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Cortex

33: Cortek

 

00:00:00   I'm just waiting for you man, anytime you want to start, I'm perfectly ready to start.

00:00:05   Always ready to go.

00:00:06   100% of the time.

00:00:09   Something we didn't talk about last time was that you snuck into WWDC.

00:00:13   Oh yeah, I guess that happened.

00:00:16   Yeah it did happen.

00:00:17   I feel like I have been so busy, I have lost all sense of time.

00:00:23   Yeah we're both back in London now.

00:00:25   You arrived significantly lighter than me because you went to VidCon as well.

00:00:29   Yeah. I'm freshly in London, and so still, freshly jet-lagged, actually.

00:00:35   But I'm back. Back for, I think, three weeks before I turn right back around and go back to America.

00:00:44   But for the moment, I am here.

00:00:46   You're doing this to yourself.

00:00:48   I know. It's the summer of lots of travel and not fun hashtag.

00:00:54   Yeah, see I've at least given myself five weeks before I go back.

00:00:58   Oh yeah? What are you going back for? I don't even remember.

00:01:00   I'm going to Memphis.

00:01:01   Oh right.

00:01:02   For Relay FM's two year anniversary.

00:01:04   That should be fun.

00:01:05   Yeah, that's gonna be good. I'm looking forward to it. Although Memphis in August seems like

00:01:08   a really bad idea.

00:01:09   I'm sure it's fine.

00:01:11   I think I'm gonna melt.

00:01:13   Look I think unlike London, Memphis should be built for the fact that it gets to be 100

00:01:18   degrees. So you should be fine as long as you stay indoors.

00:01:20   I just go there to stay in my hotel for the whole time. It's like it's too hot to go outside.

00:01:23   I'll just stay here.

00:01:24   It's a great approach, right?

00:01:25   To vacations, just staying in the hotel.

00:01:28   - Yeah, it's great.

00:01:30   I see literally no problem with this.

00:01:32   So you should have a great time in Memphis.

00:01:35   Just pick a good hotel.

00:01:36   - When you were in WWDC,

00:01:38   people know that you were in San Francisco,

00:01:40   but you actually went into Moscone

00:01:43   where they hold the developer conference.

00:01:44   You found a way in,

00:01:45   I think you broke through like an open window

00:01:47   or something like that,

00:01:48   is the word that on the street.

00:01:50   What did you actually do there?

00:01:54   What did I do? Yeah. Uh I snuck around. That that's what I

00:02:00   did. What is sneaking around in there? Did you go and see some

00:02:03   like talks or like sessions? Yeah, so sneaking around means

00:02:09   being super sneaky and also tweeting about the fact that I

00:02:13   was in WWDC. You were sneaky for about 6 minutes I think

00:02:16   before you started incessantly tweeting about the fact that

00:02:20   you'd broken in. Well what actually occurred was I got in there there were a

00:02:25   few things that I did really want to do and then once I felt like okay great I

00:02:29   have had minimum viable WWDC experience and if I get caught now I won't mind so

00:02:35   much then I started tweeting so I was I was quiet and mute I think for the first

00:02:39   few hours and then afterward I was like oh the hell with this I'm just gonna

00:02:44   tweet about the fact that I'm here because it's funny to do. I mean the

00:02:47   The answer to your question, "What did I do there?"

00:02:51   I mean, primarily I was really just a tourist at WWDC.

00:02:56   I am not a developer. I have no real reason to be there whatsoever.

00:03:02   But I am interested in Apple. I'm interested in development in an abstract kind of way.

00:03:10   I'm curious to see a little bit of, not exactly behind the scenes, but a little bit more of

00:03:17   the business side of Apple.

00:03:20   What is it that Apple does with this conference?

00:03:21   What are the kinds of people who are going there?

00:03:24   How do these talks go?

00:03:25   I was just curious to see all of this stuff in person.

00:03:29   And so I went in and actually I attended a few of the sessions.

00:03:34   I was just trying to pick titles that seemed at least vaguely relevant to my interests.

00:03:41   You sound surprised by that, Myke.

00:03:43   I mean, I know that you have a better base understanding than I do for some of this stuff,

00:03:50   but any session that I've ever seen kind of really bores me because they start doing code

00:03:55   on stage and I just can't understand it, no matter how much I try.

00:04:00   Yeah, this is a case where I have no experience with Swift, and I have no experience with

00:04:09   C, Swift's predecessor language.

00:04:13   I mean, the language I am most familiar with is actually Lisp from years ago, which is

00:04:18   a bizarre language.

00:04:21   I don't even know what that one is.

00:04:23   Yeah, if you just look at what Lisp looks like, it is like no other programming language

00:04:27   because the whole thing is based on parentheses. It doesn't even have... it is just missing

00:04:35   many of the features that you would expect a normal computer programming language to

00:04:38   have.

00:04:39   Mhmm, yeah, all those good features, they're all missed.

00:04:41   Yes, that's right, Myke, you know which ones.

00:04:43   The good ones.

00:04:44   Yes, all of the good ones.

00:04:45   It has all the bad ones, though.

00:04:47   No, it's simple and beautiful and impractical for very many situations. But nonetheless,

00:04:54   it's the one that I have the most experience with.

00:04:56   What did she use it for?

00:04:57   This is the one that's used for some of the stuff now that's being done in artificial intelligence research.

00:05:03   Uh oh.

00:05:04   So at the time it was used for genetic algorithms and genetic programming.

00:05:09   I have no idea if the language is still in use today for those purposes.

00:05:14   But, you know, ten years ago this was the language that, because of some of its strange features,

00:05:20   was very, very useful for doing the kind of thing where you are writing a program to program itself,

00:05:26   as opposed to writing it to explicitly solve a problem.

00:05:30   So LISP, very very weird, and probably not a language you would want to use under most circumstances,

00:05:35   but the thing that I was familiar with years ago, and while I could not program my way out of a paper bag today,

00:05:43   even with LISP, if I'm sitting in a session at WWDC and they do the throwing code on the screen thing,

00:05:52   While I will agree with you, it does--the level of boringness, personally, does go up quite a lot during those moments,

00:05:59   I can still at least follow the gist of what is going on.

00:06:04   Like, I have a sense of what they're talking about or what this code is doing, even though I can't follow the details.

00:06:12   So, that's why sitting in a session, it was an interesting thing to do during this experience.

00:06:19   Now like I said, I just tried to pick ones that were relevant to my interest.

00:06:23   So the first one I went to was on ResearchKit.

00:06:27   So they were doing a little session about some of the changes with ResearchKit,

00:06:32   which is their system that allows scientists and medical researchers

00:06:37   to try to collect data from patients and try to give feedback to patients.

00:06:41   And that was interesting to see, like, what they're up to there.

00:06:45   And then I also just sat in on another one which was about developing games for the Apple Watch.

00:06:50   And like the whole notion of that I thought was really funny because there's so little space here.

00:06:55   I was just kind of curious to see, you know, like what do they think is a viable option for a game.

00:07:02   And I mean to date the only thing I have ever seen which I thought was kind of an interesting game for Apple Watch

00:07:08   was something called, I think it was called Lifeline?

00:07:12   Yes, there we go. It's the astronaut and you have to kind of talk to the astronaut.

00:07:16   Right, yeah. That I thought was interesting.

00:07:19   And it's essentially like a little text adventure is kind of what's occurring.

00:07:23   But I thought the whole idea of a wrist communicator and you're sending messages back and forth,

00:07:27   like it really worked on the Apple Watch.

00:07:29   But I was curious to see like, what are they developing for games in general?

00:07:33   Like if they're having a session here,

00:07:34   they clearly think that there is something to the idea of gaming on the Apple Watch.

00:07:38   So I went in and I watched that and I thought it was interesting.

00:07:41   And I also like to try to look out for the things that Apple isn't saying.

00:07:46   So I couldn't help but notice during the entire time I was sitting in that Apple Watch session

00:07:51   that they were never ever mentioning force pressing on the Apple Watch.

00:07:56   And then I cashed my mind back to the WWDC announcement and I thought,

00:08:00   "Huh, I don't think they mentioned anything about force pressing there either."

00:08:04   And so just little things like that, I just get curious and I think,

00:08:07   "I wonder what's up with that?"

00:08:09   There are many situations here where it would seem to make sense that you'd want to have force pressing on the screen,

00:08:13   especially for games, but it seems notably absent.

00:08:16   So, yeah, I just like being in those sessions and trying to read between the lines of what Apple's up to,

00:08:23   which is, you know, always fun doing the kind of Kremlinology of Apple discussions and events.

00:08:30   So yeah, that was primarily what I was doing in the morning.

