Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► So, Gray, I feel like I need to make a statement, like a kind of press conference-like statement.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Like how if the president does something really bad and needs to get everybody in a room to

00:00:09 ◼   ► talk to them.

00:00:11 ◼   ► People think I'm evil now because of our last episode.

00:00:17 ◼   ► You know when we were talking about all the email list stuff?

00:00:20 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:00:22 ◼   ► Right?

00:00:23 ◼   ► Basically people think that I want to sell all of their information to companies.

00:00:30 ◼   ► That's some of the feedback that I have received over the last two weeks.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Okay, so Myke, I'm looking at our show notes, which as I have commented many times are very, very thorough show notes.

00:00:45 ◼   ► but you have a section where you want to justify and defend yourself for your marketing nature.

00:00:53 ◼   ► - Yep. - And this section is hugely long.

00:00:57 ◼   ► - I've been thinking about it a lot, yeah. - Yeah, I can tell you've been thinking about it long.

00:01:01 ◼   ► There are one, two, three, four, five, six top-level bullets for this section,

00:01:09 ◼   ► which then have many many sub-bullets in them.

00:01:13 ◼   ► All of which I can see in advance are Myke trying to justify his position as a marketing man.

00:01:21 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:01:22 ◼   ► It is much much more thorough.

00:01:24 ◼   ► I think you might have written more in your defense

00:01:27 ◼   ► than the whole of the audience wrote in the Reddit about your marketing nature.

00:01:32 ◼   ► - Yes, completely, yes.

00:01:34 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:01:36 ◼   ► And really, it was like three people.

00:01:38 ◼   ► But still, I just, I did also feel this listening back.

00:01:42 ◼   ► Like I've heard you say this on Hello Internet Bunch,

00:01:45 ◼   ► especially in the earlier days.

00:01:46 ◼   ► Where like you'd listen back and you were like,

00:01:48 ◼   ► oh man, look what I've done.

00:01:50 ◼   ► And I felt it at the time.

00:01:52 ◼   ► So like, so what we were talking about

00:01:54 ◼   ► was this Google match thing, right?

00:01:55 ◼   ► And the idea of like companies being able

00:01:57 ◼   ► to upload their email databases

00:01:59 ◼   ► and have that do some targeted marketing.

00:02:02 ◼   ► And I was talking about why I thought that was a good idea.

00:02:05 ◼   ► Now, I think that is a good idea in traditional marketing

00:02:09 ◼   ► if that's your business, right?

00:02:10 ◼   ► I was thinking about it as in the stuff

00:02:12 ◼   ► that I used to work in and how that would work for me

00:02:14 ◼   ► if I was still in that business.

00:02:16 ◼   ► But one of the key parts about marketing, Gray,

00:02:20 ◼   ► is knowing your audience.

00:02:21 ◼   ► And I know my audience well enough

00:02:25 ◼   ► that I would never do anything like this.

00:02:27 ◼   ► Because it's, let's say for example,

00:02:29 ◼   ► we set up an email list

00:02:31 ◼   ► and we took people's email addresses

00:02:32 ◼   ► and we spoke to them about stuff

00:02:34 ◼   ► in the same way that you do.

00:02:35 ◼   ► If I sold that email address list,

00:02:38 ◼   ► I would lose all of my listeners

00:02:40 ◼   ► because everyone would be really, really mad about it.

00:02:42 ◼   ► So I know not to do it, so I wouldn't do it.

00:02:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, but last time when we were talking about

00:02:48 ◼   ► the email list and the Google Match program,

00:02:52 ◼   ► the idea on the table was Google Match would, in theory,

00:02:58 ◼   ► want me to upload that database, not sell it, just upload it.

00:03:03 ◼   ► And then I could advertise CGP Grey related products

00:03:07 ◼   ► to people while they're just browsing around the web

00:03:10 ◼   ► if Google knows who they are,

00:03:11 ◼   ► if they can match those email addresses to people.

00:03:14 ◼   ► And I believe your exact words were,

00:03:16 ◼   ► "That's an amazing idea, you should do that."

00:03:19 ◼   ► - So I didn't say you should do that, I don't think.

00:03:23 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:24 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:03:28 ◼   ► a monster if I uploaded that database into Google's new advertising program and then

00:03:35 ◼   ► told Google, "I want you to follow these people around with ads for CGP Grey sweatshirts wherever

00:03:41 ◼   ► they are on the internet."

00:03:42 ◼   ► I think that's a great business idea.

00:03:48 ◼   ► This is the marketer inside you.

00:03:51 ◼   ► It is a great idea under traditional marketing methods, but the same feeling I feel applies.

00:03:58 ◼   ► It is a great idea if you're approaching it from a traditional way.

00:04:03 ◼   ► But if you did it, it would be death to your business.

00:04:07 ◼   ► That's the different, that's the feeling that I have.

00:04:09 ◼   ► It's like, I could do all of this stuff.

00:04:12 ◼   ► Like in the same way that we could put ads on the Relay site which track people around

00:04:16 ◼   ► the web.

00:04:17 ◼   ► We don't do any of that because I know it would be detrimental to my business.

00:04:22 ◼   ► I think it's key to say that I understand my audience and I know that people wouldn't like it, so I wouldn't do it.

00:04:27 ◼   ► So all I can do is ask you to trust that I'm not evil.

00:04:34 ◼   ► Because I know that that's difficult when you say that, I will now ask you, Gray, do you trust that I'm not evil?

00:04:42 ◼   ► "Yeah, I trust that you're not evil, you know, because we're working together."

00:04:47 ◼   ► "I wouldn't work with you if I thought that you were an evil business person."

00:04:52 ◼   ► So that's what I thought, the only way I could get out of this, right?

00:04:55 ◼   ► Because I know everything that I've just said could still be used against me.

00:04:58 ◼   ► I need to lean upon the goodwill people have for you as a barometer of my evilness, right?

00:05:05 ◼   ► Yeah, so you're basically a credibility leech right now.

00:05:08 ◼   ► That's what you've just worked into here.

00:05:10 ◼   ► And is you think people will trust me that you're not an evil person, an evil business

00:05:16 ◼   ► person.

00:05:17 ◼   ► I have an appreciation for traditional marketing and how it works.

00:05:22 ◼   ► But this type of stuff works for big businesses because it doesn't matter to them if they

00:05:26 ◼   ► upset a percentage of people, right?

00:05:29 ◼   ► Because they're working on such a large scale.

00:05:31 ◼   ► But the percentage of our audience that would be upset by doing something like this is way

00:05:35 ◼   ► higher than a bank.

00:05:37 ◼   ► that's why I know that I should never do it.

00:05:41 ◼   ► Well again I will take your word at the experience that I have had with podcasts, which is listening

00:05:46 ◼   ► back to yourself and being astounded by how remarkably unclear you are. Because I don't

00:05:51 ◼   ► remember any part of that conversation involving the words "You shouldn't do it, it would be

00:05:56 ◼   ► bad for your business." I just remember that conversation.

00:05:59 ◼   ► Oh no, no we did, I didn't say that. I'm saying that now.

00:06:01 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:06:02 ◼   ► But I didn't say that then. That was the problem. I was talking about why it would be a good

00:06:06 ◼   ► idea, but it would actually be a worse idea than a good idea.

00:06:10 ◼   ► Right, but it seems like that is a rather key part

00:06:14 ◼   ► to not have included. Because I had loaded up on my

00:06:21 ◼   ► my screen a tweet that I think summarized what I was thinking during

00:06:26 ◼   ► that conversation better than I could have said it, but

00:06:30 ◼   ► Anthony C. on Twitter tweeted at you and said, "People sitting at home

00:06:36 ◼   ► waiting for special offers targeted to them is a fairy tale they tell baby marketers."

00:06:42 ◼   ► And it felt like that was exactly the feeling that I had during that whole conversation.

00:06:47 ◼   ► I saw this and I bit my tongue, right? Because it's like that Anthony is mocking my marketing

00:06:57 ◼   ► knowledge. And of course I know people don't sit at home waiting for offers, but targeted offers

00:07:02 ◼   ► have a better response than non-targeted offers.

00:07:05 ◼   ► That's what I'm talking about.

00:07:06 ◼   ► I'm not imagining people sitting there,

00:07:08 ◼   ► like cross-legged looking at the mailbox

00:07:10 ◼   ► and just with their hands out

00:07:11 ◼   ► waiting for the mail to come every morning.

00:07:14 ◼   ► But I just know from my time of doing this stuff,

00:07:16 ◼   ► if you can target something,

00:07:18 ◼   ► it has massively better response rates.

00:07:22 ◼   ► So this is like what you do with the targeting

00:07:24 ◼   ► for your email newsletter.

00:07:25 ◼   ► So you ask people what they wanna know about.

00:07:28 ◼   ► And then they get things that are related to them.

00:07:30 ◼   ► That's the targeting.

00:07:31 ◼   ► Is there anything else from this gigantic bullet pointed list that you want to talk about?

00:07:35 ◼   ► Or was really this this list here that I'm looking at an act of catharsis for you?

00:07:40 ◼   ► Oh yeah. I needed to get all this stuff out.

00:07:43 ◼   ► And then I figured I would come I would maybe bring points forward from this multiple multiple hundred word essay that I've written.

00:07:49 ◼   ► I expect that I will probably be pulling from this essay again in our next episode.

00:07:55 ◼   ► Right. Yeah.

00:07:56 ◼   ► as people continue to mine my evil ways

00:08:00 ◼   ► from the words that I speak.

00:08:01 ◼   ► - There we go.

00:08:02 ◼   ► - I am a nice guy, I promise.

00:08:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, of course.

00:08:07 ◼   ► - So you know we were talking about

00:08:09 ◼   ► content blockers last time?

00:08:11 ◼   ► - Yes, we were talking about content blockers.

00:08:14 ◼   ► - I have installed another content blocker,

00:08:15 ◼   ► but this one is not an ad blocker.

00:08:18 ◼   ► So this is like one of the good things

00:08:19 ◼   ► about this content blockers is it can block anything

00:08:21 ◼   ► in your web browsing world.

00:08:24 ◼   ► And I have found, this was sent to me by my friend Rob,

00:08:27 ◼   ► this is a content blocker to block the cookie notices

00:08:33 ◼   ► on European Union websites.

00:08:35 ◼   ► - Oh, those are so annoying.

00:08:38 ◼   ► - So for people that don't know,

00:08:39 ◼   ► maybe if you're not in the EU

00:08:41 ◼   ► or you don't visit websites from the EU,

00:08:43 ◼   ► every time you go to a website

00:08:44 ◼   ► that's part of the European Union,

00:08:46 ◼   ► it pops up a little alert to tell you

00:08:48 ◼   ► about the cookie policy that you have to go,

00:08:51 ◼   ► like you have to click continue or close

00:08:53 ◼   ► to know that you're having cookies tracked on you.

00:08:56 ◼   ► And this blocker basically just removes all of those notices

00:09:01 ◼   ► which is fantastic.

00:09:05 ◼   ► It's called Cookie Box.

00:09:06 ◼   ► - Those things are so annoying.

00:09:09 ◼   ► I don't know, I'm not exactly sure how that works.

00:09:13 ◼   ► Like if someone from America is just browsing EU websites,

00:09:16 ◼   ► I don't know if they see that or not.

00:09:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know.

00:09:18 ◼   ► I don't know that either.

00:09:19 ◼   ► I know it's a European Union thing.

00:09:22 ◼   ► So I know that websites in the EU have it on there, but I don't know if it's restricted to people surfing from the EU as well.

00:09:30 ◼   ► Yeah, so Americans listening might not have any idea what we're talking about.

00:09:36 ◼   ► But it is hugely irritating that every time you go to a website, they're like, "Oh, by the way, did you know that we use this completely standard piece of web technology?

00:09:43 ◼   ► Please click 'yes' to allow us to use this standard piece of web technology."

00:09:47 ◼   ► And it's just irritating and very often on iOS it ends up covering up stuff.

00:09:51 ◼   ► Like it's hard to even click yes. You want to continue onward.

00:09:55 ◼   ► This is I think a very interesting use of

00:09:59 ◼   ► content blockers which is not ad blocking.

00:10:03 ◼   ► So I was doing my evil marketing during the time

00:10:07 ◼   ► that cookies were... came around, this like Cookie One-ing.

00:10:11 ◼   ► And I remember it was referred to in the company as Cookiepocalypse.

00:10:15 ◼   ► I thought it was quite funny.

00:10:17 ◼   ► Because everyone knew how worse it makes everybody's websites, right?

00:10:21 ◼   ► Especially on mobile.

00:10:22 ◼   ► Right.

00:10:23 ◼   ► Like, on the App Store description page for Cookie Box, there's a picture of the BBC website,

00:10:29 ◼   ► and it's on an iPhone 6, and it's 50% of the page, the warning.

00:10:34 ◼   ► Yeah, it's just…

00:10:37 ◼   ► It's absolutely irritating.

00:10:39 ◼   ► It's one of those laws that I think just accomplishes nothing.

00:10:43 ◼   ► What are you trying to protect people from?

00:10:44 ◼   ► why is this requirement here?

00:10:46 ◼   ► Of all of the tracking that ever happens,

00:10:48 ◼   ► is this the worst kind? I don't really

00:10:50 ◼   ► think so. It's just, yeah.

00:10:52 ◼   ► It seems to me like this was a great idea

00:10:54 ◼   ► fifteen years ago

00:10:56 ◼   ► when the web was newer, but this is just

00:10:58 ◼   ► so way behind the times

00:11:00 ◼   ► now that it's just irritating.

00:11:02 ◼   ► So this is an example of one that I like.

00:11:04 ◼   ► There are, like, the most

00:11:06 ◼   ► popular, I think, blocker at the moment.

00:11:08 ◼   ► One blocker also does this,

00:11:10 ◼   ► but it's also an ad blocker as well, but it can also

00:11:12 ◼   ► block the cookie stuff. But if you're looking for just an app that does that, this is one

00:11:16 ◼   ► of them, which is quite cool.

00:11:17 ◼   ► I actually wanted to mention OneBlocker in a somewhat related fashion, talking about

00:11:21 ◼   ► content blocking that is not necessarily ad blocking. Because OneBlocker is what I have

00:11:25 ◼   ► installed on my iOS devices. And straight away, one of the things I did notice was yes,

00:11:31 ◼   ► that it blocks the EU cookies. Oh, thank God! This is just great. But you can use OneBlocker

00:11:38 ◼   ► to write your own custom blocking of whatever you want.

00:11:42 ◼   ► They actually have a little web interface where you

00:11:46 ◼   ► can, if you know regular expressions, you can write out a regular expression

00:11:50 ◼   ► to do content blocking of just about anything that you want. So if you

00:11:54 ◼   ► want to, you can disable all of the ad blocking stuff that's in there

00:11:58 ◼   ► and then just kind of create your own little

00:12:02 ◼   ► blocker if that's something that you want to do and if you have a little bit of

00:12:06 ◼   ► technical knowledge or you at least know about how to use wildcards in URL strings.

00:12:11 ◼   ► I'm doing something with that right now but we'll probably talk about that on

00:12:15 ◼   ► the next episode. But I just want to give that a little bit of a shout out as

00:12:18 ◼   ► another interesting way that content blockers can be used that is not ad blocking.

00:12:22 ◼   ► You'll be happy to know that my Cortex t-shirts have finally arrived.

00:12:25 ◼   ► Oh yeah? Yeah, they arrived on Tuesday. I have had so many problems with the customs

00:12:31 ◼   ► and the post and everything. It's been a nightmare but my four t-shirts arrived

00:12:35 ◼   ► And over the last three days, I've just been wearing monkey brain t-shirts.

00:12:38 ◼   ► I just keep changing them. And I'm in blue today, obviously, um,

00:12:42 ◼   ► because blue is the correct color.

00:12:44 ◼   ► It's the correct color for you. Yeah.

00:12:45 ◼   ► Well, I just came back from a trip, um, to Indianapolis,

00:12:49 ◼   ► which we'll talk about a little bit later on in the show.

00:12:51 ◼   ► I was at a conference and I saw a good handful of monkey brain t-shirts and the

00:12:56 ◼   ► majority I saw were blue.

00:12:59 ◼   ► So I think people were pandering because they knew I was going to be there.

00:13:02 ◼   ► However, it felt good.

00:13:04 ◼   ► Yeah, that's not a random sampling of the population.

00:13:07 ◼   ► No, no, it's completely bias.

00:13:09 ◼   ► However, I still liked it very much to see a lot of blue, blue

00:13:12 ◼   ► Cortex monkey brain t shirts floating around the conference.

00:13:14 ◼   ► It was very nice to see.

00:13:16 ◼   ► Everybody loves bias in their favor.

00:13:18 ◼   ► Today's episode of Cortex is brought to you very kindly by Casper.

00:13:22 ◼   ► Casper is an online retailer of premium mattresses

00:13:26 ◼   ► that you can get for yourself

00:13:27 ◼   ► for just a fraction of the price that you're used to paying in stores.

