00:00:00 ◼ ► Welcome back to the State of the Workflow series on the Cortex podcast. I'm your host, Mike Hurley, and this time I'm welcoming Casey Newton to the show. Casey is the writer of the Platformer newsletter, one of my favorite publications focused on technology. Casey focuses on tech platforms and the impacts that they have on our lives. He's also the co-host of the Hard Fork podcast from the New York Times. I've followed Casey's work for years, since before he was writing Platformer, when he was writing at The Verge.
00:00:29 ◼ ► I've always liked his fresh style. He's very funny. He has excellent sources, and he breaks big stories as part of Platformer. So I wanted to see how he does it and how he manages this workload. Casey also thinks a lot about his productivity and his tools and systems, and I reckon it's going to come out in this episode. I also want to ask you to stick around at the end of the show for a very special message about our work this year with St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. So now, welcome Casey Newton.
00:00:59 ◼ ► To Cortex. So, Casey, I want to get started by asking you the important question. What is the most important device for you for getting your work done?
00:01:12 ◼ ► You know, I know that we now live in a mobile world, but as I reflect on the tools that I use to get things done, my phone is one of them. But if I could only have one, I would still want my laptop.
00:01:26 ◼ ► I'm noticing as a sense over the course of the series, different groups of people gravitate in different ways. And any writer I'm starting to expect will always say their laptop. Because it's like you can get most of what you need done on the laptop. You can still text people. You can still use maps.
00:01:42 ◼ ► You might look a bit weird walking down the street doing it, but you could if you had to. But you can't beat the real keyboard, right?
00:01:48 ◼ ► No. I mean, imagine writing a 1500 word essay on your phone. Like, the very thought makes me tremble.
00:01:56 ◼ ► Every once in a while, I'll make a mistake and I'll want to go edit my post afterwards and I'll do it on my phone because I'm out somewhere in the world and it's torture every single time.
00:02:04 ◼ ► I can imagine actually editing being more annoying than writing because you've got to like go through and like tap in just the right spots.
00:02:14 ◼ ► Do you ever write on anything like an iPad or any other tablet or anything like that? Or is it always a laptop?
00:02:18 ◼ ► Sometimes. Every once in a while, I'll take like a three-day weekend kind of trip. And I know that I don't really need a laptop for anything. So I have an iPad with a keyboard attachment and I'll just throw that on. And I like it. I like kind of having the laptop junior. But if I'm being honest, that's probably something I'm doing three or four times a year tops.
00:02:42 ◼ ► I have one of these M4 MacBook Pros. Because, you know, to run Chrome these days, Mike, you can't get by with a simple M3. You have to upgrade. Yeah.
00:02:54 ◼ ► And when we've got AI like dripping out of our browsers in the future, like, you know, it's going to need all the RAM you can give it.
00:03:01 ◼ ► All right. So I want to jump into the workflow. I want to look kind of start to finish of how an issue of Platformer, your wonderful newsletter, is made.
00:03:10 ◼ ► I want to start off with where the ideas come from. How much of what you write for Platformer is driven by news versus maybe themes or ideas that you want to cover?
00:03:20 ◼ ► So I think there are a few different kinds of platformer editions that come out. One is essentially just a straight ahead news story. I went out in the world. I found something out. And I write it down. Those tips can come from anywhere. I put my contact information in every email. People send me emails. They send me messages on Signal. And I kind of do it that way.
00:03:48 ◼ ► But another thing that I do in Platformer is a kind of news analysis where I wake up in the morning. I see what the big story of the day is on my beat.
00:03:57 ◼ ► And I start thinking about how could I move this forward? What is being unsaid? How does this connect to other stories that have come before? What does this thing that happened today predict about what is going to happen very soon?
00:04:24 ◼ ► Coming up on eight, Platformer itself is about to turn five. I wrote a newsletter at The Verge before then. And there have been different eras. In some eras, it's very easy. I sort of know every morning when I wake up immediately what I'm going to write about. And then there are eras where it's harder. And I have to work harder to figure it out. But those are some of the main ways that I get ideas.
00:04:47 ◼ ► Yeah, I know that feeling. Like, there's always stuff happening. But sometimes it's like, is this actually the stuff I want to be talking about?
00:04:54 ◼ ► You are actually responsible for being the news sometimes, right? Like, some of the stuff that you will write about becomes the news that other people will write about.
00:05:02 ◼ ► What is it like, for as much as you could talk about, I know this is obviously quite sensitive, but what is it like working with sources? Because I imagine you are getting stuff all the time.
00:05:12 ◼ ► Some of it's real, some of it's not. On another podcast that I do with Jason Snell, you know, we look at a lot of Apple rumors. And one of the things we're always talking about is like trying to understand what the beginning of that rumor is. Like, what do you use as like an idea of like, yes, this is something I want to kind of expand on and write about?
00:05:30 ◼ ► As you probably imagine, it varies quite a bit by the story, by the person. People have different motivations for sharing things. I write a lot about tech policy, the intersection between platforms and democracy. And my work often speaks to people inside companies who are trying to do the right thing.
00:05:51 ◼ ► They got into this because they want to make the world a better place. They see tech as a point of leverage where they can do that. At some point, for many of those people, it will stop feeling like that's possible at the place where they're working, because there will be some sort of change. They'll stop doing something they were doing before. They cut a team that was doing something really important. They discover something that they want the outside world to know that their company refuses to do anything about.
00:06:17 ◼ ► Those are usually the moments that people will get in touch with me. I find that in general, if you write about a subject long enough, and you give people inside these companies a sense that you actually care about it, you will start to build trust with them. And at some point, they may say to themselves, hey, I actually want to talk to this person about what's happening.
00:06:36 ◼ ► It can also work the other way, too, where I will get in touch with someone and hope that they will tell me something. Candidly, I do less of that. I always feel awkward trying to get people to tell me stuff that they're not supposed to. If I were a better journalist, I'd do that a lot more. But yeah, that's the basic way.
00:06:52 ◼ ► But I guess over time, you end up building a roster of people, and I expect they're probably getting in touch with you sooner than you would even know to get in touch with them on a lot of things, right?
00:07:02 ◼ ► Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's the dream. You know, I mean, when Elon Musk took over Twitter and started to gut that workforce, I've been covering Twitter for like a decade. And I truly could not even keep up with the tips that were coming into my signal inbox, because so much was breaking simultaneously. And I think I'll probably always look back on that as one of my favorite periods of reporting, just because it was so easy.
00:07:24 ◼ ► I mean, similarly, you know, you mentioned that I'm taken back to all the great work you did at Basecamp and 37 Signals. That was like a similar time where like, it just felt like every couple of hours, you had another new article. It was amazing.
00:07:37 ◼ ► Yeah, that was another really special one where I would say that I managed to get in touch with one or two employees and build some trust. And one thing that I always say at the end of every interview is who else should I talk to?
00:07:52 ◼ ► And sometimes that just ends up in a dead end, because they're like, I don't know. But in this case, they're like, Oh, talk to him and talk to her. And let me give you their phone number. And like, pretty soon, I really did feel like I talked to half the company.
00:08:02 ◼ ► I know I would feel a lot of responsibility in that scenario. And I feel like I would be quite anxious about it. Like, I imagine that you must have to take a lot of device security stuff really seriously in this line of work.
00:08:15 ◼ ► It sort of depends on the company, but some of them are incredibly invasive, I would say when it comes to their employees devices and privacy, companies like Meta will hire former intelligence agency employees to do these kind of internal reviews.
00:08:33 ◼ ► So if they suspect someone is leaking, they bring them into a room and they intimidate them. It's like, you know, give me your device and show me whose phone number you have in your device.
00:08:43 ◼ ► So that stuff's really spooky. And so I think over the years, a bigger part of being a reporter is helping the source understand what they might be up against, which often works against the interest of the reporter, by the way.
00:08:56 ◼ ► Like, typically, the reporter wants to break news. But I think if you're a good person, and you want the people you're talking to to keep their jobs, you do have to explain the risk to them.
00:09:05 ◼ ► And then you have to take whatever steps you can come up with together to protect them. So that's yeah, it's a dance.
00:09:10 ◼ ► So if you have something you want to cover, you have an idea for a story, where do you keep the ideas? Where do your ideas get saved?
00:09:18 ◼ ► So I'm sort of bad at this, because I do it in a lot of different places. And I sort of always have aspirations to do it slightly differently. So I'll tell you a few of the things that I do while making clear that I do not recommend any of these systems, because I think they're sort of like psychotic and self defeating.
00:09:37 ◼ ► So the main thing that I do in the morning is a kind of daily journaling practice. And for that, I use capacities. Five years ago, I started doing this in Rome, which had sort of invented the concept of bidirectional linking, and did Rome for like a year, but it didn't really develop very quickly. So I tried obsidian for a while, then I tried something called mem, then I was sort of ready to give up on everything.
00:10:04 ◼ ► But one of my readers was like, you have to try capacities. And so I tried capacities, because I kind of have a problem. And I just kind of loved it. It is pretty simple, it can do complicated stuff. I don't use most of the complicated features. What I like is, it opens every day to a daily note. I sit down in the morning, I create a bullet point, and then I just kind of empty my mind. A lot of the stuff I'm emptying my mind about is just personal stuff.
00:10:30 ◼ ► A lot of it is like, what I did for dinner last night with my boyfriend, I like just kind of having a record of that kind of stuff, because it's fun to go back a year later and be like, what was I doing at this time last year, you know, so none of that is really productive at all, except that I do think it kind of clears my brain.
00:10:46 ◼ ► And then after that happens, typically, I will noodle on an idea, you know, I'm looking at headlines on tech meme, I'm thinking, I could write about this thing that's happened with meta right now, I could write about this thing that's happening at open AI. And then sometimes I'll start to do a kind of basic outline of like, well, I like to hit these three beats, or this thing happened earlier this week, I could sort of bring that in, I haven't really seen anybody make this connection yet.