00:08:34   I'm pleased that you did it. There was a conversation where I admitted that I was way too chicken to do this

00:08:40   To sneak in I would be too scared that I'd get caught

00:08:45   See the trick with so many of these things is to just

00:08:50   Try to act very confidently when you walk through the door, right?

00:08:54   But this is why I know that I couldn't because I would be too scared of getting caught right? I couldn't act that way

00:09:00   You just gotta walk through the door with your forged and/or stolen ticket and/or gifted ticket, who knows?

00:09:07   And just, you know, the trick is like you look past the guy at the door like you're already in.

00:09:13   Like you're not concerned what he's thinking about when you're walking in the door.

00:09:17   If you look nervously at the security guard and tremblingly hand over your ticket, as I'm sure you would have done,

00:09:23   then they're going to know. They're going to know something's up.

00:09:25   but you act like you're already in the event as you're walking in the event and you're just being

00:09:30   minorly inconvenienced by having two hand over the ticket that's what you do so that's what I did and

00:09:35   it worked it worked just fine good and the fact that I had a valid ticket probably helped yeah it

00:09:39   was valid right like the biggest air quotes the ticket existed yeah that's true that's true the

00:09:46   ticket existed uh might not have been valid for me I think they're not transferable so what about

00:09:51   the people? Like, do you speak to anyone? Were you staying completely incognito because of

00:09:57   not only the fact that you like to be incognito, you were also there sneaking?

00:10:01   Yeah, so the people is an interesting thing. Once people knew that I was at WWDC, I did

00:10:08   start getting recognized by a few people who were there, and that was fine. And also I was able to

00:10:17   Actually end up speaking to a few people who make apps that I use which was an interesting

00:10:24   Experience to be able to do that. I feel so sorry for those people

00:10:27   Why do you say that Myke why do you say that?

00:10:31   Because I imagine like oh, hey, I really love your app. Here is 65 features. I would like you to implement

00:10:37   The only I need

00:10:40   See I try to take the entire

00:10:45   opposite tack in those moments. You might think that I would harass the developers,

00:10:50   but mostly I feel like people do things for their own reasons. If someone asks,

00:10:55   then maybe I'm ready to offer a bunch of things that I would like. But even then, I know full well

00:11:01   which features are just for me.

00:11:02   And so I will preface that in the conversation of "this is a feature that you should not implement because it is just for me."

00:11:09   But I'm still going to mention it if you ask, right? I'll do that kind of thing.

00:11:13   But no, I don't feel the need to harass any of the developers I am fortunate enough to speak to.

00:11:20   And really, I just like being able to talk to people and get some sense of

00:11:26   why have they structured the app this way?

00:11:29   Or like, what interesting directions are they maybe going to take it in the future?

00:11:33   Like, I think that's a-- it's just an interesting thing to be able to do.

00:11:38   and something like being on the inside of WWDC has an unusually high density of people who work on a thing which I directly use.

00:11:51   So after the sessions were over I was kind of running around and meeting a few different people for a few different things

00:11:58   and that's partly why I was saying on Twitter that I was at WWDC

00:12:03   because I was able to kind of catch a few people that way.

00:12:07   And in particular, I was actually lucky enough that a guy named Harlan was able to give me a demo of the thing that I was most interested in

00:12:17   from the WWDC announcement, which was Playgrounds for Swift for the iPad.

00:12:24   So I felt very fortunate that at one point I was able to wander down to this big ground area at WWDC where you could work with Apple employees

00:12:35   and he was able to show me the thing that had been demoed earlier in the week of Apple's attempt to

00:12:42   put a program on their iPads which can be used to

00:12:47   learn how to code in Swift. So that was very exciting.

00:12:52   That was probably the highlight of the day being able to play around with that thing, which I am

00:12:57   super interested in. It looks very, very

00:13:02   powerful. It is very impressive to see it in person and to discuss some of the ways

00:13:09   this might be implemented in the future or where it might be going and yeah I was very

00:13:14   very impressed with it and I felt quite lucky to be able to do that.

00:13:18   If you installed iOS 10 on any of your iPads? No, I haven't installed anything yet. I will

00:13:24   probably wait for one of the public betas and then I will install it on my iPad.

00:13:31   it on one of my least used iPads, primarily so that I can play around with the Swift Playground

00:13:38   thing.

00:13:39   I have it on one of my older iPads. I only have one old iPad, the iPad Air 2, and I have

00:13:44   it on there and I've been enjoying the stickers and all of the emoji stuff, texting with Federico,

00:13:50   so that's been really good.

00:13:52   Of course, of course, you're going straight for the stickers.

00:13:55   It's the most exciting thing.

00:13:57   I don't agree, I think Swift Playground is the most exciting thing. I think you are wrong.

00:14:01   I keep meaning to play with it, but I haven't yet. It's installed.

00:14:03   I just haven't done anything with it because I'm too busy sending heart stickers

00:14:07   to everybody.

00:14:08   Yeah, of course. Of course, Myke. I don't know, man. I was thinking,

00:14:13   maybe we could do a spinoff podcast where you and I could learn Swift together

00:14:17   called core tech. I think that's, that was going to happen.

00:14:22   But it seems like since you're just distracted by the stickers,

00:14:25   I'll probably need to find another cohost, another developer cohost for core tech.

00:14:29   I can do it only if we spell it with a K.

00:14:32   - Maybe, maybe that could work.

00:14:37   - C-O-R-T-E-K.

00:14:39   - Cortex?

00:14:40   - Cortex.

00:14:42   - Perfect, I think this will cause no confusion at all

00:14:45   on the relay page.

00:14:47   - Not at all, I don't know why you'd have an issue.

00:14:50   The brain would just be made out of metal

00:14:52   and we're good to go.

00:14:53   - Yeah, yeah, see, you can envision it already.

00:14:55   The logo would be green instead, like computer green.

00:14:59   Perfect.

00:15:00   - Cortex.

00:15:01   - Episode one, UI views.

00:15:04   (laughing)

00:15:06   - What are they?

00:15:07   I don't know.

00:15:08   - That's every episode.

00:15:10   Just go, what is it?

00:15:11   I have no idea.

00:15:12   - I don't know.

00:15:14   All I know is that I am making a little guy move around

00:15:17   on a playground.

00:15:18   This is my level of coding skill.

00:15:20   - Today's episode of Cortex is brought to you

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00:16:34   with your business's finances. Don't forget to enter Cortex in the how you heard about

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00:16:47   So straight after WWDC, instead of going home, which I would have wanted to do, which you

00:16:54   maybe should have done, you headed to LA instead to seek the bright lights of Hollywood and

00:17:03   to attend VidCon.

00:17:07   What is VidCon?

00:17:08   Can you explain VidCon like in a one-liner?

00:17:11   What is it?

00:17:12   Because it feels like the YouTube conference.

00:17:14   No, Myke.

00:17:15   It is not the YouTube conference.

00:17:16   It is the online video conference.

00:17:18   Oh, I forget about all the other online video services that are probably rolled into there

00:17:23   and make up a big part of VidCon.

00:17:25   Yes, they, VidCon is not the YouTube conference.

00:17:30   They're very clear on that.

00:17:31   Despite that YouTube announces new features and their CEO speaks on the main stage several

00:17:39   times and that they bring in all the big YouTube stars, it is the online video conference and

00:17:45   We also have scores of Vimeo producers, I guess, somewhere at VidCon.

00:17:53   They had five people and they had all of them.

00:17:57   I have no idea.

00:17:58   Oh, poor Vimeo.

00:17:59   They're in a different business.

00:18:01   They have a different business, Model Vimeo.

00:18:03   But it's still fun to just make fun of them sometimes.

00:18:05   Or maybe the Amazon service that was announced a few months ago that I haven't heard anything

00:18:11   about.

00:18:12   Oh yeah!

00:18:13   Oh yeah!

00:18:14   I just remembered it the other day and I was like, what happened with that? I think I signed up for it and then I just totally forgot about it.

00:18:22   Oh well. But yeah, so Amazon strongly represented at VidCon too.

00:18:28   So just to be clear, it is not the YouTube conference. YouTube does not run it.

00:18:32   It is the online video conference and it is run by the vlogbrothers.

00:18:38   I think this is the sixth year it's been going and it has turned very rapidly into just this enormous, enormous industry event

00:18:56   event that this year had I think 26,000 people. It's an absolutely, absolutely enormous thing.

00:19:06   And for comparisons sake, WWDC has 5,000 people. So it's five times larger than WWDC.

00:19:12   No, don't want it.

00:19:16   No? Doesn't sound good? It's absolutely enormous. And because of its enormity, it's a little

00:19:25   bit hard to try to describe what the experience is like being there, but I guess you could

00:19:32   say there's three main groups of people who are showing up. There are people who work

00:19:38   in the industry of online video, and this can mean all kinds of stuff. This can mean

00:19:44   advertisers, this can mean production companies, this can mean agents, like this is all the

00:19:50   industry stuff, there are creators, so people like myself, people who produce online video,

00:19:57   and then there are an enormous number of fans who are showing up to scream when their favorite

00:20:04   YouTube person comes on stage.

