Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► If you were going to do an introduction to the show, what would it be?

00:00:03 ◼   ► Like, just something like "Hello and welcome to Cortex, I'm Myke Hurley"

00:00:07 ◼   ► but I don't want to do that though, you know?

00:00:10 ◼   ► Yeah, it's no good.

00:00:11 ◼   ► I feel like it's boring.

00:00:13 ◼   ► But it's the easiest way to begin those shows because those shows don't require...

00:00:18 ◼   ► don't have the same level of editing, right?

00:00:21 ◼   ► So I have to do something or I'll be talking forever and we'll never start, right?

00:00:27 ◼   ► And then I need to find a random start, but here we can just, something just happens

00:00:30 ◼   ► and then that becomes the beginning of the episode.

00:00:32 ◼   ► It's like, uh...

00:00:34 ◼   ► What is it, when you're writing a book and maybe as rests or something?

00:00:37 ◼   ► Like you start in the middle is what they recommend for writing books.

00:00:40 ◼   ► Don't actually start where you think you want to start.

00:00:42 ◼   ► Start when the thing starts.

00:00:44 ◼   ► But that seems impossible.

00:00:45 ◼   ► Just to like, to knowingly start in the middle.

00:00:48 ◼   ► Like, how do you know what the middle is if you haven't done the start?

00:00:51 ◼   ► I do this sort of with my videos sometimes.

00:00:54 ◼   ► where I'm writing a video and then I realize the first four or five paragraphs, I can just ditch all of them.

00:01:02 ◼   ► And that's what I think they mean by starting in the middle.

00:01:05 ◼   ► You often feel like you need to have a... when you're writing something, like you need to have more of an introduction than you really need to have as an introduction.

00:01:13 ◼   ► Right, so just begin and then eventually the introduction will fall out of it.

00:01:18 ◼   ► Right, you start writing and then at some point when you are going over drafts you realize, yes,

00:01:24 ◼   ► the first third or quarter of this can just be cut with

00:01:28 ◼   ► Essentially no loss and you realize oh right my actual beginning was halfway through

00:01:33 ◼   ► So we are doing that with a podcast now

00:01:35 ◼   ► We were just talking and it feels like now we have actually really started the show

00:01:39 ◼   ► Whereas like we were just saying a whole bunch of nonsense before and it wasn't really the start

00:01:43 ◼   ► So you might start the podcast right here. I don't know

00:01:45 ◼   ► But we're definitely in it now no matter what's happening. It's too late now. We're too far gone. There's nothing we can do about it

00:01:52 ◼   ► We're inside the podcast.

00:01:53 ◼   ► Yes.

00:01:54 ◼   ► You are still broadcasting from an unknown location

00:01:59 ◼   ► in North Carolina, am I correct?

00:02:01 ◼   ► Right.

00:02:02 ◼   ► Yep.

00:02:03 ◼   ► You are traveling lots and lots this week.

00:02:06 ◼   ► We mentioned this in last week's episode,

00:02:09 ◼   ► which we recorded yesterday,

00:02:12 ◼   ► which is very confusing for me and my brain,

00:02:14 ◼   ► that we would talk a little bit about traveling.

00:02:19 ◼   ► Are you still feeling jet-lagged?

00:02:21 ◼   ► Is that still an issue that you're going through right now?

00:02:24 ◼   ► I'm better today than I was yesterday, but it takes me...

00:02:27 ◼   ► it always takes me a little while to feel perfect.

00:02:30 ◼   ► And I won't feel perfect before I have to step on a plane again.

00:02:33 ◼   ► So this is the summer of jet lag for me.

00:02:35 ◼   ► Are you going to another on the location?

00:02:37 ◼   ► I am going from visiting my family in North Carolina

00:02:43 ◼   ► to visiting my wife's family in Hawaii.

00:02:46 ◼   ► So that's where we're going next.

00:02:48 ◼   ► I have to say, of all the places to have a wife come from, it's a pretty good one.

00:02:53 ◼   ► Yes, it is a pretty good one.

00:02:55 ◼   ► It's a much more interesting place than being from New York.

00:03:00 ◼   ► A while back my wife and I realized that we were doing introductions, you know, when you meet a new couple or new people.

00:03:08 ◼   ► One of the questions that often comes up is "Where are you from?" especially if you are an expat living abroad.

00:03:13 ◼   ► And I told my wife that we always have to do the introduction, that she mentions that I am from New York first,

00:03:21 ◼   ► and then say that she is from Hawaii second.

00:03:24 ◼   ► Because the Hawaii part is way more interesting, and people naturally want to ask questions about it.

00:03:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:31 ◼   ► And if you do it in the reverse order, there's an awkward moment where people want to jump over,

00:03:37 ◼   ► like if instead you say, "Oh, my wife is from Hawaii and I am from New York,"

00:03:41 ◼   ► York, you can see that people want to go right to the Hawaii part of that.

00:03:45 ◼   ► Hey buddy, let's just forget about you. Yes, and so if you reverse that order, it's much

00:03:53 ◼   ► more smooth socially, because people don't feel like, oh let's skip the boring dude and

00:03:59 ◼   ► let's talk to his interesting wife instead. So that's what we do now.

00:04:03 ◼   ► Mrs. Grey understands how people works a lot better than you do, I think. I think she's

00:04:08 ◼   ► good for you. So on your way to undisclosed location in North Carolina you seemed to have

00:04:18 ◼   ► some issues with traveling because many things kept moving around and I would hear from you

00:04:25 ◼   ► every few hours or so and you still wasn't in the location.

00:04:30 ◼   ► Yeah, it was this was just one of those fun

00:04:34 ◼   ► travel times where

00:04:37 ◼   ► We got to the United States perfectly fine, but then I don't want to go into all of the details

00:04:42 ◼   ► But we had trouble getting from my favorite airport in the world

00:04:45 ◼   ► Which is Washington Dulles Airport to where we wanted to actually get in North Carolina because we got on an airplane and flew out

00:04:51 ◼   ► North Carolina has huge thunderstorms one of which our tiny plane just circled the perimeter of in the air over North Carolina for a while

00:05:00 ◼   ► while attempting to land before the pilot came on and telling us that we were running out of fuel

00:05:06 ◼   ► Excellent. And that we had to go back to my favourite airport, Washington Dulles

00:05:11 ◼   ► because there was nowhere else to land and so yes we arrived back at Washington Dulles

00:05:16 ◼   ► at like 2 in the morning or something. It's like this guy has something against you

00:05:22 ◼   ► Yeah, it was not a welcome piece of information to have been sitting in a turbulent jet for a long period of time and then yeah, I have to go back to exactly where you came from.

00:05:35 ◼   ► Attention everybody, I hope you like this journey because you're gonna have to do it again.

00:05:40 ◼   ► Yeah, basically, the trip from Washington to North Carolina we did three times.

00:05:46 ◼   ► Out, return, and then out again the following day.

00:05:50 ◼   ► So it was not pleasant.

00:05:52 ◼   ► But yeah, so that is why I had to keep sending you messages the following day of trying to figure out, like, when are we actually going to get out here?

00:06:01 ◼   ► And our travel schedule is relatively tight this time, so it was having a bunch of knock-on effects for other things we wanted to do.

00:06:08 ◼   ► And this is why I have caused you nothing but grief with the scheduling of these podcasts and when they are going to occur.

00:06:14 ◼   ► And I have constantly made you change things and push them around and as of now,

00:06:20 ◼   ► the episode that we recorded yesterday is actually going to go up on Saturday instead of the usual Friday,

00:06:25 ◼   ► and then we're going to be skipping an episode in the future.

00:06:27 ◼   ► And this is entirely my fault, but you know what, this is just the way things are.

00:06:32 ◼   ► And we have this constant argument, but I am convinced that people really don't care about schedules as much as they think they care about schedules.

00:06:40 ◼   ► So anyone who is familiar with my work is very much aware that I don't have a schedule for just about anything because I don't think they matter.

00:06:47 ◼   ► But you do think they matter, so I know that I have caused you stress.

00:06:50 ◼   ► I would just like to point out that where we currently are now in actual podcast recording time is four hours after we would usually put an episode of Cortex out to the world.

00:07:02 ◼   ► and I have already had a few people ask me where the episode is.

00:07:05 ◼   ► You know what? That's your punishment for having regular episodes,

00:07:08 ◼   ► is that people have expectations.

00:07:09 ◼   ► If you didn't give them expectations, you wouldn't get as much of this.

00:07:12 ◼   ► Your logic for that is my punishment is very flawed to me.

00:07:16 ◼   ► I don't think that it's a punishment.

00:07:18 ◼   ► What I did think about this, where usually I would be a bit more concerned,

00:07:23 ◼   ► is that I am recording with you,

00:07:25 ◼   ► so I expect that your audience doesn't necessarily think about it too much,

00:07:30 ◼   ► and it's just like when it will come it will come.

00:07:32 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:07:33 ◼   ► But it was one of those situations where every couple of hours

00:07:37 ◼   ► the schedule would change hugely because you just were failing to arrive at your destination.

00:07:43 ◼   ► And one of these messages that you sent me was just three words.

00:07:48 ◼   ► What preceded it was the words "show notes" and then "travel decision fatigue".

00:07:55 ◼   ► Oh yes, yes.

00:07:56 ◼   ► Now that I am out of it, I'm not so sure that was a great topic, but in the middle of being at an airport and being very tired, I thought, yes, travel decision fatigue is at least something to discuss on this episode.

00:08:09 ◼   ► And, I mean, are you aware of the general concept of decision fatigue? How familiar are you with this?

00:08:16 ◼   ► I can guess at it, but I wouldn't say I know enough of it, so why don't you explain that a little bit for me.

00:08:22 ◼   ► It is what it sounds like that as you make more and more decisions your brain gets tired.

00:08:31 ◼   ► And that sounds really obvious, but it's also interesting that there's a bunch of research that is done in this field about

00:08:40 ◼   ► actually being able to measure how quickly people's decision-making ability degrades,

00:08:46 ◼   ► you know, at what rate given how many decisions and all the rest of this.

00:08:50 ◼   ► I was talking to some people who were discussing how this is a big issue for example in the military and

00:08:56 ◼   ► that in

00:08:59 ◼   ► helicopter and jet simulators that decision fatigue and information overload are not just

00:09:06 ◼   ► terms that white-collar workers use to describe how stressed they are like they are

00:09:11 ◼   ► measurable things that you can you can see the effect on a pilot so you want to reduce the number of

00:09:19 ◼   ► inputs that they have going into their system, and you want to reduce the number of decisions that they have to make at any point in time.

00:09:25 ◼   ► And the interesting thing is that counter-intuitively

00:09:29 ◼   ► the size of the decisions

00:09:32 ◼   ► doesn't matter. That there's something about

00:09:36 ◼   ► deciding at all, which is the hard part for your brain. And the bigness of the decision

00:09:42 ◼   ► matters much much less than the number of decisions. So if you have to make five tiny decisions

00:09:48 ◼   ► it's wearing down your brain much more quickly than you might expect.

00:09:55 ◼   ► So that's decision fatigue just in general.

00:09:59 ◼   ► And all I could think of when we were traveling is how

00:10:04 ◼   ► the very nature of traveling is a decision fatigue situation

00:10:10 ◼   ► because almost everything that you're doing is new and novel.

00:10:18 ◼   ► You have to figure out where you're going, what gate is it, which way to get to the gate,

00:10:23 ◼   ► am I turning left, am I turning right, where am I getting the food from,

00:10:26 ◼   ► what meal am I going to have at this restaurant that I never have had before,

00:10:29 ◼   ► how much food am I going to bring on the airplane, am I going to stop at the duty-free,

00:10:33 ◼   ► am I going to do this, am I going to do that.

00:10:35 ◼   ► Once you're on the airplane, it's "Oh, am I going to take a nap now,

00:10:37 ◼   ► or am I going to stay up and wait for the food?"

