Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► Myke? Myke, listen, it's going at the end. Cut it now, put it at the end, we'll deal with it later.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Do you do that a lot? Do you talk to yourself a lot like that in the show?

00:00:10 ◼   ► Not always, but just in case I'm coloring.

00:00:12 ◼   ► Yeah, but see that can be the bumper now, where you were just talking to yourself,

00:00:15 ◼   ► giving yourself instructions.

00:00:16 ◼   ► That's not gonna happen.

00:00:18 ◼   ► That can be the beginning of the show, why not? Why won't you put it there?

00:00:20 ◼   ► Myke, future Myke, you need to put this at the start of the show.

00:00:25 ◼   ► Did you ever think this day would come?

00:00:29 ◼   ► What day is this?

00:00:31 ◼   ► It's our Cortex-iversary.

00:00:33 ◼   ► Oh! Happy Cortex-iversary, Myke.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Happy Cortex-iversary to you too, Gray.

00:00:37 ◼   ► Have we been doing this for a year?

00:00:39 ◼   ► A year, a whole year.

00:00:41 ◼   ► Do you remember your very strong commitment for 10?

00:00:43 ◼   ► Uh, yeah. Yeah, sort of.

00:00:45 ◼   ► Yeah, those days are long gone now, my friend.

00:00:49 ◼   ► So what is this? This is episode 30? 30.

00:00:53 ◼   ► Yeah. This is where our very peculiar schedule is always going to ruin the numbering.

00:00:58 ◼   ► in the numbering. What do you mean? Right, because we did the first 10 on a weekly basis.

00:01:02 ◼   ► Right, yeah, yeah. No, I won't forget that. I won't forget that anytime soon. Yeah, that

00:01:07 ◼   ► was horrific. Whose idea was that? It was my idea. Yeah, it was your idea. I had to

00:01:12 ◼   ► be put through the fire to understand, right, like I went through a horrible scenario, I

00:01:17 ◼   ► now know the way to do this show. It's not every week. It's not every week, no. But yeah,

00:01:22 ◼   ► we made it. We made it, and I look forward to our next Cortex adversary. Oh, that's optimistic.

00:01:27 ◼   ► Well, I like to live that way.

00:01:29 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:01:31 ◼   ► Like, in all seriousness, it's great.

00:01:32 ◼   ► I wasn't sure if we would get this far.

00:01:35 ◼   ► As always with podcasts, I just assume that the end of all things to discuss is right around the corner.

00:01:43 ◼   ► Every episode feels like, "Oh, this is probably going to be the last episode of any podcast I ever do."

00:01:47 ◼   ► Like, what else can there possibly be to talk about? But there's always more stuff to talk about.

00:01:50 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:01:51 ◼   ► And yeah, I think this has gone pretty well.

00:01:54 ◼   ► It's gone pretty well.

00:01:55 ◼   ► Happy Cortex-iversary.

00:01:57 ◼   ► to everyone. I did not get you flowers.

00:01:59 ◼   ► Oh no. Don't open that parcel just yet.

00:02:06 ◼   ► So we had a much larger response to our touch typing survey than I expected we would.

00:02:12 ◼   ► I haven't looked at any of this because I wanted to wait for the show because I was

00:02:16 ◼   ► kind of curious to see what you would put together. You did give me a little preview

00:02:21 ◼   ► of some of the data. And whenever that was, 24 hours after the show went up, there were

00:02:28 ◼   ► already what seemed like a huge number of replies. So lots of people, it seemed like,

00:02:33 ◼   ► wanted to share their information about when they learned or did not learn to touch-type.

00:02:39 ◼   ► What is the final number of people who filled out the survey, Myke?

00:02:43 ◼   ► 3944 people have given their submissions for the Cortex Touch typing questionnaire.

00:02:51 ◼   ► That is a lot of answers.

00:02:53 ◼   ► It's a lot. And the Reddit thread was a blaze, which ended up not being very useful, like

00:03:00 ◼   ► statistically because you cannot do anything with all of that, right? All you do is you

00:03:04 ◼   ► just see the comments. So I was really pleased that we had the questionnaire because we could

00:03:09 ◼   ► could actually get data which could kind of try and give us some answers. So what I did

00:03:14 ◼   ► was I took 2,000 responses and put them into a second sheet that I made public to the world

00:03:22 ◼   ► so people could take that data and try and help us understand it a little bit better

00:03:28 ◼   ► because the form on its own didn't give me some of the answers that I wanted. So once

00:03:32 ◼   ► we started getting all this data I was like, "Hmm, it would be interesting if we could

00:03:36 ◼   ► break some of it down by age, right? Because we had the age question in there, but I was

00:03:40 ◼   ► wondering like, would it be different for older and younger people as to how they answered

00:03:45 ◼   ► as to whether they were taught to touch type, that kind of thing. We got some fantastic

00:03:50 ◼   ► responses and people doing really interesting things with that data, which I'm going to

00:03:54 ◼   ► put in the show notes. So you can continue to play around with it if you want to and

00:03:57 ◼   ► take a look for yourself. But I think the overall points that I took away from this

00:04:03 ◼   ► is that it seems to indicate from our data, our completely scientific data, that the older

00:04:10 ◼   ► you are, the more likely you are to know how to touch type. And also you're more likely

00:04:16 ◼   ► to have been taught at school. And it also appears that the younger you are, the more

00:04:22 ◼   ► likely you are able to touch type on the touch screen. That was, I guess, everyone's hypothesis,

00:04:27 ◼   ► right?

00:04:28 ◼   ► Yeah, but you never know until you collect data.

00:04:31 ◼   ► And there is a much higher amount of people in the younger age brackets that could touch

00:04:37 ◼   ► type, or at least self-identified as touch typing.

00:04:40 ◼   ► Because I think that's one part that, you know, I learned a few things in this.

00:04:44 ◼   ► Like, if I would have thought we would have had the size of responses that we did, maybe

00:04:49 ◼   ► I would have asked some questions differently, added in some other questions.

00:04:53 ◼   ► Like you know, what is touch typing to you?

00:04:55 ◼   ► Because some people don't look at the keyboard, but that isn't what I think of as touch typing.

00:05:00 ◼   ► I think of that whole method that you learn

00:05:02 ◼   ► in typing classes.

00:05:03 ◼   ► - I disagree with you there.

00:05:04 ◼   ► I totally disagree with you.

00:05:05 ◼   ► If you can type on the keyboard without looking,

00:05:10 ◼   ► that is touch typing as far as I'm concerned.

00:05:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, okay, I get what you mean.

00:05:13 ◼   ► Okay, I'm just thinking as a way to understand

00:05:16 ◼   ► if someone was taught it or if they were self-taught.

00:05:20 ◼   ► I think 'cause when I think of touch typing capitalized,

00:05:24 ◼   ► I think of how you are taught in a typing class

00:05:28 ◼   ► as opposed to like I cannot look at a keyboard and type.

00:05:31 ◼   ► I think they're both completely valid,

00:05:33 ◼   ► but I think they come from different areas

00:05:35 ◼   ► and now I'm interested in learning

00:05:37 ◼   ► of the people that know, did they teach themselves,

00:05:40 ◼   ► you know, that kind of thing.

00:05:42 ◼   ► So we have some of that, like are you learning

00:05:45 ◼   ► and did you learn touch type in school.

00:05:46 ◼   ► So there's still more data that I can dig into,

00:05:49 ◼   ► but overall, this is a very useful exercise

00:05:53 ◼   ► and we all have learned something.

00:05:54 ◼   ► Yeah, like I'm looking at some of the charts that friend of the show _DavidSmith made.

00:06:02 ◼   ► And so for example on the question "Did does your school offer touch typing lessons?"

00:06:09 ◼   ► That peaks for people in the age range of 51 to 60 at almost 80%.

00:06:15 ◼   ► Right there they're saying like yes, touch typing was a thing that their school offers.

00:06:20 ◼   ► And then you get down to essentially 0 to 21, that age bracket is about, looks like

00:06:27 ◼   ► about 45% on the chart.

00:06:29 ◼   ► The slope follows upward in that direction.

00:06:31 ◼   ► So the older you are, the more likely it is that you learn to touch type at school.

00:06:35 ◼   ► But the one that I really like is the question about can you touch type on the glass without

00:06:42 ◼   ► looking?

00:06:44 ◼   ► And that peaks for the 17-21 year old demographic is essentially 60% can type on a glass screen

00:06:52 ◼   ► without looking.

00:06:53 ◼   ► Which is a higher percentage than I would have expected.

00:06:55 ◼   ► Is way higher than I would have guessed.

00:06:58 ◼   ► Slightly younger is slightly less, which is a little bit surprising, but I can kind of

00:07:03 ◼   ► see maybe why in retrospect.

00:07:05 ◼   ► My thinking would be that people in the 0-16 bracket have had less experience.

00:07:12 ◼   ► Yeah, that was my thought afterward as well.

00:07:15 ◼   ► It's a combination of less experience and probably less need to do a lot of typing.

