00:00:00 ◼ ► Summer time is here, Mike. It means it's time for the official annual completely unexpected summer heatwave that we get in England.
00:00:14 ◼ ► Don't you even start with me, right? It's like June. People go, "Oh, it's so hot!" Right? Like, yeah, it is. It always is.
00:00:21 ◼ ► Well, I feel like it was earlier. I feel like, but I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. But it just feels to me like it gets warm, but like the really wild heat that we had feels like it was sooner than I remember.
00:00:36 ◼ ► Yeah, you can't, don't be one of those people who's like, "Oh, this isn't hot!" You can't be that guy. Don't encourage that, because people are like, "Ugh, ugh, 88 degrees? Where I'm from, it's 170!"
00:00:47 ◼ ► And it's like, yeah, but you don't understand. Like, our homes and buildings are built to retain heat. Our humidity is very high. Nowhere has air conditioning.
00:00:56 ◼ ► So don't be one of those guys just because you... Why did you install air conditioning in your house? Because it gets too hot!
00:01:11 ◼ ► That's what triggering is, right? It's like we're just having a normal conversation that, bam, triggered!
00:01:22 ◼ ► I'm so sorry. I meant it in the sense of, like, I always pay attention to these heat waves. Like, again, heat waves, every time I say it, it's in quotation marks, only because I think it's summer.
00:01:31 ◼ ► But I just thought, this year, it just caught my attention because, like, usually the heat wave thing waits until, like, the temperature's a little higher.
00:01:39 ◼ ► But it kind of felt like the news was a bit like, "Oh, we need something to talk about." And so, like, right, there was like a lower threshold, right, for what counted as a heat wave.
00:01:48 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, there were so many news articles that were like, "Hey, you know, it could get to 40 again."
00:01:54 ◼ ► That is the context in which I made it. It's like, this year, the, like, threshold for what the press will report as a heat wave got, like, turned down a few degrees, right?
00:02:04 ◼ ► Of like, "We need to talk about this heat wave in end of June," right? Like, what a shocker. But so that is the way I meant it.
00:02:12 ◼ ► No, I am a creature who desperately needs air conditioning in all sorts of circumstances where people don't. Like, I just, you know, I wither away very fast.
00:02:32 ◼ ► I'm only laughing because, like, I'm happy. I just think, like, everyone in England needs to do this. Did you get one that just, like, rolls up to the window? Is that one of those kind of ones?
00:02:40 ◼ ► Yeah, it's just the issue is, like, none of our windows are really meant for those things either, right?
00:02:45 ◼ ► So we had to get this, like, weird, like, material thing that's now stuck with Velcro around the window. Because the windows don't open up, they open out, right?
00:02:58 ◼ ► But it lives behind the blinds in the bedroom. And we always have the blinds down in the bedroom anyway, so you don't even see it, right? So it's like, whatever.
00:03:04 ◼ ► Eventually, I do think we will get, in a few years time, we'll get air conditioning put in, in a couple of rooms in the house. But for right now, it's just like a prioritization of cost thing.
00:03:16 ◼ ► So we've got the portable one. It will do, we're just keeping it in the bedroom, which is the most important place for air conditioning, I feel like. And so we're just going with that.
00:03:25 ◼ ► Yeah, there's a lot of evidence of like, you got to drop that temperature for sleeping, otherwise you're not going to have a great time. Like, that's the most miserable thing.
00:03:36 ◼ ► I just wonder, like, 50 years from now, people are still going to be talking about how England doesn't have infrastructure to handle the heat. It's like, build it! You need to build it this way, guys.
00:03:45 ◼ ► I really can't believe that new buildings don't seem to be built with air conditioning.
00:03:49 ◼ ► I understand why we have all these houses that are Victorian houses or even houses from the 60s, like ours, you just didn't need it. Because it's like, oh, what, you opened the window a couple of times a year and it was fine.
00:03:59 ◼ ► But now it's like, it's just hot now. I think we have, in the summer now, we are passing the point where anyone would consider it hot. Right? Like, we're not even just like, oh, 28, that's nothing.
00:04:15 ◼ ► It's like, no, we get up to like 38, 40 now, we get to what, like, this is like no joke heat anymore.
00:04:23 ◼ ► And so it is surprising that we don't have air conditioning in new buildings more frequently.
00:04:29 ◼ ► Yeah, I find that baffling. Also, on my own, personal grievances while we're talking about this. I recently did this graycation, which got a little interrupted because of vision stuff, which I was very happy about.
00:04:42 ◼ ► But I was staying at a hotel, brand new construction, when I'm trying to look for places, especially if it's summer, was my number one criteria, air conditioning, right?
00:04:52 ◼ ► It's like, I'm absolutely shocked at the number of places of like, oh, this looks like a nice place to stay, work for a while. Do you have air conditioning? No.
00:04:59 ◼ ► So I picked this place because they had AC. When I get there, I find out that they limit what you can actually set the AC to.
00:05:08 ◼ ► So when I get into the hotel room, right, every time I go anywhere, the very first thing I do is like, where's the thermostat and I make it go as low as it can go.
00:05:17 ◼ ► Partly because like, number one, hotels just lie, right? So like the number of places where I've set the air conditioning to usually it's like 16 is the lowest to let you go, which is like 65 in American measurements.
00:05:29 ◼ ► I know what 16 feels like. Like I set the podcast recording room to 16 when we're recording. There is no universe where this hotel room is 16 degrees like you liars.
00:05:39 ◼ ► Oh, I mean, the thing is, hotel air conditioning in the UK is also very weak. Yeah, I find like just in general, like even if you set it there, you could maybe stay for a week and it's not going to get to that temperature.
00:05:55 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, just like hotels all over the world just lie about this stuff. But so when I got to this place, it's like, get in there. The very first thing I do, boop, boop, boop, I hit the little thermostat and it's like, hi, 19 and a half is the lowest that will let you set this.
00:06:11 ◼ ► Sorry, what? Again, for Americans, it's like 70. I'm sorry, I'm here to work. Like I'm going to radiate a huge amount of heat like while I'm pacing back and forth and just like working on stuff. I've checked into this hotel for like minutes before I'm back at the front desk.
00:06:39 ◼ ► I was pretty unhappy about that. But I was like, this better not be a trend. It was infuriating, right? And even there, I'm like, your air conditioning is not hitting this number that you're still just like setting for me as a boundary. So now I'm like, great. What do I need to do? Like call up places ahead of time?
00:06:56 ◼ ► When we, not last Christmas, Christmas before we went to Romania and we stayed in a hotel in Bucharest and it was cold, right? Like it is cold at Christmas in Romania.
00:07:08 ◼ ► It's freezing there. Romania has the extremes. Like it has incredibly hot summers, incredibly cold winters. And we got to the hotel and the hotel room was warm and I turned on the air conditioning. It just wasn't working. And it turns out that they turn off the air conditioning when it's cold and the heating is just on. The heating was too high.
00:07:28 ◼ ► So we ended up in Romania in the winter with a portable air conditioning unit in the hotel room. It was just like, why? Why is this happening? Like don't just set it and then we've decided that it's going to be this hot in your room. Like I find that to be, that was a very strange thing. So we ended up window open, tube out the window, freezing outside.
00:07:58 ◼ ► All of this was just to say that I have been sadly kicked out of my new garage working space downstairs in the basement of my building.
00:08:15 ◼ ► I'm glad you find that funny. That's also part of what was part of my motivation for like, oh, I need to go on a great vacation, right? So it's like, I need to work someplace that's cool. And then I get to this eco hotel and I'm like, oh, thanks a lot guys.
00:08:27 ◼ ► I had had these like brief hopes at the start of summer because I was thinking, oh, well, when I come down into the basement, it's still, it's so cool down here still while it's warm outside. But of course, it's like, I forget. Yeah, that's how thermal mass works. Like there's an entire building above you, which is slowly heating up during the summer.
