00:00:00 ◼ ► Welcome back to State of the Workflow. My guest this time is Quinn Nelson. Quinn produces tech-focused
00:00:06 ◼ ► YouTube videos on the Snazzy Labs YouTube channel. And while, of course, I wanted to talk
00:00:10 ◼ ► to him about how he thinks about his creative work, I wanted to do something a little bit
00:00:15 ◼ ► different this time. Throughout the series so far, I've been focusing on how people work when things
00:00:20 ◼ ► are ideal for them, when they're in their flow, they're producing content that they care about,
00:00:25 ◼ ► and everything's great. But what happens when your life gets turned upside down and your whole
00:00:30 ◼ ► routine changes? How do you continue to do what you want to do? I became a parent a year ago and that
00:00:37 ◼ ► threw me into this world, trying to navigate a new reality of schedule pressure, lack of sleep,
00:00:43 ◼ ► fear of risk, and emotional adaptation. And so was Quinn. He also became a first-time father a year
00:00:49 ◼ ► ago too. So I wanted to have him on the show to take a look at how a creative person can adapt to
00:00:54 ◼ ► huge shifts in their life. But look, this episode, it is not a parenting special. It's looking at how
00:01:00 ◼ ► you handle an all-encompassing, systems-breaking life event. What happens when your creative workflow
00:01:06 ◼ ► collides with brand new, non-negotiable constraints? How do you work around and with that to continue your
00:01:13 ◼ ► creative output? When your time, your energy, and your attention suddenly become scarce, how do you
00:01:23 ◼ ► So Quinn, I want to start by asking you the question I ask every one of my guests. What device
00:01:41 ◼ ► Now, I'm trying to scan back through the previous episodes. I believe you are the first person to,
00:01:55 ◼ ► frankly, the M4 iPad Pro. I did a review of the M4 iPad Pro, and it was the same as all reviews of
00:02:01 ◼ ► iPad Pros because this was before iOS 26. And I was like, it's really amazing hardware. It's just,
00:02:06 ◼ ► it's still an iPad. And I read a comment that was like, you really just need to try to use it as an
00:02:12 ◼ ► iPad. You're trying to make it a Mac too much. And so I did. And the reality is, is iPads are really
00:02:19 ◼ ► great at a lot of things, especially the things that I do, which is largely web-based and email.
00:02:24 ◼ ► My email app of choice is Spark, which is terrible on the Mac. It is like so slow and bloated and an
00:02:31 ◼ ► electron mess. And on iPadOS, it's native. And so I just started doing things on the iPad and the
00:02:38 ◼ ► hardware is so good with the tandem OLED display and the fantastic keyboard and the fact that it is
00:02:44 ◼ ► a touchscreen that I just kind of used that more and more and more. So I still use a Mac every day at
00:02:50 ◼ ► work and I still use my phone quite a lot to get things done. But when I'm like sitting down to
00:03:00 ◼ ► The Spark Mac app, when it launched was so bad, I now use Apple Mail. It just pushed me away from
00:03:12 ◼ ► No, and it's not much better. Like it's one of those apps where when you do command Q to quit the app,
00:03:17 ◼ ► there's a dialogue that pops up and it says, would you like to quit now or quit when I'm finished doing
00:03:39 ◼ ► Well, so I have an administrative assistant and I am onboarding a personal assistant and
00:03:46 ◼ ► they're both kind of in my email. My admin assistant, she does client outreach and sales and
00:03:53 ◼ ► all of the weird stuff that YouTubers need to do that most people don't know or associated
00:03:58 ◼ ► with being a YouTuber. And she brings stuff to my attention in the inbox. We do stuff in
00:04:03 ◼ ► Notion as well, but keeping it all in the email because that's where it's happening tends to make
00:04:08 ◼ ► the most sense. And so I've found that the Teams functionality between chatting and not having to
00:04:13 ◼ ► CC and being able to upload media and being able to link stuff out to Notion as well is really nice.
00:04:18 ◼ ► We'll link emails into our Notion workflow that we have. And then when I go to like, oh, what is this
00:04:23 ◼ ► ad or what was this thing? I can just click it and it automatically opens in Spark. That's very nice.
00:04:27 ◼ ► We might talk about these assistants in a little bit, but first I want to kind of set a bit of
00:04:32 ◼ ► context for the listeners. So you produce videos with the YouTube channel Snazzy Labs. That is your
00:04:37 ◼ ► channel. How long have you been doing this? 17 years. That's a really long time. How long has it
00:04:43 ◼ ► been professional? Eight. That's also a really long time. I've been doing it more time in my life than I
00:04:49 ◼ ► have not been doing it. Okay. More than half my life. Yeah. How would you describe the videos you make?
00:04:54 ◼ ► What are the videos that are on this Snazzy Labs channel? This is a great question because I never
00:04:59 ◼ ► know how to respond. I usually just say, oh, I'm a YouTuber and people say, well, what do you make
00:05:04 ◼ ► YouTube videos about? And I say, you know, really boring videos about consumer technology. And that
00:05:10 ◼ ► usually gets them to stop asking questions unless they are interested in tech, in which case I go, well,
00:05:14 ◼ ► you know, we do DIY projects and we do tutorials and we do reviews. But if I had to kind of summarize it,
00:05:22 ◼ ► our overarching goal, our mission statement is to make entertaining videos about technology that are
00:05:29 ◼ ► approachable by everyone, no matter what your skill level is. And so we hope that seasoned experts can
00:05:35 ◼ ► still watch a video and go, oh, I didn't know that. And people that have no idea what we're talking
00:05:39 ◼ ► about by the end can feel like they have a decent grasp on it rather than still being completely lost.
00:05:43 ◼ ► And it's a hard thing to manage, but that's been our MO. Take complicated things and make them
00:05:48 ◼ ► more simple. I think one of the things that I really like about your channel in general is
00:06:00 ◼ ► You will have videos where you're sitting in a chair talking about some new stuff and breaking it down.
00:06:05 ◼ ► You'll have videos that are DIY projects completely, right? Where like, you know, you'll build an entire
00:06:12 ◼ ► thing. Like you 3D printed that Mac case recently, right? What Mac was it that you were making?
00:06:18 ◼ ► We did a Mac mini. So that before the kind of new M4, we tore the whole thing apart and then stuck it
00:06:26 ◼ ► inside a smaller case because there was a lot of room that was just wasted space in that old kind of
00:06:35 ◼ ► Yeah, we designed and printed like a 1984 style homage to the classic Macintosh and then stuck a
00:06:43 ◼ ► Raspberry Pi inside that does classic Mac OS emulation really, really well. I never had a 1984 Macintosh,
00:06:48 ◼ ► so I wanted to feel what it was like. And, you know, we didn't get to the authentic experience because
00:06:54 ◼ ► it uses an LCD and it's in a 3D printed case, but it was pretty cool. And it is by all intents and
00:07:04 ◼ ► We are three. Currently, soon to be four. So very small team. Smaller than most YouTubers my size,
00:07:12 ◼ ► Okay. So it's you as like writer on air talent. You've referenced a admin assistant who sounds like
00:07:27 ◼ ► no need to still do the bulk of that, but she's a massive help. Yes. And then I have a production
00:07:33 ◼ ► guy that we always laugh, like, what's your real title again? Creative director, I believe is his
00:07:40 ◼ ► real title, but he does everything involving the camera. So he sets everything up. He shoots my A
00:07:46 ◼ ► role so that you see me on screen. And then he's been working with me for long enough that he knows the
00:07:51 ◼ ► system. So I write the video, I sit down, I read it on camera, and then he's basically off to his
00:07:56 ◼ ► devices to finish it up. He'll get all of the B roll. He edits it together. And like 90% of the video
00:08:02 ◼ ► production is him. I help with assets and stuff here and there, but he's great. So yeah, that's it.
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00:10:00 ◼ ► So what I wanted to talk to you today mainly about is the fact that about a year ago we both became
00:10:08 ◼ ► And there is nothing that will change your work more, I have learned, than something like that.