00:10:39 ◼   ► Like, there's just this endless, endless array of things to decide,

00:10:45 ◼   ► because the whole situation is novel.

00:10:48 ◼   ► In a way that if you're doing other novel experiences,

00:10:51 ◼   ► like once you're on vacation and you go for a hike,

00:10:54 ◼   ► everything is new on your hike in the woods,

00:10:56 ◼   ► but you're not making decisions.

00:10:59 ◼   ► There's a path and you walk through it and you're just experiencing the new event.

00:11:03 ◼   ► The culmination of all of this decision fatigue was

00:11:06 ◼   ► at two in the morning or whenever it was when we arrived back in Washington

00:11:12 ◼   ► I was really aware that my wife and I were at a decision fatigue point because

00:11:19 ◼   ► They were giving us the options for flights for the next day. There were basically two things

00:11:26 ◼   ► we had to figure out. Where are we going to spend the night and

00:11:29 ◼   ► what time flight are we going to aim for the next day?

00:11:34 ◼   ► And it took my wife and I so much longer to decide those two relatively simple questions

00:11:41 ◼   ► than it ever would.

00:11:43 ◼   ► And I just think being aware of something like decision fatigue is useful in those moments.

00:11:50 ◼   ► To know that like, "Okay, yes, my brain is more tired."

00:11:54 ◼   ► And to cut yourself more slack and if you're with other people to cut them more slack

00:11:59 ◼   ► when you're in those situations.

00:12:02 ◼   ► We definitely had that. We got through it, but it was just a moment of

00:12:09 ◼   ► like the gate agent behind the desk presenting us with the times and we were

00:12:14 ◼   ► just looking at each other in silence. 6 a.m. or noon or 3 p.m. or 6 p.m.

00:12:24 ◼   ► And under normal circumstances it could make that decision in a second.

00:12:28 ◼   ► But after so long in the airport and after so many other tiny decisions,

00:12:34 ◼   ► that just... like your brain is just, "We're done. We've packed it up, people."

00:12:39 ◼   ► And it's going to take a really long time to come to a decision in that situation.

00:12:44 ◼   ► So that's what I think of as decision travel fatigue.

00:12:48 ◼   ► Does that sound familiar to you, Myke? Have you experienced this?

00:12:51 ◼   ► When I travel, I'm not a nervous traveller.

00:12:57 ◼   ► But I prepare for things and do things in such a way that people either believe that

00:13:05 ◼   ► I am a nervous traveler or just think that I'm mad.

00:13:10 ◼   ► And one of those, some of the ways that this manifests itself is in the notion that I get

00:13:17 ◼   ► very, very, very frustrated very, very quickly when traveling.

00:13:21 ◼   ► My tether, I have no tether anymore.

00:13:24 ◼   ► It is so far gone.

00:13:26 ◼   ► And I think that that is part of the fact that my mind is working on a million different

00:13:31 ◼   ► little things.

00:13:32 ◼   ► Like, what time do I need to wake up?

00:13:34 ◼   ► What time do I need to leave the house?

00:13:36 ◼   ► Do I have my passport?

00:13:38 ◼   ► What time do I get on the train?

00:13:39 ◼   ► Do I have my passport?

00:13:40 ◼   ► Like these things just go over and over and over again.

00:13:44 ◼   ► And I can definitely see how it gets to a certain point.

00:13:48 ◼   ► You get to the food court in the airport or whatever.

00:13:52 ◼   ► it's like well I just don't even know how to choose food anymore. Which is

00:13:57 ◼   ► why I very much one of the ways that I try and limit this kind of thing is to

00:14:02 ◼   ► do my level best to keep as many things the same as possible. So like I try

00:14:09 ◼   ► my very best when I go overseas to fly with British Airways because that

00:14:14 ◼   ► typically means that I will fly from Terminal 5 at Heathrow which means I can

00:14:18 ◼   ► then go to the restaurant that I like to eat at you know and I like to just know

00:14:21 ◼   ► that there are certain things that I'm going to be able to do which are exactly

00:14:24 ◼   ► the same so it limits the amount of stress that I put myself through.

00:14:30 ◼   ► That is definitely the recommended strategy. My additional problem which I

00:14:35 ◼   ► don't think I mentioned on this podcast is that I normally am flying standby and

00:14:40 ◼   ► so that means I don't have a designated ticket I'm just getting on the airplane

00:14:45 ◼   ► if there are seats available but this really contributes to decision fatigue

00:14:51 ◼   ► because there are often hour by hour decisions that need to be made about

00:14:56 ◼   ► which planes is standby going to be attempted for and having to weigh

00:15:01 ◼   ► different scenarios of what is the likelihood of this flight filling up

00:15:04 ◼   ► versus that flight filling up how does that affect the connection that you're

00:15:07 ◼   ► trying to hit and so I if I was not flying standby I would do the same thing

00:15:12 ◼   ► as you which is to try and regularize the travel but it's I'm in a situation

00:15:17 ◼   ► where the travel is not regular at all. It's always different times, it's always different flights and different connections and it does not help.

00:15:28 ◼   ► There is no world in which I could fly the way you fly. Just none. I had to fly standby once because I missed a connection

00:15:39 ◼   ► because my first plane was delayed

00:15:43 ◼   ► and I was in the airport for maybe about 12 hours

00:15:46 ◼   ► and it got to the point where I was like,

00:15:48 ◼   ► if I don't get on this next plane, send me home.

00:15:51 ◼   ► Like I was in America, I was like,

00:15:52 ◼   ► I just wanna go home, I'm done.

00:15:55 ◼   ► I've been here for 12 hours,

00:15:56 ◼   ► I'm in Philadelphia Airport,

00:15:58 ◼   ► I don't even know what's going on anymore.

00:16:00 ◼   ► If they can't get on this next plane,

00:16:02 ◼   ► they're like, oh, we'll try and put you on one again

00:16:05 ◼   ► tomorrow morning.

00:16:05 ◼   ► I'm like, nope, I just wanna go to London.

00:16:08 ◼   ► Forget it.

00:16:09 ◼   ► So I don't know how you do it, I really don't.

00:16:13 ◼   ► Plus it's interesting to me that you choose to fly this way because of everything that I know about you.

00:16:19 ◼   ► Just feels like this is not something that you would want to do. It's very interesting to me that you make that choice.

00:16:25 ◼   ► I think I'm better at this than it would be expected given everything that you know about me.

00:16:32 ◼   ► because since my mom is a flight attendant and this is how we have always traveled ever since I was a kid

00:16:40 ◼   ► I've always flown standby. It has been very rare to have a designated ticket.

00:16:47 ◼   ► So my experience with what airports are like, I don't have too much of a frame of reference of what it's like to have a normal ticket.

00:16:56 ◼   ► That's why I think I'm able to do this.

00:17:00 ◼   ► Whereas if I had flown with regular tickets for most of my life

00:17:04 ◼   ► and then now in my adult life there was this "Oh, you can fly standby" thing

00:17:09 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure I wouldn't do it. I would give up a lot of the benefits of standby flight

00:17:15 ◼   ► for the regularity and the predictability of regular tickets.

00:17:19 ◼   ► But that's not the experience that I had as a kid. It was always just "We're going to the airport"

00:17:23 ◼   ► airport and maybe we're getting on a plane and maybe we're just going back home at the

00:17:26 ◼   ► end of the day and that's just how air travel works from my perspective.

00:17:32 ◼   ► There are advantages but it is reducing decisions and cognitive load on a stressful day is definitely

00:17:40 ◼   ► definitely not one of them.

00:17:42 ◼   ► And I'm assuming then that there is some sort of economical like seating class benefit to

00:17:48 ◼   ► being on standby.

00:17:50 ◼   ► The basic benefits are one, it is super cheap, and two, if you do the planning correctly, you can end up in business or first class.

00:17:59 ◼   ► So that is the big advantage, especially on longer flights. If you can figure it out right, you can end up in a business class or a first class seat.

00:18:07 ◼   ► And pay even less sometimes than what an economy seat would have cost on the same flight.

00:18:13 ◼   ► So that's the advantage, yeah.

00:18:15 ◼   ► I'm assuming that this is when checklists go into real overdrive.

00:18:20 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:18:22 ◼   ► Well, yes and no. I have a big travel packing checklist.

00:18:28 ◼   ► Is this an omni-focus?

00:18:30 ◼   ► Yes, this is an omni-focus.

00:18:32 ◼   ► But interestingly, as I have been married over the years, my wife and I have developed a bit of a division of labor for what's going to happen

00:18:44 ◼   ► to happen when we're traveling. So we used to be, each of us would take care of our own things entirely,

00:18:51 ◼   ► but now we have more like domains of responsibility. And I think this works out really well for each of us,

00:18:58 ◼   ► because it's the same thing of eliminating one thing that the other person has to think about.

00:19:03 ◼   ► And so broadly speaking, I'm in charge of a lot of the logistics for the day, so any train tickets,

00:19:11 ◼   ► the plane reservations, all of that stuff I'm setting up and dealing with.

00:19:16 ◼   ► And then I'm also in charge of packing electronics and a few other things.

00:19:21 ◼   ► And then my wife is largely in charge of clothing and toiletry stuff for the bags.

00:19:27 ◼   ► So this has just happened over time that we've settled into these rolls.

00:19:33 ◼   ► And it's definitely better than when I used to try to pack entirely for,

00:19:39 ◼   ► Like each of us trying to pack on our own for going on a trip because then there's a lot of overlap

00:19:43 ◼   ► Did you bring your toothbrush? I brought my toothbrush and and

00:19:45 ◼   ► That would just that would just be a little bit of crazy making so I really just have a checklist which is related to

00:19:51 ◼   ► tickets and

00:19:54 ◼   ► electronic stuff and I run through that but it's not a complete like I couldn't hand that checklist to another person and they would feel

00:19:59 ◼   ► Like oh, I'm fully ready for a trip because it is missing the sections that my wife does

00:20:05 ◼   ► They would only be ready for a trip with your wife, which is unlikely.

00:20:09 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:20:11 ◼   ► But I haven't actually looked at hers, but I know my wife uses Clear, and she has a travel packing checklist that she runs through.

00:20:21 ◼   ► I don't know exactly how it works in Clear, but I think she can reactivate an old list, and so she just reactivates the old one and goes through it and adds things every time.

00:20:28 ◼   ► So we each have our own separate list that we're running through the day before and the day of travel.

00:20:34 ◼   ► travel. I use Clear for my travel checklist and this was a tip that came

00:20:39 ◼   ► from my girlfriend because I would like maybe try and do something the day

00:20:45 ◼   ► before or just like run through things and she was and she has a listing Clear

00:20:49 ◼   ► which is her packing list that just gets added to over time so all she does is she

00:20:54 ◼   ► has the list and she just marks everything off and doesn't delete the

00:20:57 ◼   ► list and then just marks everything as new again every time she travels and it

00:21:02 ◼   ► ends up being a really smart system because that thing you forgot, you add it to the list

00:21:07 ◼   ► and you don't forget it again.

00:21:09 ◼   ► And it's quite...

00:21:10 ◼   ► That's exactly right.

00:21:11 ◼   ► And I like it.

00:21:12 ◼   ► And then I have one list but it serves both European and American travel.

00:21:16 ◼   ► It's like I have both EU plug adapter and US plug adapter as a thing in that list and

00:21:22 ◼   ► I just activate the ones that are necessary for that trip.

00:21:25 ◼   ► And then I just check them off.

00:21:26 ◼   ► Exactly, exactly.

00:21:27 ◼   ► It's great.

00:21:28 ◼   ► It's a great system.

00:21:29 ◼   ► really, really great app for packing stuff. Because you also get the satisfaction of the

00:21:35 ◼   ► little sounds every time you check one off. And it's like, "I'm so clever!"

00:21:40 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:21:42 ◼   ► Yeah, I do have to say, one area where Clear just trumps OmniFocus

00:21:47 ◼   ► is in the sounds and the funness of it. Where it does...