00:08:47 ◼ ► It's like, it's just gonna take longer to get to the basement. But once it does, like there'll be nothing that you can do about this heat.
00:08:54 ◼ ► So I enjoyed my garage office space while it lasted, but I've had to retreat for the summertime. So it is no more.
00:09:05 ◼ ► In all seriousness, I'm a big believer in changing locations. It's been less bad coming up to my regular office because now it does feel like, oh, it's kind of new. Right? Yeah. It's like it's new again.
00:09:25 ◼ ► I wanted to extend a thank you to Cortexens for the response to the last episode, our Vision Pro episode.
00:09:33 ◼ ► People have been very nice about the episode and it makes me very happy because it was an important episode.
00:09:38 ◼ ► I think they've been nice about it because it was a great episode, Mike. I'm just going to say it. You killed it on that episode.
00:09:45 ◼ ► It was a huge announcement for Apple and I think I went around on all of the internet just trying to get everybody's opinions after we recorded that show and listened to what everybody had to say about it and check out all the videos.
00:09:59 ◼ ► And having consumed, I think, nearly all of the Vision Pro media created in the seven days following the announcement, no one did what you did.
00:10:10 ◼ ► You made a unique thing with that episode walking through the experience of what was it like.
00:10:16 ◼ ► Yeah. And I'm very happy that it went that way, that we did it the way that we did it because I don't think I would have been able to do anything decent if I was just trying to talk about it because one of the things that I learned quite quickly in having conversations and talking about Vision Pro and Apple Podcasts is it's a very hard thing to talk about what that experience was like.
00:10:39 ◼ ► And also I have found that I kind of get a little bit speechless when trying to describe at all. It's kind of hard to put into words.
00:10:50 ◼ ► So having that very strict structure of I'm just going to tell you every single thing that I did actually just helped me get it all out and so it ended up being good.
00:10:59 ◼ ► And also, as you say, I think no one did what we did which was to just describe the entire experience. So it ended up being something that was unique and something I'm very proud of and I think people seem to dig.
00:11:11 ◼ ► It was also the fastest turnaround of a Cortex episode in history. It was kind of incredible, really.
00:11:18 ◼ ► There was a transcontinental relay race to get that thing done. When you first messaged me about "I've gotten access, I'm going to have a demo," I was very much like, "I'm dropping everything. We need to move this recording up as soon as you can."
00:11:35 ◼ ► It worked out great that I was on a work trip because I was like, "I am here for you. We will do things instantly and as fast because we've never had anything that was as time sensitive as that."
00:11:49 ◼ ► And it was like, man, at the time we were making that I had the feeling of every hour matters for getting this up. They've just done this announcement. We want to have that up as fast as possible.
00:12:01 ◼ ► We coordinated to get your very first slot of time available. It was like, what, the very next morning first thing?
00:12:08 ◼ ► We have an editor who was doing a first pass for us. He stayed up late at night right after we recorded the show, like a true hero, to get it so that when I woke up in England the next morning, I could do the next edit while you're still sleeping in California.
00:12:26 ◼ ► So that the moment you woke up, you could do what I assume was mostly just a final listen through, hopefully.
00:12:33 ◼ ► And then do all the publishing stuff. It just had this funny feeling of like, "Okay, Mike's gone to bed. Gray's gone to bed. Editor's up at night getting it done. Okay, Gray's awake. Editor's asleep. Mike's asleep." Like he's doing the edit and now Mike's awake.
00:12:47 ◼ ► Well, actually, no, I did two listens. So I listened in Logic where I made a couple of tweaks and then I listened to the finalized episode. But we were still able to get it out the next day, which is kind of incredible.
00:13:01 ◼ ► And people, I just want to clear up a thing there because it's breaking the internal idea of how this show is made. We did have an external edit that wasn't me or you work on this.
00:13:11 ◼ ► We've actually been instilling some help with some of our special episodes recently. We've been working with an external editor on this, which is not what we've ever done before.
00:13:19 ◼ ► But it ended up being great practice that we tried it out, so we knew how to make the process work for this specific episode, where it would not have been able to be done in the time that it was done otherwise.
00:13:30 ◼ ► Yeah, we couldn't have possibly done it. Yeah, I guess I did skip over that because it's one of the things we were thinking about with these special episodes is if we're going to try to do some extra episodes in the year, how does that work?
00:13:42 ◼ ► And one of the things is reducing your workload and bringing on someone external to help out. And yes, thank God we had done like one run of like, "Here's how it should work," with the Facebook episode doing their VR system.
00:13:56 ◼ ► And yeah, if we hadn't have had that in place, like this would never have happened with this fast of a turnaround.
00:14:01 ◼ ► I obviously have been spending a lot of time in the last month just thinking about Vision Pro.
00:14:07 ◼ ► One of the things I wanted to touch on was like kind of like specific to the experiences that we have focused on, which was like meetings.
00:14:15 ◼ ► So we spent a lot of time in Horizon work rooms, and there was a lot of discussion leading up to the Vision Pro of what Apple would do in response to this kind of idea.
00:14:26 ◼ ► And there was talk about like these fully animated people, which ended up being the virtual persona thing that they've made, where it's like making a fake version of you.
00:14:37 ◼ ► But that is just part of FaceTime, and Apple have not created a virtual space for people to exist in, like we have with Horizon work rooms.
00:14:49 ◼ ► And one of the real things that that provided for the two of us was this sense of like immersion and presence and place.
00:14:56 ◼ ► And we'd spoken very highly of that, of how we couldn't be together, but felt like there was an element of togetherness in this room that we were in, even though we were very clearly just these cartoons, but it still bridged the gap a little bit.
00:15:11 ◼ ► Now, what Apple has shown off that they are making for the Vision Pro, I don't think is going to do that at all.
00:15:18 ◼ ► So like, we don't want to have a video call. This is essentially just a video call, and it comes with all of the benefits and disadvantages of a video call.
00:15:26 ◼ ► It will be a different experience, but I don't think is going to provide that same experience that we've had with Horizon work rooms of creating this sense of memory that that does.
00:15:42 ◼ ► However, I think that they are just going for something completely different, like where they are aiming out with Vision Pro seems to be focused on this idea of like real world over fake world.
00:15:59 ◼ ► Or I still like what I said on that episode, I still have this feeling of it's just very happily to come late to a market and do much less.
00:16:09 ◼ ► And my initial impression of seeing the videos about the Vision Pro was they're basically just doing rectangles in space, like their windows in your physical location.
00:16:24 ◼ ► And when you watch that, because I was talking to a few friends about this, who are into VR, and I was like, no, no, look at it again.
00:16:36 ◼ ► Even what looks like the immersive environments, it's still just a wider rectangle wrapped around you.
00:16:42 ◼ ► But it's sort of like, in a strange way, it almost looks very two dimensional placed in a physical space.
00:16:54 ◼ ► But I think Apple's smart to do this because, I mean, again, when you listen to our episode about the MetaQuest Pro,
00:17:01 ◼ ► I think it helps them avoid a lot of the problems that normal people would have with VR systems or things that people would put off putting.
00:17:10 ◼ ► I'm going to coin a term, "VR dysphoria", which is clearly my experience of trying to build some body for myself in VR, which I absolutely hated.
00:17:20 ◼ ► And it was really interesting just to get feedback from lots of people saying they just hate the same kind of thing.
00:17:30 ◼ ► Will they get there at some point? I'm sure they will. But I think it's really smart to start in this limited way.
00:17:37 ◼ ► Like, sure, we can do more, but this is what we're showing you as the first version of this.
00:17:42 ◼ ► It's like your computer, but big and in your living room. I think that's a really smart sidestep.
00:17:49 ◼ ► Because now, since the episode has come out, Apple have released the Vision Pro SDK so developers can play around with it.