00:10:13 ◼ ► And so what I want to talk about today is how a huge life event can change your creative work and
00:10:20 ◼ ► how you think about it and how you approach it. But before we dig into the big questions,
00:10:24 ◼ ► I want to set a baseline. Before you became a dad, did you feel like you were organized in your work
00:10:36 ◼ ► I was married in December of 2020. And so once I married my wife, I realized that I needed to probably
00:10:46 ◼ ► better balance my time management because up until then, you know, I was a handsome bachelor. I had just
00:10:52 ◼ ► finished my schooling and I had been doing YouTube, like I had mentioned previously, for 17 years. And
00:10:58 ◼ ► so I was doing it as a high school student, as a college student, and there was no work-life balance
00:11:04 ◼ ► because I didn't have anybody to kind of be held accountable to. So I would do my school work and
00:11:10 ◼ ► then I would do a week's worth of YouTube videos in two days and I'd work till 4 a.m. And then I'd sleep
00:11:16 ◼ ► until noon the next day and go to my afternoon class. Like it was just a disaster. I did stuff to just
00:11:21 ◼ ► kind of stay alive. And then when I got married, I quickly realized that it would be more beneficial
00:11:26 ◼ ► to me and my marriage to have a greater semblance of a regular work day. I hired my first employee in
00:11:35 ◼ ► April of 2018. So they had been working for me for a couple of years, but I was not a very good boss in
00:11:40 ◼ ► the sense that they were working nine to five, but I kind of worked whenever I wanted because I was
00:11:45 ◼ ► working all the time. And so sometimes I would show up to work. Sometimes I wouldn't. And I'd just say,
00:11:49 ◼ ► I'm working from home and I'd write my scripts until 11 p.m. That changed kind of a year or two
00:11:55 ◼ ► into my marriage. And I really tried to stick pretty hard to a nine to five. And I was not perfect at it,
00:12:01 ◼ ► but I did a decent enough job. And that augmented substantially when I became a dad, because it
00:12:07 ◼ ► suddenly was to be with my baby and be with Megan, my wife. So I still don't know that I've struck a
00:12:15 ◼ ► balance. My balance has been neglect work in favor of family. Okay. Because that's more important to
00:12:20 ◼ ► me. I don't want to say neglect because I don't neglect it, but it's definitely been a change.
00:12:25 ◼ ► Well, maybe we're looking at a very long term work life balance here where you neglected life for a
00:12:31 ◼ ► while. Yeah. And so now you neglect work a little bit and over time it balances, but that's not really
00:12:37 ◼ ► in the kind of the micro. Yeah. You know, the first three, four or five months post my daughter being
00:12:43 ◼ ► born, I truly did neglect work because I just wanted to be with my family. Yeah. So I was no longer doing
00:12:50 ◼ ► a nine to five. I would go in a couple of days a week and then I would do stuff from home because I
00:12:55 ◼ ► luckily do have a job where most of the stuff that I'm doing can be done from wherever I'm writing,
00:13:00 ◼ ► I'm doing whatever. And much of it, my daughter goes to sleep at around 7 PM. So I would help my
00:13:06 ◼ ► wife during the day and then starting at seven, I'd work until it was bedtime, but I felt like I wasn't
00:13:10 ◼ ► prioritizing time with my spouse either. And so that was a kind of difficult thing to come to. And I have
00:13:17 ◼ ► reverted back to the idea that I'm at work from nine to five. And when I'm not at work, I'm not working
00:13:24 ◼ ► unless I absolutely have to. And the reality is, and you know this well, most business owners do,
00:13:30 ◼ ► you can always be working on something indefinitely forever. And so you just have to tell yourself,
00:13:36 ◼ ► no, I'm done. This can wait till tomorrow. It's not the end of the world. And there have been times
00:13:42 ◼ ► where even in the last six months, I've learned that you can say no to even people who are quite
00:13:47 ◼ ► important, where I've had clients that are like, we need this within 12 hours. And I just tell them
00:13:52 ◼ ► that's not going to happen. Sorry, we'll get it to you in 24. And guess what? The world doesn't end
00:13:55 ◼ ► and they still want to work with you and you can kind of define your own limits. You don't need to
00:14:01 ◼ ► let your clients and other people dictate them for you. So yeah. I think we're going to get some
00:14:05 ◼ ► important lessons learned today. A lot of that was very impressive, but I don't want to go back.
00:14:10 ◼ ► So unlike some other life events, things that can have huge changes to your time, attention output,
00:14:22 ◼ ► That is luckily what you get when you're going to have a child. Did you do anything specific during
00:14:39 ◼ ► Partially because there is naivete, I think, about becoming a first-time parent. You think
00:14:45 ◼ ► you'll be able to manage it more than you do. And then you have a child and you go, oh, wow,
00:14:49 ◼ ► I suddenly respect everybody in my life who was a parent that I had no idea was working.
00:14:54 ◼ ► So much and was so tired all of the time. So that was part of it. And then the other part
00:14:59 ◼ ► of it is I perhaps unwisely was doing some fairly major home renovations. And so that got in the way of
00:15:05 ◼ ► what would have been perhaps a time to kind of prepare my work balance. So I did not do much.
00:15:11 ◼ ► There is this belief that YouTubers cannot step away from doing the content, right? That you've
00:15:17 ◼ ► always got to be on the grind. What's the next video? That you've got to have a very defined
00:15:22 ◼ ► publishing cadence. And if you look at my channel, I've never been about that. There will be times
00:15:26 ◼ ► where we'll go a month between one video and then there's three in two weeks. And some would say
00:15:36 ◼ ► some truth to that. However, it's also that I make videos about the things I want to talk about
00:15:42 ◼ ► when I want to talk about them. And so knowing that I was going to have a child and not having a job
00:15:48 ◼ ► that would provide me traditional paternity, I knew that to think that I would be able to just show up
00:15:54 ◼ ► to work was silly the next day. And I didn't want to do it because at the end of the day, the most
00:15:59 ◼ ► important thing is my wife and my daughter. And I knew that that was going to be the case
00:16:03 ◼ ► even before she was born. So I did what most YouTubers I think don't do. And I pre-recorded
00:16:10 ◼ ► about two months worth of tech content so that I could take a real paternity leave. And it wasn't
00:16:15 ◼ ► a long one. It was only, you know, three weeks full paternity. And then there was another three,
00:16:21 ◼ ► four weeks after that, that was part-time where I was working, you know, five, six hours a week is all.
00:16:25 ◼ ► But I wanted to have time in that kind of first couple of months to be with them. And there are
00:16:30 ◼ ► absolutely no regrets. It was totally worth it. And the YouTube channel survived. It did well in the
00:16:35 ◼ ► videos that I made in advance. Turns out if you make, you know, kind of interesting videos, they don't
00:16:50 ◼ ► The vast majority of my projects are collaborative, so they could be handled while I was gone. And I had to do a
00:16:59 ◼ ► little pre-recording. You know, this show, we did a couple of pre-records. But outside of that, everything could
00:17:04 ◼ ► kind of just be handled because I also took two months, which is funny. It felt like a really long time before it
00:17:11 ◼ ► started. And it felt like a really long time when I was talking to other soon-to-be dads in kind of like
00:17:17 ◼ ► the prenatal group that we were a part of, because everybody else was just taking two or three weeks,
00:17:21 ◼ ► which I don't know how anybody does at two weeks. I still couldn't put sentences together properly.
00:17:27 ◼ ► But going back now, I wish I could have taken longer. I wish I was still off, you know, but it doesn't work
00:17:33 ◼ ► Yeah. And that's kind of the pro and con to running your own deal is that you can work as much or as
00:17:39 ◼ ► little as you choose to. And if you look at my 2025, it would probably be defined by, from a professional
00:17:48 ◼ ► standpoint, in terms of revenue, we did well. It met our 2024 performance. In terms of viewership, at the end
00:17:55 ◼ ► of the year, we really pulled in clutch there. But leading up to quarter four, I was down massively in
00:18:00 ◼ ► viewership, in revenue. And it's because I wasn't working as much. And this is probably not an answer
00:18:06 ◼ ► that a lot of productive people want to hear, but I just didn't care. I had enough. It was working for
00:18:12 ◼ ► me. And I spent more time with the girls that I love. And everything else is secondary to that. But
00:18:24 ◼ ► you mentioned earlier that you feel like your team is smaller than your colleagues, right? People who
00:18:30 ◼ ► have channels of your size. And so that lends itself to, well, there is an element of you keeping things
00:18:35 ◼ ► a little bit more modest than you could otherwise. But then that gives you the flexibility to not feel
00:18:42 ◼ ► That's definitely true. Every time I go and visit other YouTubers, my peers, my contemporaries,
00:18:48 ◼ ► they're always shocked that my team is as small as it is. And the question is, why? And my answer is
00:18:55 ◼ ► usually, well, I have a good quality of living and I have fairly dependable income. I have a strategy
00:19:03 ◼ ► from a content standpoint that has proven to work. However, I have not been an expansionist. Part of that
00:19:10 ◼ ► has been, I'm historically fairly risk averse. I don't want a ton of liabilities from a financial
00:19:16 ◼ ► standpoint, but then part of it is the creator conundrum where you want control of everything and
00:19:23 ◼ ► you're not a good delegator and manager. I think I've figured that out in most instances. The thing that
00:19:29 ◼ ► I still can't delegate and I probably will never be able to is my writing because that's ultimately
00:19:34 ◼ ► what I think I bring to the table. And that's the one thing that I think I'm really pretty good
00:19:40 ◼ ► at. I'm not good at almost anything else. And so that's why I've hired that stuff out to people that
00:19:46 ◼ ► can do it more efficiently and more effectively than I can. But I don't have illusions of grandeur. And I think
00:19:53 ◼ ► that's where a lot of YouTubers and small business people in general, there is this mindset that you have to
00:19:59 ◼ ► keep growing, that things have to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And I would suggest that they don't. My audience
00:20:05 ◼ ► size has not appreciably grown in the last five years, but my revenue is greater than it's ever
00:20:11 ◼ ► been. My audience retention is fantastic. It's working good. And so why work for more if you don't
00:20:18 ◼ ► need more and if that takes more out of you? That's not my goal. And YouTube is not my legacy. I'm proud
00:20:25 ◼ ► of it. I think the stuff we make is good. And there's a bunch of stuff that I don't do because I think that
00:20:31 ◼ ► YouTubers that do or sell out. So I have my own bit of arrogance and pride, I suppose. But my life is
00:20:38 ◼ ► not defined by being a YouTuber. I want to be a good dad and a good husband. And that takes priority over
00:20:48 ◼ ► Probably, honestly. Yeah. Because I was already a husband then and it just, family has always been
00:20:54 ◼ ► so important to me that work is a means to an end rather than a kind of primary driver. But I say that
00:21:01 ◼ ► as a small business owner, if that were really true, well, I would just clock in and clock out and get my
00:21:06 ◼ ► paycheck. And I don't. So there is absolutely an element of kind of pride and wanting to change.