00:21:52 ◼   ► Clear makes it just delightful to tick off items. And you do feel like, "Oh, look at me!

00:21:57 ◼   ► I'm so good. I'm just this great little person ticking off these things. Bloop, bloop, bloop.

00:22:02 ◼   ► Right? And it makes little happy sounds as you go.

00:22:05 ◼   ► So yeah, I do recommend clear to some people to use if they're looking for something that is simpler.

00:22:10 ◼   ► But it is funny, when we are packing, I hear the little bloop, bloop, bloop sounds as my wife is ticking off items in the other room as she's getting stuff ready.

00:22:18 ◼   ► But yeah, what you said is the same thing that I do and I recommend for these kinds of checklists is

00:22:23 ◼   ► you

00:22:25 ◼   ► over put things on the checklist you you like any travel scenario that you might

00:22:31 ◼   ► have you have something on that checklist and then you can just

00:22:35 ◼   ► Delete it or get rid of it or just tick it off if it isn't relevant to what you're doing

00:22:41 ◼   ► I have items on that checklist which are about

00:22:44 ◼   ► getting any money that I have for the place that I'm going. Now that's not always relevant if I'm traveling within the UK

00:22:50 ◼   ► but it's crazy to have separate checklists for travel within the UK, travel outside of the UK.

00:22:54 ◼   ► It's easy enough to just blow past those little items if they aren't relevant at the time.

00:22:59 ◼   ► Do you have any kind of specific packing things that you do?

00:23:03 ◼   ► I know that there are people that love to be able to put everything in one bag or anything like that.

00:23:07 ◼   ► Do you have different bags for these kinds of trips to the regular

00:23:13 ◼   ► go bags that you have or

00:23:15 ◼   ► are they

00:23:16 ◼   ► They actually the same bags because they're prepared for everything

00:23:19 ◼   ► Big recommendation for traveling is to get a suitcase that is an upright with four wheels on it

00:23:27 ◼   ► Yeah, I have a two-wheel one and it makes me sad every time

00:23:30 ◼   ► I mean, it's like living in the Stone Age Myke using a suitcase with two wheels on it

00:23:34 ◼   ► Because if you have a suitcase with four wheels that also has the handle that extends upward

00:23:42 ◼   ► You have become like a nimble mountain goat in the airport because you can maneuver that around

00:23:49 ◼   ► little spaces so well and the footprint of space that you are taking up is dramatically reduced.

00:23:57 ◼   ► So you can have it right, you know, right by your side like a well-heeled dog and just move around people and get around crowds.

00:24:04 ◼   ► The four-wheel suitcase is a

00:24:06 ◼   ► huge, huge improvement for traveling.

00:24:11 ◼   ► So my wife researched a bunch of four-wheel suitcases and eventually settled on one

00:24:18 ◼   ► And we each have, we're just total dorks, we have matching suitcases just in different colors

00:24:23 ◼   ► So we each have the same four-wheel suitcase

00:24:25 ◼   ► So yeah, we go through the airport like that

00:24:29 ◼   ► And that's a big deal

00:24:32 ◼   ► But I bring my regular backpack with me, but it's inside the suitcase

00:24:37 ◼   ► the suitcase because then when I'm, say like I'm in North Carolina now, I still use my

00:24:41 ◼   ► backpack the way that I do when I'm in London. As in, I mean just the other morning I packed

00:24:45 ◼   ► up my usual work stuff in the backpack, I had my iPad and I went out to a local cafe

00:24:49 ◼   ► and I was clearing email like we discussed in the last episode. So I do want that with

00:24:54 ◼   ► me, I still have that, but I just throw it into the bag and then it becomes my little

00:24:58 ◼   ► more, my mobile bag when I'm just wherever I happen to be.

00:25:03 ◼   ► But you must have something you take on the plane though, surely?

00:25:07 ◼   ► Yeah, the four-wheel, the little four-wheel suitcase is what I am taking on the plane.

00:25:10 ◼   ► Oh, you don't check anything.

00:25:13 ◼   ► I do have a bigger version of that four-wheel that if we need to check bags, I do check

00:25:19 ◼   ► bags.

00:25:20 ◼   ► When I was a younger single man, I never checked anything.

00:25:26 ◼   ► I was just not going to check a bag, partly because this can cause extra problems if you're

00:25:30 ◼   ► going stand-by, so there was a big advantage in not having to check a bag, and partly because

00:25:35 ◼   ► Because I just hated packing and so I thought, "Oh, instead of packing two bags, I'll just

00:25:39 ◼   ► pack one bag."

00:25:40 ◼   ► And also partly because I was always able to get away with it because the vast majority

00:25:46 ◼   ► of time when I was traveling as a younger man, I was coming from London back to visit

00:25:51 ◼   ► my parents at the start.

00:25:53 ◼   ► My parents were the starting point of wherever I was going.

00:25:56 ◼   ► And so I just left a redundant wardrobe and redundant everything at my parents' house.

00:26:02 ◼   ► So I didn't need to pack all of my clothes because I just had a whole other set of clothes

00:26:06 ◼   ► at my parents' house.

00:26:07 ◼   ► So that's how I used to travel.

00:26:09 ◼   ► Now that I'm a grown person and I'm going around with my wife, we do check bags.

00:26:13 ◼   ► But I bring a small four-wheel one onto the plane.

00:26:16 ◼   ► That's what I'm bringing there with me.

00:26:18 ◼   ► Alright, so you have one case though, right?

00:26:21 ◼   ► You're not bringing two suitcases to the airport?

00:26:24 ◼   ► There's two suitcases to the airport, one that is getting checked, one that is going

00:26:27 ◼   ► on the plane.

00:26:28 ◼   ► Okay.

00:26:29 ◼   ► also has within it my backpack.

00:26:32 ◼   ► Right, I see.

00:26:33 ◼   ► So you're taking out stuff that usually goes in the backpack

00:26:36 ◼   ► and putting it in the small little wheelie case.

00:26:39 ◼   ► That's exactly right.

00:26:40 ◼   ► That's exactly right.

00:26:41 ◼   ► What does Grey do on a plane?

00:26:43 ◼   ► Do you slip into like a shutdown period or, you know,

00:26:48 ◼   ► is there activities occurring?

00:26:50 ◼   ► Do you watch movies?

00:26:51 ◼   ► Do you consume like units of music utility?

00:26:55 ◼   ► I am laughing because I always end up having to re-explain to my wife what I do on a plane.

00:27:02 ◼   ► Because she forgets the particularness of what I want to do on a plane.

00:27:08 ◼   ► And I have this thing that I think of as the cognitive ramp down on a flight.

00:27:14 ◼   ► So I am very often taking long flights. I'm going from London to the US or back.

00:27:20 ◼   ► This isn't the same for a brief flight, but if you're on a flight that's at least six hours, maybe a 12-hour flight,

00:27:27 ◼   ► I have a list of things that I want to do, and I do them in the order of the cognitive difficulty of the task.

00:27:34 ◼   ► So, something like watching a movie. This is when my wife is on the plane.

00:27:40 ◼   ► She wants to start out by watching a movie, but I always feel that, no, we cannot start out watching a movie.

00:27:45 ◼   ► Or at least I'm not going to start out watching a movie.

00:27:47 ◼   ► because watching a movie is a cognitively easy thing to do.

00:27:51 ◼   ► You just sit there and you absorb the movie.

00:27:53 ◼   ► It doesn't require any effort on your part.

00:27:55 ◼   ► If you're going to do stuff, you have to start out with the things that are more difficult for you to do.

00:28:03 ◼   ► So something like reading a book is more cognitively difficult than watching a movie.

00:28:07 ◼   ► So if you have a book with you and you have movies you want to watch, you have to read the book first.

00:28:12 ◼   ► And then when you're tired of reading the book, then you can move on to the movie.

00:28:15 ◼   ► And so depending on what I have with me to do, I want to do the harder stuff first.

00:28:19 ◼   ► And on this last flight, I had loaded up some stuff that was related to one of my secret projects,

00:28:26 ◼   ► and it involved learning a new skill.

00:28:29 ◼   ► And so on the airplane, the very first thing that I did was, what was I said,

00:28:33 ◼   ► "Okay, I'm going to go through this book and these lessons that I have for myself,

00:28:37 ◼   ► and I'm going to learn this new skill as the first thing that I do on the airplane,

00:28:41 ◼   ► because that is the most cognitively demanding thing."

00:28:44 ◼   ► thing. Was it tailoring? Yeah, I was tailoring. That's exactly

00:28:48 ◼   ► right. How'd you guess? I just I can tell these things, you

00:28:52 ◼   ► know. Yeah. So, when when I grew tired of that, then I moved

00:28:57 ◼   ► on to reading a book and then from there, you move on to

00:29:00 ◼   ► watching TV or watching a movie. So, that's the way I

00:29:02 ◼   ► always want to arrange stuff because you can't go from

00:29:05 ◼   ► watching your movies to then, oh, I'm gonna teach myself this

00:29:08 ◼   ► new skill. You're just going to be too tired at the end of the

00:29:12 ◼   ► at the end of the airplane you're just gonna be restless and exhausted and not able to actually focus on something like that.

00:29:17 ◼   ► So this is always how I arrange things. What do I have with me?

00:29:20 ◼   ► And then do them in reverse order for cognitive difficulty.

00:29:24 ◼   ► That is an interesting system.

00:29:27 ◼   ► It is the only system.

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00:31:20 ◼   ► So in the spirit of this being a very irregular schedule that we have here, we decided to

00:31:27 ◼   ► incorporate and push the Ask Grey questions to their very maximum

00:31:32 ◼   ► and compile a long list of things to work through today.

00:31:37 ◼   ► So I'm going to ask you some questions today that have come via the audience of this show.

00:31:42 ◼   ► Right, because we don't have any follow up. The next show isn't even out.

00:31:46 ◼   ► This feels like it is an episode out of time, so that's why we're doing something a bit different.

00:31:50 ◼   ► This episode could actually exist anywhere within the run. You could just play it wherever and it wouldn't even matter.

00:31:56 ◼   ► The first question comes from John and John would like to know what beverage does Grey typically consume at the cafes in where he works?

00:32:06 ◼   ► I mean is that really a question? It's coffee, of course it's coffee. I drink a lot of coffee.

00:32:11 ◼   ► Do you tend to go to just chains or do you go to like fancy independent coffee shops in London?

00:32:17 ◼   ► It's mostly chains because I like things consistent.

00:32:20 ◼   ► Right.

00:32:21 ◼   ► And I haven't found any fancy independent places that are also places that you can sit

00:32:26 ◼   ► down and stay and work comfortably for reasonable periods of time.

00:32:30 ◼   ► So that's why I tend to just go to chains.

00:32:31 ◼   ► Me and you are gonna go on a little tour when you get home.

00:32:34 ◼   ► Oh yeah?

00:32:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:32:36 ◼   ► Because there's like just so many other great coffee houses that do way better coffee.

00:32:40 ◼   ► Yeah but you're just gonna take me to these hipster places where you have to sit on a

00:32:44 ◼   ► tiny stool in the corner and stroke your moustache.

00:32:47 ◼   ► Like that's the kind of coffee place you're going to take me to.

00:32:50 ◼   ► You don't have to stroke your moustache.

00:32:52 ◼   ► Mmhmm, yeah.

00:32:54 ◼   ► But you know, moustache is preferred.

00:32:56 ◼   ► That's what the sign on the door would say at your coffee places.

00:32:59 ◼   ► Tiny stall optional.

00:33:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:02 ◼   ► So do you just drink like filter coffee in Starbucks?

00:33:07 ◼   ► My current drink in the various places that I go is to get a filter coffee and to get

00:33:13 ◼   ► a...

