I'm assuming that there is a very limited amount of people that get email from that

00:24:46 ◼   ► account, just by the nature of the way it's set up.

00:24:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I use it more than you might think, but it's still not a lot.

00:24:54 ◼   ► It's still not a lot.

00:24:55 ◼   ► I mean, I imagine you're using it a lot, but I can't imagine it is a very large group of

00:24:59 ◼   ► people because if you don't see what's coming in, you don't know why you would need to contact

00:25:04 ◼   ► someone so it's just something that pops into your head, I would assume, most of the time.

00:25:08 ◼   ► Yeah, what usually happens is exactly that. A thing that pops into my head that I want

00:25:12 ◼   ► to tell a person who is not in one of the slacks that I manage, right? Like that's usually

00:25:19 ◼   ► the use case there. And so it's like, okay, now I need to send an outgoing message to

00:25:23 ◼   ► a person that I would not invite into the gray company slack because it doesn't make

00:25:27 ◼   ► any sense because they're not actually involved in the company, but I still need to send them

00:25:30 ◼   ► a message. So that's the way that works. And like I said, what I'm trying to manage here

00:25:36 ◼   ► is this idea that the phone is with me all the time. And so it is a kind of environment.

00:25:43 ◼   ► And what I'm really trying to optimize for here is the phone should be as minimally disruptive

00:25:50 ◼   ► as possible. And I have, part of while I was on my Gray Industries corporate retreat for

00:25:57 ◼   ► one, I was doing some of the pre-work for this, I really went through my phone again

00:26:01 ◼   ► and just uninstalled absolutely everything I could think of that wasn't totally vital.

00:26:08 ◼   ► Oh, interesting. I feel like I want to see that. Maybe we'll get into that.

00:26:15 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:26:15 ◼   ► AO I find it so interesting just how many apps are still on my phone. When this comes up with

00:26:23 ◼   ► people, I find it interesting that it's like, if we do phone comparisons, I'm often like the weird,

00:26:28 ◼   ► I'm like a weird Luddite with the way I use my phone where it seems like it's so limited.

00:26:33 ◼   ► But then at the same time, there's still something like 100 apps on my phone.

00:26:38 ◼   ► I just think it's an interesting commentary on modern life, how vital and important this piece

00:26:44 ◼   ► of technology is, and that even what most people would regard as crazy bear minimal use still

00:26:51 ◼   ► covers an incredible range of possible activities. So I just find that an interesting commentary on

00:26:59 ◼   ► the modern world. The largest section of this

00:27:04 ◼   ► diagram is contained within the glass cube.

00:27:09 ◼   ► So I am naturally assuming that you're out of home office

00:27:12 ◼   ► is where you're spending the majority of your work time now.

00:27:15 ◼   ► OK, Myke, let's get into this.

00:27:17 ◼   ► OK.

00:27:19 ◼   ► Glass cube.

00:27:20 ◼   ► One of the things that I decided to do

00:27:22 ◼   ► as part of the Year of Order was I have recently

00:27:26 ◼   ► upgraded my glass cube.

00:27:28 ◼   ► So I've gotten a bigger glass cube.

00:27:32 ◼   ► It's still--

00:27:32 ◼   ► That's the way to fix it.

00:27:34 ◼   ► It's still a glass cube. It's still weird. It still feels somehow like I'm working at Facebook during the day, except with glass barriers.

00:27:45 ◼   ► It's very strange. But I got a bigger space because of a bunch of things that I thought I want to do with this space.

00:27:53 ◼   ► And I was trying to think very intentionally about like, okay, what am I going to do here?

00:27:58 ◼   ► And what I have decided is that the thing that makes the most sense is that the glass cube is going to be like a forge of creation.

00:28:12 ◼   ► That this is where the kind of work that I do in this space is going to be the creative work in one way or another.

00:28:22 ◼   ► So there's a bunch of projects that relate to this.

00:28:25 ◼   ► But one of the main things that I've done is I have taken one of my older computers

00:28:32 ◼   ► and I have turned it into a dedicated writing station.

00:28:37 ◼   ► So the reason I got a bigger glass cube is because I wanted to fit not one, but two desks into the space.

00:28:45 ◼   ► Because one of those desks is going to be, or I should say is, because it's already set up now,

00:28:51 ◼   ► It is a standing desk that has a computer that is only used for writing.

00:28:58 ◼   ► And I've set it up sort of like the same idea with the phone,

00:29:01 ◼   ► like I want to pare this down to the minimum number of things required.

00:29:06 ◼   ► That writing computer is only going to have the three or four apps on it

00:29:14 ◼   ► that I need to actually do the writing.

00:29:17 ◼   ► And it's gone so far as like the account that I log in on that computer,

00:29:20 ◼   ► It's not logged into iCloud. I've set up things that I can do everything through Dropbox or separate thinking services.

00:29:26 ◼   ► So it's like that account has nothing on it really, except Evernote and

00:29:33 ◼   ► Ulysses as the two main programs that I need. It's like here's

00:29:37 ◼   ► research notes that I have and then here's the main program that I use for writing. And so when I turn that thing on it's like

00:29:44 ◼   ► these are the only apps that are here. There's nothing else for you when you're standing at this desk,

00:29:50 ◼   ► This is what you're going to do end of story. So that's that's part one of the glass cube. What is that computer?

00:29:56 ◼   ► that computer is a

00:29:59 ◼   ► 15 inch MacBook Pro that I've connected to some external monitors so that it's set up

00:30:06 ◼   ► What do you mean of course it is

00:30:11 ◼   ► Did you think it was going to be an iPad is that what you were asking?

00:30:15 ◼   ► Well, it was forever before and I don't know, just like as a machine that is single purpose

00:30:22 ◼   ► with just a couple of applications on that you can attach an external keyboard to. I

00:30:27 ◼   ► don't know. Whatever, man. Whatever floats your boat.

00:30:30 ◼   ► So I'll tell you something. This is sort of gets to a little bit of the things that are

00:30:33 ◼   ► later on. But one of the like the meta themes of the Year of Order when I was trying to

00:30:39 ◼   ► think about like setting up these physical spaces is it's kind of a funny thing that

00:30:45 ◼   ► But a little while ago, I bought myself a new backpack.

00:30:48 ◼   ► I was like, "Ooh, look at this. Look at this great backpack. This thing is fantastic."

00:30:52 ◼   ► And my backpack that I was using previously was a little run-down, and I thought,

00:30:57 ◼   ► "Yeah, this needs a replacement. Let me get a new one."

00:30:59 ◼   ► I need to save future Myke.

00:31:01 ◼   ► Okay.

00:31:02 ◼   ► Please tell me the name of the backpack.

00:31:04 ◼   ► Oh, I don't know.

00:31:05 ◼   ► You can't just say, like, "I got an amazing backpack," and then not...

00:31:09 ◼   ► And then, like, you know, me, I'm just wondering, fielding the questions, right?

00:31:14 ◼   ► Right like what's the backpack goes it linked to the backpack? I need to see the backpack

00:31:19 ◼   ► It must have a name on it. It must there must be a label

00:31:23 ◼   ► Something something I've got it. I've got it right here

00:31:26 ◼   ► Doesn't look like there's a label. I mean I like it there's got to be something

00:31:33 ◼   ► Where did you get the backpack?

00:31:37 ◼   ► Why would I remember where I got it? What did you buy in a physical suit? Did you buy it online?

00:31:43 ◼   ► It looks like there's a P... there's a P D written on it?

00:31:48 ◼   ► P D? Does that help you, Myke?

00:31:50 ◼   ► No, it doesn't help me.

00:31:52 ◼   ► Does it help if I say it's maybe the best backpack in the world?

00:31:55 ◼   ► But I don't know what it's called.

00:31:58 ◼   ► It has a... there's like a great... you can hear it.

00:32:01 ◼   ► There's like these fancy metal clasps.

00:32:04 ◼   ► You can change the interior volume around.

00:32:06 ◼   ► It's fantastic. Whatever, you know.

