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Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast, but more than just cranking widgets.
I'm Mike Schmitz and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks.
Hey, David.
Hey, Mike.
How are you?
I'm doing pretty good.
Life HQ is, as we're recording this, the launch has just wrapped up.
So really happy with how it went, but also pretty exhausted.
Yeah.
It's tough getting something out the door, right?
It is.
It is. But it's been great and I'm really happy with how it went.
I did an onboarding call yesterday for people who joined and it was,
it was awesome. 100, 100 obsidian nerds in, in one zoom room.
It was a good time.
Oh, excellent. Most excellent. Well, we're going to be going back to AI today.
We covered it a year ago.
Things have evolved as well as our thoughts.
And I thought it's a good time to talk about AI and focus.
But before we do so, guess what time it is, Mike?
It's calendar time.
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is.
The 2025 focus calendar is now available.
If you're not familiar with this,
we started selling this
calendar four or five years ago on the show.
It's a wall calendar and it's beautiful.
And it gives you the ability to see your whole year
at a glance.
You can put dry erase on it so you can circle dates.
We made a bunch of changes in the early years,
adding like habit boxes and everything you need.
It starts the week on Monday as it should.
And it's just a great looking piece of calendar
to hang on your wall.
And now it's available for 2025.
It is, yeah.
Very excited to have this product out there.
This was something that I kind of always wanted to do
and then reached out to Jesse at New Year calendars
several years ago and said,
hey, would you be willing to do a calendar for us?
And I think he kind of took a flyer on us,
didn't really know what to expect,
but the Focus listeners have really supported this
over the years and he was blown away at the response.
So we've continued to do it every year.
The relationship with Jesse has been great and we're actually kind of messing
with something new. I don't have specific details to share with it,
but it will accompany the, the calendar I'll say,
which is kind of why this one sort of slipped through the cracks or under the
radar. I've been working with Jesse on this new thing,
and in the background he was doing everything that he needed to get the calendar ready.
Yeah.
And then we were going back and forth on this other thing,
and he's like, oh, by the way, it's available.
So I look up and it's October.
How did that happen?
But I know this is when people are typically asking about the calendar.
Some people already reached out via the forum and it is officially
available. If you're not familiar with it, it has all the features that David
talked about. But the big thing that I really like is that it breaks it into
quarters. So it's perfect for like the whole quarterly personal retreat stuff.
And they're kind of color-coded. All the months run together so that you don't have these artificial distinctions
where, you know, one month will end on a Tuesday and the next month begins on a
Wednesday that actually displays on the same week. Yeah.
There are these like thicker lines so you can see where the months break apart,
but really it's a, it's for planning your, your year in,
you can see the whole year at a glance,
but really along that 12 week year format. And I think it's a great tool to make sure
that you don't overcommit yourself.
Yeah, it's really good as a no tool
when you fill it out and stick it on the wall
and somebody calls you up and says,
hey, can you do this thing?
And you look at your calendar for that time,
you're like, absolutely not, I am too busy.
I don't know, there's a big difference
between having it in a digital calendar and on the wall.
And over the years, we've heard from so many listeners that are effectively using these calendars.
Another thing I like about it, it's two foot by three foot, but it's printed on both sides.
So if you want it vertical or I guess was it landscape or portrait, you just flip it around to whichever side you want.
Every year, you get it in a cardboard tube. I guess was it landscape or portrait? You just flip it around to whichever side you want.
Every year, you get it in a cardboard tube,
it's rolled up, but every year I take it down to staples
and I have them mounted on a piece of foam board
and I find that really useful.
But it's just a great calendar.
I look forward to getting mine every year.
And New Year, the company that makes these,
I feel like makes the best wall calendars.
So we really partnered, I think like makes the best wall calendars. So we really partnered, I think,
with the best in the business.
And now you can get it.
You can also, one other pro tip for these calendars
is that you mentioned they are dry erase,
and that totally works.
But if you're gonna be writing on your calendar a lot,
then if you've got a dry erase marker you
you smudge you'll bump it with your your hand or something and you'll you'll
smudge the the marker so what I've actually done is I've used wet erase
markers so you can still wipe it clean but you have to get the calendar wet and
because it is this dry erase surface you can do that without damaging the the
calendar and that way you don't have to be quite as careful
when you are writing on it.
So I use these wet erase, fine tip markers,
and yeah, they're great.
That also includes, by the way, a PDF of the ActionPad,
which is kind of like a daily planning template
that we worked together with Jesse on a couple of years ago.
And on the page for the
Calendar you'll see a video that I made which walks through what that that looks like
And so if you wanted to use that for time blocking on like I've used it with my my onyx books in the in the past
It just has some space for time blocking your day
Which we talked about on the podcast a lot and then space for for your couple of tasks that you want to do during the day.
Uh, gratitude at the bottom, what would make today awesome room for some notes,
uh, things like that.
And that's actually a PDF that you get with the calendar as well.
Yeah. I love these calendars. I can't wait to get mine.
It's a product that I'm very proud of.
And if you'd like to hit the ground running in 2025,
go check out the link and get yourself a Focus calendar.
Yeah, I can actually share the link
if people are listening and can't click on it right now,
but it's New Year.
New Year is spelled kind of weird.
It's N-E-U.
So newyear.net slash products slash focused.
It is $30.
And I know that it's a pain to get these shipped
to other countries and I apologize for that,
but there's really not a whole lot
that we can do about that.
So 30 US dollars and newyear.net slash products slash focused
if you wanna check it out.
All right, artificial intelligence and focus.
I think the intersection of those two is actually quite interesting.
There's a lot of talk from the tech community about AI,
but I wanted to talk about it in relation to focus.
We did a show on it a year ago,
but since that time,
Ethan Molek wrote his Co-Intelligence book.
I've been evolving my thinking on it a lot,
and I thought we should probably come back
and visit it again.
Let's do it.
So like I said, I think it's getting more useful
and interesting as the tools grow,
people are starting to adapt it into productivity tools,
and also the big players in the space,
chat, GPT, Google, and the likes are continuing
to evolve their products.
So I guess the first question is, what is the curve of artificial intelligence now that
we've got, you know, we were looking at it last year, and we're looking at it this year?
I feel like while the usage has evolved quite a bit, the actual technology hasn't as much as I thought it would. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does make sense. And in some ways it has, in some ways it hasn't.
I think the thing that's kind of going around now is the,
uh, the, the podcast stuff.
So you can like feed it a bunch of of text and then it'll create this fake podcast
episode with two human sounding uh hosts debating you know what you wrote about in your blog post
that you you fed it and on a technical level that sounds kind of cool but also if you dig into it
it's uh the the text is and the material that they talk about, it still has some of the same flaws that
we've been seeing in the text based AI generation tools for a long time. And so in some ways you
look at it and be like, Oh, wow, look what it can do now. It's advancing so fast. But also in some
ways it's like, this isn't really any better. It's still still held back by the same issues,
which I think is probably to be expected in some of these,
these technologies that are, are new.
And people are just trying to figure out what's the right way to use this.
How can this actually practically benefit my, my workflows?