00:20:07   It's just an enormous, enormous gathering that is difficult to put into words and that

00:20:13   I had avoided for very many years, but because of RelayCon/WWDC week being the week directly

00:20:23   before VidCon, I decided to basically have a two week period of "I'm gonna knuckle down

00:20:35   and I'm gonna meet a lot of people.

00:20:37   This is what I'm gonna do.

00:20:39   I'm just gonna set aside these two weeks.

00:20:41   I might as well.

00:20:42   both in California. If I'm flying out there for one, I might as well fly out there for

00:20:48   the other, and then it becomes kind of an interesting way to spend a bunch of time during

00:20:52   the summer. So that's what I did. I spent two weeks at each event meeting an enormous

00:20:58   number of people and then being tremendously exhausted afterward.

00:21:05   Do you consider this networking? Would you say that that's what you're doing here?

00:21:10   That's an interesting question. I want to say no because the word networking is like

00:21:16   a sleazy word. Doesn't it feel that way?

00:21:19   It's become a dirty word. But I actually think that the core of what it is is a good

00:21:25   thing. And when I'm saying networking here, I'm not talking about like going to the

00:21:31   bar and doing like a corporate speed dating thing. Something I have seen and avoided.

00:21:38   so you can get to know the people in your adjacent teams.

00:21:42   Oh, I'm busy this evening.

00:21:43   - Yeah, many years ago, I did one of those kind of

00:21:46   businessy speed dating things.

00:21:48   - Oh, you did?

00:21:49   Oof.

00:21:50   - I was like, I don't like this.

00:21:51   That was, that was a different me in a different industry

00:21:56   many, many years ago, but even then I was like,

00:21:59   nope, do not want.

00:22:02   In no small part just because of how many hands

00:22:03   you're shaking in a short period of time.

00:22:06   Exactly.

00:22:07   But I mean it more in the sense of meeting new people

00:22:11   who are in your industry that you're getting to know

00:22:14   to maybe strike up some kind of working relationship

00:22:17   or maybe even for like for friendship or for business

00:22:20   or just so you have more contacts

00:22:23   that if something ever pops up one day,

00:22:25   you can be like, I know someone for this.

00:22:27   - It's interesting because I have also been thinking

00:22:31   a bunch about why did I do this?

00:22:36   Because this thing, I think almost everybody I have ever mentioned it to that I was going

00:22:43   to go to WWDC and VidCon one the week after the other was quite surprised that I would

00:22:51   do such a thing.

00:22:53   And I myself was a little bit surprised that it has even crossed my radar as a thing to

00:22:57   do.

00:22:58   But part of it was, I've just been thinking about how I did this and I'm doing this Year

00:23:07   of Less as part of my theme for the year.

00:23:11   And it's been crossing my mind about what do I do after the Year of Less.

00:23:18   And one of the things I was toying around with was the idea of a year of new, of maybe

00:23:22   doing new things.

00:23:24   And this certainly fell into the category of something that was new to do.

00:23:32   And in addition to just being a new thing to do, it was also just a ton of new people

00:23:38   to meet and a bunch of new people to interact with.

00:23:43   And my feeling is not so much that I'm going there and I'm sort of networking with the

00:23:53   idea that these people are business contacts. I think my primary feeling from this was just

00:24:02   one of there are very few people in the world who do the kind of work that I do. Especially

00:24:10   when you start talking about the online video side of it and doubly so when you start talking

00:24:16   about the online video side of it where my face is not visible on camera. That starts

00:24:22   That's getting into being the very very small numbers of people who do that.

00:24:27   And so part of going on this trip was being able to meet some new people in that field

00:24:37   in particular, which was a thing that I was able to do and I was very glad to be able

00:24:41   to do it.

00:24:42   But even more broadly, I find that people who make their living in a public way, and

00:24:53   so this can include people like developers, right?

00:24:56   They are making a thing and they are putting it out in public.

00:25:00   Or this can include lots of people in the periphery of the whole YouTube world.

00:25:04   They make a thing and they put it out in public.

00:25:09   just knowing more people like that is it's just nice to have contacts with

00:25:15   people who do similar things because even if you work in in different areas

00:25:20   there are a lot of comparisons and similar experiences so I can have

00:25:25   conversations with developers where I you know I don't know how to write code

00:25:31   but we can have a conversation that is sort of about like the creative process

00:25:37   because there are similarities between writing code and writing a script.

00:25:41   Like, they require a similar kind of work, and then there's also similar kind of responses to putting your work out in public.

00:25:48   So I just found it valuable to interact with people who, I mean, aside from you, Myke,

00:25:57   I know nobody in London in my social circle who does work like this.

00:26:04   And so it can always just be kind of weird that when you do work in public on the internet,

00:26:12   you feel like sort of connected to a bunch of people, but they're all always going to

00:26:16   be geographically distant because the frequency of anyone doing this work is so rare.

00:26:25   So I guess like in that sense it's networking because my feeling was a bit like, "I am going

00:26:33   to meet up with colleagues. They might not do the exact same thing that I do, but there

00:26:38   is a colleague-like relationship with a whole bunch of people. And also I can go meet with

00:26:46   people who are new colleagues to me, people I have never interacted before, but we have

00:26:52   this kind of commonality of doing work in public.

00:26:59   I don't know. That is my very long, probably overly detailed response to, was I networking?

00:27:05   I guess yes, but it depends slightly on what you mean by networking. But there was certainly

00:27:14   no speed dating business networking though.

00:27:17   Based on the type of networking that I think of and do, you were networking. This is how

00:27:24   I think of it. Just meeting people in your industry. I recommend to people always, if

00:27:29   you do something like software development or you're a designer or something like that,

00:27:32   there are probably meetups in your area. You don't have to go to California. There are

00:27:38   likely meetups that you can go to that will have like-minded people doing this kind of

00:27:44   thing so you can make these contacts yourself. I think that even though you're kind of maybe

00:27:49   approaching this from the sense of I just want to know people you know. For

00:27:53   kind of camaraderie and you know a sense of not kind of feeling alone in this

00:27:59   which you can at times especially when you work at home and in solitary ways

00:28:03   like we both do. It's nice to know that there are people out there that you can

00:28:07   talk to that you are aware of doing the same kind of thing that you are. But

00:28:13   there really is a business side of it that you potentially don't see right now.

00:28:18   Like look at me and you, right?

00:28:20   You reached out to me when I started Relay FM and it was a similar kind of thing and

00:28:26   we went for lunch and then we ended up working together like many months down the line.

00:28:31   And this is the same for me for me going to WWDC.

00:28:35   WWDC is one of the most important things on my calendar.

00:28:39   It is one of the most vital things that I do as part of my business in the year and

00:28:43   it has been the most vital thing that I have done in business over the last four years

00:28:47   as I've attended there because I get to meet people and put faces to names and kind of

00:28:53   get in front of people that I think are doing interesting work or that I enjoy their work

00:28:59   and then they get to learn a little bit about me they get to see how I interact and it's

00:29:04   kind of led to what relay FM is now you know all of the people that we work with are people

00:29:09   that I've met and that Stevens met at these types of events and over time we've struck

00:29:15   up friendships and working relationships which have eventually built to the thing that I'm

00:29:19   doing now.

00:29:20   I think it's really important to have these kind of in-person meetings and conversations

00:29:24   for people because it helps strengthen bonds.

00:29:28   Even if you know somebody online and you talk to them every single day over multiple messaging

00:29:32   services it can be really important to just see how they talk and look at their body language

00:29:38   and see their face when they talk to you in these in-person scenarios because it really

00:29:43   kind of just helps fill out the picture of that person because then when you're apart

00:29:47   again and you're talking as you were before, you then have a different kind of feeling

00:29:52   and sense for that individual and that can be so important for building the relationships

00:29:57   that you want to build, whether they're for friendship or for business.

00:29:59   Yeah, I definitely agree that no matter how much online contact you have with people,

00:30:08   It is fundamentally different to talk to people in person.

00:30:13   And that a relationship is always different after some amount of in-person time.

00:30:20   No matter how small has been spent.

00:30:23   And there's just no way around that.

00:30:26   I think this is just a side effect of, you know, humans being the monkeys that we are.

00:30:33   that there's something different that happens in your brain

00:30:39   after you meet someone in real life.

00:30:42   I think your monkey brain does a better job of

00:30:45   modeling the other person in your mind

00:30:48   when you are then talking to them online later.

00:30:51   Or it makes the person more real

00:30:55   in this way which is undefinable.