00:32:08 ◼   ► No, it's not whatever. If you bought it on Amazon,

00:32:11 ◼   ► you can get the information.

00:32:13 ◼   ► No, I didn't buy it on Amazon. I bought it directly from the website.

00:32:16 ◼   ► Well then you can open your email app and just type "backpack" into the search field.

00:32:21 ◼   ► I'll find it for you later, Myke.

00:32:23 ◼   ► No, you won't though.

00:32:25 ◼   ► Alright, okay. I just need this to be shown as testament to the fact that I tried.

00:32:29 ◼   ► I'm searching "backpack"...

00:32:33 ◼   ► I've got too many emails with the word "backpack" in them.

00:32:37 ◼   ► Not the most recent one though!

00:32:40 ◼   ► No, but you know like

00:32:42 ◼   ► Amazon is showing yeah, there's nothing I type in backpack and I've got like a hundred emails here

00:32:47 ◼   ► I don't see anything that's obviously the receipt from the company. Do you think people will ask you gray about the backpack?

00:32:53 ◼   ► Right. I was going through ask all attacks questions today

00:32:56 ◼   ► And there was somebody asking about our backpacks based upon like episode 3

00:33:02 ◼   ► Right. Yeah, that's that's what I'm thinking of it because at that point you didn't give the name of your backpack

00:33:08 ◼   ► So I am still getting those questions

00:33:10 ◼   ► So

00:33:13 ◼   ► You know, I just you know, I just need people to know that I tried to get the name. I found it. I found it. Okay

00:33:19 ◼   ► Okay

00:33:21 ◼   ► It's on the on the interior cover of the backpack by a company called peak design

00:33:27 ◼   ► That's what it is. Okay, so

00:33:30 ◼   ► It's called the everyday

00:33:34 ◼   ► backpack. Okay. I got it now. I think that's that's the okay. You good? Yeah, this is really good

00:33:40 ◼   ► Somehow I knew you were not gonna relax until I could no because I know when I know my future

00:33:47 ◼   ► I know what my future is, you know, and it was just full of like your future is fielding these questions

00:33:53 ◼   ► Yeah for forever. Yeah

00:33:55 ◼   ► Now I got it. It does look like a really nice bag actually. Oh man. Yeah, I just bought a new bag

00:34:02 ◼   ► I don't need another one, but this looks like a really nice bag. It is a really great bag

00:34:07 ◼   ► I bought a Tom Bihn Synapse backpack by the way, just so people don't ask what backpack I bought. Okay. Yeah, there you go

00:34:13 ◼   ► yeah, it's

00:34:16 ◼   ► It looks like it is ostensibly designed for cameras camera

00:34:19 ◼   ► Yeah

00:34:20 ◼   ► exactly like camera professionals and that

00:34:22 ◼   ► Is like when I bought my original backpack and I made that comment about how I was looking into like what do runners use because I?

00:34:28 ◼   ► I was trying to find the lightest backpack possible and I felt like, oh runners will use

00:34:31 ◼   ► Super light backpacks than I found when I really liked. It was the same thing with this. I was trying to think about

00:34:35 ◼   ► Equipment and I was like surely there must be backpacks that like wedding photographers would use

00:34:41 ◼   ► What is the professional solution to this and that's how I stumbled upon this this bag. Yeah

00:34:47 ◼   ► But so it is great. However, I bring all of this up because

00:34:52 ◼   ► it was an interesting thing to realize that I've got this backpack and I have

00:34:58 ◼   ► hardly used it in the past several months of having it because

00:35:04 ◼   ► I realized it's like, "Wait a minute.

00:35:08 ◼   ► I didn't buy this backpack for me.

00:35:13 ◼   ► I bought this backpack

00:35:16 ◼   ► for the me I used to be."

00:35:18 ◼   ► I used to be the person who spent all day

00:35:21 ◼   ► wandering around the city in different mobile locations and working very mobily.

00:35:27 ◼   ► Like, I haven't been that guy in a long time, and I recognize that some of my habits have changed where

00:35:34 ◼   ► I'm just much more in a smaller number of more permanent locations.

00:35:39 ◼   ► And so it was making me think very deliberately about my workspace, and so

00:35:45 ◼   ► one of the reasons that I did go with a Mac for my writing station is I was thinking about, like, I don't need

00:35:55 ◼   ► to optimize this space for mobility.

00:35:59 ◼   ► I don't need to optimize this space for the situation where

00:36:03 ◼   ► I'm gonna just grab that iPad on my way out the door

00:36:06 ◼   ► and I'm gonna use that one iPad as my writing iPad.

00:36:09 ◼   ► Like, I don't need to do that anymore.

00:36:11 ◼   ► Instead, what I can do

00:36:13 ◼   ► is if you accept that this station is never going to be mobile,

00:36:18 ◼   ► you can optimize it in a different way.

00:36:21 ◼   ► And so, one of the things that I can do is

00:36:24 ◼   ► that laptop is actually powering two of the external 4K monitors from LG,

00:36:32 ◼   ► and I have them both in the vertical setup.

00:36:35 ◼   ► Because one of the things that I really want to be able to do is see as much of the script as possible.

00:36:42 ◼   ► And so rotating a monitor to be in the vertical position is a really big bonus.

00:36:47 ◼   ► Like, it allows me to see so much more of what I'm working on,

00:36:51 ◼   ► And a lot of what I like about Ulysses allows you to like rearrange stuff.

00:36:55 ◼   ► It makes a lot of this way, way easier.

00:36:59 ◼   ► And it just comes down to the case of like, okay,

00:37:02 ◼   ► even if I wanted to use an iPad,

00:37:06 ◼   ► the biggest iPad they make is not as big as two 4K monitors.

00:37:10 ◼   ► So I'm like, I'm just gonna eat this and say,

00:37:13 ◼   ► I'm building this space to be a permanent space.

00:37:16 ◼   ► What is the ideal that I would want?

00:37:19 ◼   ► That's what I would want two monitors one for script one for research and notes and I can just have them next to each other

00:37:25 ◼   ► Super big all the time and standing up and then the other desk has an iMac Pro

00:37:32 ◼   ► That's where the iMac Pro lives. It lives on the second desk in the glass cube and this is like heavy

00:37:37 ◼   ► Project stuff including something called project golem, which is just a great name. It doesn't really matter what it's about that the names rugged

00:37:44 ◼   ► and that's where you edit and

00:37:47 ◼   ► produce stuff?

00:37:49 ◼   ► So yeah, the second half of the cube,

00:37:52 ◼   ► it's also like I'm trying to make spaces different.

00:37:56 ◼   ► So it's like the writing space is a standing up space because I always pace around anyway.

00:37:59 ◼   ► And then the iMac Pro is a sitting down space in the same cube.

00:38:05 ◼   ► And yeah, what I'm thinking of with this is

00:38:09 ◼   ► again, work that falls in some category of

00:38:13 ◼   ► creative in a way. So

00:38:17 ◼   ► So, what I'm trying not to do there is administrative tasks of any kind.

00:38:22 ◼   ► What I'm trying to do is, okay, so like, the podcast editing, I would say, is a kind of creative space that also benefits greatly from having the iMac Pro.

00:38:31 ◼   ► Like, it makes that much easier.

00:38:33 ◼   ► Doing the vlog editing is the same kind of thing.

00:38:36 ◼   ► It's like, this is creative work.

00:38:38 ◼   ► It also benefits from having the much more powerful computer.

00:38:40 ◼   ► Because it's in the same physical location as the writing, I do like to separate out when am I doing research for a script versus when am I actually writing the script.

00:38:53 ◼   ► I try not to do both of those things at the same time.

00:38:55 ◼   ► So the iMac Pro is also for research.

00:38:59 ◼   ► And then, yes, I don't want to talk about what the details of it are, but I do have a new project this year

00:39:06 ◼   ► That is sort of thematically related to the Year of Order, but I'm just going to call it Project Golem for right now.

00:39:15 ◼   ► And we will say that it definitely requires a fast, powerful computer for Project Golem.