And so they're just trying a bunch of stuff and seeing what works but yeah the I think and it causes me to have two reactions one is
you know oh my gosh this stuff is getting so good but then the on the other
side it's kind of like well it's really not even close yeah I mean the
underlying technology has not made a jump, but like I said, people are figuring out new ways to implement it.
But because it's still subject to, you know,
going down the wrong rabbit hole and getting confused
and getting things wrong,
even if they make a cool podcast
with two human-like sounding hosts,
it's not the same thing.
And so I've listened to a couple of those people have
fed at some of my stuff and sent me podcasts about me. And it doesn't impress me particularly at this
point. Maybe that's a bias because I am a podcaster and I listen to podcasts and I really like the
human connection of them and the idea of it being artificially generated.
I find a bit off-putting, but it also doesn't really sound that genuine to me.
So that's just where we're at.
But the thing with AI is you have to realize it's all going to get better.
One of Mollick's rules is this is the worst version of this.
It's always going to get better.
So imagine a future where it is believably humans and it doesn't get things wrong.
Um, that is something in the future where people will be able to generate a
podcast by a computer discussing a topic that they can listen to.
Now, do people want that?
I'm not sure.
I feel like, um, I'm not alone in wanting it to come from a human.
I guess I hope that's the case,
or I'm gonna be out of business,
but it is an interesting implementation.
But that's a good example of them taking
the existing technologies and trying to expand it.
And there's so many examples of that
that have come out in the last year.
And I guess the question is how much of this
can we harness to become more productive and
to stay more focused?
And the short version of that answer is a little.
A little of this is useful and some of it is.
But getting back to kind of the big question, they haven't really grown a lot.
At some point, we're going to make the next big leap in the large language model.
And I don't know if that's, you know, I've read articles where they say that, you know,
Chatchie PT5 or whatever the next big leap is from these companies is going to be like
a 10x improvement.
But I'll believe it when I see it, you know.
I mean, they need to deliver this.
And I don't know if that's the case.
What I would say is that if the
LLM gets a 10x improvement, that's going to open the floodgates once again to new options
and new implementations that we haven't even considered yet. But using the current technology,
can we use it to help out with our focus?
Yeah, I think we absolutely can.
I want to go back to something that you mentioned because I think this is a very human reaction to this stuff where you said as a podcaster, I'd like to think it can't replace me. won't for the majority of people who care about the craft.
And then there will be a line there of what is good enough for most people.
But I tend to agree that most consumers probably don't want AI generated content
that's filling their, their minds, their eyeballs, their ears, whatever,
they want stuff that has a human curation.
And I'm kind of struck by how accurate Cal Newport was many years ago when he
wrote Deep Work and he was talking about the people who were going to be successful in the digital economy.
Cause one of the things that he called out there was the people who knew how to
use the machines. And he wasn't talking about AI,
but he was talking about low
skill labor that would be replaced by machines and those machines would break and the people
who knew how to program the machines would be the ones that would always have a steady job.
And I think it's a little bit different application here, and it's not just understanding prompt engineering,
but it's knowing how the tools can actually supplement
what the work that is to be done.
And I actually think when it comes to the creative process,
that AI is actually a great partner and brainstorming tool.
Yeah, and I want to get into that
because we've got specific ideas on that.
But just kind of on this thread of humans interacting
with artificial intelligence, whether it be listening
to a podcast or talking to verbal AI that ChatGPT does now.
I've done that a few times where I've had conversations
with ChatGPT about something I'm thinking about,
and it is very believable.
There's a recent article in Esquire magazine
about the perfect girlfriend,
and it's all these people who find AI companions.
There's actual websites now that generate AI robots
that people talk to, and I thought it was kind of sad.
You know,
these people are lonely and they talk to an AI generated person and that,
and they don't, you know,
they don't go interact with other humans as a result. I don't know. I mean,
I, I, we are at a weird point with this stuff and it's,
it's only going to get weirder.
It is. And then I think the important thing to remember right now, especially who knows
where this goes, there's a couple different paths forward that Ethan Malik mentions.
I think we're going to get into that later, but as we record this right now in 2024,
they are prediction machines.
All they can do is try to fill in the next blank.
And if you consider that, you know, it's not a surprise that they end up hallucinating when, uh,
when a human is thinking about something and thinks about something wrong and starts going down a train of thought that leads them into a,
uh,
a different wrong place. And I guess I should be careful using the word
wrong there, but I'm kind of reminded of liminal thinking by, by Dave Gray. We were kind of
channeled down these paths supported by our, our biases and our, our bubbles of belief.
And if we just, you know, isolate ourselves, who knows where we're going to end up. And
it's kind of the same thing with the AI. It's just that they have a whole lot more data
and they can go down those paths a whole lot faster.
So if you're looking for something
and it starts feeding you information
that is a little bit wrong, pretty soon you keep following that path
and it's feeding you information that is very wrong
because it's just trying to guess at what comes next
based on what it's got to work with.
Yes, I agree.
The other part of this, I think,
and maybe this is the meta point,
is that how does this relate to the human experience?
Like, one of my big themes of AI is like,
can I use it to enhance my human experience, not replace it?
And that is, I think, something people are getting
their heads wrapped around.
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So both of us read the Ethan Molyk book, Co-Intelligence, and I think it really does inform a lot of
my thinking on it.
And it starts out with his idea of the four possible scenarios of where AI goes in the
immediate future.
Yeah.
And I feel like this is really good.
The way that he presents these, he's not putting his finger on the scale
and trying to influence people. In my opinion, he just presents these are all the paths before us
and no one really knows which way it's going to go. And some of these are disappointing. Some of
these are scary. And I think the thing is to remain kind of chill about it and you know, let's, let's see where this goes.
But the possible scenarios are number one that what we have right now is as good
as it gets. I don't think that is accurate.
And I think that's kind of played out even in the year since we recorded the last
episode with, with AI, it has gotten better,
not as great as maybe we thought it was going to be in that,
that year in some ways, but in other ways it is progressing rapidly.
There's also the second option is that it continues to get better, but it's slower than expected.
It's kind of a slow burn and eventually it's going to become awesome,
but it's going to take a while to get there.
I say often technology has this like, it starts out with a big growth spurt, but then it gets harder.
And like, it gets incremental growth after that. And we had that big growth spurt with
AI when people suddenly realized it could write college essays and everybody freaked
out a couple years ago. But like I was saying earlier, the model itself hasn't improved
that much since then. So are we going to get 10x improvements with the next version or is this going to continue
to be something more like a game of inches?
And I don't know.
I'm not convinced that the exponential growth is going to continue forever.
Yeah, I agree with that.
That is the third option, obviously, is the exponential growth. And
it just continues to advance at a rapid rate. And the fourth one is that the doomsday scenario,
the dystopian future, where we get to the super AI and it takes over the world and humans are no
longer necessary. And like that one even just feels uncomfortable to bring up any of them.
Ethan Malik basically is like, so this is a possibility,
but there's a high likelihood we're never going to get there.
So don't freak out just yet.