00:17:57 ◼ ► You can build little 3D objects. So your app can generate things that you can put in places, which is super cool.
00:18:04 ◼ ► And there's actually a persistence. So, for example, somebody could build a music app that had a little radio that would look like a little radio.
00:18:12 ◼ ► And you put the radio down on the desk and you can walk away from it. You come back to it and the radio is still there.
00:18:33 ◼ ► Volumes. Add depth to your app with 3D volume. Volumes and SwiftUI scenes that can showcase 3D content using RealityKit or Unity.
00:18:40 ◼ ► Creating experiences that are viewable from any angle in the shared space or an app's full space.
00:18:45 ◼ ► And mostly developers aren't, I have not seen a lot of examples of this yet, but it's a thing that you can do.
00:18:52 ◼ ► Actually, let me show you one. There is, Apple created a thing called Spotlight on developing for Vision OS.
00:18:59 ◼ ► It's like an article. And you'll see in this article, one of the apps is DJ. Now they got advanced access.
00:19:07 ◼ ► And you'll see there is a 3D representation of DJ decks on the table in front of you that you can interact with.
00:19:17 ◼ ► And so like with the way that the Vision Pro works is you could walk away from that table and they'll stay there.
00:19:23 ◼ ► And you come back and they'll be there again. So like there is some element of 3D that you can bring into it.
00:19:29 ◼ ► However, what they are prioritizing and what most people will make is some version of a window.
00:19:36 ◼ ► But the windows have the same level of persistence. I've been seeing some really interesting examples.
00:19:41 ◼ ► Like there is a developer, his name is Devin, and they make a recipe app called Crouton. And they were posting about how like in their app they have timers in the app.
00:19:50 ◼ ► Right, for the different things in the recipe that you're cooking at any time. And they were like breaking out the timers and sticking them to the thing that's cooking.
00:19:59 ◼ ► So something's in the oven for 10 minutes, take the timer and put it on the oven. Something's on the hob for five minutes, put it there.
00:20:06 ◼ ► So then as you're looking around you can see visually where the timers are. So like there's a lot of stuff about like presence and persistence that I think are very interesting.
00:20:15 ◼ ► But what I wanted to come back around to about this Horizon Workrooms thing is Apple have not done this, right?
00:20:26 ◼ ► And what you mean by that is a shared space. A shared space with four virtual characters, right?
00:20:33 ◼ ► Because they seem to want to make some kind of representation of real. Like they want everything to look real.
00:20:39 ◼ ► So you have a FaceTime call, it looks like a FaceTime call, everyone's there and you're pretending that you're real.
00:20:44 ◼ ► And they're trying to imagine that you're a real person even though you look like a not a real person with the persona thing.
00:20:49 ◼ ► But they're trying to build this whole idea of like the real world, like the way that people break into you.
00:20:55 ◼ ► The fact that you can see someone's eyes when they're wearing it. They're trying to break down the virtual layer and make everything some kind of facsimile of real.
00:21:02 ◼ ► However the best they can do that. So this idea of creating a fully 3D world where people are creating like effectively cartoon characters doesn't look like they're going to do it.
00:21:17 ◼ ► Again, I mentioned this before, but it's like a bravado thing, right? Like they should do this.
00:21:22 ◼ ► They should make Horizon Workrooms for Vision Pro. It's a question of whether they will because they make a competing platform that they would like to win, right?
00:21:30 ◼ ► But someone's going to do it. And I think whoever does it, it will be successful in this platform once this platform kind of proliferates.
00:21:38 ◼ ► Because it can fully support VR. Like it is a VR headset at the moment, right? As much as it is an AR headset.
00:21:46 ◼ ► It's actually more of a VR headset this one than it is an AR headset. Just like in how it's built and how it will be used.
00:21:52 ◼ ► Because it's not glasses and you can't realistically walk around in the street with one of these on.
00:21:58 ◼ ► So people will make VR experiences from it. I think someone should make some kind of like meeting thing from it.
00:22:08 ◼ ► I mean I wonder if it is possible for a third party app to make something that's like a shared space?
00:22:14 ◼ ► I'm very confident that it is. I don't know this, but like I have seen zero that would suggest to me that this could not be done.
00:22:21 ◼ ► Yeah it's funny. It just makes me wonder. A question I hadn't thought of until this moment is if two people have Vision Pro headsets and they're in the same room, can they see each other's stuff?
00:22:35 ◼ ► Right? Like if I've got a DJ table on the table in front of me and you're in the room with me, I wonder if there's a way that like we have a shared...
00:22:42 ◼ ► We have to be in physical space to have our shared VR meeting together, right? You see what I mean?
00:22:57 ◼ ► No, this could be something that they show, right? Later. But I haven't seen anything that would seem to suggest that you could do that right now.
00:23:07 ◼ ► But it's just like it's a question that hadn't popped into my head before of, oh, there's no shared virtual workspace, but if you're in the same physical workspace, can you share a virtual workspace? Or if everybody's just seeing something different?
00:23:20 ◼ ► They are pretty heavily supporting SharePlay with this device. So maybe, like maybe using SharePlay, you could share some kind of experience with someone.
00:23:29 ◼ ► That to me feels very much like a, we will show you that one later, if they can do that. Like, I don't feel like that was needed for this.
00:23:37 ◼ ► Yeah. But that would be cool. But then it's also the thing of like, also, you're going to spend $7,000 now?
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00:26:16 ◼ ► So we had a whole WWDC episode planned last time and threw it all out because the Vision Pro existed and we just spoke about that instead. Would you like to do a WWDC lightning round?
00:26:37 ◼ ► They made a change this year. They made something just a little too easy and they made a terrible decision. I was looking at my phone after WWDC came out and there was like some little software update thing, you know, you get the little red badge.
00:26:54 ◼ ► "Oh, we got a software update." And so I go to take a look and I notice there's a new little button which says "beta?" with a wink and I'm like, "Hey, what's this button?"
00:27:06 ◼ ► It was a very suggestive button. So I pressed it and then it says, "Oh, look at this! Hey! You happen to have this account as a developer account." Which I'd completely forgotten I'd set up years ago.
00:27:18 ◼ ► "So if you want, we can just put the developer beta on your phone right now." And, well, that's a terrible idea. I shouldn't do that.
00:27:26 ◼ ► And I put the phone down. This great battle of self-control and resistance of like, "Don't do that, Gray. That's a really stupid idea." Flash to me awake in the middle of the night, right, like as the phone's whispering to me like, "Why don't you put the developer beta on?"
00:27:41 ◼ ► And so I made it like less than 24 hours between seeing that button and saying like, "Sure! Why not? A developer beta on my watch? Yeah, let's try that too. While I'm traveling? Great idea! Let's do it."
00:27:54 ◼ ► So I think this is one of the most funny examples I've come across of when you make things easier, people are more likely to do them, right, than when you make things harder.
00:28:03 ◼ ► It's like, "Oh, in past years, I always could have manually put on a developer beta, but I would never have done it because it was a big pain in the butt."
00:28:09 ◼ ► But when they just put a button that says, "Press this button and try the new features now," I was completely incapable of resisting.
00:28:16 ◼ ► So I'm running the betas on everything except the machine that I'm talking to you on right now, because I couldn't do that to you, Mike.
00:28:25 ◼ ► No, that would be horrible. I mean, all to yourself, because nothing would work right now. I have actually not done it yet.
00:28:32 ◼ ► Yeah, you're smart. You should wait for the public beta at least, right? Is that your plan?
00:28:35 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm probably going to do it in the next couple of days, because developer beta 3 recently came out. That's usually the first public beta.
00:28:42 ◼ ► So I do developer beta, but when it gets to that level, I just haven't gotten around to it yet. But I am going to do it.
00:28:48 ◼ ► Because I'm pretty excited about some of the features that are just in iOS, like the autocorrect feature, which has a transformer model now.