00:21:13 ◼ ► Yeah, of course. And we're proud of the stuff we put out. And there's nothing better than meeting
00:21:17 ◼ ► someone who's a fan that goes, I saw your video about home networking and I redid the whole thing
00:21:23 ◼ ► and I didn't pay anybody anything, even though I had quotes that were $5,000 to retrofit my house.
00:21:27 ◼ ► That's awesome. As the kind of impetus to get someone to do a cool thing. But yeah, it's not
00:21:34 ◼ ► everything. And I think that a lot of people that get in the, especially in the creator mindset,
00:21:45 ◼ ► Yeah, I think I'm still working on that balance. You know, I've been doing this for a similar amount
00:21:50 ◼ ► of time that you have, like 16 years. And I'm going into my 12th professionally, I think. And so
00:21:59 ◼ ► similarly, like to your path, right? Like I spent a lot of time kind of just like sacrificing every
00:22:03 ◼ ► personal relationship that I have, because what else are you supposed to do if you want
00:22:06 ◼ ► to produce content? You've got to find time to put it in somewhere when you're working a
00:22:10 ◼ ► regular job. And I think I kind of got myself into that mode for a long time. And I've been
00:22:16 ◼ ► also working over years to try and break some of those habits. But I definitely do sit now
00:22:22 ◼ ► at this point where there is a part of me that's like the most important thing is being the best
00:22:29 ◼ ► member of my family that I can be to everybody within it. But I absolutely still have the,
00:22:41 ◼ ► And I oscillate between these two things. And I am absolutely aware of the fact that leaning towards
00:22:50 ◼ ► one or the other sacrifices the other one. There isn't really an answer for it. And I also think
00:23:03 ◼ ► Work-life balance, I think you can find where like you're doing enough work and enough life.
00:23:08 ◼ ► But the idea of like, if I want to be the best dad I can possibly be, it takes away from my ability
00:23:16 ◼ ► to be the best content creator that I want to be. And like, and I just, I'm not sure that like a pure
00:23:21 ◼ ► balance between those two things, like all the time really works. And I'm trying to find,
00:23:26 ◼ ► all right, on these days, I will be the best dad I can be. And on these days, I will be the best
00:23:32 ◼ ► content creator that I can be. And that's working a little bit better for me than trying to find like
00:23:43 ◼ ► and this is what I have had to do, is reframe what it means to be best. Is that an objective
00:23:49 ◼ ► measure? Is that subjective? I think that the videos we produce are unlike anybody else's videos
00:23:57 ◼ ► on YouTube, for good and for bad. But that by virtue has made it a measurable success against itself.
00:24:08 ◼ ► And so I don't have to compare, well, you know, my monthly view count is nothing compared to Marquez.
00:24:13 ◼ ► And it sounds like false modesty. It makes some people annoyed in my life when I say it, but it's
00:24:18 ◼ ► not. It's genuinely true. I am not a big content creator in the grand scheme of things. I am maybe
00:24:24 ◼ ► the largest small tech creator on YouTube. I do it profitably. It is my job. It is a career for
00:24:33 ◼ ► multiple people. And so I recognize the uniqueness and privilege that comes from that. That's not
00:24:39 ◼ ► normal. However, you know, my monthly viewership is one 70th that of Marquez's. It's diminutive,
00:24:46 ◼ ► it's minuscule. And so when you look at his team size, or when you look at, you know, the machines that
00:24:53 ◼ ► other people are running, you have to kind of put yourself in a check and go like, well, it's unrealistic
00:24:58 ◼ ► to try to do things the way that some of my peers do. Austin, I mean, Austin is a much smaller
00:25:03 ◼ ► YouTuber than Marquez. And Austin still does, I think, 15 times the number of views that I do per
00:25:07 ◼ ► month. It's not even close. But it's funny, because I've been doing this so long that Marquez and
00:25:12 ◼ ► Austin, they are my peers. Yeah. And so I kind of rub shoulders with them, even though I really don't
00:25:18 ◼ ► deserve to be there, other than the fact that I've been doing this for a very, very long time.
00:25:26 ◼ ► like my peers too, right? Like you and Austin are good friends of mine. Sure. But like,
00:25:31 ◼ ► the YouTuber numbers and the podcaster numbers, big gap. Yeah, but value per listener is higher than
00:25:39 ◼ ► value per viewer. You know, you got yourself some fly. But that's what I mean is I think if your
00:25:43 ◼ ► metric of success is comparing yourself to other people, you will never be good enough. Correct.
00:25:48 ◼ ► And so you have to redefine what success means to you. And my kind of barometer of success,
00:25:55 ◼ ► what means that I'm doing well is if my viewership is continuing to grow, albeit slowly. And if I feel
00:26:04 ◼ ► that my videos are entirely unique, they can't be replaced by another creator's videos. And that's
00:26:09 ◼ ► what mattered to me, is being different than anything else out there. And I know that that's
00:26:14 ◼ ► not going to appeal to everybody, but that has made me the best at the very weird niche thing that I do.
00:26:20 ◼ ► And that's success enough for me to be complacent and to just work on the little things at getting
00:26:26 ◼ ► stuff slightly bigger and bigger rather than trying to reinvent myself or become the biggest creator
00:26:36 ◼ ► When you came back to work after your parental leave was done, and you were considering yourself like,
00:26:41 ◼ ► okay, I'm back to this now. Were there parts of your workflow that started to break immediately?
00:26:57 ◼ ► but it's a huge brain drain. And again, not to suggest that other people that do this are not
00:27:03 ◼ ► working as hard as me, because that's not true at all. But it's easier to look at a widget that you've
00:27:07 ◼ ► got in front of you and say like, okay, this is squared. These are the dimensions. Whereas I'm trying
00:27:12 ◼ ► to ideate an entertaining piece of kind of educational content about a subject. So I'm doing
00:27:17 ◼ ► tons of research, taking stuff that frankly, I'm not qualified to understand. Incredibly complex stuff
00:27:25 ◼ ► like silicon manufacturing and electrical engineering, and then trying to distill that down to something
00:27:31 ◼ ► that my dumb brain can understand, and then try to take that information and then write it into
00:27:35 ◼ ► something that's not just technical, but actually entertaining, that is compelling for someone to
00:27:41 ◼ ► watch for 15 to 25 minutes. It's a lot of work and it takes days to write a single script.
00:27:46 ◼ ► And I used to be able to just get into the zone and knock it out. No problem. Cause I could just sit
00:27:51 ◼ ► down and go, okay, for eight hours uninterrupted, I'm going to do this. It's my one day a week where
00:27:56 ◼ ► I'm probably not going to get home until 10 PM, but that's okay. Cause I'm going to get it done.