And that is, you may have heard the term AGI artificial general intelligence
because LLMs are not a general intelligence. You know,
if you ask it to describe a duck,
it doesn't actually know what a duck is.
It just knows that if it jams certain words together
algorithmically, they make sense.
And it's very good at it,
and it's using the huge data model,
but it doesn't understand what a duck is.
A general intelligence would be on a next level
where it actually thinks.
And LLMs are good at fooling you into making you think
that they're thinking, but they don't really think.
Although, I've been reading that LLM could be part
of a artificial general intelligence.
That if they were to get there, it would involve
at least an element of LLM. I find that a little terrifying. I don't really want
to spin the show going down that rabbit hole but I do think this is something we
should think carefully about and I hope that the people that are doing this
research are taking necessary steps because for all of human history, we have been the dominant intelligence.
And if we're going to create something that's smarter than us, we should be careful about
that.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing is like as humans, we are terrible at predicting the future.
I remember back to the future when it came out.
Yeah.
And like that seemed plausible.
The 3D shark and the hoverboards and all that stuff.
But then like you watch it now and it's kind of funny to see how wrong a lot of
that stuff was.
And basically the huge advancements in technology weren't reflected in the
things that the, that they actually included in the movie scripts.
Yeah.
They were still faxing each other, you know? Exactly. Exactly. Read my facts.
So I think it doesn't do a whole lot of good to,
to think too far into the future with this stuff.
And so the practical application of this is how do we use what we have right now
in a positive intentional way. It's the same approach with all of the other productivity stuff that we talk about on this
show. It's not just cranking widgets, it's being intentional and following through on those
intentions. How can we use AI as a tool to help us do more of what really matters?
And that's what led to to Ethan Molyk to come up with his kind of rules of AI. And Ethan Molyk
is an interesting guy. He's a business professor at, I want to say, is it Wharton?
I don't remember the university.
It's one of those big business schools. And so he's not an AI researcher or computer scientist,
but someone very enthusiastic about AI
who's been thinking about it
and writing about it for a long time.
And that's one of the reasons why I recommend this book
to anybody that wants to think more about this stuff.
The first rule is always invite AI to the table.
So as we start interacting with it,
why not include it when you're doing some of this work?
And we're gonna get into these in a minute, a little deeper.
But the second necessary rule that he came out with
was be human, or be the human in the loop.
Whenever you let AI run amok, you get into trouble.
Like in the law profession,
people keep sending me these articles
of these lawyers that get in trouble with the bar
because they have AI write a brief for them
and AI makes up cases.
When you write a legal brief,
you have to cite authority for whatever your argument is.
Artificial intelligence makes them up.
So if you do that to a judge, you submit an artificial,
you know, a fictional case, you really get in a lot
of trouble and that's not the way you're supposed to do
it, you know, and because in legal briefs there's all
these citations, so AI says, oh, okay, I can make a citation.
Here you go.
So you need to be the human in the loop,
checking the work.
Third rule, treat it like a person,
but tell it what kind of person.
This is something that I think a lot of people miss out on,
and we mentioned it briefly last year,
but I'm more sold on it now, is the idea of AI personas.
Whenever you have AI work for you, tell it what it is.
What is its specialty?
What is its expertise?
Just as an example, when I did the Productivity Summer Camp,
it was for a bunch of kids, and I wanted to solicit kids
to join this free program over the summer,
but I haven't written for 18-year-olds in a long time.
So I had AI be an expert communicator dealing with
teenagers and then I had it proofread my words and it gave me some advice that I didn't think
of. So you give it a persona, you know, you tell it who it is. And then the fourth rule,
which I've already mentioned is assume AI is the worst it will ever be right now.
Yeah. These are, these are great rules. I want to go back to treat AI like a person I mentioned is assume AI is the worst it will ever be right now.
Yeah, these are, these are great rules. I want to go back to treat AI like a person, but tell it what kind of person it
is. I think this is a really important point,
but essentially if that rubs you the wrong way of thinking about AI,
like a person really, you can distill this down a little bit further.
And it reminds me of Clayton Christensen's jobs to be done.
There like you need to know what the actual job is that you are hiring the AI tool to do.
And if you're clear on that, then it can be really beneficial.
But when you just ask it general stuff and like make this thing for me but you don't have any sort
of parameters around it that's when what you get back is pretty useless so one of
the the examples we'll get into some of the specifics here but treat AI like a
person like one of the the first prompts that I came across that I actually found
useful is this one where it talks about I am a digital writer you are my personal idea generation
consultant you're an expert helping me fill in a content file of questions
related to a topic in a subtopic I want to write about I need your help
answering some of these questions and giving me new potential angles to answer
the questions here's what we're gonna do and then bullet list of what the whole
process is and it's sort of like no code app programming at that point where
you feed this in, then the AI responds like a person's, okay, I understand. Let's go to the
first part. What do you want? You know, and then you give it that and then it gives you some stuff
back. But that is the thing that I think makes this stuff really useful. It is a, you know,
go back to what we talked about last segment, it is a prediction machine. So in some ways it's a lot like Google.
You can just ask it a question and it'll give you an answer.
But when you treat it like a person, you tell it specifically like the perspective you want.
That's really when you kind of unlock, I think, the the the power of of using this in an intentional way.
Yeah.
And like last year, I mentioned how I like to think of AI as an intern.
I've revised my opinion this year.
Now it's a cocky intern, because it gives every answer as if it is gospel truth.
And it isn't necessarily gospel truth.
So you have to be careful with it.
It's a very confident intern at this point,
and will tell you anything that you ask it,
but might not necessarily be right.
But I try to temper that statement
because it is always getting better.
And the fourth rule is assume this is the worst
it'll ever be.
It's going to get better,
where you're going to very rarely hit these things where it goes off on a tangent and is completely off base.
It's just not there yet, but that is coming.
So I don't think that the fact that it makes mistakes is the reason you should ignore it now.
Yes. In fact, I think when you're using these tools, I mean, this is the
fourth rule, so it's kind of the last one, and it kind of assumes I think the other ones are in place.
But every time that you are using an AI tool for a specific use case, I think you should be looking
for the ways that it is improving and discovering new ways that it can do things better.
But it requires this curiosity mindset, which is why the first two I think are so important.
Number one, as you mentioned, always invite AI to the table.
So even if you have a job that I know how to do this, I've been doing this for years,
I've got my system, you should at least be considering how can AI supplement this workflow because it will interrupt that workflow most
likely at some point. And so you should kind of be looking for that stuff so you're not caught by
surprise. But then also you're not just also delegating all of this stuff to the robot intern.
The second rule be the human in the loop. You want to have
your eyes on what is actually happening here so that you can make the judgments about where this
is useful and where it isn't. But this is, it kind of hearkens back, I think, to like I'm a big PKM
nerd, right? So personal knowledge management. And one of the big things that really made PKM click
for me was realizing that it's not about all the information that I collect.
It's not about all the answers that I can put in my vault.
It's really about what I think about those things.
And I feel like that's kind of where we're at with AI is they can do all these things.
But then what do I think about these?