00:39:24 ◼   ► So that is a thing that is underway, that is also creative, and is going to happen in this space.

00:39:31 ◼   ► What was that like?

00:39:32 ◼   ► You're the worst.

00:39:33 ◼   ► Why am I the worst?

00:39:35 ◼   ► are.

00:39:36 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:39:37 ◼   ► C.I. I'm trying to describe for you my thinking process here about what's going on with these

00:39:44 ◼   ► different spaces.

00:39:45 ◼   ► M.M.M.M. It's very good. And then obviously the only - you have an outlier, right, which

00:39:49 ◼   ► is the podcast recording because really that should live in the glass cube thematically,

00:39:55 ◼   ► but from an audio sound space perspective cannot be ever recorded in that space.

00:40:01 ◼   ► Yeah, this is where there's a couple of conflicts.

00:40:04 ◼   ► I actually...

00:40:05 ◼   ► The podcasts to me are such a different kind of work.

00:40:09 ◼   ► They don't...

00:40:10 ◼   ► They don't feel creative in the same way.

00:40:13 ◼   ► Like, creative's not the best word for what I'm doing in the glass cube,

00:40:16 ◼   ► but it's just the category that's in my mind.

00:40:18 ◼   ► Um...

00:40:19 ◼   ► Whereas the podcasts are much more like...

00:40:22 ◼   ► You know, they're like going out to a dinner with people.

00:40:26 ◼   ► You know, where it's just intensely draining social work.

00:40:30 ◼   ► It feels like a very different kind of thing, and so there are two good reasons to not have it be in the glass cube.

00:40:37 ◼   ► It feels to me, one, like that work is just very different kind of work from everything else, and secondly, yes,

00:40:43 ◼   ► a glass cube in the middle of like a Facebook-style open office is an acoustically terrible environment.

00:40:52 ◼   ► But so one of the other parts of like Year of Order is thinking a lot about,

00:40:57 ◼   ► What do I use my home office for? And I'm really aware that in the past year my home office has become a kind of

00:41:04 ◼   ► mess of ambiguity. Like what what happens here? What sort of work is here? What is this space for?

00:41:11 ◼   ► I've done a really bad job with that and so

00:41:14 ◼   ► what I'm in the process of doing is

00:41:17 ◼   ► again deciding very intentionally. This is a if this is like a permanent space

00:41:23 ◼   ► How can you best optimize this space for the kinds of tasks that you want to do in here?

00:41:28 ◼   ► And so yes, I'm turning my home office into

00:41:31 ◼   ► two things, but the primary one is an audio recording studio.

00:41:39 ◼   ► So I will do all of the podcasts in my home office and that also means

00:41:44 ◼   ► finally doing something like I'm going to be upgrading some of the audio equipment that I use.

00:41:49 ◼   ► Finally!

00:41:50 ◼   ► You've been--

00:41:52 ◼   ► Listeners, Myke has been bothering me about this for so long.

00:41:55 ◼   ► But this is a great example though again of my current podcast recording setup.

00:42:02 ◼   ► I mean, you know this. It's optimized for

00:42:05 ◼   ► mobility and flexibility. That's why I choose some of the equipment that I choose.

00:42:10 ◼   ► Like I use the Rode USB NT microphone, which I totally love and it is a great super flexible microphone.

00:42:18 ◼   ► But I'm making this decision of, okay,

00:42:20 ◼   ► if you're starting over and if this space is for this one task and all of

00:42:28 ◼   ► the equipment in here is never going to move would you choose the equipment that

00:42:33 ◼   ► you're currently using and the answer is no I would not choose this microphone

00:42:36 ◼   ► under those circumstances so I feel like I have to have a conversation with our

00:42:41 ◼   ► good friend Marco Arment about what to get because I am very out of my depth

00:42:46 ◼   ► here oh I know what you get like I've already had a conversation with him so

00:42:50 ◼   ► So you're probably going to end up with exactly what I have.

00:42:54 ◼   ► Okay, great.

00:42:55 ◼   ► Do you want to give me a preview?

00:42:56 ◼   ► What do you use, Myke?

00:42:57 ◼   ► No, it's too much.

00:42:58 ◼   ► It's too much.

00:42:59 ◼   ► It's too much.

00:43:00 ◼   ► I will put a link in the show notes to Marco Ammann's guide for podcast microphones because

00:43:07 ◼   ► what I use is not good to tell people to use because it kind of gets into that area of

00:43:14 ◼   ► you end up with small gains for a large cost, right?

00:43:17 ◼   ► Right, yeah.

00:43:18 ◼   ► I've been doing this for eight years and have built up over time.

00:43:22 ◼   ► There's pointless to start at where I am, but, uh, you know,

00:43:26 ◼   ► it's all included in that, in that guide, which you'll find in our show notes.

00:43:29 ◼   ► But that's also part of the, um,

00:43:32 ◼   ► like intentionally thinking about the kind of work that I do and

00:43:37 ◼   ► recognizing that optimizing for mobility is not sensible and that I am in the

00:43:42 ◼   ► same category as you. Like,

00:43:44 ◼   ► obviously I don't do nearly as much audio work as you,

00:43:47 ◼   ► But I do enough that optimizing for small gains is a sensible thing to do.

00:43:53 ◼   ► And it's probably a thing I should have done a year ago.

00:43:56 ◼   ► But like now I'm just doing it now.

00:43:59 ◼   ► And the other thing that I'm going to be looking into is acoustic treatments for the room.

00:44:06 ◼   ► So like getting some of the noise reduction foam and other things put into this office.

00:44:12 ◼   ► Like this office is fine for that but it's not great and I know that I could make it better.

00:44:17 ◼   ► And that's again the same kind of thing of like

00:44:19 ◼   ► Does it make the audio 5% better? Maybe

00:44:22 ◼   ► but I'm gonna spend time on that under this umbrella of the year of order, but

00:44:28 ◼   ► Right now my main focus

00:44:31 ◼   ► My main focus has been setting up the glass cube and I've gotten the glass cube into what I think of as version

00:44:38 ◼   ► 1.0 where it's minimally functional, but there's much more that I want to do and I'm really aware of

00:44:45 ◼   ► Like when people try to change, it's very easy to try to change everything all at once and then you do everything terribly.

00:44:52 ◼   ► And I'm taking this like very limited

00:44:56 ◼   ► small

00:44:58 ◼   ► focus and so that's why I feel like right now I'm focusing on my just my physical space.

00:45:03 ◼   ► I'm not even trying to touch my routine or my health or any of these other things that I want to do.

00:45:08 ◼   ► It's like okay, just focus on the physical space and then within that right now I am

00:45:13 ◼   ► just focusing on the glass cube as the main area.

00:45:16 ◼   ► And so I'm gonna get that absolutely the way I want it to be.

00:45:21 ◼   ► It's like, and then I will turn my full attention to the home office. And what's going to happen is

00:45:26 ◼   ► everything that's in the home office is coming out, and then I'm going to just deliberately bring things back in or set up the new equipment.

00:45:33 ◼   ► But so it's like I'm trying to focus on the smallest possible piece

00:45:37 ◼   ► each at a time. But I can tell you, all of my

00:45:42 ◼   ► glass office cube neighbors

00:45:45 ◼   ► They know who the who the weirdo on the floor is really fast

00:45:49 ◼   ► What are you doing now? Two desks doesn't seem that weird. It does seem weird as two desks and it's one person

00:45:56 ◼   ► but it was also just I had just I had a lot of boxes coming in and

00:46:02 ◼   ► coming in under

00:46:06 ◼   ► short periods of time and there was a lot of activity going on and

00:46:11 ◼   ► There's just a few things that make me like the office weirdo that I don't quite want to go into details

00:46:15 ◼   ► But it's like I can see the people looking. They're like that that guy's that guy's the weird guy on the floor in that office

00:46:20 ◼   ► What's he doing?