00:11:14 ◼ ► So, some days, it is like very simple, like a sentence or two about what the call might be. Other times, I'll actually sort of like outline the call actually did this yesterday for the column that I wrote, you know, I knew I was going to do this. And it turns out that once a year, I just love writing about kind of what I'm doing with productivity. And so I'm platformer, I wrote like, here's basically everything I've learned over the past year. And it just so happened that I decided I kind of wanted to outline it in capacities. And so I did. Could I have done that literally anywhere else? Yes.
00:11:44 ◼ ► Like there's no superpowers in capacities that are making it easy. Except that I really do like this kind of time based note taking, putting everything into a daily note, creating a little miniature time capsule every day. And I kind of really like it. Now, it can also do tagging, linking, I've experimented with having a sort of big picture idea, like the internet is splintering into zones. And then as I see new stories that splintering into zones,
00:12:14 ◼ ► I will speak to that, I will throw those links into that note. And the hope has been that's going to lead me to some really cool columns. I think what I've learned over the past year is, by the time I've added the third or fourth link to that note, it's already occurred to me to write that story, right? Like there actually was not that much value in creating that note.
00:12:34 ◼ ► And as far as keeping track of all the links, like Google exists, ChatGPT can now find those stories. So even though I'm constantly drawn to this idea of like being a digital gardener, and like creating this like amazingly rich interconnected series of notes, having done this for five years now, I just have the learned experience that it is not that useful to me.
00:12:56 ◼ ► Yeah, I've spent a lot of time looking at this on the show, like the PKMs and all this kind of stuff, right? And the offboard brain. And I just always come back to I just search, like, I maybe I'll keep the notes, right? Like, and I'll just make some notes about stuff. Search is pretty good. Most of the time. And like, I'll find everything that I need from that.
00:13:17 ◼ ► You mentioned outlining capacities is outlining a typical part of your article writing process. Does that come before writing?
00:13:24 ◼ ► The way that I have learned to defeat like the terror of a blank page is by writing what I call the first draft. What I've learned over the years is that editing is 100% easier than writing. And so even if you write the worst sentence in the entire world, even if you just write down four keywords and a verb and a period, you will be able to edit that into a paragraph much easier than if you try to get it right.
00:13:54 ◼ ► Write the first time if you try to write a beautiful sentence right the first time. And so for me, I always begin by thinking like, what are the beats of this column? It's usually like, this thing happened a week ago, or a month ago. And it made us think this today, this new thing happened. And here's a little quote from the story where we learned what was really going on. And then from there, I get into whatever the column is going to be about. I bring in other voices, I contrast it with another new story. But like, structurally, that's how a lot of my columns are.
00:14:24 ◼ ► And so just like getting those beats down into an outline, it gives me the confidence that when I sit down to like do the dang thing, I have a roadmap, I know where I'm going, and I can write the piece in one and a half to two hours.
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00:15:52 ◼ ► support of this show and all of Relay. When it comes to doing the writing, what tools do you use for
00:16:00 ◼ ► that? So I do a lot of writing in Google Docs, even though I think it's a hideous product. It's
00:16:06 ◼ ► basically disgusting to me. I get the sense that this is something that's pretty typical for people
00:16:11 ◼ ► that have worked at larger organizations at some point. Yeah. I mean, I think anyone who ever had
00:16:17 ◼ ► to like have their document edited by someone else would do this way. The reason I do it now
00:16:22 ◼ ► is because I have an editorial assistant at Platformer who writes link summaries for like
00:16:28 ◼ ► the links that I save that I put in every newsletter. And we can't both be in the CMS at the same time
00:16:34 ◼ ► on Ghost, which is the platform that we use. And so I just need to be somewhere else to write this
00:16:39 ◼ ► thing. And Google Docs is just the easiest thing to do. Well, never write directly in the CMS, right?
00:16:45 ◼ ► You should never be doing that. You know what? Here's what's actually interesting. This is a thing
00:16:49 ◼ ► that has gotten better in tech. It did used to be like 10 years ago. It was psychotic to write inside
00:16:53 ◼ ► the CMS. You can basically do it now. I hate to say it. You can. It is a joke, but like essentially
00:16:57 ◼ ► then don't write in Google Docs, right? Like everything's just saving everything constantly.
00:17:01 ◼ ► The reason you didn't write in the CMS before is because it didn't save. And if the browser crashed,
00:17:10 ◼ ► hey, your last thing didn't save. And that's usually how I learned that my home internet went down.
00:17:14 ◼ ► So yeah. And then it's like immediately copy and paste into a note and get on me today.
00:17:22 ◼ ► Yes, I do Google Docs in Chrome. Every once in a while, Lindsay, my assistant like finishes
00:17:26 ◼ ► early and I'm able to just write directly in the CMS and I like doing that as well. But it's one
00:17:30 ◼ ► of those two places. You mentioned editing. You said you have an editorial assistant. Are you
00:17:34 ◼ ► editing your own work? Do they help? Like, do you have other people help you with editing? How does
00:17:39 ◼ ► that work for you? Yeah. So until like last year at a managing editor, Zoe Schiffer, she edited my
00:17:45 ◼ ► columns. She's at Wired now. After she left, I experimented with just having chatbots do editing for
00:17:53 ◼ ► me. A year ago, they were really bad at this. They constantly told me that I was making mistakes that
00:17:58 ◼ ► I had not made. They would refer to text I had not written. They did not have access to the web. They
00:18:03 ◼ ► could not do any meaningful fact checking. They can do that now. And so now every day, like I'll usually
00:18:09 ◼ ► have ChatGPT, Gemini or both just go fact check my columns. They find mistakes all the time. They
00:18:16 ◼ ► find typos all the time. Grammatical mistakes, style errors. It's really quite good. And so I am actually
00:18:24 ◼ ► like delighted with the state of AI editing in this moment. Now, I also am very like confident as a writer.
00:18:31 ◼ ► I am not looking for structural help with my stories. I'm not looking for like feedback on like,
00:18:37 ◼ ► did you like my lead or like, did you like my kicker? If I were a more junior reporter, I would
00:18:42 ◼ ► absolutely want those things, but I'm old man now. So I just write the way I want to write and then try
00:18:46 ◼ ► to fix the typos. Yeah. It's gotten so much better. I mean, I know that I tried to use this kind of
00:18:51 ◼ ► stuff in the past and I felt like, oh, it's just writing its own version of the thing that I was
00:18:56 ◼ ► writing. Yeah. It's like, we're not even in the same ballpark anymore, but it feels like with such
00:19:00 ◼ ► little instruction now, you can be like, just fix my grammar and punctuation. If you want to make some
00:19:05 ◼ ► recommendations, make them, but otherwise just keep this text the same. I find it to be really
00:19:09 ◼ ► good for that. For sure. And to be clear, like I actually don't even have it like recommend changes
00:19:14 ◼ ► to the text in terms of like, how would you like tighten this up? Like I truly am like leaning on
00:19:18 ◼ ► myself for that now. Maybe at some point I'll stop doing that, but I like the system I have so far.
00:19:22 ◼ ► It always asks though, right? Yeah. It's always like, let me know if you want me to completely redo
00:19:30 ◼ ► Is that the only spot that AI is playing a role in your worker platform or are you using it for
00:19:36 ◼ ► research too? Yeah. Some of the things that it's great at number one, finding sources. So if you're
00:19:42 ◼ ► writing about something and you have not read all the academic literature and you want to know who has
00:19:47 ◼ ► researched this, ChatGPT will go out and they will find you the research. They'll find you the people
00:19:52 ◼ ► that wrote it and they'll find you their email address and their phone number. And they'll do that in
00:19:56 ◼ ► about a minute. That's incredibly useful. I'm starting to use it all the time. It's also really
00:20:00 ◼ ► good at finding a time when. So a lot of times when I'm writing the column, I'll be trying to link
00:20:06 ◼ ► something to previous times where it happened. You can now go into ChatGPT, the thinking models in
00:20:12 ◼ ► particular are great at this and say, give me some examples of how the Trump administration is cracking
00:20:18 ◼ ► down on free speech. It's like, if I thought long enough, I would remember them, but I'd probably miss
00:20:22 ◼ ► some. And now I have a LLM that will just go sort of like pull up everything that's, you know, happened
00:20:27 ◼ ► since January. Or after the GPT-5 backlash, I said, pull up some other examples of when a tech company
00:20:34 ◼ ► cut off access to a model and caused an outcry. And it went and it did that for me. So I find that
00:20:40 ◼ ► really useful. So yeah, those are a couple I'd point out. Yeah. I feel like for me now, Google is where
00:20:47 ◼ ► I search when I know the thing I'm looking for. Like I know where I want to go. And ChatGPT is
00:20:52 ◼ ► where I don't know. It's like, I just have a question. I have no idea. But Google is just like a quick
00:20:56 ◼ ► jump to the thing that I want rather than remembering what the URL is. Yeah. I mean, obviously this stuff's
00:21:01 ◼ ► been around for a long time now. It has not changed the ethical considerations. At this point, how are you
00:21:15 ◼ ► When Dali first came out, I was like blown away by it. I was like, this is incredible. I can just like
00:21:20 ◼ ► make images now almost like creating illustrations or cartoons for my columns. And, you know, I would
00:21:27 ◼ ► never hire an illustrator to illustrate an individual column. Right. So I didn't feel like I was taking away
00:21:32 ◼ ► anyone's job by doing this. And it was fine for like a year. And then like people just turned on it and
00:21:38 ◼ ► people started sending me these emails. It's like, I'll never like buy a subscription a platformer if
00:21:42 ◼ ► you like keep putting the slop art in there. And eventually I just kind of declared defeat. And I
00:21:47 ◼ ► was like, okay, like y'all hate this. I'm gonna stop doing it. I do think that the way that these
00:21:52 ◼ ► systems were trained is incredibly unethical. I've talked about that a lot over the years. I think that
00:21:58 ◼ ► people should be compensated for the work that they did to build these models. The fact that nobody
00:22:02 ◼ ► could opt out of it, I think is really bad. And I think it's shameful. Unfortunately, we live in a
00:22:07 ◼ ► country where there's no accountability for anybody about anything, at least at the level of like
00:22:11 ◼ ► technology executives. And so I can keep talking about it. I can keep saying that I wish things
00:22:16 ◼ ► were better. And I can keep advocating for systems like Cloudflare's Paper Crawl, which hopefully will
00:22:22 ◼ ► incentivize people to keep making more webpages and actually compensate the people making them
00:22:25 ◼ ► and will be paid by the AI companies. So that's like kind of where I'm trying to put my advocacy energy
00:22:31 ◼ ► to like live in a more just world. I'm also just somebody who likes trying new things. I like trying new
00:22:35 ◼ ► software. I like doing things more efficiently. I'm also a solo entrepreneur running a business
00:22:40 ◼ ► trying to write three newsletters a week and make a podcast. So if there's a tool out there
00:22:45 ◼ ► that helps me as a research assistant, as an editor, and increasingly a lot of other things,
00:22:51 ◼ ► I'm in a similar spot to you, which is like, I really wish this was done differently. However,
00:22:57 ◼ ► this is one of the biggest leaps in technology that I've seen in my career. Like, yeah, I can't deny
00:23:03 ◼ ► what these tools are doing. And what these tools are doing is it's impressive, even though there are
00:23:14 ◼ ► So you mentioned Ghost. This is the platform that you use for publishing. I know you originally
00:23:19 ◼ ► started on Substack and talking about more reporting, like you had like issues with Substack and the lack
00:23:24 ◼ ► of content moderation, which you have proven to be right at over time. Thank you. How did you come
00:23:31 ◼ ► to Ghost when it came the time for you to leave Substack? And have you been happy with that experience?