00:13:30 ◼   ► The mattress industry has always been one that's difficult

00:13:33 ◼   ► to get into from a price perspective because you are going to buy something that's pretty

00:13:37 ◼   ► expensive and the way that you have to do it is really kind of weird. You go to a store

00:13:42 ◼   ► and you sit on a bed for a moment or two and then you decide if you want to sleep in that

00:13:46 ◼   ► bed for the next 10 years. The mattress that you're sometimes sitting on in a store, you

00:13:50 ◼   ► don't know if it's going to be the right one for you. So Casper is here to revolutionise

00:13:55 ◼   ► everything about the mattress industry by cutting the cost of dealing with resellers

00:13:59 ◼   ► and showrooms, passing those savings on to you, creating new products and creating a

00:14:03 ◼   ► new experience that goes along with it. A Casper mattress will provide you resilience

00:14:07 ◼   ► and long lasting supportive comfort. Casper mattresses are one of a kind, they have created

00:14:11 ◼   ► their own type of mattress. It's a hybrid that combines premium latex foam and memory

00:14:16 ◼   ► foam together. These two technologies come together beautifully for better nights and

00:14:20 ◼   ► brighter days. It has just the right sink and just the right bounce. It's the best

00:14:24 ◼   ► of both. Usually a mattress that you will find in a store is going to cost you well

00:14:29 ◼   ► for $1500. But Casper mattresses cost between $500 for a twin sized, $750 for a full sized,

00:14:36 ◼   ► $850 for a queen and $950 for a king. Which is fantastic. And even better, all Casper

00:14:42 ◼   ► mattresses are made in America.

00:14:45 ◼   ► Casper understands that the idea of buying a mattress online can seem crazy. We're used

00:14:50 ◼   ► to going to the showroom and sitting on them. You get those couple of minutes but at least

00:14:55 ◼   ► you get to feel how it feels. Casper understand how important this is, so buying a mattress

00:15:00 ◼   ► from them is completely risk free. They will ship it to you for free and you will be able

00:15:05 ◼   ► to return it within a 100 day period for free as well if you are not happy. It is that simple.

00:15:12 ◼   ► You will get to sleep on this bed for 3 months before you can decide if it's the right one

00:15:16 ◼   ► for you. That is a complete risk free experience and a brand new way to try out a mattress.

00:15:22 ◼   ► shipped to you in this fantastic box where opening it is an experience all of its own

00:15:26 ◼   ► because like the box is super small and you cut it open and it like breathes life in.

00:15:30 ◼   ► You see your mattress come to life before you, you try it out for 100 days, if you're not happy

00:15:35 ◼   ► you'll send it back but I'm sure that you will be happy because they've built something super

00:15:39 ◼   ► awesome. Listeners of this show can get $50 towards any mattress purchase by visiting

00:15:44 ◼   ► casper.com/cortex and using the code cortex at checkout. Terms and conditions apply,

00:15:50 ◼   ► Please see this site for details. Thank you so much to Casper for supporting this show and Relay FM.

00:15:56 ◼   ► Yesterday evening I was doing some busy work and preparing more of our episodes of YouTube.

00:16:03 ◼   ► Following the Grey tutorial.

00:16:04 ◼   ► Yeah having fun with that.

00:16:06 ◼   ► Yep it's fantastic. I did just want to mention about the Grey tutorial.

00:16:09 ◼   ► It's not a public thing unfortunately. A bunch of people asked for it to be included in the show

00:16:15 ◼   ► show notes. But we can't do it because it's all specific stuff to Cortex and those kinds

00:16:21 ◼   ► of things. I'm afraid there is no grey YouTube tutorial. Maybe you should think about that

00:16:27 ◼   ► one day. People might like it.

00:16:28 ◼   ► Yeah, it'll be relevant for exactly one day before YouTube changes something in the background.

00:16:34 ◼   ► This is the problem, right? So for example, yesterday whilst doing it, I came across two

00:16:39 ◼   ► new pieces of UI that I hadn't seen in any of my other instances of trying to do this.

00:16:44 ◼   ► One of them was a processing progress bar, which seems like a genius thing to have.

00:16:50 ◼   ► Because one of the things that we were complaining about was that when you upload your video

00:16:54 ◼   ► and it goes into processing, it can just seem like an amount of time that you have no idea

00:16:59 ◼   ► about.

00:17:00 ◼   ► So it makes a ton of sense to have a progress bar, but for some reason that doesn't show

00:17:04 ◼   ► every time.

00:17:05 ◼   ► Yeah, you sent me this screenshot and you were really excited, as though someone working

00:17:10 ◼   ► at YouTube listened and changed this for you immediately.

00:17:13 ◼   ► And I didn't even know what you were trying to point out, because to me, that little percentage

00:17:18 ◼   ► processing bar is just one of the many pieces of UI that sometimes it's there, sometimes

00:17:23 ◼   ► it isn't.

00:17:24 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:17:25 ◼   ► Who knows why it is there?

00:17:26 ◼   ► Who knows why it isn't?

00:17:28 ◼   ► I would say I see it about 25% of the time when I upload something, and the rest of the

00:17:32 ◼   ► time it's just, you know, whatever, it just says "Processing" and you don't get the little

00:17:35 ◼   ► indication of when it's done.

00:17:37 ◼   ► If you get that bar in the future, Myke, you may be happy to know that sometimes it'll

00:17:40 ◼   ► zoom all the way to 95% and then just stay there for a really long time at 95%. Maybe

00:17:47 ◼   ► it's processing, maybe it's not. Who knows? Who knows?

00:17:51 ◼   ► But still, even with that processing bar, it's just telling me how long it takes to

00:17:54 ◼   ► process to like 360p and I still have no idea how long it takes to get to 1080. Like, in

00:17:59 ◼   ► an impossible amount of time, I continue to hate YouTube.

00:18:06 ◼   ► Yeah you hate the YouTube backend. What was the other thing that you saw that was new?

00:18:09 ◼   ► You said there were two things?

00:18:10 ◼   ► Oh, also where you put the ads.

00:18:13 ◼   ► So you can put the ads before and after the video.

00:18:16 ◼   ► Previously it was just boxes that you checked.

00:18:18 ◼   ► This time it was like a graphic.

00:18:21 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:18:22 ◼   ► And it slid around this slider on the graphic or something.

00:18:25 ◼   ► I think I have seen that graphic exactly once.

00:18:29 ◼   ► And I haven't seen it since.

00:18:31 ◼   ► And this is what I was telling you last time.

00:18:33 ◼   ► The craziness of YouTube.

00:18:36 ◼   ► It's these... this backend, pieces come and pieces go, it's not even like it just changes consistently.

00:18:43 ◼   ► And I would just love to know what the reasoning is behind it.

00:18:46 ◼   ► Again, my guess is it's some kind of A/B testing randomly on a small portion of the people who are using the background.

00:18:53 ◼   ► That's my guess about what it is. Like they're just taking 5% of the population on a given day and just trying out new stuff.

00:18:59 ◼   ► But if you use YouTube a lot, like you're going to bump into this stuff relatively frequently.

00:19:05 ◼   ► And it is also why I cannot imagine doing a tutorial on how to do anything on YouTube because it just wouldn't stay relevant for very long.

00:19:14 ◼   ► Or you just hear constantly from people trying to do stuff that the screen doesn't look the way it looks in your tutorial.

00:19:20 ◼   ► I don't know how anybody could make something like this because I get confused every time.

00:19:26 ◼   ► And I'm not silly. I know how to deal with these things.

00:19:29 ◼   ► with these things, but every time I open it,

00:19:31 ◼   ► like I'm following along with this tutorial,

00:19:33 ◼   ► and the UI's just not the same,

00:19:35 ◼   ► so I have to kind of just guess.

00:19:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, I just happened to run into something this weekend.

00:19:40 ◼   ► That was, I was on YouTube's official help pages,

00:19:46 ◼   ► trying to get something done,

00:19:47 ◼   ► and looking at their official how to do a thing documents,

00:19:52 ◼   ► and their documents didn't match the screen that I was on,

00:19:55 ◼   ► that it had changed since they had written

00:19:57 ◼   ► their official documents.

00:19:58 ◼   ► That kind of moment is just hugely frustrating.

00:20:02 ◼   ► I am on your official support page that I got to

00:20:06 ◼   ► by clicking "Help" on the page that I want help with.

00:20:10 ◼   ► And this thing is not relevant. It works entirely differently now. Thanks.

00:20:14 ◼   ► Thanks a whole lot. We love you, YouTube.

00:20:18 ◼   ► Were you doing this? Did you get a new Mac? I know that your Mac

00:20:22 ◼   ► you had problems. Did you buy one? And has it arrived yet?

00:20:26 ◼   ► Talking to you on my new Mac right now. Me too. I have one. Oh, look at us. We're new iMac buddies

00:20:33 ◼   ► So where's the old one?

00:20:36 ◼   ► The

00:20:39 ◼   ► That's why I wanted to ask you about this yeah, there we go. I just wanted to see what happened

00:20:44 ◼   ► Yeah, you want to you want to see what it happened?

00:20:47 ◼   ► long story short is

00:20:49 ◼   ► Who knows why but for some reason I was I

00:20:55 ◼   ► I was able to get the old one to boot again.

00:21:01 ◼   ► Like, I don't know why I was just playing around with it and seeing if I could get it to turn on at all.

00:21:05 ◼   ► And I got it to the point where at least I could boot it and reformat it

00:21:10 ◼   ► and then see if I could fix the HFS+ stuff.

00:21:14 ◼   ► So I actually did get it back into a working state.

00:21:19 ◼   ► But my policy on this stuff is

00:21:23 ◼   ► I just do not trust a computer when that kind of thing has happened.

00:21:29 ◼   ► It has failed you now.

00:21:30 ◼   ► I know, I know that I will hear from many of the computer nerds talking about the nature of HFS+ errors

00:21:39 ◼   ► and how they are software errors and how they are random and how it doesn't have anything to do with the hard drive.

00:21:44 ◼   ► It's not like the hard drive is failing. This kind of thing can just happen.

00:21:47 ◼   ► So there's nothing wrong with the system if you were able to eventually get it to reformat.

00:21:51 ◼   ► I know all of that, but it is irrelevant.

00:21:55 ◼   ► I just have this feeling like, "I will never trust you again, computer."

00:21:58 ◼   ► And there are many projects where I cannot have it go down

00:22:03 ◼   ► in the middle of a project.

00:22:05 ◼   ► And no matter how small the error is,

00:22:07 ◼   ► I just don't even want to think about that as a possibility.

00:22:10 ◼   ► So, even though I did get that computer into a working state,

00:22:15 ◼   ► it has done the shuffle-down progress in our house,

00:22:19 ◼   ► which is that we used to have a very old non-retina iMac that functioned as our computer screen

00:22:26 ◼   ► and that iMac was in terrible, terrible state.

00:22:31 ◼   ► It was borderline unusable and so I thought, "Okay, perfect! Everything has just worked out well here."

00:22:36 ◼   ► That old computer, which was our TV, it's time for that thing to just go

00:22:40 ◼   ► and now what was previously my work computer is now functioning as our TV

00:22:45 ◼   ► Because if there's a catastrophic error on a computer that is functioning just as a TV, it doesn't matter.

00:22:51 ◼   ► Because we're just watching Netflix or whatever on there.

00:22:54 ◼   ► And now I have a nice bigger retina screen which is acting as our TV. So everything is good.

00:23:00 ◼   ► It's all come up roses.

00:23:02 ◼   ► Yeah, everything's coming up grey. That's how it works.

00:23:05 ◼   ► So last week when you were doing your final pass-through of the show after I had done the edit and passed it over to you for you to listen through before we published it,

00:23:11 ◼   ► it. You sent me back over iMessage a video of you driving a truck.

00:23:16 ◼   ► Uh, yeah, driving a truck on the computer. I can't remember why I sent you this video.

00:23:21 ◼   ► I don't know why you did it either. We'd spoken about this game a long time ago. What's it

00:23:26 ◼   ► called? This is called Euro Truck Simulator 2.

00:23:31 ◼   ► Oh, obviously the second edition. Yeah, there's something about the two which

00:23:35 ◼   ► I find really entertaining. Don't go near edition one. That hasn't got

00:23:39 ◼   ► the road markings correct because I'd assumed that you'd obviously started playing this

00:23:43 ◼   ► game for a reason unknown to me that hopefully I'll be able to understand in a moment and

00:23:48 ◼   ► I thought there's only one reason you've sent me this video it's like something funny happens

00:23:52 ◼   ► at the end like maybe you crash and like fall off a cliff but no it's just four minutes

00:23:57 ◼   ► of you just driving down motorways yeah I think I was just driving across a bridge and

00:24:02 ◼   ► was delivering some onions to France of course you were and you also told me and there's

00:24:07 ◼   ► I must tell the listeners this, that you turned all the lights off at home because you were

00:24:12 ◼   ► driving overnight and you felt like you had to be in the correct mood.

00:24:15 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:24:16 ◼   ► To be clear, it was nighttime in the game and so it felt like setting the scene correctly

00:24:23 ◼   ► to turn off all the lights in my office.

00:24:25 ◼   ► So it really did feel a bit more like driving at night.

00:24:28 ◼   ► What compelled you to start playing Euro Truck Simulator 2?

00:24:31 ◼   ► Okay.

00:24:33 ◼   ► This was a joke in an earlier episode of the show.

00:24:37 ◼   ► And now you've been sucked in.

00:24:39 ◼   ► Since I mentioned Euro Truck Simulator 2 on the podcast, I just kept hearing in these

00:24:44 ◼   ► small dribs and drabs from people little remarks on Twitter or an email about how, "Oh, they

00:24:50 ◼   ► play Euro Truck Simulator while they listen to podcasts."

00:24:53 ◼   ► And it's really an enjoyable experience.

00:24:55 ◼   ► And it was like Chinese water torture where it's just like every once in a while these

00:24:58 ◼   ► little dribs would come in about, "Oh, this is really fun to do."

00:25:03 ◼   ► And just the ridiculousness of a thing called Euro Truck Simulator, I finally decided, "You

00:25:08 ◼   ► know what?

00:25:09 ◼   ► The hell with it.

00:25:10 ◼   ► I'm going to cave and let me just try this out.

00:25:11 ◼   ► Let me just see how this goes."

00:25:13 ◼   ► Because I've just—I made myself curious about this over time.

00:25:19 ◼   ► And the end result was I got totally, totally hooked on the game.

00:25:30 ◼   ► The original the original intent here was as as is very often the case when I do some edits of the podcast so

00:25:38 ◼   ► Usually on on hello internet when I do the first and the final edits of that podcast I

00:25:45 ◼   ► Usually want something else to do on the screen because I'm listening

00:25:51 ◼   ► Just for very broad changes or things that need to be fixed for the first and final one and then with cortex

00:25:56 ◼   ► I only do the final edit where you've done most of the work

00:25:59 ◼   ► and then you send it to me to give a listen through.

00:26:01 ◼   ► And so I've always found that doing a video game during that time is a helpful tool.

00:26:08 ◼   ► Like, it keeps me alert so that I'm still paying attention to what I'm listening to

00:26:13 ◼   ► and I don't get bored or zoned out by the podcast.

00:26:16 ◼   ► So I'm always looking for games to play, and so I thought I would give Euro Truck Simulator a try.

00:26:21 ◼   ► I thought, "Okay, this will be the one that I try this time for editing Cortex."

00:26:26 ◼   ► And man, it just, I don't even know if I can call it a game,

00:26:30 ◼   ► but it really did, it really did just suck me in.

00:26:34 ◼   ► And I could see exactly what everybody who had messaged me

00:26:38 ◼   ► over the past couple of months was saying,

00:26:40 ◼   ► that it feels surprisingly like driving

00:26:45 ◼   ► if you're also listening to something

00:26:48 ◼   ► that is very much like listening to talk radio.

00:26:50 ◼   ► It's like, oh yeah, here I am, I'm driving.

00:26:52 ◼   ► - It fits.

00:26:53 ◼   ► - Listening to a podcast and driving a truck,

00:26:56 ◼   ► they fit in a weird way.

00:26:59 ◼   ► - It is amazing, amazing synergy.

00:27:03 ◼   ► It's hard to explain.

00:27:05 ◼   ► And so now I find myself in the position of,

00:27:08 ◼   ► oh, I know I made fun of Euro Truck Simulator last time,

00:27:11 ◼   ► but seriously people, if you haven't tried,

00:27:14 ◼   ► if you haven't tried listening to a podcast

00:27:17 ◼   ► while driving an imaginary truck from London to Prague,

00:27:22 ◼   ► you're really missing out.

00:27:24 ◼   ► - See, I wanna do it now,

00:27:25 ◼   ► but I would feel embarrassed if anybody saw me.

00:27:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, you gotta let that go.

00:27:31 ◼   ► - Like, if I'm playing this game and Adina comes home,

00:27:33 ◼   ► she's like, "What are you doing?"

00:27:34 ◼   ► And I'm like, "Oh, I'm driving a truck to Scotland

00:27:37 ◼   ► "because I need to deliver the maple syrup."

00:27:40 ◼   ► Like, you know, I'm gonna look like a madman.

00:27:43 ◼   ► - You have to let that go, Myke.

00:27:45 ◼   ► You know, you enjoy what you enjoy.

00:27:48 ◼   ► I ended up uploading, I don't know,

00:27:49 ◼   ► I think like a 40 minute long video to my second YouTube channel that was just a really

00:27:54 ◼   ► long drive.

00:27:56 ◼   ► Also people can see then, they can see what it's like for Grey to drive a truck.

00:28:00 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, on CGP Grey 2 where I only upload very boring, very long videos sometimes, I

00:28:06 ◼   ► put up a video there that I guess I'll put in the show notes so people can see what it

00:28:09 ◼   ► looks like to drive in Euro Truck Simulator.

00:28:12 ◼   ► 20,000 people have watched this.

00:28:15 ◼   ► I think that's worse than you playing it.

00:28:18 ◼   ► You know, I don't know why people watch it.

00:28:20 ◼   ► I hope that you can look at the graph and just see a massive decline after a minute.

00:28:24 ◼   ► That's what I hope.

00:28:25 ◼   ► I really hope.

00:28:26 ◼   ► I don't want people watching 40 minutes of you driving a truck.

00:28:29 ◼   ► Let me look it up.

00:28:30 ◼   ► The worst part of all of this is like I'm interested in playing it, but I can't do it

00:28:34 ◼   ► because I need to be more focused during the edit that I do, right?