00:46:21 ◼   ► Eventually, you're gonna have to build that building because you're gonna be kicked out of every office space within the m25

00:46:27 ◼   ► I am aware that some of the stuff that I'm bringing into the

00:46:30 ◼   ► Glass cube like maybe this is not the final resting home of all of this stuff

00:46:33 ◼   ► But I am mentally treating it as though I'm gonna be there for a long time

00:46:37 ◼   ► Even if when I do construct an office building of my own it may it may all be relocated

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00:48:50 ◼   ► Anyway, so those are like the two main things with the computer that I'm going to be using in my home office.

00:48:56 ◼   ► Again, I'm going to deliberately strip everything off of there that is not required for recording a podcast.

00:49:03 ◼   ► So I'm going to have a machine that the only thing it does is I turn it on and I record podcasts on it.

00:49:11 ◼   ► Then I save those files and they get synced to the cloud and that machine is used for

00:49:16 ◼   ► Literally nothing else because if there is one thing I have learned over the years of podcasting is that audio recording is

00:49:23 ◼   ► surprisingly fiddly and stuff just

00:49:26 ◼   ► Somehow changes even when you're doing other things on the machine. That's incredibly frustrating

00:49:31 ◼   ► So it's like I'm gonna have a machine that is untouched except for this one

00:49:35 ◼   ► purpose and and that is going to be in my home office and all other software that is not

00:49:43 ◼   ► necessary on that machine is going to be removed. And it's again, it's the same thing with like the iMac Pro in the glass cube.

00:49:50 ◼   ► It's very deliberate removal of all software that is not necessary for

00:49:57 ◼   ► the vlog or for editing or for Project Golem, like everything is coming off that is not required for those things.

00:50:05 ◼   ► I really like how you refer to the vlog when you've done one.

00:50:09 ◼   ► Well, maybe we can get back to this a little bit later, but

00:50:13 ◼   ► We can say that I'll just say now that on my wheel of wheel of recorded time for last year

00:50:19 ◼   ► Vlog stuff was a surprisingly big chunk of that time

00:50:23 ◼   ► So in for me, it is still a very active project, even though I know two outsiders

00:50:28 ◼   ► It seems like it's crazy right like nothing has happened

00:50:31 ◼   ► So that's that still seems very active

00:50:35 ◼   ► I have a very small update for the year of adulting, one of my two themes.

00:50:39 ◼   ► I am now 30, so I've completed task one, which was to have my birthday, and I've done that.

00:50:46 ◼   ► You've made it.

00:50:47 ◼   ► Yep.

00:50:47 ◼   ► Happy birthday.

00:50:48 ◼   ► Yeah, so that's point one. Thank you very much. And I'm adding something in to the year.

00:50:53 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:50:54 ◼   ► I do not have a driving license.

00:50:57 ◼   ► I live in a big city, so there are two things to this.

00:51:02 ◼   ► I tried to learn to drive when I was like 17

00:51:08 ◼   ► and I would spend 45 minutes once a week stuck in traffic,

00:51:13 ◼   ► which is not the best way to learn how to drive.

00:51:16 ◼   ► And then also I am afforded with fantastic travel

00:51:20 ◼   ► in this city, public transport is wonderful.

00:51:23 ◼   ► But to think about some things that I want to do

00:51:27 ◼   ► in my work and personal life over the next few years,

00:51:31 ◼   ► a car would be a great addition to that

00:51:34 ◼   ► and would help facilitate a bunch of things.

00:51:36 ◼   ► So I am planning to get a driving license

00:51:41 ◼   ► by the end of the year.

00:51:42 ◼   ► Like after we get married,

00:51:43 ◼   ► some point towards the end of the year,

00:51:45 ◼   ► I'm gonna take one of those intensive courses things

00:51:48 ◼   ► and get a driving license and get a little car

00:51:50 ◼   ► that I intend to bump into some stuff.

00:51:52 ◼   ► and then I'm gonna have a car and a driving license.

00:51:55 ◼   ► So that's part of my other thing for my year of adulting.

00:51:59 ◼   ► - That's very exciting.

00:52:00 ◼   ► I have a friend who, she just went through that,

00:52:03 ◼   ► where she's never, never drove,

00:52:05 ◼   ► and as an adult, got her driver's license.

00:52:08 ◼   ► And when you live in a city, your whole life,

00:52:11 ◼   ► it's just like people who live in Manhattan, right?

00:52:13 ◼   ► There's no real need or pressure to get a driver's license,

00:52:17 ◼   ► because public transport is fantastic.

00:52:20 ◼   ► and doubly so in the world of ride sharing services.

00:52:24 ◼   ► It's like, you know, it makes it even less necessary.

00:52:28 ◼   ► But that'll be an interesting

00:52:31 ◼   ► and exciting project for you, Myke.

00:52:33 ◼   ► - Yep, 'cause like one of the things that I wanna do

00:52:35 ◼   ► is eventually, probably within the next couple of years,

00:52:37 ◼   ► I wanna get an office space outside of my home.

00:52:40 ◼   ► And where I am, like in the kind of the area that I'm in,

00:52:46 ◼   ► I don't know where there would be any office spaces,

00:52:49 ◼   ► but I reckon that they would probably be

00:52:51 ◼   ► like a 10 minute drive from home.

00:52:53 ◼   ► - Right.

00:52:54 ◼   ► - And it would just be easier if I have my own car

00:52:56 ◼   ► to deal with that.

00:52:56 ◼   ► - Right, then because I wanna limit--

00:53:01 ◼   ► - I can easily imagine that as the situation

00:53:03 ◼   ► for where you are.

00:53:04 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:53:05 ◼   ► - If you're going to have an office,

00:53:07 ◼   ► almost certainly it's going to be way easier

00:53:09 ◼   ► to drive to that office.

00:53:11 ◼   ► - Because the other thing is,

00:53:12 ◼   ► there are some places close to me

00:53:14 ◼   ► where I could get a space,

00:53:15 ◼   ► but they're not gonna be ideal.

00:53:18 ◼   ► And I open myself up to many more opportunities if I have a car.

00:53:23 ◼   ► Because I can then, you know, the catchment area for my studio space can grow

00:53:30 ◼   ► significantly if my mobility is increased.

00:53:32 ◼   ► So that's kind of one.

00:53:35 ◼   ► That's one of the things I'm thinking of.

00:53:37 ◼   ► So this is that.

00:53:38 ◼   ► That is like a multi-year project, which doesn't need to start.

00:53:42 ◼   ► But before I can do it, I need to get a driving license and get a car.

00:53:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the year of adulting seems like the perfect year

00:53:50 ◼   ► to have that as a target.

00:53:51 ◼   ► - We have a car parking space in our building that we own.

00:53:56 ◼   ► It just came with our apartment.

00:53:59 ◼   ► And it's in like an underground car park type situation.

00:54:03 ◼   ► And I have no idea what the feasibility would be

00:54:05 ◼   ► to try and convince the owners of the building

00:54:07 ◼   ► to put a plug socket in there for me.

00:54:09 ◼   ► But I'm thinking it because like, I've never owned a car.

00:54:13 ◼   ► Why don't I just get an electric car, right?

00:54:15 ◼   ► car and just never own a petrol car.

00:54:18 ◼   ► But if you're going to do that,

00:54:20 ◼   ► I would highly recommend

00:54:23 ◼   ► making that technological leap.

00:54:25 ◼   ► My plan is to try and see

00:54:27 ◼   ► if we can convince someone to allow us

00:54:29 ◼   ► to get that put in because.

00:54:30 ◼   ► I just feel like if I'm going to be

00:54:34 ◼   ► buying a car in 2018,

00:54:36 ◼   ► why even bother with petrol?

00:54:38 ◼   ► Yeah, I would agree with you 100%.

00:54:40 ◼   ► So I mean, I'm not.

00:54:41 ◼   ► We would, you know, there's like

00:54:43 ◼   ► a pretty decent second-hand market for like Nissan Leafs and stuff like that, right?

00:54:48 ◼   ► That we would probably get something like that. But you know, I have my mind that maybe in five

00:54:53 ◼   ► years I buy a Tesla or something, you know, like when I can actually buy a real car because I'm

00:54:57 ◼   ► not just going to bump it into everything. But I just figure why, if it's possible for me to just

00:55:03 ◼   ► go straight to electric, because that's clearly the future, why don't I just start with electric?