00:28:00 ◼ ► And once you're in the zone, it's easier to do. And now I have to break that up because I want to be
00:28:05 ◼ ► home when it's time to be home, but also I'm tired. And my brain, I don't think has since recovered the
00:28:17 ◼ ► Yeah. The thing that you need to do to be the most creative is difficult. Like for me, the thing that
00:28:23 ◼ ► I have struggled with more, cause where I don't write, I do a lot of preparation, a little reading,
00:28:27 ◼ ► writing, show notes and stuff like that. But that just inherently, because of the way that my content
00:28:33 ◼ ► works can be broken up quite nicely into segments and chunks, the biggest thing for me has been the
00:28:39 ◼ ► presenting. Like that has been the thing that I have struggled with the most because there are days
00:28:46 ◼ ► where I feel like I can't string sentences together correctly. And I am now going to sit and talk for
00:28:54 ◼ ► two hours to someone who's not at that level. They're feeling fine. And I have to try and hold a
00:29:00 ◼ ► conversation. I have to try to be engaged. I can't be distracted. Like that is what I have found to be
00:29:05 ◼ ► the most complicated, but it's a similar thing of like your body has a different demands on it and
00:29:11 ◼ ► your attention and time and your sleep and your focus has changed, but you still have to go back
00:29:21 ◼ ► What I will say of my videos, and I think this helps me particularly is they are fully scripted.
00:29:26 ◼ ► I read every single word off of a teleprompter. Now, when I've written the video, which I do,
00:29:31 ◼ ► I will oftentimes take kind of unscripted deviations, but in general, I would say a published
00:29:37 ◼ ► snazzy labs video is 95% as written. And so when I'm on camera presenting for me, it's quite easy
00:29:45 ◼ ► because I'm just reading the words I've already written. And I've been doing this long enough
00:29:48 ◼ ► that even if I'm exhausted and I don't feel very good and I'm hungry, I can fake it pretty good.
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00:32:01 ◼ ► show and relay. This time is a lot about prioritizing, you know, working out what's important, what's not,
00:32:07 ◼ ► how to handle the things, and what order to handle them in. Yeah. Are there types of work now that
00:32:13 ◼ ► you're less willing to do than you were before? Oh, 100%. Almost everything. Okay. Yeah. One of the
00:32:22 ◼ ► reasons I'm hiring a executive assistant is that there is so much of my day-to-day. It's important,
00:32:29 ◼ ► but it doesn't need to be done by me. And like the other things that I've hired out could probably be
00:32:36 ◼ ► done better by somebody else. And so I still do all of my own bookkeeping. I run payroll and I am not good
00:32:44 ◼ ► at it and it takes me way too much time. And I have found someone that can do those things better
00:32:50 ◼ ► than me, probably more efficiently. And that's the thing that I think if you heard, oh yeah, I'm a
00:32:57 ◼ ► YouTuber and my team consists of one guy that makes the videos and I kind of help him. And then there's
00:33:02 ◼ ► two people that help with, you know, ad sales and then doing all the business stuff that I don't want
00:33:09 ◼ ► to do. It sounds like, bro, hire more video people or, and that's normally what you hear. I listened
00:33:14 ◼ ► to your episode with Marquez and Marquez is still doing, to my knowledge, a lot of the kind of
00:33:21 ◼ ► administrative stuff that I have no interest in doing. And it's because Marquez is good at it.
00:33:26 ◼ ► And I think that he wants control over that thing, but he's hired out an enormous team of people
00:33:31 ◼ ► involving production. And you look at an MKBHD video and it shows, I mean, it's production value is
00:33:36 ◼ ► amazing, but I'm hiring out what I know to be my deficiencies and weaknesses rather than trying
00:33:43 ◼ ► to expand, if that makes sense. And so my goal is by the end of the year to be able to increase our
00:33:52 ◼ ► video volume. My goal is to hire two more people and then kind of, that's, I think my ideal team size
00:33:57 ◼ ► be done. Both of those people will be production related. One of them will be more of a kind of
00:34:03 ◼ ► researcher kind of preparatory role than real writing, I think. But that'll get me to the
00:34:08 ◼ ► point where I can do what I know I'm good at and then not have to do the stuff that I don't want to
00:34:16 ◼ ► do. And because I can afford to do that, it doesn't mean that the company will continue to grow and
00:34:21 ◼ ► revenue will 3X. I might actually, at the end of the year, be making less money than I have
00:34:26 ◼ ► historically. But if it means that I can do less and be happier, then it's worth it. And that's the
00:34:33 ◼ ► thing that I think has been the most eye-opening is all the stuff that I thought I had to do,
00:34:37 ◼ ► I don't. Turns out there's a lot of really skilled people in the world that can do stuff
00:34:47 ◼ ► And I wonder what your focus is on it. Do you have stages where you think like you should do
00:34:53 ◼ ► more than you're doing, but you struggle with that? Do you feel like you should be doing
00:34:57 ◼ ► less than you've been doing? You know, like, do you go through periods of feeling like I want to make
00:35:07 ◼ ► Yeah. I think everybody goes through waves of that and has to. I mean, that's the basis for
00:35:12 ◼ ► the famous kind of YouTuber burnout where, you know, you have YouTubers that do stuff for 10 years
00:35:18 ◼ ► and then they just quit. And on the one hand, you have a bunch of people who work jobs, they're
00:35:23 ◼ ► software developers, they're teachers, they're researchers, they're what have you. And they're
00:35:28 ◼ ► like, why? Like, that's just called a job. I do it every day. I don't get to go take several
00:35:34 ◼ ► months off. And I think that both things can be true where one creators are on one hand,
00:35:40 ◼ ► a little dramatic and entitled and not really tuned into the real world. On the other hand,
00:35:46 ◼ ► it is a machine. You can't take a week off and do something else. You've got to keep the machine going.
00:35:53 ◼ ► And what I will say is I think that, and you can probably back me up on this, it gets easier to do
00:36:02 ◼ ► content, the more that you're in the zone doing content and that content is performing well.
00:36:07 ◼ ► And so I think one of the easiest ways to atrophy and feel burnt out is to step off the gas.
00:36:14 ◼ ► Because then you take a breath and you're like, holy crap, I'm tired. And if you don't ever let
00:36:20 ◼ ► yourself feel that, then you can just keep going perpetually until you, you know, I don't know,
00:36:23 ◼ ► explode or you blow it. And I will say that it's not even just from a work volume standpoint,
00:36:29 ◼ ► but to give you an example, 2025 was a really hard year financially because many of our clients,
00:36:36 ◼ ► and to give a brief explainer, most YouTubers are not making money from YouTube. Like Google does not
00:36:44 ◼ ► pay anything. So I would say 85% of our annual revenue comes from our sponsors. So this video is
00:36:51 ◼ ► sponsored by Squarespace or the typical kind of transitions. That's where the money is. And many of
00:36:57 ◼ ► our clients because I'm in tech are Chinese. And last year was really hard with all the tariff stuff
00:37:03 ◼ ► because there was so much uncertainty about, we don't know if we're going to be able to sell. We
00:37:08 ◼ ► don't know what the prices are going to be that everybody just kind of backed off. And so going
00:37:11 ◼ ► into quarter four, we were in the red, we had lost money over 2025. And I was starting to kind of freak
00:37:19 ◼ ► out because I'm a dad now. I have more things to be responsible for. I have employees. I've got to pay
00:37:25 ◼ ► payroll every two weeks and there's got to be money to pay that. And I've never really had to worry about
00:37:30 ◼ ► it until last year where my bank balances were as low as they've ever been. It was starting to get
00:37:35 ◼ ► uncomfortable. And it wasn't for lack of trying. It was just that there was no money to be had.
00:37:40 ◼ ► Well, quarter four kind of turned around with the stay on tariffs. And then I think with the holiday
00:37:49 ◼ ► And that's why the whole like tech-tober, tech-tember that you always hear from YouTubers,
00:37:54 ◼ ► one of the reasons why they say that is because yes, that's when all the new device releases are,
00:37:59 ◼ ► but that's also when all the money is spent. So that's when you have to do all the work because
00:38:04 ◼ ► of the holiday season and driving, you know, sales and conversions for Christmas and the holidays.
00:38:09 ◼ ► But quarter four came around and I just started saying yes to probably more things than I should have
00:38:14 ◼ ► because we needed money. And I oversold the inventory that I had available. And so I did have
00:38:23 ◼ ► a bad kind of employer and bad dad and husband moment in the month of November because we worked
00:38:29 ◼ ► like crazy. Don't worry. I gave bonuses to all the employees involved that were very generous,
00:38:35 ◼ ► I think. But it was a lot of work. And on the one hand, we finished it and we were exhausted.
00:38:40 ◼ ► But on the other hand, it was a lot of fun because we were making so much content volume.
00:38:45 ◼ ► Fans and viewers of the channel were so excited to see video after video. And because we were in
00:38:51 ◼ ► the groove, because we were in the rhythm, each video was just, it was hitting so good. Like
00:38:55 ◼ ► Marques talked about it in his episode. He said like, oh, you'll, you'll see a nine out of 10 or a 10
00:39:00 ◼ ► out of 10. YouTube ranks on a scale of one to 10, how videos are performing relative to other videos
00:39:05 ◼ ► historically in your catalog. And a one out of 10, despite what you might think is the best one.