00:07:20 ◼   ► But it's still shockingly high at 55%.

00:07:23 ◼   ► But what I love is when you get to the 60+%, the number who can touch type on a glass screen without looking drops to exactly 0%.

00:07:33 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:07:37 ◼   ► It's not zero rounded off, it's exactly 0% of people 60 or older said that they could

00:07:44 ◼   ► type on Glass without looking.

00:07:46 ◼   ► And the 51 to 60 demographic is at just barely 6%.

00:07:55 ◼   ► Something that I also picked up from looking in the Reddit is it seems like typing classes

00:08:01 ◼   ► do still exist but mainly in America.

00:08:04 ◼   ► Just from looking at people's comments, it seems that not a lot of people in the UK,

00:08:09 ◼   ► if any, or in Europe are taught TouchType, but it seems like there are still parts of

00:08:13 ◼   ► America where it's part of the curriculum, because it wasn't like resounding for everyone.

00:08:18 ◼   ► I had a lot of people saying to me like, "What, your schools don't teach it?" So I will infer

00:08:21 ◼   ► from that, no, they do not, and that yours must do and you are in America, so maybe there's

00:08:26 ◼   ► still some of that going on.

00:08:28 ◼   ► But yeah, I think this was interesting. I'm really glad that you took the time to put

00:08:33 ◼   ► the survey together because yes as you said a large large number of

00:08:37 ◼   ► anecdotal answers in Reddit is interesting to read through but it's hard to pull out

00:08:41 ◼   ► more specific trends. So this was great to

00:08:45 ◼   ► have the data and the links will be in the show notes for

00:08:49 ◼   ► people who want to play around with it and visualise it further

00:08:53 ◼   ► than we have done so far today. I think the only downside from doing this

00:08:57 ◼   ► is that now I am survey hungry.

00:09:01 ◼   ► What do you mean?

00:09:03 ◼   ► Now I want to do surveys for everything.

00:09:05 ◼   ► So I'm gonna have to just try and resist myself from doing that.

00:09:10 ◼   ► Like now I want to know everything about how people manage email, but I won't do it.

00:09:16 ◼   ► Every episode of QuaTeX comes with an appropriate survey now.

00:09:19 ◼   ► I won't do it great, but I want to.

00:09:21 ◼   ► But I won't.

00:09:22 ◼   ► I think if you want to put in the time to construct a well done survey, then I think

00:09:29 ◼   ► you can go survey crazy.

00:09:30 ◼   ► There's nothing wrong with that. I feel it should be tactically deployed. Okay, otherwise we'll have survey fatigue

00:09:36 ◼   ► Okay, all right I can get I can get behind that

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00:11:46 ◼   ► show.

00:11:47 ◼   ► So it's time to check in on the hiring project.

00:11:51 ◼   ► Yes. How's it going? I assume that now

00:11:55 ◼   ► based on our last conversation, you have taken a look

00:11:59 ◼   ► at the submissions. Yes, yes.

00:12:03 ◼   ► I feel like between

00:12:07 ◼   ► last time we spoke and today when we were recording

00:12:11 ◼   ► has been an unusually ridiculously

00:12:15 ◼   ► busy time for me. So I have less progress to report than I might otherwise want. But

00:12:24 ◼   ► I have definitely moved forward on this. I have looked at all of the applications and

00:12:29 ◼   ► I've gone through a little bit of a process trying to whittle them down and select people

00:12:36 ◼   ► to work with in the future. How many submissions did you get?

00:12:40 ◼   ► Alright, what would you guess for submissions?

00:12:44 ◼   ► This is a more fun game.

00:12:45 ◼   ► Take a guess, what do you think?

00:12:48 ◼   ► 176.

00:12:49 ◼   ► Wow, look at you, very precise guess there.

00:12:54 ◼   ► Because look, if I'm right, it's the best thing ever.

00:12:57 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:12:59 ◼   ► Return on this roll of the dice here, you look like a psychic if you are correct.

00:13:05 ◼   ► And you're almost certainly wrong anyway, so there's no downside to guessing.

00:13:09 ◼   ► So here are the numbers. At the time that we are recording, the video has about 40,000 views.

00:13:18 ◼   ► So we can assume that 40,000 people in some way were exposed to the existence of this application.

00:13:26 ◼   ► And when I took a look to see what was in my Dropbox folder, which was about a week after the supposed deadline where I was going to look,

00:13:37 ◼   ► there were 75 applications waiting for me to take a look at.

00:13:42 ◼   ► - That's a really good number,

00:13:46 ◼   ► because if it would have been a lot higher than that,

00:13:50 ◼   ► one, it would have been super hard to go through,

00:13:53 ◼   ► and the quality would have probably been overall worse.

00:13:57 ◼   ► I would expect that you were able to really whittle it down

00:14:01 ◼   ► to a more manageable number.

00:14:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, and this is a bit of an estimate on my part,

00:14:05 ◼   ► But I think that the number of total submissions that I may have gotten might actually be quite close to your guess, around 150.

00:14:17 ◼   ► Because after the point at which I looked at it, I just had a message to my assistants to anybody who submitted from that point on.

00:14:26 ◼   ► She was only to pass it along if it really struck her as something worth taking a look at.

00:14:31 ◼   ► Right.

00:14:32 ◼   ► And I did see, I did just look and see briefly that there were a bunch more submissions after

00:14:36 ◼   ► that, but none of them made it through her barrier.

00:14:39 ◼   ► Ah, okay.

00:14:40 ◼   ► I wouldn't be surprised if the total number was 150, but the number that I actually looked

00:14:45 ◼   ► at was 75.

00:14:48 ◼   ► And this was, like, like so many moments in life, it is really easy to overestimate how

00:15:00 ◼   ► easy a task is until you try to do it yourself.

00:15:04 ◼   ► And so I just had a lot, a lot of sympathy for hiring managers and HR people in this

00:15:13 ◼   ► moment because I was thinking, "Oh, this is going to be super easy just to go through

00:15:16 ◼   ► a bunch of applications.

00:15:18 ◼   ► How hard can it possibly be?"

00:15:20 ◼   ► And it turns out the answer is it's a lot harder than you think it is going through

00:15:25 ◼   ► this.

00:15:26 ◼   ► So I ended up having to break it into two parts.

00:15:29 ◼   ► I did a first pass where all I was doing was I literally created a folder called "Tolerable"

00:15:39 ◼   ► and so my estimation there was all I want to do on round one is put anything that is

00:15:48 ◼   ► tolerable or better into this folder.

00:15:51 ◼   ► Because simply trying to watch all of the videos, since some of them were very different

00:15:57 ◼   ► in quality, it's like it was surprisingly hard to make comparisons after watching three or four videos.

00:16:02 ◼   ► Like your brain just gets really muddled up with all the details, so I thought, okay,

00:16:07 ◼   ► I just need to do a quick first pass of which ones are definitely out and which ones are definitely in.

00:16:13 ◼   ► So I sorted it that way and then I thought, okay, once I have done that, then I can try again to make

00:16:19 ◼   ► finer distinctions between some of the applications.

00:16:23 ◼   ► But so that was the round one and then I did a round two, which was trying to limit it down a bit further.

00:16:28 ◼   ► But that's how I ended up doing this on my own so far.

00:16:32 ◼   ► Yeah, that makes sense to me because I think if you watch so many things in a row,

00:16:36 ◼   ► you kind of lose track of what's better than another.

00:16:41 ◼   ► Right? So like whittling it down by like, "Can I watch this and it doesn't hurt my eyes?" is a good way of doing things.

00:16:49 ◼   ► Right. Round one was basically identify the instant no's.

00:16:54 ◼   ► Right? That was all I was trying to do. Because I realized very quickly that as you're watching through stuff,

00:16:59 ◼   ► you end up comparing the thing that you're currently watching mentally to the thing that you have just watched.

00:17:04 ◼   ► You're like, "Wait a minute, that's not what this comparison should be at all!"

00:17:07 ◼   ► I can't do this just all in one go in the way I was originally intending.

00:17:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:17:13 ◼   ► So it was interesting, just again, since I think the whole purpose of this show is to talk a like about the details of being self-employed

00:17:24 ◼   ► and of course there are some things here that I won't be able to discuss because we're talking about actual people

00:17:28 ◼   ► but of the 75 applications that I had, 50 of them were sorted as instant nos and 25 of them were sorted as tolerable or better.

00:17:41 ◼   ► So that was the round one of the applications.

00:17:46 ◼   ► What happens next was that I had to give my brain a couple of days to

00:17:51 ◼   ► filter that out, to kind of like, "Okay, forget what you've seen,

00:17:57 ◼   ► and I need to come back to this at a later point."

00:18:00 ◼   ► So I gave it a little while.

00:18:03 ◼   ► This is where we may return to it later, but a whole other thing happened which distracted my attention for a little bit,

00:18:08 ◼   ► for a little bit, so this has gone on a bit longer than I would have wanted to otherwise.