00:55:08 ◼   ► So that's like another long, I'm sure very arduous project that I think that Idina would probably take great enjoyment out of trying to win.

00:55:17 ◼   ► That's something that she would enjoy greatly as like a

00:55:21 ◼   ► project for her to try and convince the building owners to allow us to put a plug in the car park.

00:55:28 ◼   ► We'll see how that one goes.

00:55:29 ◼   ► When you get your license, you know, you you're legally required to go on at least one road trip.

00:55:34 ◼   ► So just FYI.

00:55:35 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is like a whole big thing.

00:55:37 ◼   ► We were talking about it yesterday.

00:55:39 ◼   ► It was like, "Oh, we can go down to the coast."

00:55:41 ◼   ► And then it was like, "Yep."

00:55:43 ◼   ► Think of all the places we can go.

00:55:44 ◼   ► We never go anywhere, but think of all the places we can go.

00:55:46 ◼   ► Well, I wish you luck with that.

00:55:47 ◼   ► Yeah, there's some time on that one, but it did occur to me that that fits quite nicely

00:55:52 ◼   ► in with the theme.

00:55:53 ◼   ► So Myke, speaking of people who don't upload logs, I haven't seen you upload a log in a

00:55:59 ◼   ► very long time.

00:56:00 ◼   ► How's that going?

00:56:02 ◼   ► I've come to a decision about my vlogging experiment, which I'm now calling an experiment

00:56:06 ◼   ► in retrospect.

00:56:07 ◼   ► Okay, I was like, wait a minute, I don't remember this word before.

00:56:10 ◼   ► I'm sure I said it at some point.

00:56:13 ◼   ► Alright, so, okay.

00:56:14 ◼   ► We're retconning this.

00:56:15 ◼   ► I'm not retconning it.

00:56:17 ◼   ► One of the things that I did last year was, in essence, I guess was an introduction to

00:56:25 ◼   ► what it would be like to have a year of branching out, was to try something new and create a

00:56:31 ◼   ► YouTube channel and create vlog content for it.

00:56:34 ◼   ► That was the plan and I wanted to see what it would be like to start a vlog and what

00:56:39 ◼   ► that would take.

00:56:40 ◼   ► And I've come to some conclusions about how I feel about being a vlogger.

00:56:47 ◼   ► I think that it is very clear that to get good and to get popular requires frequent

00:56:52 ◼   ► uploading.

00:56:53 ◼   ► Right?

00:56:54 ◼   ► I think that that is, in vlogging, that seems to be something which helps success is to

00:57:01 ◼   ► upload frequently.

00:57:04 ◼   ► whatever that ends up being like.

00:57:05 ◼   ► - Okay, so what does that mean?

00:57:06 ◼   ► There's a big spectrum here.

00:57:07 ◼   ► - I don't know.

00:57:08 ◼   ► I think at least once a week or a couple of times a week,

00:57:12 ◼   ► it would seem, right?

00:57:13 ◼   ► At least from the people that I follow

00:57:15 ◼   ► that are primarily doing lifestyle-ish vlogging-type stuff,

00:57:21 ◼   ► there is frequent uploading to that.

00:57:23 ◼   ► And I have a couple of issues that have

00:57:28 ◼   ► precluded me from being able to do that.

00:57:32 ◼   ► One is the amount of time that I actually have

00:57:37 ◼   ► to put into another creative project.

00:57:42 ◼   ► And really, I don't have it.

00:57:46 ◼   ► I don't have the time in my life

00:57:49 ◼   ► to create two YouTube videos a week, or one a week even.

00:57:53 ◼   ► It's just not a thing that I can do.

00:57:56 ◼   ► - Well, if I remember, your original goal

00:57:58 ◼   ► was one a month, wasn't it?

00:57:59 ◼   ► Wasn't that sort of roughly what you were aiming for?

00:58:01 ◼   ► - Yep, it was.

00:58:02 ◼   ► - Okay, so you're saying this is the combination of

00:58:05 ◼   ► if this thing is going to be successful,

00:58:07 ◼   ► it probably needs to be at least once a week.

00:58:10 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:58:11 ◼   ► - And that energy is just beyond the amount

00:58:12 ◼   ► that you have to spend in a week.

00:58:14 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:58:15 ◼   ► - Especially with the upcoming big project.

00:58:18 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:58:18 ◼   ► But the thing is, one of the problems that I had was,

00:58:24 ◼   ► one of the problems that I had with doing stuff

00:58:27 ◼   ► on a more frequent basis.

00:58:29 ◼   ► It's not even just time, it is content.

00:58:33 ◼   ► Like, what do I make, right?

00:58:37 ◼   ► - Well, Myke, the viewers, they wanted to see

00:58:40 ◼   ► what a normal day in Myke's life is like.

00:58:42 ◼   ► That's what people want to see. - No one wants to see that.

00:58:43 ◼   ► You think you want to see it,

00:58:44 ◼   ► but like I'm telling you, you don't.

00:58:46 ◼   ► It's so boring.

00:58:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, everybody thinks they want to see it,

00:58:49 ◼   ► but it's actually super boring.

00:58:51 ◼   ► - You would hate it. - And--

00:58:52 ◼   ► - Just trust me, like, you would hate it.

00:58:55 ◼   ► - How would you describe what a normal day

00:58:57 ◼   ► actually looks like for you, Myke?

00:58:58 ◼   ► - Sitting down.

00:58:59 ◼   ► - Sitting down in front of a computer,

00:59:02 ◼   ► what are you doing, clicking?

00:59:03 ◼   ► - All of the stuff that anybody wants to see

00:59:06 ◼   ► is just different places that I sit down.

00:59:09 ◼   ► - Right. - Right.

00:59:10 ◼   ► - How many of those places even are there?

00:59:12 ◼   ► - Two. - Three.

00:59:13 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly, right? (laughs)

00:59:15 ◼   ► - The thing is, is I don't have enough to give

00:59:20 ◼   ► from a content perspective because I make so much already.

00:59:25 ◼   ► So all of the things I have to say, I've already said them.

00:59:30 ◼   ► Right?

00:59:31 ◼   ► So I was thinking, something that I see from the vloggers

00:59:34 ◼   ► that I like is about half of the content, at least,

00:59:38 ◼   ► that they make tends to be them talking

00:59:40 ◼   ► to the camera about a thing.

00:59:43 ◼   ► Yeah, and in a broad way, a lot of it

00:59:45 ◼   ► could be classified as opinion pieces.

00:59:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:59:49 ◼   ► But I have no extra opinions than the ones

00:59:52 ◼   ► that I give on all of the shows that I make.

00:59:55 ◼   ► So that became apparent to me really quickly,

00:59:59 ◼   ► that I burned through my topic ideas

01:00:02 ◼   ► within like three months.

01:00:05 ◼   ► They were just all gone.

01:00:07 ◼   ► And typically, with a creative project that I have,

01:00:10 ◼   ► that is not the case.

01:00:11 ◼   ► That I will hang on to topics for a long time

01:00:15 ◼   ► because the initial list that I create

01:00:19 ◼   ► hasn't foreseen all of the other things

01:00:21 ◼   ► that might come to me, but they didn't.

01:00:24 ◼   ► Nothing really came to me.

01:00:26 ◼   ► And the other big thing is that I realized

01:00:31 ◼   ► that I would lose too much of my private life

01:00:36 ◼   ► if I decided that I wanted to do this more frequently.