00:39:10 ◼ ► That means it's outperforming everything else that it can be compared to. And during the month of
00:39:15 ◼ ► November, I think we had eight videos that we published. I think four of them are one out of
00:39:19 ◼ ► 10s and the other four were two or threes. And that was only because they were being compared to
00:39:24 ◼ ► the other one out of 10s. So my viewership in November was five or six X what it typically is
00:39:31 ◼ ► month to month. And that made it so fun to write. And if you look at the style of writing in my videos,
00:39:37 ◼ ► like I was in the zone, but it was unsustainable because I didn't see my wife and I wasn't home.
00:39:42 ◼ ► And so that's what I'm trying to figure out is I think that I have in some ways selfishly wanted to
00:39:49 ◼ ► have more control than I really ought to have over every facet of the business. And also I think that
00:39:56 ◼ ► I've told myself that I'm complacent with the lack of growth when in reality, I still would like to
00:40:03 ◼ ► have growth. I would like for it to be more successful. And so the thing that I'm going to
00:40:07 ◼ ► try, and if it works great, and if it doesn't, well then okay, is to try and increase the video volume by
00:40:14 ◼ ► way of bringing on other people. It's not sustainable for me and Benjamin, my production lead to do more.
00:40:20 ◼ ► We can't. We're tapped out. But maybe if we add one or two more people, we can increase the volume
00:40:25 ◼ ► flow to where I think is a good amount of volume, which is 1.5 videos per week, I think is about the
00:40:37 ◼ ► But that's still staying way smaller. Again, at the beginning of the episode, even at that level,
00:40:47 ◼ ► 100%. I mean, look at Marques, look at Linus. I mean, they're both very, very successful. But I
00:40:53 ◼ ► also know that both of them, and I say this in the nicest way possible because I wish I had this,
00:40:59 ◼ ► they are freaks in the sense that they work so hard and they never stop working. And the amount of
00:41:07 ◼ ► contact they have with every single facet of their business is mind-blowing. I do not know how they do it.
00:41:12 ◼ ► It's superhuman. And I just, I don't have the motivation or desire or skill set to do any of that.
00:41:18 ◼ ► Well, I think even if you had it, it sounds like you wouldn't be happy with that in this mode of your life
00:41:25 ◼ ► No. And because I know that both of those guys, and it's not just them, it's a lot of YouTubers,
00:41:30 ◼ ► there is no 40-hour work week for content creators. Like you're working 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 hours a week.
00:41:36 ◼ ► And I actually pretty much do have a 40-hour work week. And it's awesome. And I don't have
00:41:42 ◼ ► illusions of grandeur. I don't think that I'm going to become the next huge phenom on YouTube,
00:41:46 ◼ ► but that's okay. I'm past that. And I'm really happy with what I have now. And I hope that I'm
00:41:51 ◼ ► still receptive enough to market changes that I don't become so complacent that the world passes me by.
00:41:56 ◼ ► And I think that over the last three, four years, I've demonstrated that I can kind of reinvent myself
00:42:14 ◼ ► rethink anything or use new tools to try and help you manage your work more effectively?
00:42:21 ◼ ► Yeah. Notion has been the sword by which we live or die for good and bad. I'm going to say what
00:42:27 ◼ ► Marquez said where Marquez goes, yeah, I'm the one that manages the notion, even though I probably
00:42:31 ◼ ► shouldn't. I kind of do the same. We are in a weird situation where of the four team members at
00:42:39 ◼ ► Snazzy Labs, two of them are fully remote. Now, one of them is fully remote, 10 minutes away from the
00:42:44 ◼ ► office, but she never comes in because she doesn't need to. The other one is truly not even
00:42:51 ◼ ► in the state of Utah. So there needs to be some sort of communication between all of these parties
00:42:59 ◼ ► because otherwise it falls apart. And there is enough contact between all groups that there needs
00:43:05 ◼ ► to be some sort of shared platform. However, I kind of am the conduit. I'm the means to the end for both
00:43:12 ◼ ► sides. There's the business side and then there's the production side. And the business side does need
00:43:17 ◼ ► to talk to the production side sometimes, but pretty rarely. However, both sides need to talk to me every
00:43:22 ◼ ► single day. And so Notion has been the one place where we can kind of link everybody together. But it has
00:43:28 ◼ ► been hard because on the production side, the production lead is not, frankly, very good at updating the
00:43:34 ◼ ► Notion because I think in his head he's like, well, why? Like, you're here and like, but it's not for me.
00:43:47 ◼ ► Yeah. And most people build out their databases to be so tedious as to like, make it like a project.
00:43:57 ◼ ► out of our Notion because we're like, we don't want Notion to be like, we're doing it so that the
00:44:03 ◼ ► Notion can be actualized. Like it needs to be done so that we can know where we're all at.
00:44:07 ◼ ► And no matter how that gets done, even if it's not the prettiest thing ever, let's do it.
00:44:11 ◼ ► And so we've drastically simplified how Notion works. And then frankly, we are using more and
00:44:17 ◼ ► more iMessage where we'll just text each other and be like, yo, we need this right now. I'll be like,
00:44:21 ◼ ► okay. And rather than ping me in Spark or rather than upload the PDF to Notion and say, here's the PDF,
00:44:28 ◼ ► Quinn, please sign it. My admin assistant can just go, hey, I need you to sign this PDF. And then I just
00:44:33 ◼ ► search for it in Spark and it's just as quick and it saves everybody time and we get the thing done.
00:44:45 ◼ ► we would be in bad shape without a Notion because I can go into a dashboard where I can go in and see,
00:44:50 ◼ ► okay, these are our current sponsors. These are sponsors that we're negotiating with. These are
00:44:54 ◼ ► ones under contract. This one was finished 45 days ago. They still haven't paid what's going on there.
00:44:59 ◼ ► And so without that, it would be a disaster. However, we've gone from performative Notion,
00:45:05 ◼ ► which I think many Notion instances are where you do it for the love of the Notion to like what's
00:45:11 ◼ ► functional and what works for us. And so it's pretty lean. And then we just fill in everything else by
00:45:16 ◼ ► just talking to each other and asking each other to get the things done that we need done. And it works
00:45:24 ◼ ► Yes and no. I would still say on the whole, I'm working nine to five, but realistically,
00:45:29 ◼ ► I'm probably in office most days from 11 to five, where one of the things that I've determined is
00:45:37 ◼ ► important to me is I'll wake up in the morning when my daughter wakes up and starts crying.
00:45:41 ◼ ► My wife is usually, she's not a good sleeper in general, and she's a mom. Being a mom is the
00:45:47 ◼ ► hardest job in the world. And so she, by the end of the day, she's exhausted. And so I've been waking
00:45:51 ◼ ► up in the morning and I'll go get the baby and I change her and I play with her for a little bit.
00:45:55 ◼ ► And that's like 45 minutes to an hour of time that I can spend with her. And it's just me and her and
00:46:00 ◼ ► it's awesome. And I love it. And I would not change it for anything in the world. And then I'll typically
00:46:05 ◼ ► do one or two hours worth of kind of the more menial stuff that I need to get done, payroll, checking
00:46:12 ◼ ► email calendar stuff, just from home at the dining room table with my wife and daughter in the background.
00:46:18 ◼ ► And to say that it's like a super productive hour or two would be a lie. It's not, but I'm with my
00:46:24 ◼ ► girls and like, that's what I want to do. And then when I get to work, then I come here and I put my head
00:46:29 ◼ ► down and I get stuff done. But my kind of active hours, I would say are roughly the same, but the amount
00:46:35 ◼ ► of focus I have during each individual segment of the day is different. Conversely, you go back a year
00:46:42 ◼ ► and a half ago and there were times at the office where I just sit at my desk for two hours and I'm
00:46:46 ◼ ► like, I'm going to play around with this and see if I can figure this out so that I can maybe do a
00:46:49 ◼ ► video about it. And I'm like, oh, I don't have time to do that. We got to do this and this and this.
00:46:52 ◼ ► I would suggest that anybody who says like, oh, I don't have time to do anything like it. No, it's just
00:46:58 ◼ ► the way you've prioritized to use your time is different. And if you were really honest with
00:47:04 ◼ ► yourself, you would probably find inefficiencies in the day that you could eliminate and or be
00:47:09 ◼ ► complacent that they exist. And so there are absolutely inefficiencies in my day and I'm
00:47:13 ◼ ► great with them. Like, that's awesome. And when I need to be productive and put my head down and
00:47:18 ◼ ► don't talk to me, I'm working on something and I can get that done. And that was always a small
00:47:23 ◼ ► part of my day anyways. And it still is. When you are at home, how is your intentionality? Are you good
00:47:31 ◼ ► staying focused on being present in the moment or do you get distracted? I mean, if it makes you feel
00:47:38 ◼ ► any better, I will say this is something I'm not as good at as I would want to be. Like I get distracted,
00:47:43 ◼ ► I start thinking about work, I might be checking something, you know, and I find myself in moments
00:47:50 ◼ ► where I realize I'm not paying as much attention as I would like to be. And it's, this has been something
00:47:55 ◼ ► I've been working on for years. It's now more important to me than it's been before and I'm
00:48:01 ◼ ► trying to get better at it, but I've definitely got work to go. How are you with this stuff?