00:18:12 ◼   ► But when I came back, then I was trying to make a decision about...

00:18:19 ◼   ► through these 25 applications, I want to narrow this down as much as I can, again, based solely on the animation.

00:18:30 ◼   ► So I'm still looking at all of these things as files with just single numbers.

00:18:35 ◼   ► I don't know anything about the people, I don't know where they are, I don't know their experience, I'm just looking at the animations.

00:18:40 ◼   ► And the second round of cutting was a much harder thing to do, but I did a round two that took it from 25 down to 10.

00:18:53 ◼   ► So that was the second round of trying to figure out what's happening.

00:18:57 ◼   ► And there I was looking at many more finer details about the animations, like, "Oh, what choices did you make to animate this or that?"

00:19:07 ◼   ► Some of the things that are very hard to articulate is, for example, watching a video is seeing...

00:19:12 ◼   ► Did the person get me to laugh when I'm watching the video? Like, did this person do something that matches up with my sense of humor?

00:19:24 ◼   ► Again, that's not to say that the people that I didn't select weren't funny, but the question is

00:19:29 ◼   ► do they match up with the kind of joke that I might make in a video, right?

00:19:36 ◼   ► Like that's what I'm looking for there.

00:19:38 ◼   ► And so yeah, it was, again, surprisingly hard to do.

00:19:43 ◼   ► But it was down to

00:19:46 ◼   ► 10 then. So what's happening now is that my assistant is

00:19:52 ◼   ► reaching out to those 10 and collecting some information that I want to have about the applications at this point

00:20:00 ◼   ► to be able to make some decisions about where to go in the future.

00:20:04 ◼   ► Is it seeming like that this was the worthwhile experiment you were hoping it would be?

00:20:09 ◼   ► I'm feeling pretty good about how

00:20:11 ◼   ► this has been going.

00:20:14 ◼   ► It's especially interesting to me because I am, as we are recording, I am currently in the middle of

00:20:21 ◼   ► animating my next video, which should be out in a few days.

00:20:26 ◼   ► And of course while I am in the process of animating this video

00:20:30 ◼   ► I can't help but have my mind constantly turn to thinking about how will this be different when I'm working with somebody else.

00:20:37 ◼   ► And before the application went out, I was just really nervous and really concerned about the kind of quality of

00:20:45 ◼   ► applications that I was going to get. And now being future me,

00:20:51 ◼   ► who has seen the applications, I have to say that the average quality of application was much higher

00:20:58 ◼   ► than I was expecting, which to me was a big, big relief. Like, okay, I am glad to see that there are

00:21:05 ◼   ► lots of skilled people in here. And even, I just, I do have to say that for lots of the applications

00:21:12 ◼   ► that I rejected, those people could be motion animators. Like, without a doubt. I rejected

00:21:19 ◼   ► people who could do this for a living.

00:21:21 ◼   ► But just the average quality was quite high

00:21:24 ◼   ► and then that's where it starts to come down to

00:21:26 ◼   ► again, just some of the particulars about how would I do something

00:21:29 ◼   ► or what are the particular choices that they made about how to animate.

00:21:32 ◼   ► It's not necessarily about that person's skill

00:21:35 ◼   ► but it's their understanding of your style, which is the point I guess.

00:21:39 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. But that

00:21:42 ◼   ► that is what made it so hard is because there were definitely some applications where I felt like

00:21:47 ◼   ► I want to reject this, but this person is undoubtedly good.

00:21:51 ◼   ► Like, they're very good, they just made decisions that I don't agree with for my own style.

00:21:57 ◼   ► And it's just a strange position to be in.

00:21:59 ◼   ► But overall, I was very happy to see the quality of the submissions.

00:22:04 ◼   ► And in my experience of animating the video that I'm currently working on,

00:22:10 ◼   ► It's a huge relief to know that in the future I will almost certainly be working with someone to help make this process easier

00:22:19 ◼   ► because I can tell that I am still not fully recovered from some of the RSI problems I had the last video or the video prior to that

00:22:29 ◼   ► Like I am having to work in much shorter bursts and with larger breaks between bursts, like I can just still feel that I am not fully recovered from that before

00:22:39 ◼   ► And so it's just, I think everything has happened at the right time.

00:22:45 ◼   ► Like I was already thinking about bringing people on board.

00:22:48 ◼   ► I had a thing that accelerated this whole process, which I think ultimately is good.

00:22:53 ◼   ► And I'm looking at these applications and I have to say, of the ten people that I'm going to get some more information about,

00:23:01 ◼   ► I think any of them I could imagine working with to produce animations in the future.

00:23:07 ◼   ► I think that there are definitely people here that I can work with and I want to work with in the future.

00:23:15 ◼   ► Presuming that everything works out between us and that it's all okay.

00:23:20 ◼   ► Were you planning on giving feedback to the applicants?

00:23:25 ◼   ► It was a thing that crossed my mind because I remember when I was applying for a job as a teacher

00:23:33 ◼   ► that the schools did give feedback to people if they didn't select you.

00:23:38 ◼   ► One of the very first schools I ever applied to, I didn't realize they were offering me a job

00:23:43 ◼   ► and I sort of talked myself out of the job and then I got some feedback about how like,

00:23:47 ◼   ► "You seemed really uncommitted to the school."

00:23:48 ◼   ► And then I realized like, "Oh, I realized what was happening here."

00:23:51 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:23:55 ◼   ► I had this... okay, I'll have to tell you now, but I applied to this school

00:23:59 ◼   ► which was very high on the list. Like I had a short list of three schools that I really wanted to work at.

00:24:03 ◼   ► and I applied to one of them.

00:24:05 ◼   ► And you do a whole test lesson, and then you talk to the head of department,

00:24:10 ◼   ► and then you talk to the head of the school,

00:24:12 ◼   ► and then presumably they have a little meeting about you,

00:24:14 ◼   ► and then they walk you out to the front and someone's talking to you.

00:24:16 ◼   ► And as the head of department was walking me out of the building,

00:24:19 ◼   ► he was going, "What would you say if we offered you the job right now?"

00:24:25 ◼   ► I said, "Oh, I'd have to think about it,

00:24:29 ◼   ► because I don't like to make decisions on the spot."

00:24:33 ◼   ► He's like, "But what if we were going to offer it to you right now?"

00:24:39 ◼   ► And I was like, "Well, I would just have to think about it."

00:24:42 ◼   ► And like, I was just a total idiot.

00:24:46 ◼   ► Like, I just didn't realize what was occurring there.

00:24:51 ◼   ► And I remember he was like really insistent on this point all the way out to the front door about,

00:24:56 ◼   ► But if we were to tell you at this very moment that you could start work immediately, what would you think about that?

00:25:03 ◼   ► And I was like, I would just have to think about it.

00:25:05 ◼   ► And then it was a couple days later when I got a phone call from the headmistress and she was telling me how it seemed like I was uncommitted to the school.

00:25:12 ◼   ► And then it was like the other penny dropped, I was like, oh, that's what was happening.

00:25:17 ◼   ► That's my experience with feedback for applying to jobs.

00:25:24 ◼   ► No desire to have an impulse.

00:25:26 ◼   ► But I don't know, like when I watch Shark Tank,

00:25:28 ◼   ► I always think when the VCs offer a deal

00:25:30 ◼   ► and they're like, "Oh, here's a deal,

00:25:31 ◼   ► "but you have to say yes or no right now."

00:25:32 ◼   ► It's like, "Oh, I'm sorry, my blanket policy is no.

00:25:34 ◼   ► "If you need me to decide right now, the answer is no."

00:25:36 ◼   ► Right, but this is why you would never go on that show.

00:25:39 ◼   ► No, no, I would never go on that show.

00:25:41 ◼   ► 'Cause it's pointless.

00:25:41 ◼   ► But I think that's a reasonable policy.

00:25:43 ◼   ► You spend hours and hours preparing for it.

00:25:46 ◼   ► You go on the show, give your pitch,

00:25:47 ◼   ► they offer you the $100,000 you want

00:25:49 ◼   ► and you tell them you need to go away and think about it.

00:25:52 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not unreasonable.

00:25:54 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:25:55 ◼   ► Going back to the feedback question.

00:25:57 ◼   ► Right.

00:25:58 ◼   ► I did think about it simply because of the large number of applications and also because

00:26:03 ◼   ► of how surprisingly busy my past two weeks were.

00:26:06 ◼   ► I realized if I was going to do this I would want to do it right and this was, this would

00:26:11 ◼   ► quite easily be two full days of work to just write back with feedback on the applications.

00:26:19 ◼   ► What about to the final ten?

00:26:20 ◼   ► It's a much smaller number.

00:26:22 ◼   ► people all know that you're kind of interested now. Maybe they would be at least a more manageable

00:26:29 ◼   ► task to give feedback to those 10.

00:26:32 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a possibility. It's a possibility. But I'm not sure how much more specific the

00:26:37 ◼   ► feedback would be at this stage than just some peculiar reasoning on my part.