How can I actually use these in a way that is beneficial? You don't want to bury your head in the sand and pretend
that this stuff doesn't exist until it is disruptive and it's coming for your job. Like
I said, I don't think that people who care about excellence and craft and things like
that, knowledge workers, I think if you're constantly, if you're embracing a growth mindset,
which I think is probably a high percentage of the focused audience,
you're probably okay because you're looking for the path forward for yourself
personally. And I think that that will help you stay ahead of the machines,
honestly. But you do have to be curious about this stuff. You can't just be like,
Oh, well, it's not for me. You can't just write it off. And well,
we'll come back to that in five years
because it's gonna be completely different.
It's kind of like, you know, when I was in high school,
I was making websites and I was coding HTML
and then CSS came out
and I started dabbling with it a little bit,
kind of figured it out and then took like a three year break
and it advanced so much in that time
that when I came back I'm like,
I don't know how to do this anymore.
Yeah.
No, I do think you need to keep up with it,
but you keep up with it as an assistant, not as a replacement. And that's the thing. I mean,
we don't need to go down this rabbit hole too deep, but like there's a lot of people that are just,
you know, they're ignoring that second rule from Malik of be the human in the loop. And I talked about lawyers, but it's students
and people all over are just letting AI
do the thinking for them.
And that is not its job, in my opinion.
Its job is to help be a tool to make your thinking easier.
Going back to Steve Jobs' statement
about the computer being a bicycle for the mind, I think AI could really fit
that analogy as well. But maybe it's a horse for the mind,
because you have to grab the reins. And you really have to
kind of drive it, you can't, you can't just get on and let it go,
you've got to control that. But the AI can be useful for that
stuff. So that's really what we want to focus on today is like,
as with someone who's serious about a focus practice
and being productive, where do these things fit?
I'll share an example with you of something
that matches up with what Mike was just saying a minute ago.
I've made like over 1,200 podcasts now at this point.
I don't know the total count, but a lot.
And today I did something odd.
After the outline was ready, I copied it
and I went in chat GPT and I said,
you are an expert podcaster
on the topic of artificial intelligence.
I'm gonna make a show about the relationship
of focus and AI.
Take a look at this outline
and let me know what you think I missed, you know?
And one of the questions in this outline
was suggested by AI.
I'm gonna ask it at the end of the show.
It was like, where does this go in a few years?
I didn't have that in the initial outline.
AI suggested it.
And I thought it was a good question.
So, you know, I did the hard work of making the outline.
It looked at it and made a few suggestions back at me. And I think that to me is a comfortable use of this technology.
Yeah, it can be an augment to the creative process is kind of the place
where I'm using this a lot, too.
But I think I think it has a lot of application
beyond the obvious stuff that makes the
news headlines. And the,
the big thing here is not to try to stuff it in a box and say,
Oh, this is terrible because it's affecting certain industries in these ways.
Some of those things are going to be uncomfortable and is it perfect?
No, it's not. I mean, anytime that there's a disruptive technology like this,
it's kind of like the wild West as we figure out what are the regulations that
need to be in place around the, the right use of this.
And there certainly is stuff that's happening right now.
People are being affected by it while all this stuff
shakes out. But I guess the thing is to think about how we can actually use it. And I think
we'll probably talk about the ways we're using it in the next section.
Yeah, I mean, there is definite negative consequences to this stuff. You know, even just that article
that is kind of terrifying about these guys getting computer girlfriends, right?
But I mean, that's not healthy.
Not to mention people are gonna lose their jobs
and like there's lots of things
that are gonna change from it,
but sticking your fingers in your ears
and closing your eyes isn't gonna change any of that.
You know, as people who want to be mindful,
we need to look at it and get what we can out of it
and make sure we don't fall into those traps.
Exactly.
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All right, so we are using it.
We've been toying with that throughout the show.
Let's talk about where it's working now for us.
And the easy one, the low-hanging fruit is transcription.
This thing has got so good at transcription,
whether you're talking to a recording
and getting voice-to-text,
or you're doing OCR on existing text.
My transcription game has really upped over the last year
in a couple ways, So let me just mention them
The first is there's this app out called whisper memos and there's a bunch of these but this one I like because it's got a
couple features that I that I dig but it has a watch app and
You just talk a record your voice and then it downloads a model to your phone
so it does a transcription on device, as I understand it.
And then it does a remarkably good job at the transcription,
and it also has a mail to feature,
which means once it finishes it,
it'll email it to any address you describe.
And I love this app called Drafts,
that's where I do all my writing.
And Drafts has a mail from feature
where it has a magic email address.
Anything you email to that email gets added to Drafts.
So I've got this app on my watch.
I push the action button on my Apple Watch Ultra,
the little orange button on the side.
I just start talking.
And then after I finish talking,
I press stop and within a couple minutes,, uh, it shows up in my drafts inbox.
I can't tell you how this has changed.
Um, my game, I've always been a fan of transcription, but now I can do it
anywhere, any place, and as soon as I think of it, I was driving back from the
vet with the dog and thought of something that I needed to email somebody that was kind of important and literally just push the button
on it while my wrist was on my steering wheel and I dictated it at a stop sign. And by the
time I got home, it was already there. And like so many things that I write now start
off with me pushing that orange button on the side of my watch, I can't get over it. So that's one way AI has made a big difference
and helped me kind of up my game
in terms of intentionally and focus.
And another way is that, as the listeners know,
I struggle with the analog versus digital tools
for journaling and writing.
I do like writing on paper.
It does feel like a nice change of pace for my life,
but I've always had trouble digitizing it because I write in block caps, you know, like architect
style and OCR engines are terrible at that. They just can't do it. And one day, I think three
months ago, I was just thinking about that problem again. And I said, well, I wonder.
So I took a picture of it and I told chat GPT, I write an architect block style.
This is my handwriting.
Um, can you transcribe it?
You know, can you give me a text file back reading my handwriting?
And it was letter perfect.
I've never seen nothing has ever OCR'd
optical character recognition.
My writing, good until AI.
And now anything I write, I can stick at chat GPT,
assuming I'm willing to throw it at chat GPT.
There's a privacy issue there.
But it just does a remarkable job.
So transcription and all the ways
that you can mean
transcription for me are remarkable. One more example of this is the Max Sparky
Field Guides. They're now in like 10 different languages because AI can go
through and create language captioning in different languages. Very cool. Yeah I
don't use transcription a ton. Having said that, with
LifeHQ I recorded a whole bunch of videos and I was using Otter.ai to
upload the videos and get the text transcriptions so that I could add
those to the pages with the videos. But that's not a new tool, but I notice it has gotten a lot better. Like in the past,
I would be talking about Obsidian in a video and it would use the lowercase O Obsidian thinking
that I am talking about the rock. And now it uses the uppercase O Obsidian because it recognizes
that I'm talking about the app. So I feel like the accuracy of the transcriptions has gotten a lot better regardless of the tool that you use. A lot of
these engines are probably very similar. Yeah, agreed. But transcription is an easy win for AI,
in my opinion. And again, right now we're using the worst version of this that will ever be.
I do think that if you were doing like
broadcast quality transcription,
you would still need a human to go through and check it.
Yep.