00:48:05 ◼ ► I could definitely improve. I think I'm better than I was probably six months ago, but my wife,
00:48:12 ◼ ► and she's amazing, holy smokes, I do not deserve her because she never tells me what to do. She will just
00:48:19 ◼ ► do a thing on her own. And by proxy, it makes me go, Oh, I should be doing that too. And so she got
00:48:29 ◼ ► one of those like brick things where you scan the NFC tag on your phone and it locks you out all of your
00:48:34 ◼ ► social media. So she does that every day in the morning because she's with our daughter all day
00:48:39 ◼ ► long. And she was like, I was noticing that, you know, when she was playing with toys, I would get on
00:48:45 ◼ ► Instagram for 10 minutes and I'm like, okay, that's fine. Like you're with her all day long.
00:48:50 ◼ ► And like anybody who has a baby knows that like, there is no off button on a baby. Like they're
00:48:55 ◼ ► always crawling around. They're always doing something. Like I come home, I'm with my baby from,
00:48:59 ◼ ► you know, five to seven most weeknights and I'm exhausted by the end of those two hours. And my wife
00:49:04 ◼ ► does it for 10 hours a day, but she was like, I want to be more present. So I'm going to block my social
00:49:10 ◼ ► media out and I had seen her doing that. And I noticed while she was no longer on her phone,
00:49:15 ◼ ► but I still am. I have it in my hand. I don't need that at all. Like, why is this here? Is this
00:49:20 ◼ ► bringing me greater joy than what I'm doing with my kid and with my wife? So I have tried to,
00:49:26 ◼ ► and I'm not bulletproof at it, but I have tried to just put my phone in the kitchen. So like when I'm
00:49:31 ◼ ► home with my daughter and with my wife, it's just, my phone is not near me. I have not been very good
00:49:36 ◼ ► at wearing an Apple watch lately, which is actually awesome because there are things that are quote
00:49:41 ◼ ► unquote important that I miss because they're not that important. They can wait an hour, they can
00:49:46 ◼ ► wait two hours. And then once my daughter goes to bed, then my wife and I will, you know, she'll watch
00:49:51 ◼ ► TikTok and I'll do some kind of remainder emails. And then we spend some time with each other before we
00:49:55 ◼ ► go to bed. And so I still suck at it compared to my wife and I hope to be way better in the next six
00:50:09 ◼ ► The ad I find kind of annoying. It's like an ad from a camera taken down low, looking up at a parent
00:50:15 ◼ ► using their phone and be like, is this how you want to be remembered by your child? I'm like,
00:50:24 ◼ ► But I bought one of those a long time ago just because I was interested in seeing how it worked
00:50:33 ◼ ► time and MDM stuff. And really, it's not what I would want to do to my phone. What I did was I
00:50:38 ◼ ► removed pretty much all social media from my iPhone and got a second phone and made that my work phone
00:50:43 ◼ ► that works for me for this stuff. So I spend significantly less time on it than I did before.
00:50:50 ◼ ► But my biggest issue really, it's not social media that's pulling me away. It's work that's pulling me
00:50:55 ◼ ► away. And one of the problems that I have is I can't work a nine to five because everybody that
00:51:03 ◼ ► I work with, their nine to five is a different nine to five to mine. And so that's where I'm still
00:51:08 ◼ ► struggling, where there are people that would like my attention at different times. I'm still working
00:51:15 ◼ ► my way through it. Like, you know, I've now started my work day a little bit later because no one needs
00:51:20 ◼ ► me early in the morning. And I'm trying to do the majority of my work when I'm in my office. But I'm
00:51:27 ◼ ► not coming to the office five days. I'm coming to the office three or four days a week, depending on
00:51:33 ◼ ► what I've got going on. And then when I'm at home, I'm trying to help out more, be more present, and then
00:51:42 ◼ ► If that's the way that it works, that's the way that it works. That's a good thing. I haven't even thought
00:51:46 ◼ ► about that at all. I mean, even this call that I'm on with you right now, it started at nine. So I'm
00:51:50 ◼ ► like, okay, which is a little earlier than what I would normally come to the office at, but it's still
00:51:55 ◼ ► within my kind of predetermined work hours. And so it works. It's easy. It's a hard thing to balance,
00:52:03 ◼ ► Based on what you've explained to me, you're clearly a very good dad and a very good husband. And we're
00:52:07 ◼ ► both kind of just chopping away at making it a little better. Yeah. And that's the best you can do.
00:52:13 ◼ ► That's the other thing that I'll say. There are so many people, especially in the productivity
00:52:16 ◼ ► space that beat themselves up about like, I should be more optimized. I can do better than this.
00:52:20 ◼ ► And at the end of the day, it's like, we're all people and nobody's perfect. And it's all about
00:52:25 ◼ ► improving and being better. And it's also okay to have a bad day or a bad week or be off. And that's
00:52:33 ◼ ► just part of being human. And work is the thing that provides me the life that I want rather than life
00:52:39 ◼ ► being what provides me the work that I want. And I'm lucky enough to have both. I recognize that
00:52:43 ◼ ► that's like pretty privileged and not most people have that opportunity. And what I will say is had
00:52:49 ◼ ► I not gone through that kind of quote unquote grind era, I would not be where I am. Like, I don't think
00:52:55 ◼ ► I could build what I have now without having done that. So I recognize that it's like, it's part of the
00:53:00 ◼ ► process. However, where I am at my life at this point in time, like if I didn't have what I have now,
00:53:09 ◼ ► We think very similarly with this kind of stuff where I absolutely realize that I'm only here
00:53:15 ◼ ► because of all the sacrifice that I put in. It's not something I would have the ability to do today
00:53:21 ◼ ► or the desire to do today to grind in that way. And now I'm very happy with the audience that I have,
00:53:28 ◼ ► and I'm very grateful for them. And I would just like them all to stay around. That's kind of ideally
00:53:33 ◼ ► what I'm looking for. I'm not looking to be the next big thing. It was not where I want to be
00:53:44 ◼ ► No, I don't think so. Because my kind of overarching goal has always been make entertaining content that
00:53:53 ◼ ► can educate and can inform. And I don't think that's changed much. And I don't think changing the
00:54:02 ◼ ► size of my family or having my family really changes that either, because I have always been
00:54:07 ◼ ► so focused on learning and understanding why things are the way that they are. And I think way too many
00:54:13 ◼ ► people are complacent with just being like, oh, okay, sure. That's how a thing works. And you're like,
00:54:17 ◼ ► but don't you want to know why? And so that's kind of always been my MO, just to be curious. I don't think
00:54:26 ◼ ► Yeah, you see, I definitely feel like I've fallen into the place where I'm aware of what I can bring
00:54:33 ◼ ► to my family. And then when I work hard, what it can make sure that we have. Like, I'm very aware of that.
00:54:42 ◼ ► And I think about that a lot. Then in turn, I'm grateful for being in the position that I'm in.
00:54:48 ◼ ► Partly because it then helps me to reconcile with the fact that I'm not there as much as I want to be.
00:54:55 ◼ ► Yeah, that's fair. My wife will always say to me, and she's been saying it more and more lately,
00:54:59 ◼ ► she'll just say, you know, I'm really grateful for you, right? And like all of the work that I
00:55:04 ◼ ► recognize you put in for the family and the work, and I know it's like hard balancing the two. And on the
00:55:09 ◼ ► one hand, I'm very grateful. But on the other hand, I'm like, is this what you got to do?
