Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) The Tools Episode!

Episode Date: January 15, 2022

... and I'm not just talking about the hosts! Myself, Chris, and about a dozen listeners kick around the latest apps, tools, platforms and other things we use to GTD. Sponsors: Wix.com Some of the books I mention at the end: A Short History Of Nearly Everything The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome. Welcome in, everybody. I'm sorry, there are new features in this Twitter space that I'm going to try and I'm going to annoy you guys for a second. Oh my God, how does this work? I don't, wow, I don't understand. What the hell is this? Did anyone else hear that weird?

That's, I think it's me. Yeah, it's me. What is, am I a B? I'm sorry, I'm going to go back to normal voice. This is a Sam. Okay. Do you have the voice transformer? Brian? I don't know that I do. Hey, maybe that's our first thing to talk about it.

I feel like a bunch of like features have just like, you know, suddenly blown up in, um, in my app. And I'm like, what is this app? What is all about this? Okay. Speaking of, I need to, hold on what it. Let's share a tweet. Join me in my space. Okay.

That's fine. Sorry, everybody. This is like the normal process of like orientation, um, after the new year. Okay. Let's see. Come talk about productivity and stuff. Tweeting, done. Whoa, what's that?

Sorry, the app, every time I try to do a Twitter space, there's always something new and different to distract me. Brian, it's all the same for you, huh? You never, like, update your apps, huh? No, no. So you just heard that? Let me do another one. Okay.

Oh, you're muted. All right, sorry. For those of you who are just, like, joining us and, like, trying to figure this out. there is now a button that is a magic wand at the bottom of our display. And if you tap it, it'll change your voice. And I don't know if my voice has changed now. I can't hear myself.

But you can pick and choose, like, different things. And it's very distracting. This is a sample of the voice transformer. Nope. And then it really screws you up. And then you go out. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So it's not working. Okay. Well. Right. It is working. That's the weird thing. It's like you can't hear it when you do it.

Right, but I didn't hear you do a weird voice. Did you do a weird voice? I was trying to. All right, let me try it again. Hold on one more time. Okay, so now you're muted. So you're like fudging with UI. Sorry, everybody.

We will get started momentarily. This is just like too weird and strange and interesting to try out. So, no, Brian's gone. Yeah, so I tried to do it. Did you dismiss the UI that lets you preview? Preview, hold on. Because you press the wand and then you try to like voices and then you come back and I don't know. I don't understand Twitter's product philosophy here.

It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, but so I tried several different things and it just mutes me. I mean, yeah. I swear to like the fact that we are Twitter's little like gerbils or hamsters that they're just like experimenting with, you know, and don't actually try their stuff out before they launch it. But anyways, one of the new PMs on Twitter spaces reached out to me and wants my feedback on stuff. And so I will let him know that the voice transformer is dumb. I mean, it could be cool. Probably not.

Maybe it's not for us. I don't know. Anyways. Okay, I got another question for you. Yeah. And by the way, when you edit this, leave this all in there. Why do certain people have locks on their... Because they're private accounts, I assume.

Huh. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I'll go and I'll take a look, but yeah, they have protected profiles. So we just got three private accounts just show. Welcome private Twitter users to our very public space. Welcome. No worries.

Yeah. I got no problem with that. Hey, everybody, happy 2022. Yes, yes. Happy 2022. Welcome. Welcome to New Year. Everything's new.

Nothing that happened last year is the same. It's a complete refresh. Except for your chair. That goddamn chair from 2021 is still there. Okay. All right. Hold on. Hold on a second.

I'll tell you a story about that. I got the new chair last time. and I gave it to my wife because what I like to do, I guess, is like, you know, do you know how you like pull your feet up under you as you're sitting sometimes? I ruined so many leather shoes that way. I go to the bar. Exactly. Exactly.

So the chair that I got had like really high and hard ends to it. Like it was a, you know, a $500 chair. And it was like if you ever try to do that, like pull your. your foot up under you while you're sitting, it hurts like hell. And so I'm like, well, this chair is a waste of money. It looks good and it's attractive, but it's totally unfunctional for how I would

actually want to sit. I understand. Which I realize I do it constantly. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so is this the Tools episode? You know, I want to recommend a good chair. Oh, that's it. That's what we'll do for a

and maybe, you know, housewares some other time or something. I feel like, you know, with the whole pandemic thing, people are probably really, like, you know, leaned into figuring out their style, their preferences, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that's the thing is the, um, so one of the things that I want to do for the new year. So like, look, this is, this is literally loosey-goosey.

This is what this episode is going to be. It is. Welcome to 2020. First of all, I need a new chair. Number two, the other reason I need a new chair is because the one that I have, have so old that like when I'm on a Zoom calls behind me like it's all like um rated out and ugly like and so and then the other thing is is I'm doing so many Zoom calls that like I need a good background so we're literally going to change this room and put like a bookshelf behind me so

I'm not just you know having my kids now that I've actually visited your place I actually believe and know that you have books as opposed to going to like some of those you know fancy bespoke hotels where they just like buy a bunch of of whatever books and they put them up and they're usually empty or blank. Yeah, yeah. I feel like you're a little bit late to this, Brian. I mean, for a guy who like only does tech,

the fact that you waited two years into like the pandemic and like Zoom to like be like, you know, I should really replace my background with something more interesting. Don't underestimate my laziness. Yeah, a chair, a better background. You know, I will. Here's one.

tip for for for yourself and for the listeners perhaps is I have actually gone uh onto Etsy and they you don't really have walls that are exposed so you don't really qualify for this unfortunately unless you actually move your you know thing all around but you can get um peel and stick attachable detachable wallpaper yeah and it looks great and uh you can go back to the 1910s or into the 2020s or wherever you want to go um and so my background is great i get a lot of comments people are like is that real or is out of Zoom background and I go back and I tap on the wall. They're like, no, it's real. And it's very satisfying.

So, right. I'm going to, I mean, I know that from having kids. Like, you can do crazy stuff to kids' rooms these days in terms of stickers and things like that. But, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to, okay, 2022, I'm going to lose 25 pounds. And I'm going to have a better background. The thing that I am screwed up on now is I, I got a haircut right at the beginning of December, and I was like, oh, Omicron's coming. I better get a haircut now.

And so now... In case they shut down the hair cutting places? Yeah. So my wife is going to reopen her salon. Okay. Enough. Wait, I'm sorry. Your wife cuts hair?

She has a salon? Oh, no. The home salon. I'm sorry. She has... I understand. Yes. So she's going to have to reopen it.

Okay. My partner actually was like, you know, a hair salon. on stylist for many years. Oh, really? Okay. Well, I need that. By the way, Lisa might come on at some point because... Oh, she should.

She had opinions about things. She did, and she wants to clarify. So if she's listening, she needs to ping me. Okay, so, guys, let me do the resetting that Chris usually does. TechMe and right-home experience. What do what you want? Yeah, look, and this is Lucy Goosey. And by the way, Chris texted me offline and he's like, how are we going to do this?

I'm like, just go with it because just because we're doing something different, it's going to be fine. So don't worry about it. Yeah. So like I said on today's show, Chris endlessly, whenever we're doing something together, he's like, well, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, and using this app and that app. And remember, Chris is not only the inventor of the hashtag, he's also the number one hunter on product hunt. So, like, he knows all of the tools, all of the apps and all the things. So I've said to him multiple times, just please, you know, let's talk about what you use. And maybe I'll adopt some of those things.

Actually, I'm going to get a piece of paper. I'm sorry, I have to start with, like, a tool that you need. But now I'll tell you that. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay. All right, so aside from a piece of paper, okay, let's start there. I've used notational velocity. I've used simple note.

I've used, you know, going back to Evernote, which is a disaster these days or whatever. If you need a scratch pad that, like, how do you keep notes, especially among devices for things that you need to keep track of, that sort of thing? What do you do? Yeah, so, you know, I want to step back and just like set maybe a frame and then I think it'll be helpful to sort of understand like what apps are and how I kind of like relate to them. And I was thinking about this. And I kind of, I guess, have like some, you know, frameworks, some patterns that repeat in my life in terms of how I organize my work and what I do. Then I, I kind of have like some fillers, like helper apps, utilities, stuff like that. Like you think about it like maybe if you think about your kitchen and, you know, if you don't cook, then this is probably going to be totally.

a gibberish to you. But if you cook at all, you know, like, during my walkabout year in 2019, you know, I was staying in a lot of Airbnbs. And there was a lot of places I went with Airbnbs that had just horrible kitchens, you know, they just weren't good. And so I learned that I needed to carry like a spatula with me. Like literally, I packed a spatula. I packed salt and pepper. You've said this to me before. Yeah, it's true. And it elevates my experience just enough. You know, I'm a big breakfast guy. So making sure. sure that I have, you know, the right accoutrements for that experience is important. And so in a similar way, I do the same thing. I think in my, you know, computing environment where I have, you know,

the right spatula or this or that for, you know, just making different types of, I don't know, notes or something, something. So it's those. So small little like helper apps and stuff like that makes your experience better. And then there's sort of like the megas, which are these apps that kind of sit there and they have like years and years of features in them. And, you know, you have to use them. And for a long time, I think the Adobe suite for me was probably like in that realm, especially like Adobe Illustrator. Now there are like several other apps that I use that have replaced it. But nonetheless, those are kind of like the, I don't know, the broad stroke patterns in terms of like how I think about this. So in terms of like notes, for a long time I was using bear.

Okay. So let me also step back. I am a big Mac user. I went in deep many, many years ago. I, you know, I don't know. Like in college, I think I was resistant. I was a big PC user. and then I switched over. And now I just, you know, so most of my frame of reference is going to be on the Mac or on the web. And I'm going to say same, by the way. What's that? Same for me. Mostly Mac.