00:23:37 ◼ ► Yeah, for the most part, yes. When we decided we wanted to leave Substack, we looked at a couple
00:23:42 ◼ ► other options. The two main ones were one called Beehive and one called Ghost. Beehive is another
00:23:50 ◼ ► venture backed platform. They have a lot of outside investors, their valuation is creeping up. And I just
00:23:58 ◼ ► felt very burned with my experience trying to build a business on a platform that owed a lot of money to
00:24:06 ◼ ► Andreessen Horowitz. And I thought, I don't want to be in this position. Again, I do not want the fate of
00:24:13 ◼ ► my business to rest on what happens to this company. The cool thing about Ghost is that it is open source
00:24:22 ◼ ► software. And it's a bootstrap company that's been profitable for a long time. It's a small team.
00:24:30 ◼ ► And even if that company blew up, the software would still work. It's not like the servers would
00:24:36 ◼ ► be unplugged or be like sold to some private equity company. So there's just not as much pressure on Ghost
00:24:44 ◼ ► to do what Substack is doing now, which is push into podcasts and videos and ads and whatever else it's
00:24:52 ◼ ► going to take to live up to their insane valuation. And that just gives me a lot of peace of mind.
00:24:57 ◼ ► Even beyond the fact that Substack continues to host literal 1930 Nazi content, I just don't think
00:25:05 ◼ ► that business is going to have that great of an outcome. And I don't want my fortunes to be wrapped
00:25:13 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, we are, sorry to put you in this bucket, content creators, right? Essentially. And
00:25:18 ◼ ► we know what those businesses look like. And they can be really good for individuals and small teams.
00:25:23 ◼ ► But even with scaling that up to lots and lots and lots of people, I don't see a scenario where
00:25:28 ◼ ► that creates like a unicorn business. It's just, you can make a great business, but you're not going
00:25:35 ◼ ► No. Also, I was paying Substack tens of thousands of dollars a year to get the exact same level of
00:25:40 ◼ ► service that somebody who was paying them a hundred dollars a year was getting. Like there's always
00:25:45 ◼ ► been something really broken about their business model and the founders have not wanted to fix it.
00:25:50 ◼ ► They're just like, come for the network. We'll pump up your free subscribers and you'll be able to turn
00:25:54 ◼ ► those into paid subscribers. And you'll never even miss the 10% of your revenue that we're taking from
00:25:59 ◼ ► you. But if you click around, you'll see that this spring, some people's number of new free subscribers
00:26:04 ◼ ► started to drop precipitously. The thing is like, I write about tech platforms. I know how it works.
00:26:09 ◼ ► Yeah. And tech platforms do not become friendlier to creators over time. They start out friendly and then
00:26:14 ◼ ► they get less friendly. And we're now in the starting to get less friendly era of Substack.
00:26:18 ◼ ► So I just think we're going to hear a lot more squealing from the people over there as the
00:26:22 ◼ ► So yeah, Ghost, as you mentioned, is open source. They have a hosted version and you can self-host.
00:26:29 ◼ ► No. So we pay for Ghost Pro, which is their hosted service. It's like, I don't know, less than 20% of
00:26:35 ◼ ► the cost of Substack for us. They're super responsive, like great support. There are some things that we have
00:26:41 ◼ ► to do now ourselves that Substack did for us. So like Substack used to handle all of our customer service.
00:26:47 ◼ ► We now handle that ourselves. Substack would send out your like welcome email and your subscription
00:26:53 ◼ ► renewal email. And we now use a third party service called Outpost to do that for us because Ghost
00:26:58 ◼ ► doesn't do that natively. So are there like aches and pains along the way of like doing this ourselves?
00:27:03 ◼ ► Like, yes. But I'm just like, when I think about what it's going to be like in five years,
00:27:14 ◼ ► It's a three-person operation right now. So it's me, it's my editorial assistant who helps me
00:27:19 ◼ ► summarize the links every day. And then I have an executive assistant who does ad sales, customer
00:27:27 ◼ ► support, helps me manage like my calendar and various other administrative tasks. So we're a three-person
00:27:34 ◼ ► operation. Next month, we're going to have our first fellow. So for nine months, we're going to have
00:27:40 ◼ ► another younger reporter who's going to be working with me, learning from me, and hopefully leveling up
00:27:47 ◼ ► our AI coverage. So yeah, so next month, we're going to be four. Yeah, yeah, I'm really excited.
00:27:53 ◼ ► Somebody emailed me and they said, we would like to hire a fellow to work for you and do a bunch of
00:28:03 ◼ ► I'll do it. Yeah, I said, I'm sold. I said, you drive a hard bargain, but I'm going to allow it.
00:28:14 ◼ ► We use Discord. I don't like Slack. The app brings me no pleasure. Yes. And when I use Discord,
00:28:24 ◼ ► gaming offers. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Slack is one of those classic tools that had so much promise.
00:28:31 ◼ ► It was so exciting. And then it just stopped. Yeah. It turned out mostly to just be a place
00:28:37 ◼ ► inside the company that collects all the grievances about the company that would then leak out to
00:28:42 ◼ ► reporters like me. And so I often say that Slack is a piece of software that is built to destroy
00:28:46 ◼ ► companies. And it has taken down more than one. Slack is terrible for discovery process,
00:28:51 ◼ ► right? Absolutely. Here is my like very like pro management tip. It's like, if you run a company,
00:28:57 ◼ ► do not let the employees create their own channels. Okay. Like you're going to want to keep a very firm
00:29:02 ◼ ► hand. I think the issue is it is still work communication. Yeah. But it doesn't feel like
00:29:08 ◼ ► it. You know what? It's actually, that is also good advice for employees too, right? Because
00:29:13 ◼ ► you want to make sure that the things that you're saying, if you don't want them to ever be read by
00:29:18 ◼ ► management, don't say them in the company tool. It's true. Although it's always interesting to
00:29:24 ◼ ► me how many things employees do want management to see. But of course, if you take the path I
00:29:29 ◼ ► describe, what employees now do is they just start up their own separate Slacks or their own separate
00:29:33 ◼ ► signal groups. So, you know, the horses are out of the barn. The grievances will be collected.
00:29:37 ◼ ► I just, I find something uniquely distasteful about Slack as a place to run my business.
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00:31:37 ◼ ► Do you have any kind of to-do management amongst the team? Do you use Trello or Todoist or anything and share tasks?
00:31:46 ◼ ► No. Fortunately, we're small enough that I don't have to do that. I used to be really excited about those apps, but
00:31:54 ◼ ► then I realized that there's almost no upside to the individual worker of using those things. Like it is
00:32:01 ◼ ► always software that the manager has to force you to use and you're only ever going to use it begrudgingly
00:32:06 ◼ ► in like 90% of cases. And I just didn't want to run that kind of business where I was like forcing
00:32:12 ◼ ► employees to run software. So instead, I'm just on Discord. It's like, hey, can we do this? How's it going?