00:28:38 ◼   ► There's even like a GPS.

00:28:39 ◼   ► There's a GPS on here.

00:28:42 ◼   ► That part really tickles me.

00:28:43 ◼   ► The fact that there is a GPS within the game that you have to follow is so much like driving

00:28:48 ◼   ► having a truck. I feel like it would maybe be more fun if there was no GPS. Oh you nearly

00:28:55 ◼   ► went right off the road there, Gray. Smashed into a lamppost, you just started. Oh this

00:28:59 ◼   ► is perhaps the most interesting audience retention graph I have ever seen on YouTube. So for

00:29:06 ◼   ► the listeners, one of the parts of the YouTube backend which is good, which I always want

00:29:12 ◼   ► to give YouTube credit for, is they are crazy with analytics and stuff that you can find

00:29:17 ◼   ► out about the viewers, and they include this chart that shows when people stop watching

00:29:23 ◼   ► the video, which is surprisingly helpful.

00:29:26 ◼   ► But I've never seen a graph like this one because it starts off below average, meaning

00:29:33 ◼   ► that more than an average number of people stop watching within the first minute.

00:29:40 ◼   ► But it does nothing but pick up steam, so that by the 20-minute mark, it's now losing

00:29:46 ◼   ► viewers at an average rate for a comparable video, and by the end, by the end at the 40

00:29:54 ◼   ► minute mark, it's maxed out the chart for the number of people who are still watching.

00:29:58 ◼   ► So this confirms to me that right out of the gate, a large number of people are like, "You

00:30:04 ◼   ► know what, I'm not going to watch an imaginary truck drive across a continent."

00:30:07 ◼   ► But there's a significant number of people who watch all the way to the end who realize,

00:30:14 ◼   ► Yes, this is exactly what they didn't know they needed in life.

00:30:18 ◼   ► You're not very good at attaching to trailers, that's what I'm learning.

00:30:22 ◼   ► Oh yeah, well... Not very good at that bit, Gray. Oh that's a terrible

00:30:26 ◼   ► angle I'm watching right now. Now that's gonna be a disaster.

00:30:30 ◼   ► Oh wait, hang on. No, you made... oh, you made it. You made it.

00:30:34 ◼   ► Congratulations to you. Thank you. For anyone who actually does give this a try

00:30:38 ◼   ► I just need to immediately recommend something which I didn't know when I was watching

00:30:42 ◼   ► this video, but there are a variety of ways to try to control the truck.

00:30:46 ◼   ► Don't try to drive it by the keyboard, that'll make you go crazy.

00:30:50 ◼   ► You can get by with a mouse, but what I eventually learned is that a trackball is a very good

00:30:59 ◼   ► input device for this game.

00:31:00 ◼   ► That's really where it's at.

00:31:02 ◼   ► Yeah, I can imagine that actually.

00:31:04 ◼   ► I can imagine that being a nicer movement because it's a ball and you turn the ball

00:31:07 ◼   ► left and right to go left and right.

00:31:10 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:31:11 ◼   ► good unless you want to really go off the deep end, which I have been seriously investigating.

00:31:21 ◼   ► You can drop a couple hundred dollars to get a force feedback pretend steering wheel and

00:31:30 ◼   ► pedals and a gear shifter.

00:31:34 ◼   ► You know what the best part is?

00:31:36 ◼   ► I've been looking into this.

00:31:37 ◼   ► I have never ever learned to drive any other car than an automatic.

00:31:42 ◼   ► So I don't even know how to shift gears, but I've found myself looking up videos.

00:31:46 ◼   ► I'm like, hi,

00:31:47 ◼   ► I wonder how you do shift gears so that I can learn how to drive a manual

00:31:52 ◼   ► truck. That's not real.

00:31:53 ◼   ► The biggest hurdle for me is that all of these wheels are dependent

00:32:00 ◼   ► on windows.

00:32:01 ◼   ► And so they don't work with force feedback and a bunch of the other,

00:32:06 ◼   ► features on a Mac, but I did start a thread on the Eurotruck subreddit about

00:32:12 ◼   ► trying to figure out if this stuff can work in a virtual machine on Mac so that

00:32:18 ◼   ► I can have it running in parallel. So here's how you start this, right? You

00:32:22 ◼   ► start talking about this and you say, "Oh, I've been doing some research," making it

00:32:29 ◼   ► sound like, "Oh, I'm just seeing what it would be like." You would already own one

00:32:32 ◼   ► one if it worked on the Mac. That's what I can see here. You would have bought one already

00:32:38 ◼   ► and you make it sound like "oh I'm just looking into it". The only reason you don't have one

00:32:42 ◼   ► is because it doesn't work. You would have bought one by now and I am not sure how I

00:32:48 ◼   ► feel about that. My imagination of you sitting there in your computer chair with pedals at

00:32:54 ◼   ► your feet, a gear shifter to your side and a steering wheel in front of you and you're

00:32:59 ◼   ► driving down the Autobahn listening to Hello Internet. I'm not sure how I feel

00:33:03 ◼   ► about that whole scenario.

00:33:05 ◼   ► Okay, so aside from the fact that I have gone in

00:33:09 ◼   ► really deep on this quote "game" that is barely a game...

00:33:12 ◼   ► It's not a game, really. I know, I know. Yeah, it's... it is what it is. But I do have

00:33:19 ◼   ► an actual work case for this. I mean, obviously not the steering wheel or

00:33:23 ◼   ► anything, but I did find this interesting and I

00:33:26 ◼   ► And I want to talk a little bit just more broadly, to back up a little bit from the craziness of the particulars of this,

00:33:32 ◼   ► about

00:33:34 ◼   ► why I do play

00:33:36 ◼   ► games during certain cuts of the podcast and why I actually find it a useful tool, is

00:33:41 ◼   ► I'm doing something while I'm listening and what

00:33:47 ◼   ► what I have a tendency to do is

00:33:52 ◼   ► really intensely edit the podcasts if I don't find a way to

00:33:57 ◼   ► Slow myself down or distract myself from it. So the middle edit of hello internet that I do is an intense

00:34:05 ◼   ► Intense edit of that show it is possibly too long. You do edit that show too much

00:34:11 ◼   ► Because I mean, I don't know how you feel about the edit when I give you the cortex edit

00:34:17 ◼   ► But you don't ever really do too much to it

00:34:20 ◼   ► Which makes me think that you have an acceptable standard level

00:34:24 ◼   ► Which is a lot lot lower than what you

00:34:28 ◼   ► Allow yourself to do for Hello Internet

00:34:31 ◼   ► Yeah, the Hello Internet is is a little crazy, but I have to get it to a certain stage

00:34:36 ◼   ► but it's it's it may be too much because it is not uncommon for a Hello Internet episode to have a

00:34:43 ◼   ► Thousand to twelve hundred cuts in an episode. Yeah, I mean, but the thing is though an average cortex edit will have 700

00:34:50 ◼   ► Are you talking about audio segments?

00:34:52 ◼   ► Edit points. So when you open up that little tray on the right side, and it shows you how many little audio parts there are in there, like the last episode was over 700.

00:35:03 ◼   ► Oh yeah, if you're doing that thing...

00:35:06 ◼   ► Then it's like 2000 for Halloween 2000.

00:35:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I think the last episode was just about 1700 edit points.

00:35:13 ◼   ► It was a little bit unusual, that one. It's not normally that high, which is why I noticed.

00:35:18 ◼   ► So I have a tendency to edit that show quite a lot.

00:35:22 ◼   ► But so here is where... Oh you just got a speeding offense.

00:35:27 ◼   ► I'm watching this video, so I'll come back to that in a moment, the fact that I'm

00:35:31 ◼   ► still watching this.

00:35:32 ◼   ► But so here's where I find the game is a useful tool

00:35:37 ◼   ► because the game is an engaging thing.

00:35:40 ◼   ► There's a certain amount of friction

00:35:43 ◼   ► to alt-tabbing out of the game to fix something in the audio.

00:35:48 ◼   ► And so when you say, "Oh, I don't change a lot in Cortex,"

00:35:52 ◼   ► the game is part of the tool so that I don't spend

00:35:56 ◼   ► an entire afternoon making Cortex exactly the way that I want it.

00:36:03 ◼   ► Because there are lots of little things in the final edit

00:36:06 ◼   ► that if I was just sitting there looking at the screen watching the audio go by,

00:36:10 ◼   ► I would take the time to fix every single one of those.

00:36:13 ◼   ► those. Yeah because you've loosened the amount that you've done over time. Yeah

00:36:17 ◼   ► that's one of the things that when I do the second edit of Hello Internet that's

00:36:21 ◼   ► what I'm doing. I just have the the podcast on the screen and I edit

00:36:25 ◼   ► everything as I see it go by. But so when I do that final edit having the game to

00:36:31 ◼   ► engage me that little bit of a friction means I'm not gonna alt tab out every 10

00:36:36 ◼   ► seconds to adjust something. I'm going to alt tab out much much less frequently

00:36:41 ◼   ► and only for the bigger things that it feels like, "Okay, it is worth it to switch for a second, fix something, and then switch back."

00:36:48 ◼   ► So that's why I can make a use case for playing a game during the final edit actually decreases the amount of time that I would spend otherwise.

00:36:57 ◼   ► Because if I was just looking at it, I know I would edit the show too much if I didn't distract myself to some extent in the final cut.

00:37:05 ◼   ► So that's a long way of justifying why I was driving a car across Europe.

00:37:11 ◼   ► So the problem that I have now is I have sat here for the last 10 minutes watching you drive.

00:37:18 ◼   ► So I have upset some co-hosts of my shows in the past with the admission that I have been known to play video games whilst recording podcasts.

00:37:34 ◼   ► And the reason I do this is a very similar reason for you.

00:37:38 ◼   ► What it does is it stops me doing other things,

00:37:41 ◼   ► like somehow finding myself in another tab,

00:37:44 ◼   ► which might have Twitter in it.

00:37:46 ◼   ► - Right.

00:37:47 ◼   ► - Because I,

00:37:48 ◼   ► I can concentrate a lot better on a show

00:37:52 ◼   ► when I have something to occupy my eyes and my hands.

00:37:55 ◼   ► It just helps me listen better.

00:37:57 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

00:37:58 ◼   ► - So I'm looking at this, I'm like,

00:37:59 ◼   ► this looks like a very,

00:38:00 ◼   ► except for the fact that you need to scratch into a wall,

00:38:02 ◼   ► It looks like a very low engagement video game.

00:38:07 ◼   ► - That's exactly right.

00:38:09 ◼   ► It's very low engagement.

00:38:12 ◼   ► - And I'm thinking, I could imagine me playing this game

00:38:15 ◼   ► right now whilst talking to you.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Can you play, just out of interest,

00:38:20 ◼   ► is there a multiplayer mode of this?

00:38:22 ◼   ► - There is a multiplayer mode, yes.

00:38:24 ◼   ► - 'Cause I now quite like the idea

00:38:26 ◼   ► of us doing a normal episode,

00:38:28 ◼   ► but both of us trucking across Germany, right?

00:38:33 ◼   ► Whilst we're recording.

00:38:34 ◼   ► Not really making any reference to it,

00:38:36 ◼   ► but making our delivery.

00:38:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, while I'm driving right now,

00:38:39 ◼   ► I just haven't made any reference to it, but.

00:38:42 ◼   ► - Really?

00:38:43 ◼   ► - No, not really, Myke, I'm sorry.

00:38:45 ◼   ► I am not you.

00:38:46 ◼   ► - It wouldn't have bothered me.

00:38:48 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:38:49 ◼   ► I couldn't do it because when I do the podcasts,

00:38:55 ◼   ► I find that I have to concentrate a lot.

00:38:58 ◼   ► I'm-- it-- it's just part of the-- it's just part of the way it works, so I can't possibly do anything else.

00:39:04 ◼   ► And I want to be really clear. That's not me saying like, "Oh, I'm giving this my full attention,

00:39:08 ◼   ► and I can't believe you're over there playing threes," or whatever it is that you play.

00:39:13 ◼   ► Because it's just knowing yourself and knowing how you work.

00:39:18 ◼   ► And I saw a little bit of this when I was a teacher that...

00:39:23 ◼   ► is a bit of a divide with teachers about students doodling

00:39:27 ◼   ► but I was just about to bring up doodling because that's what I do when we record

00:39:31 ◼   ► yeah there were definitely students I could tell

00:39:36 ◼   ► that they would be better in class if they could doodle while a lecture was

00:39:41 ◼   ► happening yeah and my policy on that was always if

00:39:45 ◼   ► you're not being disruptive I don't have a problem with you doodling

00:39:49 ◼   ► And I think for some students, they need to keep the visual part of their brain active

00:39:57 ◼   ► while they are listening to something.

00:39:59 ◼   ► Or they just need to keep their hands active.

00:40:03 ◼   ► And so that's why I never get worried about, "Oh, is Myke paying attention or is Myke doodling

00:40:12 ◼   ► or playing a game or something over there?"

00:40:15 ◼   ► Because you know you well enough to know that this is part of the process for you.

00:40:19 ◼   ► That this helps.

00:40:21 ◼   ► And I completely agree with what you said before, that a low engagement video game helps

00:40:29 ◼   ► me stay focused on, for Hello Internet, a piece of audio that at that point I have heard

00:40:35 ◼   ► four times.

00:40:36 ◼   ► Because we recorded it and I've edited it already a couple of times and now it's the

00:40:40 ◼   ► final thing.

00:40:41 ◼   ► It helps the focus stay in place to have something like that.

00:40:47 ◼   ► So I've gone from being very disappointed in you to now I have the tab open, I have

00:40:55 ◼   ► the page opened by this video game.

00:40:57 ◼   ► It's only a matter of time until you get a wheel if I can figure out how to make them

00:41:00 ◼   ► work on Mac.

00:41:01 ◼   ► I'm really scared now.

00:41:02 ◼   ► I can sell the case for the wheel because think about how easy it would be.

00:41:07 ◼   ► It reduces the engagement even further.

00:41:09 ◼   ► You can just keep one hand on the wheel while you're talking to your co-hosts.

00:41:16 ◼   ► Welcome to Drive Time with Myke and Gray.

00:41:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:21 ◼   ► You're on the air, caller.

00:41:23 ◼   ► This episode of Cortex is brought to you by Fracture.

00:41:27 ◼   ► Fractures are really like no other photograph you're going to have in your house.

00:41:31 ◼   ► They're printed directly onto glass, but they are surprisingly lightweight and easy to mount

00:41:37 ◼   ► on the wall or display on your desk, they look just fantastic.

00:41:43 ◼   ► And they are ridiculously easy to make.

00:41:45 ◼   ► You just go to their website, you upload whatever image you want, tell them what size it is

00:41:49 ◼   ► you want, and they ship it right to your door.

00:41:52 ◼   ► And it really can be any image that you want to have printed out.

00:41:55 ◼   ► I mean, photographs are great, they make excellent gifts, hint, hint, the holidays are coming

00:42:00 ◼   ► up, but maybe you're playing a video game.

00:42:03 ◼   ► Some games are, quite frankly, breathtakingly beautiful.

00:42:07 ◼   ► Maybe they're so beautiful you feel like you want to take a quick screen grab of what

00:42:11 ◼   ► you are looking at.

00:42:13 ◼   ► That's an image too.

00:42:14 ◼   ► You can upload your video game screenshots to Fracture and get them printed out and put

00:42:19 ◼   ► up on your wall.

00:42:21 ◼   ► Just saying.

00:42:22 ◼   ► I can imagine some pretty cool looking gamer rooms covered in fractures.

00:42:27 ◼   ► Maybe one of you listeners will create such a thing and let us and Fracture know on Twitter.

00:42:31 ◼   ► Now the fractures are hand assembled in their "fractory" in Gainesville, Florida.

00:42:36 ◼   ► But this does mean that because fracture has become so popular and because they are lovingly

00:42:42 ◼   ► individually assembled, if you are thinking about getting one of these done for the holidays,

00:42:49 ◼   ► you seriously need to act right now to make sure that you get it in time.

00:42:55 ◼   ► Head over to FractureMe.com and use the code "CORTEX" to get 15% off your first order.

00:43:02 ◼   ► Seriously, if you haven't done your Christmas shopping, there are plenty, plenty of family

00:43:08 ◼   ► members who would love to receive fractures of you and those you love as gifts.

00:43:14 ◼   ► So head on over to FractureMe.com and use the offer code "CORTEX" to get a great gift

00:43:20 ◼   ► for you or those you love, or set up your awesome gaming room, and also to support Cortex

00:43:24 ◼   ► and all of Relay FM.

00:43:27 ◼   ► So I have just gotten back from a trip.

00:43:30 ◼   ► I mentioned that I was at a conference and I gave a talk during this conference.

00:43:34 ◼   ► I was the keynote speaker at a conference called Release Notes, which was about building

00:43:38 ◼   ► businesses but focused on iOS app developers.

00:43:42 ◼   ► So people that make apps for a living and helping them think about their business as

00:43:47 ◼   ► a business, right?

00:43:50 ◼   ► Because they can be far too many times when you think, "I'm an independent app developer

00:43:54 ◼   ► and this is lovely and the money will come.

00:43:56 ◼   ► And sometimes you have to think about business.

00:43:57 ◼   ► So they invited me to speak

00:43:58 ◼   ► because I had been running a business for a year.

00:44:01 ◼   ► And obviously part of all of this

00:44:02 ◼   ► is creating a presentation.

00:44:05 ◼   ► So I'd been working on it for a few months

00:44:07 ◼   ► and seriously over the last few weeks beforehand.

00:44:10 ◼   ► And part of this step was practicing the presentation to you

00:44:14 ◼   ► which was the worst part in the nicest possible way.