Yes. Go on. And I think, you know, there's been a lot of very interesting changes in the, you know, last five or six years that have evolved the state of what web apps can do and how people spend a lot of time in browsers. And considering that I started my career launching Firefox and in that world and, I understand deeply on the one hand, like the world of browsers and the web and how accessible it is. I also understand its shortcomings and the ways in which you kind of have to navigate this

system that was built us almost like an OS inside of an OS, and so it kind of sucks. So there are specific, unique individual apps that I will use to amplify my productivity. So we're starting with notes. You asked about notes. I was starting to say that I've used bear for a long time. So it's Bear app, B-E-A-R, as in The Animal. It's essentially a marked down editor. And, you know, I once used Evernote and eventually, I don't know, it just got too Kluji or there wasn't a mobile solution, whatever it was. I kind of moved in the direction of wanting my notes to be stored in plain text

so that I could always choose to use something else that was better. And Bear met that need. Now, that said, actually, let me go through my list. So Bear is one. Used it for a lot of things. It's great. You can create notes, sort of wiki style stuff between different notes. I also use day one for journaling.

Tons like maybe half a dozen or so, different journals for different topics, different purposes. Use that for a long time. And more recently, I got into an app called Kraft. And Craft is, as the name suggests, like a very well-made, very Mac-specific application that has a lot of craft built into it. It's sort of like, you know, I think of Figma from a design perspective as being, I don't know, it's sort of like cross-platform, very webby, you know, as a tool for designers, but I can't quite get into it because the aesthetics, I don't know, slightly annoy me.

Whereas sketch as a design tool is just much more pleasant, pleasing, attractive. I like it. And I think craft sort of fits into a similar aesthetic. paradigm. So those are the ones that I use for notes. I don't know if that helps, but. Yeah, but slow down a second. So, by the way, are you recording? Because I just started recording. Oh, I am recording. Yes, for sure. Okay, good. So when I was writing the book, I was on Evernote a lot. Oh, what was that like? Because a lot of people use Ulysses as their Okay, so I don't know. I started writing the book in 2014, so this was a while ago.

And one of the key things was, yeah, right. And the key was searchability and tagging, and I was literally going to the library and going to microfiche. And so I needed the ability to, you know, download PDFs. Or also, I was, you know, I was going in and finding old copies of industry standard and things like that. And so when I would see something, From 1999, I would literally take a picture of it, right? So if you look at my photo album from those years, there's tons and tons of pictures of like old dot-com era magazines and things like that. So Evernote got me through the book, but Evernote also tied into notational velocity, which I don't know. Did they stop supporting that, I think? So my understanding, okay, so let me speak to Notational. rotational velocity, because I think it's an important idea that, you know, folks who are listening to this might, you know, familiarize themselves with. So the idea of notational velocity goes back a very long time. And as far as I know, it actually started out of Japan. And the whole intention was to make it as fast as humanly possibly, or perhaps computerly possible, possible, I don't know, to have a thought and then jot it down without having to worry about structure or filing or putting into a folder or whatever. You'd have a hot key, and then you just start typing, and that was it.

And so it was sort of like an infinite stream of your notes, and you'd go back later and sort them. So that was the idea of notational velocity, the idea of creating notes at velocity. So what I understand is that the core developer either eventually moved off or got, you know, whatever, stopped working on it. And there have been several successive restarts or reboots of that project over time. I don't know that it's been worked on in several years, but every now and then I kind of like get interested or excited about checking it out. I don't even have it on my Mac right now. So I basically have reverted to Simple Note because also SimpleNone pulled from the same thing. But it's mostly searchability and tagability that I, that's my main need for it.

Yeah, okay. So I'm going to pin a link to it, but you can get to it at notational.net. It looks like it was last updated literally 11 years ago, not exactly, but in 2011. Okay, I'm going to do, we're all over the place here, but I'm going to do a couple things for this reason. Great. That people hear these things thrown around, and I'm going to ask you how and what you use

them for, but like you've already mentioned Figma. Yes. So Figma, if you hear that thrown around, but have never used it, don't know what it is. Tell me what you would use Figma for or what? that I might use Sigma for it. Yeah, great question. So I think for many people who have to do anything with graphics, anything with design, anything with layout,

maybe their entry these days is probably Canva. It's sort of a web-based editor for creating graphics and stuff. Figma came along, and it's so funny, I talked to Dylan Field, who's the CEO at a food camp, you know, before he was getting Figma started, and actually was trying to recruit me. I was like, hey, do you want to come work on essentially like a design tool in the browser? And at the time, the browser was still shit.

Like it didn't have all the features that it had. I was like, man, that's never going to work. Like, that's going to be so slow and so janky. And sketch is amazing. I think sketch was out at the time. And so I said no. But Figma has turned into this just beast, you know, and betting on the web in Dillon's case was so wise, so smart. And they just really crushed it.

So what you can do with Figma is you can lay out art boards essentially with different designs, different layouts. There's lots of tools for this, but it works in the browser. I think the real differentiator that really put it ahead of sketch, rather, was the real-time collaboration aspect. So as a former designer, and actually I started my design career at Google working in Keynote because it was vector-based and it was therefore resolution independent, a lot of people at the time were designing UI in Photoshop. And Photoshop, as the name implies, was not actually intended for designing interfaces. Some people would use Illustrator, but Illustrator also was intended for magazines and for print and for, you know, kind of like legacy design services.

So once Figma came out, it was really adopted by, I think, the web design community because this was a design tool that was written in their native language, JavaScript and they could actually hack it and build plugins and things like that. And so it's really blown up in that community. So anyways, if you're just coming to Figma for the first time, what you would use it for would be laying things out, you know, cards, posters, things of that nature, designing apps. Or just even actually, there are a lot of people who will design presentations in Figma because

if you remember a couple years ago, there was sort of like this zooming interface that allowed you to create presentations that you could kind of like zoom in, you know, deeper and deeper, sort of an infinite interface concept. Do you know what this was? Do you remember this or no? Vaguely, but I don't know what it would be called. Yeah. Someone's probably got the idea. Anyways, so you would lay these things out and then you could like zoom in and just keep going infinitely deep. Well, Figma kind of allows you to do something similar, but I would say in a more maybe X, Y, coordinate spatial sense. So for example, you might have a slide deck and then, then you create your slides and then you can just, you know, drag them around while you're, let's

say, presenting in Zoom. And so rather than having to go in a linear fashion when presenting, you can just bounce around to whatever topics are, you know, relevant based on your audience and based on the conversation. I'm going to jump to another one. Yeah. Notion. Yeah. What do you use Notion for? Jesus. Okay. So, um, like, and there are probably, it's funny to think about, like, you know, kind of haters that exist in some of these apps. It's kind of like, you know, whatever works. Like, this is sort of like what I was saying before. Like, I have frameworks for, what are the things that are going to solve my problem

with the fastest, easiest, most, you know, understandable way that require the least amount of cognitive energy. And I feel like notion kind of like teeters on the edge where as a platform for enabling people to collaborate on, you know, not just like straight documents like Google Docs, but actually with some depth and some inner, I guess, relationships. in a database sense, Notion kind of is the first merger of a database with, you know, standard pages. So you can build a little internal intranet where your company can put resources and stuff like that,

but you can also maintain it as a database and create relationships between all the pages in a way that you just couldn't before. So. Well, databases and wikis and stuff too, right? Like that's, yeah, okay. Yeah. So the big difference here is like you can embed tables into a Google Docs page. But once you get into a database, you can filter the table, you can filter the views, you can create alternative views. So essentially you have kind of like this, you know, collection of information and you create, let's say a list of filters that determine which or what subset of the data that you want to show actually appears in the page.

And that's incredibly powerful if you want people to coordinate and not. create like dozens of spreadsheets that repeat the same information over and over again, which personally is something I'm constantly fighting against. So that's one of the ways in which Notion is really amazing, and it really just blew up because there are people who, you know, are looking for a tool to organize their lives and have the ability to sort of annotate with some text areas. Now, if you've ever used Numbers for the Mac, one of the things that was very different about the way that Numbers approaches spreadsheets

relative to Excel, although I used Excel many, many years ago, or perhaps if you've used Google Sheets is that numbers provide you a canvas where you can create multiple spreadsheets that all live and occupy kind of in the same, you know, X, Y coordinate space. So again, maybe if you think about maybe like the right metaphor here is like Google Maps. You know, you can kind of like drag to move your space around and figure out where you're going. Well, you can do it with Figma. You can do it with numbers. And so in that way, you're able to kind of like,

see all the connections or, well, not connections, but, you know, lay out the data in a more holistic way. In other words, I guess what I'm trying to say is in Google Sheets, you have tabs. And each of those tabs can interact with the other tabs through formulas, but it's really hard to actually visualize it. So numbers gives you a way to kind of like visualize it, but they're still just, you know, flat tables as opposed to being databases that share different types of, you know, query languages or lookups. I feel like I've really. lost the script here. Anyways. Well, I'm going to move on anyway.

And by the way, if you're listening, if you're listening, we are going to get to, I know everyone knows these, we're going to get to our more obscure recommendation a bit, but I'm literally asking for what Chris uses things for to see if I need to do them. So far, have I convinced you of anything or not yet? No. It's going, it's watching over me like a, whatever. But,

air table, which I'm sent to air table stuff all the time. Yes. So how can I integrate air table to what I do and why? Okay. So now you've hit my sweet spot. So I love air table. It's a little bit too expensive for, you know, what it is, but yet the value it provides, I think, is enormous. Relative to, again, creating lots of spreadsheets or something else.