00:55:12 ◼ ► I'm like, you do the same thing in your domain. And like, I hope that I'm grateful to her in
00:55:18 ◼ ► vocalizing that because I absolutely am. But like, it's good to thank people for those things. But I'm
00:55:23 ◼ ► also kind of like, yeah, well, what do you expect? Like, this is what we've got to do. So I'm just
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00:57:19 ◼ ► Squarespace for the support of this show and all of Relay. So I think you can tell a lot about someone,
00:57:25 ◼ ► maybe the things that they're not aware of about themselves and what they prioritize by looking at
00:57:30 ◼ ► their home screens. So I asked you to share your home screen with me and I asked some questions about
00:57:35 ◼ ► your home screen. Okay. Well, first off, I wanted to just note that the Rivian widget that you have
00:57:41 ◼ ► at the top of your home screen looks really nice. Handsome, right? Yeah. Is their app as good as this
00:57:47 ◼ ► appears? It's very beautiful. My main complaint with the Rivian app is that, so the tap targets are very
00:57:55 ◼ ► large, which is nice because like it's a key and you've got your hands full and when you need to go
00:57:59 ◼ ► into the app, which shouldn't be that often, it's nice to have big, huge buttons and the buttons are
00:58:02 ◼ ► huge. But on the flip side, there is very little information density. Right. And I do like the Tesla
00:58:07 ◼ ► kind of has their quick five, six buttons you can hit at the tap of a thumb and I've kind of go like
00:58:12 ◼ ► scroll, scroll, tap. But it is, it's visually gorgeous. It does not look like an iOS or Android
00:58:17 ◼ ► app at all. It's like its own thing. But yeah, the widget's awesome. I leave it there because it's a live
00:58:22 ◼ ► activities widget. So you can just tap it and then it does its own thing in the background. Doesn't launch
00:58:26 ◼ ► the app or anything, which is great. That's nice. So like climate precondition and it's warm when I get in the
00:58:31 ◼ ► car. Love it. I'm hopeful that their push into making slightly smaller vehicles is their beginnings
00:58:39 ◼ ► of thinking that they will leave America, come to Europe. Right. Like not just be an American car
00:58:45 ◼ ► company because the, is it the R3, their little one? That car excites me. I like that one. It's sick. I
00:58:53 ◼ ► want that too. They did say, I saw some stuff this morning about the R2. They've redesigned the hood
00:58:58 ◼ ► so that it matches like pedestrian collision requirements for the EU because they did say
00:59:04 ◼ ► they are intending to ship the R2 to Europe and there will be markets in which it's desired,
00:59:09 ◼ ► but the R2 is still quite large. Well, I think it's similar-ish in size to the Model Y, right?
00:59:16 ◼ ► It's bigger because it's so much taller. Yeah. It's pretty close to the Model X actually.
00:59:25 ◼ ► But it's footprint. Yeah. Because our roads are small. Sure. So as long as it can fit in our lanes,
00:59:31 ◼ ► it's fine. Like the R1 would not work here at all. Like it just wouldn't. You couldn't drive that
00:59:35 ◼ ► thing around. No. It's big. Big, big, big car. But I'm hopeful that these other ones would enable
00:59:38 ◼ ► them to come here because it looks nice. Yeah. And everything I know and all the people I know that
00:59:42 ◼ ► have Rivians, they speak really highly of it. They're fantastic cars. Yep. You are the first person I've
00:59:48 ◼ ► seen with the Apple Passwords app on their home screen. Yeah. And I'm just intrigued for like,
00:59:54 ◼ ► what do you need that on your home screen for? Well, I still need sometimes to get like OTPs
01:00:02 ◼ ► because we do stuff all the time with a bunch of gadgets here. And I'll often log into like my
01:00:08 ◼ ► accounts to download a piece of software or to get a license key or whatever. And it's not always a Mac.
01:00:13 ◼ ► Sometimes it's a PC. Sometimes it's something else. And rather than going through the whole
01:00:16 ◼ ► song and dance and being like, I'm going to install the Passwords Chrome extension onto
01:00:20 ◼ ► this Windows laptop, or I'm going to download one password where I moved from, I just keep it on my
01:00:24 ◼ ► screen. And if I need to type in a password and raw text, I will. But it's frequent enough that I
01:00:28 ◼ ► have it there. It's for manual entry when that needs to happen, which is a few times a week.
01:00:34 ◼ ► That is an app that I am actively developing. That hideous icon will change before launch.
01:00:46 ◼ ► I have two apps that I've developed. I say that in air quotes because I've probably only written
01:00:52 ◼ ► 30 lines of code total. But yes, the idea is, I think you guys have talked about this or Federico
01:00:58 ◼ ► definitely has. There's an app called When Did I? It's this idea of like, when was the last time I did
01:01:03 ◼ ► So it's not something that's important enough to go into your to-do list or into your calendar.
01:01:07 ◼ ► When did I change the furnace filter or whatever? There are several apps in this category. I used
01:01:13 ◼ ► When Did I for a couple of years. I think they're all terrible. And so I have developed my own that
01:01:20 ◼ ► kind of elevates what that app is because there are a lot of things that I don't think are important
01:01:26 ◼ ► enough to be in a to-do list because to-dos I treat as something that like actively needs to be done
01:01:30 ◼ ► and something that needs to be done sometime this month. Like that's not a to-do. That's like a
01:01:35 ◼ ► checklist item. So this app will consist of like, when was the last time I did stuff, but also have
01:01:41 ◼ ► chores constituted in like time zones. So like you need to do this within the next couple of weeks
01:01:46 ◼ ► rather than like a specific day or whatever. And then the last thing it will do, which I wish
01:01:51 ◼ ► more task-based apps did. And this will sound like a crazy person thing to you probably, but there are
01:01:59 ◼ ► a lot of things that like I need to be reminded of that I don't want as reminders. So like take the
01:02:03 ◼ ► trash out. That's something that I need to do every Monday night because the trash comes Tuesday morning.
01:02:08 ◼ ► I used to put it in my to-do list, but then what would end up happening is because I have enough
01:02:15 ◼ ► things in to-do list and there's enough categories within to-do list, I'd like get into my to-do list.
01:02:19 ◼ ► I'm like, oh, the last three times I was supposed to check off, take out the garbage, I didn't.
01:02:23 ◼ ► So I have three weeks worth of the take out the garbage recurring notifications. So the thing that
01:02:30 ◼ ► I've implemented into this app, I'm calling presumed completion. So this idea that like it sends you the
01:02:35 ◼ ► notification and then if you didn't interact with it, well, it's just going to assume you did it
01:02:41 ◼ ► because the trash comes Tuesday morning and I either did or did not take it out. It doesn't
01:02:46 ◼ ► matter to me to check it off. There's no point in leaving it unchecked by next Thursday because
01:02:52 ◼ ► it's pointless now. I see. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. So by item, you'll be able to say,
01:02:56 ◼ ► hey, remind me of this, but if I don't check it off, just assume I did it. There's a couple other
01:03:01 ◼ ► things that I'm excited about, but it became, and this I think is true with a lot of people that
01:03:05 ◼ ► start vibe coding stuff. It became very complex. So I had a little bit of future bloat. I'm trying
01:03:10 ◼ ► to pare stuff down. And as a testing ground to kind of improve my own skills in UX design and all of
01:03:18 ◼ ► that stuff, I was like, okay, rather than try to do this right now, I'm just going to make a whole
01:03:23 ◼ ► separate app that's a lot easier. And that took me like, I don't know, four or five days and it's
01:03:28 ◼ ► already done and I have an icon and everything. It's a journaling app that doesn't suck because I've
01:03:32 ◼ ► been wanting to document my days with my daughter and funny things, but I've tried everything and
01:03:38 ◼ ► none of them are good. I think Apple journal is probably the closest one, but I still don't like
01:03:42 ◼ ► it. Day one. You'd like to try day one. I tried day one. The problem I had with day one as well,
01:03:47 ◼ ► and mine is probably the most similar to day one. I feel my main concern with all of them is they become
01:03:52 ◼ ► too scrapbooky. I'm like, I don't want to scrapbook. I want to just like put some stuff down and none of
01:03:58 ◼ ► them, I think make very good use of LLMs. I write all day long. And so I want to be able to type
01:04:05 ◼ ► something out, but sometimes I just want to ramble. And so one of the features is it's actually been a
01:04:10 ◼ ► lot of fun where I'll push the recording button and it uses, you can either choose to download a
01:04:16 ◼ ► whisper model or use Apple's local model for a speech to text. And then it actually goes to the
01:04:22 ◼ ► Apple foundation model on device to clean up that text and format it to then push to a cloud model.
01:04:29 ◼ ► So then it goes to, I have it going to Haiku 4.5 from Claude, but the cloud model will read your journal
01:04:37 ◼ ► entry. If you elect for it to do that, you can also do it through the private cloud compute, but Apple's
01:04:42 ◼ ► models are just not very powerful right now. I'm hoping that changes with the Gemini stuff, but Haiku
01:04:47 ◼ ► then responds with a couple of like follow-up questions because sometimes when I feel I'm
01:04:52 ◼ ► rambling, like I miss some stuff and it's looking for not as much like, how did this make you feel?