00:32:18 ◼ ► And that works really well. Now we're a three to four person team. So we can do that. If we were
00:32:23 ◼ ► 10 people, we probably would have to have a different system, but the level we're at, it's working great
00:32:27 ◼ ► for us. What is your current app of choice for reminders and tasks? So my hot take about this
00:32:35 ◼ ► is that every to-do list app is exactly the same. Like truly, they're all exactly the same, but I still
00:32:40 ◼ ► enjoy changing them out about every six months for aesthetic reasons. Like I think you should use the
00:32:46 ◼ ► to-do list app that you think is beautiful. Inevitably, it's going to fill up with a bunch
00:32:49 ◼ ► of stuff you don't want to do. You're going to look at the stuff that you haven't done and you're
00:32:52 ◼ ► going to think, I hate this to-do list app. I just want something that works for me. And then you'll
00:32:57 ◼ ► shift over and then it'll look so beautiful when there's nothing in it. And then, you know, over six
00:33:02 ◼ ► months, it'll fill up with stuff you haven't done and you'll change again. So I truly just change every
00:33:06 ◼ ► six months for no reason at all. I'm currently on Todoist. I think twist my arm. Todoist is the best
00:33:11 ◼ ► of them. I think they're the most thoughtful and it feels like they pay the most attention to how
00:33:15 ◼ ► people actually work and like what would be easy to help them get stuff done. But do I use 98%
00:33:20 ◼ ► of the functionality of Todoist? Absolutely not. Yeah, I agree with you. I have lived that life
00:33:24 ◼ ► of moving to-do managers and eventually I was just like, I'm just sticking with Todoist. Sometimes
00:33:29 ◼ ► I wished that to-dos had a system that was kind of like email so you could move without having to
00:33:35 ◼ ► manually retype everything because no export tool works the way that you want it to. They just don't.
00:33:42 ◼ ► Would you like just a blank list of stuff with no dates on anything anymore? Not really. That's not
00:33:47 ◼ ► what I was looking for. I mean, sometimes I think that the bullet journal people have figured this
00:33:51 ◼ ► out where it's like, if it's really important, you actually should just recopy it into your planner
00:33:56 ◼ ► every single day. And the moment that you stop recopying it is the moment that you admit to yourself,
00:34:03 ◼ ► So if we're kind of like looking at your workflow, I jumped out for a moment, but like you've written
00:34:09 ◼ ► in Ghost, you've done all your research, you've written the post, you've put it out. How much time
00:34:14 ◼ ► do you spend promoting your work? Yeah, so probably like 10 or 15 minutes a day. Like every day,
00:34:22 ◼ ► I will go on to threads, blue sky and mastodon. I will usually pull a screenshot of whatever I think
00:34:31 ◼ ► is the most enticing thing in the column, craft a post, put it out there. I guess I should say I've
00:34:36 ◼ ► also been experimenting with LinkedIn, although less consistently. Sometimes I think about doing other
00:34:41 ◼ ► things, but I think like it's easy to imagine a world where I'm spending 30 minutes to an hour to
00:34:47 ◼ ► create like a video promo for Instagram and TikTok and trying to use that to drive subscribers. But
00:34:52 ◼ ► I think the effectiveness of that would be like very limited. Do you still find text-based social
00:34:59 ◼ ► media to provide you with the value that say Twitter used to like when it was the one place? No, no,
00:35:05 ◼ ► nothing is as good as Twitter. I grieve Twitter every single day. I refuse to use X. I find it disgusting,
00:35:10 ◼ ► but there's a cost to me because there are still a lot of customers that I could reach there. I just can't
00:35:16 ◼ ► bring myself to do it basically. Especially writing in AI because it feels like that's where all the
00:35:19 ◼ ► conversation is, right? I know. I hate it. It's like a sacrifice I'm making for a principled reason that
00:35:25 ◼ ► is costing me money. And so I do feel that every day, but I just can't imagine another way to live. You
00:35:29 ◼ ► know what I mean? I agree. Let me drop a name. I had dinner with Sam Altman last week. It was me and
00:35:33 ◼ ► nine other reporters. And I was trying to press him to like, I was like, Sam, Elon Musk hates your guts,
00:35:41 ◼ ► or at least he acts like he does. He's trying to destroy your company in court right now. And every day,
00:35:45 ◼ ► you and all of your employees go on X.com and you create value for him to help fund his effort to
00:35:52 ◼ ► destroy your company. Sam himself could personally single-handedly move all of AI Twitter wherever he
00:35:58 ◼ ► wanted to. If you went to threads, Blue Sky, there's rumors that OpenAI is building its own social network.
00:36:02 ◼ ► Make your own. Do anything. Literally. And I've made a suggestion to him more than once,
00:36:08 ◼ ► and I think it's starting to have an effect. So that is my hope. It may be that nothing is ever as good as
00:36:22 ◼ ► On Twitter, I used to really love the replies I would get. Like, I really love the audience that
00:36:26 ◼ ► I had on Twitter. There were like people who would show up all the time that it felt like we had this
00:36:30 ◼ ► like really fun, jokey relationship with. And that's like mostly gone. The closest that I have to that,
00:36:34 ◼ ► believe it or not, is on threads. On Blue Sky, I feel like I'm only ever talking to people who
00:36:39 ◼ ► are barely putting up with me and maybe hate me. And that's just like a lot of fun plays to hang
00:36:44 ◼ ► out. You know, I think like I follow you on threads. I mean, I don't know if you do this on
00:36:53 ◼ ► I mean, I started writing about social media because I thought it was fun. I thought it was
00:36:57 ◼ ► like fun to go on Twitter and write a little joke and see if people liked your joke. Like to me,
00:37:01 ◼ ► that was the whole appeal of it. And then I realized like, oh, wow, I could like grow an audience and
00:37:06 ◼ ► maybe like build a business. But like those were all secondary considerations to me. Mostly I just
00:37:10 ◼ ► wanted to like tell jokes and get attention. I mean, but there was a time where like that was
00:37:14 ◼ ► just what Twitter was. It was just jokes about technology. It was incredible. I know. And we'll
00:37:20 ◼ ► never get it. The amount of grief I have for Twitter blows my mind. I truly never thought I could miss a
00:37:25 ◼ ► piece of software the way that I miss Twitter. There truly has never been anything like it in my life.
00:37:30 ◼ ► No. And it just won't be again because no social network will ever be started with the same
00:37:39 ◼ ► aspirations that they had when they started. I mean, on one hand, I'm sort of like never say
00:37:44 ◼ ► never. Like you just kind of never know. But on the other hand, these things do evolve. And so I feel
00:37:49 ◼ ► like even if we get a replacement for Twitter in some ways, I do think it will look very different.
00:37:53 ◼ ► It will operate differently. So many people tried to create a one to one Twitter clone after Elon bought
00:37:58 ◼ ► it. And it was just impossible to get a critical mass. But I don't know. I mean, I think there's
00:38:04 ◼ ► reasons to be optimistic about blue sky. There's reasons to be optimistic about threads. And so I
00:38:08 ◼ ► try to live in hope rather than despair. Do you promote in any other way? Do you consider any other
00:38:15 ◼ ► outlets that you would get your word out? Obviously, you have your podcast hard fork. Do you consider
00:38:20 ◼ ► that as part promotion for platformer too? Or you see a misdistinct? Yeah, for sure. Because it happens
00:38:25 ◼ ► on a semi-regular basis that I'll write something that we will talk about on the show that week. And
00:38:29 ◼ ► you know, I usually get emails from people every week that say like, hey, like I finally became a
00:38:33 ◼ ► paid subscriber because I've been listening to on hard fork. I would not say it's an overwhelming
00:38:36 ◼ ► number. I think that there's a Venn diagram between the hard fork audience and the newsletter
00:38:40 ◼ ► audience. But they're sort of separate. Like people who like getting their news via podcasts and
00:38:45 ◼ ► people who like getting sober tech policy analysis on their inbox. It's not a perfect circle.
00:38:58 ◼ ► Do you know how people are reading your work? Are they reading in RSS, email, the web? Like,
00:39:09 ◼ ► Yes, mostly via email, second on the web, RSS, distant third. We work with Outpost to create
00:39:17 ◼ ► sort of token-gated RSS feeds. So if you're a paid subscriber, you can get full text RSS.
00:39:22 ◼ ► It's a very small percentage of our audience. I'm very happy to offer it to them, but it's not the
00:39:32 ◼ ► And I really want to try like audio narration of my columns, but I'm still thinking through the
00:39:37 ◼ ► You know, I was going to pitch you on this in the more text segment. I want to impress upon you why
00:39:47 ◼ ► But like, it's just so fascinating how email has made this comeback. I feel like in tech where it just
00:39:54 ◼ ► felt like we were all in on RSS, like it was Google reader and then that went away, but we just stuck
00:40:03 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, here's my theory. It's that most people get horrible emails all day. It's spam.
00:40:08 ◼ ► It's people who are asking you to do things who you've never heard of and want you to do something
00:40:13 ◼ ► stupid that would waste your time. Or it's somebody you work with who, you know, is making a request of
00:40:18 ◼ ► you. But then every once in a while, you get an email from someone you like and you think,
00:40:23 ◼ ► I love that guy. I wonder what's going on with him. And like for once in your life of staring at
00:40:28 ◼ ► email, you're happy. So I think that's like a very powerful dynamic and I'm glad it exists.
00:40:33 ◼ ► I like that. You've imagined that people get your email and they're like, I love that guy.
00:40:53 ◼ ► And what I like is that means that my email newsletters, they go in a place. So they're
00:40:59 ◼ ► not in my main inbox. So then when I'm ready to read a newsletter and I'll go and I get them
00:41:05 ◼ ► I use that in my like personal Gmail for like my main email at platformer. I just kind of like
00:41:10 ◼ ► get a fire hose of all of it. Like for whatever reason, I don't like it being segmented in that
00:41:15 ◼ ► way. But yeah, I mean, it definitely makes sense that email should have a tab that is just the
00:41:20 ◼ ► newsletters you subscribe to. Although selfishly, I love the idea that I just come directly to your
00:41:26 ◼ ► I love that guy. Are you an analytics person? Do you pay attention to view counts, that kind
00:41:33 ◼ ► A little bit. I try to keep like basic awareness of like what the open rate is, like how that's rising,
00:41:38 ◼ ► falling over time. But really the only two metrics that matter in my line of work are number of paid
00:41:45 ◼ ► subscribers and revenue. It's like beyond that, it's like, you know, who clicked on what story and
00:41:49 ◼ ► how many times and all that. It's like, first of all, it feels like very invasive to me to pay
00:41:53 ◼ ► attention to any of that stuff. So I truly don't. But also it's like I'm running a business. Like the
00:41:57 ◼ ► job of the business is for that one number to go up. And so I try to put all my attention there.