Now, I suppose part of this maybe is a little bit nostalgic. When I started out my career in the early, early webs, and I'm talking like the late, late 90s, I was building access databases. And access was such an amazing database, at least for me, because it provided kind of a visual tool for laying out relationships between data. And as you, you know, probably figured out by now, the way my brain works is by connecting, you know, patterns with data and information and trying to see things that, you know, are related or correlated or similar. So what Airtable allows me to do is to organize so much information that, I guess the way that I approach it is that when you build an Airtable database, you're essentially mapping a bunch of nouns. And then you're creating attributes of those nouns. And then that's the data that goes into the columns of that database. And so the more nouns or noun types that you have, the more interrelationships you can create between those different tables of nouns. and then you can do filtering or things like that.

So what's a concrete example of this? Well, I manage all of my product hunting activities in an air table. So people submit a form. I get all the information for their hunt. And then each of those hunts is a noun. But each of the makers of those product hunts, they are also nouns. Those are people. And so there's a people table within my air table, which relates to all of those products.

And then I do some consulting calls. and each of those calls has its own table, of course, and each of the makers then does those calls. And so now I have relationships between products, between makers, between calls, and on and on. So you can see how the database kind of allows me to understand better, you know, what I'm doing, what products are happening, and to get insights into, you know, what's trending

and who I've worked with, frankly, over time. So it's a note-taking app that also you can, like, throw up for people and be like, well, here, this and I can show it to you. You know, so that's, I mean, you could. I know. I feel like it's like really using, that's like it's a way overpowered tool for notes. Now, granted, you and I used it last, last season to get a bunch of input for our top stories episode.

And so in that case, I was able to spin up a form very quickly. It has a much more simplistic version of kind of like typeform where you can get surveys and have people fill out information for you. It's not very sophisticated in that sense. But it's fast, it's easy. The interface is, I think, really pleasant to use. And, oh, the one big thing that I like more about Airtable than Notion is that it's much more performant. Like, it's just, it's much faster. And that makes a big difference when you're trying to load, you know, thousands of records or work with lots of data.

So, yeah, if you're going to use, you know, like if you want to do note-taking, I think the stuff that we talked about before is much better. Let me get into stuff that I can comment on. What's your go-to calendar thing? Is it Calendly? No. Well, it depends. So I do use Caliomely. Probably not so well.

I feel like, actually, I'd be very curious to hear how you organize your time and schedule. I've been using, yeah, go ahead. So I'll just lay it out and then I'm curious to hear what you do. So I use Google Calendar. Google Calendar is kind of like where everything goes to live. I use Fantasticalo to actually, like, you know, on a daily basis, which connects to... A thousand percent FantasticCal. If no one is...

If someone listening is not aware of Fantastical, I can... There's nothing I could recommend more, especially if you're in the Mac ecosystem. But, yes, go on. And so, by the way, the reason why Fantastical is so great is because it is one of those natural language tools that allows you to just write what you want, you know, meeting with Brian every Thursday, 6 p.m., TechBeam Rion Home Experience until, you know, January 2023. And Fantastic. I will understand that. The heat of the universe, yes. And it'll actually just create those events for you. And it's amazing. So their natural language processing is amazing. And so relative to

Google Calendar, which doesn't offer that, it really speeds things up. Now, Google Calendar has done a lot to facilitate collaboration. So now you can add other people's calendars. You can see their availability if you work in the same organization. Those things are really good. Fantastic Al has added the ability to propose changes and different times for meetings, which I think is okay. That is something that Cal only kind of supports. Here's where my stuff breaks apart. So I have like my personal calendar. Then I have a calendar that I share with my partner Joe. And so she and I put all of stuff on the same calendar so we know what we're doing and what we're up to. Then we have a house calendar so that the kids can see what's going on and the kids can actually add their items to the

house calendar. And what I haven't been able to figure out is how to connect my actual availability to Cali. Because I have stuff on a calendar that is not my events. It's my partner's events. And yet I need to see it. And sometimes I need to block that stuff off. So I don't know. Cali is great like for booking times. But I suppose you kind of have to be very specific. about when you're making your time available, as opposed to what the dream was, if you remember X.coma.I, which was like sort of an AI, which was like sort of an AI calendar service, it would sort of allow people to book open slots on your calendar. Well, most of my daily time has taken up or is blocked not only by my stuff, but my partner stuff and the kid stuff. Yeah, I've been

messing around with VimCal, which you and I talk about, I think you hunted them at some point. It's essentially the superhuman of calendars, which, of course, if you know what superhuman is, superhuman is a kind of like command line based way of working with your Gmail. I guess is how I'd put it. Yeah. So let me ask you about that. Are you still a superhuman user? Because I famously bowed out when they required me to do an hourly, an hour onboarding for it.

And I'm like, screw you. I kind of regret that. Yeah. Well, because in some ways it's kind of like screw yourself. Like because, and I'll say this because, okay. Okay. This is going to tee up, of course, one of my very, very sort of, I don't know, strong passion areas, which is command lines and Alfred and this stuff. So let's get into that. But so the reason why Superhuman does these 30 minutes, 60 minute onboardings is because a lot of people don't really know how to use their either like keyboard shortcuts or commands. and superhuman is all built around keeping your fingers on the keyboard and not using the mouse.

So a lot of people, if you just watch them, you watch how they use computers, they are kind of very kind of explicit interface interaction oriented. They want to press all the buttons, you know, to make sure that the thing that they want to happen actually happens. And that is effective but not efficient. So superhuman is all about kind of getting you into the flow and moving quickly in triaging your email and either setting reminders or responding right away or BCCing people and doing introductions, like the idea is just to power through your email once you learn those keyboard shortcuts. So the onboarding experience is designed around that so that you can play your email like a game.

And, you know, I regret it because one of the problems that I have now is that I wear so many email hats. I'm literally jumping from lily pads. I've had an email from my first company for 20 years that I never check anymore. And then I went to Gmail, a personal Gmail that I never use it anymore. Then I have the internet stream podcast. That's sort of become my personal. And then now there's the right home media one. There's the tech meme one.

There's the right home fund one. So what I do half the time, and it's sort of, accidentally, it's siloing. So it kind of works for me, except for the fact that I miss things, right? So I know that what I'm missing out on is being like an email, sort of, you know, fighter pilot or something.

In your cockpit, huh? A real email jockey where, like, everything could be coordinated. I mean, Chris, I literally on my phone, assign different email apps to my emails as opposed to having them in one unified inbox. No, so first, you're not crazy. And second, the idea of sharding your different identities into different apps, I think is actually a very common, if not brute force way of solving the problem, right?

Whether it's with browsers and having separate cookie jars, so you can go to like Safari and be signed in under one account and go to Chrome and be signed in under a different, you know, Google account or something. That is a very common way to solve for this problem. Fortunately, I mean, having been someone who worked on, you know, internet identity for a long time, because it's so critical, it's so important. And I mean, I think the thing that's maybe that you're alluding to or not saying out loud is that you need a way to know for sure that the account that you're acting as is the one that you intend to be acting as. And so you're using apps as a way of kind of slipping into different exoskeletons, if you will, like I'm thinking like Iron Man, so that you know that what you're doing. doing is, you know, sending an email from the right place as opposed to the wrong place.

And it's, I find one of the things that's really challenging is like, so I have registered the mail to handler on my Mac to Superhuman. But sometimes when I click on a mail to, which doesn't happen that often, the wrong email address will actually be, or the wrong email account will be activated. And then I end up actually sending an email from the wrong account. And then I'm like, oh my God, oh my God, this is horrible. Thankfully, superhuman will allow me to do or to undo that send and then resend, and then resend, it from the right account. So let me explain a few things. So superhuman actually will allow you to have

multiple accounts that you're signed into. I don't know if it's up to five, whatever it is. And you just use command K to activate the command bar. And then you can type switch and you can switch to a different account. So very quickly you can move between those different accounts. From a browser perspective, I use Chrome profiles very intentionally and very heavily because it allows you to sign into differ to Google accounts and to manage those identities simultaneously all using the same browser. As well as you can't exactly share extensions. I need you to stop for a second. What was that?

Chrome. Chrome what? Chrome profiles. In fact, I just wrote a blog post about this. Okay. Because it explains how to open, here, I'm going to share this and pin this tweet. So it's how to use or how to open. links in specific Chrome profiles.

Okay, so what is a Chrome profile? A Chrome profile, you can imagine it's, it allows you to have, well, let me start with a higher level sort of understanding of it, and then how you can adapt it to yourself. So if you are a Mac user, you can create multiple users on your Mac. So for example, if you have a shared computer or PC or whatever, you know, Brian, if you and I lived in the same house, you would have your account, you sign into it. you've got all your apps.

When I sign in, I have my apps, all my preferences. Well, this allows you to do the same thing at the browser level. So when you create Chrome profiles, you can create multiple profiles for different people. And the reason why this, well, it's not the only reason why this exists, but Chrome OS necessitated the creation of these different profiles. Well, the good news is you can use this for your personal purposes. So you can have one Chrome profile for your own personal Google account and then one for your professional Google account. and then one for your professional Google account. And you can have those things.

You can log into both. You can sync across your devices, and you can keep everything separate. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay. I'm going to link that tweet. Okay. Well, for email, the real problem is that people have to chase me around, like, you know,

for Christmas when my mom was like, where should I send your gift cards? Like what address we actually find them at? Because it's evolved over the years and everyone knows how to reach me anymore. Let me, this is going to like a real left turn, but let's talk about crypto and NFT stuff. Like the only wallet I've ever used is Metamask. Is that old school now? What should I be moving towards? Yeah.

So MetaMask is kind of like the OG. You know, the interface feels OG. And it's very popular. It's quite common. It's robust. The mobile app is shit. So I would say a lot of crypto on mobile really sucks. A new entrant into the marketplace is the Rainbow Wallet.