But I don't think that is true for much longer.
Right, no, I agree with that.
Another way that I'm using it,
and this is a very specific way,
but I think it's kind of a cool
example, is I'm using it to write better email headlines. So I have a newsletter that I send out
every week and it's called Practical PKM. I really spent a lot of time dialing in what my newsletter
was going to look like about a year ago and I landed on this format where I've
got an original essay that takes me quite a bit of time to write and I write that myself and I
link to something cool that's usually obsidian related and then I share a mind map of my book
notes usually on a book that I've read fairly recently but is also relevant to the topic. And then I will take the text from the essay and I will feed it into an AI tool that I've been using, which is called Spiral.
The URL for this is spiral.computer and it's basically a whole bunch of prompts for taking text from one format and changing it into something else. So they have
all these spirals they call them where you can take a YouTube video transcript and turn it into
a blog post for example. And it uses the same material, but the voicing changes a little bit
for the new medium. One of the spirals that they have built for that is
you take this text from this email
and it will craft these subject lines
and you can have it create multiples at a time.
So I'm terrible at writing subject lines.
I really like writing.
I have no trouble cranking out the words,
but then when I try to sit down and write the subject line,
it's always fairly bland.
I don't have that.
I have trouble with the like superlative click baity.
That's the wrong term, but that's kind of as a negative connotation.
But you know, writing these subject lines that people actually want to open, some people,
you know, will just open the email because it came from me and that's great.
But I would prefer to have subject lines that are intriguing and they sound good. They don't make false promises, but
they're good headlines. And that's just not a skill I've got currently. So I feed the text into the
spiral.computer app and then it gives me five different headlines. And sometimes they are just
two over the top. I'm like, no, I don't like these. Do it again and I'll do it again. I'll do it again.
And I'll generate like 15, 20 different headlines. And usually
it'll give me something that it's like, Oh, I like where this one's going. And then I'll
tone it down a little bit or I'll change it a little bit and I'll end up using that. But
for whatever reason, like I can, I have no, no problem creating the content for the newsletter,
but then I hit this huge mental roadblock whenever I have to write the email subject
headline and using spiral.computer just eliminates
that roadblock for me so I can move forward
and actually send it.
Yeah, I mean that, and we're gonna talk about writing
in a minute, I wanna give that kind of its own topic
because it's an important one, but yeah,
the editing process
and like the title of an email newsletter,
all that stuff I think is better with AI as an assistant,
so long as you stay in the loop, you know, that's the thing.
Like Mike said, even with Spiral, he will make adjustments
to the heading before it gets added to the email.
It's gotta be unique to you.
Some, some of the other interesting kind of uses, uh, summarization.
Uh, I think it's, it's pretty good for that now.
Again, it's not perfect and you have to keep track of it, but like if you're
doing research and you have a bunch of things you want to get summaries of, you
can throw them at it and it does a pretty good job.
And I forgot one more example of transcription I use is
when we do the show and I need to get edit points out of it,
I will run the recording at transcription
and then I'll say search for the word edit point
because I say edit point when we record,
you guys never hear that.
But so I can go through and find edit points.
But you know, summarization, reviewing and digesting text,
it's good for stuff like that.
You talked about email headings.
It's also, I think, getting very good at email filtering.
There are tools like Sanebox,
which is a sometime sponsor of the Mac power users.
Apple has its own email AI filtering tools
coming down the pike.
And in the future, AI is definitely going to be looking
at your email for you and trying to sort it for you
so you know the important stuff versus the unimportant stuff.
Which that is to me, the kind of things that we can do
with this that will make you more focused
and make your life easier.
A hundred percent. Yeah.
The other big thing that I use it for and this isn't necessarily the writing
process yet, but it's sort of related, I think is the inspiration.
So I will take a topic and I will ask the the AI tools to kind
of unpack it for me. And I showed the beginning of one of the prompts that
I use for that, but there are others which are just kind of like idea
generation or here's a topic give me a bunch
of subtopics and that never gives me you know a list of this is the the next 52 newsletter topics
but it always inspires me when I look at those lists and that is what I use when I craft the next
52 email newsletter topics I can look at that and be like, okay, okay, see where you're going with this. I would actually attack it from this other angle, but to have to try and
come up with that stuff on my own again, feels like a huge mental lift a lot of
times. And so just asking for some, uh, some inspiration helps me see things
from some different perspectives, which I guess is kind of like collaboration.
Um, you're asking for some feedback on this thing or what are you seeing me see things from some different perspectives, which I guess is kind of like collaboration.
You're asking for some feedback on this thing or what are you seeing essentially, and you're
never just accepting 100% what it's telling you, but it does help you kind of see things
from a different angle.
You know, it's funny because you and I are on opposite ends of that.
Like I don't really find I have much trouble with inspiration or ideas,
but I bring AI in often at the very end.
Like I was talking about with the outline for today's show,
or if I write something,
I guess it's an old lawyer in sync,
but I'm always afraid I miss something.
And AI has given me the ability at any hour of the day,
without having to call somebody,
to say, hey, read this over and see
if you think I missed anything.
And it comes back with points, often.
They'll say, well, maybe you should have added this point,
or maybe you should have communicated this better.
And I use that, and I read it,
and oftentimes I'll read it and say, I disagree, and I'll ignore it, and oftentimes I'll read it and say I disagree and I'll ignore it.
And sometimes I'll read it and say, good idea.
And I'll get back to work and add that point
or find some way to like cover that issue.
And so I do that a lot now with the stuff I write.
So it comes in at the end for me more than at the beginning,
but we're both using it kind of to assist
in the grunt work of writing.
Yeah, and I do use it at the end,
but not the exact way that you're using it.
I think you're going a little bit deeper with me
than I do with the last part of the process,
but I use Grammarly, and I think that qualifies
as one of these tools too,
where is it as good as a human editor?
Absolutely not.
But as a independent creator
who is working by myself currently,
I can't afford to hire an editor either.
And so just running whatever I have written
through Grammarly to clean it up a bit,
that is very valuable.
Yeah, I also use Grammarly primarily for the grammar stuff,
not for the style stuff.
Although sometimes the style stuff is a good suggestion
and I follow it.
Like I have tendencies to use too many adverbs
and when Grammarly points that out,
it will cause me to pause and go back and remove a few.
I'd like to talk about a couple other uses for it.
Coding is very useful and I'm talking about coding at the most basic level.
I'm not a professional programmer, but I'm an automator.
I like to automate things, but automation languages are difficult.
Apple script and some, you know, JavaScript, regular expressions,
all this stuff takes a pretty high degree of knowledge,
and I don't do them often enough
to be real conversant in them,
and I find AI is a great tool for doing stuff like that.
I did a video in the Max Barkie Labs
after somebody asked me, well,
can I just get the listing out of OmniFocus as rich text,
just rich text lists, because they wanted to try
another app, I said, sure.
And we wrote an Apple script with two queries
to ChatGPT that exported it and put it on the pasteboard.
I mean, it's just so easy to do stuff like that now
that wasn't possible before.