01:04:58 ◼ ► But more of like a, oh, you said you went to your grandma's 90th birthday party. Where was it? And so
01:05:04 ◼ ► it's asking more kind of like story building detail. And then you can respond and it will show in a nice
01:05:10 ◼ ► formatted journal entry. And then the other thing that I'm having it do that I was skeptical would work
01:05:14 ◼ ► well, but it's actually working great is it automatically pulls out kind of highlights that
01:05:20 ◼ ► it thinks you'll want to refer to later. And so there's your main journal screen, which is like,
01:05:25 ◼ ► here's all your journal entries by date, like all journal apps are. And then the highlights tab
01:05:29 ◼ ► is AI curated single liners that you have from your entries that are pretty funny. And I've been using it
01:05:36 ◼ ► for like three, four weeks now. And it's been fun tapping that tab where it'll like show you a picture
01:05:40 ◼ ► or it'll show me like a joke that I wrote down that I never told it to put that in the thing.
01:05:44 ◼ ► But like, that's the thing that it's recalling. It's pretty cool. And I'm going to make it free
01:06:08 ◼ ► Yep. That's a great question. And that's why for my real app, the chore clock one, I will probably
01:06:15 ◼ ► end up hiring a developer at the end and being like, can you clean up the slop and like a couple of the
01:06:21 ◼ ► things that I know it can't do. And maybe that's naive of me to think that that's possible. But I've
01:06:26 ◼ ► talked to a few developers that are like, yeah, that's possible. It's doable. So we'll see.
01:06:31 ◼ ► What I will say is for somebody who took a little bit of C sharp in high school and then
01:06:37 ◼ ► determined within probably two weeks of being in that class, like development is not for me. I'm
01:06:41 ◼ ► never going to be good at this. It actually has been fun kind of looking at Swift UI and trying to
01:06:46 ◼ ► relearn some stuff. I still suck at any level of coding, but I now feel like I'm pretty competent
01:06:52 ◼ ► working around Xcode and stuff. And it's been cool learning a new skill, even if it's kind of a
01:07:06 ◼ ► Yeah. Okay. So I've been using Snapchat since I was in high school. So I still talk to my wife and my
01:07:14 ◼ ► friends largely through Snapchat. Like we'll send each other goofy pictures or videos or yeah, there's
01:07:19 ◼ ► probably like five or six people that I send Snapchats to not every day, but almost. And it's
01:07:24 ◼ ► a terrible app. I mean, it just sucks, but it's one of those things where we're like, well, we use it.
01:07:30 ◼ ► And so what are we going to use instead? I mean, I guess like, there's nothing that we send that you
01:07:34 ◼ ► couldn't just send as an iMessage because at the end of the day, it's just like, it's always video
01:07:37 ◼ ► stuff, but it's kind of nice. Like I like that. It's not sent through iMessage because I like to keep
01:07:43 ◼ ► most of the media that's sent to me and that's just ballooning my iCloud size. And I don't want
01:07:49 ◼ ► a bunch of like stupid videos of squirrels that we send each other, but like, that's a great thing
01:07:53 ◼ ► for Snapchat where you watch it and that just is gone and you don't have to worry about it. And so
01:08:01 ◼ ► And Narwhal, that's a Reddit app. I used to use this app a lot. I ended up kind of using Reddit less
01:08:08 ◼ ► and less over time, but do you spend a lot of time on Reddit? Are you using it for fun, for research,
01:08:21 ◼ ► neighborhood and stuff. And I live in a really fun part of Salt Lake City. I live in like the
01:08:26 ◼ ► historic district where a bunch of festivals and stuff happen. And so like, it's fun to be able to
01:08:30 ◼ ► see like, oh, what's going on? Or when traffic's horrible, I can open up Reddit and be like, oh,
01:08:34 ◼ ► that's why. So I use it a lot for that. And then also there are a number of communities that I kind
01:08:40 ◼ ► of like passively follow. When I develop a new interest or hobby, like there's always a subreddit.
01:08:46 ◼ ► So I'll often kind of go and add it and casually kind of look at stuff in there. So yeah, I don't
01:08:52 ◼ ► use it every single day, but I probably use it as much as most social media apps. And I don't like
01:08:59 ◼ ► Reddit as a platform. I don't like Reddit management, but it is pretty good at the thing that it's good
01:09:06 ◼ ► that. And I have not found anything like there's always a Reddit community and it's generally pretty
01:09:11 ◼ ► well indexed. And I still think forums are the best way to document and converse with people on the web.
01:09:16 ◼ ► Reddit, I think is secondary to that. I hate that so many communities and like documentation is moving
01:09:24 ◼ ► to discord. Don't put documentation on discord. Stop that. That's not a place to put like instructions
01:09:29 ◼ ► and manuals and, but everybody's doing that. And so whenever there's a Reddit community instead,
01:09:34 ◼ ► I will use that because it's just there forever. It's indexed by Google searches. You don't have to
01:09:39 ◼ ► like know keywords. Discord sucks. I hate it. So we've reached that point in the episode when I would like
01:09:44 ◼ ► to give you the opportunity to let our listeners know about things that you're excited about right
01:09:52 ◼ ► What would you like to promote? Yeah. It's something that has been in progress for quite
01:09:57 ◼ ► some time, has been put on pause and restarted many times. Nobody better steal my idea and do it before
01:10:03 ◼ ► me, but we have been working on putting an M4 Mac mini inside of a 3D printed and then a highly polished
01:10:13 ◼ ► clone of the Lumen case from Severance. Oh my gosh. So there was a reproduction keyboard that kind of
01:10:23 ◼ ► did a Kickstarter thing. They sent one for the video and then we've been working with a metal fab to
01:10:29 ◼ ► develop the stand and then the 3D print. It's a big, we wanted to make it full size. We're using a 13 inch
01:10:35 ◼ ► OLED where the display would be. And then we're even going to have like functional drive bays and stuff
01:10:42 ◼ ► too for like, it's going to be cool. Anyway, the 3D print is such a large 3D print that typically you'd
01:10:49 ◼ ► have to break it up into multiple slices and we'll create that for people because I do want to give
01:10:54 ◼ ► the files for free to any nutso that wants to do it. But I'm like, I need a bigger printer. So we got
01:10:59 ◼ ► this printer called the Soval Max 8, I think. And it is an enormous 3D printer. It is just colossally
01:11:06 ◼ ► huge. And it's big enough to print the shell all in one go. That's quite large. I think it's like 17
01:11:12 ◼ ► inches across. The problem with it is that 3D printers, if you think about the way that like
01:11:19 ◼ ► gantries and, you know, tolerances work over great distances, it's just your standard run of the mill
01:11:26 ◼ ► kind of core XY printer. And the larger the printer gets, the more noticeable the manufacturing
01:11:35 ◼ ► tolerance deficiencies. So it has taken quite some time to get something calibrated enough that we can
01:11:42 ◼ ► have kind of like a good first layer and have it build up and have it not jam because you still have
01:11:46 ◼ ► just a standard printhead, but it's this enormous printer. But that should be fun eventually. It's still
01:11:51 ◼ ► probably a couple months out, but we wanted to get it really polished. And then maybe even,
01:11:55 ◼ ► we're still trying to decide whether or not we make kits because like the stand is like stamped steel.
01:12:00 ◼ ► And we're like, technically, if people wanted to build one, we could make a few so that you could
01:12:05 ◼ ► like buy it kind of ready to go. You'd still have to do the printing, but all the other components and
01:12:10 ◼ ► hardware so that you don't have to source that yourself because it's kind of been a pain in the
01:12:18 ◼ ► And it would be basically no money that I would make off of it. So I don't know that I care to do that.
01:12:23 ◼ ► But the reason I'm compelled to do it is there's so many amazing 3D printer projects like that,
01:12:29 ◼ ► where someone will be like, I made this thing. And you're like, holy crap, that's amazing. I'm going
01:12:32 ◼ ► to do it. And then the documentation sucks and they don't really tell you how to do it. And they're
01:12:36 ◼ ► like, yeah, use a screw here. And you're like, but what kind of screw and where? And by the time that
01:12:41 ◼ ► you decide to do it on your own, it's not worth doing, or you find that it looks really polished in
01:12:46 ◼ ► the unveil. And then when you start building it yourself, you're like, oh, this part doesn't fit,
01:12:51 ◼ ► or this was glued together. Or he doesn't mention about this not working at all, but it doesn't work.
01:12:55 ◼ ► Like what's the matter? And so that's why I'm like, it would be nice to have like a really polished kit
01:13:04 ◼ ► I really hope that you enjoyed this show. I've been looking forward to talking to Quinn
01:13:08 ◼ ► about this stuff for months now. And I really hope that you like the different approach that
01:13:12 ◼ ► we took with this one. Now, while I tried to keep the specific parenting talk at a minimum in the
01:13:18 ◼ ► episode, I do think that maybe some parents or parents to be may actually want some product
01:13:23 ◼ ► recommendations from Quinn and I. So that's what more text is all about this time, a back and forth