And we've actually, we had Jackson who works for those guys here on the pod last year. I think the Rainbow Wallet is actually really great. They just, who did they just hire? I think, oh, they hired a bunch of folks from the Messenger team. So you can imagine that a lot of the folks who are working on crypto and Messenger and DM or whatever it was last called before David Marcus left are now going to be working on Rainbow. And I think Rainbow has done just a really great job in terms of the interface and the experience and it's great.

If you do use Rainbow Wallet, and I think it's, you can get to it at Rainbow.Me, you can create your own wallet. It's very simple, very fast. And then if you go to any website that you want to sign in with your crypto account, you'll need to use something called wallet connect. Now, again, as an old school internet identity guy, like I'm very familiar with the idea of choosing your identity provider or your identity service and then, you know, clicking on sign in with Google, sign in with Facebook. Well, sign in with your wallet is a very similar type of concept.

So if you use Metamask, great. You can sign in. You can access your funds. you're basically creating a public, private key pair. And the way that that works is that you are the only person who knows your secret phrase. And that's what allows you to sign transactions that prove that you as the wallet owner have the, I guess, the permission to do so. And so then when you sink across your different devices, you're moving that secret phrase with you and you're signing them using, I'm not going to get into all the cryptography, but it allows you to do the same. So to your point, MetaMask is, it's great, it's solid.

I think Rainbow Wallet is a much more user-friendly tool. One of the things actually, I'll just give you one more benefit of this. So one of the things in CryptoLand that's becoming more common and more popular are these things called EnS domains. So these are kind of like friendly looking names, like domain names, but for crypto wallet addresses. So it is highly unlikely, although I'm sure that there are humans who have remembered their crypto wallet addresses. But these human-friendly, human-readable address forms are becoming quite popular. So people say, oh, drop your E&S, drop your ether address, and you'll see people doing that on Twitter. Well, one of the things you can do is you can take those E&S domains, which end in .etH, you can go into Rainbow Wallet, and you can actually follow other people.

So you can actually look at other people's wallets and see what's in their wallets, not only like what NFTs they've purchased, but how much crypto they have. It's such a weird, mind-blowing thing. And once you have that experience, you're like, oh, my God. But anyway, so Rainbow makes it very easy, very possible. So in that way, it's a little bit like a kind of like crypto Twitter and that you can see what your friends are up to and what kind of stuff they're into. Let me ask a terrible sort of noob, not noob, but a basic question because. Because questions are great. I mean, like, when you do your NFTing, your crypto trading, like, what are you doing

it on? And let me say this, I've done lots of things. I've, you know, transferred, you know, I've wrapped EF and used exchanges. But also, like, I've got freaking Bitcoin sitting in Coinbase since 2013, you know. So, like, so what would you say? is your main thing when you're doing NFT stuff or crypto stuff. And that could be either the platform you're using

or the wallet as we just talked about or whatever. This is such a hard question. And I don't want to like bore the audience per se by making this like sort of a big crypto thing. I think what's more interesting about this is the way in which computing is changing. And the things that people are now wanting to do or able to do, you know, online,

these social platforms is evolving. And crypto and the underlying mechanics of crypto are allowing people to engage in those activities. What do I mean by that? Well, for starters, commerce used to be very, very difficult and used to have to go through sort of a centralized middleman credit card processor or something like that to buy and sell goods. Now this can happen actually on a peer to peer basis through the blockchain. So the reason why that is so exciting is because it allows for a lot of emergent, experimental, new ideas to be tried out, many of which are completely stupid and asinine and make no sense. But think about it this way. I realize this. It feels like we're entering into a space. Again, we've talked a lot about the, you know, software is eating the

world. Like, it's the democratization of publishing, lots of things. But what seems to be happening is we are now changing who can mint or create credit cards. And I don't quite know even like what that means, but I've always thought about kind of, you know, the, I mean, there's many around the world, but the four major credit card providers, always being the ones who would sort of just be there, you know, behind the scenes, you know, creating kind of like the rails for this and the trains would run on time and you'd get on the train, you'd go from one place to another, and it was always handled by someone else. But crypto changes those assumptions so that now, you know, Brian, you could sort of issue your own credit card and I could, you know, buy into your, you know,

your coin, and I can hold that, and I can do a bunch of transactions, and no one else has to be privy to that. So it sets up a new set of primitives that allow people to try things out on the web that weren't possible before. So the way I'm trying to answer your question is to say, I'm doing a lot of exploring. I'm seeing what other people is doing. I'm using, you know, I'm in Telegram a lot. There's a lot of bots on Telegram that allow me to watch or see what people are buying, what things they're engaging in, what they're trying out. I've actually found Twitter Blue, Twitter's subscription service, to be incredibly useful to find out what's going on and to explore. Specifically, I use top articles. And the way that top articles works is that it

kind of works like a tech meme for the people that you follow on Twitter. So if a bunch of people that you follow all share the same link, you get the signal that everyone thinks it's interesting. And so top articles kind of is a, I don't know, it's like, what's the word? What do you do? There's a word between pining and mining. It's when you're panning for gold. Panning for gold. And so the best links, the most interesting things sort of bubble up there. And I find a number of interesting Discord servers or things like that.

Then there's a number of tools that have been created that watch different people's wallets or that, again, allow you to follow people's wallets. Like there's one called context. I think it's just context on Twitter. And you can put in, again, people's Ethereum addresses, their E&S domains, and follow and see what they're up to and what they're doing. All these things provide you ways of seeing what's happening. And anyways, I guess, does that answer your question? Yes. And this is, I mean, all of this is exactly what I wanted to go into. Because let me ask you this.

To stay on top of crypto web three stuff, do you find yourself, do you find yourself using Discord, Telegram? Like, what is what is the main place that you? you go to be like, well, this is where I'm staying on top of. Yeah. For me, the trifecta of Twitter, Discord, and Telegram are it. I think it's the delusion of information, you know, that I feel like I'm trying to stay on top of is just enormous. I've never, I can't say I've never, but yeah, I've never, I've never been exposed to this much kind of divergent energy across the internet, you know, as as now. And, you know, I don't mean to, I don't know, like overly center on my experience,

but as the guy that came up with the hashtag to try to learn more about what was going on, you know, in everybody's lives to now find myself in this moment where there's just, it's just too much. There's just like stuff going on every day. And when I find new pockets of, you know, activity and people doing things, like, these are massive cities and massive sets of activities that are not, coordinated and are doing things on their own. And I'm like, wow, this really, like, it's coming into its own. And that's very different because I feel like there was a time 10 years ago where

you could kind of see every app as it was coming out. You could, you know, download it, try it out, sign up for an account, see if they got it right. And then, you know, find some friends and go through those procedures very quickly. I feel like that happens like almost every day now. There's a new app. There's a new service. There's, you know, somebody else launching a Dow or launching a coin or launching an NFT or something. And it's really, really hard to stay on top of. So, one, I think that's more like the real world. You know, there's just every day. You can't be in every city. In every city, there are, you know, millions of people who are doing things. And so you have to kind of, I think, find the people that are interesting to you that are, what I think of as

emitters. And when I think about emitters, I think about people who have found a kind of truth or type of signal that they don't have any like question or doubt about and they send out that signal to the internet because it's true. And they pursue that grain of truth to whatever end makes sense to them. And it's amazing to sort of watch those things. Actually, it's funny. I was on the Peloton today and Mortensen, Dennis, Dennis Mortensen was the instructor. And he quoted Picasso and said that, I think Picasso's, that the purpose of life is to discover your gift. And then what was the other thing? And then like, and the goal of life is to essentially then share your gift with the world.

Which I thought was really great because it sort of reiterates or I guess reaffirms the way that I think about what's happening right now. I think that there is, as much as there is negativity and haters and doubters and all the typical noise that always works against new and novel things that are happening. There's a set of people who are, I think, genuinely pursuing a vision or a view of the future and of how they want to be in it, how they want to act, how they want to interact. And I think that should be cultivated. I think you should pursue that. I think you should say yes to that and move towards it as opposed to being like, yeah, like, you know, NFT is so stupid. You know, ruining the planet. Like, I think we have to find some positivity someplace.

Well, here's the thing, though. like that's, this is, it's my job to stay on top of things, but that's the thing that people always miss where it's like, and I always talk about like generation gaps and things like that all the time, but it's when you decide, you know what, I'm not going to listen to this band because they're dumb and I'm not into this music. And then 20 years later, that's all of the music. If you were like, I don't believe in reality television when Survivor came out, well, 20 years later, you're not watching any television. Like, that's the thing is that like, if you turn yourself off to a thing where it's like, it's easy to do because it's like, well, I don't like this. This doesn't gel with me.

And then there's too much. And then it's just a fire hose, right? Yeah. But then when you shut that room, you close the door to that room, you'll never reopen it again. And because then you'll be behind two years later. So I always, even things that, like, I don't like and don't grok, like, I always try to, like, leave the doors cracked a bit, you know? Yes. Which, you know, especially for the crypto and.

So I think, I'm sorry, like, you know, to go, like, high level and abstract. And maybe this is, like, really annoying for people who just, like, want the, you know, the core hard stuff. But I think this is really important. And it feels important as we're entering into, like, a new year. And there is a moment to sort of reflect on what craziness 2021 was and what 2020 was. Like we've been in a very strange place for a couple years. And those who, I think, maintain their neuroplasticity and their ability to encounter new and foreign and unknown lands and say, okay, like, what does this land about? Like, what are we need to learn?

Like, what's going on here? I think is a pattern that can be used and applied to many things. You know, it's how I approach software. Many times I see, you know, founders or makers trying to solve the same problem, you know, in different generations. And sometimes the generations are very, you know, short in terms of their frequency. And sometimes they take many years for someone to come back around and try it again. And it's very easy, you know, and obvious to over-emphasize memory and say, oh, because I remember this happening before and it didn't work out, well, it's not going to work this time. as opposed to trying to sort of be more expansive and say, well, actually, there are many, many more things that are happening now that weren't happening then.