00:33:14 ◼   ► Now I always have to find the magic words at the various place for what I'm going to

00:33:17 ◼   ► next but at Starbucks in the UK I have to ask for pouring cream I have learned is the magic word

00:33:23 ◼   ► but if I'm at a place like um at some of the other places I'll have to say something like

00:33:27 ◼   ► single cream seems to be the magic word for what it is that I want but there seems to be some

00:33:34 ◼   ► confusion about this in England but I don't want milk in my coffee I want cream in my coffee.

00:33:40 ◼   ► Yeah we typically don't don't go the cream option.

00:33:43 ◼   ► I have found to my horror that at Starbucks if I just say that I want a filter coffee with cream

00:33:50 ◼   ► If there are if there are no follow-up questions from the barista I get a filter coffee with whipped cream on top

00:33:58 ◼   ► Who in the world wants this why would you think this is a reasonable drink, but it has happened on more than one occasion

00:34:07 ◼   ► That is so ridiculous

00:34:09 ◼   ► That I get a filter coffee with whipped cream on top

00:34:11 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:34:14 ◼   ► - You know what the problem with that is?

00:34:17 ◼   ► Is that is internal jargon gone wrong?

00:34:20 ◼   ► Because Starbucks call it cream, right?

00:34:24 ◼   ► If you get like a frappuccino,

00:34:25 ◼   ► they say would you like cream on top?

00:34:28 ◼   ► So that is like, they're just like,

00:34:29 ◼   ► oh, well he's obviously referring to the cream

00:34:31 ◼   ► that we talk about.

00:34:32 ◼   ► That's very weird, but you know, we'll do it anyway.

00:34:35 ◼   ► Oh, that's incredible.

00:34:36 ◼   ► I can only imagine your horror when you take a sip.

00:34:40 ◼   ► like what is this? Yes but for some reason the it must be something with the

00:34:46 ◼   ► training of the baristas but at Starbucks it has to be pouring cream if I

00:34:52 ◼   ► say single cream at Starbucks it's always a big like what do you want what

00:34:56 ◼   ► is the thing that you're after you want a single serving of whipped cream is

00:34:59 ◼   ► like no it's not but single cream is the is the much better word at almost

00:35:03 ◼   ► everywhere else so yeah this is this is this is my drink and my big problem of

00:35:09 ◼   ► course is that this is slightly unusual asking for pouring cream so it always

00:35:13 ◼   ► makes me be the guy who's like standing out online I don't just have a

00:35:16 ◼   ► straightforward order and then I hate that because then they get to know you

00:35:19 ◼   ► faster at Starbucks which is a whole other problem that I really hate.

00:35:23 ◼   ► Mr. Single cream it's not very incognito, you should bring your own cream.

00:35:27 ◼   ► I have thought about that. I figured that you had. You should bring your own coffee as well just sit outside.

00:35:35 ◼   ► Maybe I'll do that next time.

00:35:36 ◼   ► But yeah, so, coffee.

00:35:38 ◼   ► Lots of it.

00:35:39 ◼   ► That's what I drink.

00:35:40 ◼   ► So another John asks, there's a lot, John seemed to like asking you about beverages,

00:35:46 ◼   ► because John would like to know, do you have other beverages that you like to consume when

00:35:51 ◼   ► working after breakfast time or when you're relaxing or socializing?

00:35:56 ◼   ► I like coffee for all those occasions.

00:35:58 ◼   ► Yeah?

00:35:59 ◼   ► Relaxing, socializing, breakfast, lunch, sometimes after dinner.

00:36:03 ◼   ► I like coffee.

00:36:04 ◼   ► It's good.

00:36:05 ◼   ► a lot.

00:36:06 ◼   ► Whenever we meet for lunch I consume more caffeine than I tend to with over like a four

00:36:11 ◼   ► day period.

00:36:12 ◼   ► Oh yeah, are you just being polite with all the coffee that you drink when you're with

00:36:16 ◼   ► me?

00:36:17 ◼   ► No because I like it but I try not to do it right because this is my problem I really

00:36:19 ◼   ► love coffee but I have one a day in the morning except on special days like sometimes what

00:36:26 ◼   ► I refer to as two coffee Tuesday because I have to stay up really late on Tuesdays.

00:36:30 ◼   ► Wow two whole coffees.

00:36:32 ◼   ► this is the thing because I like to try and limit myself so when I have another

00:36:36 ◼   ► one it really makes an effect and plus the other thing is if if I let myself I

00:36:43 ◼   ► would be drinking more coffee than water which you know I would just consume it

00:36:48 ◼   ► constantly so I try and limit the amount I have but whenever we see each other I

00:36:52 ◼   ► have maybe like three or four lattes which is what basically if anybody talks

00:36:58 ◼   ► to me I mean you see this I don't know if you even notice it but you maybe

00:37:01 ◼   ► you'll notice it now, now that we talk more often.

00:37:03 ◼   ► I tend to end up talking about a thousand miles an hour

00:37:07 ◼   ► when we're done for the day, so.

00:37:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, you talk faster in person than on the podcast.

00:37:12 ◼   ► - Because I'm drinking an incredible amount of coffee,

00:37:14 ◼   ► that's why. (laughs)

00:37:16 ◼   ► 'Cause I've already had one before I come and meet you,

00:37:18 ◼   ► so the first sip of the first coffee

00:37:21 ◼   ► is already more than normal.

00:37:23 ◼   ► And then that makes me like twist your arm

00:37:26 ◼   ► into starting projects, so.

00:37:29 ◼   ► That's how that happens.

00:37:29 ◼   ► Adam has asked a question that I'm very intrigued to find out your answer to.

00:37:37 ◼   ► If you won millions of pounds on the lottery, would you still make videos or would you maybe

00:37:43 ◼   ► learn to program or something different that would fulfill you?

00:37:47 ◼   ► What would you do?

00:37:48 ◼   ► I mean here's the thing, our very first episode of this little run was called "I don't really

00:37:51 ◼   ► like work."

00:37:52 ◼   ► And I think it's pretty clear that I think that a lot of the things that people say about

00:38:02 ◼   ► work, particularly in school environments where I'm familiar with people giving career

00:38:05 ◼   ► advice, is just total nonsense.

00:38:08 ◼   ► Where people talk about loving your job, right, and finding work that you really love.

00:38:14 ◼   ► And I think there are precious, precious few people who are in positions where they wake

00:38:24 ◼   ► up in the morning and feel like, "Wow, I really love my job."

00:38:29 ◼   ► And the thing that I usually tell people when they ask, like, "Oh, do you really love your

00:38:33 ◼   ► job?

00:38:34 ◼   ► It must be awesome!" is it's hard for me to imagine work that is better suited to my personality

00:38:43 ◼   ► than the work that I currently do.

00:38:45 ◼   ► So, figuring out how something works, and then making a video explaining about it,

00:38:50 ◼   ► I can't imagine that there's something that would just naturally fit with the way that I want to work than that.

00:38:57 ◼   ► But it's, to me, it's still work.

00:39:01 ◼   ► It's still something that I have to do.

00:39:04 ◼   ► And it's still something that I feel pressure that I have to make a certain number of videos,

00:39:09 ◼   ► and my livelihood depends on all of this.

00:39:11 ◼   ► Which is a long way of saying that if I won enough money that I never had to work ever again,

00:39:17 ◼   ► I would not keep making the same number of things that I currently make.

00:39:25 ◼   ► I would make fewer things.

00:39:28 ◼   ► But the flip side of this is that I have had periods in my life,

00:39:33 ◼   ► because I was a bum who didn't have any financial requirements,

00:39:37 ◼   ► like I just was, you know, living very low,

00:39:41 ◼   ► where I didn't really have to work. I've had stretches of time like that where it's like "oh, I don't really have to work at all"

00:39:48 ◼   ► And that's too little.

00:39:52 ◼   ► Just if you don't have, or I shouldn't say you, but I'm saying for me personally, if I don't have anything to do, that is depressing.

00:40:01 ◼   ► That's not a good situation to be in, and that then just makes me unhappy.

00:40:06 ◼   ► So I would work less if I didn't have to work,

00:40:11 ◼   ► but the amount of things that I would do would not be zero,

00:40:14 ◼   ► because zero would just be depressing and life would just feel totally aimless.

00:40:19 ◼   ► So I would still make videos, I would still make podcasts,

00:40:23 ◼   ► but I might not make them as frequently as I currently do if I didn't have to work.

00:40:28 ◼   ► So now, what about you, Myke?

00:40:30 ◼   ► Because I... I don't have a good sense of the shape of your mind in many ways yet.

00:40:38 ◼   ► So I'm not quite sure how

00:40:41 ◼   ► you would answer this question. I have a feeling you might have a similar answer to me, but I may be

00:40:46 ◼   ► very wrong about that. So what about you? You win

00:40:49 ◼   ► enough money that you could buy an apartment in the Shard plus more. What does your life look like from this point on?

00:40:58 ◼   ► It overlaps with you in some ways, but it is different.

00:41:02 ◼   ► So my feeling is, I also agree that the love what you do

00:41:07 ◼   ► thing is, it holds some idealistic merit,

00:41:16 ◼   ► but on the whole is very, very difficult to achieve.

00:41:20 ◼   ► So I currently do the job that is the only job

00:41:24 ◼   ► in the world that I wanna do.

00:41:27 ◼   ► and I have worked for five years tirelessly

00:41:31 ◼   ► to get to this point and now I have achieved it.

00:41:33 ◼   ► But what happens when something like this becomes your job

00:41:37 ◼   ► is there is the part of it that you love,

00:41:39 ◼   ► which is this bit, so I am doing this bit,

00:41:42 ◼   ► but there are parts of it that I don't love as well

00:41:46 ◼   ► that come along with it.

00:41:47 ◼   ► So I do the job that I love,

00:41:50 ◼   ► but what comes along with that is the baggage

00:41:52 ◼   ► of the things that I don't wanna do,

00:41:54 ◼   ► like bookkeeping, accounting,

00:41:56 ◼   ► dealing with my accountant for my end of year tax return.

00:41:59 ◼   ► Like all of the random, like boring, not fun things

00:42:04 ◼   ► that you have to do when it comes to running a business.

00:42:07 ◼   ► So, if I was to win that amount of money,

00:42:11 ◼   ► I maybe would just make a little bit less

00:42:15 ◼   ► or maybe my schedules would go a little bit awry

00:42:18 ◼   ► because I wanna go see the world a little bit or something.

00:42:22 ◼   ► But on the whole, I would then use that money to hire people and just pay more people to do more of the things that I don't want to do.

00:42:30 ◼   ► I actually don't, I can't imagine a world now in which I don't do this because I really love making this stuff.

00:42:44 ◼   ► And I really, really love hearing from people

00:42:46 ◼   ► and knowing that people enjoy what I make.

00:42:50 ◼   ► Like the thrill that I get out of that,

00:42:53 ◼   ► I couldn't trade that in for anything now.

00:42:57 ◼   ► - You like having an audience, Myke?

00:42:58 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:42:59 ◼   ► Don't you?

00:43:02 ◼   ► - This may sound strange, but if I,

00:43:04 ◼   ► if I could trade my current work

00:43:10 ◼   ► for something that was equivalent in every way.

00:43:14 ◼   ► So I get to continue talking to people who are as interesting as the people that I currently talk to

00:43:19 ◼   ► and I get to earn the same amount of money that I currently earn

00:43:23 ◼   ► and I get to work the same number of hours that I currently work.

00:43:25 ◼   ► It's a different job, but all of the benefits are there

00:43:29 ◼   ► except that I am no longer a public figure in any way.

00:43:34 ◼   ► I would make that trade without a doubt.

00:43:37 ◼   ► Like I love the Reddit stuff, like that's really fun and I like that, but I always view any level of being a

00:43:45 ◼   ► public figure as a cost that I have to incur to do other stuff.

00:43:51 ◼   ► I don't like it, so if I could trade my job for an equally satisfying job

00:43:57 ◼   ► where I was not in the public eye at all, I would do it.

00:43:59 ◼   ► I think you are...

00:44:02 ◼   ► Me and you are built differently in this way.