00:42:01 ◼ ► Do you pay attention to feedback? I'm sure you get lots of feedback coming in via the many social
00:42:07 ◼ ► media platforms and probably by email. I expect people will come reply to you, I guess.
00:42:10 ◼ ► Do you monitor feedback? Do you try and get a gauge for what people think about what you're writing?
00:42:19 ◼ ► I mean, you could though, right? Like you could just be like, I've thrown this out into the world
00:42:25 ◼ ► No, I do. I read all the emails I get. I try to respond to people. I don't respond to as many people
00:42:31 ◼ ► as I would like to. Platform readers are wonderful. Like they're incredibly supportive.
00:42:36 ◼ ► They're very curious. They're smart. They're open-minded. So I love hearing from readers. And in fact,
00:42:41 ◼ ► anything I'm trying to figure out, like how can I kind of juice that flywheel to get it going? Like
00:42:46 ◼ ► something I've been trying to do ever since I started platformer, but I've never figured out
00:42:49 ◼ ► is just how to build community. You know, a lot of my readers are like executives at tech platforms.
00:42:54 ◼ ► They don't want to like be commenting under their own name, like getting into like fights with random
00:42:59 ◼ ► people in my comments. And so I've never figured out a way to like get my community talking to each
00:43:04 ◼ ► other because they just work at companies and I feel like they would get in trouble if they were like
00:43:08 ◼ ► out there under their own name. So it's been a constant challenge for me and just, I've never figured
00:43:13 ◼ ► it out. How do you respond to criticism? Violently. I will say, I'm going to come to your house.
00:43:19 ◼ ► Say goodbye to your loved ones because it's over for you. It sort of depends on who it comes from.
00:43:24 ◼ ► If it is like a peer, I always take that criticism really seriously. If it's a reader, I take the
00:43:31 ◼ ► criticism seriously. I mean, like, again, I feel like I selected for like very smart readers. If I was just
00:43:36 ◼ ► writing about like labubus or something, I could imagine just having readers who I didn't really feel
00:43:43 ◼ ► like I shared a lot of experience and values with, but I'm writing a tech policy newsletter for people
00:43:50 ◼ ► who care about tech policy. And so usually if somebody is like, I completely disagree with you,
00:43:55 ◼ ► even if I don't agree with them, I'm probably going to learn something. So for the most part,
00:44:10 ◼ ► that it's such a self-selecting group of people, the likelihood of them being like weird and nasty
00:44:25 ◼ ► And while I think there are some exceptions to this, for the most part, I do think it's true.
00:44:29 ◼ ► Like, I don't think I have a lot of paid hate readers, but that's great because who wants hate
00:44:33 ◼ ► That would be a very weird dynamic, right? Like, I really don't like you, but I'm going to give you
00:44:39 ◼ ► I'll draw a comparison. If I compare the emails that I get about Platformer to the comments that
00:44:44 ◼ ► people leave about me on Apple Podcasts, it is night and day. And a reason for that is because
00:45:00 ◼ ► and there are at least 10 things I would change about his personality. And I'm just going to write
00:45:03 ◼ ► those all down here on Apple Podcasts. If Apple Podcasts were paid, it wouldn't be that way.
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00:47:12 ◼ ► and Relay. We've spoken throughout the conversation so far and hit upon these moments of like,
00:47:19 ◼ ► you've written something that has been impactful. Does that ever enter your mind when you're writing
00:47:25 ◼ ► a story? Do you ever think about a way up the impact that something that you are writing may have
00:47:35 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, a really like unexpected thing that happened after I started my newsletter at The Verge
00:47:41 ◼ ► was that Facebook executives started to subscribe to it. Like I was writing about the backlash to the
00:47:47 ◼ ► company, often critically. I try to be thoughtful and open-minded about stuff and not reach dramatic,
00:47:54 ◼ ► angry conclusions about every single thing. There's like a critical newsletter. And one day,
00:48:00 ◼ ► it's like, Mark Zuckerberg just subscribed to it. And I was like, that's insane. And so from that moment
00:48:05 ◼ ► on, everything you write, you're like, Zuckerberg could read this. And I do think it changed the way
00:48:13 ◼ ► that I wrote, probably in ways good and bad. You know what I mean? Like the bad thing is you always worry
00:48:17 ◼ ► that you'd pull your punches because like, you're like, well, if this person was paying attention to me,
00:48:22 ◼ ► I would like to keep that channel open so that I can get what I think to be relevant information to
00:48:29 ◼ ► them. You know, on the other hand, if you just sort of like feel like you're wearing kid gloves all the
00:48:33 ◼ ► time and you stop saying what you think, that's like obviously bad. And then why bother writing a
00:48:37 ◼ ► newsletter? Yeah. So I think as I became aware that like basically the CEOs of all the companies I
00:48:46 ◼ ► write about were at least occasionally reading what I was writing, I did feel this added sense of
00:48:52 ◼ ► responsibility and added awareness of anything I write could be the thing that makes them say the
00:48:59 ◼ ► hell with this guy. And actually, interestingly, that happened to me this year where like somebody
00:49:03 ◼ ► who'd been very supportive of my work at one of the companies I wrote about wrote to me and was like,
00:49:07 ◼ ► I just want you to know I've unsubscribed from your newsletter. I no longer pay for it. And I no
00:49:11 ◼ ► longer read it because I think you become too negative about our company. And I don't think your work
00:49:15 ◼ ► has the intellectual rigor that it used to. And of course, it really like hurt my feelings and like
00:49:20 ◼ ► it really stung. And yet at the same time, I was just kind of like, in a way, this is good. I should
00:49:27 ◼ ► not be waking up every day trying to make you the executive feel like I'm doing a great job. I should
00:49:35 ◼ ► be making the workers at your company feel that way. Yeah. I should be making the people who use your
00:49:40 ◼ ► apps feel that way. Right. So while I value having that crowd as an audience, for a lot of reasons,
00:50:00 ◼ ► And I feel like I wouldn't really believe it, especially if you've seen the names or they tell
00:50:04 ◼ ► you, there's no way you're not thinking about them, but you can use it well. Right. Like if you
00:50:10 ◼ ► do care about wanting to, if a company is doing something you disagree with, to try and get them
00:50:16 ◼ ► to change, you have the ear of the person who can make the change. So if you can make your point
00:50:26 ◼ ► You've mentioned as well, like having dinner with like Sam Altman executives and being able to speak
00:50:35 ◼ ► It's a great question. Access is a trap. I think it almost always dulls your senses when you are
00:50:45 ◼ ► in the environment of the tech executive. And at a time when these people are truly among the most
00:50:53 ◼ ► powerful people in the world, I think it's only human to have in the back of your head,
00:50:59 ◼ ► like, I hope this isn't the last time. I hope that there can be another conversation after this.
00:51:05 ◼ ► And I do think that that can lead you to soften your approach a bit. Now, at the same time,
00:51:13 ◼ ► I am just not a confrontational person by nature. I don't like watching videos of other people
00:51:18 ◼ ► confronting other people. I don't really follow the journalist whose stock and trade is sort of
00:51:22 ◼ ► welcoming people into the chair and being like, screw you. I think you suck. Primarily, by the way,
00:51:27 ◼ ► because I think you typically do not learn anything from the interaction. So my approach to access has
00:51:33 ◼ ► always been like, it's good if you can get it, particularly if you feel like you can learn things
00:51:39 ◼ ► that you otherwise would not. And to the extent you're doing that, you should try to maintain the
00:51:45 ◼ ► access. You should also expect that you are going to lose the access. Because over the long arc of
00:51:52 ◼ ► history, you're just going to write enough stuff that is going to be annoying enough that they're
00:51:56 ◼ ► going to go try to find another journalist that they like better. And I've had that experience too.
00:52:02 ◼ ► You know, with Altman, this was an interesting one because he had come on our show right before he
00:52:08 ◼ ► got fired the first time. We had a really good interview, but then all this crazy stuff happened
00:52:12 ◼ ► to him. I didn't see him for a couple of years. We did a live show and asked if he would come on it.
00:52:18 ◼ ► And to our surprise, he said, yes. And had one again, what I thought was like a pretty good
00:52:22 ◼ ► substantive interview. There was also some like drama and conflict and back and forth that you can go look
00:52:27 ◼ ► up if you're curious. And after that, I sort of thought, well, I'm probably not going to see him
00:52:30 ◼ ► for, you know, a couple of years or maybe he hates me forever. Like true. I don't know. It's like you
00:52:34 ◼ ► do the interview and then who knows what happened, but you try to kind of wear it lightly. And then
00:52:38 ◼ ► literally like a month later, they're like, hey, Sam's on a dinner. Do you want to come? And I was
00:52:42 ◼ ► like shocked. I did not truly think that I have this opportunity, but I'm glad in this moment that I'm
00:52:47 ◼ ► like wearing all of it lightly. Like again, I enjoy talking to these executives. I do feel like I learn
00:52:52 ◼ ► things. I want to keep those channels of communication open, but I also like, I've just
00:52:57 ◼ ► been doing this long enough to know that like eventually they're probably going to give up on
00:53:01 ◼ ► you. Not all of them do for what it's worth. You know, some of them like keep paying attention to
00:53:04 ◼ ► you and selfishly have a lot of respect for those people. I also, for what it's worth, I try to write
00:53:09 ◼ ► about companies where I feel like they like engaging with the press. Like I would absolutely never be an
00:53:14 ◼ ► Apple beat reporter. I would absolutely never be an Amazon beat reporter. Like those companies,
00:53:18 ◼ ► yes, they care on the margins about what the press is saying, but like there's almost nothing I could
00:53:23 ◼ ► ever write. They would make Tim cook feel like he had to talk to me. And that just kind of makes me
00:53:27 ◼ ► want to not write about that. You know, it's like, I want to write about places where I feel like I can
00:53:31 ◼ ► penetrate a little bit. Do you like interviewing executives? Is that something that you want to do?