00:28:56 ◼ ► So this is them putting the tea of ChatGPT into autocorrect. I'm very excited about this, because as well, everyone that I know that's put the beta on their phone, it's just like, it's unbelievably good.
00:29:08 ◼ ► Yeah, there's lots of good stuff here. And I have this funny feeling, like I almost feel bad for everyone who was working on all of the stuff before the Vision Pro announcement, because I was really aware watching this WWDC, like just completely chop off all the Vision Pro stuff, pretend it didn't happen.
00:29:26 ◼ ► On every level, Apple just nailed this one out of the park. The production of it, even like the editing flow, like I'm very sensitive to transitions between things. And it's like, there were very few awkward moments. No, no, no, the whole thing was like smooth.
00:29:43 ◼ ► I think they had some of the best little like light touches of humor without being corny and just like keep moving on. And just feature wise, it was like jam packed with just a ton of like quality of life improvements. So I felt like it was an amazing WWDC on its own.
00:30:00 ◼ ► You could have just drawn a line at the Vision Pro part, right? If you would just cut that off, we would have come away being like, Oh, good. Good year this year.
00:30:08 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I feel like I want to really congratulate everybody who worked on all the non-Vision Pro stuff. Like it just was a killer year, even without the thing that basically stole all of the oxygen out of the air for what everyone wanted to talk about.
00:30:23 ◼ ► Yeah, there's just a huge number of small things in this which are all great. Starting with, of course, the thing that I have been requesting for like 10 years since they took it out, cats and dogs in your photos as faces.
00:30:39 ◼ ► Yep, raining cats and dogs over there in photos. This is good though. I do think that this is a smart thing to add because people feel very strongly about their animals, right? They are part of the family, right? So why would you not be able to do this?
00:30:54 ◼ ► Because they've done it before. And like, I feel like it must be complicated, but not impossible to be able to distinguish animals in the same way that you do people.
00:31:04 ◼ ► Yeah, it's funny. I was thinking about that. I don't actually know. So it wasn't there at the start. It just rolled out in developer beta 3. So my phone is still processing through this.
00:31:15 ◼ ► But I realized a funny thing when it started populating all of the dog faces in my photo albums, which is I didn't realize how many pairs of pets I had that look very similar to each other.
00:31:27 ◼ ► And it's like, oh, wow. It's like, okay, we've got four Yorkies, there's like three French Bulldogs, I've got two sets of cats, like one black and white set of cats, like one orange set of cats that are all very similar looking to each other.
00:31:41 ◼ ► And it's interesting to see like so far, it's actually done a pretty good job with telling the pets apart, especially like two of the Yorkies when I was younger, like from photos when I was a kid, it's like, I have a hard time sometimes telling like which of these two it is.
00:31:56 ◼ ► But I think like the machines doing a better job than me on some of these old photos. And it does make me wonder though, like, oh, if you're a computer, is it harder to tell pets apart from people?
00:32:09 ◼ ► Like, I don't know, like computers don't really know anything about either of them. I'd be quite curious to know, is this more computationally difficult? Or is it harder to do it more accurately than faces?
00:32:22 ◼ ► Because, yeah, I don't know, like with pets, you can try to narrow in on something like particular patterns of the hair color in a way that like seems like harder with people, right? Humans change hairstyles in a way that pets do not.
00:32:34 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm thrilled it's there. And so far, I have to say it's doing pretty good, even between pets that I as a human would have a hard time distinguishing in some photos.
00:32:43 ◼ ► I can imagine it would not surprise me if someone said, no, it's about as hard as it is to do humans, but they're all really hard. So we just prioritize. You know what I mean?
00:32:53 ◼ ► It's all very hard to try and do this stuff, especially again, a lot of these things Apple makes more complicated for themselves, but in a good way, right? Of like doing it all on device.
00:33:05 ◼ ► I'm sure it is harder to do that way to like build these models and then just like put them out there and you have no idea what they're doing.
00:33:14 ◼ ► Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm really glad to know that it's all being processed on device. Like that can be sort of frustrating at the beginning while you're trying to like wait for it to set up and it's clearly taking forever and it's different on different devices.
00:33:27 ◼ ► But ultimately it's like, no, no, no, I'd much rather take the trade off of like, oh, it's going to take a week to process through the hundreds of thousands of photos of dogs that you have.
00:33:36 ◼ ► But like we're also just not uploading all of your puppies to like our giant AI eye in the sky, which is going to like comb through them all.
00:33:45 ◼ ► Like I'm very happy that Apple does it this way with the on device stuff, even though I'm sure it is an enormous pain for them program wise.
00:33:51 ◼ ► I think the thing I might be most excited about is interactive widgets. It's like a big widget year anyway.
00:33:59 ◼ ► I was sitting next to Dave during the keynote and it was very exciting because he was very excited.
00:34:14 ◼ ► We got widgets on the iPad lock screen, including some new sizes and also widgets on the Mac that are basically being screened from your iPhone.
00:34:34 ◼ ► I think it's in the beta, but again, I haven't installed the beta yet, but I will like you be able to press buttons so you can start and stop timers.
00:34:40 ◼ ► They also like interact with the live activities on the iPhone so you could start a timer and the live activity will begin and the apps never opened.
00:34:48 ◼ ► And because live activities and widgets are built on the same kind of things, you can like press the button in the live activity now and it will stop the timer as well.
00:35:05 ◼ ► Widgets on the Mac on the desktop never would have expected and I've tried it on the beta.
00:35:10 ◼ ► That broadcasting from your phone thing, I was like, boy, does that sound like trouble, but actually it works great.
00:35:15 ◼ ► Like there's no problem. Like I'm even having it work with apps that clearly haven't been updated to do it.
00:35:20 ◼ ► It's like, no, no, I'll just broadcast whatever widget your phone can run. Like it can just drop on the desktop.
00:35:24 ◼ ► It's interesting because it's making me rethink a little bit how I do my window management on the computer.
00:35:29 ◼ ► I don't think this will change, but I've for a long time I've been really set in a kind of like a three pane system on my desktop where it's like center window and then like status windows on the left and on the right.
00:35:42 ◼ ► But I was almost wondering like, oh, it might make sense just to leave like a third or a little less of the screen free on one side of the computer to just like have the visual of the widgets there.
00:35:54 ◼ ► Like, especially if they're interactive, I might just end up using it that way instead of trying to like precisely tile all of these different windows on the screen.
00:36:01 ◼ ► So yeah, it's totally unexpected, but works great. Very interesting. It'll be great as like more and more things start using that.
00:36:07 ◼ ► I mean, I leave my desktop just completely blank anyway. I never have files or icons on there.
00:36:13 ◼ ► So this feels like, oh yeah, now I can finally do something with all of this real estate that I've just had as a vacant field for 10 years of my computing life.
00:36:21 ◼ ► It's going to be especially good for me. I'm a stage manager user on the Mac and that just tends to generate a lot of empty space behind the windows.
00:36:28 ◼ ► Right. Because they're not overlapping very often. It's crazy to me. I like it. It works nicely for me.
00:36:33 ◼ ► And so I, you know, I'm looking at, spoiler for later on the show, I'm looking at Notion right now and I have like space on the left and right where I could have some widgets like poking out.
00:36:43 ◼ ► That would actually be pretty sweet. Like I have time in my menu bar. I would prefer to see it as a widget instead to be honest, to be more visual.
00:36:50 ◼ ► The interactive widgets have also born two widgets that I've really wanted from Apple. So one is the single shortcut widget that just like the block widget can now have two actions rather than just one action.
00:37:06 ◼ ► No. So that will be way nicer. But the other one I'm more excited about is a home widget where you can just turn on and off smart home things from a widget.
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00:39:26 ◼ ► So the journaling app that we spoke about prior to WWDC, that is not in any beta. It seems like this is coming after iOS 17 comes out. It's like the way Apple's been talking about it. They keep referencing it later this year for the journaling app.