And I think a lot of people who are not
programmers aren't even thinking about that
But it's so easy if you're the least technically inclined you can get little bits of code very easily
I
Can see that and I've kind of every time I hear you or somebody else talk about using AI that way
I'm like, oh I should totally do that to create an Apple script or something.
And then I never do it.
Yeah. Well, the next time you have a problem that looks tedious, think about it.
And you have to interact with it a little bit. You tell it what you want.
And then sometimes the first version of it will give you an error. And then you tell it,
well, this is the error I got. And we're like, oh yeah, okay, I understand why.
Here's a new version.
It'll take two or three iterations back and forth.
And I'm sure it's just scraping all the Apple script sites,
but it does a good job.
And I get to the end much quicker.
And regular expressions don't even get me started.
That is so hard for me to write regular expressions,
but with the LLM, it's trivial.
Although, I wanna talk about a little experiment
I ran a few months ago.
I've been meaning to bring this up on the show,
and I thought today's episode would be a good chance.
There's services out there now
that will allow you
to throw all your tasks out.
They're like task managers with AI built into them.
And there's a part of me that's always been interested
in this, right?
In fact, I even talked to the OmniFocus guys at one point
and said, man, you guys should put this in there
so it can use AI to see what I really wanna do.
And so I tried one of these web-based ones and as soon as I started using it, I immediately
hit a brick wall with it.
It's just not for me.
I realized that I don't need an AI to tell me what to do every day.
In fact, the AI isn't any good at that. And I'm not sure it ever will be because I know what's important to me more than it does.
And this is an example of me thinking that this AI is going to help kind of with the grunt work of being productive.
But the big decisions, you know, what blocks am I going to work on this week and what's important?
I think that needs to stay with the human. Decisions, you know, what blocks am I going to work on this week and what's important?
I think that needs to stay with the human. I had a kind of a negative reaction to trying to throw that at AI and
And I am I thought I'd just share that. I don't know if there's much more to say than that
Well, i'll add one thing to that because um, I just did the onboarding webinar for life hq And I was walking through some of the task management stuff and
people were asking me the difference between
OmniFocus and the stuff that I was doing inside of Obsidian and OmniFocus is a great app But you have to have the right mindset
when you use it and the trap that I fell into is I
created all these artificial due dates and then you
Open up OmniFocus and you have 10 overdue things and you feel overwhelmed,
you immediately close it and just forget it.
I don't want to deal with that, right?
So the distinction that I made or the approach
I take to the task management now,
which seemed to really resonate with people was
the, your task manager should not be your task master.
Yeah.
So it's a recommend, and I know this is how you use it too,
but it's a recommendation of the I know this is how you use it too, but it's a recommendation
of the things that you should be considering. It is not the list of things that you should be doing
today and having a separate place for that stuff. Like some people will think that's a bridge too
far. You don't really need that. For me, it's really helpful having that not only in a different app,
but ultimately it ends up on a note card that I prop up on
my desk analog style. And is it more work to transfer all that stuff over? And we talked
about this on other episodes. Yeah, it is. But now it's real clear. This is what I have
decided I'm going to do today. And that's the difference between me feeling like, okay,
I was actually productive today and I did the things that really mattered and feeling completely overwhelmed because I had a whole bunch of stuff. There was no
quality distinction between it. And it's just, here's what you should be doing today. And
if you don't get it done, you're behind.
Yeah. For me, the thing that unlocked that was the blocks, right? Getting a block of
time and saying, okay, I've got two hours to do project X, I'll go into my list, whether it be an OmniFocus or
Obsidian or on a piece of paper.
And I'll do as much as I can in those two hours I gave it.
So the decision that's made is that you're going to work on block X
and you're going to give it two hours.
That's all.
Right.
And then you don't stress about getting everything done on the list
because you gave it two hours.
You're going to get two hours worth of that list done
and that's a win.
And if you can switch gears to that,
then you'll find that all this stuff gets a lot easier.
But there is an investment in that
because you've got to know what's important.
You've got to make the blocks.
You've got to be willing to put the time and effort
into choosing that stuff.
But if you do, there's a huge win,
because you actually work on the stuff that's important
and you make progress.
It's something that took me way too long to figure out,
but that's really the answer for that.
And that isn't really lend itself to AI.
Which is interesting,
because I'm always interested in AI as an underlying tool
to help in productivity,
but there are certain parts of it
that I don't think you can hand off to the robot.
Yep.
You wanna talk about AI and writing?
Yeah.
The reason this came up,
I wrote a newsletter as well,
two or three months ago called the SLM.
I called it the Sparky Language Model.
And the inspiration was I went to an event
and there was a guy there who gave a big speech
about his parents, it was an anniversary thing.
And afterwards I said, hey, great job.
And he says, oh yeah, AI wrote it.
And I just found it really kind of off putting. And like, I feel like the process of writing
a speech about your parents to me should be something that you invest yourself into.
I mean, I think it helps you understand your relationship with them better.
And it comes from the heart heart and I don't know.
It's just a very strange thing to me
that like the experience of being a human
in that relationship is given to a robot.
And it just got me thinking about my relationship
with writing in general and artificial intelligence
because I'm really repelled by it.
I don't like the idea of it writing for me.
Part of it is like a lot of the stuff I write
gets published because that's what I do.
And the idea that I would have a robot write words
that went out under my name is really weird to me.
Like then what's the point of me
if that's what's gonna happen?
You know, where do I fit in this process
if all I'm doing is blocking and copying from a robot
and then pasting and saying, here you go world.
Well, it's not my words.
And you know, just the process of writing the words for me
is very difficult, but also it opens my mind to new ideas
and it allows the actual words to get better
because of the process.
And I just really feel pretty strongly
that the AI as your writer is denying you something that you probably shouldn't deny.
Yeah, I agree with that, but I think there is a slightly different version of that,
which I have to be honest, I'm intrigued by. There's a service that I came across because
I saw Tiago Forte had created an AI version of himself that people could interact with based
on everything that he had written. I think that's actually kind of cool. And it's using a service
called Delphi.ai. So I don't think I want it to create the original stuff, which I think is kind
of what you were hitting on there. But if it can take a look at everything
that I have ever written,
and I can build this into my website as a chatbot
or something to scale my ability
to answer people's questions,
I think that's actually kind of cool.
I'm not sure what I think about Delphi.
I haven't really thought about it enough to have an opinion.
But I do know that the thoughts that I have
are impacted and better because of the process.
And if I don't do that anymore,
then that is going to atrophy
and the stuff that I make is going to be worse.
Yep.
And that is something that I'm very aware of.
And I'll say, as much as I like AI, I like it.
So it gets me time to stop and think more and write more
and develop my own thoughts more.
So to me, that's kind of the end target of this.
So I don't really want it to do that part for me.
That's the dessert of all this, even though it's hard work.
You know, and I just don't wanna do that.
Now, I've said earlier, I'll use it to proofread.
You know, I'll even use it to check me.
But the process of writing the words,
I just can't seem to bring myself to do that.
And I've had a lot of people dispute it with me.
You know, people, very smart people,
writing me saying, oh, you're being silly.
You know, so long as you write the prompt
and you're editing it, it's still your words.