00:53:38 ◼ ► I like talking to them off the record more. Yeah. Most of the executives are incredibly polished. You know,
00:53:46 ◼ ► it's like, I've had this chance to interview Mark Zuckerberg. It's always an interesting experience. I
00:53:50 ◼ ► would love to do it again in the future. It's very difficult. He comes with a message that he's ready
00:53:55 ◼ ► to sell and he spends the entire interview selling it. And if you're lucky, you get two or three questions
00:53:59 ◼ ► to try to like break a little bit of news before the whole thing is over. Also, when you're doing that
00:54:05 ◼ ► interview, you have the weight of the world on you because when everyone watches it, everyone has in
00:54:09 ◼ ► their mind the question that they would ask Mark Zuckerberg. And you're probably not asking that
00:54:12 ◼ ► question right now. Yeah. And so there winds up being this big backlash to like, hey, you didn't do it
00:54:16 ◼ ► the way that I would do it. So I do find those kinds of interviews fraught. Now, on the other hand,
00:54:22 ◼ ► interviewing Sam Altman is really fun because he is less careful. He will indulge a wide range of
00:54:29 ◼ ► questions. He doesn't filibuster. He just kind of tells you what he thinks. Yeah. And he just kind of moves
00:54:35 ◼ ► on. So like to me, that's a great interview. If I could interview Sam Altman like once a month,
00:54:40 ◼ ► I would be thrilled to do it. So all the executives are a little bit different, but I like the ones who
00:54:47 ◼ ► seem like they actually like enjoy talking to the press and kind of like batting ideas back and forth,
00:54:53 ◼ ► like getting into a little bit of mix up. You know, I think Zuckerberg just feels like very burned by
00:54:57 ◼ ► many of the interactions that he's had. And so when he goes into any interview, it's like the walls are up.
00:55:02 ◼ ► I've listened to many interviews that he's done and I've been struck recently, especially that it
00:55:09 ◼ ► feels like he just says the same things and makes the same jokes to everyone. And it's like, oh, he
00:55:16 ◼ ► just doesn't want to talk to people anymore, really. And he's being made to. I think he's almost never had
00:55:22 ◼ ► a good experience with an interview, honestly. Like, I think it's like, there are just probably very few
00:55:25 ◼ ► times where he talked to somebody and felt like, wow, I really liked that. I was really breathing easy
00:55:30 ◼ ► the whole time. And I feel like I had a great conversation. Like if he feels that about any
00:55:34 ◼ ► interview, I think it'd probably be like maybe the Joe Rogan interview or something where he just kind
00:55:38 ◼ ► of like didn't get asked anything too tough, kind of got to talk about everything he wanted to at like
00:55:44 ◼ ► great length and just kind of felt like he was hanging out. Like that's where he's going to be the most
00:55:49 ◼ ► comfortable. Yeah. The kind of thing that like I'm doing, it's probably always going to feel a little
00:55:53 ◼ ► bit like torture, you know? Because he's either doesn't like the questions or he knows there's one
00:55:57 ◼ ► coming. Like, or just, it's not something I want to answer. Yeah. I mean, like he loves talking about
00:56:01 ◼ ► is like product and like innovating. What he does not like talking about is the consequences of the
00:56:06 ◼ ► products that he's built. Yeah. I almost always want to talk about the second thing. So. How do you
00:56:17 ◼ ► So I just picked a beat that I'm sincerely fascinated by. Like the whole social media era,
00:56:23 ◼ ► I woke up every day just wanting to know what had happened to Facebook next, right? Particularly as
00:56:27 ◼ ► everything started to get crazy with like the backlash and in 2016 and 2017, I just wanted to
00:56:33 ◼ ► know what was going to happen next. I wanted to see how the industry was going to develop, which
00:56:37 ◼ ► companies were going to win, which companies were going to lose, which companies were going to commit
00:56:41 ◼ ► horrible atrocities. Like I wanted to know all of it. And then over the past few years,
00:56:45 ◼ ► as AI has started to bubble up, that has just started to feel like maybe the biggest story of
00:56:51 ◼ ► my tech career. And I'm very caught up in the horse race, but I'm also caught up in the safety
00:56:58 ◼ ► implications of having large, powerful AI systems that are largely unregulated and might be very dangerous.
00:57:08 ◼ ► I think the challenge as a solo entrepreneur is trying to understand what is my purpose in this
00:57:16 ◼ ► moment. And I think that last year I struggled with that actually quite a bit because I was still
00:57:22 ◼ ► coming out of that social media era where like I knew how I covered Facebook and like how I wanted
00:57:27 ◼ ► to do that every day. I was less certain about what my role was in covering AI, but then like I started
00:57:33 ◼ ► to figure it out and then it started to feel better. And like, I feel like I got my legs underneath me
00:57:37 ◼ ► and like now I know what I'm doing again. But I think it's in the nature of the media business that
00:57:41 ◼ ► the thing that you write about and maybe like get some acclaim writing about, it's not going to stay
00:57:46 ◼ ► hot forever. You're going to need to have a second act and it's torture because who wants to change
00:57:50 ◼ ► anything except for software, which you should change constantly and for no reason. But I did it.
00:57:57 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, it's tough, right? Because especially when new technology comes along all the time,
00:58:03 ◼ ► and there's been a bunch of different waves over the time that I'm sure we've both been
00:58:07 ◼ ► paying attention to technology, but they don't usually come with this big ethical baggage.
00:58:12 ◼ ► I mean, to me, it's the power of the systems that is the thing that like has me paying attention.
00:58:17 ◼ ► There's real questions about whether these things become conscious. There's real questions about
00:58:22 ◼ ► what happens after that. So some of your listeners will be rolling their eyes out of the back of your
00:58:28 ◼ ► head and be like, oh my God, he's one of these AI hypeies, disgusting. But like, I believe that stuff.
00:58:32 ◼ ► And so, yeah, I'm going to be paying close attention to that for the foreseeable future.
00:58:45 ◼ ► Yes. So the main thing I do is I use the Notion share sheet extension and Chrome extension,
00:58:52 ◼ ► and I share everything I think is interesting into a database. The database is shared by my team.
00:58:57 ◼ ► And if it's in the database, it goes in platformer. So every day, like I save 30-ish links.
00:59:04 ◼ ► My assistant goes through, takes the first pass at summarizing them. I then take a pass,
00:59:14 ◼ ► Very recently, I've started to use the Notion AI feature to ask questions about this database,
00:59:20 ◼ ► which has five years worth of links. So thousands and thousands of links. And you could Google this
00:59:26 ◼ ► stuff. But what I like about my approach is a lot of the links that I've saved to Notion have the full
00:59:30 ◼ ► article text. It is sometimes stuff that AI systems can't reach because they're all blocked from
00:59:35 ◼ ► accessing websites like the New York Times and others. Because I'm a subscriber to those publications,
00:59:39 ◼ ► I have just saved the article text. And now I can actually do really like amazing search stuff with
00:59:44 ◼ ► it. So what I've always wanted is a database that I could talk to. And like literally within the past
00:59:50 ◼ ► few weeks, I feel like I've gotten that. So like, that's something that I'm actually like quite excited
00:59:54 ◼ ► about. And I guess as well, better than Google, this is stuff you've already vetted as interesting.
01:00:00 ◼ ► Exactly. And the Notion AI does a really good job at grounding its responses in your save the links.
01:00:08 ◼ ► So there's like a citation icon after everything it says, and you click it, and it pulls up the story
01:00:13 ◼ ► from years ago, where like that information is located. So a lot of people don't want to use these
01:00:18 ◼ ► systems because they're hallucinating and make mistakes. That's a really good reason you should
01:00:21 ◼ ► keep doing that. Never bet your career on something that LLM says. But like, this is a way around
01:00:26 ◼ ► that problem that I think is insanely promising. How much of your time are you spending playing with
01:00:32 ◼ ► new technology? Do you make time to try new stuff? Yeah, but it's like procrastinating time. You know,
01:00:38 ◼ ► it's like my deadline for a column is an hour. This would be a really great time to check out a new
01:00:42 ◼ ► to-do list app. Or like, I'm going to watch a YouTube video about a PKM system. So I do it at the
01:00:49 ◼ ► stupidest worst times, like very self-defeating times. Actually, maybe my favorite newsletter is
01:00:59 ◼ ► It's so good. It comes every Saturday morning. It's just a bunch of stuff to try. Some of it's like
01:01:04 ◼ ► watch this on Netflix. Some of this is like play a video game. But there's a lot of like productivity
01:01:09 ◼ ► software in there. And so a lot of my favorite apps from the past few years, I've just gotten from
01:01:13 ◼ ► Installer. And so often Saturday mornings when it comes out, where it's like, actually, like I don't
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01:03:33 ◼ ► All right. I want to talk about your home screen because I think I can tell a lot about the things
01:03:38 ◼ ► that you've maybe not said or you don't know you're doing. Oh yeah. By looking at your home screen.