00:39:50 ◼ ► Yeah, it was the same thing. They showed up for WWDC, but it didn't come until later on. So I think the journaling app would be a similar thing.
00:39:57 ◼ ► I'm very excited about what they've shown off, but I have a lot of questions that I won't get answers to, I don't think, until I've actually been able to use it.
00:40:07 ◼ ► Like what content can it pull from third party apps realistically? Like I'm intrigued about that.
00:40:13 ◼ ► But I think that Apple have hit all of the areas that I would have wanted to see them hit with this journaling app. That it takes in information from your phone, you know, who you've been contacting, who you've been with in person, taking photos of and stuff.
00:40:28 ◼ ► Along with like what music did you listen to, what podcast did you listen to that day, did you read some cool articles and stuff.
00:40:33 ◼ ► Like it's pulling all of that together to inspire you to say something about the day. They've also got prompts, which is so important for something like this, where they're trying to like encourage you to say some things.
00:40:46 ◼ ► I think it looks really good. I'm very intrigued about this app. I actually can't wait to get time with it and use it and understand kind of like what depths are they going to.
00:40:55 ◼ ► This is something I could 100% see myself using because a lot of the stuff that it would be prompting is not really what goes in my theme system journal.
00:41:03 ◼ ► Like my theme system journal was more kind of like work focused and I could imagine this being a little bit more personal of like, "Hey, you and Adina went to this thing today. Why don't you talk about how it made you feel?"
00:41:15 ◼ ► You know, like I think that could be a really powerful way of introducing journaling to more people. I'm very excited about it.
00:41:22 ◼ ► Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe you could act as some kind of like life timeline, which is a sort of thing I would want, but I would never be willing to put in the effort actually required to make something like that.
00:41:35 ◼ ► So yeah, it's interesting if it can draw enough stuff that's like personal, but also representative about your life. It might be interesting.
00:41:44 ◼ ► My iPhone should know everything about me. It should know things that I don't even know about myself, right? And I feel like an app like this could help expose that, which I think could be kind of cool.
00:41:53 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, well, I'm absolutely sure that your iPhone does know things about yourself that you don't know. It's just one of my endless frustrations with the health app.
00:41:59 ◼ ► But yes, this feels like them bringing more of that to the surface maybe. Do you have any thoughts about the mood app tracking thing?
00:42:06 ◼ ► Yeah, that part of health, right? So they're doing like mood tracking. I think this is a good addition to the whole wellness piece that they're building. They've got like meditation apps, breathe and stuff like that.
00:42:17 ◼ ► Just like a very simple mood tracker, like how are you feeling? And also to include some like standardized questionnaires to check your mental health state.
00:42:26 ◼ ► I think these are all just very smart, good additions to the kind of Apple health, Apple watch kind of area. I like how they are representing a lot of the mood stuff in colors too.
00:42:38 ◼ ► Like I think that that's just like a good way of helping someone feel some kind of emotion towards a particular choice. I think they've done a very good job of it.
00:42:47 ◼ ► I liked how they presented it. They presented it from a very like medical perspective as well, which I thought was a really nice way of kind of like presenting this feature.
00:42:57 ◼ ► So again, like I want to see it, but I am actually pretty intrigued by this. Like I was doing mood tracking for a while. I spoke about it on the show and it really helped me at the time.
00:43:07 ◼ ► And so I think this kind of stuff, it can be quite simple, but it can be very effective.
00:43:22 ◼ ► Like it was just a very simple app of like, how are you feeling at any particular time? Do you feel happy? Do you feel sad?
00:43:29 ◼ ► Like it was just very simple and I think it worked really well for me at a time when I needed it.
00:43:34 ◼ ► I was trying to put into words feelings that I was having and was struggling, but this app helped me kind of like get a sense of what was going on, like with me and I found it very, very helpful.
00:43:48 ◼ ► I will find it, the app that I was using, Mood Path. I found it by googling our own show.
00:44:00 ◼ ► What was that thing Mike recommended? It was like a screenshot app, right? So I just like googled, like, ah, clean shot, thank you.
00:44:07 ◼ ► Unfortunately, it seems like the company has pivoted and now it's called MindDoc and I don't know what that means.
00:44:13 ◼ ► So I can't necessarily endorse this application anymore, but what it did was it just prompted me every day to open the app and like say like, hey, how are you feeling right now?
00:44:25 ◼ ► And then I would think about that and I would basically tap on an angry face, a happy face, a sad face, that kind of thing.
00:44:32 ◼ ► This app doesn't look anything like this anymore. But yeah, I found that to be really helpful to kind of like help me kind of break through into understanding some bigger things about myself.
00:44:42 ◼ ► It was just like a very surface level thing of like, can you put into images and maybe words what you're feeling right now?
00:44:52 ◼ ► So I found it very good. So I think that these are, this is like a good twofer. I could imagine people starting with the mood thing.
00:44:59 ◼ ► Let's try and break through a little bit here and then maybe they would break out the journaling app and talk more about what's going on in their lives.
00:45:05 ◼ ► Huh. It's interesting to hear you say, because the journaling app I think is interesting. Like it has a lot of potential.
00:45:10 ◼ ► I was really doing like narrowed, squinty, suspicious eyes during the entire time when they were talking about that mood app.
00:45:17 ◼ ► And I was like, I want to see the details of how this works. And I loaded it up on the developer beta.
00:45:23 ◼ ► I guess this, maybe this is just like one of these things where people are just very different.
00:45:29 ◼ ► Like my constant theory of like people's internal experiences are much more different from each other than we think they are.
00:45:35 ◼ ► But I was looking at that mood app and I was like, I think this is awful. I think this will make people sad.
00:45:41 ◼ ► But I don't know. Maybe, maybe if you just have like a very different mindset than I do, it works. But.
00:45:52 ◼ ► So I enabled it because I just, I just wanted to see, because I wanted to kind of be like, how does this work?
00:45:57 ◼ ► I just, I find it, it's like, oh, you have the opposite effect on me where it's like, oh, I'm just minding my own business.
00:46:05 ◼ ► And my experience of life is I feel like I have a really neutral emotional set point, which is like what if, you know, someone asked me like, how are you feeling right now?
00:46:14 ◼ ► The answer is like, uh, like always I, I've, I feel nothing, but not in the way I think that sounds.
00:46:21 ◼ ► See that's the difference between say you and me, where I have a different emotional set point.
00:46:39 ◼ ► And so like the time when I was using what was called mood path, I was going through a lot of upheaval and my emotional stable state was unstable.
00:46:56 ◼ ► And I think maybe there are lots of people like me where like there can be something going on in my life that will change my kind of just like standard emotion.
00:47:04 ◼ ► And I think what these apps can do is if you are in that state is try and help you understand like when you are feeling good, what did you, what could have happened?
00:47:13 ◼ ► So like on Apple's health page, like one of the things that they're talking about is they will be able to show you, for example, your exercise and your emotional state of mind together.
00:47:29 ◼ ► It tracks exercise, sleep and their new one, which is time and daylight, which I actually just really love as a metric.
00:47:38 ◼ ► It's crazy. Like even when I'm wearing sleeves over my watch and if I just like step out onto the street for like two minutes, right, to let a dog go to the bathroom, it's like, oh, you spent two minutes in the daylight.
00:48:02 ◼ ► And it's like, I know, I know when you're outside, like I heard the front door, whatever the hell it's doing.
00:48:08 ◼ ► And I also my constant complaint about the health app is like, I want them to do more of this of like, show me correlations.
00:48:23 ◼ ► And yeah, it would totally be, I suspect for almost everybody, like directly related to, oh, are you real sad?
00:48:29 ◼ ► Like you've spent zero minutes in daylight in the last four days, like that might be a contributing factor.