But for some reason, I just can't get over that.
The other feedback I got to that post
was a bunch of people writing me saying,
yeah, you're absolutely right,
there's no way it can write better than you can.
And that is not my point.
When I hear that, I want to take exception
because I do feel like it eventually
will write better than me.
I don't know if that's in one year or 20 years,
but at some point AI will always write better than I can
if this curve continues.
But I don't care.
Even if we get to a point where it does a better job
communicating than I can,
I still feel like it needs to be my words.
And I still wanna drag my brain through the process.
Am I being unreasonable?
No, you're not.
And I think if I were to guess at why you have that hesitation, I think it probably,
and I have that same hesitation, but it's not because I don't think that AI can generate good
words. I think it's because I want to know that the message that I put out into the world is completely authentic,
and I believe in every word that has been written. And even if I go back and I review what AI has
done, it hasn't come from me. It's not based off of my experiences. It's based off of a bunch of data that was fed into a model. And that just feels that feels wrong,
but it also kind of hearkens back to something that came up when we talked to
Bob Dotto, uh, when he was on the show. And,
and he talks about this in his book,
a system for writing with the whole, uh,
Zettelkasten idea that there are people who use Zettelkasten the system just to crank out words and they don't really pay attention to be quality writing is an idea that I really believe in
that I think can actually have a positive influence in someone's life and that's why
I'm willing to put in the effort to share it, whether it be words that appear on a webpage
somewhere or a video script for a YouTube video, something like that.
I want it to be completely authentic and I want it to be completely me.
And as long as there's an AI tool that is creating that
in some way, shape or form, it feels like that's not,
that's not truly Mike Schmitz at that point.
Yeah, you and I are on the same page on this.
But there are people who disagree legitimately.
And I, you know, I don't think we all have the answers,
and you could argue I'm a hypocrite
if I'm not using AI to write,
but I'm using AI to check the work,
and I'm using AI with Grammarly,
and all the other ways I'm using AI,
I've talked on the show.
I'm not trying to say I'm holier than thou.
What I'm trying to say is that for my own personal growth, I need to do
the work when it comes to writing.
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In general on this topic,
does AI help with focus or does it get in the way?
I think it is entirely up to you.
We've talked about several implementations here in 2024
that we're using that absolutely helps me focus. It's really up to you. We've talked about several implementations here in 2024
that we're using that absolutely helps me focus.
Me capturing ideas and creating things
with the transcription workflows
and some of the other stuff we've talked about
is to me a huge benefit.
And I would have loved to have these tools 10 years ago.
So I think it actually can help,
but I think you have to think about the relationship with the work and what are
the parts that you're willing to give the smart intern and what are the parts
you're not willing to give the smart intern.
And it has to be intentional like everything.
Like everything. That's exactly it. You know, the approach is,
is the same and it's just figuring out what are the things that you should
actually be doing.
You can lean into your unique ability,
your zone of genius, whatever term
from whatever guru you wanna use there.
The things that only you can do
or the things that you do better than anybody else,
your strengths, and then delegate the weaknesses.
Figure out the ways that the tools can help you
do things that
you're not great at faster, more efficiently, so that you can focus on
what really matters. That's the right approach, not just with AI tools, but
with everything. I have a document that I call the Sparky Technology Stack and in
it I write down every app I use and why.
That helps me avoid jumping from app to app, right?
I've documented, it's, you know,
whenever you spend the time to write something
that makes a difference.
And a few months ago,
after I discovered the transcription thing,
I added a section to my technology stack for AI.
So AI has specific jobs for me.
And I've explained them all here in this episode, but,
but I've written that down and like, I know in my mind,
clearly where I use it and where I don't use it.
And having written that down really kind of solidifies that in my brain.
And if you're struggling with this stuff,
I'd suggest trying to do something like that. Yep, 100%.
I've done the same thing.
I call it the PKM stack.
It's a Canvas file inside of Obsidian,
but I've got the different levels of the PKM stack,
which we've talked through in other episodes.
But then from there, what are the different things I do
intentionally to facilitate the flow of information
into and out of my PKM system?
And then what are the apps that I'm using for those those different roles?
And it eliminates a lot of the shiny new object syndrome.
Well, I got to find something that's better because I know clearly this is what
I'm using this app for. And yeah, maybe it's, you know, 5%, 10% of what the app
is actually capable of. But if it solves that specific problem for me, it's worth it.
Mike, where would you like, this is the question AI told me to ask.
Where would you like this to be in a few years? It's a good question.
Like, like what, what, where are the friction points in your life right now that you'd like to see AI solve that it can't right now?
That is a great question. To be honest, I don't really know.
Um, I don't find myself thinking
I wish I didn't have to do this thing very often although maybe that's just the
the mode I'm in as an independent solo creator currently where everything is by
default gonna gonna land on on my plate But there's nothing that really is just a huge pain point
and I really wish I didn't have to do this thing
and I could delegate this to something else right now.
Now that being said,
I absolutely know there will be things that will come up.
So one example, I was putting in a Life HQ
and I have all these book notes that I was bringing over
and I was creating these three sentence summaries.
And after doing like 30 of them, I was like, these three sentence summaries are so much mental work.
And it took me a little bit of going back and forth with a prompt to kind of dial it in and get it in my style.
But then I was feeding it my notes and it was condensing it into these three sentences.
And I would take that again as a starting point.
And all that one's not quite right, you know, change that a little bit,
but being able to use that as a way to start the process of creating
those, those three sentence summaries that I was including in those notes.
I had no idea that was on my radar. That that's really the point I'm trying to
make here. Like I couldn't have predicted that. And I don't have,
I have trouble predicting where AI could really help me right now,
but I can absolutely believe that in a couple of years from now,
I will have a dozen other ways that I am currently using it.
I don't know. Do you have something specific where, you know,
I really wish it would get to the point where it can do this for me?
Yeah, there are some of the administrative work stuff
I'd like to see it step up for.
When you think of it, these tech billionaires,
or people who are just loaded,
they've got someone who follows them around
who takes care of things for them.
And to me, that is something that I would like to see AI
do more of for us normal folk who can't afford to pay somebody to do all this stuff.
And like calendar management like a system where if I wanted to meet with you.
Are a eyes would talk to each other and you and I would have get fed them our parameters and they would you know theIs would come up with a mutually agreeable time
without any involvement from us.
I think that's something in the future.
The email filtering is good.
I'm not a fan of the idea of answering email from me
because then suddenly, again, the human's out of the loop,
but there are certain kinds of email I get
where people ask for a password reset code in the
Max Barkey Labs or something. Having AI take care of that kind of stuff for me would be something
I would be interested in seeing. I'm really looking at the low end of work, not the high end
here, but the grunt work kind of stuff. I think AI is getting to a point where it should be able
to do some of that stuff in the future.
I think that the idea of a companion to check my work,
but smarter would be good.
So yeah, I can see areas where I'd like to see this improve
and make my life easier, but it's all aimed
at giving me more time
to do the thinking and writing and woodworking
and the human creativity tasks that I enjoy so much.
I want more of that.