00:30:59   There were a number of people that I met this summer

00:31:01   who I had had a bunch of text interchanges with over the internet.

00:31:07   But it's still fundamentally different than when you actually see them in person

00:31:12   and spend some time together in person.

00:31:14   It's just like there's some part of your brain that kind of needs this

00:31:19   or that treats things differently when the person is more embodied for you.

00:31:27   you. And I do think that this is, it's like the next level of, I wrote this article a

00:31:33   while back called "faceless voices" talking about radio voices or narration voices and

00:31:40   how something in your brain changes if you ever see a picture of that person. Like if

00:31:45   you just hear someone's voice and then you see what they look like, your brain treats

00:31:49   it differently. And I really do, I really do think that that's something going on in

00:31:53   the mind. That if you hear a voice unconnected from a face, your brain experiences it in

00:31:59   a different way than once you know what the face looks like. And I think there's another

00:32:03   level past that, which is you've heard the person, you know what their face looks like,

00:32:10   but now they are sitting in front of you. And the two of you are exchanging non-verbal

00:32:18   communication in the form of body language or the way you're looking. I really do think

00:32:23   that that matters a lot for human interaction.

00:32:26   The internet can't replace that yet.

00:32:30   Maybe when VR gets good enough, but not at the moment.

00:32:33   I will just reiterate what you were saying earlier though,

00:32:37   that even if it is not my intention

00:32:40   to make business connections,

00:32:41   that doing this kind of stuff in the past

00:32:44   has definitely resulted in business opportunities.

00:32:49   Like the very first conference of this that I ever went to

00:32:52   was this conference organized by Henry of MinutePhysics called BrainSTEM at the Perimeter

00:32:57   Institute in Canada. And for various reasons I was trying to leave my teaching job at the

00:33:06   exact same time that that conference was happening. It was just like this horrible, horrible disaster

00:33:11   of like a difficult time to get to Canada for that conference. It was an incredible

00:33:17   nightmare. But I was determined to get there and I still really think that that might be

00:33:26   one of the most defining conferences I ever go to because it was the first time that I

00:33:32   met a bunch of people who are now professional colleagues and friends. And like, I'm absolutely

00:33:38   sure that if I had never gone to that Brainstem conference, I would never have started the

00:33:43   the Hello Internet podcast with Brady,

00:33:45   because that was the first time that I met him.

00:33:48   And because I met him then, when I met him again

00:33:52   at later conferences that YouTube put on,

00:33:54   now we weren't meeting for the first time,

00:33:56   we were already meeting as friends, right?

00:33:59   And starting a little bit earlier makes a difference.

00:34:02   And I also think that like the random acts

00:34:04   of intelligence show that happened a couple years ago now,

00:34:09   that would have never been put on

00:34:11   if the five of us hadn't met at Brainstem.

00:34:14   So, and those are definitely cases of getting to know people

00:34:18   and then thinking, hey,

00:34:19   maybe we could work together on a podcast.

00:34:21   Or, hey, the five of us really get along together,

00:34:24   maybe we could do some kind of fun one-off show.

00:34:27   Like you never know where it's going to go.

00:34:30   And like you said, our own podcast was just a side effect

00:34:33   of me reaching out to you mainly because it's like,

00:34:37   oh, look, it's another creator who lives in London.

00:34:39   Like let me send him a message

00:34:41   because I don't know anybody else who lives in the city.

00:34:43   You know, and then like, oh, surprise, surprise,

00:34:46   like we do similar work and so we get along

00:34:50   and then eventually, you know,

00:34:51   you pitch me on a podcast and here we are.

00:34:54   - So whilst it may have been exhausting and crazy

00:34:57   and huge and unwieldy,

00:35:00   you probably have made some connections at VidCon

00:35:04   which will prove fruitful in the long term.

00:35:07   - You never know.

00:35:09   you know, just, just with all these things,

00:35:13   it's impossible to know what the future holds.

00:35:16   And right now, all I can say is,

00:35:19   I was able to meet a bunch of new people

00:35:22   who I'd never met before.

00:35:23   That was kind of the purpose of doing this.

00:35:26   And I'm very glad that I went,

00:35:28   even though I'm still in like week two of recovery.

00:35:33   - Let me take a moment to thank Squarespace,

00:35:37   the simplest way for anyone to create

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00:35:44   can start booting your own website today at squarespace.com and use the offer code Cortex

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00:36:06   a new idea or project that I want to start. Squarespace is the first place that I go because

00:36:10   you don't have to worry about anything, you don't have to worry about hosting, you don't

00:36:13   have to worry about scaling, you don't have to be someone like me, you would then have

00:36:15   to worry about learning how to develop and code a website. I have no idea how to do any

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00:36:24   know any of this. Squarespace take care of it. They have professionally designed templates

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00:37:15   Would you like to talk about our old friend Evernote?

00:37:19   Now I don't know if and when Evernote

00:37:22   has ever come up on the show,

00:37:25   but I know that we have both been Evernote users

00:37:27   for a long time.

00:37:30   Like I'm gonna hazard a guess to say that seriously I think I may have had an Evernote account for about ten years

00:37:36   Yeah, and I know that sounds like it sounds like an incredibly long time, but I

00:37:40   Think I really have it's getting if not then it's about eight, you know

00:37:46   It's getting close to ten years if not already ten years because I got in

00:37:49   Pretty much immediately from when they launched. Mm-hmm

00:37:53   the reason that you're bringing this up right now is because in the document for quite a while and

00:38:00   I have had a little bullet point which was simply called "F*ck Evernote"

00:38:05   Mhmm, yup.

00:38:07   As an item to talk about.

00:38:10   So many people that I know that use Evernote have in some way that feeling.

00:38:19   Yeah.

00:38:20   And that probably comes with the fact that it's a 10 year old product.

00:38:23   Yeah, I think there's many complicated things that are wrapped up here.

00:38:28   But I have just heard incidentally that Evernote has done some pricing changes

00:38:34   and so I feel like if we were ever going to get to this bullet point maybe this

00:38:39   week is the week. So the first thing is I would actually like it if you could

00:38:45   summarize for me in a clear and concise way what changes have just occurred at

00:38:50   Evernote because I cannot figure out for the life of me what's happening.

00:38:54   "Oh, I think you've asked the wrong person."

00:38:56   I can't work it out either.

00:38:59   Basically, they've increased their pricing plans,

00:39:02   so they're more expensive than they were before.

00:39:06   And the free plan, I think, only works with two devices now.

00:39:11   And if you want to use more than two devices,

00:39:15   you have to go to now one of the two paid plans,

00:39:18   plus and premium.

00:39:20   And I think it's very confusing.

00:39:25   And I know as a current Evernote premium customer,

00:39:30   they have not contacted me to tell me what's happening

00:39:32   to my account if I'm gonna be paying more.

00:39:34   It seems like I probably will be paying more.

00:39:36   And then they just have two kind of accounts

00:39:38   that have some different features

00:39:41   and different storage space.

00:39:43   - So clear, so simple, Myke.

00:39:46   - Yeah, I try, honestly, that's as clear and simple

00:39:48   as I can make it.

00:39:49   Basically Evernote's more expensive and for free accounts they're restricting the amount

00:39:53   of devices you can use.

00:39:55   That's like in a nutshell.

00:39:56   But there is a lot of nuance to it which is making the whole thing a bit of a nightmare.

00:40:00   Yeah it's a bit confusing even just reading through the description of what they've changed

00:40:06   on the website.

00:40:08   It's like oh okay you've raised the prices but with only one of the plans can you search

00:40:13   inside of documents?

00:40:15   Isn't this the whole thing of which your service is?

00:40:17   "Okay, but now I need to have the most expensive one

00:40:20   to do that."

00:40:21   It just seems like I've seen a lot of people

00:40:22   who are super angry at Evernote about this.

00:40:26   - Yeah, I think the OCR is only on premium now,

00:40:29   but like the expensive one,

00:40:32   and if you wanna download notes,

00:40:34   you have to have one of the paid ones.

00:40:36   Basically, they had a feature set

00:40:40   that was available to everyone,

00:40:41   and then they split it, and then they split it again,

00:40:44   and then they put the prices up.

00:40:45   - Right.

00:40:46   10 year old product.

00:40:51   And sometimes it feels 10 years old.

00:40:56   Now, this pricing thing is interesting because

00:41:01   I think many people have had a feeling from the outside of

00:41:06   "What's going on Evernote?"

00:41:10   The company has gone through some weird announcements over the past year, if I remember correctly.

00:41:17   The CEO changed, then they laid off a bunch of people. I feel like I've just been hearing odd news about Evernote for a year.