00:44:06 ◼   ► You are built differently to everybody else that I work with in that you are synonymous

00:44:11 ◼   ► Mm-hmm, and you are very clearly a private person

00:44:17 ◼   ► who has stumbled upon a

00:44:20 ◼   ► Large audience of people which is a very very peculiar mix

00:44:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I was not aiming for this. No

00:44:29 ◼   ► What were you aiming for then I

00:44:33 ◼   ► I was always running a bunch of side projects when I was teaching.

00:44:42 ◼   ► And I was just aiming for independence.

00:44:47 ◼   ► That's what I was aiming for. The ability to work for myself so that I was in control of my own life.

00:44:56 ◼   ► life. And it just so happens that the first project that hit successfully enough that

00:45:03 ◼   ► I was able to leave teaching and work for my own was also a project that just happened

00:45:09 ◼   ► to be one that depends on having an audience of people. But no, it was not on purpose,

00:45:17 ◼   ► it was incidental, and this kind of career was so far out of my mind that it took a long

00:45:25 ◼   ► time for me to even realize, "Oh, you're making videos on the side that lots of people are

00:45:33 ◼   ► watching and maybe this can turn into a career."

00:45:36 ◼   ► And I've gone back through some of my old emails and some of my old notes from around

00:45:40 ◼   ► that time, because of course you can't trust your memory, and just seeing how dim-witted

00:45:45 ◼   ► I was about the thing that is obviously being the successful thing and doubling down on

00:45:50 ◼   ► that.

00:45:51 ◼   ► It took me a long time to realize it because, yeah, this kind of career just wasn't in my

00:45:55 ◼   ► mind I was thinking more along the lines of okay what kind of services can I sell to people

00:46:00 ◼   ► or what kind of products can I make that people might want to buy I was not thinking about

00:46:05 ◼   ► how can I entertain a large enough audience so that I can support myself it wasn't it

00:46:09 ◼   ► wasn't on my mind at all.

00:46:11 ◼   ► Robbie would like to know what is it like in a day where Grey gets sick what do you

00:46:16 ◼   ► do do you just like everything shuts off and you watch movies and play games like what

00:46:22 ◼   ► happens when you're unwell. Because again, this is something else, maybe even more than

00:46:27 ◼   ► holidays that changes massively when you're self-employed.

00:46:31 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. This is another case where we're going to have something that's very different

00:46:36 ◼   ► because largely I try to arrange my working life so that I don't have schedules, I don't

00:46:44 ◼   ► have things that absolutely need to get hit by a particular day. Like I'm often aiming

00:46:50 ◼   ► for a video to be released on or by a date, but almost always that can get moved around,

00:46:56 ◼   ► there's a little bit of flexibility in there. It isn't often a real requirement that it

00:47:03 ◼   ► happens on an exact time. So a sick day for me when I'm feeling like I just can't do any

00:47:09 ◼   ► work is probably way less stress than it is for you, because I can take a day off and

00:47:16 ◼   ► and just say, "All right, I'm going to lay on this couch

00:47:19 ◼   ► being a big snotty slug of illness doing nothing."

00:47:24 ◼   ► And that means there's going to be a knock-on effect

00:47:29 ◼   ► of pushing back podcasts or pushing back videos,

00:47:32 ◼   ► but it doesn't necessarily have a huge impact.

00:47:37 ◼   ► But again, that's on purpose.

00:47:41 ◼   ► I don't like schedules.

00:47:43 ◼   ► It's one of the reasons why this cortex every week thing

00:47:44 ◼   ► really irritated me because like, "Oh man, we just did one of these! What do you mean I have to do it again?"

00:47:48 ◼   ► It's like it's happening so frequently. I'm not used to this at all.

00:47:52 ◼   ► So yeah, that's why for me a sick day is a relatively easy thing to do.

00:47:59 ◼   ► It's usually not too stressful and depending on how sick I am most of the time I will just end up

00:48:06 ◼   ► just putting something on TV, like trying to find a TV series where I can say, "All right,

00:48:11 ◼   ► Is there a season of something I can just watch all day until I slip into unconsciousness at the end of the day?

00:48:16 ◼   ► That's that's what I'll do if I'm not if I'm not feeling well

00:48:19 ◼   ► But what do you do? And one thing is I have to be really unwell for something to change

00:48:26 ◼   ► Like if I'm just not feeling great

00:48:29 ◼   ► Then what I might do is like take the day off from everything except what has to happen

00:48:35 ◼   ► So if something is scheduled then I will do my level best to make it

00:48:40 ◼   ► But I might not do any of the other tasks on that day. Like for example one day this week

00:48:45 ◼   ► I didn't sleep the night before very well at all

00:48:49 ◼   ► And I just felt crap like just really crap like I'd slept maybe like

00:48:54 ◼   ► Four or five hours sometimes I do maybe even less than that and I'm okay

00:48:59 ◼   ► But I woke up and just felt like I had not slept at all

00:49:02 ◼   ► Like I had the feeling of when I come home from a big flight overseas

00:49:08 ◼   ► That was how I felt. And I was like, "I am going to sit here and play Batman on my PlayStation all day."

00:49:14 ◼   ► And that was what I did.

00:49:17 ◼   ► And so I can, you know, and I just moved some tasks around and there were a couple of things

00:49:21 ◼   ► I had to do that day that I did, but the majority of my day was just playing PlayStation.

00:49:25 ◼   ► But if I'm su- if I get super, super ill, then I just have to have someone stand in for me.

00:49:31 ◼   ► But luckily that has not happened yet.

00:49:34 ◼   ► So if you were super sick, I'd be talking to somebody else right now. I don't like that at all

00:49:38 ◼   ► No, you wouldn't I would have to find something else for you because I know you wouldn't accept that but everybody else would

00:49:43 ◼   ► Probably be okay with it plus. I don't think like I don't think I would feel okay

00:49:49 ◼   ► Letting anybody else in this scenario

00:49:53 ◼   ► Oh, so what you're saying is you're better than all of the other people who could potentially fill this role

00:49:58 ◼   ► Is that what you know? I'm just worried of what you might do to them. Oh

00:50:01 ◼   ► Oh, you're worried about my reaction.

00:50:03 ◼   ► OK, yeah, different.

00:50:05 ◼   ► That's you.

00:50:06 ◼   ► Maybe you'd like systematically break them down or something.

00:50:08 ◼   ► And I would do I would do nothing.

00:50:11 ◼   ► I would do nothing except be bad at conversation, which is my skill.

00:50:14 ◼   ► Utsav has asked, what advice would you and Gray give your university

00:50:19 ◼   ► selves with regards to productivity and work ethic?

00:50:22 ◼   ► OK, you have to go first on this one.

00:50:24 ◼   ► I can't help Utsav at all.

00:50:27 ◼   ► Because I didn't go to university.

00:50:29 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.

00:50:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I finished school at the age of 18 after completing sixth form college.

00:50:36 ◼   ► Was going to take a break from studying because I applied for a bunch of universities,

00:50:43 ◼   ► got into them and then decided I didn't want to do English literature anymore

00:50:46 ◼   ► and that I wanted to do media. And only one university would accept me to change my course

00:50:55 ◼   ► and it was a university in London and I didn't want to go to university and live at home.

00:51:00 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. So I decided to take a year off. I got a job and then stayed employed at that

00:51:08 ◼   ► company for eight years because I got used to the money.

00:51:15 ◼   ► So depending on what you want to be productive with, Woodserve, I can't help you.

00:51:21 ◼   ► That's good. You got used to the money. Once again, this is the purpose of the money is

00:51:25 ◼   ► for the company to make you stay. Here, have some money. Why don't you stay?

00:51:28 ◼   ► How kind of you?

00:51:30 ◼   ► If I'm trying to answer this question I also

00:51:34 ◼   ► I also have difficulty with this because some of the videos that I make feel like I am trying to

00:51:41 ◼   ► address something to my past self like that's the audience whose mind I'm trying to convince

00:51:48 ◼   ► Is an earlier version of me who didn't believe a thing and maybe if he stumbles across this video it would change his mind

00:51:55 ◼   ► But when I think back to my university self, I just don't know if there's much about that person's mind

00:52:02 ◼   ► I would be able to change

00:52:04 ◼   ► because

00:52:07 ◼   ► I was doing fine at university. I mean some of the classes were harder than others, but there wasn't like some big problem

00:52:14 ◼   ► I was having and so the perspective of past me was everything's going great

00:52:21 ◼   ► It's like I like my classes. I'm doing fine in them and so while current me

00:52:27 ◼   ► might wish that he could convince past me to

00:52:31 ◼   ► work harder or to learn how to do some things, I don't think past me would be receptive to that at all

00:52:37 ◼   ► I don't think I could convince past me to

00:52:39 ◼   ► change his productivity or his or his work ethic. The only

00:52:44 ◼   ► concrete piece of advice that I will give which is something that I learned from one of my professors in university

00:52:50 ◼   ► was how to study for a test and

00:52:55 ◼   ► This piece of advice I gave this to the students that I taught and those who followed it it went very well

00:53:03 ◼   ► but if you are

00:53:05 ◼   ► Preparing for a test in something like physics or math or anything where you can get your hands on

00:53:11 ◼   ► old versions of the tests

00:53:14 ◼   ► And you can also know for sure that you're answering them correctly

00:53:18 ◼   ► Because you have the answer keys or because it's physics and there's actual answers

00:53:22 ◼   ► Unlike English where you know you're just making up stuff and a teacher is subjectively grading on you preparing for an English test

00:53:30 ◼   ► I guess the answer to that is just try to know the mind of your teacher and work towards that and just keep

00:53:35 ◼   ► Practicing and just keep writing and just keep doing it over and over and over again

00:53:39 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, you go through you go through the old tests and you do them over and over again, but more importantly

00:53:47 ◼   ► You keep doing one of the old tests until you score

00:53:50 ◼   ► Perfectly on it. Don't move on to any additional old tests that you have. Do one of them until you get a perfect score.

00:53:58 ◼   ► And the purpose of this is

00:54:01 ◼   ► Not what you're thinking. It's not that "Oh now I finally got all of it right." The purpose of this is actually to drill into your mind

00:54:11 ◼   ► the easier parts to make them second nature so that you just

00:54:15 ◼   ► Very quickly know how to do the simple things and kind of going to our cognitive load discussion before

00:54:22 ◼   ► It helps you when you're facing a difficult question

00:54:26 ◼   ► That the the easy stuff you don't even have to think about it's not a burden on your mind

00:54:31 ◼   ► You just know it because you've done it 20 30 40 50 times. So that's my advice for preparing for a test

00:54:37 ◼   ► So you end up with some points in the bag basically

00:54:40 ◼   ► Because it's just stuff you know, it's not even stuff that you have to remember.

00:54:45 ◼   ► Yes, that is definitely what happened when I prepared for test that way.

00:54:50 ◼   ► Particularly with math and physics, you just go, "Oh right, I can just look at this easy problem for page 1 and 2 on a 10 page exam,

00:54:58 ◼   ► and I feel like I haven't even started thinking until page 4, because the beginning pages, I just know this.

00:55:05 ◼   ► I just know it because I've done it so many times."

00:55:08 ◼   ► I don't think there is a better way to study for a test than that.

00:55:13 ◼   ► I really think that's the best thing you can possibly do.

00:55:16 ◼   ► Toby would like to know which RSS reader do you use?

00:55:19 ◼   ► I would like to add to Toby's question

00:55:21 ◼   ► and ask, do you even use RSS?

00:55:23 ◼   ► It's funny this question comes up now

00:55:25 ◼   ► because literally just yesterday,

00:55:27 ◼   ► I canceled my subscription to an RSS syncing service

00:55:32 ◼   ► because I realized that even though I think I use RSS,

00:55:35 ◼   ► I haven't actually used it in any meaningful way in probably a year or so.

00:55:41 ◼   ► So I mean, I used to be really heavy into RSS.