00:48:36 ◼ ► I think my suspicion of it is sort of what I came across when I made that video, which I think is perhaps one of my like genuinely helpful videos,
00:48:44 ◼ ► which is the Seven Ways to Maximize Misery, which was based on the book, which was 42 Ways to Maximize Misery,
00:48:57 ◼ ► And so I suspect there are other people like me that it's just quite clear that if you are unhappy,
00:49:04 ◼ ► focusing directly on your happiness can be incredibly counterproductive and can make things worse.
00:49:12 ◼ ► Like you need to focus on related things and then happiness is a byproduct of other things, but focusing on it directly.
00:49:22 ◼ ► Like I just found that mood tracker of like I'm having a neutral experience right now and then it pops up and it sort of prompts you of like,
00:49:55 ◼ ► Like for me, I would find that helpful because it would help me in that exact way you just described that.
00:50:13 ◼ ► It's so interesting to hear because again, my experience is more like a backwards thing happened.
00:50:37 ◼ ► So it came from the idea of me really digging into why do I feel negative a lot of the time.
00:50:47 ◼ ► And so like going through and working out the things that were bugging me in my life, helped me get to those two themes.
00:50:54 ◼ ► And that came from more of a focus on trying to understand what were the things in my life that were making me feel unhappy.
00:51:34 ◼ ► I was feeling like concerned about this on like an epidemiological level of like so many people are going to be exposed to this.
00:51:41 ◼ ► I was like, oh, no, wait, I think I might be some kind of like weird freakish outlier here.
00:51:52 ◼ ► Like this is just like I feel like you're dipping your toe into the water of what that's like.
00:52:01 ◼ ► because all therapy feels like is just someone trying to get you to talk about what's bothering you.
00:52:21 ◼ ► Yeah. Again, I'll just say it backwards. I feel like, oh, I have a high state of self-knowledge without emotional valence.
00:52:45 ◼ ► Part of my year of work is there is there's a big focus on like one of those things was work on your health.
00:52:57 ◼ ► Like it makes it much easier to get a fast overview of like all the stuff that I'm tracking this year and try to change.
00:53:04 ◼ ► The other feature that I just loved is there like cycling stuff, which I again tried immediately.
00:53:10 ◼ ► If like, oh, great, I can have this like live dashboard on my bike of what heart zone rate am I in right now?
00:53:20 ◼ ► It's one of those features of like the instant you see it, you're like, oh, my God, how has this not always been a thing?
00:53:32 ◼ ► It's like when I'm doing the elliptical machine at the gym, it's like, no, I want the little status thing, like show the bar, show like which heart zone I'm in.
00:54:18 ◼ ► but it also kind of lets you build a kind of dashboard of fitness widgets inside of the application itself.
00:54:30 ◼ ► I think they're like they've started of a certain set of things that it's tracking health wise or like can interpret health wise.
00:54:47 ◼ ► Like I now have a widget on my iPhone which includes my activity rings and my step counting.
00:55:02 ◼ ► Yeah. You know, I'll check this out because we'll see how we are at the end of the year for the theme episode.
00:55:07 ◼ ► Like I really have been focusing on the health a lot which has also just been making me like increasingly frustrated in many ways with the health app.
00:55:13 ◼ ► And I'm just like I would like can I hire someone to like make a thing to like do it all exactly the way I want.
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00:57:20 ◼ ► They cleared up some UI, like the way you reply to people and stuff, it seems a bit simpler.
00:57:25 ◼ ► But I'm very excited about the updates they've made to stickers. We're back to stickers again.
00:57:31 ◼ ► Yeah, I've been wondering for years, like, what's going on with that? Is this abandoned or is this not abandoned?
00:57:44 ◼ ► They've made all emoji stickers finally and they're letting you create stickers from photos.
00:57:50 ◼ ► There was an app that I love called Sticker Drop which did this and that app has now been obliterated.
00:57:56 ◼ ► I wouldn't even call this one Sherlocking. Like, they took the feature completely and then they did some stuff that only they could do.
00:58:03 ◼ ► Where it's using the object recognition thing that they added in iOS 16 to make stickers from images that are in your photo library.
00:58:11 ◼ ► You can make animated ones and you can also do some little effects to them to make them look more like stickers.
00:58:16 ◼ ► Like, you can make them look like those puffy stickers or holographic stickers which I think is very fun.
00:58:34 ◼ ► So now being able to add emoji but those emoji also be stickers as well as other things like create my own custom tap backs.
00:58:43 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. I always have to admit like, this is the funny part of WWDC for me where I always get like real bored during the iMessage part.
00:58:53 ◼ ► And for this, my wife, as soon as she noticed that I had the beta on my phone, she's like, "Can you put that on my phone?"
00:59:02 ◼ ► She's like, "But I want the stickers." I was like, "No, I'm gonna put my foot down on this."
00:59:10 ◼ ► There's a bazillion things in here, but I just have to mention my other thank goodness feature from this year's WWDC was AirTag sharing.
00:59:26 ◼ ► This totally bizarre effect of like, "So I can see my wife's location 24 hours a day, but I can't see where her keys are."
00:59:38 ◼ ► So I'm just like so happy that this is a thing now. This is just going to logistically make so much easier, especially for us with like dog harnesses and things.
00:59:58 ◼ ► More Texans got a preview of this a couple of episodes ago, but I have hired a virtual assistant to help out with some projects that I'm working on.
01:00:08 ◼ ► Cliff notes on this. I hired an assistant many years ago. That assistant showed aptitude in things that we weren't expecting, like sales, which was not the original idea.
01:00:17 ◼ ► Carrie ended up becoming so good at sales that she's now chief revenue officer of Real AFM. What that essentially means is Mike lost an assistant.
01:00:33 ◼ ► But the thing that changed was the thing I needed help with four or five years ago was the management of podcast advertising sales.
01:00:43 ◼ ► Like I needed help with that, right? Well, Carrie ended up taking the admin tasks, but then also taking the sales.
01:00:52 ◼ ► So then I didn't really need an assistant because that part that I needed help with was all being taken away from me. Right.
01:00:58 ◼ ► So like I ended up other things I may have wanted help with. I didn't need help with so much anymore because I was also having this other thing taken away from me time wise.
01:01:09 ◼ ► So I was gaining more time back, so I was able to handle things more myself. So like the balance shifted because part of my responsibilities were shifting.
01:01:17 ◼ ► And that has only continued to the point now where I don't really deal with podcast sales at all.
01:01:22 ◼ ► Like it's a very little bit, but not much. But what has changed over time is this whole other company that I now own with you.
01:01:33 ◼ ► It adds a lot of work. Yeah. And you know, as Cortex brand is growing, I now need help with some of my things there.
01:01:41 ◼ ► But also again of like, can you take away other things from me so I can put more effort into that?
01:01:59 ◼ ► What I wanted was not somebody employed by relay FM, not somebody employed by cortex brand, someone employed by me.
01:02:12 ◼ ► So the closer that we have worked together, which is with cortex brand, I've had more of an insight into how great industries runs.
01:02:19 ◼ ► And like one of the things that I noticed is I work with your assistant for cortex brand stuff.
01:02:25 ◼ ► So they help you out with stuff. And so I'm kind of like realizing like, ah, I think I need something a little bit more like that. Maybe.
01:02:36 ◼ ► Yeah, I never really thought about that. But yes, the number of conversations in our cortex brand business that you are having with my assistant is very high.
01:02:45 ◼ ► Like that's quite a frequent thing. And then like, she pings out to me like when something requires my specific attention.
01:02:52 ◼ ► I don't need or want you getting involved with the administrative work because I feel like I am most effective in a business when I understand how the entire business runs, even if I don't do it.
01:03:01 ◼ ► So like I like to do a bit of everything. So then I feel knowledgeable later on when somebody else is dealing with it.
01:03:10 ◼ ► Yeah. Like at the moment I am doing some of the initial like expenses and bookkeeping for the company.