And so there may be echoes of what I've seen or heard previously, but I need to be open to a new emergent or kind of generative outcome that I can't anticipate. And so what if I look at this on the merits as opposed to what is very easy to do, which is to think about this from the negative or like what if it doesn't work? Well, what if it does? And what if it works a little bit and starts to grow? I think the example of Figma is really good. You know, I was wrong. I didn't think enough about where browsers were going or what they could do or what they could be. I didn't think enough about how CPU was going to get better and faster and how the mobile revolution was going to change battery technologies such that now we have these, you know, amazing M1 MacBook Pros that will last all day and longer because they're using technologies that were designed for, you know, micromobility.

And I just, I didn't think enough about that cross-pollination between these things until I think we are in such a rich moment right now that I guess I just keep my eyes open. I don't expect to see everything or to understand everything. But I'm trying to really take a beginners or child mind to these things because I know that what's happening now is going to determine, you know, not only this year, but probably the next four or five years, it's all starting right now. It's funny that you use the child's mind thing because, you know, as a perfect example of like closing a door, like when the MCU started, I kind of was not at a place where I gave a shit about, because my whole thing about, I was a film major in school. So like, oh, Jesus Christ, comic book movies. Every movie ends with a superhero punching the bad guy in the face and destroying a city. but again, if you close that door in 2010, you've missed out on all of the movies that people care about for the last decade. And kids, me having kids has helped save me from, you know, being out of touch in that way.

But at the same time, as I say again, like, one of the reasons I love my job is, especially when it comes to tech, I can't afford to close any doors because then I wouldn't be useful. people. Let me reset back to narrow, tangible stuff. Let's get into the fact that you recently upgraded your Mac. I want to get to that in a second, but go down your list of a couple things. You sent me sort of like your step-by-step of how to set up a new Mac thing. So number one, you still use Alfred? Every day. I am such a big Alfred fan. And for those who don't know, Alfred essentially is a launcher. I believe it preceded spotlight on the Mac, but it's one that, you know, I used in a very perfunctory, you know, kind of simple way for a very long time. And at the start of the pandemic, I realized that I'd been using

this app and there was a lot of depth to it, but I really hadn't dug in. And so I decided to, like, get much deeper and learn more about the real unlock, which are these workflows. So a workflow essentially is kind of a little program that is easy to distribute and you plug it into Alfred and you can activate the workflow using a number of different I guess triggers. And those triggers could be a keyword. It could be a hotkey or a shortcut combo, something like that. And I essentially started to build little apps. You know, I'm not a programmer or developer. I mean, I can copy and paste, but, you know, this is one of the things that I hope to learn this year is a little bit more programming. But I was doing so many things inefficiently, as I said, sort of pointing and clicking and moving around.

Like, one of the things that I do every day now constantly is I search for my own tweets so that I can expand threads that I started in some cases like years ago. And why do I do that? Well, it's sort of like a long running record or archive of the things that are happening. I guess the way that I have, you know, think about myself in some ways is, I'm kind of like the photographer of like the internet. You know, if you think about like sort of war photographers who go around and, you know, are they shooting, people shooting each other, but with a camera, I feel like I do the same thing with interfaces.

And I've been doing it since, I don't know, 2006. So I have tens of thousands of screenshots. And I uploaded many of them to Flickr. And of course, Flickr is, you know, sort of not as relevant anymore. I use Twitter a lot more. And what I'm trying to do is to document like the, every evolving set of patterns that are defining software that we live with today. So one of the things that I started doing last year was I created these hashtags when I

discover or find new features in products or apps, and I want to share them. So if you search, you know, you could search on Twitter and you'd probably find other people's tweets. If you search specifically for mine, you'll find a bunch of new stuff under hashtag new Twitter or hashtag new Spotify or hashtag new Google Drive. I have a bunch of them. And I've created an Alfred workflow that essentially allows me to search my own tweets for specific cash tags and pull that stuff up very, very quickly in the browser so I can continue those threads very, very quickly and sort of stay in flow. So I use it all the time all day long, and I've only gotten deeper into it this year.

you use bartender like I do which again Mac people if you're not familiar with bartender very vital actually now that I'm up there I'm going to give you a couple are you of pop clip which this might be a really specific one do you know pop clip I believe I do remind me if it's the keyboard I'm sorry the clipboard tool it's basically a clipboard tool. So if you're somebody that cut and paste a lot like I do on a daily basis, like it basically supercharges your ability to cut and paste and not only carry through like, you know, the markup and the fonts and things like that, but like it's, it just allows you to manage for someone like me that's writing a script every day where I'm

pulling quotes from, you know, five dozen different browser tabs at a time. It's an invaluable tool for me for managing my clipboard. So I use a tool called paste. And I think paste is great, probably very similar to PopClip, a little more modern in terms of the interface. It syncs between my phone and my MacBook Pro. And in it, you can create collections. And so one of the things that's really helpful about it is I have a hot key so I can pull at my clipboard. and then I have these collections, which are folders of things that I often paste or send to different people.

So, for example, I have a product hunt collection within paste that one allows me to send my airtable form to people who want me to hunt their products. But I also have a number of product hunt's help center links saved because of the number of common questions that I get. So people are like, well, can I link to my, you know, product hunt post? I heard that like it'll get dinged and I'll lose points or whatever. I'm like, no, here it is. Here's the Help Center article, and I send that off.

So there are a bunch of things like that that you can save in paste if you happen to, you know, send the same links often or to different people. I do use something called snippets in Alfred. And this allows you to use either plain text or rich text to format commonly used, you know, links or information, whatever it might be. And it also supports variables. It's not super robust, but it does allow you, for example, to, I've created something where it'll take what's on the clipboard, and it'll paste it into an email that I send out after I hunt people's products that have the link to their product hunt and a bunch of other information. So you can also set up that way.

So that's another thing that I use Alfred for. Alfred has its own clipboard manager too, but I don't find it quite as good because it's not as visual. What do you use for backup? Because I don't even know what they call it anymore. And it might not be consumer-facing, but I've used crash plan, which I think they call Code 42 now for years and years and years. Do you have an auto? Okay. Well, I have that too.

Listen, by the way, I have a network-attached storage device. I have a hard drive. that I connect, I use a time machine, but I've also, code 42, which used to be called Crash Plan when it was a consumer-facing product, which I don't think it is anymore. But it's like, I always have to remember to turn it off for bandwidth purposes when I record something. Right. Because you're like, that does, that's web-based backup, right?

Yes, yes. Okay. So in the past, I've used something called copy, what is it, something CCC, Bombich Software. Why do I remember these things? Carbon Copy Cloner. is something that I used for quite a while that will create sort of a verbatim copy of your hard drive to another disk or drive. There's another tool called Superduper that's something similar. So if you're more on the, I don't want to touch the cloud kind of thing or I don't want this time machine, those will work.

I also do use Dropbox. And I sync a lot of stuff and I use selective syncing to make sure that I'm not downloading everything. And it offloads and stuff. Yeah, see, I've never done that full Dropbox conversion that some people live their lives in, which one more one more question. And then I do want to get to the maxing. What do you use for your password manager? Because, by the way, if you're a human being listening to me right now and you're not using a password manager, you're not a modern. Make it like this year to make the switch.

Yeah. Yeah. So, well, I use one password. You know, we had those guys on the show. As do I am. And I have for a decade now, I guess. Same. Same.

You know, and I would say, you know, my use of software has changed. And I think it's very important to start noticing and thinking about, you know, one, some of the things that we were talking about with the change in crypto and the change in software. And the nature of how software and the web and all these things are kind of, you know, pushing on each other, because I am now like a paying subscriber to a number of these apps. And one password is one of them. You know, for a long time, I kind of just, you know, had one license and that was it. And it was a desktop app. And, you know, fine. I've gone full in on the one-password 8th conversion.

So have I. You know, it's not perfect. And by the way, people, listen, if you, if you're not using a password manager, I want you to understand something. So there's not, I don't replicate a single password that I use, which is the main point of having a password manager is every password is, I don't know a password. If you put a gun to my head, I wouldn't be able to give you a password until I got into one password. So number one, it's just, you know, opsec people, you know, if one of your passwords get stolen, the rest of your passwords aren't, you know, susceptible. But think about this. It also works on my frigging phone so that when I'm somewhere else and I need to log into a site, like, it just goes to, you know, it scans my face.

And like, so the fact that one password follows you around wherever you need to go whenever you need it, like, If you're like, oh, I can never use a password manager because like that's too it's not complicated. And once you, it's one of those things where once you give yourself over to it, you can't imagine living without it. And let me, let me add on that and say something a little bit different. So one, not only should you be using a different password, of course, for every website that you sign into, at this point, you know, if you do anything online that touches anything

that's important to you, whether it's your photos or whether it's your bank account, it's really important to use different secure passwords that, you know, inevitably, one of these, you know, one of these services, one of these accounts that you use will get breached. And you just don't want to create more surface area for you to be vulnerable and exposed. In addition, you want to be shifting over to two-factor authentication for everything. And one password makes it very easy to get those tokens and to, you know, reuse them on the phone and on desktop. The other reason why I find OnePassword 8 and beyond, which is the OnePassword.com account service to be very useful, is that my partner and I now have several accounts that we will share or need access to.

Yes. And the kids are starting to have their own accounts as well. So you can add. And also, that's where you store your kids' social security numbers. That's where you store like the COVID vaccination information, you know, healthcare cards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, you can use your phone to like, all right, my COVID stuff. I take a picture with my phone.