00:41:26   Yeah, which makes you feel not super secure about a product that is supposed to be

00:41:33   keeping your off-board brain

00:41:35   Safe and synchronized and and searchable everywhere, you know, it doesn't it doesn't make you feel good

00:41:43   And it's also a company that seems to have been very very

00:41:48   Slow at making any kind of significant changes that people want

00:41:55   Actually, when we were in San Francisco, we ended up driving past the headquarters of

00:42:00   Evernote at one point.

00:42:01   We were looking at the building.

00:42:03   And asking them if they needed work chat.

00:42:05   Yeah, yeah.

00:42:07   I believe someone might have suggested to write "Do you know about work chat on a brick?"

00:42:13   and throw it through the window.

00:42:17   Which is kind of the feeling about how intrusive Evernote is about letting you know if they

00:42:20   have work chat.

00:42:21   It's like, how many times do I have to close this notification?

00:42:24   Why don't you just throw a brick through my window at this point?

00:42:28   But when we drove past it, as with other companies, but particularly with Evernote, I looked at

00:42:34   this huge building and again had the feeling of, "What do all of the people in there do?"

00:42:43   I have no ability to understand how a building full of people equals the product that is

00:42:51   Evernote.

00:42:53   And I will now tell you the reason why I originally had that bullet point listed as it is in the

00:42:59   show notes.

00:43:01   Because okay, here is the selling point of Evernote.

00:43:04   Save everything in this digital brain.

00:43:08   This little app can just serve as your memory.

00:43:12   This is what all of their branding and marketing is about.

00:43:14   The elephant never forgets.

00:43:15   Right, their icon is an elephant, elephants never forget.

00:43:20   This is fantastic.

00:43:21   Okay, great.

00:43:22   I've been using Evernote for a very, very long time, as you have.

00:43:27   And you saw a little while ago for one of our Book Club episodes that I have a system

00:43:36   that I use with Evernote to make a record of all of the books that I read.

00:43:43   So here's this little workflow that I've had for quite a while.

00:43:46   I read a book.

00:43:47   Now I'm reading it on iBooks, formerly on Kindle, but it's the same idea.

00:43:51   And so I make a bunch of highlights as I go through the book.

00:43:55   And sometimes I type little notes to myself.

00:43:57   It's active reading and just pulling out the parts that I think are important or that are

00:44:03   interesting.

00:44:04   At the end of reading any particular book, I take screenshots of all of the pages with

00:44:10   highlights or notes on them.

00:44:13   And then I would make in Evernote a folder with the name of the book and I would dump

00:44:17   all of those pages in there.

00:44:18   I would go through again and make further annotations to future me.

00:44:23   And this is an extremely useful thing to do because when we do the book shows, for example,

00:44:29   I'm able to just pull up, "Oh, here's all the pages from the book," so I'm looking at

00:44:33   only the relevant sections and the notes to myself.

00:44:36   And also super valuable is because Evernote does all this optical character recognition,

00:44:42   I can search through all of that stuff.

00:44:45   And what's really useful is that you can't possibly remember everything from every book

00:44:51   that you've ever read, but if I'm doing a video on some topic, I can search for a couple

00:44:57   of keywords related to that video topic.

00:45:00   And sometimes I would find a page of text from a book I read a while ago that had something

00:45:05   interesting that was related to the topic that I'm working on now.

00:45:08   So it has been this way for me for years to keep books that I have read in active memory.

00:45:18   And this is along with all of the other various notes and things that I'm just collecting

00:45:23   regularly for videos and stuff.

00:45:27   So this is the process that I've been doing for quite a while.

00:45:29   And I'm really deep into Evernote with this, as you can quite imagine.

00:45:34   Now, about two months ago, which is when I first put this bullet point in the document,

00:45:39   I went to go follow my little process as normal, and I had finished a book, I had taken all

00:45:46   the screenshots, and I thought, "Okay, great, here we go. Time to make a new notebook and

00:45:50   time to save these pages into it." And I pressed the "Press the New Notebook" button. Huh,

00:45:56   that's funny. Nothing happens. Nothing happens when I press the New Notebook button. So I

00:46:01   So I try it on a different device, press the new notebook button, hmm, nothing happens.

00:46:05   Huh, how interesting. I open up AlterNote, which is that lovely

00:46:09   additional interface to Evernote, and the new notebook button is grayed out.

00:46:13   I can't even click it. Well gee, that's strange.

00:46:17   And then it dawns on me. I do a Google search for

00:46:21   Evernote notebook limit.

00:46:25   And sure enough, sure enough,

00:46:29   allow you to have 250 notebooks. Why? That is what I want to know! Why? Why, Evernote?

00:46:40   Isn't this your whole f*cking business? Is to remember all the things? Why? Why on earth

00:46:48   would you ever limit the number of notebooks that a person can have? Why

00:46:53   Why would you do this? You have a whole building filled with people. You have servers, you have monthly revenue.

00:47:01   Why on earth would you ever limit this? This is what your business does.

00:47:07   This is your selling point. But no, somewhere in some array some dude was like, "Eh, 250. That's enough.

00:47:15   Hard-coded limit." Right? And it's not even like

00:47:19   256 or something so like oh, maybe I'm running into a bug that nobody just considered right they ran out of space in their integer

00:47:25   No, someone just decided there's 250 and even better. Okay, even better Myke

00:47:30   I'm googling around this is like I cannot believe this but then I find oh there is a solution. Don't worry

00:47:35   Don't worry, you can archive some of your notebooks to get back

00:47:41   Space so it's like oh you can take a whole section you can archive a bunch of notebooks. Oh, that sounds great

00:47:46   What happens when I archive a notebook? Oh, don't worry. It's still there.

00:47:51   It just won't show up in search and it won't sync on anything. Great. Thanks.

00:47:55   Well, how do you get it?

00:47:56   You can manually go to like an archive section to manually go look through everything,

00:48:01   but I will remind you the whole purpose of the way you store things in Evernote is to be able to search for things,

00:48:08   not to be able to categorize everything in an absolutely perfect way. And it's just like...

00:48:14   I've been feeling vaguely irritated with a whole bunch of minor things in Evernote for a very long time,

00:48:24   not least of which is how awful their app is to use on iPad, but I've been living with it forever because,

00:48:30   "Okay, well there's just this debt that I have."

00:48:33   But Evernote is one of the only remaining programs where I will prefer to use it on the computer

00:48:38   simply because using it on the iPad is so awful.

00:48:40   awful, but again it's like you have a building full of people like why haven't

00:48:45   you been able to update your iPad app to be usable on I don't know an iPad for

00:48:49   anyone who's ever used this for 10 seconds like has anybody ever used this

00:48:53   program on an iPad at Evernote? What are you doing with those hundreds of people

00:48:56   or whatever? It's so infuriating but so I've been living with all of this stuff

00:49:01   for a while just kind of like grrrr right whatever Evernote but you got me because

00:49:05   I have literally over 3,000 individual notes in Evernote and there really is

00:49:09   nobody else that does what they do in the way that they ever do it.

00:49:12   Yeah, I've been living with it for ages. Like, you have a hard-coded limit that I have just

00:49:18   run up against and there is nothing that I can do. Thanks a lot. It feels like just a

00:49:24   gigantic middle finger for being a user over a long period of time. Like, that's just what

00:49:31   it feels like. Guess what? When your technical debt is too high, like when you're into this

00:49:38   far far too much and there's no turning back we're going to show you that we

00:49:42   have an arbitrary limit for no good reason. Like great thanks thanks Evernote

00:49:46   really appreciate that one. So frustrating. So what are you gonna do? I

00:49:51   don't know what I'm gonna do I mean the answer is for the past couple months

00:49:56   I've been just kind of like not saving notes because I don't I don't have a

00:50:01   good solution right but this is not a good solution either. I have I have tried

00:50:06   to look into some of the alternatives and the only one which even comes

00:50:12   remotely close to being able to replace Evernote is Microsoft's OneNote. This

00:50:17   is the only program out there that is sort of close to being able to do what

00:50:22   Evernote does. Right, yeah, because they do OCR as well, don't they? That was my main

00:50:26   thing. It's like, do they do OCR? Because the OCR is a totally killer feature. OCR

00:50:32   OCR is the optical character recognition.

00:50:36   So I can save an image, like for example a screenshot of a bunch of text from a book,

00:50:41   or I have tons of infographics and just a huge number of images that I can save.

00:50:47   And when I search for stuff, OCR, the optical character recognition, will recognize those as actual words.

00:50:53   And I have to say, Evernote's OCR is very impressive.