00:26:43 ◼   ► Sometimes that's all it takes, though. Just to know, so you don't question it.

00:26:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess. Again, I think all of the ten, the people who, by the time this goes up, will almost

00:26:54 ◼   ► certainly have replied if they got the email in their inbox. Any of them I could imagine

00:27:00 ◼   ► working with. So it feels like that's... isn't that feedback enough? I don't know.

00:27:06 ◼   ► But yeah, to just reiterate my earlier answer is I am feeling pretty good about this.

00:27:16 ◼   ► It's going slower than I would have otherwise wanted, but I'm feeling pretty good about this.

00:27:21 ◼   ► And at this stage, it's just going to come down to the peculiarities of working with the individuals,

00:27:28 ◼   ► or like when are people available. At this stage, it's just going to be, I think, very

00:27:34 ◼   ► particular and maybe not a whole lot to be gained from talking about those details.

00:27:41 ◼   ► Like, it's just the specifics.

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00:29:58 ◼   ► Of the people that are in the last final ten, this sounds like a reality show now. You give

00:30:03 ◼   ► roses out to the ones that you like and maybe you give them like Wacom styluses or something

00:30:09 ◼   ► you know?

00:30:10 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:30:11 ◼   ► That's how they know.

00:30:12 ◼   ► Yeah that'll work.

00:30:13 ◼   ► Of the ones that are through to the final round, are there any in there or are they

00:30:19 ◼   ► all kind of in a scenario where you could have an all-in-one person?

00:30:22 ◼   ► I know we spoke about that before about like someone who would be animator and illustrator.

00:30:29 ◼   ► Is this something that you think might exist in these people?

00:30:33 ◼   ► Yeah, I would say that all of these people would be totally fine as animator/illustrators.

00:30:40 ◼   ► And what I was kind of thinking from the beginning but didn't quite want to say is work collaboratively on storyboards.

00:30:47 ◼   ► Like, I... If a person is good, my thought is I want their feedback on a storyboard.

00:30:54 ◼   ► If I can give them a script, I think...

00:30:56 ◼   ► I think a good workflow... Again, this is me just speculating, just thinking about it in the future.

00:31:01 ◼   ► But all of these people seem really good.

00:31:03 ◼   ► And so my thought is that if I have scripts, one of the things I might be able to do is say,

00:31:07 ◼   ► look, here is the script.

00:31:09 ◼   ► I'm going to do a rough storyboard.

00:31:11 ◼   ► You separately do a rough storyboard and together, let's see what is the best thing to do.

00:31:18 ◼   ► Right, because those people have already done that.

00:31:20 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:31:20 ◼   ► That was the first challenge, right, was take just the audio, not even the script, right,

00:31:28 ◼   ► making it even harder than it would be and make something entertaining out of this and

00:31:33 ◼   ► to get into that position that they're in now, they have done that.

00:31:37 ◼   ► Yeah. So it's again, it's a strong group of people and all of them could be animator,

00:31:44 ◼   ► illustrators, storyboarder people. So I think, I can't remember what I said in the last episode

00:31:49 ◼   ► that I was expecting like a 25% chance that I might be able to find someone who fills

00:31:54 ◼   ► that all-in-one role, and here I am with 10 possibilities of people who could fill that

00:31:59 ◼   ► all-in-one role.

00:32:01 ◼   ► So I think I dramatically, dramatically underestimated last time.

00:32:07 ◼   ► That was my bet, by the way, that you would find lots of people that could do both, because

00:32:10 ◼   ► how else could they have gotten to the point where they made the submission?

00:32:14 ◼   ► Yeah, you are totally right.

00:32:17 ◼   ► You were right on this one.

00:32:18 ◼   ► #mikewasright, I guess, because you like to hear that.

00:32:21 ◼   ► I love to hear that.

00:32:22 ◼   ► I know it's a sweet, sweet sound to your ears, so I'll give it to you.

00:32:26 ◼   ► It is core to my emotional wellness.

00:32:28 ◼   ► So you found these 10 people, is there going to be a fleet of CGP Grey animator illustrators?

00:32:37 ◼   ► Like you have 10 now. It's an abundance.

00:32:41 ◼   ► This is where I have found things a little bit tricky is I'm not 100% sure how to proceed

00:32:50 ◼   ► from this point.

00:32:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:32:52 ◼   ► Because...

00:32:53 ◼   ► Again, this is where I...

00:32:56 ◼   ► For the purposes of hiring,

00:33:00 ◼   ► I again wish that I was a bigger entity.

00:33:03 ◼   ► I would love to be able to

00:33:06 ◼   ► do something like bring on three animators

00:33:10 ◼   ► and have them work on stuff.

00:33:12 ◼   ► But the question is, I just don't produce enough

00:33:15 ◼   ► writing at this point to support something like that.

00:33:19 ◼   ► Right? It's just--it is--it is just not practical.

00:33:22 ◼   ► So I don't really know how this is--this is going to proceed.

00:33:26 ◼   ► And this is partly why I am doing this information gathering stage on the people who have applied.

00:33:31 ◼   ► Because...

00:33:32 ◼   ► I could easily see...

00:33:35 ◼   ► you know, one of two...

00:33:37 ◼   ► outcomes for this. I could--I could see either...

00:33:41 ◼   ► having one person who does a large amount of work for me...

00:33:47 ◼   ► or I could see rotating between a few people.

00:33:51 ◼   ► And one of the interesting things about this submission process,

00:33:57 ◼   ► which I did expect but didn't explicitly want to say,

00:34:01 ◼   ► is that a couple of people ignored what was seemingly the most important piece of advice,

00:34:10 ◼   ► which was, "You are to animate this video in my style."

00:34:14 ◼   ► And I anticipated that some people would just totally ignore that,

00:34:19 ◼   ► but still produce very interesting work.

00:34:24 ◼   ► And so I have a couple of submissions which fall into that category of

00:34:29 ◼   ► "This is obviously not a video that I could have ever produced."

00:34:34 ◼   ► No one would watch this and think,

00:34:36 ◼   ► "Boy, CGP Grey got a little bit better at animating!"

00:34:39 ◼   ► It's like, no, no, no, CGP Grey did not get this good at animating.

00:34:42 ◼   ► Like somebody else did this. This does not look like his style at all.

00:34:45 ◼   ► And so those submissions are interesting in a different way.

00:34:50 ◼   ► Maybe there's a way that the future of the CGBGray channel that it has rotating styles.

00:34:56 ◼   ► That, just like in the past I have had Knut do animation for a few of my videos,

00:35:02 ◼   ► Lord of the Rings videos, the Star Trek videos.

00:35:04 ◼   ► Like maybe going forward in the future there might be a couple of different animation styles.

00:35:09 ◼   ► You already do have different styles though.

00:35:11 ◼   ► else though. Like you have the like the slideshow-y type ones, like the Royal Family tree and

00:35:19 ◼   ► the political ones like the voting ones. Then you also have like Great Explains where it's

00:35:24 ◼   ► little stick figure guy talking. Or you go like full on stock footage 15 minute mini

00:35:31 ◼   ► documentary.

00:35:32 ◼   ► Right. So what you are saying right now is the thing that everybody I have spoken to

00:35:38 ◼   ► says right back to me, like, "You know you already do this, right? Like, you don't actually have a single style that every single video looks like. You already do this."

00:35:48 ◼   ► And so, part of me feels like that is quite naturally the solution going forward.

00:35:54 ◼   ► That the people that I am working with might end up just having their own style, so I have a couple of different looking things on the channel.

00:36:04 ◼   ► But now the only thing that's different is that it is other people who have made them, it is not me.

00:36:08 ◼   ► Because from my perspective, since I have made all the videos,

00:36:13 ◼   ► I think I over assume their visual similarity to the viewer.

00:36:19 ◼   ► Because I have made them, if you see what I mean.

00:36:23 ◼   ► And so I was saying like, "Oh, if I have other people doing different things, it'll look just crazy different every single video."

00:36:27 ◼   ► But I imagine that that is largely the experience of the viewer already.

00:36:32 ◼   ► It's like, "Oh, this video looks nothing like the other CGP Grey videos."

00:36:36 ◼   ► And, you know, if you go back earlier in the channel, like, there's tons of videos that

00:36:39 ◼   ► don't even have the notion of stick figure CGP Grey. Like, there's a bunch of videos that don't

00:36:44 ◼   ► even have that what now feels like a constant element, right? But it was totally missing from

00:36:49 ◼   ► probably half of my videos. I've got to say, I tip my hat to those people.

00:36:53 ◼   ► Yeah, what do you mean? It's a ballsy move.

00:36:57 ◼   ► It is a total ballsy move.

00:36:59 ◼   ► And I think that that shows a level of creativity,

00:37:02 ◼   ► which and confidence, which could be beneficial.

00:37:06 ◼   ► Those people were confident enough in their own style and their own ability

00:37:11 ◼   ► that they could create something that was different,

00:37:13 ◼   ► even though you explicitly asked for the same.