It goes right into one password. Yeah, exactly. So anyways, I guess maybe that answers the question. I don't want to like oversell it. But I do think that moving to a world where you have a protected place where, especially, you know, if you are the person who, you know, decides which apps, you know, your family members should or could use or you suggest them to people, you know, we're doing that in our household.

and the fact that we can now share securely passwords, you know, is a real game changer. You know, it's no longer about having, you know, my partner or my kids, like, you know, asked me to send them the password via text, which then if their phone gets stolen and they forgot to like lock their phone, now, you know, we're exposed. Now they have a secure way of doing that. So it just, it just really helps and it reduces the overall stress levels. Let me put in a shout for if you're not also peeled into the two-factor authentication world, like go ahead and do that too because it's not as annoying as you think it's going to be

and especially if you use things like one password it's fine but like you know I do two-factor authentication for everything that'll allow me to do like I think it was a year or two ago maybe it was in lockdown that I totally went over to that so I'm just doing a shout for that like go ahead if you're not into the two-factor thing you should do that Chris you just got a new MacBook Pro, was it? I did, yes. Okay, let me ask you this. Yeah.

Where do you come down on when you get a new computer or even a new phone starting from scratch or downloading from the cloud and like reinstalling? Because when I do finally pull the trigger on my next Mac, I'm for sure because it's been a long time now, I'm going to start from scratch. So what's your philosophy on that? Okay. First, before we go on, we've got some questions and some follow-ups from the Twitters.

So Matt Hartman asked. Oh, yeah. We should have done that too. Sorry. Right. So you guys can obviously, you know, either send us DMs or leave replies and we'll see it. Actually, I'm going to ask before we end for people to give us their recommendations, too. So we'll do that.

So anybody who wants to do that. Yeah, so anybody who wants to start coming up in the next, you know, five or ten minutes, please start thinking about your suggestions and we'll bring you guys up. To answer Matt Hartman's question, which I think is a great question. How secure is one password itself, right? You're putting all your keys into like this one castle. Is it secure? And, you know, my sense and my answer is that I believe that it is secure. I did share a link and I'll pin the link here that talks about some of the security design of one password.

What's going on outside? They've been at it for a long time. They've raised a lot of money. Does that mean that it's secure? Not necessarily. On the other hand, relative to me doing it myself or let's say using Apple keychain, I think one password gives me enough flexibility to store the number of things that I want to secure in a way that I feel is secure. I mean, these guys have been doing it for a long time and they have that background.

So hopefully, Matt, that does answer your question. We also had a question about whether I use obsidian. which is sort of a, I don't want to say it's kind of a quasi competitor to bear. It's one of those kind of marked down slash. There was a period last year where kind of linked documents like Notion was very trendy. And there was like the Notion tribe and there was the Obsidian tribe and they were going at it. And I feel like, you know, crypto was kind of taken over those battles. I did try Obsidian.

I think obsidian's, you know, interesting as a markdown editor goes. I didn't quite understand the data model, and I'm sure for some people who, so there were some people who like to create a lot of linked notes. There was a time period where I was using wikis online, and actually there was a desktop app, I think that Daniel Punkass is his name on Twitter built. Was it that? Anyways, that allowed me to create kind of brackets to create links and then new documents, and you could kind of traverse, you know, the notes that you were creating very easily. And that was great. I think Evernaut might have even had that. I just, I don't know, like publishing to the web and, you know, using native linking styles is just more fitting for me.

So that's why I haven't really gone down the obsidian path. And then I also got one question from Andrew about budgeting and financial planning tools. And man, I wish that I had a better answer for this because my partner and I are starting to do this. And I will tell you, here's what we do. And I do not recommend this for everybody. But we literally will download all of our account statements and we will put it into an air table that I've set up. And I run reports and I have views. And this is how she and I actually kind of audit what we're spending and where our money's going.

I've also started to use a tool called card pointers. It's available on iOS. You can also use the same native app on M1 Max. And what it allows you to do is to plug in your credit cards and actually see whether you've, whether you're using the benefits, the discounts and things like that. So we're going to start using that. I've been in touch with the developer.

He's got an Android app coming out soon. So we're checking out. Otherwise, there's something called True Bill. I've used, I don't know, a bunch of things, but I don't know, nothing really works so well. Do you have joined accounts yet? No. And I don't know if we will.

And of course, this is a personal choice. I think, Brian, I remember you said you do. No, no. Oh, you don't. Oh, you have not done that. So we're coming up on our 10-year wedding anniversary this year, and I think we're going to pull the trigger on, to this day, we have separate bank accounts.

I have no idea how much money she has. She has no idea how much. And it's sort of fallen into a thing where there's certain things. She buys, like, groceries and, like, kids clothes, and then there's certain things that I do and et cetera, et cetera. And it's just always worked out that way, but I don't know. I think we're going to finally co-mingle now. Well, one thing that I will say about this, you know, and as much as I'm, you know, into

apps and software solving problems, they don't solve all problems. One of the things that my partner and I actually did, and I think are still in the process of doing, is having a series of conversations about what money means to each of us and actually getting into how money makes us either uncomfortable or empowered or whatever, you know, starting, you know, with an analysis, you know, kind of of ourselves and then bringing that into a ideally a safe space in a container because I think, you know, once you co-mingle those things, if you bring your own assumptions and your own ideas and, you know, the way your parents married, you know, manage money or whatever into a relationship, suddenly you can bring up a lot

of things that were not conscious before and it can cause a lot of, you know, stress and friction and, you know, your partner is spending a bunch of money. You're like, what are you doing, spending money on this? And then, you know, you relive your parents' drama. I don't know, not until I get too into it. But I would start with some of those conversations first. I'm afraid of that because the reason we've never commingled is because, you know, I've, from my entire adult life, run businesses to the, so that on a daily basis, I know, like in my bones how much money I have. Because it's like, oh, this business is doing well, that business is not doing well.

It seems like an intuitive sense of where you are financially. Right. And I've never been able to get to that point where it's like, well, here's a, here's a, an Excel spreadsheet that tells you, no, I have to feel it, right? Yeah. It's sort of like the weather, you know, or something like. And, and my mood changes like that. Like my wife knows that now. She's like, oh, shit, is something going wrong with one of your companies?

right now because you're in a pissing mood. And so, like, I don't know how to have somebody else, you know, I can't ask Lisa to behave that way. You know, like, so I don't know. This will be an interesting experiment. So my partner, Joe, is actually, I mean, I think there's going to be like a financial, what does she call it? It's almost like a couples therapist, but around money. And so I think we're going to have a few sessions with this person. You know, because they know the language.

They know where the, you know, minds tend to show up in relationships. And so we're going to work with that person to work through the stuff. So if you and Lisa get the chance, that might actually be something to think about. Yeah. Because, like, it's crazy. So many adult relationships end because of money and because of the way that money is managed differently or because we just don't have the ability or skills to talk about it. And it's, you know, as it's becoming more and more part of the web, like, it's just part of our everyday experience.

And you need to like know, especially if you're going to commingle in those ways, you know, that you can, you know, trust the other person. Or at least, you know, maybe, well, I think trust is actually the foundation, right? So can you communicate about it even if you don't agree or you want to choose different behaviors? Okay. I do want to ask people for- I want to answer your question. So, yeah. Yeah, I want to, right.

So in a way to get back to asking people for their suggestions for apps and tools and things like that, answer my question about what's your philosophy on when you get a new device, start from scratch or refresh from the backup. So as of maybe, you know, MacOS 10.10, I think starting from scratch is a very bad idea in like 99% of cases. I would do that previously. And what I found, and, you know, my experience is going to be very different for different people and different people use their computers in very different ways. And, you know, some people modify their systems and personalized and customized like I do. Other people will keep the same doc icons for 10 years and, you know, won't change the background, you know, wallpaper ever. That is not me. And so what I

found a couple years ago when my laptop was stolen and I had to forcefully start all over again, there was a lot of stuff that I, you know, used implicitly, whether it was in terminal or whether it was, you know, apps and packages that I installed that were just gone. And so now that, you know, so much of the Mac kind of manages your account and your personal account is so important to your whole Mac experience, I think you should probably stick with it. Now, that said, this time around, I, with my new MacBook Pro, I started from scratch. I completely, you know, got rid of everything. And the reason is because I started by doing a time machine restore, and I found that things were crashing. My apps weren't working.

Now, that might have been because I didn't have the arm compatible apps. You know, they were still built for Intel. Maybe some of the customizations or preferences were corrupted. I don't know what it was. I was not having a good time. And I started over, and it's been great ever since. And so what I've done in the process, and hopefully at some point I'll publish this, is I went through and I took an inventory of all the stuff that I had. installed and all the things that I was using. And I went through one by one. And I, you know,

we decided, you know, sort of Marie condoed my shit and was like, do I want this? Do I not? Does it Spark Joy? Does this this app that I downloaded? That I knew of use. No. That's why I do it for both my phone and my computer every, I don't know, half a decade or so is because what you do, what you discover is the things that you're carrying around that you don't need. Sure. Because you'll never notice that it's not there. Right. So, what I'll do, when I get a new computer, I won't immediately, you know, trade in the old one. I will literally sit with it for a good six months. Yep.