00:50:57   stuff in the back of photos that I would never notice with like there's a little

00:51:00   thing written on a sign or something. Like it's it's very very good. It's also

00:51:05   why okay great I can rely on this. And so for a while I don't think Microsoft

00:51:10   OneNote had image OCR but they have added it since I checked last. But the

00:51:17   problem with OneNote is their whole structure, right, their whole layout is

00:51:26   is not just like their hierarchy is basically you can have a notebook

00:51:31   and that notebook can have a bunch of tabs in it

00:51:34   as opposed to Evernote which allows you to have like an arbitrary

00:51:39   number of hierarchical notebooks so you can have a notebook

00:51:42   that contains a hundred notebooks and so for example like I have a notebook which

00:51:47   is just called

00:51:48   book notes and within that are a bunch of other notebooks

00:51:51   each for each individual book. But the OneNote metaphor is much more like you

00:51:57   you have a notebook

00:51:58   and that notebook has a bunch of tabs on the top

00:52:01   kind of like you're going to have browser windows. And let me tell you

00:52:05   tabs on the top does not scale when you want to have a hundred of them.

00:52:10   Like clearly in OneNote's design conception

00:52:15   they were kinda thinking that no notebook will ever have more than a

00:52:18   you know, maybe half a dozen tabs in it. It's just not designed to work like that.

00:52:25   So OneNote is just structurally unacceptable, plus their icon is so Microsoft-y and purple.

00:52:33   It's really hideous. Sorry OneNote team, it's really ugly.

00:52:37   Yeah, they have an interesting design language. Do you think some of the structural stuff

00:52:41   is just because you're too baked in in your mind to the way that OneNote works?

00:52:46   I have been trying to think about how to make this work, and I am not in any way devoted

00:52:57   to the way Evernote lays stuff out.

00:53:00   It's simply a question of how can I have a way that sorts things like I want to corral

00:53:06   all of my book notes into a separate section, but also be able to access any of them at

00:53:11   any point in time.

00:53:13   And I want to be able to group all of my projects in process together, like in one little place.

00:53:19   And I want to group together all of my future projects together all in one place.

00:53:24   When you have a large number of notebooks, and I don't see any way around that, you need

00:53:30   some structure that is on top of the notebook level.

00:53:34   You need to be able to group them together in a reasonable way.

00:53:37   But the thing is, I think what is going to have to happen is that I'm just going to have

00:53:44   to move over to OneNote and just deal with it as best I can.

00:53:49   Because my current situation of resenting Evernote but still being a premium user is

00:53:55   the worst of everything.

00:53:57   It's like shaking my fist at Evernote, not using it, but I'm still paying for their service

00:54:03   and now they've done a price increase so potentially paying more.

00:54:07   like well this is dumb like one of these things has to give and so my actual plan

00:54:13   is Microsoft does have a little program that will let you import an Evernote

00:54:21   database but of course it only runs on a Windows computer they didn't make one

00:54:25   for Mac thanks guys so I was thinking well I guess I don't know how I'm going

00:54:31   to use this and then I remembered oh my father has a Windows computer so I think

00:54:35   I think when I visit my family for part two this summer,

00:54:39   I'm just gonna go onto my dad's computer,

00:54:42   install my Evernote, let it download all 3000 notes,

00:54:45   install OneNote, and then on my dad's Windows laptop

00:54:49   run this program which should be able to import everything

00:54:53   from Evernote into OneNote.

00:54:54   I think that's just what's going to have to happen

00:54:58   because I can't think of any other tool

00:55:02   or solution for this.

00:55:05   So this doesn't necessarily help with this problem,

00:55:08   but it is just worth noting,

00:55:09   Apple's Notes app on the Mac

00:55:14   will import an Evernote database.

00:55:17   - Oh, will it?

00:55:17   Interesting. - Yeah.

00:55:18   I'm too scared to do this,

00:55:20   because I have literally no idea what will happen,

00:55:24   but it does do it.

00:55:27   - It's also interesting because

00:55:28   Notes has a flat hierarchy of folders.

00:55:31   It doesn't like folders in folders.

00:55:32   So it's just like, what are you gonna do

00:55:34   with the notebooks in notebooks importer.

00:55:37   It's interesting, interesting thing to find out.

00:55:38   - Exactly.

00:55:40   I don't want any part of it, but it will do it.

00:55:42   I'm feeling like I wanna move away from Evernote now as well.

00:55:45   This has just been like a wake up for me,

00:55:47   where it's like I use it for just one thing

00:55:49   and I don't even really need to do that anymore.

00:55:51   Basically, I use Evernote now for travel stuff,

00:55:54   so when I get emails of confirmation things,

00:55:58   I send them to Evernote.

00:55:59   And I know that there are a bunch of apps

00:56:01   that are specifically built for this purpose,

00:56:03   stuff like TripIt and things like that.

00:56:05   But Evernote has just been always what I use

00:56:07   because it's so simple and I know I can have

00:56:09   everything downloaded and it's there

00:56:10   and I've used it forever.

00:56:11   But for my next upcoming trip to Memphis,

00:56:15   I'm trying out something different

00:56:17   and hoping that it will be a better solution for me.

00:56:22   I'm basically just using Apple Notes.

00:56:25   So I have been previously, more recently,

00:56:28   writing out just a simple text note

00:56:31   with some information in it,

00:56:32   like basic flight information and confirmation numbers,

00:56:35   hotel addresses and stuff like that.

00:56:36   So that's just there when I need it.

00:56:38   But what I've realized I can do,

00:56:42   from Steven on Connected recommending this to me,

00:56:44   I completely forgot you could do this,

00:56:47   is save PDFs into Apple Notes.

00:56:50   So now when I get confirmation emails of trips

00:56:53   and hotel bookings and stuff like that,

00:56:55   I use my email application Air Mail,

00:56:57   which can take an email and turn it into a PDF,

00:57:00   and then I just open it up in Apple Notes

00:57:02   and append it to the travel note that I started.

00:57:04   So now I have a note which has all of the basic text

00:57:07   information and then a bunch of PDFs down at the bottom.

00:57:10   And I think this is probably going to be the solution

00:57:13   for me going forward.

00:57:14   I'm gonna try it out on one trip.

00:57:16   If it works as flawlessly as I pretty much expect it will,

00:57:19   I think I might just download my Evernote information

00:57:23   and then kind of cancel my premium plan.

00:57:25   - Yeah, that sounds like that's probably

00:57:28   the reasonable thing for you to do.

00:57:30   - For what I'm using it for,

00:57:31   I think it makes the most sense because it's literally all I do with Evernote now is just

00:57:36   email and travel stuff and there are a bunch of specifically purposed tools that do this

00:57:40   better I've been told but also I just want to use notes because notes has kind of become

00:57:46   my brain now.

00:57:49   That is now my off-board brain not Evernote anymore.

00:57:52   Yeah, and I wonder how many people are in a similar situation to you where the price

00:58:01   raise in Evernote reminds them that they basically don't use Evernote anymore and it is time

00:58:06   to cancel it.

00:58:07   I think I'm paying something like five or six pounds a month for Evernote and it's not

00:58:12   a lot of money but I guess it is if I'm not using it.

00:58:16   Yeah, you might as well cancel it if you're essentially using it to just keep track of

00:58:20   a single thing.

00:58:21   At this point, the only reason I'm paying for it is because they're limiting the free

00:58:25   account to two devices.

00:58:26   Because I don't use any of the other features.

00:58:29   Right.

00:58:30   So I just, when a company does something like raise the prices, I think the presumption

00:58:36   is they need more money.

00:58:39   That's probably why they're raising the prices.

00:58:43   And that to me just seems to be adding to the Evernote tale of woe with shrinking the

00:58:51   company and then also still needing more money and with a somewhat confusing upgrade structure,

00:59:02   I wouldn't be surprised if Evernote finds itself with fewer paying customers and fewer

00:59:10   revenue after this price change.

00:59:12   I just keep wondering what's going to happen on iOS because it's the same thing.

00:59:17   I haven't heard anything about this price change, but sooner or later something's going

00:59:21   to have to happen.

00:59:22   And I'd be willing to bet that with all of the improvements that Apple has made to Notes,

00:59:27   which everybody seems to love, and even though I use Notes in a very minimal way, I can tell

00:59:33   it it's way better.

00:59:35   I have a hard time imagining who is the Evernote user that couldn't get away with using Notes.

00:59:44   I think that's very, very few people.

00:59:47   And when facing the option of "do you want to pay more for Evernote in this complicated

00:59:53   structure or do you just want to use Notes for free?"

00:59:59   I think at this point, this year, Notes is good enough for almost everybody who probably

01:00:06   uses Evernote.

01:00:08   And so that to me adds to this feeling of this is an elephant standing on a sinking

01:00:14   ship from which all of the rats are fleeing.

01:00:17   That's Evernote.

01:00:18   At least that's what it feels like.

01:00:19   Sorry if you listen to this and you work at Evernote, but that's the impression from the

01:00:22   outside.

01:00:23   One of the great things about Evernote is the fact that it's everywhere.