00:37:16 ◼   ► Yeah, and this is this is kind of what I was I was getting at last time.

00:37:21 ◼   ► We were talking about talent, but I still want to be a little bit indirect about it

00:37:25 ◼   ► that the people who are going to do that, they're just going to do that anyway.

00:37:29 ◼   ► Yeah. Because they believe in their own ability, which they should.

00:37:33 ◼   ► Right. You know?

00:37:34 ◼   ► Sometimes that goes terribly wrong. Like I did reject very quickly some videos that made that

00:37:41 ◼   ► move, but in a way like, no, this is not going to work. But yeah, it is the daring move and it's an

00:37:48 ◼   ► interesting move and like I said I was anticipating that this would happen but I wasn't going

00:37:56 ◼   ► to bank on it as a 100% certainty.

00:37:59 ◼   ► Hey, so a couple of times you have mentioned that something kept you busy. Like you said

00:38:07 ◼   ► that you had to take some days off because you were busy etc. What's going on over there?

00:38:12 ◼   ► What are you doing?

00:38:14 ◼   ► You know, it's just grey industries.

00:38:16 ◼   ► It's such a massive global venture.

00:38:19 ◼   ► There's always something going on.

00:38:22 ◼   ► - Those wheels just keep on turning, huh?

00:38:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, they do.

00:38:25 ◼   ► I just, I had an experience which was, again,

00:38:28 ◼   ► where having started this process

00:38:33 ◼   ► of trying to get someone as an animator

00:38:37 ◼   ► for the YouTube channel,

00:38:39 ◼   ► and also the thing that happened before with us,

00:38:42 ◼   ► where you helped me get an editor for Hello Internet.

00:38:47 ◼   ► Like having those two experiences

00:38:50 ◼   ► have turned out to be extremely useful

00:38:53 ◼   ► in the past two weeks,

00:38:55 ◼   ► because related to hiring,

00:38:57 ◼   ► I was able to do a thing that I know eight weeks ago

00:39:00 ◼   ► would have seemed like an incredible, difficult task,

00:39:04 ◼   ► but now became a thing that I just did in between shows

00:39:08 ◼   ► without really mentioning it to you,

00:39:10 ◼   ► which was I had a thing that I needed to do for the company.

00:39:15 ◼   ► I'm not gonna specify what that thing is.

00:39:18 ◼   ► I will let people in the Reddit speculate

00:39:19 ◼   ► because people love to speculate on stuff.

00:39:21 ◼   ► But basically I had a project that needed to get done

00:39:24 ◼   ► and sort of unexpectedly needed to get done.

00:39:28 ◼   ► And I thought, okay, this is,

00:39:31 ◼   ► I'm like a person who tries to find freelancers

00:39:33 ◼   ► to work with now.

00:39:34 ◼   ► I can do this.

00:39:35 ◼   ► Let me see if I can just quickly get some people

00:39:38 ◼   ► to do this thing for me.

00:39:39 ◼   ► And so I was really pleased that I had this thing that needed to be done.

00:39:43 ◼   ► I wrote up a basic job description of what needed to occur.

00:39:48 ◼   ► I passed off the relevant information about here are the key characteristics of

00:39:53 ◼   ► what I'm looking for to my personal assistant.

00:39:55 ◼   ► I had her go look out for a list of candidates who matched these various

00:40:01 ◼   ► criteria. She gave me a short list of five people.

00:40:05 ◼   ► I selected it down to a list of three people.

00:40:08 ◼   ► I then had three people work on a thing simultaneously as a test for each of them.

00:40:15 ◼   ► And then two of those three people worked out with doing this thing precisely the way

00:40:20 ◼   ► that I needed to be done.

00:40:21 ◼   ► And so now I have two freelancers to be able to call on for a particular task when I need

00:40:25 ◼   ► to get done.

00:40:27 ◼   ► And I feel like this thing just happened.

00:40:28 ◼   ► It was like boom boom boom boom boom.

00:40:30 ◼   ► Here's another time where I feel like I'm being a CEO.

00:40:33 ◼   ► There's a thing I need done.

00:40:34 ◼   ► Oh, I have people to help me with hiring.

00:40:36 ◼   ► I'm going to make some decisions about the individuals.

00:40:39 ◼   ► I'm going to pay people to do this work.

00:40:41 ◼   ► And then I'm going to be able to see right away

00:40:43 ◼   ► if it was done properly.

00:40:45 ◼   ► And it was just done.

00:40:46 ◼   ► And it was just a thing that was like done, sorted, solved.

00:40:50 ◼   ► And I feel like without Cortex,

00:40:53 ◼   ► that would never have happened.

00:40:54 ◼   ► That would have been a huge disaster and huge time sink,

00:40:59 ◼   ► much more than it was just for a couple of days.

00:41:01 ◼   ► So yeah, it was good.

00:41:03 ◼   ► It was a good experience, Myke.

00:41:04 ◼   ► - Wow, look at you.

00:41:05 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:41:06 ◼   ► - How long did this process take?

00:41:07 ◼   ► - From start to finish, it was probably three days,

00:41:12 ◼   ► but it was also a relatively small amount

00:41:15 ◼   ► of my time and attention.

00:41:17 ◼   ► It was a bit of a panicky thing

00:41:18 ◼   ► 'cause it needed to be done straight away,

00:41:20 ◼   ► which is why it diverted my mental attention.

00:41:22 ◼   ► But in terms of the actual amount of time that I spent,

00:41:25 ◼   ► it was relatively small.

00:41:29 ◼   ► And I just think this was just an interesting thing to occur

00:41:33 ◼   ► and was one of the ways in which,

00:41:35 ◼   ► I don't know, people change over time.

00:41:38 ◼   ► Like again, this would have just been

00:41:39 ◼   ► a much more difficult task a long time ago.

00:41:41 ◼   ► - This would have been horrible for you

00:41:43 ◼   ► a couple of months ago.

00:41:44 ◼   ► You would have done everything you could

00:41:46 ◼   ► to avoid this process.

00:41:48 ◼   ► - Right.

00:41:49 ◼   ► - Right, of like, admitting that you needed help.

00:41:52 ◼   ► - Right.

00:41:53 ◼   ► - And then trying to go out to the open world to find it.

00:41:58 ◼   ► - Right.

00:41:59 ◼   ► - Then judging the work and dealing with people.

00:42:00 ◼   ► Like, it's like everything you hate.

00:42:03 ◼   ► Yeah, it was absolutely terrible.

00:42:05 ◼   ► But it was...

00:42:07 ◼   ► It also just to me falls into this category of

00:42:12 ◼   ► the theme of the year of less, as with so many of these things, of me trying to do less.

00:42:18 ◼   ► And when I was thinking about this, of like, "Okay, I need someone to help with this task."

00:42:25 ◼   ► I was originally thinking, like, "Okay, let me try to find one person, and I'll test one person, and I'll do this."

00:42:31 ◼   ► And like, but no, wait, this needs to be done quickly.

00:42:33 ◼   ► And so this also goes back to the spreadsheet that I still need to help you

00:42:36 ◼   ► make at some point, Myke.

00:42:37 ◼   ► I was able to kind of think about this as this is a thing that I need solved

00:42:42 ◼   ► quickly.

00:42:43 ◼   ► What is like, what is the cost calculation of having three people just do it

00:42:49 ◼   ► if I just pay them to do it and using that essentially as also the job

00:42:53 ◼   ► application?

00:42:54 ◼   ► And I was like, OK, well, the return on investment for this from a business

00:42:57 ◼   ► perspective says just do it like you need this thing done quickly.

00:43:01 ◼   ► and the cost to trying to do it sequentially doesn't make sense.

00:43:05 ◼   ► It was an interesting way to realize of how to try to solve a problem

00:43:09 ◼   ► relatively quickly in a very "I am thinking about this

00:43:14 ◼   ► as a CEO, I am not thinking about this as

00:43:17 ◼   ► me, a person, trying to solve a problem." So yeah,

00:43:22 ◼   ► Cortex. Changing lives, even mine.

00:43:26 ◼   ► Today's episode of Cortex is also brought to you by one of my favorite

00:43:29 ◼   ► companies and that is FreshBooks. I love FreshBooks because they help me save time and stress

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00:45:16 ◼   ► Great, what is Colmak?

00:45:22 ◼   ► Are you thinking about switching keyboard layouts, Myke?

00:45:24 ◼   ► No, I've just come across a word I'd never heard of before.

00:45:28 ◼   ► A ton of feedback.

00:45:29 ◼   ► Colmac is better.

00:45:30 ◼   ► You should try Colmac.

00:45:31 ◼   ► That's what I've been told.

00:45:33 ◼   ► Look, the internet is an endless fractal

00:45:37 ◼   ► of opposing wars of things.

00:45:41 ◼   ► It's like, oh, there's Apple versus IBM, right?

00:45:45 ◼   ► Or like, there's Mac versus PC.

00:45:48 ◼   ► I was like, OK, well, we're all on the Mac side.