So that if there is something that I notice isn't there on my new thing. And also, I've sectioned off things like the photos into specific files and things. Like, I'll carry over the things that I know I need. And then the things that after six months, oh, by the way, I didn't even realize that that's not on my new computer. well, I didn't need it, you know. I definitely agree and I support that. And I've done more or less the same. And there have been those moments where I, you know, go to access something and I'm like,

oh, it's gone. So I think I've now done a good enough job of moving more of my Apple libraries onto external drives. And what I mean by that is my photos library. Now is on an external drive. My Apple music, which I don't use that often, but I still have sort of my legacy archive of MP3s and DJ mixes and stuff, that's on a separate drive. I've moved more and more of those things that, you know, kind of, you know, end up growing

and becoming these, actually my Apple TV library is now on a separate backup. Because I have like, you know, movies and videos from years ago. So those things, I think, if you can move them off, then you're fine. And I've also moved a lot more of my, you know, personal documents and things like that into Dropbox. And so I can just start fresh, do a re-sync. and that's fine. So that's how I use Dropbox in that way. But the things that you don't see, at least, you know, as a non-developer person who dabbles in code, is all the, like, home brew, you know, customizations and little scripts and things like that. And once you lose those, you know, like they're maybe from some GitHub repo that doesn't exist anymore, some app that, you know, some developer made in 2014. And, you know, you need that app to open that software and, you know, or the file. And it doesn't work anymore. So, but, yeah, this brings me back to my, you know, I think to your point, how much of the stuff do we need to

remember? And will we, like, remember? Will we ever go back to it? You know, I think there are some people who just interact with computers and they're like, whatever. Like, you know, every time I used to, you know, a computer, I just sign out and everything's gone. No big deal. Like, you know, I create a new Twitter account. Every time I, you know, want to go tweet or something. And I'm like, wow, it's so different. But okay. Cool. Hey, if you all want to share tips, ask whatever. Please raise your hand.

Come on up. Yeah, Remy has requested for a while. So if he's got one of those, but yeah, raise your hand and suggest apps, tips, tools, whatever for us. What do you bring into 2022 and what do you leave behind in terms of, you know, the stuff that you want to use? You want to use more of, less of? Let us know. Remy. We put everyone to say.

sleep. By the way, people, if you don't use your hand soon, the way we're going to close is I'm going to go through my Kindle and give you book recommendations, because that's my real superpower is here's what you should be reading. But, oh, my God, please. Take Daza. Remy, what you got? Did I and get rugged? Uh, okay. All right. So I'm up. Um, mine is actually an app that I started you, Chris? Oh, no. I'm still here. Okay.

Maybe Twitter is screwing us right now, and no one can come up. Oh. Remy, I was hearing Remy. Are you not? Oh, no, I'm not. So, see, there you go. There we go. All right.

I will, Remy, I will hold a space for you. Brian, be quiet. And then once Remy's done, I will let you know you can speak. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. me, floor is yours. So I'm a little bit more analog on certain things like journaling. I like to actually handwrite iPad stuff. And I found a really cool app at the end of Tony's 21 called Concepts, which is one of those. It has an infinite board. You can't like zoom infinitely, which is a little bit of a peppy of mine. But like you can change the background to being like dots or lines or graph.

Oh, do you use this on like an iPad or something? something? So the app is concepts. You can get to it at concepts.com. Yes. Okay. Oh, this looks great. I think I've actually seen this. Wow. And it's cross platform. This looks really cool. I absolutely love it. And the coolest part about it is it's like it's designed for like artists. So even with the infinite board, it has features like multiple layers and multiple different writing utensils, um, which I've, I love. I use it from journaling daily basis. Um, like I have a template. Um, Like, I have a template where I, like, drew a grid of, like, the 52 weeks in the year. And then, like, have, since it's an infinite board, you can just, like, put a little square where you, like, will copy notes over the same way, like, people use, like, paper journals.

And I like infinite board because my ADHD brain likes everything in one place. So I don't have to go anywhere. There was, what was actually? Was it called paper? Or it was called? And this paper is another one. It has infinite zoom and everything. but my one deal break on endless paper was I couldn't put the dot grid behind it.

It was just blank. It's always like one thing. Yeah, and this was the one thing. That dot grid was the deal was like the thing that I really like needed in order to, you know, regular bullet journal things. It allows you to draw the templates a little bit cleaner and, you know, set up some lines. And obviously you can do snap to grid on this too so you can make boxes really nice. easily.

Oh, that's nice. Yeah, I love this thing. Awesome. Cool. Thanks for me. We've got Daza, Daza Greenwood. You want to come up? Yeah, hey, how's it going?

Good. How are you? Really good. Thank you. So this year, I, okay, for a tool for notes, I kind of reverted for the last many years just a plain text, UTF-E-E-encoded, markdown period. So I've got it. it and then I sort of integrated with other systems in different ways.

But this year, for the first time, I went back through and made use of tags that I had sort of interspersed for... Oh, say more. Tags. So, yeah, so I use little at tags. Just to be different. Just to be different. I'm just kidding. So I can, everyone does it. And it is a problem when I have emails in there, but I'll usually just, just.

strip it out in real time and hashtags because it's marked down. At any rate, so I've got these ad tags and use them for actions and to-do lists or we have to write something or follow-ups or ideas. And for the first time, because of the nice break between Christmas and New Year's, I was able to kind of do some rejects and some grip and kind of go through the entire last year and not lose anything and see the patterns across multiple files and synthesized it. And so that's my hack, I guess, is just plain text and rechecks, you know, for the win. You know, I wonder if Obsidian actually might be a good solution for you,

because I think Obsidian does some of those cross-linkings sort of automatically for you. I don't know for sure, but it might be worth checking out, but that's really cool. I like that. Obsidian. Okay, thanks. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Tommy is up next.

Hey, guys. Thank you so much for letting me speak. a huge fan of the podcast. I recommend it to every tech person. I'm in the tech field, and I just, I've never had a bad review from it. So thank you so much for always putting on good content. So I am, you were talking about earlier, just kind of slipping into different personas, Brian, about like for your email apps on your phone. And like, I am that guy, right? So having different email apps for different things. But I also do that for notes. So on my setup of that guy, couple of dual 27-inch monitors, et cetera.

So for customer notes or client meetings, et cetera, I usually use OneNote because I found, while on video calls, if I'm using my Apple Pencil to write down notes, it's a lot better than if somebody sees me typing, they might think, oh, he's side chat in somebody or whatever. So I actually use the Apple Notes on my iPad, and that syncs up with the OneNote that's currently open on my desktop, so I can kind of best of both worlds, right?

Handwritten notes, and then kind of take screen caps, put it all together, aggregate it really quickly in real time. So that's the one notating thing that I do. The productivity, I'm an Omnifocus person. I know most people I haven't heard. Oh, like the Omni Group. Yeah. I used Omni-Graffle and that stuff for sure.

Oh, yeah. I love Omnifocus. It's awesome. I was listening to a podcast, though, and they talked about how OmniFocus is really good for kind of a macro view of things, but for micro, it can kind of get in the weeds. So I found what's called the Full Focus Planner, and you talk about going analytics.

and actually like writing out. And I've found that me and my partner with my wife and I, we actually will have both have them and kind of plan for the day and say, okay, well, what are we trying to get accomplished? And at the end of the day, you know, we kind of go back and review with each other. We both, you know, have crazy busy days, kids, et cetera, et cetera. So that kind of helps make it more micro to focus on what am I trying to get done. What am I trying to achieve?

And then it's written down. So anyway, I know I kind of ran through a few things. But I'm a huge fan of Pockets, like I said, really, enjoy all the talking back and forth. The Concepts app, I've already opened it up and took a look at that too. Nice. Thank you for recommending that earlier. I forget the gentleman's name, but anyway, that's... Yeah, yeah, I definitely check out concepts. Actually, you and your wife actually might find that very helpful and useful, and the kids too. Absolutely. And your whole thing about fantastical and content, there's a calendar for everything in our house.

There's a calendar for the dog. Exactly. Right. Yes. Without our customers, I'm lost. Anyway, thank you for the time. Appreciate it. Awesome. Tommy, thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Yash, you've been waiting. What have you got?

Hey, this is the first time I'm ever speaking at any tour space. So I'm excited to be here. The two apps that I'm absolutely in love with is I'll go one by one. So, you know, at least for me, I've always hated time tracking apps because I have to spend more time actually logging what I'm doing. right, the start and M. So I found this app called rise.io, like, that's literally the domain. Right.

What it does is... R-I-S-E or... R-I-Z-E, like R-I-Z-E dot I-O. Okay, got it. So what it does is that you basically do your work and automatically based on the app that you're using or the website that you're going, it will categorize it in some way. For example, if I'm on Pigma, it'll make it design. If I'm wasting time, it'll make it entertainment.

And so it's basically like you can do whatever you want and it'll automatically categorize your time. And there's another cool part where you know you can program it for like taking breaks or how many hours do you want to work. And not just that. If you open a specific working hour, it doesn't like it knows what's work and what's like not worth. Yeah. Hmm. That's good. And the best part what I love is it also tells me while working if I'm context,

how many times am I doing that or if I am like or if I'm getting distracted which apps really cost the distractions yeah I mean really loved it I think you guys should check it out the second app that I was absolutely I'm sure everyone loves Rome research but I'm not that's the one sorry it's Rome and obsidian and notion and all those guys yeah but in case you felt that Rome is too expensive for you and you don't want to be paying that subscription I found this app called RemNote, which used to be a Rome competitor, but had really bad UX. Suddenly, they raised so much money and now they're like really, really awesome in the

sense of like, so you know, if you guys are into those linkings and the bullet style note-making, I think RemNote is the outlining. If you're into outlining, it sounds like. It's outlining, but it's also sort of making linkages and connections between pages. So it's a little bit different. Like, for me, it's kind of like, if you're, you know, how, why does it help me as that? I used to journal on motion, but it felt like I have to type a document. Yeah. Yeah, I can just, I just come and vomit and things get connected and I can make links and stuff.

So it's, it's more for the draw, note taking. And then you can take this and like expand it to a big notion doc or a Google dog or whatever. Right. That's cool. that's pretty much different from me. Thank you. Sorry, now that I'm back and can speak again. Yes, welcome back.

Something that I thought of when somebody else was speaking was, Chris, what app do you use to listen to podcasts? You're a Spotify person, right? I am. I'm a Spotify. Okay. So my journey with podcast app, I won't overly bore you, but I do think it's kind of interesting. You know, I've used many of them. and for a while I was using Google Podcasts, actually.