01:03:43 ◼ ► And it's one that jumps out to me immediately. In your doc is Bear, which is a text writing app,
01:03:53 ◼ ► I just take a lot of like quick transient notes. Okay. And I have like a few like pinned
01:03:58 ◼ ► things that I like refer to like often enough that it makes sense there. Like I have a close group of
01:04:06 ◼ ► friends. Whenever anybody like says something that makes me laugh really hard, I just write it down
01:04:10 ◼ ► really quickly. But I also just find it great for writing down, I don't know, just like the little
01:04:15 ◼ ► snippets of things that you write down, little reminders. So yeah, it's definitely a weird one. I do
01:04:20 ◼ ► like my little Bear app. It's not weird. You're just using it as a notes app, right? Where I think
01:04:24 ◼ ► Bear would maybe talk about themselves more as a markdown text editor. Oh, get over yourself. No,
01:04:45 ◼ ► tech products. I love software. I love writing about software. And so many companies I wrote
01:04:50 ◼ ► about were like varying news in their app store updates. So it just became a daily habit to me
01:04:54 ◼ ► to like go to the app store, refresh the apps and see if there were any new features. And sometimes I'd
01:04:59 ◼ ► write about it before anybody else did. So the fact that the app store has pride of place just
01:05:11 ◼ ► Do you consider that kind of like your home social network? Like it's what you want to be
01:05:16 ◼ ► It kind of changes back and forth between Threads and Blue Sky. I think Threads is a better reading
01:05:22 ◼ ► experience. Like I see more stuff that's like fun and enjoyable. Also just more like news links.
01:05:26 ◼ ► It's the closest thing I have to a replacement for Twitter. Blue Sky at times has been much
01:05:32 ◼ ► better for actually like driving attention to my stories. So like sometimes Blue Sky will
01:05:36 ◼ ► get really excited about something I write and the numbers there will just be a lot bigger
01:05:41 ◼ ► than they are in Threads. So it kind of just like goes back and forth. There would be like
01:05:53 ◼ ► I love Bellatro. That guy really snapped. Given the Nobel Peace Prize, he's made so many plane
01:06:04 ◼ ► It's an incredible game. Do you know? I'm not sure how much you pay attention. They're anonymous.
01:06:09 ◼ ► They don't accept awards. They have people accept them for them. They're just not interested in the
01:06:21 ◼ ► Claude and ChatGPT on your home screen. Are you using them that often? I mean, you kind of referenced
01:06:31 ◼ ► Yeah. So I think I may update some of this stuff. There was a time when like Claude was like my
01:06:37 ◼ ► default for everything. Disclosure, my boyfriend works at Anthropic, which makes Claude. But I was
01:06:42 ◼ ► not using it for that reason. It was just kind of like, oh, Claude is kind of the best.
01:06:45 ◼ ► ChatGPT really started to overtake it for at least my use cases over the past year. And so I put
01:06:52 ◼ ► ChatGPT there as well. And so, yeah, I would say ChatGPT probably is now one of the most used apps on
01:06:56 ◼ ► my phone now. It clawed a little bit less so. I think, again, like I don't have a lot of productivity
01:07:02 ◼ ► uses on mobile. I do use every single chatbot on my desktop. When it comes to just on the phone,
01:07:08 ◼ ► nine times out of 10, I'm just hitting ChatGPT unless I'm like looking up a conversation that I
01:07:13 ◼ ► had like on another bot. You have the Google app as well on your home screen. I feel like I never
01:07:18 ◼ ► see anybody using the Google app. Oh, I use that all the time. What for? For exactly what you said.
01:07:23 ◼ ► Oh, I need to look up this thing really quick. I know what I'm looking for. What's going on? I mean,
01:07:27 ◼ ► I guess I kind of use like Google and Google Maps interchangeably, but like, where is this
01:07:31 ◼ ► restaurant? What's the address? See, I just figured that stuff goes in Safari. I found that really
01:07:35 ◼ ► interesting that you actually use Google for it. Why do I use Google? I don't know. Can I,
01:07:40 ◼ ► I should look up what are like my last queries? I mean, I guess you don't get the really annoying
01:07:44 ◼ ► thing that you get when trying to use it in Safari, where it's like, would you like to open the Google
01:07:48 ◼ ► app? Like, I just really want you to open that up. Exactly. Yeah, that's a good point. I could be
01:07:53 ◼ ► using Safari more. And you use Notion Calendar? Yeah, I was like a fantastic help person for a long time.
01:07:59 ◼ ► And then there were just like certain things that weren't working for me. And so Notion bought this
01:08:03 ◼ ► company called Cron. And I really like Notion. And I really kind of want to see what they would do with
01:08:08 ◼ ► it. And so I started using Notion Calendar. And I basically say like, it's fine. I don't think
01:08:13 ◼ ► anybody's really figured out the calendar thing exactly. Like I'm not thrilled with any of my
01:08:17 ◼ ► options. But that's the one I'm using. I want to thank Casey again for joining the show. And of
01:08:22 ◼ ► course, I want to thank you for listening to our conversation. And now I'm going to welcome
01:08:27 ◼ ► Steven Hackett to Cortex. Steven is my co-founder at Relay. We have been working together for nearly
01:08:33 ◼ ► two decades. And his son is the reason why we started to raise money for St. Jude Children's
01:08:39 ◼ ► Research Hospital. So I wanted to welcome him to the show to talk himself about why we do this,
01:08:45 ◼ ► where your donations go to, and what we're all doing as a community this year to raise money for St.
01:08:51 ◼ ► Jude. Steven, can you tell the Cortex listeners what your backstory is to St. Jude? Like why do we
01:08:57 ◼ ► raise money for them every year? Yeah, I'd love to. In 2009, my wife Mary and I had a six-month-old
01:09:06 ◼ ► baby boy, our first kid. And we went to like a well baby checkup. So if you're not a parent, or if you
01:09:14 ◼ ► are, it has been a while, you take your baby into the pediatrician several times, kind of mark
01:09:19 ◼ ► milestones of, are they doing what they're supposed to be doing? Are they gaining weight? Are they
01:09:24 ◼ ► growing? And we thought everything was fine. And our pediatrician had some concerns. And that set off,
01:09:32 ◼ ► you know, the meme of like, little domino pediatrician has concern. Big domino relay has raised $4 million.
01:09:39 ◼ ► Like, that's how this has gone. And over the course of the coming days, it was discovered that our son
01:09:45 ◼ ► had a fairly large brain tumor that was believed to be cancerous. And so he had surgery to remove
01:09:56 ◼ ► part of that tumor, where part of his tumor is, is really near the brainstem. And so they couldn't go
01:10:02 ◼ ► in there and remove all of it. So he was going to require chemotherapy. And that's where St. Jude
01:10:09 ◼ ► and the Hackett family intersect. My wife and I are both from Memphis, where St. Jude is. So it's
01:10:15 ◼ ► always been in my backyard, right? Memphis, St. Jude is everywhere. Like I knew what they did, right? But
01:10:20 ◼ ► I didn't understand it until my son was a St. Jude patient. And we made it over to the St. Jude campus.
01:10:33 ◼ ► make sure they had our paperwork and they had his scans. And the person helping us kind of get started
01:10:40 ◼ ► at St. Jude, she just looked at us and was like, we know all about you and Josiah, your son. Like,
01:10:52 ◼ ► And it was just the first example of many where St. Jude takes care of families with kids with cancer.
01:11:01 ◼ ► And our son underwent 18 rounds of chemotherapy over about a year and a half time period. So he was
01:11:09 ◼ ► about two when chemo ended. And thanks to the amazing work of St. Jude, he is still with us today. He is
01:11:19 ◼ ► getting ready to be 17. He's a man. He's my size. And that's all because of what St. Jude does.
01:11:30 ◼ ► St. Jude would have taken him for his specific diagnosis. They have a process you go through
01:11:37 ◼ ► where you may have a referring doctor or hospital. We were just fortunate that we were already
01:11:49 ◼ ► they pay for that travel. They pay for your housing. St. Jude has some amazing housing on
01:11:55 ◼ ► campus and right around the campus. And actually, Mike, when you're here, we're going to get to see
01:12:03 ◼ ► It's been being built the whole time we've been going there, doing the podcast-a-thon. And so I'm
01:12:11 ◼ ► I got to go to the ribbon cutting and it was just an incredible moment. They designed these places for
01:12:17 ◼ ► families to be together. And so, you know, very often it may be one parent traveling to Memphis if,
01:12:24 ◼ ► you know, it's a couple and they've got multiple children. So they're trying to take care of everybody
01:12:28 ◼ ► through travel, through housing, and of course, treatment. And so we lived in our same apartment
01:12:35 ◼ ► and, you know, went to the same grocery store, but that's definitely not the case for most people
01:12:43 ◼ ► Obviously, you went through such a huge, long, traumatic experience with Josiah, but lots of
01:13:01 ◼ ► Because I got to see up close what the power of hope can do. And like, that sounds cheesy or
01:13:10 ◼ ► whatever, like I know, but I really mean it. Like when you are on that campus and you meet and spend
01:13:16 ◼ ► time with families who have stared into the abyss, right? Having a sick child, the possibility of
01:13:22 ◼ ► losing a child is one of the hardest things a human being can go through. And thankfully, we were
01:13:30 ◼ ► fortunate to come through it. Not without scars, I have plenty, but once the dust had settled,
01:13:37 ◼ ► Mary and I both wanted to find a way to spread what St. Jude was doing so they could help even more
01:13:46 ◼ ► families. So more families would have the outcome that we did. And it took a little while to find
01:13:52 ◼ ► what that was. But then one day it clicked. It's like, well, we have this audience through Relay.