00:55:45 ◼   ► And when I, the app that I was using was Reader with two E's, which is unhelpful.

00:55:50 ◼   ► The worst name.

00:55:51 ◼   ► But yeah, it's the worst name ever.

00:55:53 ◼   ► This is the worst name.

00:55:54 ◼   ► Reader, especially when Google Reader existed, because that was what people called Google Reader.

00:55:59 ◼   ► They called it Reader.

00:56:00 ◼   ► Oh, the worst.

00:56:01 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:02 ◼   ► I like Reader in no small part because it has the dark mode viewing, which is very easy on my eyes.

00:56:09 ◼   ► That's what I used, but when it came time to renew my subscription to my RSS syncing service,

00:56:16 ◼   ► I just realized, "Oh, I just don't really use this." I still have it, and I think I do, but I don't.

00:56:22 ◼   ► So I just cancelled it, and I don't--I'm just admitting to myself that I don't use RSS. I used to.

00:56:28 ◼   ► The thing that I do now is I actually use "if this then that" to send a limited number of websites that I want to follow straight to Instapaper.

00:56:40 ◼   ► So Instapaper is sort of an RSS reader now, but the nature of Instapaper versus a proper RSS reader forces me to limit the number of things that I actually want to get sent to Instapaper.

00:56:56 ◼   ► The other limitation which is useful is it makes me think about

00:57:00 ◼   ► Who is writing stuff that is actually long enough and interesting enough that I want to read it?

00:57:07 ◼   ► As opposed to just I mean I used to have

00:57:10 ◼   ► 100 200 websites that I was theoretically following in my RSS reader, but lots of those were just very

00:57:17 ◼   ► short pieces of writing or they were link aggregators in some way and

00:57:22 ◼   ► And it's one of these ways where I realize I don't really care.

00:57:26 ◼   ► Like I think I care, but I don't.

00:57:28 ◼   ► And so I have a much, much smaller number of people who write something that I think is substantial

00:57:32 ◼   ► that I want to go to Instapaper, and when I'm looking for something to read, I open up Instapaper and go through that.

00:57:38 ◼   ► So that's what I do now, and that has dramatically reduced the number of things that I follow.

00:57:47 ◼   ► I was a big user of RSS and then just for some reason just stopped checking it I think

00:57:53 ◼   ► because I just ran out of the time to do that as well every single day. So then a few months ago

00:58:00 ◼   ► I took my maybe 200 subscriptions or something silly like that down to about 15 or 20 to see if

00:58:07 ◼   ► I would then check it. I wasn't checking it. So like for me my feeling is I will find it on Twitter

00:58:17 ◼   ► if it's good. And I just signed up for an app called Nuzzle. It's a little service.

00:58:23 ◼   ► So what it does, you plug your Twitter account into it and it surfaces what lots of people are

00:58:30 ◼   ► linking to on Twitter that you follow. So it kind of what it does is it basically delivers your own

00:58:37 ◼   ► personal zeitgeist. So you just find out what is happening in your circle or of the people that

00:58:43 ◼   ► you're interested in what are they talking about and I haven't I haven't

00:58:49 ◼   ► used it enough yet to know if this is something that I'm interested in but

00:58:52 ◼   ► what I do know is there have been a few things in Nozzle that I have come across

00:58:56 ◼   ► and read or watched or whatever that I would have missed otherwise so I think

00:59:02 ◼   ► that there might be some utility in there but I'm just trying to get used to

00:59:06 ◼   ► it because it sends notifications and sometimes that can be annoying so I'm

00:59:11 ◼   ► trying to work out if one I want the notifications and you can tweak what it

00:59:15 ◼   ► will notify you about and then two and then if I'm not gonna get notified about

00:59:20 ◼   ► things am I ever gonna go in there and look at it so I'm still playing around

00:59:24 ◼   ► of it but it is an interesting thing but for me it's just if it's really gonna be

00:59:29 ◼   ► that important I will find out about it on Twitter and I need to stay fairly

00:59:33 ◼   ► well informed because I have a bunch of shows that are quite topical and

00:59:36 ◼   ► news-based and I never feel like I don't know what's happening so yeah you have

00:59:41 ◼   ► much more reason to stay up to date with lots of things that I do. So you need something

00:59:45 ◼   ► to do that for you. And it sounds like you have found something that helps filter out

00:59:51 ◼   ► the important stuff.

00:59:52 ◼   ► Effectively just following people that I'm interested in that have something to say and

00:59:57 ◼   ► then following the official accounts of a couple of blogs and sites that I like to read,

01:00:03 ◼   ► I pretty much just find everything I need on Twitter that way. It works out. But yeah,

01:00:10 ◼   ► RSS for me is just not a thing that I use anymore.

01:00:14 ◼   ► Brookfield would like to know why do we both use Tweetbot and not the official Twitter

01:00:19 ◼   ► app?

01:00:20 ◼   ► I don't exactly know why.

01:00:24 ◼   ► Okay.

01:00:25 ◼   ► I just, every time I use the official Twitter app, I have both of them on my iPad.

01:00:31 ◼   ► I just, something about the official Twitter app just repels me.

01:00:35 ◼   ► I don't like the way it displays too much information, and it sometimes also just feels

01:00:41 ◼   ► like the information density is too low.

01:00:43 ◼   ► I can't put my finger on what it is, but there's something about it that I don't like.

01:00:48 ◼   ► So I still use the very, very old now looking Tweetbot on my iPad.

01:00:54 ◼   ► Oh, it's a sorry state of affairs.

01:00:57 ◼   ► It's just horrific.

01:00:59 ◼   ► It's a sorry state of affairs because of first, how old that is.

01:01:05 ◼   ► And second, that there aren't better alternatives.

01:01:08 ◼   ► Or at least alternatives that I like better.

01:01:10 ◼   ► I mean there's um...

01:01:11 ◼   ► Twitterific.

01:01:12 ◼   ► What's the other?

01:01:13 ◼   ► Yeah, Twitterific, thank you.

01:01:14 ◼   ► That is the only other contender in this space.

01:01:17 ◼   ► And something about Twitterific feels very similar to the Twitter app to me.

01:01:21 ◼   ► Where it's like, I don't like these for the same reason.

01:01:24 ◼   ► There's just something about the way they're presenting tweets I don't like.

01:01:28 ◼   ► But this is all Twitter's fault. There should be very many different Twitter clients that

01:01:32 ◼   ► you can try and that you can like, but there are not. It's a sad, withering field for Twitter

01:01:41 ◼   ► apps.

01:01:42 ◼   ► >> SANDEEP SINHA: Tweetbot gives me a few features that Twitter's official apps don't

01:01:46 ◼   ► do and will probably never do. One of them is syncing my timeline position. So if I'm

01:01:53 ◼   ► looking at Twitter on my iPhone and then open Twitter on my Mac, my Mac will

01:01:58 ◼   ► scroll to where I was last looking on my iPhone and that is very much against

01:02:02 ◼   ► like Twitter's business model because they always want you to know what's

01:02:06 ◼   ► happening right now you know because that helps them and their ads are always

01:02:10 ◼   ► at the top and stuff like that. The ads are annoying just because of the quality

01:02:16 ◼   ► of stuff that's in there. They're not very tailored to me I don't think or any

01:02:22 ◼   ► tailoring that they're doing I don't think that's a good job because I never

01:02:25 ◼   ► look at the ads on Twitter's app because I check it every now and then just to

01:02:30 ◼   ► see what it's like and the ads that it shows me are never relevant to me but

01:02:37 ◼   ► that and I don't feel that way about a lot of web advertising because a lot of

01:02:41 ◼   ► the time I'm going around the web and there's stuff happening that it's like

01:02:43 ◼   ► okay there's some I can see why you're thinking that or yes I am interested in

01:02:47 ◼   ► But Twitter stuff, it's just like, "Play Game of War!"

01:02:51 ◼   ► It's like, I don't even want to and/or know what that is.

01:02:54 ◼   ► All I know is that you're showing me a picture of Kate Upton.

01:02:57 ◼   ► Like, that's 100% of all I know.

01:02:59 ◼   ► I don't feel very aware of the Twitter ads, but it does feel the same way.

01:03:02 ◼   ► These seem like TV ads on Seinfeld or something,

01:03:07 ◼   ► where they're just hitting as broad of an audience as possible.

01:03:11 ◼   ► - Yeah. - And so it's not...

01:03:14 ◼   ► intensely relevant to anybody it is mildly interesting to a huge group of people

01:03:20 ◼   ► that's maybe the way they feel so they don't even stick in my mind I can't think of anything

01:03:25 ◼   ► that was an ad that caught my attention on Twitter

01:03:27 ◼   ► and plus like you know you're effectively trying to make a choice as to what app

01:03:33 ◼   ► are you going to use that has underdevelopment on one platform like Twitter don't seem to not care about their Mac app

01:03:38 ◼   ► right right

01:03:40 ◼   ► and they also don't really seem to put a lot of effort into their iPad app

01:03:43 ◼   ► But at least on Tweetbot I get a really good iPhone app and a really good Mac app

01:03:47 ◼   ► and the iPad is just in limbo.

01:03:49 ◼   ► Okay, Gray.

01:03:51 ◼   ► Mhm.

01:03:52 ◼   ► Kirk Orpicard.

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01:06:00 ◼   ► Oh the classic nerd question Kirk or Picard.

01:06:07 ◼   ► Well first of all how much how much Star Trek have you ever watched Myke?

01:06:10 ◼   ► Absolutely zero.

01:06:11 ◼   ► I've seen I had a feeling that might be the answer.

01:06:15 ◼   ► I've seen the new movies and I like them.

01:06:18 ◼   ► New from 2007 the ones with the like the rebooted Star Trek?

01:06:22 ◼   ► The rebooted ones and I really like those.

01:06:25 ◼   ► And I know enough about the important parts of Star Trek, right?

01:06:30 ◼   ► Like I know who Kirk Picard are.

01:06:33 ◼   ► I know who they're played by.

01:06:36 ◼   ► And I've seen some episodes of Next Generation when they were just on TV, but I have never

01:06:42 ◼   ► been much of a Star Trek guy at all.

01:06:45 ◼   ► I don't have anything against it, but I've just never spent any time with it.

01:06:52 ◼   ► So I answered this question on one of my videos a while back, and I gave the answer which, if I have to choose between Kirk or Picard, I generally like Picard better.

01:07:04 ◼   ► But since I made those videos, those new Star Trek movies, I have realized that there are two Kirks now, which is unique in the Star Trek universe.

01:07:14 ◼   ► And I think that the new Kirk is very interesting in a way that the old Kirk I just found ridiculous.

01:07:20 ◼   ► I may be too young to appreciate the Star Trek original series, but the episodes that I have seen, I find them difficult to enjoy.

01:07:31 ◼   ► They're just too corny or... I don't know. I'm not a huge fan of them.

01:07:36 ◼   ► So if I'm choosing between Kirk and Picard, I think it's a more interesting question now.

01:07:40 ◼   ► I think the new Star Trek reboots are very good. I really like them.

01:07:44 ◼   ► But I'm still going to choose Picard as the better Star Trek captain.

01:07:49 ◼   ► I like him better.

01:07:50 ◼   ► But it's always Kirk or Picard, but I really like Janeway.

01:07:55 ◼   ► I am biased towards Janeway because I have seen more Voyager than

01:08:01 ◼   ► anything else. My wife is a big Voyager fan and

01:08:04 ◼   ► Voyager was on when I was in high school and I had some friends who were super into Star Trek

01:08:10 ◼   ► and so we would watch the new episodes of Voyager at their house when they came out.

01:08:15 ◼   ► I think the character of Captain Janeway has more interesting things going for her in some ways.

01:08:23 ◼   ► I like the situation that Janeway is in way better, that she's stranded out in deep space, she doesn't have the fleet behind her, and she has to make these difficult decisions.