00:44:20 ◼   ► I think I was more nervous presenting to you

00:44:25 ◼   ► than I was actually giving the talk.

00:44:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think I bullied you into this a little bit.

00:44:32 ◼   ► - I'm pleased that you did though.

00:44:33 ◼   ► I was very happy that you offered your time

00:44:35 ◼   ► and I appreciate that.

00:44:36 ◼   ► It was a very helpful part of the process.

00:44:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause I know this sort of thing

00:44:42 ◼   ► is very uncomfortable to do,

00:44:43 ◼   ► which is why I was a little bit insistent on,

00:44:46 ◼   ► I think this would be helpful for you to do,

00:44:49 ◼   ► even if it feels very awkward giving a presentation

00:44:53 ◼   ► to a room with just one person in it.

00:44:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, you were, I've never known you

00:44:59 ◼   ► to be so fixed on logistics before.

00:45:01 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, how so?

00:45:03 ◼   ► - Well, just in so much as like we were messaging

00:45:06 ◼   ► late in the evening as you were trying to get rooms booked

00:45:09 ◼   ► for us to do this in.

00:45:10 ◼   ► So I could tell that this was something

00:45:13 ◼   ► that you specifically wanted to happen.

00:45:16 ◼   ► - Well, it's serious business.

00:45:17 ◼   ► We had to book a room in my co-working space, which you got to visit, so that you would

00:45:23 ◼   ► have a place that felt like an official place to give the presentation.

00:45:29 ◼   ► So imagine this, dear listener, that you are standing in a long room and there is a conference

00:45:35 ◼   ► table in front of you which sits about 12 people.

00:45:38 ◼   ► You've seen these in the movies at least, these long wooden tables.

00:45:41 ◼   ► And you're standing there where you've got a TV behind you with the presentation you've

00:45:44 ◼   ► been working on for a few weeks.

00:45:46 ◼   ► you've got your laptop in front of you with your notes, sitting at the other end of that

00:45:50 ◼   ► table is CGP Grey with a legal pad and a pen and he says to you "I'm going to keep a very

00:45:56 ◼   ► stern face" which he does.

00:45:58 ◼   ► With a couple of exceptions I was able to make you laugh when I know you didn't want

00:46:03 ◼   ► to and the whole time that you're giving this presentation Grey is sitting there and making

00:46:07 ◼   ► notes about you.

00:46:10 ◼   ► Imagine how that feels.

00:46:11 ◼   ► It was nerve wracking.

00:46:12 ◼   ► It seems like a low pressure situation.

00:46:13 ◼   ► Oh yeah, no problem.

00:46:16 ◼   ► I'd given this presentation to a bunch of different people and it was all fine.

00:46:21 ◼   ► This is the only time I screwed up and I screwed up so badly during this presentation I had

00:46:25 ◼   ► to begin it again.

00:46:28 ◼   ► I got so far into a hole I couldn't get back out again and had to just say we need to start

00:46:33 ◼   ► over.

00:46:34 ◼   ► But that was actually a very useful part of the whole process because it helped me fix

00:46:38 ◼   ► a part of the presentation.

00:46:40 ◼   ► So I wanted to thank you for your help.

00:46:42 ◼   ► I'm definitely glad that you found it helpful.

00:46:45 ◼   ► I wanted to do this with you because

00:46:49 ◼   ► back when I was learning to be a teacher

00:46:54 ◼   ► I had this done to me as part of teacher training

00:46:59 ◼   ► and I often think back to that and it was a deeply, deeply uncomfortable experience

00:47:07 ◼   ► where I had someone who was in charge of the teacher training program

00:47:12 ◼   ► And what they made you do was they say, okay, you have to prepare a lecture on a topic.

00:47:16 ◼   ► I think it was maybe only half an hour.

00:47:18 ◼   ► And my advisor did the same thing,

00:47:21 ◼   ► sit at the other end of a table and you give a presentation to her and she sat

00:47:25 ◼   ► there very sternly the whole time.

00:47:27 ◼   ► And the other detail that you left out here, Myke,

00:47:29 ◼   ► is that I was also recording you while you were giving the presentation.

00:47:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I have to own up that I couldn't watch that video.

00:47:35 ◼   ► I was going to ask. And yeah, so I,

00:47:39 ◼   ► In addition to having my advisor watching me, she was also doing a video recording of me giving the presentation and

00:47:46 ◼   ► [sigh]

00:47:47 ◼   ► That experience was so deeply uncomfortable because

00:47:54 ◼   ► She laid bare all of the faults that I had as a presenter

00:48:01 ◼   ► and then I also watched the video and

00:48:07 ◼   ► could see that there was no arguing with her on a few points about things that I did when I was giving a presentation.

00:48:15 ◼   ► It's like, I can't get defensive about this. I just do X, Y, and Z poorly.

00:48:22 ◼   ► I can see it right there on the film.

00:48:25 ◼   ► But that single session probably helped more than almost anything during my teacher training

00:48:34 ◼   ► with actually being able to talk in front of a classroom

00:48:37 ◼   ► is being aware of the things that you do badly

00:48:40 ◼   ► and attempting to fix them.

00:48:42 ◼   ► So it was because of that

00:48:46 ◼   ► and because you were giving this keynote presentation

00:48:48 ◼   ► I thought, I really do want to try to help you with this if I can

00:48:52 ◼   ► but I was going to put money on the table

00:48:56 ◼   ► that you might not have been able to bring yourself

00:48:58 ◼   ► to watch the actual video of you doing the presentation

00:49:02 ◼   ► because that stuff is just so intensely awkward to see yourself on a video

00:49:11 ◼   ► in the same way that many people find it very intensely uncomfortable to hear their own recorded voice.

00:49:16 ◼   ► It's a thing that you just have to get used to, but it is deeply uncomfortable the first time you do it.

00:49:22 ◼   ► Yeah, because you gave me some really good pointers, some that were like...

00:49:29 ◼   ► you know, you're saying to me like,

00:49:30 ◼   ► basically fix things that you don't know you're doing,

00:49:33 ◼   ► which is, you know, difficult.

00:49:35 ◼   ► Like you told me about like the way I was pushing my glasses

00:49:37 ◼   ► on my face and the way I was kind of like shifting

00:49:41 ◼   ► awkwardly from side to side.

00:49:42 ◼   ► And like, it's like, I don't even know

00:49:44 ◼   ► I'm doing those things.

00:49:45 ◼   ► So it was already so much to think about.

00:49:47 ◼   ► I didn't, I couldn't bear seeing it

00:49:50 ◼   ► because then I knew I wouldn't be able

00:49:52 ◼   ► to stop thinking about it.

00:49:53 ◼   ► But when I was on stage, I was thinking about it, right?

00:49:56 ◼   ► I was like, don't push your glasses up now.

00:49:58 ◼   ► And every time I wanted to shift to the side,

00:50:01 ◼   ► I took a step.

00:50:02 ◼   ► So I was probably pacing like a madman

00:50:04 ◼   ► when I was giving the presentation.

00:50:07 ◼   ► But it went really well and I deeply appreciated

00:50:10 ◼   ► the assistance that you gave me.

00:50:11 ◼   ► And I will recommend it to anyone

00:50:14 ◼   ► that you need to find someone who will lay it all bare

00:50:17 ◼   ► with you.

00:50:18 ◼   ► 'Cause I presented it to my family and to my girlfriend

00:50:20 ◼   ► and she is also very good at giving real good pointers.

00:50:23 ◼   ► But one thing that I didn't do is I wasn't standing up

00:50:27 ◼   ► any point when I was giving the presentation to her.

00:50:29 ◼   ► And you basically made me go into full on mode.

00:50:33 ◼   ► Like you need to completely do this as you're going to do it in front of people.

00:50:37 ◼   ► Yeah, you have to do it for real for anybody giving a presentation.

00:50:40 ◼   ► You absolutely have to do it as though it's really going to happen.

00:50:45 ◼   ► And I've given a few presentations in my time, not any recently,

00:50:48 ◼   ► but when I was preparing for things,

00:50:52 ◼   ► I would always do the presentation standing up as though you're on a stage, you know,

00:50:58 ◼   ► talking to a group of people.

00:51:00 ◼   ► You have to do it like that.

00:51:02 ◼   ► And also for anyone preparing for a presentation, no matter how good your family is at giving

00:51:10 ◼   ► you feedback or your close friends, there's always something in your mind that just never

00:51:17 ◼   ► quite fully trust them to be fully honest, no matter how fully honest they are being.

00:51:22 ◼   ► So it helps to have someone who can really be objective.

00:51:27 ◼   ► Get someone who you really know is able to be objective

00:51:32 ◼   ► watching you do a presentation.

00:51:35 ◼   ► Family is great and they might be telling you

00:51:40 ◼   ► the 100% truth, but you and your mind

00:51:42 ◼   ► are always going to doubt just how truthful they are

00:51:45 ◼   ► when you're hearing their feedback.

00:51:47 ◼   ► That's just not something that you can necessarily help.

00:51:51 ◼   ► But giving presentations is high-stakes stuff.

00:51:53 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, everybody needs a gray.

00:51:55 ◼   ► That's what I've learned.

00:51:56 ◼   ► - I should start a sign business.

00:51:58 ◼   ► - You should.

00:51:59 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:51:59 ◼   ► - But you'd have to sit behind some sort of screen

00:52:02 ◼   ► so people couldn't see you, right?

00:52:04 ◼   ► - No, no, no, I'd do it in person.

00:52:06 ◼   ► - But it would be a lot of money, right?

00:52:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, actually, that makes this sound

00:52:11 ◼   ► like an even better idea for a business.

00:52:12 ◼   ► I like this.

00:52:13 ◼   ► (both laughing)

00:52:15 ◼   ► Are you a businessman in London with a lot of money

00:52:18 ◼   ► and a very important presentation to give?

00:52:20 ◼   ► Get in touch.

00:52:21 ◼   ► - I recommend this, I recommend this.

00:52:24 ◼   ► - There we go, yet another thing to do.

00:52:30 ◼   ► - Oh dear.

00:52:33 ◼   ► - But yeah, so the presentation went well,

00:52:34 ◼   ► 'cause we haven't actually really spoken about it

00:52:37 ◼   ► since you did it.

00:52:39 ◼   ► I messaged you right after it had happened

00:52:41 ◼   ► just because I wanted to know

00:52:42 ◼   ► that it wasn't a total disaster,

00:52:43 ◼   ► but you were confident with the whole event?

00:52:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, I was actually.

00:52:48 ◼   ► I mean, I was nervous before,

00:52:50 ◼   ► but I got myself into like a zone of the way

00:52:52 ◼   ► that I was gonna prepare in the hours leading up to it.

00:52:55 ◼   ► Luckily my talk was on the first day of the conference,

00:52:58 ◼   ► so I could get out of the way.

00:53:00 ◼   ► It was the first talk, it was the opening keynote.

00:53:02 ◼   ► And once I got on the stage,

00:53:03 ◼   ► I knew I was talking too fast to begin.

00:53:05 ◼   ► And then once I got kind of like,

00:53:08 ◼   ► once I could hear people laughing at the jokes

00:53:09 ◼   ► that I intended to make,

00:53:10 ◼   ► I knew that then people were on my side

00:53:14 ◼   ► and that felt really good.

00:53:15 ◼   ► And then I felt confident

00:53:16 ◼   ► to actually deliver the rest of it.

00:53:18 ◼   ► And I came in at time, so it was like 40 minutes,

00:53:20 ◼   ► and I had between like 30 and 45 minutes.

00:53:23 ◼   ► So I felt really good about that.

00:53:25 ◼   ► And I had some good feedback as well.

00:53:27 ◼   ► So I wanna do more of this sort of stuff,

00:53:30 ◼   ► partly because I enjoy it,

00:53:32 ◼   ► and partly because it will help me see

00:53:34 ◼   ► other parts of the world, right?

00:53:37 ◼   ► So it's something that I really want to do more of.

00:53:39 ◼   ► There wasn't video of the talk,

00:53:42 ◼   ► but there may be audio of it at some point in the future.

00:53:47 ◼   ► - So did people come up after the talk

00:53:49 ◼   ► and discuss it with you?

00:53:51 ◼   ► - Not immediately after,

00:53:52 ◼   ► but during the rest of the conference, yeah.

00:53:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's what I mean.

00:53:55 ◼   ► During the conference people brought it up and spoke.

00:53:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I've had some emails from people

00:53:58 ◼   ► that were there as well.

00:53:59 ◼   ► 'Cause the way that I basically told the story

00:54:02 ◼   ► of when I started podcasting to now.

00:54:05 ◼   ► So it kind of hit most of the people in the audience

00:54:09 ◼   ► who were like, you were just starting out

00:54:10 ◼   ► with a thing they wanted to do,

00:54:12 ◼   ► getting ready to want to quit their job,

00:54:15 ◼   ► starting a business or like having been in a business for some time.

00:54:19 ◼   ► So it hit a lot of people quite nicely in that way.

00:54:23 ◼   ► I'm asking that because that is one of my little metrics

00:54:27 ◼   ► for also trying to get at the true impact of a talk, is

00:54:31 ◼   ► after you have given it at the event, do people

00:54:35 ◼   ► come up to you to talk about your talk?

00:54:39 ◼   ► Because everyone will applaud at the end and will say, "Oh, it went great."

00:54:43 ◼   ► But does anybody engage with you about what you said over the course of the event you are at?

00:54:49 ◼   ► If the answer to that is yes, then you have had a successful talk.

00:54:53 ◼   ► That's a way that you can get a sense of people's true reactions to what you have done as opposed to just their polite reactions

00:55:00 ◼   ► or just their feedback on a little card about, "Oh, yeah, it was great," you know, whatever.

00:55:05 ◼   ► Were you able to actually convince people to come up with you and continue the discussion?

00:55:10 ◼   ► that's an excellent talk.

00:55:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's a good point.

00:55:12 ◼   ► Yeah, like if people just,

00:55:14 ◼   ► if you hear nothing about it.

00:55:16 ◼   ► - That's bad news.

00:55:18 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:55:18 ◼   ► - If everybody just says something like,

00:55:20 ◼   ► oh yeah, it went great,

00:55:21 ◼   ► and then they don't mention anything specific

00:55:22 ◼   ► about your talk, that's feedback

00:55:25 ◼   ► that the next time you give a talk,

00:55:26 ◼   ► you need to change your strategy.

00:55:28 ◼   ► - So part of my talk focused on what I kind of want to do

00:55:33 ◼   ► in my second year of being independent, right,

00:55:37 ◼   ► and having my own business.

00:55:39 ◼   ► And one of the things that I was thinking about

00:55:41 ◼   ► is how I balance my time a little bit better

00:55:45 ◼   ► and how I start to think about

00:55:47 ◼   ► what are some of the things that I'm currently doing

00:55:49 ◼   ► that I don't need to do or I can pass along to somebody else.

00:55:54 ◼   ► So this leads into something that we have been wanting

00:55:57 ◼   ► to talk about for quite a long time,

00:55:59 ◼   ► which is this idea, and these words actually,

00:56:01 ◼   ► they came from you and they made it into my talk,

00:56:04 ◼   ► which is the idea of what you need to do

00:56:06 ◼   ► versus what others can do for you.

00:56:08 ◼   ► I'll try and explain this from the way that you've explained it to me, which is understanding

00:56:16 ◼   ► what the jobs are that you currently do inside of your business that you can outsource because

00:56:21 ◼   ► you don't need to do them or you don't like to do them.

00:56:24 ◼   ► And it's all about how you delegate things.

00:56:29 ◼   ► There's kind of an idea of the way that you balance time and money, like how much money

00:56:33 ◼   ► are you willing to pay to get some of your own time back.

00:56:36 ◼   ► I've discussed this with a number of people who are running their own businesses or who

00:56:41 ◼   ► have started up their own things.

00:56:44 ◼   ► And I think...

00:56:49 ◼   ► Let's put it this way.

00:56:50 ◼   ► It should be no surprise that the kinds of people who end up creating their own businesses

00:56:57 ◼   ► are also the kinds of people who feel like they can do a lot of different things in a

00:57:02 ◼   ► lot of different areas.

00:57:05 ◼   ► that they don't shrink from doing additional things.

00:57:12 ◼   ► Like I even just think sometimes about being a professional YouTuber.

00:57:15 ◼   ► There are a surprising number of very different skills that you need to have

00:57:24 ◼   ► to make this work at the start.

00:57:28 ◼   ► Like when you're just a person on your own.

00:57:30 ◼   ► You know, you need to be able to figure out how to put together a presentation,

00:57:34 ◼   ► You need to figure out how to work with video equipment.

00:57:37 ◼   ► You need to figure out what you can do to be engaging to some section of the global audience.

00:57:44 ◼   ► But then you also need to figure out on your own all the back end stuff of YouTube like we were complaining about earlier.

00:57:51 ◼   ► And then you also need to start thinking about some of the business stuff.

00:57:55 ◼   ► And so it's very natural. If you take someone who starts building a business like that,

00:58:00 ◼   ► you get very used to doing all of the things yourself.

00:58:05 ◼   ► And I'm just speaking about YouTube because that's what I'm familiar with,

00:58:09 ◼   ► but I imagine it's very similar for almost any kind of business.

00:58:14 ◼   ► It's going to be very similar for almost anybody who starts up their own thing.

00:58:18 ◼   ► That at the beginning, when you don't have a business that is generating revenue,

00:58:24 ◼   ► you are the person who needs to do everything.

00:58:27 ◼   ► everything is your responsibility.

00:58:31 ◼   ► But then if the business becomes successful,

00:58:35 ◼   ► there comes some point where you have to start

00:58:39 ◼   ► letting go of control of a lot of these different areas.