01:00:41 ◼   ► Because if I don't have topics to sit in front

01:00:48 ◼   ► the camera to talk about all I can do is show more of my life right and I decided

01:00:57 ◼   ► that I'm comfortable with the amount that I already show and that the things

01:01:05 ◼   ► that I don't talk about and the things that people don't know about is for a

01:01:09 ◼   ► reason and if I vlog more I would lose all of it. Far too frequently something

01:01:18 ◼   ► that I see with the vloggers that I like to watch is that you see in their videos

01:01:23 ◼   ► they spend time with colleagues and friends who are also vloggers and

01:01:29 ◼   ► you see these scenes where it's like five people each talking into a camera

01:01:34 ◼   ► and I don't want to put my friends and family in those types of

01:01:39 ◼   ► situations because my friends and family don't do this and I don't want to subject everything

01:01:48 ◼   ► about my life and all of the people in it to the world like podcasting what I do right

01:01:53 ◼   ► now is fixed like I'm in my studio and I talk about what I want to talk about but vlogging

01:01:58 ◼   ► shows more of everything in a direct way like people and places and like bad hair days like

01:02:04 ◼   ► you see everything.

01:02:06 ◼   ► Yeah, there's a world of difference between you talking about Adina on a podcast and you filming Adina to put in your vlog.

01:02:19 ◼   ► There's a way that that turns it into, "Oh, I'm not just relaying a thing where the original person is not involved."

01:02:28 ◼   ► when, uh, yeah, how to put it, but like when vloggers are filming their family, they are pretty explicitly

01:02:38 ◼   ► requesting a performance of their family.

01:02:41 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:02:42 ◼   ► Like that, that is what is happening and it's the same thing that happens if you're friends with someone who is vlogging.

01:02:50 ◼   ► They are, even if you're just sort of in the background, now there's like an implicit request

01:02:58 ◼   ► that you do a performance for them.

01:03:00 ◼   ► I really have noticed it when I have vlog trips that I've taken, that people are very

01:03:07 ◼   ► aware.

01:03:08 ◼   ► Like if I'm doing anything with my phone, they think that I'm filming.

01:03:13 ◼   ► And like the people make these like jokey comments, but they're really just checking.

01:03:18 ◼   ► When we were in WWDC I saw a bunch of this and I was aware of that with you where people

01:03:23 ◼   ► were making comments to you where they're like "Oh, are you vlogging this?"

01:03:25 ◼   ► Like "hahaha" but...

01:03:28 ◼   ► Am I on camera?

01:03:29 ◼   ► Am I on camera right now?

01:03:31 ◼   ► That's what they want to know.

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01:06:07 ◼   ► Basically I've just come to realize that the life that I have right now doesn't fit this.

01:06:15 ◼   ► If I want to do this I have to make changes to my life and I've come to kind of come to the

01:06:22 ◼   ► conclusion that I don't want to be a vlogger. Like I've just come to I don't want to pursue it

01:06:28 ◼   ► to try and become this thing because I think I might lose too much of what I currently

01:06:33 ◼   ► have and like it would disrupt everything in a way that I'm maybe not comfortable with

01:06:41 ◼   ► and I don't want to never do them because there are vlogs that I know I will be able

01:06:48 ◼   ► to make about travel where it's mostly just me and I still want to make those because

01:06:55 ◼   ► 'cause I actually really enjoy that,

01:06:57 ◼   ► but I have no intention of continuing

01:07:02 ◼   ► to make this a serious thing.

01:07:03 ◼   ► There are other types of technology-based videos

01:07:05 ◼   ► that I wanna do, and I still wanna make those.

01:07:09 ◼   ► I wanna do more game streaming as a thing,

01:07:13 ◼   ► because I like doing that.

01:07:14 ◼   ► It's relatively low amount of input for the output.

01:07:17 ◼   ► But yeah, as far as vlogging goes,

01:07:23 ◼   ► I'm not a vlogger and I'm not gonna be one.

01:07:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean there is a way in which

01:07:28 ◼   ► from my limited experience with it, but also just from knowing and seeing people who are really in that industry that

01:07:37 ◼   ► How can I put this in a nice way?

01:07:43 ◼   ► But I think for people who are vlogging constantly it is like strip mining their life

01:07:49 ◼   ► where everything they're doing is

01:07:52 ◼   ► seen through the lens of how this can be presented to the outside world.

01:07:57 ◼   ► And there is a long tradition of people who are vloggers on YouTube who do very frequent multi times a week content

01:08:08 ◼   ► who you can just see them burn out.

01:08:12 ◼   ► And so there is no shortage of videos on YouTube where a vlogger who has been very prolific says

01:08:19 ◼   ► "Hey, I need to step away from this for a while because it's just emptied out my entire

01:08:26 ◼   ► life."

01:08:27 ◼   ► Well, there's actually two ways. You would burn out or you flame out, right? It's either

01:08:30 ◼   ► you've had enough or you push it too far and there's an equal amount of videos of people

01:08:37 ◼   ► doing something for the vlog, which was too much, right? And I have no desire to go in

01:08:45 ◼   ► either of those journeys in my life.

01:08:48 ◼   ► Yeah, well and there's also the thing that I think people you know if anybody out there's like like oh

01:08:53 ◼   ► I want to be a vlogger well

01:08:54 ◼   ► There's also that this thing you just probably don't think about very much, but there's a question of

01:08:58 ◼   ► How many how much hmm? I never quite know how to phrase this, but it's like

01:09:03 ◼   ► you know it's like your life is a garden and things in the garden grow slowly and

01:09:09 ◼   ► Vlogging is like you're trying to harvest flowers out of the garden every single day mm-hmm. It's like well

01:09:17 ◼   ► that just can't happen. There's a question of like, what is the frequency of which you can pull flowers out of this garden?

01:09:24 ◼   ► But they don't make flowers every day. Flowers take a while.

01:09:28 ◼   ► And, you know, like we discussed last time, I went through my own little version of this and that was part of what the year of

01:09:34 ◼   ► Redirection was. It was just recognizing like, I'm

01:09:36 ◼   ► I'm doing

01:09:39 ◼   ► podcasts that are

01:09:41 ◼   ► largely about my life in some ways as like the frequency is just a little too high

01:09:47 ◼   ► that it feels like I'm coming back to this garden to pull flowers too often. So I need to pull it back just a little bit

01:09:54 ◼   ► and when people are doing daily vlogs

01:09:56 ◼   ► it's like you are ripping all of the flowers out of this garden and I think it's why when I

01:10:02 ◼   ► think it's why there's two things that happen very frequently with the vlogs is that they become

01:10:08 ◼   ► Or people who do successful vlogs have a disproportionate amount of travel in their life

01:10:12 ◼   ► because

01:10:14 ◼   ► Travel is a way of like getting flowers out of another garden. Like you're going somewhere. You're doing something and then

01:10:22 ◼   ► especially lately what has been a trend on on YouTube I think is

01:10:26 ◼   ► Manufactured stunts for the vlogs. So you're now you're not really vlogging your daily life

01:10:34 ◼   ► It's much more like you're putting together a TV show. Oh you have to yeah, and so now you're artificially

01:10:41 ◼   ► Constructing things nobody's life is interesting enough like yeah, you have to create

01:10:47 ◼   ► situations and that was something that I've realized

01:10:51 ◼   ► Quickly like I started vlogging at a time in my life. That was very interesting

01:10:57 ◼   ► Yeah, we discussed it that you were very aware that there was a bunch of stuff going on in your life at that time

01:11:03 ◼   ► And so if you were going to try this project, that was the fertile time to do it.

01:11:08 ◼   ► MATT: Yep. And it worked for me, but then I realized, "Oh, but now

01:11:12 ◼   ► it's normal daily life." And every couple of months, every six to eight weeks,

01:11:18 ◼   ► I'm going somewhere interesting and they're cool, but what about all the other times?

01:11:23 ◼   ► And that was what I was struggling with. Once I moved into my house and built my office

01:11:29 ◼   ► I did all of that stuff, the really exciting time in my life was done, and I'm moving into

01:11:35 ◼   ► an exciting time now, which is getting married, but I have absolutely no desire to film any

01:11:43 ◼   ► of that process.

01:11:44 ◼   ► AO That's again the conflict of being a private

01:11:48 ◼   ► person who lives in public, in a way.

01:11:52 ◼   ► Do you want to strip mine your marriage?