01:03:16 ◼ ► I am like pulling together receipts and statements and stuff like that and sending them to our accountant and then dealing with questions from the accountant.
01:03:23 ◼ ► Now, I feel like just getting to that tipping point now where I won't do that anymore. I have my own UK company.
01:03:36 ◼ ► So she deals with all of my bookkeeping and stuff like that because I got to that point where I was like, I don't want to do this anymore.
01:03:43 ◼ ► So I feel like I am just getting to that tipping point with Cortex brand as well where it's like, oh now there's enough transactions running through the company that the accountants have questions.
01:03:53 ◼ ► And I don't want to deal with those questions. And so then maybe we'll transition it over. We'll work out how that's going to run.
01:03:59 ◼ ► But like that's the kind of way that I like to be like to be involved in something until when I understand it and then I start to feel like it's becoming an annoyance, then I get somebody else to do it.
01:04:08 ◼ ► And she's making me realize overall I need a bit more help again. And so I'm bringing someone in. Right now, she's mostly working on helping me establish some stuff for Cortex brand because it's where I need the most pressing assistance.
01:04:21 ◼ ► Because it's also the case of like, if we put some processes in place now, it's only going to benefit us in the future.
01:04:30 ◼ ► So it's best to do it now while things are new rather than trying to untangle things later on.
01:04:36 ◼ ► I want to build a bunch of foundational stuff. And this person lives and dies in Notion.
01:04:46 ◼ ► So they are building for me like lots of things in Notion. And we're starting to work on some projects together and we're working on them in Notion.
01:04:56 ◼ ► So I'm like, go for it. Just build us the Cortex brand Notion and we'll start moving it from there.
01:05:02 ◼ ► And so this is all very much in a testing phase for me. We're trying it out with some, we have a new product that we're working on and we're starting all of that work in keeping it all in Notion.
01:05:12 ◼ ► We also have some just like marketing projects that I want to work on that she's helping out with. And we're tracking all of that in Notion.
01:05:19 ◼ ► So like I'm still learning how to use it. And I feel like I have gotten to the point now I'm like, okay, now I need to bring everything from Obsidian into Notion.
01:05:29 ◼ ► Obsidian, you had a good run. I really like using you, but that's just not where I'm going to be now.
01:05:33 ◼ ► So I need to now migrate all the stuff that I had in Obsidian into Notion. So I need to go through and do all of that.
01:05:40 ◼ ► And then I think this is going to become the like home of everything Cortex brand, which is helpful for a bunch of reasons.
01:05:46 ◼ ► I mean, one of them, you will be able to see all of it, which is great, which is just not a thing that we can do easily in Obsidian right now.
01:05:53 ◼ ► That will be very helpful. But the key thing, and I feel like, you know, hey, if you use Notion, you already know this.
01:05:59 ◼ ► But the thing that I'm actually finding to be super interesting is essentially Notion is a database.
01:06:05 ◼ ► And what it allows you to do is take the same set of data and view it in a variety of ways. And I find that to be very cool.
01:06:17 ◼ ► Yes. So one of the things that as I was playing around with Notion more, I was realizing, I think something that we need for Cortex is a content calendar, which I kind of can't believe I'd never thought to do this before.
01:06:35 ◼ ► I feel like it is not very difficult for me to lay out on a calendar, like 12 ideas of things that we might talk about on an episode.
01:06:44 ◼ ► I feel like I should be able to do that. And I feel like now we have more and more like recurring episodes that we do.
01:06:51 ◼ ► So I feel like half of the episodes in a year, I should be able to know what they are 12 months in advance.
01:07:05 ◼ ► Of like going through and trying to plan out what we've got and what we've got going on.
01:07:17 ◼ ► As I was building this through and I was putting in like, oh, this will be episode 144 or come out in July.
01:07:27 ◼ ► So show notes are now in Notion. We're moving away from Google Docs for the time being.
01:07:31 ◼ ► This is funny for me to see because this was pitched to me as I get a message from you going,
01:07:51 ◼ ► Like someone is always the primary owner of all things and like you own those show notes.
01:07:55 ◼ ► So I was like, okay, well, if Mike wants to move the show notes to a thing that's going to be easier for him,
01:08:04 ◼ ► And then I get the invitation to look at the Cortex show notes and see that there's like,
01:08:27 ◼ ► Once I've got everything in here, me and you are going to have one in one of our meetings.
01:08:31 ◼ ► I'm going to go through and show you everything that lives inside of the Cortex brand hub, which is inside of Notion.
01:08:38 ◼ ► But what I do understand right now is the Cortex podcast section, which is our calendar.
01:08:44 ◼ ► And so what I have is I have a Kanban board that has a calendar and it has every month and in it, I can put,
01:08:52 ◼ ► Oh, and if there's something that we need to mention, like we need to promote more text in this episode
01:09:20 ◼ ► But because they have tags associated with them of like episode date or they're like, where are they in the process?
01:09:40 ◼ ► And so I have a list just called episode ideas and it's another board where I've just got a bunch of different ideas in there.
01:09:46 ◼ ► So I'm able to very quickly, if I'm like sitting like, what do we do on this next episode?
01:09:58 ◼ ► So I like that you can use metadata inside of these notes to surface them in different views which can be set very particularly.
01:10:09 ◼ ► It's kind of very frictionless to just see a particular kind of thing because you can just build a view for it.
01:10:14 ◼ ► Right. I see you've already sucked out a thing that I had put in the show notes as a separate thing to be like, no, no, this is a topic, right?
01:10:23 ◼ ► Oh, okay. So we don't just have one infinitely long Google doc where random things get added.
01:10:36 ◼ ► There are things in our Google doc that I put in there like six years ago and we never spoke about them.
01:10:45 ◼ ► And this will allow me to see all of that stuff more easily and then also just get rid of the things that we're never going to talk about.
01:10:52 ◼ ► Because they're just like, we don't want to talk about them or they're not interesting anymore or they changed a bunch.
01:10:59 ◼ ► I think that it's in general just like very interesting the way that you're able to collect things together and then also pull them apart.
01:11:11 ◼ ► I feel like I'm going to make a request now that I may live to regret, but I'm going to make it anyway.
01:11:17 ◼ ► If any Cortex is out there have good resources for understanding Notion, I would say mostly videos is going to be best for Mike Hurley.
01:11:29 ◼ ► I would like to know if you use Notion, what has helped you understand how to use Notion?
01:11:49 ◼ ► But I also feel like I want to understand it so I can think bigger with it, which is kind of what happened with the content calendar.
01:11:57 ◼ ► As I was digging around inside of Notion and then I kind of stumbled across Notion templates.
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01:14:20 ◼ ► I feel like my resistance, this is going to sound completely absurd to anyone who has ever used Obsidian.
01:14:25 ◼ ► My resistance to Notion has always been like, I just feel like it's too easy for stuff to get lost forever in Notion.
01:14:36 ◼ ► I'm trying to understand that more, which is why I want to really get a good handle on how things are surfaced.
01:14:44 ◼ ► Because it feels like it's very possible to do that, but things I also feel like can get lost in the hierarchy.
01:14:51 ◼ ► And so I'm making sure that I try and understand that. I feel like I'm jumping around a lot.
01:14:57 ◼ ► And where does a project canonically live? These are the kind of things that I'm trying to nail down.
01:15:11 ◼ ► It can just be that the primary owner is the person ends up then arranging it however it works best for their brain.
01:15:22 ◼ ► So I just had this with grey industries just two days ago where I was like, I need to find some information.
01:15:26 ◼ ► I know it's a notion that my assistant has set up, but it's like, I just can't find it.
01:15:33 ◼ ► And that kind of thing, it kind of makes me think of like, when I was working at schools,
01:15:37 ◼ ► you have these big binders of like, here's all of the rules and documents of the school.