01:08:34 ◼   ► So I'm a big fan of Janeway. I like her a lot as a captain, even though I think as we've discussed there are many things about Star Trek that frustrate me.

01:08:42 ◼   ► There are many things that I would want to change and that it's horrifically inconsistent.

01:08:48 ◼   ► I'll drop a little nerd trivia here that you won't care about at all because you don't know any of these things, but...

01:08:52 ◼   ► [laughs]

01:08:54 ◼   ► You laugh in the background there?

01:08:56 ◼   ► Nope.

01:08:58 ◼   ► Of course not.

01:09:00 ◼   ► Behind the scenes at Voyager there was a big disagreement between the writers about what Captain Janeway's character should be.

01:09:10 ◼   ► they split into two groups which were basically Captain Mom versus the Iron Lady.

01:09:16 ◼   ► So should her character be very mothering or should she be just this really cold-hearted person who makes these decisions and never looks back?

01:09:24 ◼   ► And the writing team was split on this.

01:09:26 ◼   ► And so the result is that in many episodes of Star Trek, Janeway acts in these wildly inconsistent ways from episode to episode.

01:09:35 ◼   ► And if you've seen Voyager as much as I have you notice this like wait a minute

01:09:40 ◼   ► This is a totally different person than three episodes ago like oh now

01:09:44 ◼   ► She's really caring, but you know she was she was willing to discard things earlier

01:09:49 ◼   ► You know so anyway, so just wildly inconsistent, but what I love is that the actress Kate Mulgrew

01:09:54 ◼   ► Said that this was driving her crazy, and she decided that

01:09:58 ◼   ► The way to make this work is to simply play the character as though she has shell shock

01:10:04 ◼   ► Right, as though she's going through PTSD, and this is the only thing that can make this character work.

01:10:11 ◼   ► Is that the situation that she has been in is so traumatic that she has PTSD, and so she reacts very badly under some circumstances, and perfectly fine under others.

01:10:22 ◼   ► So I thought that was that was a great little moment from like if you're an actress handed this difficult situation

01:10:30 ◼   ► how to figure out to make this into something coherent and

01:10:34 ◼   ► the only other minor thing that I will say is that

01:10:37 ◼   ► in our household my wife and I

01:10:40 ◼   ► we give out to actors and actresses what we call the Janeway Award, which is

01:10:46 ◼   ► when we see someone on film

01:10:51 ◼   ► sell a completely ridiculous line.

01:10:55 ◼   ► Because

01:10:57 ◼   ► Kate Mulgrew had to say some of the worst, most

01:11:01 ◼   ► convoluted lines in Star Trek Voyager.

01:11:04 ◼   ► But she was able to sell them sometimes in just this amazing way where it's like, "I totally buy this ridiculous dialogue."

01:11:12 ◼   ► And this came from one of the early episodes where

01:11:15 ◼   ► Captain Janeway is talking to Amelia Earhart on a planet out in the Delta Coast.

01:11:21 ◼   ► quadrant and is trying to explain to Amelia Earhart the situation and the

01:11:26 ◼   ► actress Kate Mulgrew has to look at Amelia Earhart and say with complete

01:11:29 ◼   ► seriousness you have been abducted by aliens and it's just like it's just the

01:11:36 ◼   ► worst ever but she sells it and so when we see someone's accomplished that we

01:11:40 ◼   ► say that person has just won a Janeway Award. This is me selling a ridiculous line of

01:11:46 ◼   ► dialogue so anyway that's my uh that's my situation with Star Trek.

01:11:50 ◼   ► compromise that those writers came to is one of the worst decisions possible

01:11:55 ◼   ► we'll just write it differently than you will like that is just the worst way of

01:12:00 ◼   ► dealing with that situation yeah and the the interesting thing is that this this

01:12:04 ◼   ► big split is actually what eventually led to Battlestar Galactica because it

01:12:09 ◼   ► was the writing team that was on the side of Iron Lady that eventually

01:12:14 ◼   ► produced Battlestar Galactica as very much a reaction to their experience

01:12:19 ◼   ► putting together Voyager. And if you're watching Battlestar Galactica knowing that, you can

01:12:23 ◼   ► see this in the couple of female lead characters, that they are both way more like the ruthless

01:12:32 ◼   ► decision makers than they could have ever made Janeway be on Star Trek Voyager.

01:12:38 ◼   ► So probably it kind of basically ended up being best for everyone, because you got Battlestar

01:12:43 ◼   ► out of it.

01:12:44 ◼   ► Yeah, Battlestar Galactica is pretty good.

01:12:47 ◼   ► And when I watch Voyager, I'm always feeling like it could use 20% more

01:12:53 ◼   ► Battlestar Galactica.

01:12:55 ◼   ► That's what Voyager needs.

01:12:57 ◼   ► Let's turn down the happiness 10% and turn up the Galactica 20%.

01:13:02 ◼   ► So I want to ask you a couple of questions that are focused around something

01:13:07 ◼   ► that is near and dear to my heart.

01:13:09 ◼   ► OK. Which is paper and pens.

01:13:14 ◼   ► people may not know this about me, but I actually host a podcast, co-host a podcast about pens and paper on Relay Fm.

01:13:21 ◼   ► And Walker has written in to say,

01:13:25 ◼   ► "How does Myke feel about Gray's 'shred everything shreddable' policy with regards to notebooks and things like Field Notes, for example?"

01:13:33 ◼   ► Field Notes is a brand notebook that I love.

01:13:35 ◼   ► So I notice about you that you enjoy shredding things.

01:13:38 ◼   ► Well, I enjoy shredding useless things.

01:13:41 ◼   ► Yeah, see this is this was my thought too. I also believe in shredding everything except

01:13:48 ◼   ► the stuff that I want to keep. Which seems like a very simple argument there. Like, oh

01:13:55 ◼   ► well yeah but it makes sense to me. Again, and one thing, my notebooks once I'm done

01:13:59 ◼   ► in them they never get opened again because they're done. And I have had the habit in

01:14:05 ◼   ► the past of scanning them but I don't really do that anymore. There used to be more when

01:14:10 ◼   ► I used to take notes that were more critical for my job.

01:14:13 ◼   ► I would scan them in case I ever needed to get back to them again.

01:14:17 ◼   ► But it doesn't bother me like I don't shred my notebooks.

01:14:22 ◼   ► I just put them in storage, but

01:14:25 ◼   ► I could quite easily see a world in which I did that.

01:14:27 ◼   ► It wouldn't really bother me too much.

01:14:30 ◼   ► Right, because you're never accessing them in storage anyway.

01:14:32 ◼   ► It's like they have been shredded.

01:14:33 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:14:34 ◼   ► It just happened to still physically exist.

01:14:36 ◼   ► Yeah, I keep them just because.

01:14:38 ◼   ► Yeah, I have a few things like that as well.

01:14:40 ◼   ► In my pre-iPhone days, I used to write in notebooks, and I still have a bunch of notebooks that are just filled with handwritten things,

01:14:50 ◼   ► and I have them around. They're actually at my parents' house where I am right now.

01:14:56 ◼   ► And I've scanned some of them, and yeah, they're still here, you know, just because I haven't shredded them, but I never look at them either.

01:15:05 ◼   ► Of all of the questions that we've received, the way in which this one is phrased, I love

01:15:12 ◼   ► the most of all. This is from Le Blobbs. "When writing with the primitive pen and paper,

01:15:20 ◼   ► do you write in cursive or in normal romanised text?" I just really love that, going into

01:15:26 ◼   ► this, the bias, like, it's primitive. Well we all know that, we accept this to be true,

01:15:32 ◼   ► that pen and paper is primitive, which I do not agree with, because pen and paper,

01:15:37 ◼   ► as I know that Grey employs, is really great for some tasks.

01:15:40 ◼   ► Mm-hmm, yeah, it definitely is.

01:15:42 ◼   ► Like you can't, you cannot, like, well I know that I cannot, and I know many people are the same

01:15:49 ◼   ► as me, the thinking process that occurs during using your hands to write is very, very different

01:15:57 ◼   ► to the one that you go through when you're using a computer, and sometimes

01:16:01 ◼   ► it's what you really need to get through something, is to be able to grab a pen and paper and go for it.

01:16:06 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. Oh, without a doubt. This is where

01:16:09 ◼   ► I do print out my scripts, and I work on them by hand, because it is... it's just different.

01:16:16 ◼   ► Your brain just treats it differently, and I'm able to often cut through problems in scripts

01:16:21 ◼   ► when I'm working with them on a piece of paper with a pen, in a way that I am not when I'm working on my iPad.

01:16:26 ◼   ► So it is definitely useful.

01:16:28 ◼   ► Um...

01:16:30 ◼   ► To answer the question, when I am working on my scripts, so something that is going to be for video

01:16:37 ◼   ► I make all of the corrections in cursive

01:16:41 ◼   ► If I'm writing anything that is not a script, I'm writing it just in regular print

01:16:46 ◼   ► I don't know why my brain has decided that this is the way it's going to be

01:16:50 ◼   ► But that is just the way that it is

01:16:53 ◼   ► Everything else that I write is print, but if I'm working on a script, for some reason it's cursive time

01:16:58 ◼   ► time and that's that's the way I write. Whilst I don't have a distinction or my

01:17:04 ◼   ► brain isn't making a distinction as strong as yours, I do very wildly between

01:17:09 ◼   ► block capitals, print, and cursive or joined-up handwriting as I would know it

01:17:17 ◼   ► to be called here and I don't know why this happens but sometimes halfway for a

01:17:21 ◼   ► sentence I change from cursive to script. That must be great for anybody who has

01:17:26 ◼   ► to read the things that you write.

01:17:27 ◼   ► - Not many people have to read what I write,

01:17:29 ◼   ► but my handwriting--

01:17:30 ◼   ► - That sounds good then.

01:17:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, so it works out for everyone.

01:17:34 ◼   ► It's my own special brand of code.

01:17:35 ◼   ► All right, I have a couple more for you.

01:17:38 ◼   ► Nicholas would like to know how precise you are with scripts.

01:17:42 ◼   ► Like for example, do you write the word so,

01:17:46 ◼   ► or do you put like long pause

01:17:48 ◼   ► or anything like that in your scripts?

01:17:51 ◼   ► - The scripts are word for word when I write them out.

01:17:54 ◼   ► So any non-word thing is written

01:17:59 ◼   ► And I do make notes about pauses or sounds

01:18:04 ◼   ► And I use a lot of italics as well for what word do I want to emphasize in this sentence

01:18:10 ◼   ► But that's partly because when I'm going through the scripts, one of the phases is to read them out loud

01:18:16 ◼   ► As though I am doing the video

01:18:18 ◼   ► And part of that is trying to find the rhythm of the sentences

01:18:22 ◼   ► So I do have to make notes about, yes, this word is going to be the word that is emphasized

01:18:28 ◼   ► and I want to pause at this moment for a second or two

01:18:32 ◼   ► If I was writing something just for an article in a website or something, I would still read it out loud

01:18:38 ◼   ► because I do think that helps when you're writing, but I wouldn't feel the need to make a whole bunch of notes about

01:18:45 ◼   ► or I wouldn't feel the need to include italics in the way that I currently do

01:18:50 ◼   ► Yeah, that's why. That stuff is in there because I'm trying to find the way that sounds best when I'm saying it out loud.

01:18:57 ◼   ► That's really cool. I didn't know that. I like that. That's a real level of detail that I enjoy now that I know that fact.

01:19:05 ◼   ► Paul says I understand a little bit more, but emphasizing certain words, choosing that in advance is very interesting.

01:19:12 ◼   ► Yeah, if people look at, if people turn on the captions for my videos, not so much with the newer ones, but with a lot of the older ones, I would just upload the captions as the script that I had written, and very often just didn't bother taking out some of the italics or a few other things.

01:19:31 ◼   ► I would take out, if I wrote something like that was a pause or a little note to myself, I would take that out because I'm obviously not saying it.