01:00:28   That is one of its great things. It is on all devices, it is on all platforms, so you

01:00:31   know you're going to get it wherever you are. That is like one of its best features. So

01:00:36   like you know if I open my Android phone, Evernote is there and all my notes are there.

01:00:40   There are very few applications that are in as many places as Evernote, but in the same

01:00:46   vein I think that's been part of their undoing because they've wasted time and effort on

01:00:50   making things like a Pebble app.

01:00:52   That doesn't seem like a good use of developer time.

01:00:55   I mean, and look, fundamentally one of the things that is really upsetting about this

01:00:59   is this two-device limit is not friendly to those who have come around to live the multi-pad

01:01:03   lifestyle, right?

01:01:05   Yeah, I'm sure that is, that's the real sticking point for the Cortex audience.

01:01:12   There's no way that me and you could use the free account because the multi-pad lifestyle

01:01:17   dictates at least two iOS devices unacceptable.

01:01:21   Well these two, if you're doing iOS devices, it's going to be three because everybody needs

01:01:24   phone. Then you have two iPads. So for all the cortexians who are living the righteous

01:01:34   multi-iPad lifestyle, the Evernote free account is totally unacceptable. And oh look, there's

01:01:40   Notes just sitting there getting better every year waiting for you to check it out. I think

01:01:48   that's what's going to happen. So I mean my feeling is boy I sure would love it if Evernote

01:01:53   raised the 250 limit, but the feeling is really one of slow development plus weirdness about

01:02:04   the company plus increasing prices that I suspect won't actually help. All of this equals

01:02:12   it's time to go. I guess it's time to find another way to do this.

01:02:17   this.

01:02:24   Gotta get that in there.

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01:04:17   [beep]

01:04:18   Grey, I would like to do one Ask Cortex today.

01:04:22   Okay.

01:04:23   But it's a long one.

01:04:24   Oh.

01:04:25   But it's a good one.

01:04:26   Hmm.

01:04:27   So you will have to bear with me for a moment because I think it is important to paint the

01:04:32   picture of GuideGhost on the Reddit.

01:04:34   Okay.

01:04:35   Alright.

01:04:36   Alright.

01:04:37   I'm gonna give you a little leeway here.

01:04:38   Okay.

01:04:39   But this better be good.

01:04:40   Okay, so this is from GuideGhost and they say, "I've been working on my side project

01:04:44   for long enough that I feel that my primary job is just taking too much of my time. I

01:04:49   often wake up, put in a solid pomodoro or two of progress on my side project, but then

01:04:55   just as I'm feeling great and like I'm feeling like I'm right on track with it, I have to

01:04:59   completely derail my progress and go to work. My side project is not yet making money and

01:05:04   I feel like it's going to be hard to get it to that point without a stretch of a few months

01:05:08   of uninterrupted full time work. I lucked out in the career that I chose in the given

01:05:14   city that I work in that there's a ton of demand for my services at all times, so I

01:05:18   can kind of do my own teaching holiday schedule thing, work for a stretch, quit for a few

01:05:23   months then find a new job. The obvious consequence is having a bunch of one year stints on your

01:05:29   resume which could make future employers wary and it's difficult to explain to somebody

01:05:33   why you've done this. I guess I might as well continue burning my career to the ground

01:05:38   anyway right it's useless when I want to make it as a self-employed person later right?

01:05:43   The TL;DR of this is how many times can one quit their job and get a new one before rendering

01:05:50   themselves outwardly unemployable? This is super tricky.

01:05:57   So when I left my employment I had no solid backup plan. I was not allowing myself to

01:06:06   to think this isn't gonna work,

01:06:09   you're gonna need to go get a job

01:06:10   or you're gonna need to go back, right?

01:06:12   Like when I left it was just like that's it.

01:06:14   I never left with the idea of like put a few months in,

01:06:17   get a new job.

01:06:18   And before that as well, people knew what I did outside,

01:06:24   but I got on with my own job like it wasn't an issue.

01:06:26   It's like people knew what I was doing on the side, right,

01:06:28   when I worked for the bank.

01:06:29   They were just like you do that thing,

01:06:31   but I was already there so it wasn't a problem.

01:06:33   I just made sure I just got on with my job, right,

01:06:35   it wasn't an issue. But I can imagine this scenario being tough on an employer, coming

01:06:41   in and saying like, I do this thing on the outside. I've been spending some time away

01:06:47   doing this thing. Like, how would you know if this person is going to bother sticking

01:06:50   around, especially if like you saw a CV that was like one year and then like a four month

01:06:55   gap, then another place for a year, then a four month gap, you would look at it and probably

01:06:59   think this person is going to leave me after a year.

01:07:02   Hmm.

01:07:03   Like I know if I was employing someone and saw that CV, I think that's how I would look

01:07:08   at it.

01:07:09   And then once you're inside a company it's fine because as long as you're doing your

01:07:13   work, most companies don't care what you do on the side.

01:07:15   But trying to get employed by someone with a CV like that I think might be a bit difficult.

01:07:23   That is very tricky.

01:07:28   also interesting because... so I basically did this when I was trying to do

01:07:37   anything other than teaching on the side. So I mean I've you know I worked as a

01:07:46   teacher depending on how you want to count it like six or seven years but I

01:07:51   had a year gap essentially in the middle-ish end-ish part of that so I

01:07:57   So I worked at one of my first schools for about four years and then I quit teaching

01:08:04   for a year and then came back to teaching at the end of that year.

01:08:10   I think that's a little more palatable, right?

01:08:13   Like I left to do a thing, the thing didn't work out, I'm now coming back.

01:08:17   Like that one time that you do that, I think that's okay.

01:08:21   But a string of that I think is difficult.

01:08:25   Yeah, that's the problem. And also, just to be clear, I was not forthcoming about the fact that I had left to go do a thing.

01:08:36   I was real vague on what I've been doing for that year in between teaching.

01:08:42   Why? That feels like a bad idea.

01:08:44   Well, I mean this is, to go to the questioner's thing here, this goes to the point of the

01:08:51   riskiness of doing something like this is directly proportional to just how in demand

01:08:56   is your job, right? Just how in demand is your particular set of skills. And my view

01:09:03   on this, I mean I know we sort of took different tacks, but no one at any of the schools that

01:09:09   that I worked at ever had any idea

01:09:12   that I was doing anything on the side ever.

01:09:14   And that was very intentional.

01:09:17   I thought no good can come of this.

01:09:19   And I just kept my mouth shut

01:09:20   about everything that I was doing on the side.

01:09:23   People were like, oh, what are you doing this weekend?

01:09:24   Oh, nothing.

01:09:25   - Like as I said, I think I said this

01:09:26   in a show in the past, my mouth would have been shut,

01:09:29   but I got the job in marketing because I proved

01:09:31   that I was able to do something creative.

01:09:33   Like I had no choice.

01:09:34   - Yeah, you were leveraging it.

01:09:35   It was a different situation, right?

01:09:37   you were leveraging it to advance your career.

01:09:41   That's different, whereas,

01:09:42   I think to most employers, like side projects,

01:09:48   unless like in your situation,

01:09:50   they can see how it would directly benefit them,

01:09:54   they're not gonna wanna hear about this.

01:09:55   - Because it's splitting up your working brain.

01:09:58   - Yeah, it's splitting up your working brain.

01:10:00   They're not going to like it.

01:10:01   And like GuideGhost is doing as well,

01:10:05   if you're really serious about it,

01:10:07   the only way to make real progress is to do it before you go to your actual job.

01:10:12   Which again is what I did.

01:10:14   It was like putting in a couple hours of work on the thing that I really cared

01:10:18   about. And then like, Oh, I guess I'm off to work now.

01:10:21   After I've given up the best part of my brain.

01:10:24   That's why I never understood the morning part. It doesn't make the,

01:10:28   like working on this stuff in the morning has never made sense to me why you did

01:10:32   it, why guide ghost did it. Because you have a hard stop time.

01:10:36   Like the way that I did it,

01:10:37   I would just work until my body shut down

01:10:39   and that could be many hours.

01:10:42   I don't know, work for me.

01:10:44   - Yeah, this is again the difference between people

01:10:47   and when their optimal work times are, right?

01:10:49   And figuring that out.

01:10:51   But so to get back to the main point,

01:10:53   I think that I was able to be a bit more vague

01:10:58   about precisely what I had been doing during that time.

01:11:03   I mean, and I also like the story happened to work out very well,

01:11:07   which was I was spending time with family in Hawaii.

01:11:10   It was like, guess what? People don't really question that. Right.

01:11:13   Because everybody's like, Oh man, if I could live in Hawaii for a long time,

01:11:16   I totally would.

01:11:17   Lucky you dude.