01:15:44 ◼ ► Like this thing is just totally unuseful as like, anyone's ever going to look up in here how to do anything.
01:15:53 ◼ ► I always just worry about these things kind of becoming like, divorced a bit from the business that they're supposed to represent.
01:16:02 ◼ ► It's like the documentation almost lives in a parallel world to what is actually happening.
01:16:31 ◼ ► The reason I mention this is they were sponsoring to talk about their projects feature.
01:17:07 ◼ ► I just feel like it's very important because it's like, hey, this, I'm taking money from this company on other shows right now.
01:17:26 ◼ ► Don't think they have any ads on this show, but I don't know if that's going to change because you know what?
01:17:32 ◼ ► But I find their project management stuff very intriguing because I have projects that need managing.
01:17:37 ◼ ► They have timelines, manufacturing timelines, like all of that kind of stuff is what I plan to build into this.
01:17:43 ◼ ► And so what I hope from that it was it will if I have this documented like that, it will help us understand how long does it take to make a project?
01:17:52 ◼ ► How long does it take for something to be manufacturing, which I know you would find helpful for the stock of Tron that you're building?
01:17:59 ◼ ► I figure that this kind of tracking would be very helpful for the products that we're making.
01:18:06 ◼ ► And I felt like that notion had the features that obsidian doesn't. Obsidian is really great for managing notes and stuff.
01:18:14 ◼ ► And I actually think like some of the things that I was bumping into with obsidian, I still while you help me fix,
01:18:19 ◼ ► I still don't super like the way that like it isn't easy or delightful to do mixed media in obsidian.
01:18:26 ◼ ► Well notion is just very simple to do that. You just very easily drag images in and it doesn't like sequester them to their own folder somewhere.
01:18:33 ◼ ► I think that this is going to be the one just because it's got everything that I need it to do.
01:18:37 ◼ ► And like, you know, it does task tracking too, which realistically I'm going to continue using Todoist.
01:18:46 ◼ ► But if I'm dealing with multiple people, isn't it helpful for them to know where I am in the task list or where for me to know where they are in the task list of the production for this product?
01:19:02 ◼ ► If we're working on three or four different new ideas, isn't it helpful to know if they're in the idea stage, the quoting stage, the prototyping stage?
01:19:11 ◼ ► Like we'll be able to see that all in one go and look at overall where the business is.
01:19:15 ◼ ► I think that there's something really interesting in here. I feel like this is probably going to become a big part of my life over the next few months.
01:19:28 ◼ ► Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But also it's just, I think it just lends itself more to what Cortex brand is than obsidian does.
01:19:35 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. Obsidian really lends itself towards notes and weird obsessive researching and yeah, notion is just like a different sort of tool for sure.
01:19:43 ◼ ► It's teams and project management and you know what I need? Project management within a team. So here's what I'm using now.
01:19:52 ◼ ► I guess I'm going to have to learn to live with every episode that's going to have its separate show note documents.
01:20:00 ◼ ► I built a little template and I have a new episode template and then it just lives in there.
01:20:04 ◼ ► All you need to do is just go to the Cortex podcast section and it will be the episode number in the month that we're in. Easy.
01:20:14 ◼ ► I need to get used to it too. Something I actually really like, they have a bunch of really cool widgets on iOS.
01:20:28 ◼ ► There are four. So I have the Cortex brand dashboard because that's the thing that we have.
01:20:34 ◼ ► So my assistant built this like, here's just one page where it's going to pull in a bunch of information from all of the disparate things.
01:20:40 ◼ ► People love dashboards, right? In notion. It's like a thing that you build. So I have that.
01:20:50 ◼ ► Just put in whatever it is and I'll deal with it later on. Like an inbox kind of thing.
01:20:54 ◼ ► I have one for the Cortex podcast. So when I tap that, it takes me right into our little content calendar.
01:21:12 ◼ ► Okay. That sounds pretty functional. Maybe you could have a little Cortex podcast widget and it would just take you to the content calendar and then you can just choose the episode.
01:21:20 ◼ ► Very easy. Okay. I'll think about it. Yeah. I'll see if I can find a way that like I can maybe give you a shortcut or something.
01:21:28 ◼ ► I don't know. We'll have to work it out. Yeah. I'm wondering like, is there something like a redirect URL like the equivalent of current?
01:21:33 ◼ ► I'll look into that because I wouldn't mind that right there. Like there's just this one place that I can go to and even though it's a new note, it like lives in a certain section of notion that it knows what the current one is.
01:21:44 ◼ ► I'm going to look into that. But yeah, it is easier to just have the one Google doc URL. Right. Like that's how I've done this forever.
01:21:51 ◼ ► But I think this is a more sensible way for us to manage this show because you know, if we did 52 of them a year, this wouldn't be really that easy to manage.
01:22:02 ◼ ► No, you're right. I think the interesting thing that you've hit upon here is this concept of on the Kanban calendar topics being little modular notes.
01:22:10 ◼ ► Yeah. Right. So like the thing that you just pulled out, it's like, oh, does it make sense? Like I can just drop that and say like this would probably make more sense to talk about in like August or September.
01:22:19 ◼ ► Yes. And so in a way we can start building the future shows instead of just having this doc that's just an endless list of things.
01:22:27 ◼ ► And then it's like, oh, this way we can more easily look across shows for the years. Yeah. That's, that's what I'm saying. I'm being proactive.
01:22:35 ◼ ► See, cause now when I come to that episode, right. And so like, I could be like, oh, okay, should we do this here? And then I will take that content and put it into the main episode document.
01:22:43 ◼ ► Yeah. Or maybe we build this out in the future. Every topic is its own note and we just go through and talk about the things we want to talk about. Like we don't have one episode note. We just have like every month column has like six little topic ideas and we just talk about those. We'll see how it fits.
01:23:00 ◼ ► Yeah. That could be quite interesting because then it's like the Kanban is the show notes.
01:23:12 ◼ ► For me, it was just kind of like, when is the yearly themes episode? Like I know, but it would be helpful for me to know how many episodes it is between now and then. Right. Like to be able to look at that and see that visually.
01:23:23 ◼ ► Yeah. Or I think this has also come up because with potentially launching new products.
01:23:27 ◼ ► There's also this bit of the collision of everything happens at the end of the year. So it's a bit like, Oh wait, we have to spread things out and start thinking about that half a year in advance. So we don't end up trying to do like two things in every episode for the last three episodes of the year.
01:23:53 ◼ ► We have done this. I don't even know how many times, but for the last three years, we've been doing an RPG adventure where me, you and Jason Snell have been traversing through a time and place in space.
01:24:06 ◼ ► We have the wonderful game master, Tony Sindelar from the total party kill podcast, helping us out.
01:24:11 ◼ ► And this is the third installment of a running adventure that we've been running where we have been sucked into a space void and have been having to try and just live our lives out in space somewhere.
01:24:22 ◼ ► This is my favorite by far the three that we've done. I think Tony did an incredible job of building a very particular and unique adventure for us, which has a very fun mechanic and also includes for the first time in the history of these adventures, combat, which I was so excited about that there was actual combat occurring, which we've never dealt with before. That was super fun.
01:24:49 ◼ ► Now this is available to relay FM members. There is a link in the show notes of this episode where you can log in if you're a member and you'll be able to subscribe to a feed called the crossover feed.
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01:25:11 ◼ ► Of course, if you subscribe to more tax at get more text.com, you get this, this is something that is available to you along with a ton of other benefits.
01:25:19 ◼ ► And we really hope that you enjoy this special. We had a lot of fun putting this one together as always.
01:25:24 ◼ ► These things take a lot of time because I like to do the very best that I can to make them sound super fun and put loads of sound effects and things like that in there.
01:25:31 ◼ ► So you can go and grab that in the relay FM crossover feed. And I really hope that you enjoy our RPG special this year.
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