And I want AI to help make that possible.
Yeah, I can get on board with that.
Okay, that's it.
We'd love to hear what you're thinking about AI and focus.
We have a forum for that,
so let us know over at talk.macpowerusers.com.
There's a room for it.
I'm very interested in this topic
and I know we've got some very smart listeners.
You wanna talk about shiny new objects?
Let's do it.
So I've got one here.
I mentioned that Life HQ has launched.
It has gone fairly well.
So I am in the process of making a few upgrades to my studio, which I've wanted to do for
a long time.
One of the things that I'm doing is I'm getting some, getting a better camera for the desk shot so I can look better on the YouTube
videos.
And I came across this device called a road caster video,
which is sort of like the, the ATEM mini,
but better in just about every conceivable way. Okay. And,
it's not actually even available yet. I have pre-ordered this and it's an audio interface
plus a video interface.
It's got a couple different HDMI inputs.
I've actually got two cameras on my desk.
Currently, I've got the one desk view and then the YouTube video YouTube view.
And I've got an audio interface plus the ATEM.
So this is going gonna allow me to consolidate
all this gear together.
I'm actually using a Rodecaster Duo right now
as we record this podcast.
I really like that device.
I'm actually gonna use that for a different setup
for my wife and I when we do the Intentional Family podcast
so we don't have to set stuff up,
tear stuff down all the time.
But this one little board actually will handle everything audio and video related it's got a whole bunch of things for changing
scenes and things like that which I believe are gonna help with the more
video stuff that I do and I'm starting to get into some more live presentation
stuff streaming stuff that kind of thing I'm sort of kicking the tires on that
and yeah so this this is the thing that caught my eye.
And I've read some different reviews and in places like The Verge and that everyone seems to rave
about this device, but it's not going to be available until December, I believe. I think
you can get it from B&H or something. It kind of has it in stock and out of stock, but it's sort
of an exclusive. And there's an audio company nearby
that always has done me right.
So I buy all my stuff from them and I put in my order.
They said it'll be here probably mid December.
But yeah, I think this will allow me to clean up
a lot of the stuff on my desk
and we'll also up my video game.
Yeah, this looks really impressive.
It always bugs me that these are all 1080,
because you've got these 4K cameras
and you have to downscale them to use this stuff.
True, but for like a live video thing,
you're really not wanting to do more than that anyways,
because it's gonna be a huge bandwidth suck
for everybody that's that's joining.
So yeah, you're right. It is 1080. I looked into the ATEM stuff. They have some that allow
you to stream 4k, but it's like multiple thousands of dollars and really designed for like production
studios and way overboard for what what I would need. What I like about the road stuff
is like I'm a single person here in my office doing this stuff and I can handle it all on my own with the clean user interface and stuff like that.
No, this looks really nice. And so are you going to use it for your microphone as well?
That's the plan. It's got the same audio guts that the Rodecaster Duo has and that's what I'm using right now. Once
we figured out the bitrate matching, I haven't had any issues with this one. So
yeah, I like this Rodecaster Duo a lot and I anticipate that I'm gonna
love this Rodecaster video as well. It's got the same, you have two XLRs in the
back, you can also have the the inputs that go to your desktop.
Cause I've got two desktop monitors.
They're not great monitors, but I have those on my desk
as like reference monitors when I'm doing audio stuff.
So that can all get hooked up there.
And then there's a whole bunch of HDMIs.
I'm not going to use them all, but like I said,
I do have use for at least two HDMIs.
And I'm also thinking about how I can do
some sort of like overhead shot
or like writing in a notebook or something on my desk
when I'm doing these live presentations
and I think this is gonna allow me to do that kind of stuff.
Yeah, let me know what you think of it
because I'm interested as well.
I do a lot of webinars for the field guides
and for the Max Barkey Labs
and right now my method is not that advanced,
but something like this might be useful.
Because in addition to your two cameras,
you could also plug in an iPhone or an iPad
if you're demonstrating on that, like you said.
Maybe an overhead camera, if it makes sense.
And there's some nice stuff here.
Yep.
Okay, well let me know what you think of it.
I'll tell you what I've been playing with lately
is my 3D printer.
I just did a kind of a two year audit of my studio
now that I've been in here two years.
And I was, I got rid of a bunch of stuff.
Anything that I haven't used in two years,
I decided I'm never gonna use.
So the local high school video program,
I donated a bunch of extra gear
and I've really kind of scaled things down
to just the stuff I need.
And I'm printing gridfinity for my drawers,
because that's what I do.
It's like a system where you make these little trays
of grids and then you can make boxes that snap into them.
And it allows you to have things
very organized and there's a part of me that loves that
more than I can tell you.
So I'm constantly now printing out grids and drawers
and bins and next time you visit me,
you're gonna be very impressed with my drawers.
Nice, well you shared some pictures.
They look great.
Yeah.
Well, it's next level now and that's what can I say.
But yeah, I really like that.
It makes me think about myself sometimes.
I think there's a part of me that's just a little too into organization.
Like you know what I mean?
Yeah, I get it. Yeah, so, but either way, this scratches that itch.
And I bought four reels of gray filament
and I'm having so much fun going through them.
So that's a thing I'm doing these days.
What about reading?
What are you reading these days? Well, I I am reading a I say I am reading as we record this, I am not reading it,
but we are reading this recording this couple weeks in advance. So behind the scenes here today
is Meditations for Mortal Stay. The book by Oliver Berkman that I pre-ordered many months ago is
being delivered today. And I'm going to start reading that one.
This one's gonna be interesting.
I didn't really know a whole lot about this book
when I bought it other than Oliver Berkman wrote it.
And I really like everything Oliver Berkman does.
But this is like a four week retreat for your mind
is how it describes it on the Amazon page.
So I'm not really sure what to expect with this
but I am really looking forward to it and
yeah, I guess I'll report back on this but
Oliver Berkman is the one who introduced me to the idea of like the cosmic insignificance theory and memento mori
I know the memento mori specifically isn't an original idea of his, but I like the way
that he explained those concepts a lot.
That has really kind of influenced my perspective.
I even built memento mori into my daily notes template for Obsidian.
So yeah, really looking forward to this book.
I've been actually counting down the days for this one.
I thought I pre-ordered it, but I apparently didn't.
So now I'll get it tomorrow.
I'm definitely gonna read this book.
I can't wait.
Oliver Berkman is one of my InstaBuy authors.
So I'll check that out.
I have been collecting the Chicago Press
collected works of Seneca.
There's a whole bunch of them.
I have three of I I think, five now.
And I have just been spot reading those lately.
I'm in the middle of finishing up
my next shortcuts field guide,
which is taking a tremendous amount of time.
So I don't really have time to focus in on a book,
but I realize I still want to be reading every day.
So I'm spending some time going through the Seneca Readers.
Once I finish this field guide,
the Oliver Berkman will be my reward.
I'm gonna read that book next.
Nice.
Well, we are the Focus Podcast.
You can find us over at relay.fm slash focus.
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Stick around if you are a member of Deep Focus,
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and I need to talk to somebody about it.
So we're gonna do it today.
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