01:11:53 ◼   ► MATT This was one of the big reasons for me where

01:11:56 ◼   ► I realized that maybe this wasn't for me.

01:11:58 ◼   ► So it was like, if I'm gonna be a vlogger, man, I have a wedding.

01:12:02 ◼   ► Like how great a video type thing is that, right?

01:12:06 ◼   ► To show your wedding to people?

01:12:07 ◼   ► But I realized I didn't want to do that.

01:12:09 ◼   ► Yeah, and there's also a way in which, obviously, I'm not really like a vlogger vlogger, but

01:12:17 ◼   ► my most direct comparison to this of a thing where you realize something is changing the

01:12:22 ◼   ► the way you think is, I mean, now this is several years ago when I decided to take Twitter

01:12:26 ◼   ► off of my phone, but I realized it cleared up all of this mental space where there was

01:12:32 ◼   ► some part of my brain that was constantly thinking, "Oh, is this a funny thing to tweet?

01:12:37 ◼   ► This thought that just came into my brain? Is this a funny thing?" Or I'm at some place

01:12:41 ◼   ► and I'm like, "Oh, is there a picture I could put on Twitter at this place that I am?" And

01:12:46 ◼   ► by removing Twitter from my phone, it just took that away and then I'm just not thinking

01:12:49 ◼   ► about that anymore. But again, it's like if you are going to be a successful vlogger,

01:12:55 ◼   ► you start thinking about everything in your life in those terms of, "Is this for the vlog?"

01:13:01 ◼   ► Right? "Is this for the vlog?"

01:13:03 ◼   ► And I feel like I need to make this super clear. This conversation is not based around

01:13:07 ◼   ► the fact that, "Oh, if I decided to do this, I would become a megastar." That's not what

01:13:12 ◼   ► I'm thinking here. When we talk about being successful, it is me trying to attempt to

01:13:17 ◼   ► get to a place where I might be in that position.

01:13:20 ◼   ► Like, I don't believe that if I made a video every week for six months that I would be

01:13:23 ◼   ► like the next Casey Neistat.

01:13:25 ◼   ► Right, because there's many people who make videos every week who are not Casey Neistat.

01:13:29 ◼   ► But I can't be that unless I put the work in.

01:13:31 ◼   ► I could never get to anywhere unless I put the work in.

01:13:34 ◼   ► And I've just decided that I don't want to put the work in to even try and attempt to

01:13:38 ◼   ► become someone who'd be considered a part of the vlogger as part of their work.

01:13:42 ◼   ► Yeah, no, the conversation here is not that you would be inevitably successful.

01:13:47 ◼   ► There's a lesson here for everyone who might want to be a vlogger, which is that you can

01:13:52 ◼   ► strip mine your life for the public and still be unsuccessful as well.

01:13:57 ◼   ► And you get nothing, right?

01:13:58 ◼   ► So that was part of it.

01:14:00 ◼   ► It was like, I give up everything and maybe get nothing back.

01:14:04 ◼   ► And it's like, do I really want to take that risk?

01:14:06 ◼   ► And then one of the other big things for me, which is a lesson that I will want to impart

01:14:10 ◼   ► to anyone, I was dreading the creation.

01:14:14 ◼   ► That's a bad sign.

01:14:15 ◼   ► That's a really bad sign.

01:14:16 ◼   ► - Exactly, so I would be like, I'd have my task come up

01:14:19 ◼   ► to be like, okay, you've gotta start working on a vlog

01:14:21 ◼   ► like you're approaching the end of the month.

01:14:23 ◼   ► And I'd be like, oh, but I don't wanna do it.

01:14:25 ◼   ► - For a project that's supposed to be a fun side project,

01:14:28 ◼   ► that's terrible, that's a bad idea, that's bad.

01:14:30 ◼   ► - Nothing else that I do do I feel that way.

01:14:33 ◼   ► And if I ever start to feel that way with anything,

01:14:36 ◼   ► one of two things happens.

01:14:37 ◼   ► I either change significantly the project or kill it.

01:14:41 ◼   ► And I've always worked that way.

01:14:43 ◼   ► And when I came to the realization

01:14:46 ◼   ► I was not enjoying thinking about necessarily being forced

01:14:51 ◼   ► to make a video.

01:14:52 ◼   ► That was when I deleted the task, right?

01:14:54 ◼   ► And that happened in the summer.

01:14:55 ◼   ► So the recurring task of Create a Vlog went away.

01:14:59 ◼   ► So then you will notice my frequency went down

01:15:02 ◼   ► because then I only just started making vlogs

01:15:04 ◼   ► about what I wanted to make vlogs about.

01:15:06 ◼   ► And then one of the bigger ones was when I was away

01:15:08 ◼   ► for four weeks over the summer,

01:15:11 ◼   ► I recorded a bunch of vlog footage

01:15:13 ◼   ► to create a huge vlog out of and I got home

01:15:15 ◼   ► and I had so much footage, I didn't know what to do with it,

01:15:20 ◼   ► and then that was when I kinda decided

01:15:22 ◼   ► that this probably isn't a thing for me.

01:15:26 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, it's been an interesting experiment.

01:15:29 ◼   ► Personally, I'm kind of sad

01:15:31 ◼   ► that you're not going to be vlogging frequently.

01:15:33 ◼   ► Like, obviously, the writing was on the wall

01:15:35 ◼   ► a little bit with this as the frequency dropped.

01:15:38 ◼   ► I did really enjoy your vlogs.

01:15:41 ◼   ► But I do think that you have still come out of this

01:15:43 ◼   ► with you learn how to do a new thing,

01:15:47 ◼   ► and you have also established the existence

01:15:50 ◼   ► of the Myke Curley YouTube channel.

01:15:52 ◼   ► - It is there whenever I wanna do something with it.

01:15:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's no longer the case of

01:15:56 ◼   ► if you wanted to upload a YouTube video,

01:15:58 ◼   ► you'd be starting from ground zero.

01:16:00 ◼   ► You now have some inbuilt audience over there,

01:16:05 ◼   ► and it's like if you feel like there is a video

01:16:07 ◼   ► that you want to make, that you feel compelled to make,

01:16:09 ◼   ► you have a place to put it,

01:16:11 ◼   ► and it has a place to start on YouTube

01:16:15 ◼   ► with some pre-existing audience that is already there.

01:16:18 ◼   ► - I have ideas for standalone videos

01:16:21 ◼   ► that I will make in the future,

01:16:22 ◼   ► but it's just nothing that I want

01:16:24 ◼   ► to necessarily start on right now.

01:16:27 ◼   ► And every now and then I get something

01:16:28 ◼   ► that pops into my head where I'm like,

01:16:29 ◼   ► that might be a fun thing to make a video about.

01:16:31 ◼   ► And so it just gets locked away

01:16:33 ◼   ► and I'll talk about it later.

01:16:35 ◼   ► I mean, and this maybe sounds weird,

01:16:38 ◼   ► but I'm happy that I have put as much time

01:16:42 ◼   ► into talking about this on this show as I have.

01:16:44 ◼   ► Because I follow a lot of people that are successful

01:16:50 ◼   ► and talk about their successes and the things that they do

01:16:52 ◼   ► and the things that they don't.

01:16:54 ◼   ► This has clearly been a failure

01:16:55 ◼   ► in what I attempted to start with,

01:16:59 ◼   ► like from where I am when I was talking about this,

01:17:01 ◼   ► doing this project to where I am now.

01:17:04 ◼   ► Like I have failed to achieve

01:17:05 ◼   ► what I was hoping to achieve from this

01:17:08 ◼   ► And it was because my feelings towards it changed.

01:17:11 ◼   ► So I'm happy to share that as a thing to say,

01:17:14 ◼   ► like, this is something that happens to everyone.

01:17:17 ◼   ► You start a project and it just doesn't go the way

01:17:20 ◼   ► that you want.

01:17:21 ◼   ► And that is totally fine for you to then

01:17:23 ◼   ► just move away from it.

01:17:24 ◼   ► And I actually feel better having moved away.