00:45:50 ◼   ► "Now it's iOS versus OS X."

00:45:53 ◼   ► Right? And then, "Oh, okay."

00:45:54 ◼   ► And then it's, like, these things go on forever and ever and ever.

00:45:58 ◼   ► And there is nothing that you can mention that there is not going to be some other side for.

00:46:04 ◼   ► No matter how obscure you get.

00:46:06 ◼   ► So the question is, are you in the 0.00001% of the population considering switching to a Dvorak keyboard?

00:46:14 ◼   ► Guess what? You have many options, right?

00:46:16 ◼   ► options, right? And people are going to argue with you about which of the variations is the best one.

00:46:21 ◼   ► So everything, everything devolves into these kind of little wars, but

00:46:26 ◼   ► the answer to your question is that

00:46:29 ◼   ► Colmac is another alternative keyboard.

00:46:33 ◼   ► Just as Dvorak is designed to minimize finger movement,

00:46:37 ◼   ► Colmac is also designed to minimize finger movement, but my understanding of it is that it is also

00:46:45 ◼   ► optimized to be easier to switch to.

00:46:49 ◼   ► So that when it was being designed, the question

00:46:53 ◼   ► was not "let's minimize the amount of finger travel"

00:46:57 ◼   ► the question was "let's minimize the amount of finger travel

00:47:01 ◼   ► and also minimize the amount of keys

00:47:05 ◼   ► that were actually going to move." Yeah, I'm looking at a layout now

00:47:09 ◼   ► and it's very similar, very similar.

00:47:13 ◼   ► So the standard copy-cut-paste keys that everybody in the world uses, those are not moved on purpose

00:47:21 ◼   ► because everybody has that just burned into their brain about cut-copy-paste.

00:47:26 ◼   ► There's a few other frequent keys that are not moved, but that is my understanding,

00:47:30 ◼   ► is Colmac is designed to make switching simpler, which is why--

00:47:34 ◼   ► Yeah, like if you're using OS X, it would be better.

00:47:38 ◼   ► Yeah, sure, that one too.

00:47:40 ◼   ► Because the Q and W are in the same place

00:47:42 ◼   ► for the quit and close windows and stuff like that.

00:47:45 ◼   ► I can see how, especially as a Mac user,

00:47:47 ◼   ► it would maybe be easier to switch to Comac.

00:47:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, my feeling is,

00:47:53 ◼   ► it's been funny, I've been getting a lot of Twitter messages

00:47:58 ◼   ► and messages from people telling me

00:48:01 ◼   ► that they have decided to switch

00:48:02 ◼   ► and that they now understand the feeling

00:48:04 ◼   ► like you've had a stroke.

00:48:05 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:48:06 ◼   ► It's like, oh God, that was not a joke.

00:48:09 ◼   ► That is legitimately the feeling of trying to type

00:48:11 ◼   ► on a new keyboard layout.

00:48:13 ◼   ► - As a QWERTY user, looking at Dvorak,

00:48:15 ◼   ► it's like a nightmare.

00:48:17 ◼   ► Like everything is-- - It looks alien.

00:48:19 ◼   ► - It just looks horrific.

00:48:20 ◼   ► It's all over the place.

00:48:21 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:48:22 ◼   ► - I like the people that have also,

00:48:23 ◼   ► I've seen a couple of people that have sent in pictures

00:48:25 ◼   ► of photos or printouts of the Dvorak layout

00:48:29 ◼   ► on the top of their monitor.

00:48:31 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

00:48:32 ◼   ► - You know like how you did that?

00:48:33 ◼   ► I've seen a few people have taken that on.

00:48:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:36 ◼   ► Even though I use Dvorak, I feel the need to reemphasize,

00:48:39 ◼   ► although possibly too late for many,

00:48:41 ◼   ► that I don't promote switching just for funsies.

00:48:46 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:48:49 ◼   ► I think you need a really good reason to wanna switch.

00:48:52 ◼   ► And switching because it's the more efficient layout,

00:48:55 ◼   ► I think is not a good decision.

00:48:57 ◼   ► You need to switch to Dvorak

00:49:00 ◼   ► because you have a really good reason to do so.

00:49:04 ◼   ► not for, oh it'll be a little faster

00:49:07 ◼   ► or it's a little bit more efficient.

00:49:08 ◼   ► I think that is not good enough for the transition costs.

00:49:11 ◼   ► - I can't even imagine the minuscule amount

00:49:13 ◼   ► of people in the world that it actually would affect

00:49:16 ◼   ► to have more efficiency with typing.

00:49:18 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:49:19 ◼   ► - What sort of difference are you looking at here?

00:49:22 ◼   ► If you're gonna double your typing speed, it might be good.

00:49:26 ◼   ► - Right, but you're not.

00:49:27 ◼   ► - No, you're not doing that, buddy.

00:49:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, and so the amount of time you lose

00:49:32 ◼   ► over a couple of months getting back your regular typing speed, you're never going to

00:49:36 ◼   ► recover that over the course of the whole rest of your life because Dvorak may or may

00:49:41 ◼   ► not be slightly faster or more efficient.

00:49:43 ◼   ► One thing that has been kind of rattling around my brain that I'm not sure that I fully understand

00:49:48 ◼   ► from our discussion last week is why changing keyboard layout would have helped your hands.

00:49:54 ◼   ► You're still making the same movements, right, but just in different locations.

00:49:59 ◼   ► Yeah, it's an – like, this is why I'm, like, a reluctant Dvorak promoter, and barely

00:50:07 ◼   ► even a Dvorak promoter, because –

00:50:10 ◼   ► Or last week would have said different.

00:50:13 ◼   ► Like, soliloquy.

00:50:16 ◼   ► I think if you listened back last time, if you didn't cut it, I did say something like,

00:50:20 ◼   ► all I know is that when I switched to Dvorak, I stopped having problems.

00:50:25 ◼   ► That is a very different statement from "Dvorak will solve all of your problems and make all

00:50:30 ◼   ► of your dreams come true."

00:50:31 ◼   ► And I could just cut that section out and just use that part.

00:50:34 ◼   ► Yeah, there you go.

00:50:36 ◼   ► Perfect.

00:50:37 ◼   ► This is the problem with you doing the edit.

00:50:40 ◼   ► I imagine it was a combination of many things at the time.

00:50:44 ◼   ► I think it was certainly a combination of taking a big break from typing when I had

00:50:48 ◼   ► a problem.

00:50:50 ◼   ► I think it was almost certainly being forced to get back into typing very slowly, because

00:50:57 ◼   ► I wasn't able to type very quickly.

00:51:00 ◼   ► And then I think those two things started me down on the right path, and then now that

00:51:07 ◼   ► I type with Dvorak, I think that the amount I am moving my hands is now under the threshold

00:51:17 ◼   ► that would cause me RSI problems.

00:51:20 ◼   ► whereas before with QWERTY, I think it was over the threshold.

00:51:25 ◼   ► But I may not be representative of the general population.

00:51:30 ◼   ► It's very possible that I am right on the edge with that kind of thing.

00:51:34 ◼   ► Whereas everybody with RSI problems, they have some threshold.

00:51:39 ◼   ► Some people's thresholds are naturally higher, some people's thresholds are naturally lower.

00:51:44 ◼   ► And that is going to affect what helps you or what doesn't help you.

00:51:48 ◼   ► And so I suspect that typing-wise, I was right on some threshold where changing to Dvorak

00:51:55 ◼   ► switched.

00:51:56 ◼   ► But if your sensitivity to RSI problems is very high, switching to Dvorak might not help

00:52:01 ◼   ► you at all.

00:52:02 ◼   ► It might just cost you some time and not be beneficial.

00:52:06 ◼   ► So that's why I always try to be really careful when I talk about it.

00:52:10 ◼   ► It helped me, but I'm not sure that I can universally recommend it.

00:52:17 ◼   ► So I would say if you are having RSI problems, it doesn't necessarily hurt to try.

00:52:25 ◼   ► Because what else are you going to do?

00:52:28 ◼   ► You can try different split keyboards, there's a bunch of stuff that you can try, and Dvorak

00:52:32 ◼   ► is one of those tools.

00:52:35 ◼   ► And I've used split keyboards, I've done a bunch of that other stuff, but I think switching

00:52:40 ◼   ► the layout was the thing that worked well for me.

00:52:43 ◼   ► But I am not a doctor, I do not play one on a podcast.

00:52:46 ◼   ► All I will say is, with the Colmac people, I don't know how much easier it is to actually

00:52:52 ◼   ► switch to Colmac.

00:52:54 ◼   ► My suspicion is that if you're going to Dvorak or you're going to Colmac, either way you're

00:53:01 ◼   ► going to feel like you've had a stroke.

00:53:02 ◼   ► Like, I can't imagine it's going to be that much of a difference.

00:53:06 ◼   ► So I think that the thing that really matters is just knowing that whatever device you are

00:53:12 ◼   ► going to use has software-level support for the keyboard that you are going to use.