01:11:18   Yeah, exactly. Right. Like what were you doing then? Oh,

01:11:21   spending time with family,

01:11:23   like not working really hard to make sure I wasn't in this exact position now

01:11:26   where I'm re-interviewing for a job.

01:11:27   But here I am a failure.

01:11:30   - Exactly, totally exactly.

01:11:32   But I failed in my endeavors and so this is why

01:11:35   we're having this conversation.

01:11:36   Like you don't put that on the resume.

01:11:38   It's not a good thing to do.

01:11:40   But I again, I think people were not super inquisitive

01:11:45   because my job was a physics teacher.

01:11:50   And if there's one thing that's great about being

01:11:53   a physics teacher is that the job is in incredible demand.

01:12:00   And so at any interview,

01:12:04   I was essentially able to get a job

01:12:06   as long as I did a pretty good job

01:12:08   on the actual interview itself.

01:12:10   So it was just like, it was just kind of a no brainer.

01:12:13   - Unless you walk out on a completely vague and shady

01:12:15   about wanting to work in a place, right?

01:12:17   That's the only time that it would come back to bite you.

01:12:20   - Right, yeah, when you're being an idiot

01:12:22   who doesn't know what's happening, yeah.

01:12:24   So this is like, I gotta think about it.

01:12:27   Ah, you moron past me.

01:12:29   But anyway, so like I think this is, my feeling with GuideGhost here is, there's two things

01:12:41   here.

01:12:42   One of which is, we don't know the details about what the side project is, but I find

01:12:47   it's a little concerning to me that whatever it is is not already earning money.

01:12:53   Yeah, if it's not making money but you think it can after a few months of work,

01:12:58   before making a decision like this I would recommend that you burn the candle

01:13:04   at both ends and make a little bit of money first because if you can't make a

01:13:09   little bit of money when you're completely overworking yourself

01:13:12   unfortunately, I would be surprised that you would make any money if you put all

01:13:18   your time into it. Like what is this thing that you believe will take a

01:13:22   couple of months and then you'll be golden. I don't know about that.

01:13:26   Yeah, no idea. I mean it's possible that it's a thing, let's just say it's possible

01:13:32   it's a thing like developing an app for example, right? That you can't put it up on the store

01:13:36   until it is done. However, if it's something like that, I really do think that the business

01:13:44   idea of a minimum viable product is something to seriously consider here. And it's like,

01:13:52   What is the smallest version of this thing that someone might give you some money for?

01:13:59   And if there's no version of that, ultimately this to me feels like a hell of a gamble.

01:14:08   And so when I left teaching the first time to attempt to spin up one of my older projects,

01:14:15   which didn't work, I was already making a decent amount of money from the project before

01:14:22   I quit teaching the first time.

01:14:24   And the only question was

01:14:26   can I spin this up into a full time living

01:14:31   over the next many months?

01:14:34   The answer to that turned out to be no.

01:14:36   It was just very, very frustrating,

01:14:38   perhaps one of the most frustrating periods in my life.

01:14:41   But at the very least I had an indication

01:14:44   that there is some level of market demand

01:14:46   for the thing that I'm doing.

01:14:48   And the only question is

01:14:49   can I just triple this in size?

01:14:52   Which I think is a very, very different question from

01:14:56   I have no income from this thing now,

01:15:00   can I make it into a full-time living

01:15:02   in the space of several months?

01:15:04   The other thing that is a little bit concerning

01:15:09   is I don't know what the intended schedule here is,

01:15:12   but if,

01:15:17   I mean, my gut feeling here is it would be better to take a

01:15:21   longer break than to take a series of long-ish, but inconvenient breaks to employers.

01:15:30   Like, I don't know if it is practical to try to save up enough to say have a

01:15:37   six month break instead of doing two

01:15:41   three month breaks. I don't know if that is

01:15:45   given the situation, but I think that to the main question about how many times can you do this before employers start to worry,

01:15:53   the best way to mitigate that to me would seem to be try to take a longer break and

01:16:01   then come back to a job that is in high demand instead of

01:16:06   switching employers more frequently for

01:16:09   shorter breaks.

01:16:11   Again, it's a little difficult to provide advice without specifics about what is the

01:16:17   job because I could see some jobs where it wouldn't matter so much, but I'm presuming

01:16:22   that employers would, like you say, not like a series of breaks after quitting jobs after

01:16:30   eight months to then not work three months or something along those lines.

01:16:35   Because one of the things if you're working in a team and the person who runs that team

01:16:39   that manages you, they don't care if you're loyal to the company, right? In most instances

01:16:44   if it's a big company you're going to work for, but they just don't want to have to go

01:16:48   through this hiring process again in seven or eight months time.

01:16:52   Exactly. Speaking as someone going through the hiring process.

01:16:56   Of course you are.

01:16:56   I would like to do it as little as possible.

01:16:59   So the idea of loyalty is sometimes just loyal to the team, right? And you know that you're

01:17:04   not going to leave the manager in the lurch after six or seven months because you've really

01:17:09   got to go out and work on your passion project for a while. Which leads me to ask the question

01:17:15   of GuideGhost, wouldn't it be better to just try and do contract work rather than getting

01:17:19   full-time positions in companies?

01:17:21   Yeah, that's an excellent point. If there is a version of this work which is contractable,

01:17:27   that seems like the way better option as well.

01:17:29   So like my advice would be, pause the passion project, spin up a contracting business, find

01:17:36   some contracting work, and then you will be ready to set your own schedule for as long

01:17:40   as you want.

01:17:42   That's what I think this person should do.

01:17:44   I would say that my primary feeling still is try to make any amount of money, even if

01:17:53   it is small, with the side project before doing anything else.

01:17:57   Oh yeah, you've got to do that before you do anything else.

01:18:00   You need to know that what you're doing is something other people want.

01:18:04   Like I'm sure you believe it's a good idea, I'm sure it is a good idea, but it doesn't

01:18:09   mean people want it or need it.

01:18:11   Yeah, and there is an interesting feeling which is earning some money from a thing that

01:18:19   you have done for the first time, even if it is a trivial amount of money.

01:18:26   that simple barrier to get over that a person somewhere has handed you dollars

01:18:33   for a thing. Like that is a bigger barrier than you might think it is and

01:18:40   it's also just such a great confirmation for you that yes like somewhere in the

01:18:46   market a person has value for this because as much as you you might want to

01:18:53   just ask people you can't really trust people's answers if you're just asking

01:18:58   them if you say what do you think about this thing people just want to be polite

01:19:02   and nice and they'll say oh yeah that sounds like a great idea or if you ask

01:19:06   them would you buy this thing people will say sure of course I'll buy that

01:19:09   thing but if you followed up with immediately with will you give me five

01:19:13   dollars for this thing right now you'd be surprised like people will just

01:19:17   change immediately like oh no I won't actually give you money for it now I

01:19:20   I was just saying that to be nice. And so I think that's partly why it's very important to earn

01:19:27   something from the side project first as a test and as a confirmation that you are

01:19:35   on the right path. The absolute amount doesn't matter, but just getting something from someone

01:19:43   who doesn't know you really does.

01:19:46   But good luck to you.

01:19:48   Good luck, Ghost Guide. Good luck.

01:19:51   And I have to say, Myke,

01:19:54   that was a good question.

01:19:56   Oh, you were happy to have that one. It was, wasn't it? It was long.

01:19:59   There was a lot to it, but I think it was worth it in its length.

01:20:01   I think so as well. I was a little,

01:20:04   a little worried when you were pitching this as a question.

01:20:07   I thought I'm gonna be, oh, here's Myke with a long thing.

01:20:10   thing. But someone was laying out their situation and it was a good question so it was worth

01:20:18   it. So I give you thumbs up on that Myke. I give you thumbs up on that.

01:20:23   My collaborator guide ghost. On this one. If you have any Ask Cortex's, especially maybe

01:20:30   if they're of this kind of nature, you know, I would hope that we might be able to help

01:20:34   with some advice. I would suggest write it up, tweet it at me with the hashtag #askcortex

01:20:39   and we'll see them, they go into a document.

01:20:41   Or if you wanna put them in the Reddit,

01:20:42   you can do that, tag me in it, and hopefully I'll see it.

01:20:44   I don't know if tag me in it is correct vernacular

01:20:47   for Reddit, but that's what I'm gonna say anyway.

01:20:50   - They're gonna mention your username.

01:20:51   - There you go, mention my username on the Reddit,

01:20:53   and maybe you get your question on the show.

01:20:56   We're helping people here, Gray.

01:20:58   - Oh yeah?

01:20:59   - Yeah, maybe it's time for our second spinoff show.

01:21:01   Care Techs.

01:21:07   helping people. GATEX. Isn't it... no I do not approve of that name. Kortek GATEX. No.

01:21:19   Building an empire. An empire with limits I think. The limits are Myke can't name

01:21:28   stuff.