01:19:38 ◼   ► But on the older videos you can watch them with the captions on and you'll see the little asterisks around a whole bunch of words which were like "Yes, I decided that this was a word that I was going to emphasize in the sentence."

01:19:47 ◼   ► So that stuff is still there, sort of, in some of the older videos.

01:19:51 ◼   ► Do you use any kind of script writing software or do you use any kind of script writing markup or do you just have your own little codes and symbols that you use?

01:20:00 ◼   ► I'm pretty much using Markdown.

01:20:02 ◼   ► I want to talk about Markdown one day.

01:20:04 ◼   ► With you.

01:20:06 ◼   ► We can talk more in detail about that.

01:20:08 ◼   ► But the short answer is I'm just using Markdown

01:20:10 ◼   ► which is why I put asterisks around the words

01:20:12 ◼   ► to mark that it's italics.

01:20:14 ◼   ► So my last question today

01:20:16 ◼   ► comes from Bobby. And Bobby would like to know

01:20:18 ◼   ► what advice would you give to somebody

01:20:20 ◼   ► who's looking to become self-employed

01:20:22 ◼   ► in a similar fashion to how you are?

01:20:24 ◼   ► We sort of touched on this earlier

01:20:26 ◼   ► actually. So this is a good

01:20:28 ◼   ► good bringing things around to the beginning question. I employed a very deliberate strategy

01:20:37 ◼   ► when I was trying to become self-employed, and that was to try a bunch of different little

01:20:47 ◼   ► projects on the side. So I always had something else that I was doing in addition to my actual

01:20:57 ◼   ► main job. And so for a while when I was teaching I woke up very early in the

01:21:04 ◼   ► morning and I always dedicated my first hour or two of wakefulness, which is my

01:21:11 ◼   ► prime useful time, to my side project. I'm not giving my first couple of hours of

01:21:18 ◼   ► wakefulness to my employer, I'm going to give them to me to work on things. And

01:21:26 ◼   ► I think you have to think about becoming self-employed.

01:21:31 ◼   ► I always think of it as a bit like,

01:21:32 ◼   ► this is the worst analogy ever,

01:21:36 ◼   ► but in my mind I'm always imagining like a roulette table.

01:21:40 ◼   ► And what you wanna do is you wanna place

01:21:44 ◼   ► a bunch of small bets all over the table.

01:21:48 ◼   ► You don't want to go all in on a single thing

01:21:54 ◼   ► because you want to be doing a little experiment to see what do people want to do

01:21:59 ◼   ► and I went through this with a bunch of stuff that just didn't work out

01:22:03 ◼   ► where, like we said before, I was trying to think of services to sell or other things to do

01:22:08 ◼   ► and I had things that were successful but never successful enough to fully employ myself

01:22:14 ◼   ► and that's a useful piece of information to have

01:22:18 ◼   ► or I just had stuff that just totally didn't work

01:22:21 ◼   ► And so you have to just try a bunch of little things and cut the stuff that isn't working.

01:22:27 ◼   ► And that's... this is exactly why I have ended up in a career that I did not aim for.

01:22:33 ◼   ► I wasn't planning for this. I never could have planned for this.

01:22:37 ◼   ► But making the videos were little side projects that I thought would be popular in some way.

01:22:45 ◼   ► I didn't just make them because I thought, "Oh, well, you know, this will be a fun thing to do."

01:22:49 ◼   ► They were a very purposeless experiment that I still thought people might like.

01:22:56 ◼   ► And I was originally thinking maybe any attention that I get from these videos, I can parlay that into something else.

01:23:04 ◼   ► Right? Then people just know I exist and then maybe I can sell goods or services or do something else or do consulting or whatever.

01:23:11 ◼   ► So that's what I think is the best thing to do.

01:23:14 ◼   ► try a whole bunch of little things and try to figure out very quickly

01:23:20 ◼   ► what people are interested in and what people aren't interested in.

01:23:25 ◼   ► But if you do that, you may end up doing something that is just...

01:23:28 ◼   ► that you're not planning for.

01:23:30 ◼   ► You're just trying to figure out what people are interested in.

01:23:32 ◼   ► And I have read a few books that match up with this advice

01:23:37 ◼   ► from people who are also successful.

01:23:39 ◼   ► The one that I usually recommend to say people who are just graduating

01:23:42 ◼   ► is so good they can't ignore you by Cal Newport, which I really like.

01:23:46 ◼   ► And the guy who writes Dilbert actually just wrote a book

01:23:51 ◼   ► called, I think it's called "How to Fail at Everything and Still Succeed"

01:23:55 ◼   ► and yeah,

01:23:59 ◼   ► he's a very strange guy. He's a very strange guy.

01:24:03 ◼   ► But reading through that book I could see

01:24:07 ◼   ► he had the exact same experience that I did of...

01:24:10 ◼   ► He didn't really care what it was that he was going to do, he was just willing to try a whole bunch of little things and just go with what works and what doesn't.

01:24:20 ◼   ► And for him the cartooning was exactly one of these side projects.

01:24:23 ◼   ► And even the beginning of Dilbert was very different than what he was thinking it would be.

01:24:28 ◼   ► I forget the exact details, but it was originally going to be all about Dilbert's home life,

01:24:33 ◼   ► and he quickly realized that the cartoons that got the most reaction from people were about Dilbert's job.

01:24:39 ◼   ► And so he changed the direction of the whole comic to be entirely about work.

01:24:43 ◼   ► And, you know, now this is what he does for a living.

01:24:45 ◼   ► So, that's, that is my overall advice.

01:24:49 ◼   ► And potentially two books to read.

01:24:51 ◼   ► Do you have anything you want to add to that, Myke?

01:24:53 ◼   ► Yeah. I have a very, very, very different opinion to you.

01:24:58 ◼   ► Uh-huh. Well, you had a dream job you were aiming for.

01:25:01 ◼   ► There you go. So that's, so this is the idea.

01:25:03 ◼   ► We're both coming at this from very, very different avenues.

01:25:07 ◼   ► because I remember when I quit my job

01:25:11 ◼   ► and I was telling people in the office that I was leaving,

01:25:14 ◼   ► a lot of the time I would have people say to me,

01:25:16 ◼   ► "Oh, I'd love to have my own business."

01:25:19 ◼   ► But they never had a business doing X.

01:25:23 ◼   ► It was just, "I'd love to have my own business."

01:25:25 ◼   ► And I was like, "I don't understand

01:25:26 ◼   ► "how that can be a goal that you have

01:25:28 ◼   ► "if you don't have any idea what you wanna do."

01:25:31 ◼   ► So you can't just have, "Oh, my business does business,

01:25:34 ◼   ► "so can you give me some money?"

01:25:36 ◼   ► Like that's not how things work.

01:25:37 ◼   ► So I always found that--

01:25:38 ◼   ► - Like the haha business meme.

01:25:40 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:25:41 ◼   ► - The haha business.

01:25:42 ◼   ► - What are you doing today?

01:25:42 ◼   ► Oh, just so much business.

01:25:44 ◼   ► Like it doesn't exist.

01:25:46 ◼   ► You have to have an idea.

01:25:48 ◼   ► So my thing, my advice is,

01:25:51 ◼   ► once you've found the thing that you really wanna do,

01:25:53 ◼   ► you gotta get ready to sacrifice a whole bunch of stuff

01:25:55 ◼   ► that other people might not wanna sacrifice.

01:25:58 ◼   ► And if you can manage to do that, then you'll succeed.

01:26:02 ◼   ► Because I genuinely believe the reason

01:26:04 ◼   ► that a lot of people don't is because they don't want to sacrifice and that is

01:26:08 ◼   ► not a criticism because some of the things you have to sacrifice are things

01:26:11 ◼   ► that you just don't want to. Like I didn't and kind of still really don't

01:26:16 ◼   ► have a social life like I didn't have a social life for years because every

01:26:20 ◼   ► night I would come home and start my second job so and luckily now I know a

01:26:26 ◼   ► bunch of self-employed people so I can meet the lunches and stuff like that but

01:26:32 ◼   ► gave up that I gave up the ability to really sleep right because I would go to

01:26:36 ◼   ► bed late because I was working on a project and wake up really early in the

01:26:39 ◼   ► morning because I was working on a project and I lost a lot of friendships

01:26:43 ◼   ► and relationships and these are things that I'm not saying good because they're

01:26:47 ◼   ► not good which is why a lot of people can't do them but I think sometimes if

01:26:51 ◼   ► the thing you want to do and this is this applies way more to I want to

01:26:56 ◼   ► achieve my dream then I want to be self-employed but if you do have a dream

01:27:00 ◼   ► job that you want to do. Sometimes the only way to get there is to go through some really

01:27:04 ◼   ► tough decisions and to give up a lot of stuff.

01:27:08 ◼   ► Yeah, that is definitely the case.

01:27:12 ◼   ► One of the things that someone might get the impression from listening to

01:27:16 ◼   ► our previous episodes that you also have to give up is if you're trying to

01:27:20 ◼   ► do something outside your main job, it means that you have to make

01:27:24 ◼   ► sacrifices at your main job. Which

01:27:28 ◼   ► I think it might be clear that maybe we weren't the best employees we could have possibly been at the places we were working

01:27:37 ◼   ► And even that is a stress that is difficult for some people to handle

01:27:44 ◼   ► And so yes, if you are trying to do anything on your own you totally have trade-offs

01:27:50 ◼   ► trade-offs. There are things that you have to sacrifice.

01:27:54 ◼   ► But I mean, this is true with anything in life.

01:27:58 ◼   ► All of life is about making decisions and cutting off options.

01:28:04 ◼   ► But it's just that if you're going for working on your own or being self-employed,

01:28:09 ◼   ► it's a big decision with a big impact so it also has

01:28:13 ◼   ► big trade-offs that you have to face. But it's interesting hearing you say that,

01:28:17 ◼   ► that Myke because my goal was of course exactly like I want to be self-employed

01:28:22 ◼   ► in the same way that people want to have a business. What do you want to be self

01:28:25 ◼   ► employed at? I don't know self-employment like this is this was the goal that I

01:28:29 ◼   ► was aiming for and I was not particularly concerned with what the

01:28:34 ◼   ► details of that were. Yeah that was just always so weird to me but as I said we

01:28:42 ◼   ► were coming at it from very different perspectives I did really really not

01:28:45 ◼   ► want to have to work with someone but more importantly to me was to do the

01:28:49 ◼   ► thing that I really really want to do so maybe if this didn't work out or maybe

01:28:54 ◼   ► if it ends up not working out I will end up in that mode. Because now it's like now I really have to be

01:29:01 ◼   ► self-employed so maybe I will just do anything. Yes once you once you become

01:29:08 ◼   ► self-employed I mean I've heard many people joke about it but it's totally

01:29:11 ◼   ► true. If you become self-employed, the danger is that you are now pretty much

01:29:16 ◼   ► unemployable to anyone in the future. It's just like you just wouldn't do very

01:29:21 ◼   ► well in a regular job once you've been self-employed, which adds to the pressure

01:29:26 ◼   ► of like you have to remain successful because otherwise you're in a lot of

01:29:30 ◼   ► trouble. Oh yeah, I would. I was never a great employee because I always had

01:29:36 ◼   ► something I wanted to do, you know? So I was never fully focused but now it would be just

01:29:45 ◼   ► horrible for everyone involved. So we're skipping an episode next week, we're not gonna be around

01:29:53 ◼   ► because of your travel schedule and the fact that what we can blame, basically we can blame

01:29:59 ◼   ► Washington for this, right?

01:30:01 ◼   ► Eh, the episode next week, you can just blame that on me because of the difficulties of

01:30:06 ◼   ► trying to schedule and make sure that we have an episode and my refusal to believe in the

01:30:11 ◼   ► schedule which I am now forcing on you but, yeah, I am not around to work as much as I

01:30:17 ◼   ► would normally be so there's not going to be an episode next week.

01:30:20 ◼   ► Unless I do one on my own.