00:53:18 ◼   ► That is the primary feature.

00:53:20 ◼   ► Okay, Myke, last week I told you about the One True email app, which is Unibox.

00:53:30 ◼   ► And I would like to know if you have tried it since then.

00:53:33 ◼   ► I have set up Unibox on all of my devices.

00:53:37 ◼   ► Hey!

00:53:38 ◼   ► And I've played with it and I can see a utility for it,

00:53:43 ◼   ► but I don't think I will use it as much as you do.

00:53:48 ◼   ► I know exactly when I will use Unibox.

00:53:51 ◼   ► - When is that?

00:53:52 ◼   ► - When I go on trips.

00:53:53 ◼   ► - Okay, so why on trips versus other times?

00:53:59 ◼   ► What is your thinking here?

00:54:00 ◼   ► - So when I'm on trips,

00:54:02 ◼   ► this can be vacations or work trips,

00:54:04 ◼   ► I have less time to devote to email.

00:54:08 ◼   ► So whenever I do open my email inbox,

00:54:12 ◼   ► I would like to be able to, at a glance,

00:54:15 ◼   ► pick out important things, and that would be by person.

00:54:18 ◼   ► So it's very likely that if I'm not looking email

00:54:22 ◼   ► for a few days, I might have a few emails

00:54:24 ◼   ► from a few important people,

00:54:25 ◼   ► and they'll be grouped together in Unibox.

00:54:27 ◼   ► And it's a better way, I think, to manage a large inbox.

00:54:32 ◼   ► So I will definitely use it then,

00:54:35 ◼   ► which is why I'm keeping it installed,

00:54:37 ◼   ► Because I know that at times where I can only just dip into this and pick out important things

00:54:41 ◼   ► And I know there's gonna be a lot more in there than usual

00:54:44 ◼   ► This would be a really good way at a glance to get a view of what is happening

00:54:49 ◼   ► Hmm, which is why I also think that this app is kind of made for your style

00:54:55 ◼   ► Of email because that's kind of how you I mean, it sounds like I'm making a joke, but I'm being serious

00:55:02 ◼   ► Like it's this is how you kind of always do your email, right?

00:55:06 ◼   ► Is it all you would let it build up then you go in and you chop away at it, but mostly

00:55:11 ◼   ► You need to see email from maybe one person. Yeah, and that's what makes your situation different to most other people

00:55:18 ◼   ► Yeah, this was something which someone in the reddit left a comment along the lines like uni box is the perfect email app

00:55:26 ◼   ► If you only check your email once a week, that is very accurate. I realized in retrospect. I think I had not quite really

00:55:34 ◼   ► But that really got a laugh out of me because I realized as soon as I read that, yes, of course, that is exactly the purpose of this email app.

00:55:42 ◼   ► If you are checking your email all the time, the very feature that it is built around, Sort By Sender, is almost entirely useless to you.

00:55:50 ◼   ► Whereas if you are someone like me who wants to check their email inbox once a week and then for as little time as humanly possible, then this is the email client for you.

00:56:03 ◼   ► - I think it's more than just sort by sender

00:56:06 ◼   ► that makes it useful, it's the grouping.

00:56:09 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:56:10 ◼   ► - You know, 'cause I think you could have other apps,

00:56:12 ◼   ► I know you've tried and not many do it,

00:56:13 ◼   ► but sort by sender is a new thing to do,

00:56:15 ◼   ► it's just a different way to sort the inbox,

00:56:17 ◼   ► but it goes an extra step to group email

00:56:20 ◼   ► from the same person,

00:56:21 ◼   ► even if it's a different thread together,

00:56:23 ◼   ► that's a whole different scenario.

00:56:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's what I totally love about it.

00:56:29 ◼   ► - I applaud doing it this way, right?

00:56:33 ◼   ► you have a way of wanting to manage email

00:56:37 ◼   ► that is different and going for it.

00:56:39 ◼   ► I wish that more apps would do that in all honesty,

00:56:42 ◼   ► like find a thing that works for you and go for it.

00:56:45 ◼   ► Like it was one of the things

00:56:47 ◼   ► that I loved about mailbox, right?

00:56:48 ◼   ► Like the idea of mailbox was focused around

00:56:52 ◼   ► what they referred to as inbox zero,

00:56:55 ◼   ► which is like a real twist

00:56:57 ◼   ► on what it actually started out as being.

00:57:00 ◼   ► But their idea was, clear the email from your inbox,

00:57:03 ◼   ► whether you are marking it as to do, snoozing it for later,

00:57:07 ◼   ► answering it or archiving it.

00:57:09 ◼   ► But like at the end of the day, have nothing in there.

00:57:12 ◼   ► And I liked it 'cause the whole app was built around

00:57:15 ◼   ► that ideology, whether it's right or wrong,

00:57:18 ◼   ► like that was the way that they built their application.

00:57:20 ◼   ► And that's what I also like about Unibox.

00:57:22 ◼   ► And I wish that more email applications would come

00:57:25 ◼   ► with some kind of overriding like theory to them.

00:57:29 ◼   ► - Right, some design philosophy around

00:57:32 ◼   ► how should you handle messages.

00:57:34 ◼   ► - Yep, and that is exactly what my new email app has,

00:57:37 ◼   ► which is do everything to them,

00:57:40 ◼   ► I think is the overall theory of airmail.

00:57:43 ◼   ► Have you played with airmail on iOS?

00:57:46 ◼   ► - Yes, I have played with airmail.

00:57:48 ◼   ► It is the white icon, right?

00:57:50 ◼   ► It's like the white envelope, is that it?

00:57:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, it has an envelope on it.

00:57:53 ◼   ► Do you know what one I mean?

00:57:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, I do know.

00:57:56 ◼   ► - Okay, good.

00:57:56 ◼   ► But the envelope is thin blue lines, is that airmail?

00:57:59 ◼   ► Do you know what you've done to me? I just said envelope.

00:58:02 ◼   ► Yeah?

00:58:03 ◼   ► Should be envelope.

00:58:04 ◼   ► Okay.

00:58:05 ◼   ► Ugh. Terrible.

00:58:06 ◼   ► This is what happens when you talk to Americans all day, Myke.

00:58:08 ◼   ► Oh, I know. Mobile. Mobile envelopes.

00:58:11 ◼   ► This is just accent drift. There's no way to avoid this.

00:58:15 ◼   ► I know.

00:58:16 ◼   ► You can hear this in my voice if you go back and you listen to my early videos. Like, you

00:58:22 ◼   ► back and you listen to that UK Explained video, the very first one, I sound like a totally

00:58:27 ◼   ► different person because that was the me who spoke to British people all day long. Right,

00:58:33 ◼   ► my accent drifted in the opposite way and then since I left schools and don't talk to

00:58:40 ◼   ► British people all day long, my accent has very naturally just drifted back much more

00:58:46 ◼   ► towards the normal American. I wouldn't have expected that to happen. In schools, I think

00:58:51 ◼   ► it's worse because you're aiming when you're talking in front of children to be non-distracting.

00:58:58 ◼   ► And so I was actually very conscious, particularly when I was teaching, of having a much softened

00:59:05 ◼   ► version of my American accent.

00:59:07 ◼   ► Right, but that's exactly my thinking with my accent.

00:59:10 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:59:11 ◼   ► I soften it down for the Americans.

00:59:14 ◼   ► Exactly, because otherwise the Americans will go, "huh-huh-huh, lol, listen to the way you

00:59:18 ◼   ► said that word!"

00:59:20 ◼   ► Right? That's... so you learn you have to talk in a certain way to not distract your American co-hosts.

00:59:26 ◼   ► Isn't that what happens?

00:59:28 ◼   ► Yep, that's exactly my thinking. Anyway...

00:59:31 ◼   ► So, accent drift. It happens to everybody. There's no way around it. And you are just in the funny

00:59:37 ◼   ► situation that even though you live in the United Kingdom, the vast majority of words you speak at

00:59:43 ◼   ► this point are to non-British people. I mean, that has to be the case, right?

00:59:47 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, well, because I tend to speak to either American people or a Romanian person.

00:59:55 ◼   ► Exactly, well that's what I was thinking, right? It's like you're not even normalizing back at home.

00:59:59 ◼   ► You're being pulled in an entirely other way back at home. So, yeah, it should be no surprise that

01:00:07 ◼   ► you were saying... I don't even know. Envelope? Envelope?

01:00:11 ◼   ► Envelope.

01:00:11 ◼   ► Envelope, okay.

01:00:12 ◼   ► Instead of envelope.

01:00:16 ◼   ► So just after we recorded our last episode, Canvas,

01:00:20 ◼   ► which is another show on relay FM, which is kind of iOS focused.

01:00:24 ◼   ► They did a whole big episode about third party email clients and Federico was

01:00:29 ◼   ► really pushing airmail and he had previously written a big review about it and I

01:00:35 ◼   ► decided to check it out and I like it a lot.