01:14:01 ◼ ► Yeah. One of the things that I'm always struck by every year during the whole fundraising thing,
01:14:08 ◼ ► but during the podcast-a-thon, especially, we'll talk about the podcast-a-thon in a little bit,
01:14:12 ◼ ► we get to speak to patient families. And there's this whole network of patient families that
01:14:18 ◼ ► kind of provide their stories for fundraising efforts for St. Jude. And I'm always so hit by
01:14:27 ◼ ► the fact that some of these stories, they're not the outcome that people would have wanted.
01:14:32 ◼ ► like, the child didn't make it. But the experience that the whole family had with St. Jude means that
01:14:38 ◼ ► these families actually still want to advocate for the place and talk about why it was so special for
01:14:44 ◼ ► them, even though they weren't so lucky. Like, I'm always so struck by that. And I think it is
01:14:50 ◼ ► it's a testament to how well they treat the children. It really is not like any other hospital
01:14:58 ◼ ► in the world. And it's very special for that. Yeah, absolutely. That is a true honor every year
01:15:05 ◼ ► to get to talk to patient families. I just, the other day, recorded an interview with a patient
01:15:10 ◼ ► family that'll be played during the podcast-a-thon. And it's like, we have this connection
01:15:15 ◼ ► with these families, right? As fellow patient families, like, you've all kind of been through
01:15:20 ◼ ► the same thing. But we all have a love for this place, because exactly what you said, because they
01:15:26 ◼ ► treated our children so well. And not just in the medical sense. Of course, it is the best pediatric
01:15:31 ◼ ► cancer research hospital on the planet. Like, I believe that with everything in my body. But it's all of the
01:15:40 ◼ ► other things that it's done without charging the families. I'd never received a bill. I mean, we've
01:15:46 ◼ ► been a St. Jude family now since 2009. I've never received a bill from St. Jude. The fact that they are
01:15:54 ◼ ► using research to push things forward, that's incredible. They're not happy with the status quo.
01:16:00 ◼ ► They're dissatisfied with the survival rate being at 80% in the U.S. for childhood cancer.
01:16:08 ◼ ► They are unhappy that families have to go through this. But then there's also just the environment
01:16:13 ◼ ► and the atmosphere of the hospital. And you've been fortunate enough to see this over the years.
01:16:18 ◼ ► St. Jude is not a sad place, right? You'd think walking into a children's cancer hospital, like,
01:16:40 ◼ ► that medicine is not allowed in, right? It's like not for doctors, not for treatment. It's for families
01:16:45 ◼ ► to connect and regroup. And there's a maker lab and a music lab and a hair salon, like all these places
01:16:52 ◼ ► and the hospital, to let families have as normal of life as they can during their darkest days.
01:16:58 ◼ ► I do want to touch on, before we talk about the podcast-a-thon, a little bit about the global impact of St. Jude,
01:17:04 ◼ ► because I think that is important, right? Obviously, I'm not in the States, but that wouldn't matter.
01:17:08 ◼ ► Like, if we needed, and if St. Jude wanted to treat us, they treat people from all over the world.
01:17:13 ◼ ► But they also share the knowledge and share their resources to people over the world. That is something
01:17:19 ◼ ► that's so special to me. I was just talking to somebody a couple of weeks ago, and they were
01:17:22 ◼ ► talking about the fact that St. Jude is offering cancer medicines to countries all around the world.
01:17:27 ◼ ► And the initiative aims to reach more than 120,000 children in 50 countries over the next seven years.
01:17:33 ◼ ► But it's also the research. Like, the research that St. Jude does, they could keep it, right,
01:17:43 ◼ ► medicine. They want everyone to have it, because St. Jude doesn't win if only children that are treated
01:17:50 ◼ ► at St. Jude make it, right? That's right. It's got to be everyone, and that's part of what the
01:17:55 ◼ ► institution does, and I think that's so special. Yeah. I recently saw an email from somebody who had
01:18:00 ◼ ► a child with cancer. They were in Europe, and in their city, there was actually an amazing children's
01:18:07 ◼ ► hospital, right? St. Jude is not the only amazing hospital in the world, and their child got the best
01:18:14 ◼ ► possible care there. And what's really cool is that the doctors there were collaborating with the doctors
01:18:23 ◼ ► at St. Jude, providing access not only to the information and data you were talking about,
01:18:28 ◼ ► but actually to medication through shared clinical trials. So it's not just data, it's not just information,
01:18:34 ◼ ► it's a relationship that St. Jude wants with these other hospitals around the world to extend their
01:18:40 ◼ ► reach and to make cures available everywhere. That's amazing. All right, Stephen, what's the
01:18:45 ◼ ► podcast-a-thon? Like, we raise money all month, right? People can donate all month, and I'm going to talk
01:18:49 ◼ ► about the many ways in which you can help support this incredible life-saving work, but we also have an
01:18:54 ◼ ► event every year called the Podcast-a-thon. What is it? It's the best day of the year, Mike. Amazing!
01:18:59 ◼ ► Okay. So it is a 12-hour live variety show. We stream it on Relay's YouTube channel. So this year,
01:19:11 ◼ ► it's me and you and four other Relay hosts. And it's just 12 hours of fun, right? So we're going to be
01:19:18 ◼ ► playing games, doing challenges, talking about St. Jude. I know you did an amazing interview
01:19:24 ◼ ► with one of St. Jude's, like, researchers. And so all of that stuff gets rolled up together,
01:19:35 ◼ ► And it's starting at noon US Eastern time, right? There will be a link in the show notes to the
01:19:39 ◼ ► YouTube video. And so you can see what time that is in your location and also click to be reminded.
01:19:44 ◼ ► But of course, it will live on YouTube. But we'd love it if you tuned in. We do it for 12 hours,
01:19:48 ◼ ► and we do it the time that we do because we try and hit as many time zones around the world throughout
01:19:52 ◼ ► the day. So if you could just tune in for part of it, it is a great time. We have lots of physical
01:19:57 ◼ ► and emotional activities, I guess, is the way to describe it, like, throughout the time.
01:20:02 ◼ ► But also, every year, like, the production value of the podcast-a-thon increases. And this year,
01:20:06 ◼ ► there is a pretty big ace up the sleeve production value-wise, which I'm excited for people to see.
01:20:11 ◼ ► It's just a really, really fun time. And I hope that everyone will tune in. What's the date again,
01:20:16 ◼ ► Stephen? It is Friday, September 19th. I definitely didn't forget that. I want to tell people how they
01:20:22 ◼ ► can support St. Jude. And there's a bunch of ways to do it. So we have asked over the last seven years
01:20:29 ◼ ► for you to donate, and you've shown incredible generosity. As Stephen mentioned, in the last
01:20:33 ◼ ► seven years, Relay has raised over $4 million, which is truly unbelievable for a podcast network
01:20:39 ◼ ► of our size to have raised that amount of money. And that is because of the generosity of our listeners.
01:20:43 ◼ ► So if you are to make an individual donation of your own of $60 or more, you'll be eligible to
01:20:49 ◼ ► redeem a digital bundle of wonderful campaign-themed wallpapers and a screensaver for macOS.
01:20:54 ◼ ► Donors who make a gift of $100 or more can redeem the 2025 sticker pack, which has a ton of great stickers
01:21:01 ◼ ► this year, which the artwork is incredible, done by our friend Jelly. They look amazing.
01:21:05 ◼ ► If you donate, make sure that you find out if your employer will match that donation. This happens
01:21:12 ◼ ► employers big and small, so you can double the impact of your donation. When you make the donation,
01:21:19 ◼ ► there is a blue button called search employer, and you can see if it's registered there, but you can
01:21:23 ◼ ► also talk to your employer and they may be able to match it too. There are also things called donor
01:21:28 ◼ ► advised funds. If you have one of those, we would love you to make a donation. If you don't know what
01:21:33 ◼ ► that is, don't worry about it, but you can find out more at stjude.org slash Relay. And if you are looking
01:21:39 ◼ ► for even more ways to help, why don't you become a Relay community fundraiser? You can create your own
01:21:44 ◼ ► personal fundraising campaign. This can massively impact the amount of money that you're able to
01:21:51 ◼ ► give to the campaign because you can go to your friends, your family, your co-workers and say,
01:21:55 ◼ ► hey, I'm raising money for St. Jude. Why don't you donate? And so there are some incredible incentives
01:22:02 ◼ ► that are available for different amounts raised from challenge coins to desk mats and even a St. Jude
01:22:07 ◼ ► backpack. All of this information is available at stjude.org slash Relay. I think this is one of the
01:22:13 ◼ ► most amazing ways to get involved in the campaign because even if you can't afford it yourself, you
01:22:17 ◼ ► may be able to go to people in your life, in your community. Maybe you're a Twitch streamer. Maybe you
01:22:22 ◼ ► just have a large social media following, right? Like you can set up your own campaign and it can help
01:22:26 ◼ ► give. But no matter what you do, please go to stjude.org slash Relay. There are so many wonderful
01:22:32 ◼ ► ways to get involved. All we ask is you take a look and see what works for you and just know that every
01:22:38 ◼ ► dollar you give makes an impact. And it also means so much to me and Stephen. Like I've got to see
01:22:44 ◼ ► Josiah through his entire life and seeing that kid grow up. That's why we do this. We all got to spend
01:22:50 ◼ ► time with him and he's still here because of that work. And that is not just Josiah's story. That is the
01:22:55 ◼ ► story of countless children who are helped by the work of St. Jude. So please go to stjude.org
01:23:01 ◼ ► slash Relay and donate today. All right. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Cortex. I
01:23:07 ◼ ► really hope that you enjoyed it. In Mortex this time, I welcome Casey back to the show to talk about some
01:23:12 ◼ ► of the business aspects of running his newsletter, Platformer. You can get access to this really
01:23:18 ◼ ► interesting conversation and the entire Mortex back catalog by going to getmortex.com. I'll be