00:58:44 ◼   ► And again, at least in the experience of everyone

00:58:48 ◼   ► that I have spoken to, nobody picks the right moment

00:58:52 ◼   ► to do this, everybody waits until way, way after

00:58:57 ◼   ► should have done it because they're recognizing like, "Man, I am just so overburdened with

00:59:04 ◼   ► dealing with all of the parts of my business that I just have to bring on someone to help

00:59:10 ◼   ► me because otherwise I am this bottleneck in my own business and I am the person who

00:59:16 ◼   ► is just running me down with the huge number of things that I have to do."

00:59:22 ◼   ► But it's, I think it can be hard for that kind of personality type to let go of stuff

00:59:27 ◼   ► that you have always done.

00:59:29 ◼   ► So I wanted to take a look at some of the things that we do hand off to other people,

00:59:35 ◼   ► and some of the things that maybe we could and try and understand the reasons that we

00:59:39 ◼   ► do and don't for each of these.

00:59:41 ◼   ► Okay.

00:59:42 ◼   ► So for example, accountants and lawyers.

00:59:46 ◼   ► Now accountants and lawyers, they do jobs that are very important.

00:59:52 ◼   ► If we wanted to, we could learn.

00:59:57 ◼   ► Me and you are smart enough.

00:59:58 ◼   ► We could take the time necessary at least to do our own taxes because there are people

01:00:03 ◼   ► that do that.

01:00:05 ◼   ► But there's no way in hell I want to put that time in.

01:00:08 ◼   ► So I'm more than happy to pay for an accountant and I'm more than happy to pay for a lawyer.

01:00:13 ◼   ► Just to clarify something I just said then, to be nice to accountants and lawyers, I could

01:00:17 ◼   ► do it to an acceptable standard, but there's no way I could do it as well as an accountant

01:00:22 ◼   ► or lawyer. Do you know what I mean? Like I could learn how to deliver a tax return, but

01:00:25 ◼   ► I would end up paying way more tax than I should be paying, or I would get something

01:00:28 ◼   ► wrong somewhere.

01:00:29 ◼   ► Yeah, the thing with the accountancy, for example, is I have, I mean, let's say I've

01:00:37 ◼   ► been in business for myself to some extent for, I guess, four years, five years now?

01:00:43 ◼   ► say it's four years. I have done my own accounting for essentially that whole

01:00:52 ◼   ► time because it feels like, "Okay, this is something that I need to be on top of

01:00:56 ◼   ► because it's the money coming in and it's the money going out and I need to

01:01:01 ◼   ► make sure that things are profitable and I need to have a good sense of where

01:01:04 ◼   ► everything is." But it is just in the last year that I am in the process of handing

01:01:11 ◼   ► over the accounting to someone else.

01:01:14 ◼   ► And it is the process of doing that that makes me realize, "Man, I should have done this

01:01:17 ◼   ► two years ago.

01:01:18 ◼   ► I should have done this as soon as I could have hired an accountant."

01:01:22 ◼   ► Because while I can do it, the real question with handing stuff off is, "Does me doing

01:01:32 ◼   ► the accounting really help the bottom line of my business?"

01:01:40 ◼   ► And the answer to that is very clearly no.

01:01:44 ◼   ► That if I spend a weekend doing all of my accounting, what has the business gained from

01:01:51 ◼   ► that?

01:01:52 ◼   ► Not really very much.

01:01:55 ◼   ► I should have spent that weekend making something that the business makes.

01:02:01 ◼   ► So for me, that's editing a podcast.

01:02:04 ◼   ► It's writing a video.

01:02:06 ◼   ► It's animating a video.

01:02:08 ◼   ► These are the things that are the stuff that I should be working on in the business.

01:02:14 ◼   ► And so I really, really try very hard to constantly remind myself that I have these core activities

01:02:20 ◼   ► -- writing, recording, editing, animating.

01:02:26 ◼   ► If I'm not doing one of those four, I should really evaluate if I am the best person to

01:02:34 ◼   ► do this thing because those four activities are the core of my business.

01:02:40 ◼   ► They are, to use corporate speak, they are where the value is generated in my business

01:02:47 ◼   ► and the value is not generated in my business in doing the books.

01:02:53 ◼   ► That is a case of where I can hand something over.

01:02:56 ◼   ► But it's very hard to let that go because it just feels like such an intimate part of

01:03:02 ◼   ► business and it's something that I've just been doing on my own for so long that I feel

01:03:06 ◼   ► like oh but I can do this so maybe I should do this.

01:03:12 ◼   ► It's really funny to me because one of the first things I did when I started was to get

01:03:15 ◼   ► an accountant because I knew there was just no way I would be able to do that stuff efficiently.

01:03:22 ◼   ► Because I don't understand it. Like I don't understand any of it and I don't want to take

01:03:26 ◼   ► the time to understand it. Like I just I have no desire to do that. It's like even when

01:03:31 ◼   ► I was making no money I was still paying an accountant. I'm just not I'm not gonna

01:03:37 ◼   ► go through this scenario. I have to say I advise the mic strategy on this one.

01:03:42 ◼   ► Get an accountant way before you think you ever need one. Like as soon as you

01:03:47 ◼   ► decide you want to start a business get an accountant. That is what I think you

01:03:51 ◼   ► need to do because they help you put so much stuff into place and if you get a

01:03:55 ◼   ► really good one they end up just becoming a good person you can ask

01:03:58 ◼   ► ask business-like questions to and they can give you just another point of view. And I

01:04:02 ◼   ► agree with that exactly for the same way of a lawyer, but I don't know if you need a lawyer

01:04:06 ◼   ► immediately depending on the type of thing you're looking to do.

01:04:09 ◼   ► Yeah, the lawyer is a bit of a different case. And the lawyer to me is an example of something

01:04:15 ◼   ► where I am under no illusion that I could do what a lawyer could do. I could not go

01:04:21 ◼   ► to law school and become a lawyer. I just don't think I would be capable of doing that

01:04:25 ◼   ► because when I try to read contracts, it's, I swear my brain tries to protect itself by

01:04:33 ◼   ► making me fall asleep.

01:04:36 ◼   ► I cannot read a contract and focus on it for any length of time.

01:04:42 ◼   ► And even when I can, like, okay, I'm bringing all of my concentration to bear on this clause,

01:04:48 ◼   ► it still just reads to me like, in my head it almost sounds like a swarm of bees.

01:04:54 ◼   ► It's like, I know all of these words, all of these words are floating around,

01:04:57 ◼   ► but I just cannot make any sense out of what this is.

01:05:01 ◼   ► This whole other legal language.

01:05:03 ◼   ► And it seems like a miracle that lawyers communicate to each other in these terms.

01:05:07 ◼   ► And so yes, I have a lawyer that I send contracts and stuff to.

01:05:10 ◼   ► And it always feels like, thank God she is there to read through all of these paragraphs,

01:05:17 ◼   ► because I couldn't do it for all of the tea in China.

01:05:21 ◼   ► in China. It just wouldn't be possible for me to derive any meaning from most of the

01:05:24 ◼   ► contracts that I have to look at.

01:05:27 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, and there's all these other things like just making sure that you have

01:05:32 ◼   ► all of the paperwork that apparently you need to have that you'd never know you'd need until

01:05:37 ◼   ► a lawyer can tell you that it's required.

01:05:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:05:40 ◼   ► Right, it's like, oh, if you don't have this, anyone in the world could sue you and you'd

01:05:43 ◼   ► immediately lose. Like, okay, Mr. Lawyer, where do I sign? Because that's the system

01:05:51 ◼   ► has been created around this sort of stuff right and now we're far too deep

01:05:53 ◼   ► into it so if you want to have a serious business eventually you're gonna need to

01:05:56 ◼   ► think about some of these things yeah and so that's why you end up again you

01:06:01 ◼   ► could do all of the reading if you really wanted to and you could try and

01:06:04 ◼   ► do a job out of it but you just at a certain point you're wasting money

01:06:09 ◼   ► because of the amount of time you're spending not doing what your business is

01:06:14 ◼   ► supposed to be doing yeah yeah without a doubt this is where I think there are a

01:06:18 ◼   ► a bunch of mental tools that you can have which help you think about this

01:06:22 ◼   ► stuff and the number one of these is opportunity cost. Just simply the idea

01:06:27 ◼   ► that whenever you're doing something you can't be doing something else. Which

01:06:33 ◼   ► sounds like like duh that idea is so obvious

01:06:37 ◼   ► but it's very useful to keep in mind of I'm working on this part of my business

01:06:44 ◼   ► Is this the best part? Like, how much revenue am I potentially losing out on by not working on the value-generating parts of the business?

01:06:53 ◼   ► Like, that is a real cost.

01:06:57 ◼   ► And I actually find it's very helpful in decision-making to figure out what that actual number is.

01:07:05 ◼   ► And this is where I think I mentioned, oh yeah,

01:07:08 ◼   ► I definitely mentioned on one of the previous shows

01:07:09 ◼   ► how I use Launch Center Pro as this impromptu time tracker.

01:07:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, I wanna know more about this one day.

01:07:18 ◼   ► I don't think you're ever gonna tell the world

01:07:20 ◼   ► that I wanna see this.

01:07:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I'll just say, I'll say what I do with it now,

01:07:25 ◼   ► which is that I track the time that I spend

01:07:28 ◼   ► on various parts of my business.

01:07:32 ◼   ► So I'm able to know pretty accurately how much time did I spend writing or animating a YouTube video

01:07:38 ◼   ► versus working on Cortex versus working on Hello Internet.

01:07:42 ◼   ► I track all of those in regular units of time for myself.

01:07:47 ◼   ► But one of the big reasons that I do that is it's half just because I find that a very effective way to work.

01:07:54 ◼   ► I just learned that my brain likes timers.

01:07:57 ◼   ► So it's like doing these little dashes of work.

01:07:59 ◼   ► That's very helpful.

01:08:01 ◼   ► but it's also so that I can take some numbers about what revenue is generated by different

01:08:08 ◼   ► activities and come up with an exact number for opportunity cost for various things that

01:08:16 ◼   ► I do.

01:08:17 ◼   ► So when I say like, "Oh, I have an idea about how much it costs me to work on part X of

01:08:21 ◼   ► the business versus part Y," I actually have a number.

01:08:25 ◼   ► I know exactly what that number is.

01:08:29 ◼   ► In a business context, that's also where it's helpful when you think about things like hiring

01:08:34 ◼   ► an accountant or hiring a lawyer or like with my personal assistant.

01:08:38 ◼   ► I can have some numbers that make sense about how much am I willing to pay in the business

01:08:44 ◼   ► to have people help me with various things.

01:08:48 ◼   ► Over time, this has been really interesting because I have seen a personality shift in

01:08:54 ◼   ► myself in the last maybe year or two where I used to be very very used to being on top

01:09:05 ◼   ► of every single part of my business and keeping track of absolutely everything and now I find

01:09:11 ◼   ► myself much more focusing on "Okay, what else can I have other people do or help me with?"

01:09:18 ◼   ► to the point where, as we were actually discussing just before the show started,

01:09:22 ◼   ► I just loathe paperwork of any kind.

01:09:27 ◼   ► And I used to be really good at always filling out paperwork and making sure all the forms are in place and everything is set.

01:09:33 ◼   ► And now my opinion on that is largely, "Okay, my personal assistant knows just about everything about me.

01:09:38 ◼   ► Can she just fill out this form for me and submit it for me?

01:09:43 ◼   ► can do it. I'm not incapable of writing my name in block capitals in these boxes,

01:09:48 ◼   ► but I just I wouldn't do it for fun. And so this is work and I have a number

01:09:55 ◼   ► which is "Okay, does it make sense for me to pay my personal assistant to do this?"

01:09:58 ◼   ► If the answer is yes, like yes, I would love to do this. And any time I can

01:10:02 ◼   ► come up with a little solution like that, it's like yes, this makes

01:10:06 ◼   ► very good sense for the business. The flip side of this is of course that over

01:10:12 ◼   ► the past two years this also means that I have been getting a lot more business

01:10:16 ◼   ► expenses than I ever used to have. I used to feel like "oh boy this business is

01:10:19 ◼   ► great it has no expenses" and now it's like "well I have a lot of business

01:10:23 ◼   ► expenses that I didn't used to have" but the trade-off is is definitely worth it

01:10:27 ◼   ► but it is interesting to see that this has caused a personality shift that I

01:10:34 ◼   ► notice that trying to always think in this efficient way has really really

01:10:40 ◼   ► driven down my patience for certain kinds of activities.

01:10:44 ◼   ► It's like, oh God, can I have someone do this?

01:10:46 ◼   ► And I really hope the answer is yes.

01:10:48 ◼   ► - So it can actually, when you get too far into it,

01:10:51 ◼   ► can actually be a detrimental thing.

01:10:53 ◼   ► Because you maybe spend more money than you need to

01:10:56 ◼   ► because you now have such a low tolerance

01:10:58 ◼   ► for work you don't wanna do.

01:11:00 ◼   ► You will do anything to pay someone

01:11:02 ◼   ► to take something off your plate, right?

01:11:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, but this is where the spreadsheets

01:11:07 ◼   ► and the numbers act as the sanity check.

01:11:09 ◼   ► Where does this not make sense? What should you do and what should you not do?

01:11:13 ◼   ► You have to have it some kind of anchoring in reality. I really do recommend

01:11:17 ◼   ► anybody out there who is running their own business to do the actual

01:11:23 ◼   ► calculations of what your time is worth per hour and the really the really key feature here is

01:11:29 ◼   ► to not

01:11:32 ◼   ► lie to yourself about how much time you spend on things.

01:11:35 ◼   ► So if you're sitting at home all day, and you feel like, "Oh, I had a whole work day,"

01:11:40 ◼   ► you don't just get to divide, "Oh, how much money I earned today,"

01:11:43 ◼   ► divided by the eight hours that I spent in the office. Like, this is one of the reasons why I use the timers, is I am

01:11:50 ◼   ► really, really strict about

01:11:52 ◼   ► was this a solid 40 minutes of writing? If it wasn't a solid 40 minutes of writing, it doesn't count.

01:12:01 ◼   ► So I

01:12:03 ◼   ► really do keep a very very accurate account of this stuff. And if you do that

01:12:09 ◼   ► it is really eye-opening. I have convinced a few people to try this and

01:12:13 ◼   ► once they do just a little bit of tracking the time and then working out

01:12:17 ◼   ► their hourly rates it does really change how they think about their business and

01:12:21 ◼   ► how they're spending their time. So the obvious thing here, like maybe the

01:12:24 ◼   ► elephant in the room when looking at this scenario, is production. So we're

01:12:29 ◼   ► talking about the way to maximize money and part of the thing we're

01:12:32 ◼   ► talking about is take things away from us so we can make more stuff. So what if

01:12:39 ◼   ► you had people making stuff for you? So I do some of this. I'm not on every show

01:12:45 ◼   ► in Relay. Yeah this is your specialty Myke. Yeah so we have currently like

01:12:52 ◼   ► something like 29, 28 hosts as part of Relay. Something like that.

01:12:58 ◼   ► between them produce 18 shows. I'm on nine of them so I'm on a lot.

01:13:05 ◼   ► There's only like six or seven frequent shows the other ones are more kind of

01:13:10 ◼   ► ad hoc. Yeah but over time you are on a decreasing percentage of the total

01:13:16 ◼   ► number of shows that Relay produces. Exactly. So that is the idea of me

01:13:21 ◼   ► bringing in people because every show produces money for the business of which

01:13:26 ◼   ► which I as a business owner have some of that money, right?

01:13:29 ◼   ► It's natural.

01:13:30 ◼   ► We do all the ad sales, we do the infrastructure.

01:13:33 ◼   ► So we work out deals of all of our hosts

01:13:34 ◼   ► on a split of the revenue.

01:13:37 ◼   ► And so I make money by people doing work,

01:13:41 ◼   ► which is the other part of this whole thing.

01:13:45 ◼   ► And over time, I'm trying to maybe pull back the amount

01:13:49 ◼   ► that I do to push forward more people to do that, right?

01:13:52 ◼   ► So I become a facilitator of other people's work.

01:13:55 ◼   ► So that is how in the long term my business succeeds.

01:14:00 ◼   ► Is that I have a host of people that are happy to work

01:14:03 ◼   ► with me and Steven on these new shows

01:14:06 ◼   ► and that we can help continue to foster talent

01:14:08 ◼   ► and push our stuff forward.

01:14:10 ◼   ► - And to be clear, the whole proposition from Relay

01:14:14 ◼   ► is the reason why I agreed to do this podcast.

01:14:17 ◼   ► Or at least it's a big part of it.

01:14:19 ◼   ► Is I can do this show, but only if I don't have to worry

01:14:23 ◼   ► about details X, Y, and Z.

01:14:26 ◼   ► Like with the Hello Internet podcast,

01:14:28 ◼   ► I am in charge of all of the background logistics

01:14:33 ◼   ► and all of the editing, with the exception of ad sales

01:14:35 ◼   ► where I work with someone for that.

01:14:37 ◼   ► But I just knew I could not possibly replicate all of that

01:14:42 ◼   ► for a second podcast, it would just be far too much.

01:14:45 ◼   ► And so yes, that's why it's like, okay, yes,

01:14:46 ◼   ► Relay as a company takes a portion

01:14:48 ◼   ► of the advertising revenue for this show.

01:14:51 ◼   ► But I was very happy to sign up for that.

01:14:53 ◼   ► if it meant that, "Oh, I don't have to upload the shows

01:14:56 ◼   ► to the website, I don't have to put the show notes together."

01:15:00 ◼   ► It's like, this is what we worked out, you and I,

01:15:02 ◼   ► and it is a good example of the same kind of thing,

01:15:05 ◼   ► like having someone else do something

01:15:08 ◼   ► and being more than happy to help pay for that.