01:00:40 ◼   ► I like it a lot. Um,

01:00:42 ◼   ► It is rough around the edges in places, like it does some weird stuff, like it has some weird bugs.

01:00:48 ◼   ► And there's some UI stuff that I'm not massively keen on, but I feel like and have heard that there's gonna be some changes which would be a bit nicer for my eyes.

01:00:56 ◼   ► But it also does the custom IMAP screwing around thing.

01:01:00 ◼   ► I just realized that's why I know Airmail, because I've been trying to delete their custom IMAP folders from my setup for a while, and they keep coming back, because it must be installed somewhere that I don't know, or it's waking up every once in a while.

01:01:11 ◼   ► 'cause it will do snoozing and all that stuff,

01:01:13 ◼   ► but I don't use any of it.

01:01:15 ◼   ► It sets them up, but if you just don't go buy into that,

01:01:18 ◼   ► it will just, they just live there as empty labels.

01:01:22 ◼   ► But what I really like about this application

01:01:26 ◼   ► is it has tons of third-party integrations.

01:01:28 ◼   ► So I'm very easily able to take an email

01:01:33 ◼   ► and send it to OmniFocus.

01:01:35 ◼   ► It will open OmniFocus, attach the whole text

01:01:37 ◼   ► the emails a note, which is so cool for me.

01:01:42 ◼   ► So like say somebody sends me ad copy,

01:01:45 ◼   ► I can add the whole copy that they've sent me

01:01:47 ◼   ► to the OmniFocus note, reminding me to write it up.

01:01:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing is really nice

01:01:54 ◼   ► to be able to do.

01:01:55 ◼   ► - They can send, there's just so many services

01:01:57 ◼   ► that it plugs into, and it also can do really powerful

01:02:00 ◼   ► things with the email messages, like turn them into PDFs.

01:02:04 ◼   ► It has something that I've never seen any email app do,

01:02:08 ◼   ► in that you can take an email and save it in a folder

01:02:11 ◼   ► in another email account.

01:02:13 ◼   ► - What?

01:02:16 ◼   ► - So say you have multiple email accounts.

01:02:18 ◼   ► - Okay.

01:02:19 ◼   ► - And you get an email to cgpgray1@gmail.com.

01:02:22 ◼   ► - Right.

01:02:23 ◼   ► - But really, you would like to save it in a folder

01:02:25 ◼   ► that you have in cgpgray3@gmail.com.

01:02:29 ◼   ► - Okay.

01:02:29 ◼   ► - It will let you take that email and save it in the folder

01:02:32 ◼   ► in the other email account.

01:02:33 ◼   ► Like it does some crazy stuff of like sending them around.

01:02:36 ◼   ► But it's just like a weird feature that I really like

01:02:40 ◼   ► because this feels like an app that is made by people

01:02:44 ◼   ► who deal with lots of email.

01:02:46 ◼   ► So it has all these crazy little things that you can do.

01:02:49 ◼   ► And they just had a new Mac app update come out

01:02:52 ◼   ► and so this is an all around system

01:02:55 ◼   ► which is on all of my platforms.

01:02:59 ◼   ► And if I want to I can snooze emails

01:03:01 ◼   ► but I'm not getting back into that now.

01:03:03 ◼   ► - Right, right. - Because I've learned

01:03:04 ◼   ► to live without it, and I really like it.

01:03:07 ◼   ► And it has one of my very favorite things,

01:03:10 ◼   ► and it does it so well on all my devices,

01:03:12 ◼   ► and this is my main reason, seriously,

01:03:15 ◼   ► for sticking with this.

01:03:16 ◼   ► - Wait, wait, if I can remember,

01:03:17 ◼   ► it was email notifications, is that right?

01:03:20 ◼   ► - No. - Is that what it was?

01:03:20 ◼   ► Ah. - It has notifications,

01:03:22 ◼   ► which is fine, a notification.

01:03:23 ◼   ► - I remember notifications driving you crazy

01:03:25 ◼   ► that you used to have an email app set up

01:03:27 ◼   ► solely for the notifications.

01:03:29 ◼   ► - That was the one time, yeah.

01:03:30 ◼   ► But the notifications are so good.

01:03:33 ◼   ► You can choose to pull down

01:03:35 ◼   ► and read the entire email message.

01:03:38 ◼   ► - Nice.

01:03:39 ◼   ► - Which I really like.

01:03:40 ◼   ► But no, my favorite feature is, you can choose this,

01:03:43 ◼   ► it does not mark an email as read

01:03:46 ◼   ► until it is opened and acted upon.

01:03:48 ◼   ► - Oh, and acted upon.

01:03:50 ◼   ► - Yes.

01:03:51 ◼   ► - That's nice.

01:03:52 ◼   ► That's a nice touch.

01:03:53 ◼   ► - So, 'cause I am constantly, in all of my email apps,

01:03:56 ◼   ► opening a message and then marking it as unread again.

01:03:59 ◼   ► and that drives me crazy,

01:04:00 ◼   ► 'cause I like to leave messages as unread

01:04:04 ◼   ► until I do something with them.

01:04:05 ◼   ► And then sometimes I'll purposely mark them as read,

01:04:09 ◼   ► do something with the email, but leave it in my inbox

01:04:11 ◼   ► 'cause it's something I need to catch up on,

01:04:13 ◼   ► but it's not an unread email anymore.

01:04:15 ◼   ► And that's my own weird system,

01:04:17 ◼   ► but I like that it has that feature

01:04:19 ◼   ► and it has a bunch of different things that it will do,

01:04:22 ◼   ► but I, yeah, I really like this application.

01:04:26 ◼   ► There are tons of settings, tons.

01:04:29 ◼   ► every setting so you can really go in and if you're willing to put the time in

01:04:34 ◼   ► and kind of make this the email app that you want it to be. I'm really impressed with this Gray.

01:04:38 ◼   ► So do you think you have found an email home?

01:04:41 ◼   ► I think so. That's very nice.

01:04:44 ◼   ► Plus they charge for the application.

01:04:48 ◼   ► Right. Yeah. I'm with you on this one as well.

01:04:52 ◼   ► I get nervous when apps don't charge. It feels like that if you're important to me

01:04:55 ◼   ► I would like to give you money. I would like to give you more money than you're charging

01:04:59 ◼   ► because I want you to be around.

01:05:00 ◼   ► - Yep.

01:05:01 ◼   ► - Charging is a feature for important apps.

01:05:05 ◼   ► But I think that's good.

01:05:06 ◼   ► You are with Air Mail, you may have found a home there.

01:05:09 ◼   ► And since we did that, the last show

01:05:11 ◼   ► where I was promoting Unibox,

01:05:14 ◼   ► someone pointed out to me an additional feature of Unibox

01:05:17 ◼   ► which has now allowed it to become my only email app.

01:05:22 ◼   ► So last time I mentioned I had this funny workflow

01:05:24 ◼   ► of flipping into mail for VIPs and then flipping back.

01:05:27 ◼   ► But someone sent to me that there's a feature on the message list where you can pull down

01:05:34 ◼   ► and have it only show messages from people who are in your contact book.

01:05:41 ◼   ► And that's not exactly the same as VIPs, but to me it's like a 70% solution.

01:05:49 ◼   ► It's good enough that if I can do this, then I don't have to bother flipping back into

01:05:56 ◼   ► mail.app and using a different interface. So now I can just do my entire workflow in

01:06:01 ◼   ► Unibox in one interface, in one place, and I'm very happy. So I have found an email home

01:06:08 ◼   ► and you have found an email home. For now, anyway, because the wheel always keeps turning.

01:06:13 ◼   ► Oh yeah, it's the great wheel of email.

01:06:15 ◼   ► Yeah, in a week! We'll be complaining about it again.

01:06:19 ◼   ► Well, in Cortex episode 1, like I'm looking at my home screen, it's a completely different

01:06:24 ◼   ► email application to what I'm using now. The email application on my home screen doesn't

01:06:27 ◼   ► even exist anymore.

01:06:31 ◼   ► That ugly, ugly home screen.

01:06:32 ◼   ► Aw, rest in peace little buddy.

01:06:35 ◼   ► Think about how much better your life is after you've met me.

01:06:40 ◼   ► Do you think that was a worthy Cortex-versary episode, Myke?

01:06:47 ◼   ► Well, I mean, we spoke about email.

01:06:54 ◼   ► I guess it's an excellent point.

01:06:56 ◼   ► Email is central to all of the work

01:07:01 ◼   ► that occurs in our lives.

01:07:03 ◼   ► So I think so.

01:07:04 ◼   ► I think maybe right there.

01:07:05 ◼   ► Well, yeah, it is kind of perfect

01:07:07 ◼   ► because the gift for a first anniversary is paper

01:07:10 ◼   ► and emails are just electronic paper.

01:07:14 ◼   ► That's the traditional gift.

01:07:15 ◼   ► Clocks are the modern gift.

01:07:16 ◼   ► What do you want me to do?

01:07:20 ◼   ► (laughter)

01:07:23 ◼   ► (laughs)