01:17:27 ◼   ► 'Cause a lot of the time it's like,

01:17:28 ◼   ► oh, but I started this thing and if it doesn't work out

01:17:31 ◼   ► and I stopped doing it, like, how does that look?

01:17:34 ◼   ► Like, I look like I kind of failed

01:17:35 ◼   ► or like I look like I couldn't do it.

01:17:39 ◼   ► But I feel better being comfortable

01:17:41 ◼   ► in saying that it's done.

01:17:42 ◼   ► Like I'm not gonna attempt to try and push this further

01:17:45 ◼   ► than it needs to go,

01:17:47 ◼   ► because otherwise I'm just gonna hate it.

01:17:49 ◼   ► And I don't hate it.

01:17:50 ◼   ► And it means that I can still come back

01:17:52 ◼   ► to making some videos when I want to,

01:17:54 ◼   ► but I didn't suck everything out of it.

01:17:56 ◼   ► And I'm kind of happy to share that.

01:17:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, and killing projects is a vital skill.

01:18:03 ◼   ► - Oh God, if you can't do it,

01:18:04 ◼   ► then you can never do anything, right?

01:18:06 ◼   ► 'Cause you're just dragging along these old projects

01:18:10 ◼   ► behind you all the time.

01:18:11 ◼   ► - When I look at my younger self,

01:18:14 ◼   ► I think a skill that he was not so great at

01:18:16 ◼   ► was killing projects.

01:18:19 ◼   ► And yeah, it's like that's one thing

01:18:22 ◼   ► if I was to go back in time and try to advise

01:18:25 ◼   ► my younger self about how to get what he wants

01:18:28 ◼   ► out of the world faster,

01:18:29 ◼   ► one of the things would definitely be,

01:18:32 ◼   ► "Hey buddy, let's go through your list of things

01:18:35 ◼   ► and let's decide that some of these are over sooner."

01:18:38 ◼   ► Let's do that because it frees up your energy

01:18:41 ◼   ► and time for other things.

01:18:42 ◼   ► - Yep.

01:18:43 ◼   ► And like for me talking about it here,

01:18:45 ◼   ► nothing has changed because I'm making the same amount

01:18:50 ◼   ► of videos as I've been making the last few months,

01:18:52 ◼   ► which is none.

01:18:53 ◼   ► But now I am addressing it, right?

01:18:57 ◼   ► Like nothing's different,

01:18:59 ◼   ► like I'm not making more of those videos,

01:19:00 ◼   ► but I am now addressing the fact that don't expect them.

01:19:04 ◼   ► And kind of I feel relief in that.

01:19:07 ◼   ► It's like well now nobody's expecting the vlogs

01:19:09 ◼   ► because I told you never to expect the vlogs.

01:19:11 ◼   ► Expect that there will be YouTube videos

01:19:13 ◼   ► sometime in the future,

01:19:15 ◼   ► but don't expect them to come anytime soon

01:19:17 ◼   ► and/or to be anything that you expect them to be.

01:19:19 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:19:21 ◼   ► - The Myke Hurley channel is just gonna be

01:19:25 ◼   ► your channel of what you want it to be.

01:19:27 ◼   ► - Whatever that ends up being.

01:19:29 ◼   ► I don't know what it's gonna be.

01:19:30 ◼   ► So you can take up the mantle now, you can be the vlogger.

01:19:35 ◼   ► I never put it down, Myke.

01:19:38 ◼   ► If I could give past me some advice that would have saved him some time, which is related

01:19:45 ◼   ► to what you were talking about, it would certainly be, "Hey, shoot less footage."

01:19:49 ◼   ► Oh, that will kill you.

01:19:51 ◼   ► Shoot way less footage.

01:19:53 ◼   ► That will kill you.

01:19:54 ◼   ► When you sit down in front of Final Cut and you've got four weeks' worth of vlog footage,

01:19:58 ◼   ► Like that will kill a vlog, I tell you that right now.

01:20:01 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, that's one of the many reasons there's been delays.

01:20:05 ◼   ► It's like, boy, don't capture everything.

01:20:09 ◼   ► You will regret it.

01:20:11 ◼   ► So next episode, we're going to do something we've never done before.

01:20:15 ◼   ► We're going to watch a documentary and talk about it in kind of the vein of Cortex Book

01:20:21 ◼   ► Club.

01:20:22 ◼   ► So it's kind of a book club, but a documentary?

01:20:24 ◼   ► It's like a documentary club for work?

01:20:27 ◼   ► Sure, that's the working title. We'll go with that one. The Cortex Documentary Club for Work.

01:20:33 ◼   ► There is a documentary about the team behind South Park called Six Days to Air. This documentary

01:20:40 ◼   ► I've seen a couple of times and I thought it would be interesting to bring to the table

01:20:44 ◼   ► because these are people who create an episode of a TV show within six days every week. So they

01:20:53 ◼   ► create a weekly show and every episode is created in six days. And it is interesting

01:20:58 ◼   ► to watch a team work under this incredible deadline pressure that I thought it could

01:21:03 ◼   ► be interesting to talk about on the show. Now it is worth noting at this point, this

01:21:08 ◼   ► is a documentary about the TV show South Park. So it includes clips of South Park episodes

01:21:14 ◼   ► and lots of South Park humor, which can be very questionable and awkward in some places.

01:21:24 ◼   ► So I say, and I'm like, it's not that the humor is questionable. There's no question

01:21:30 ◼   ► that it can be quite vulgar. There you go. That's a lovely way of putting it. Yes. It

01:21:34 ◼   ► is tasteless and vulgar. It's not like, is this funny or not? Like that's not the question.

01:21:40 ◼   ► Yeah, the question is more, will you want to see it?

01:21:45 ◼   ► So you probably know at this point if this is something you want to watch.

01:21:50 ◼   ► If you don't know South Park, I recommend not watching it.

01:21:53 ◼   ► If you know you don't like South Park, I recommend not watching it.

01:21:57 ◼   ► We're going to take a look at how the team works and just talk about that.

01:22:02 ◼   ► We're not going to talk about the content too much because it's not important for the

01:22:05 ◼   ► overall discussion.

01:22:07 ◼   ► Yeah, this is this is just a thing that has been on our list for a long time when you first

01:22:11 ◼   ► mentioned it and I have wanted to see this for quite a while because I think the the two guys behind South Park are

01:22:18 ◼   ► uniquely prolific and

01:22:22 ◼   ► they also

01:22:24 ◼   ► from what I have have gleamed they work in

01:22:26 ◼   ► very different ways and they have also had careers over

01:22:32 ◼   ► now a

01:22:36 ◼   ► - a fantastically long period of time. - Yeah.

01:22:38 ◼   ► So I think that they are at the intersection of a bunch of things that I'm interested to see a documentary

01:22:45 ◼   ► about how

01:22:47 ◼   ► they're working. So ever since you mentioned to me that this thing existed, I have wanted to see it.

01:22:53 ◼   ► But yeah, so just to be clear, our interest in seeing this is

01:22:56 ◼   ► how do they work?

01:22:59 ◼   ► It's not really a conversation about like, what do we think about South Park?

01:23:03 ◼   ► Because I think people already know what they think about South Park

01:23:06 ◼   ► Yeah, you either like it or you don't like it and there are probably extremely good reasons for both depending on your opinions

01:23:12 ◼   ► I will say that I

01:23:15 ◼   ► Don't really like South Park

01:23:18 ◼   ► and kind of never have

01:23:20 ◼   ► Isn't something that I have been that interested in but the documentary is very good

01:23:25 ◼   ► We are going to talk about it like we talk about the books. So you don't have to watch this to

01:23:32 ◼   ► understand what we're going to talk about. So you don't need to watch it. I want to tell people that

01:23:36 ◼   ► we are watching it in case you do want to watch it. But this comes with all of the warnings we

01:23:41 ◼   ► could possibly give for such an explicit documentary because it's got South Park in it. So there you

01:23:46 ◼   ► go. That's that's what we have to say. Six Days to Air is what it's called. And we'll talk about it

01:23:50 ◼   ► next time. See you next time.