01:15:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, like if I take a quick sidebar a moment,

01:15:13 ◼   ► and I'll tell this story and you can decide

01:15:15 ◼   ► if we keep it in, but when me and you were talking

01:15:17 ◼   ► about the split between the two of us

01:15:21 ◼   ► as hosts of the remaining revenue,

01:15:24 ◼   ► I was pushing to give you more of it,

01:15:26 ◼   ► but you were pushing to give me more money.

01:15:31 ◼   ► So I was trying to give you a better split

01:15:34 ◼   ► than what we ended up agreeing on.

01:15:35 ◼   ► Because I, as a person looking for talent,

01:15:39 ◼   ► wanted to try and make the sweetest deal possible for you.

01:15:42 ◼   ► That was my thinking.

01:15:44 ◼   ► So I will offer you more money,

01:15:46 ◼   ► because then more money means more likely to say yes.

01:15:50 ◼   ► But you all think, so that was one part of it,

01:15:52 ◼   ► but you were thinking on the other side,

01:15:54 ◼   ► and saying you wanted to give as much as possible

01:15:56 ◼   ► for me to do work-wise, so you wanted to compensate me

01:16:00 ◼   ► accordingly to keep me happy.

01:16:02 ◼   ► So we worked out a very, very fair deal,

01:16:05 ◼   ► but that resulted in me happily agreeing to do things

01:16:07 ◼   ► like all of the YouTube work and the editing

01:16:09 ◼   ► and that sort of stuff. - Exactly.

01:16:10 ◼   ► - So that's the both sides of this coming into play,

01:16:13 ◼   ► which I thought was quite interesting in the way

01:16:15 ◼   ► that we ended up coming to the arrangement that we did.

01:16:18 ◼   ► without a doubt, I was convincing you to take a larger portion of the show and also to do more

01:16:26 ◼   ► of the things. Like I wanted you to be more invested in the show than the original deal was

01:16:31 ◼   ► going to be. And that's exactly part of it. It's like, oh, in some way I am hiring Relay and Myke

01:16:37 ◼   ► to help with a larger portion of the show and so I want to pay for that. Like that is my perspective

01:16:44 ◼   ► on how that negotiation went down.

01:16:47 ◼   ► The interesting part of this is you are very much focused on optimizing, but you are the

01:16:54 ◼   ► bottleneck in your business.

01:16:57 ◼   ► Yeah this is...

01:17:00 ◼   ► Because I found a way for my company to generate money that I don't need to actively be a part

01:17:06 ◼   ► of.

01:17:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:17:08 ◼   ► So like I do the ad sales part which is a lot of work, but recording the shows is where

01:17:13 ◼   ► the advertising goes on to. So I don't record all the shows, so I have found a way to optimize

01:17:19 ◼   ► my business by creating a scenario in which we have a welcoming environment for many people

01:17:26 ◼   ► to come and do their work. Now I remember a long time ago, on an earlier episode, we

01:17:32 ◼   ► spoke about a scenario that you believed you were trying to look at with your work, but

01:17:37 ◼   ► that didn't pan out, right?

01:17:38 ◼   ► Yeah, I did at one point try to do an additional YouTube channel and pull together a little team of people to do that

01:17:45 ◼   ► and I realized very quickly that there were a few reasons why it just couldn't work out and also that I might be particularly ill-suited to this exact role

01:17:55 ◼   ► and this is one of the things with Cortex that I think is interesting because while you and I are both self-employed

01:18:03 ◼   ► the nature of our businesses are very different

01:18:07 ◼   ► in that you are working with a very large number of people

01:18:11 ◼   ► and you don't have employees, but you do have this company structure

01:18:17 ◼   ► whereas I am just an individual. There is nobody in my business but me.

01:18:23 ◼   ► I'm the only person here. There are people that I work with on a freelance basis

01:18:27 ◼   ► like for example right now I'm working with an artist for

01:18:31 ◼   ► a future project and so you know I pay the artist for their assistance but I don't have any I don't

01:18:37 ◼   ► have an in-house artist who I employ who does the work and this is just a personality difference

01:18:46 ◼   ► that I just don't think I would be very well suited to be in charge of that kind of company

01:18:55 ◼   ► So I make a lot of business decisions to intentionally keep what I'm doing very, very small scale.

01:19:03 ◼   ► And in the YouTube world, it's a bit weird. Like, it's actually quite easy to end up spinning up your business and having a whole lot of people working with you and for you.

01:19:15 ◼   ► Like, it is actually quite remarkable when you look into it. How many big YouTube channels are actually small to medium-sized companies that have changed behind the scenes?

01:19:24 ◼   ► the scenes. Like it still might be the same guy or girl on camera, but you don't realize

01:19:28 ◼   ► they have acquired like an entire staff behind them who's also assisting with things. So

01:19:33 ◼   ► for me it's just me because that's a personality difference, but it does mean that I am the

01:19:40 ◼   ► bottleneck for just about everything. Like if I'm having... like if it's taking me a

01:19:46 ◼   ► long time to write a script, like it is taking a long time to write a script and I am the

01:19:52 ◼   ► only one holding up my business. I'm not sure I would use a word like productivity.

01:19:57 ◼   ► I don't focus on productivity, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about maximizing output

01:20:06 ◼   ► per hour. That is really my focus, because I am aware that I am always going to be the

01:20:14 ◼   ► one who limits the amount of things that I produce, because I only have so much time

01:20:19 ◼   ► that I'm going to dedicate to work, and so I have to get the most out of that time that

01:20:26 ◼   ► I possibly can.

01:20:27 ◼   ► And actually, to bring it around, I'll give you a perfect example of this.

01:20:31 ◼   ► So I mentioned before that I haven't done any speaking engagements in a while, and one

01:20:35 ◼   ► of the reasons I haven't done that is because when I'm invited to do a presentation somewhere,

01:20:41 ◼   ► like there's a conference and they want a speaker, you know, just like what happened

01:20:45 ◼   ► with you. Because I am the bottleneck in my own business, when I get an invitation like

01:20:52 ◼   ► that, I, on an actual spreadsheet, do a literal opportunity cost calculation for, I know what

01:20:59 ◼   ► my say, video production time is worth per hour, and then I do an estimate of how many

01:21:08 ◼   ► work hours would I lose going to this conference?

01:21:13 ◼   ► And this is what I mean by it's very important to know your value per hour per project.

01:21:19 ◼   ► And so I spec out things like, "Okay, well, I have to do the opportunity cost for the

01:21:27 ◼   ► travel days.

01:21:28 ◼   ► I have to do the opportunity cost for preparing for the trip, for preparing for the presentation,

01:21:35 ◼   ► And I also have to do the opportunity cost for coming back.

01:21:38 ◼   ► Because it's very easy to think of a conference as—and conference organizers like to think

01:21:42 ◼   ► of it this way—"Oh, we just want you to come and give a one-hour presentation."

01:21:46 ◼   ► It's like, "Okay, yes, but from my perspective, if you want me to give a one-hour presentation

01:21:53 ◼   ► in California, that does not subtract one hour of script writing time from my work schedule."

01:22:00 ◼   ► So I do that opportunity cost of, at a bare minimum,

01:22:03 ◼   ► like how much in theory would I be losing out

01:22:07 ◼   ► by doing this conference?

01:22:09 ◼   ► And then I have to figure, well, if I'm gonna do this,

01:22:12 ◼   ► I don't just wanna break even,

01:22:13 ◼   ► like this has to be an actually profitable engagement for me.

01:22:17 ◼   ► And so I have to put some kind of markup on that.

01:22:19 ◼   ► And then the answer to all of this is,

01:22:22 ◼   ► the amount of working time that I would lose

01:22:25 ◼   ► by going to a conference almost never ever

01:22:29 ◼   ► going to work out with the amount of speaking fees that an organization can pay.

01:22:34 ◼   ► Like and I'm not trying to be a jerk here, I'm not trying to be like, "Oh, pay me an

01:22:37 ◼   ► enormous amount of money."

01:22:39 ◼   ► I'm really just trying to do this in the most dispassionate way of, "Am I willing to delay

01:22:46 ◼   ► releasing a video for a conference?"

01:22:51 ◼   ► And the answer to that question is almost always, "No."

01:22:55 ◼   ► But it is because I am the only person in my business.

01:22:58 ◼   ► And because you have a business where you have multiple people working with you and

01:23:03 ◼   ► the business generates income, you are much more free than I am to accept more conference

01:23:09 ◼   ► invitations.

01:23:10 ◼   ► Like, that's where this plays out as a difference between the two of us.

01:23:14 ◼   ► Like, there are very, very many things that I would like to do, but that from a business

01:23:19 ◼   ► perspective are very hard decisions to say yes to. Whereas the structure of your business

01:23:27 ◼   ► allows you to say yes to a much wider variety of things much more easily than I can.

01:23:33 ◼   ► Yeah, and that even goes into because of the way that my business is structured, next year

01:23:38 ◼   ► I'm going to reduce my output in some areas and I can do that safely now and the effect

01:23:43 ◼   ► that it will make on my income won't be dramatic.

01:23:46 ◼   ► Right.

01:23:47 ◼   ► So like if you said, "I'm gonna make one less podcast a week" or "I'm gonna do one less

01:23:52 ◼   ► video a month" that would make a dramatic impact on your income.

01:23:58 ◼   ► Oh yeah, and that actually just happened this month.

01:24:02 ◼   ► I'm going to...

01:24:03 ◼   ► I just mentioned on Twitter I'm probably going to put up an article in the next couple of

01:24:08 ◼   ► days, but basically this month for various reasons I had to delay a video that was supposed

01:24:14 ◼   ► to go up at the end of this month.

01:24:15 ◼   ► Like, man, is that a costly business decision that really hurts.

01:24:19 ◼   ► Like, it makes a big difference if I can upload a video in a month versus not uploading a video in a month.

01:24:26 ◼   ► And that is the downside of being the guy who is also in total control of everything that's going on in my business.

01:24:32 ◼   ► It's like, I'm also the guy that everything depends on.

01:24:36 ◼   ► But I pay that price because I prefer to be an independent person.

01:24:43 ◼   ► I'm not sure, like I said before, I would do very well working with lots of other people.

01:24:47 ◼   ► So that's why I make this decision the way that I do.

01:24:50 ◼   ► [BEEP]

01:24:51 ◼   ► Today's episode of Cortex is also brought to you by the lovely people over at Igloo

01:24:56 ◼   ► who make the intranet you'll actually like.

01:24:59 ◼   ► If you use any kind of intranet product, I'm pretty sure that you'd probably be unhappy

01:25:03 ◼   ► with it.

01:25:04 ◼   ► I remember using an intranet in my previous job, and I had to use it only on the machine

01:25:08 ◼   ► that was connected to my network.

01:25:10 ◼   ► So I could only be using my internet stuff while I was sitting at the Windows PC that

01:25:15 ◼   ► I used to sit in for 12-8 hours a day.

01:25:18 ◼   ► This did not mix with the way I like to work.

01:25:20 ◼   ► I like to be able to work from all of my devices, I like to be able to work from wherever I

01:25:25 ◼   ► am.

01:25:26 ◼   ► That's just the way my brain is programmed and I think that's the way it is for many

01:25:29 ◼   ► people these days.

01:25:30 ◼   ► And this is what igloo is all about.

01:25:33 ◼   ► You're able to do your work from wherever you want to get your work done.

01:25:36 ◼   ► You can manage your task list from your laptop whilst you're maybe not paying full attention

01:25:40 ◼   ► on during a meeting, you can share status updates from your phone as you're at the

01:25:44 ◼   ► site of a client, and you can even share and access the latest version of a file from home

01:25:50 ◼   ► in your pajamas or maybe in the garden with a lovely little drink on a summer's day.

01:25:54 ◼   ► Wherever you want to do your work, that's where igloo can be with you.

01:25:58 ◼   ► Igloo is also really customisable and you can do so much to make it look and feel exactly

01:26:02 ◼   ► how you want and make it fit with your organisation.

01:26:05 ◼   ► You can customise the colours, you can add your logo, and you can even permit different

01:26:10 ◼   ► parts of functionality to the different teams within your business so everybody

01:26:14 ◼   ► has the stuff that they're going to need to get their work done. You can also

01:26:18 ◼   ► integrate services like Box, Google Drive and Dropbox into their big easy to

01:26:23 ◼   ► secure platform. Because we're so mobile these days people are increasingly

01:26:27 ◼   ► bringing in their own apps inside to their companies and also sharing

01:26:31 ◼   ► documents with these services that maybe they shouldn't because if you're using

01:26:34 ◼   ► stuff personally it can maybe break some security protocols or something like

01:26:38 ◼   ► that you have. So that's why igloo have made it possible to integrate these services inside

01:26:43 ◼   ► of your secure platform making sure that people are keeping things where they need to be.

01:26:49 ◼   ► So people can store stuff in Dropbox but it's in the company's Dropbox. It's really really

01:26:53 ◼   ► awesome. They use 256 bit encryption, single sign on and active directory integrations

01:26:58 ◼   ► to make sure that your platform is secure at all times. And you can also use igloo's

01:27:03 ◼   ► own document preview engine to collaborate on stuff and also so you can track who has

01:27:08 ◼   ► read things with read receipts. This makes sure that when that new health and safety

01:27:12 ◼   ► document goes around rather than walking around the office with a pen and paper and checking

01:27:16 ◼   ► everybody off as you're getting it done to make sure that everyone is on the same page

01:27:20 ◼   ► you will actually be able to just log into igloo and see exactly who's read it and just

01:27:24 ◼   ► bug the people that haven't. It's time to break away from the internet that you hate.

01:27:29 ◼   ► Go and sign up for igloo right now and you can try it out for free with any team of up

01:27:32 ◼   ► to 10 people for as long as you want. Sign up at igloosoftware.com/cortex.

01:27:37 ◼   ► Thank you so much to igloo for supporting this show and Relay FM.

01:27:41 ◼   ► So a couple of weeks ago we spoke about your personal assistant and the way that

01:27:45 ◼   ► you work with them on email and I actually think that it might be a good

01:27:48 ◼   ► point now to finish that kind of conversation about your personal

01:27:52 ◼   ► assistant. Because this is obviously a scenario in which you're passing off

01:27:57 ◼   ► probably the majority of things that maybe you don't want to do because

01:28:01 ◼   ► because you're paying somebody to do a lot of the kind of day-to-day

01:28:05 ◼   ► menial work, I suppose, that you're not interested in taking care of.

01:28:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I wouldn't say necessarily menial work.

01:28:13 ◼   ► I'm trying to think of a word for it that I can't.

01:28:17 ◼   ► Yeah, but here's the way I think about it, right? Because I actually feel like there's a lot of menial

01:28:21 ◼   ► work that I have to do. I'm looking at you, animation. Which is

01:28:25 ◼   ► incredibly tedious work to do. So why don't you just get someone to do that for you?

01:28:29 ◼   ► Like I'm in this scenario now where we are starting to more seriously consider an audio editor for some of our shows

01:28:35 ◼   ► And that is partly due to time and partly due to the fact that I'm having some pretty worrying RSI issues at the moment

01:28:43 ◼   ► Which we will talk about on a later episode. I want to talk about RSI with you. Yeah

01:28:47 ◼   ► Yeah, we should talk about that

01:28:48 ◼   ► But I need to get a better handle of what's going on in my life first before I feel like I can accurately talk about it

01:28:55 ◼   ► So we're thinking about you know, basically it's dawned on me that if I lose the use of my hands

01:29:00 ◼   ► We're screwed unless we have a scenario that we have an editor

01:29:04 ◼   ► So we're starting to more seriously think about what that would look like to have somebody

01:29:10 ◼   ► Who could take care of a lot of that stuff for us now?

01:29:13 ◼   ► you could you could have somebody do the animation for you and

01:29:18 ◼   ► It probably wouldn't make too much of a difference to the

01:29:23 ◼   ► presentation of your videos if you think about it objectively because the majority of the work for you goes in

01:29:28 ◼   ► The writing and then you could storyboard a video and then hand over the animation to somebody else

01:29:35 ◼   ► Whether you want to do this or not, but yes, you could do this, right?

01:29:41 ◼   ► I mean I could do it because obviously this is how a company like Pixar works

01:29:46 ◼   ► They don't they don't have one dude write and animate

01:29:52 ◼   ► Incredibles. That's not like that's not how that movie comes together. Obviously, obviously there are ways that teams can work. I just think there are trade-offs

01:29:59 ◼   ► involved in having a larger

01:30:02 ◼   ► structure like that. I do think the animation style would have to change a little bit, but my...

01:30:08 ◼   ► I always have a hard time communicating this but

01:30:11 ◼   ► my problem is that by the time I have finished writing the script

01:30:16 ◼   ► I know exactly how I want animations to go,

01:30:19 ◼   ► and I'm often writing the script so that the animation lines up in a particular way,

01:30:26 ◼   ► and the result is trying to communicate this to someone is a lot of overhead

01:30:31 ◼   ► of exactly how I want it to be.

01:30:35 ◼   ► Now, could I get someone else to do it? Of course.

01:30:38 ◼   ► But if you have someone else working creatively,

01:30:43 ◼   ► I think it's a lot better if you can give them some creative control.

01:30:47 ◼   ► And as an example here,

01:30:49 ◼   ► Dosti, who I work with, who does the Hello Internet animated videos,

01:30:55 ◼   ► he has total artistic control over those things.

01:31:00 ◼   ► Like, we do that together in the sense that he selects audio clips,

01:31:04 ◼   ► I approve of the audio clips, he sends me a draft, and I approve or make some feedback on the draft, and then he makes it.

01:31:10 ◼   ► But it is almost entirely under his control and his discretion how he wants those things to look.

01:31:15 ◼   ► And I have an element of creative control over this show.

01:31:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:31:19 ◼   ► That you give me.

01:31:19 ◼   ► Oh yeah, yeah, without a doubt. This is, it's a similar thing. Like I allow you, or I allow you.

01:31:24 ◼   ► I have permitted you the right in which.

01:31:30 ◼   ► Yeah. Audio is a bit different from video, but it's definitely the case that yes, there is a

01:31:36 ◼   ► a certain amount of artisticness to how a thing is edited and how it is put together.

01:31:41 ◼   ► And so that's a similar thing.

01:31:43 ◼   ► So if I were to ever have someone else animate one of my videos, I would have to write the

01:31:52 ◼   ► script differently from the perspective of "someone else is going to animate this," which

01:31:57 ◼   ► would change the way I would phrase things in some points.

01:32:00 ◼   ► And I would also want to give that person much more creative control over what happens.

01:32:06 ◼   ► Because that's the only way I could be happy about it.

01:32:08 ◼   ► I couldn't be happy about it imagining, "Okay, this is exactly what I want, and if it's not exactly what I want, then it's terrible."

01:32:14 ◼   ► So I would have to change the structure of the way that I do things.

01:32:18 ◼   ► And I also think I would have to really be working with someone who was a full-time animator.

01:32:22 ◼   ► And then that goes back to the very question of, "Is that the kind of structure that I want for my business?"

01:32:28 ◼   ► And the answer is "No" at this stage.

01:32:32 ◼   ► I don't like the idea of other people being dependent upon me for their living.

01:32:36 ◼   ► This is part of the issue that I've been thinking about in editor,

01:32:40 ◼   ► is that with the way that I currently do things, I want it picked up immediately.

01:32:44 ◼   ► And that usually means that that person needs to have nothing else that they do.

01:32:48 ◼   ► Exactly. Or I need to change the way that I think about things.

01:32:52 ◼   ► Now there's a huge advantage to obviously having someone around to help out

01:32:56 ◼   ► full time. What this whole conversation is reminding me of

01:33:00 ◼   ► is, again, going back to

01:33:03 ◼   ► my days as a teacher, and perhaps the first exposure I ever had with the idea

01:33:09 ◼   ► of having someone help you with work.

01:33:12 ◼   ► Now in the school where I first worked,

01:33:16 ◼   ► there was a photocopy lady, and she was in charge

01:33:21 ◼   ► of the photocopy machine. And so the idea was

01:33:25 ◼   ► if you had some worksheets, you would take one

01:33:28 ◼   ► of those worksheets. You'd quickly fill out a little form about how many copies you need

01:33:33 ◼   ► and who you are, of course, so she would know where to deliver the photocopies and put it

01:33:38 ◼   ► in an in-basket for her and she would make the little photocopies for you.

01:33:43 ◼   ► And I resisted so hard using the photocopy lady for maybe the first year, year and a

01:33:50 ◼   ► half of being a teacher because I always thought, "Well, I can make photocopies. This isn't

01:33:56 ◼   ► this is an easy thing to do and I'm perfectly capable of doing it

01:34:01 ◼   ► why don't I just make the photocopies?

01:34:04 ◼   ► But then I eventually started using the photocopy lady

01:34:12 ◼   ► and when you do that, you realize that in order to be able to fully take advantage of someone helping you

01:34:22 ◼   ► you actually need to be more organized in a way.

01:34:28 ◼   ► So what this means is if I'm going to have someone make the photocopies for my lesson,

01:34:32 ◼   ► that needs to be in her inbox at least a day before the lesson is actually going to happen.

01:34:39 ◼   ► And so that takes away the option of waiting until the last minute to prepare a lesson

01:34:45 ◼   ► and doing the photocopies at the last moment.

01:34:48 ◼   ► you have to be more organized in some ways to take advantage of other people helping you.

01:34:55 ◼   ► And so when I started to learn to use the photocopy lady,

01:35:00 ◼   ► it meant that I had to be preparing lessons much more in advance than I normally would.

01:35:07 ◼   ► But the payoff of that was definitely worth it.

01:35:12 ◼   ► Because one of the other things that I find with having people help you with things

01:35:17 ◼   ► is unexpected snags can just derail your whole day.

01:35:21 ◼   ► And so, you know what?

01:35:22 ◼   ► The photocopier, it doesn't always work,

01:35:25 ◼   ► or there's a jam, and then suddenly,

01:35:27 ◼   ► you're doing something at the last minute,

01:35:29 ◼   ► and now you're trying to fix a paper jam

01:35:32 ◼   ► in the photocopier, or the photocopier's out of paper,

01:35:34 ◼   ► and so now you need to go to the stock room

01:35:35 ◼   ► to get some paper and to fill it up.

01:35:37 ◼   ► Whereas, if you're doing things more in advance,

01:35:40 ◼   ► all of these problems just disappear, right?

01:35:43 ◼   ► They just go away.

01:35:46 ◼   ► And so I'm thinking with you, for example,

01:35:49 ◼   ► and talking about bringing on an editor possibly

01:35:52 ◼   ► for the podcasts, this means that you need to change

01:35:56 ◼   ► some aspects of your business

01:35:59 ◼   ► about what is the turnaround time on podcasts.

01:36:02 ◼   ► It means if you're going to have someone do this,

01:36:05 ◼   ► you can't have a really rapid turnaround.

01:36:08 ◼   ► It may mean that there's going to be a multiplication

01:36:11 ◼   ► of the number of things that you can produce

01:36:13 ◼   ► or a reduction in the number of hours

01:36:15 ◼   ► that you are working, both of which are good,

01:36:18 ◼   ► but it does fundamentally change some of the things

01:36:22 ◼   ► that happen in your business.

01:36:24 ◼   ► And in my own analogy here with my own life

01:36:27 ◼   ► and with animating, it's like yes,

01:36:29 ◼   ► if I did bring on an animator, maybe I could produce more,

01:36:33 ◼   ► but it would dramatically increase the cycle time,

01:36:37 ◼   ► and quite frankly, I like being able to finish a script

01:36:42 ◼   ► and then have the video up relatively fast,

01:36:45 ◼   ► that I'm just going to grind through a few days of animating and getting it done.

01:36:49 ◼   ► Like, that's something that I actually don't want to change.

01:36:52 ◼   ► Like, I don't want the trade-off that's involved there.

01:36:55 ◼   ► But...

01:36:57 ◼   ► Anyway, it's just... this stuff is just very, very

01:37:01 ◼   ► connected with who you are and how you run your business.

01:37:06 ◼   ► But, to get back to your original question, where you were talking about having

01:37:10 ◼   ► my personal assistant do the grind work,

01:37:13 ◼   ► I feel like that is not necessarily the case. I think that in my mind

01:37:17 ◼   ► I am passing off to her a lot of what I think of as

01:37:20 ◼   ► "administrada work"

01:37:22 ◼   ► It's it's administration stuff.

01:37:25 ◼   ► That's the word I was looking for.

01:37:25 ◼   ► Yeah, there you go.

01:37:26 ◼   ► Yeah, you go.

01:37:26 ◼   ► Some of it is

01:37:28 ◼   ► Surprisingly difficult or complicated and as an example a little while ago

01:37:35 ◼   ► she was on the phone with like the

01:37:39 ◼   ► tax or the the business sub department of the IRS

01:37:43 ◼   ► to fill out some papers and to get some forms to have the right number to give to the UK for a business that exists

01:37:51 ◼   ► both in the US and and in the UK and

01:37:53 ◼   ► like boy

01:37:55 ◼   ► That work is it is

01:37:57 ◼   ► Administrada work it is it's not a grind work because there's lots of questions that need to be answered correctly and

01:38:03 ◼   ► forms that need to be filled out, but it is something that I would just I

01:38:09 ◼   ► I don't think I could bring myself to do it anymore

01:38:12 ◼   ► to be on the phone and repeating long strings of numbers to

01:38:17 ◼   ► tax people in different countries like I just couldn't possibly

01:38:20 ◼   ► manage doing that and from the perspective of

01:38:23 ◼   ► you know cgpgray the youtube channel like that doesn't help get a video made

01:38:28 ◼   ► any faster spending a day doing that kind of work

01:38:32 ◼   ► all right having somebody be on the phone to the irs for you

01:38:35 ◼   ► I think is a real issue of trust and trust is an important part of this and I want to put a pin in

01:38:43 ◼   ► that just for a moment because I want to just jump back a step. How did you find your personal

01:38:48 ◼   ► assistant? The way this came about was I just tried a series of companies that specialize in

01:38:55 ◼   ► this stuff. So if you search for virtual assistant there are just a bunch of companies that will

01:39:01 ◼   ► attempt to match you with someone based on your needs and

01:39:04 ◼   ► They all make it sound like it's going to be magic right from the start like oh, don't worry

01:39:11 ◼   ► we're gonna find a perfect person who you can just work with and

01:39:13 ◼   ► in my experience it took several tries to

01:39:18 ◼   ► find someone who meshed with me and

01:39:23 ◼   ► the current person that I'm working with now is the

01:39:28 ◼   ► second long-term personal assistant that I've worked with.

01:39:31 ◼   ► So it's not an easy thing to just immediately find someone, and there were a few people who were just

01:39:39 ◼   ► at least for me not great to work with who I didn't think did really, really excellent work.

01:39:47 ◼   ► I'm going to highly recommend that if anyone out there is trying to find a virtual assistant,

01:39:52 ◼   ► This is not the place to cheap out.

01:39:54 ◼   ► Like if...

01:39:55 ◼   ► Don't try to get someone on the other side of the earth who's going to work for

01:40:02 ◼   ► seven dollars an hour.

01:40:04 ◼   ► It seems like it's a really tempting thing to do,

01:40:08 ◼   ► but my experience has led me to believe that that is a terrible, terrible decision that you will regret.

01:40:14 ◼   ► Like it'll just end up being more work than it's worth.

01:40:18 ◼   ► I would recommend, you know, find someone who

01:40:21 ◼   ► speaks your language as their native language

01:40:25 ◼   ► and yeah, you know this? I get what you're saying, like it sounds

01:40:31 ◼   ► because it's funny getting someone to

01:40:33 ◼   ► speak your language is a metaphor but you mean it literally

01:40:38 ◼   ► I do mean it literally but it's just that there are enough

01:40:42 ◼   ► communication problems with someone you're working with just

01:40:45 ◼   ► normally that, you know, for me obviously I need someone who speaks English fluently as a first

01:40:52 ◼   ► language but whatever your first language is make sure that person speaks that as their first

01:40:58 ◼   ► language as well. That is an absolute requirement I think because there's just enough barriers

01:41:02 ◼   ► already to communicating clearly with other human beings. And then again I would be looking for

01:41:08 ◼   ► someone who has a lot of experience which means they're going to be charging a bunch of money

01:41:14 ◼   ► But again, this is a business decision and this is going back to like the return on investment or the opportunity cost spreadsheet before.

01:41:21 ◼   ► You should be looking at the value of your time and the answer is you are finding someone who the cost for their hourly work is less than the value of your time from a business perspective.

01:41:37 ◼   ► So would you advise that before somebody goes down a route like this they need to understand

01:41:42 ◼   ► the value of their hours?

01:41:44 ◼   ► Yeah, you cannot make this decision unless you have a very good sense of what your hourly

01:41:50 ◼   ► work is.

01:41:52 ◼   ► Because really you need to be paying less than that.

01:41:56 ◼   ► Yeah, and when I say this is not a place to cheap out, like some of the, at the really

01:42:02 ◼   ► high end of this, there is, this is a fascinating world, but there's this whole world of,

01:42:07 ◼   ► like executive assistants and super high-end executive assistant placement services.

01:42:13 ◼   ► And the numbers that some of those companies charge are just crazy.

01:42:21 ◼   ► You cannot believe how much the apex of the apex of personal assistants can earn.

01:42:29 ◼   ► But the thing is, they are working for people like Bill Gates.

01:42:33 ◼   ► Because I assume as well, we can't really perceive the amount of money you would pay

01:42:40 ◼   ► because we also can't perceive just the level of the work that they do.

01:42:44 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:42:45 ◼   ► I imagine when you get up to that level, you just don't need to worry about anything anymore

01:42:50 ◼   ► because your assistant will take care of it.

01:42:52 ◼   ► I'll see if I can find it for the show, but there was an article that I was reading which

01:42:54 ◼   ► was talking about some of the highest tier executive assistants.

01:42:59 ◼   ► And one of the reasons why those executive assistants are able to charge such high rates

01:43:04 ◼   ► is that those assistants, they use a networking service that puts them in contact with the

01:43:12 ◼   ► other executive assistants of very high level people.

01:43:16 ◼   ► So

01:43:17 ◼   ► Oh, that makes so much sense.

01:43:19 ◼   ► Right?

01:43:20 ◼   ► they are acting as a conduit across very high level social and political circles.

01:43:28 ◼   ► Yeah, the way they get things done is by talking to each other.

01:43:33 ◼   ► Exactly. So you are actually really buying into this whole network of people.

01:43:39 ◼   ► Yeah, what you get is access to everyone.

01:43:42 ◼   ► Right, and so it's a case of, you can say someone like a very high level

01:43:47 ◼   ► business executive needs to get the chancellor of some country on the phone.

01:43:53 ◼   ► Right? And like, they can just pass it off to their assistant and say,

01:43:57 ◼   ► "You need to make a meeting happen with X."

01:44:00 ◼   ► And that assistant can charge such crazy high rates because they are in contact

01:44:04 ◼   ► with a whole network of other assistants at a very high level

01:44:07 ◼   ► and they can try to work that out amongst themselves to see if they can

01:44:10 ◼   ► make this happen.

01:44:11 ◼   ► But I bring all of this up because again it's just

01:44:15 ◼   ► the value of someone like Bill Gates or like Richard Branson or Elon Musk or any of these guys

01:44:23 ◼   ► the hourly value generation from them is just crazy

01:44:29 ◼   ► and so that's why they can afford to have very high level, very expensive people helping them out

01:44:37 ◼   ► but if you, you know, like, "We are not Elon Musk here, like we're not in that position"

01:44:43 ◼   ► but you still need to have an understanding of where you are in this hierarchy of people

01:44:50 ◼   ► who you can have assist you.

01:44:52 ◼   ► And my advice is to probably go higher than you think you should as long as it is lower

01:44:59 ◼   ► than like your hourly value.

01:45:02 ◼   ► So let's go back to this trust thing.

01:45:04 ◼   ► So you've gone to the service, you've found the person, and you've been working with them

01:45:09 ◼   ► for an amount of time.

01:45:12 ◼   ► I mean, I assume you start them off with smaller tasks, right?

01:45:15 ◼   ► Just to test to see if they're a fit for you?

01:45:18 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:45:19 ◼   ► Where do you start?

01:45:20 ◼   ► Like, what do you give to someone to begin on this path?

01:45:23 ◼   ► Because you can't just be like, "Here's the password to my email account.

01:45:26 ◼   ► Go crazy."

01:45:27 ◼   ► Yeah, well, there are definitely boundaries which I would not cross.

01:45:33 ◼   ► Again, talking about some of YouTube frustrations from before, the way the whole YouTube system

01:45:38 ◼   ► works is that you have a password that allows you to access everything, which is like the

01:45:43 ◼   ► video upload, also all the emails, absolutely everything. That's a kind of very high level

01:45:48 ◼   ► thing which I wouldn't trust anybody in the world with just because it's like the beating

01:45:52 ◼   ► heart of my business and if anything goes wrong I want to be the one who messed it up,

01:45:57 ◼   ► not somebody else.

01:45:58 ◼   ► Exactly. Like that trust element isn't "I think that you're stupid and you do something

01:46:02 ◼   ► wrong." The trust element was if you had an acc... if you did something by accident...

01:46:07 ◼   ► You could have a catastrophic effect on everything.

01:46:11 ◼   ► Exactly. I'll give you an example of a company that does things well

01:46:14 ◼   ► that I wish more companies would follow. But MailChimp

01:46:18 ◼   ► has a like a sub-account level where you can give someone access to

01:46:22 ◼   ► setting up something in MailChimp for you but they can't

01:46:26 ◼   ► have the authority to press the button to send. They can just set it up so that

01:46:31 ◼   ► you have the authority to review it

01:46:33 ◼   ► and then only you can press the send button.

01:46:36 ◼   ► Do you think YouTube have this for some people?

01:46:38 ◼   ► They must do, right? Because there are such big companies

01:46:41 ◼   ► and organisations that use YouTube.

01:46:45 ◼   ► There can't just be one password that everybody shares.

01:46:48 ◼   ► I wonder if this is something that has changed

01:46:52 ◼   ► but I can say for a fact, as of at least two years ago,

01:46:58 ◼   ► they didn't have anything like this because I knew

01:47:02 ◼   ► of gigantic companies that just had some dude who has the password to their account and has access to everything.

01:47:09 ◼   ► Like I just did a Google search for YouTube for teams and there's nothing.

01:47:13 ◼   ► Which I cannot believe that doesn't exist. Because Twitter has it, right?

01:47:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I think they're bringing on a few tools now. Like I think there's a little bit more of this with some of the Google+ integration.

01:47:24 ◼   ► But it's not enough and it's not adequate.

01:47:26 ◼   ► So, I bring this up simply because there's a certain amount of what I might call "structural trust"

01:47:32 ◼   ► in that there are ways that you can have someone help you because limitations are built into the system

01:47:40 ◼   ► like there is trust structurally there. It doesn't depend on you actually trusting the human being.

01:47:46 ◼   ► But ideally, you want someone that you actually can trust.

01:47:49 ◼   ► And so yeah, that's something you have to build up over time.

01:47:51 ◼   ► And what I used as my initial test with the personal assistants that I was trying, some of whom worked out, some obviously many of whom didn't,

01:48:01 ◼   ► was I would send a script that I had marked up by hand to have corrections made.

01:48:11 ◼   ► And so I think if you take a look at that iteration blog post that I wrote a while back,

01:48:18 ◼   ► I have an example of some scripts that I would mark up by hand and

01:48:20 ◼   ► I would pass that off to someone and say I need these corrections made on

01:48:26 ◼   ► this text file

01:48:29 ◼   ► But here's the thing I write all of my text files in

01:48:34 ◼   ► Markdown, which is a very lightweight markup language so that you can mark out things like italics or a link or bold

01:48:42 ◼   ► It's not really complicated, but you just need to know a couple of things

01:48:47 ◼   ► And so as this first test project, what I would say to the person is, here is my

01:48:54 ◼   ► original text file, it's written in markdown, here is a PDF of the changes

01:48:59 ◼   ► that I want made, which are written in my abysmal handwriting, this document is

01:49:05 ◼   ► written in markdown, you need to go look up the syntax and just make sure that

01:49:13 ◼   ► any of the changes are compatible with Markdown.

01:49:16 ◼   ► - It's a good test.

01:49:18 ◼   ► - Right?

01:49:18 ◼   ► That's exactly it. - It's a good test.

01:49:19 ◼   ► - It's an excellent test because I'm trying to see

01:49:23 ◼   ► if they can figure out something.

01:49:25 ◼   ► It's not complicated, but it's just something

01:49:28 ◼   ► that almost nobody would have run across before

01:49:30 ◼   ► under normal circumstances.

01:49:32 ◼   ► It's ever so slightly nerdy, the idea of a markup language.

01:49:37 ◼   ► And then also, I know very well exactly

01:49:42 ◼   ► how all of those corrections are supposed to be made,

01:49:46 ◼   ► and I want to make sure that someone reading through

01:49:49 ◼   ► what I have written can understand and make all

01:49:52 ◼   ► of the corrections in the way that I want done.

01:49:55 ◼   ► And I would get back some abysmal things.

01:49:58 ◼   ► I mean, a couple people just right out of the gate,

01:50:01 ◼   ► it was just no, was I get back a Word document, right,

01:50:05 ◼   ► where someone's copied and pasted the text file

01:50:07 ◼   ► into a Word document and sent it to me.

01:50:10 ◼   ► And part of the original instructions is,

01:50:12 ◼   ► you are modifying this text file.

01:50:15 ◼   ► Right, like I'm not,

01:50:16 ◼   ► I don't want a different document back,

01:50:17 ◼   ► I want this thing back.

01:50:20 ◼   ► So there's a lot of stuff like this,

01:50:22 ◼   ► you'd be surprised when you're trying to work with someone,

01:50:24 ◼   ► it's like communication difficulties,

01:50:25 ◼   ► or there's little ways that things can go wrong

01:50:27 ◼   ► that you would never expect.

01:50:29 ◼   ► So that was always my first test,

01:50:30 ◼   ► and some people just failed immediately.

01:50:32 ◼   ► But from there, like if someone can do that,

01:50:36 ◼   ► then you can start working up to bigger things.

01:50:39 ◼   ► But I did notice with a few of the first assistants

01:50:41 ◼   ► that I work with, they were okay at these very low-level tasks, but I found myself not

01:50:49 ◼   ► wanting to use them for higher-level tasks. And then that was a sign of like, "You know

01:50:54 ◼   ► what? I don't want to work with this person." And an example of a higher-level task is when

01:51:00 ◼   ► someone is representing me to somebody else. So I don't know if we--have we discussed meetings?

01:51:06 ◼   ► I don't remember if we discussed meetings on the podcast.

01:51:09 ◼   ► Not really.

01:51:10 ◼   ► Okay.

01:51:11 ◼   ► So as an example of a higher level task is I occasionally have my personal assistant

01:51:15 ◼   ► set up a meeting for me with someone else.

01:51:19 ◼   ► Now again, this is something I would totally be capable of doing on my own, but it's nice

01:51:25 ◼   ► to be able to have somebody else work out, say time zones or available times.

01:51:30 ◼   ► But that's a higher level task because not only is the person just doing the thing, but

01:51:35 ◼   ► but I also want them to be representing me well to a third party.

01:51:41 ◼   ► And so, like recently my personal assistant set up a meeting with a domain expert for a future project.

01:51:49 ◼   ► And I want to be able to know and be able to rely on that just going smoothly.

01:51:55 ◼   ► And that's a higher level task where it's harder to define how is it to be nicely interacting with someone else.

01:52:01 ◼   ► you just you can't write that down in words as a series of instructions

01:52:04 ◼   ► but you need to be able to trust that someone can do that.

01:52:07 ◼   ► How do you get to the point then when you can say to somebody

01:52:13 ◼   ► "here is my email, here is the most important communication method in my business"

01:52:22 ◼   ► you now have access to what comes in, you could send something out, you see stuff

01:52:30 ◼   ► that I don't let other people see.

01:52:34 ◼   ► Like how do you get to that point?

01:52:38 ◼   ► Well

01:52:42 ◼   ► for me having a one person business

01:52:46 ◼   ► I don't think I ever really need to get to the point where

01:52:50 ◼   ► someone else is controlling directly all of the

01:52:54 ◼   ► email accounts that I use. Like that is just like

01:52:58 ◼   ► the YouTube password. It is a beating heart of the system.

01:53:02 ◼   ► And so the way that I work things out with my assistant is that I have a bunch of rules that forward stuff to her

01:53:10 ◼   ► that comes through my account. And then it filters that stuff out of my view so I don't see it.

01:53:16 ◼   ► But this is a case of what I mean by structural trust.

01:53:20 ◼   ► Like, certain messages go to her, and she is able to reply to them,

01:53:26 ◼   ► but that's very different from say handing over the keys to my primary email account.

01:53:32 ◼   ► Sure, but no system is perfect and there are going to be things that she will see that you would maybe prefer that she didn't.

01:53:38 ◼   ► Eventually over time if that hasn't happened already. So that's where the human trust comes in, right?

01:53:45 ◼   ► Oh yeah. So that definitely requires a certain amount of trust.

01:53:50 ◼   ► And that kind of thing only comes from working with someone over a long period of time.

01:53:55 ◼   ► There's no test that you can necessarily do with that.

01:54:00 ◼   ► So it's all about having increased the number of things

01:54:03 ◼   ► that you are willing to rely on someone for

01:54:06 ◼   ► and that they have successfully helped you out

01:54:08 ◼   ► within the past and that continuing onward over time.

01:54:13 ◼   ► There's no way around it.

01:54:14 ◼   ► That's the only way to have it work.

01:54:15 ◼   ► But I mentioned the thing about being

01:54:18 ◼   ► a single person business before because at a certain level,

01:54:22 ◼   ► this is again goes to like why very high-level

01:54:26 ◼   ► assistants are almost certainly extraordinarily expensive as well is

01:54:29 ◼   ► because

01:54:30 ◼   ► like I don't think someone like Elon Musk

01:54:33 ◼   ► is really in charge of his personal email anymore

01:54:36 ◼   ► he really shouldn't be

01:54:38 ◼   ► I don't think there should ever be a time where he sits down and he's like "oh let me

01:54:42 ◼   ► check my email" click refresh

01:54:44 ◼   ► oh what came in? Someone should be filtering almost everything that gets to

01:54:48 ◼   ► him

01:54:48 ◼   ► at that point

01:54:50 ◼   ► saying about that. What about Apple executives? Because there's always these stories of like them

01:54:55 ◼   ► replying to individuals. What do you think about that? You know like someone will write and complain

01:55:01 ◼   ► about something in iOS and they'll write back of a little note. Yeah I wonder about that.

01:55:07 ◼   ► My guess is that they find it useful sometimes to dip into a stream of unfiltered stuff. Yeah.

01:55:16 ◼   ► So you can write, you know, tim@apple.com

01:55:19 ◼   ► Or is it tcook? I don't know, what is his address?

01:55:22 ◼   ► I forget what the official one is.

01:55:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's tcook, but...

01:55:26 ◼   ► So you can write to him, but I don't imagine that he's using that email in any kind of work function.

01:55:33 ◼   ► I think that that just might be a useful tool for him to just see, like, what is coming in from the unfiltered outside world

01:55:41 ◼   ► just to calibrate every once in a while his sense of things.

01:55:45 ◼   ► Like that might be my guess about what some of the higher level up people are doing.

01:55:50 ◼   ► But I just have a hard time imagining that at a really extremely high levels,

01:55:55 ◼   ► it really makes sense for a person to really be doing with their own email

01:55:58 ◼   ► anymore. Like you just,

01:55:59 ◼   ► you just have to have someone that you rely on to to filter and present to you

01:56:03 ◼   ► the most important things that are coming through this stream.

01:56:05 ◼   ► And I remember a while ago you were talking about using stuff like Wunderlist

01:56:10 ◼   ► or Wunderlist as I like to call it, um,

01:56:13 ◼   ► as a way to share tasks.

01:56:15 ◼   ► Has that panned out over the long term?

01:56:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, that's definitely something that I still use.

01:56:21 ◼   ► I actually just added something to Wunderlist today.

01:56:24 ◼   ► - Wunderlist.

01:56:25 ◼   ► - Wunderlist, it's not Wunderlist.

01:56:28 ◼   ► - German, man, it's Wunderlist.

01:56:30 ◼   ► - Okay.

01:56:31 ◼   ► - Remember we went through this before?

01:56:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, I know we went through this before,

01:56:34 ◼   ► but I'm not giving up.

01:56:35 ◼   ► So yes, I added something to Wunderlist today.

01:56:39 ◼   ► And I have to say, I quite like that as a tool

01:56:42 ◼   ► for communicating with another person these kind of actionable tasks.

01:56:46 ◼   ► It's much better than email because I can open it up and I can see a list of,

01:56:50 ◼   ► "Okay, here are the 10 to 15 things

01:56:55 ◼   ► that I can have some assistance on." And you can leave comments on

01:56:59 ◼   ► on Wunderlist so that the other person can see and I can reply to those comments

01:57:02 ◼   ► very easily on Wunderlist.

01:57:03 ◼   ► And it keeps everything together with a project.

01:57:06 ◼   ► So I really like that as a as a method for

01:57:09 ◼   ► assisting working together with someone.

01:57:13 ◼   ► I'm not sure it would be great for a team, but I think for two people

01:57:17 ◼   ► working together, Wunderlist is a pretty good tool.

01:57:21 ◼   ► Yeah, that does sound pretty wonderful, I must say.

01:57:25 ◼   ► Me and Steven have been using Trello recently

01:57:29 ◼   ► as a way to plan out some stuff together, and that's a tool

01:57:33 ◼   ► that we quite like. Like for some future projects and things like that. So I just

01:57:37 ◼   ► to start one out there because that is actually a pretty good tool. We tried

01:57:40 ◼   ► Vinderlist a few times and when we were launching it was very useful for us

01:57:44 ◼   ► because there was a lot of like you need to do this I need to do this you need to

01:57:47 ◼   ► do this but now we kind of both just manage our own systems and communicate

01:57:50 ◼   ► about it because you know he's the person that I work with the closest

01:57:55 ◼   ► because we have to run our business together but we've tried using systems

01:57:59 ◼   ► like that but neither of us are all in on that system personally so that's

01:58:04 ◼   ► where it starts to fall down a bit because then I'm checking two to-do

01:58:07 ◼   ► list systems which doesn't... like you know as we've been through before I use

01:58:11 ◼   ► different systems for different things but most of my tasks are relay related

01:58:15 ◼   ► tasks and I don't want two different lists that are relay related and right

01:58:19 ◼   ► now Thunderlist is not the system that I feel most comfortable in using on a

01:58:25 ◼   ► day-to-day basis but Trello is definitely one which is very good as a

01:58:31 ◼   ► way to like outline and picture longer term projects and bigger projects and

01:58:35 ◼   ► stuff like that. It's a good way to keep track of that kind of stuff.

01:58:38 ◼   ► Yeah, I played around with Trello a little bit. It looks like it's optimized for... I

01:58:43 ◼   ► just realized this is one of those words I've read but I've never said out loud. It's optimized

01:58:46 ◼   ► for a kanban system or kanban? Do you know the correct way to pronounce that?

01:58:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

01:58:52 ◼   ► I'm gonna call it a kanban system.

01:58:55 ◼   ► We'll call it kanban. Kunderban. I think that there's a method of programming, right, which

01:59:02 ◼   ► learns itself quite well to Trello.

01:59:04 ◼   ► But I can't remember what it's called. Yeah, you're talking about...

01:59:08 ◼   ► Agile? Yeah agile. Thank you. Yeah, I was just blanking out on it

01:59:13 ◼   ► But we'll put a link to or I'll say we will but I really mean you will

01:59:17 ◼   ► You will put a link to Kanban in the show notes. The Royal We. Yes

01:59:20 ◼   ► It is an interesting system that I have looked into and I have tried for myself

01:59:27 ◼   ► and I have adopted some parts of. But Kanban is very good for

01:59:31 ◼   ► high-level and I think bigger teams.

01:59:35 ◼   ► We have these big blocks of a project that we are trying to move forward.

01:59:39 ◼   ► And so yeah, if you're on a bigger team, that definitely seems like

01:59:43 ◼   ► it might be a better tool to use. It was one of the things I did also evaluate

01:59:47 ◼   ► for thinking about what's a tool for me to use with my assistant and rejected it

01:59:51 ◼   ► very quickly because if that was like, "Oh, this is not great if it's just two people."

01:59:55 ◼   ► bit too much or it's just not optimized for that. But yeah, if you're in a bigger team

02:00:01 ◼   ► I think that's something to look at.

02:00:02 ◼   ► To kind of put a bow in this section for now...

02:00:07 ◼   ► Yeah, this big, messy, rambley, all over the place section.

02:00:12 ◼   ► That's why it needs a bow, right? To just tie it all together and collect it all up

02:00:16 ◼   ► nicely.

02:00:17 ◼   ► Look at this mess! It looks so much nicer with a bow on top.

02:00:20 ◼   ► Uh huh. How long have you had a person stood for?

02:00:25 ◼   ► Maybe three years in some form?

02:00:29 ◼   ► So this is something you'd recommend to people then basically? That's what I want to know.

02:00:33 ◼   ► Yeah, it's definitely something I use way less in the beginning and

02:00:37 ◼   ► something that I constantly think about how can I use

02:00:41 ◼   ► more of. I underutilise this resource

02:00:45 ◼   ► for some of the things that we, for some of the reasons that we mentioned earlier

02:00:49 ◼   ► in this conversation. That it is difficult to let go of

02:00:53 ◼   ► of some areas of your business.

02:00:55 ◼   ► Before we leave today, I wanted to just very briefly mention your six degrees of mic idea.

02:01:00 ◼   ► Oh yeah?

02:01:02 ◼   ► Have you seen any notable progress on the desired outcome that you wish for this?

02:01:08 ◼   ► So the one that I have seen which is the closest is the one that you have in the show notes,

02:01:12 ◼   ► which is six degrees of mic dot net with dashes.

02:01:16 ◼   ► With all hyphens in it.

02:01:17 ◼   ► Yeah with hashes.

02:01:18 ◼   ► Six hyphen degrees hyphen.

02:01:19 ◼   ► I feel like you probably could have got it all in one, right?

02:01:22 ◼   ► I can't imagine that that was taken up.

02:01:25 ◼   ► - No, I'm sure sixdegreesofmike.com was already purchased.

02:01:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, of course.

02:01:30 ◼   ► So this actually, yeah, it is definitely the system

02:01:33 ◼   ► which is closest to what I envisioned.

02:01:35 ◼   ► So you can kind of put me or any other podcaster in

02:01:40 ◼   ► and then select from a dropdown menu,

02:01:42 ◼   ► then select another person

02:01:44 ◼   ► and see what their connection is.

02:01:46 ◼   ► And this is built by Alex.

02:01:50 ◼   ► And it's closest to what I would like it to be.

02:01:55 ◼   ► But I personally, if I was to ask for something

02:01:58 ◼   ► which I don't really have any right to do,

02:02:00 ◼   ► would like to see more people in this list,

02:02:03 ◼   ► way more people in this list.

02:02:05 ◼   ► And some of the connections need to be tied up

02:02:08 ◼   ► because I do actually have some connections to people

02:02:10 ◼   ► that it says I have no connections to.

02:02:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, see, Myke, here's how this works.

02:02:14 ◼   ► You obviously can't request that this person

02:02:19 ◼   ► change anything in particular. But we like the six degrees of mic idea. The idea of having

02:02:28 ◼   ► a gigantic network of all podcasts and how they are connected to each other. Just because

02:02:34 ◼   ► it's fun. It's a fun thing and I would also like to see the big web of how all podcasters

02:02:39 ◼   ► are connected and be able to do these little calculations and see what the hops are from

02:02:43 ◼   ► one person to another. So while it is a

02:02:47 ◼   ► monstrous task to attempt to do this, you know

02:02:51 ◼   ► that if you are a person who makes progress on this, you are very likely to be mentioned on the show.

02:02:55 ◼   ► [laughs] In very glowing

02:02:59 ◼   ► light here as well. So if within the next couple of weeks

02:03:03 ◼   ► 6 the number degrees of Myke.co

02:03:07 ◼   ► appears and it has a massively improved database

02:03:11 ◼   ► you know we might mention it. It's very likely.

02:03:15 ◼   ► So that's how this works. There's an incentive out there in the world to create this thing

02:03:19 ◼   ► that we would like to see. But so far we're going to plug

02:03:23 ◼   ► 6-degrees-of-mike.net

02:03:27 ◼   ► as the current leader in podcasting

02:03:31 ◼   ► host connector technology.