It was pretty fast. It was clean. And I believe the offline experience was pretty good or something. Anyways, what ended up killing it for me was the Apple Watch experience for controlling the podcast playback was horrible. It just couldn't keep up. I don't know. And so I ended up dropping it. And it turned out that Spotify has done a lot of work on their Apple Watch experience.

for music and they ported it over to their podcast and so the Apple Watch experience of Spotify playlist is actually very good. So I do listen to podcasts on Spotify now. It's not as bad as I think a lot of people thought it was going to be. It was rough in the early days, but now I actually do both and it's totally fine. And actually one of the other things that I really like about using Spotify for that is that I can create playlists of my podcasts and then share them. So we have one of all the tech meme ride home experiences. And so it's really convenient in that way in a way that I haven't really been able to figure out with the Apple podcast app. Well, look, obviously I have a lot of feelings about this because this is going to make my living.

But do not use the Apple Podcast app. If you're going to use a non-Spotify app, which, by the way, I would not listen to podcast on Spotify either. If you're not using Overcast, I don't know. Overcast for many years. Okay. So, yeah, yeah, well, look, I mean, have we ever had Marco on? Jesus Christ. No, we have not.

Do you know him personally? A little bit, yeah. We've really never had him on it. From the day that he launched Overcast, I've used Overcast. So basically my entire podcasting life has been on Overcast. So if you're listening right now and you're not happy with Apple Podcasts, especially, please get off Apple Podcasts, please, please, please. go to Spotify if you want,

but if you want an alternative, try overcast, Marco Arment. Creator of Tumblr, you know, independent developer. Exactly. And he does this as his gig slash hobby is maintaining this app. That's one of the things that I love about it. But also, I think it's the best designed. And actually, you know what, I've,

let me go into, I think a third of our listenership is still overcast, which lets me know that yeah, that makes sense though. Yeah, I was going to say. So if it's a tech-heavy audience, it makes sense that that's really going to be. Okay. Yeah, go out. Two more folks. Cornelius, you want to come up?

Hey. Hey, hello. Long-time listener, first time caller. I'm welcome. I just looked at my Overcast stats. Overcast is saved me over 940 hours with the smart speed features. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.

Yeah, I'm a heavy podcast listener. I think a lot of my tools, my apps are going to probably be browser-based. Yep. We barely even got into the browser stuff, but yeah, go ahead. Yeah, Chris, you mentioned the Chrome profiles. Yep. And I do use that. It's just I'm now trying to run as few instances of Chrome as possible.

And I actually like Firefox's approach to isolation better, so containers. So you can create containers, and they're essentially like tab groups. I think behind the scenes, they're kind of managed as profiles, but I think it's a lot lighter weight. And then another feature that's built on top of it is that they have special containers for sites that are kind of notorious for tracking. So I think if I open the Amazon link, it's going to go to my shopping container. And if I go to Instagram or Facebook is going to put me in a Facebook container, but try to keep that activity segregated to that one container. So pretty, I like that. I'm a developer, and so I use a bunch of different browsers.

So I use an app called B-U-M-P-R. B-U-M-P-R. I think it's Ku-A-V-V-N. I think. Oh, how? Cool. It's the creator behind that. I could be wrong on the creator, but I think...

He was also the designer at the New York Times, so it's possible. It enables you, so when you click links, you can choose what browser you want to open the links in. Ah, so this is very similar to what I posted, my link about. I use an app called Switchbar, and there's another one called OpenIn, which is very lightweight. It's like two or three megs, very small. Switchbar is pretty chunky, to be honest. It's like 160 megs or something, but it does it. Is it a job?

I do see, let's see, get bumper.com. Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah. Yeah. B-U-M-P-R. Got it. Yep. And it's in the App Store.

Cool. Yeah, I used to use... Oh, this is nice. Yeah, you used one before they're called Choozy, but yeah, that's what I use currently is bumper. That's a great recommendation. Went back to RSS, so I'm using news net wire. Oh, net newswire. Yeah, it's open source now.

Yeah, yep, yep, yep. That's a blast for my past, too, right? Back when the social web was actually decentralized. And they're adding the first time back in. So, like, I had all of my feeds that used to be in Google Reader. I exported them over to Flipboard and to Feedly, and they added Feedly support. So I just hooked up Feedly or whatever and stuff. So the people are still published, I still get their updates.

A new one is, I think it was shared on Darren Fireball, it's vinegar. So vinegar is a safari extension. Okay. And it replaces the YouTube video embed with an HTML5 embed. Oh, nice. So I guess one way you want to use it, if you haven't paid for YouTube premium, you can try it out, right? Like on iOS, where you can, you know, like if you want to have background playback in the YouTube app or on the site, you have. premium but you can use vinegar and since it's going to use like the web native

email video player you can do background audio oh very clever right of course yep it's like a two or three dollar extension but it's it's like a significant quality of life upgrade I love that wait so and but you use Firefox and not Safari or use both I use everything okay I mean, like on my workbox, I've been having used Chrome more just because a lot of the apps we use just work best in Chrome or whatever. I prefer to use Firefox. And a lot of times I do personal stuff in Safari. If you have to use Chrome, shout out to Brave, who I still continue to use for a good three years now gone.

Yep. I would also add Sidekick. Sidekick is another Chrome browser that I use that does a much better job. And this is much more relevant when I was using my Intel Mac to aggressively manage memory and to essentially unload Chrome tabs to give you back some of that memory. Similar to what it sounds like Firefox does. Yeah, yeah. And I have to declare tab bankruptcy quite a bit. So I use, on Chrome and Firefox, I use session saver so I can just save all the, just save all the windows and all the tabs.

And then I just have things, like I have extensions that will just basically collapse all the open tabs into just one page. Oh, one tab, right? Like, yeah, one tab, yeah. Yeah, that's cool. I like that one too. That was useful. Awesome. I've been going for a while.

Well, thank you. those are some really great suggestions actually i hadn't heard of those um cool thank you uh let's bring up matthew uncle hey how are you uh so you had uh brought up kind of like a plethora of uh mac backup tools and one that i am always uh standing for is arc arq it checks a lot of like tinfoil uh hat kind of data boxes for me. Clientside encrypted and has the same, it's basically just a slick client

on top of S3. And it's like a small shop. I think it's like maybe like a company of like a half a dozen people or so. So just try to rep them whenever I can. And they're very reasonably priced. I think it's somewhere around like $100, $120 a year

for like more stores than you'd need. And then also I was the person that had added you about obsidian. Right. Or some people that, I do get it, right? Like, it's not the most approachable thing to start with, but in terms of, like, how to apply, like, information architecture to it, there's a book, if you want to dive down a dark rabbit hole of Ziddle Koston, there's a book on Amazon, how to take smart notes.

and it kind of, it's pretty interesting. It kind of has you unlearn our Western education style of note-taking and try to kind of reprogram your brain to take notes that's a little bit more organic to how you should be thinking or whether you're introspective enough to recognize it or not. So yeah, it's not a terribly long read. It's like 250 pages or so. You could, you know, blow through it in a weekend.

It's pretty interesting. Definitely an interesting perspective to gain. Yeah, and then I saw a bumper. You blitzed me. There's an open source alternative, though, called Finicky. Oh, yeah, Finnekey. Finicky's great. So if you're not afraid of a little bit of JSON,

it's pretty nice because it gives you all the pattern-matching goodness that you'd want to kick out different patterns to different browsers. Yeah, I think I actually looked at that. And, I mean, the name is actually quite accurate because I installed it and I was instantly like, oh, this is a lot more work that I'm ready to put into this. But, you know, I think if you're able or willing to change your mind, like, you know, and really go deep as clearly you were able to with, you know, obsidian. And what was the, what's the German note-taking thing that you mentioned? Yeah, so it's called Zetl Kasten. Zittal Kasten.

Yeah, yeah. There's a very active Reddit that you can kind of subscribe to. And that's more of like the methodology, whereas like Rome research, obsidian, even Notion, you can apply this methodology with these tools. Totally. Okay. Matthew, those were great recommendations. Appreciate that.

We've got one more. And then Brian's going to end with his book recommendations. Ardham, what do you got for us? Hi. So I use an app called meter all the time. It's M-E-E-T-E-R. Okay. So, and what it does, it's a small tray app that basically connects all your calendars. And whenever you have a meeting coming up, you just click and it joins the meeting. Yes.

It supports over 30 different meeting platforms. It's pretty neat. The other one that I use all the time is called Shutter. It's S-H-O-T-R, for screen shots and annotating them. I think of it's like, you know, kind of like loom, but for screenshots, I use loom all the time. And Chris, is it okay to kind of self-promote and plug things that we're working on? Absolutely. Yeah, go for it. So that's my personal favorite is Bardeen.

So it's similar to... Oh, of course, yes. Yes, now I recognize your name. Yeah, hi. So it's similar to Alfred, except that it's a Chrome extension, and it integrates with APIs from a bunch of productivity tools, and you can create workflows across a bunch of things. And you can do one-click things like, you know,

convert an email to a GERA ticket or scrape a LinkedIn profile to Airtable, and or, you know, join my meetings automatically. So, yeah, that's my list. Awesome. Well, thank you. What can people look forward to in Bardeen in 2022, let's say, in Q1? Well, I'm glad you asked. So we're actually planning a product launch.

Oh. That we've been nagging you about. If I haven't gotten back to you, I'm sorry. No worries. But initially we saw that everyone would be super happy to kind of use a lot of text. And then define their workflows in text. It's like similar to programming, but very close to like natural language where you could say like join my next meeting and it would join your next meeting. Right.

But then we realized that people actually want more visual workflows. and so we're going soon to release a visual builder where you can drag and drop basically action. Yeah, I mean, just to make it more accessible, I've been pushing Alfred actually for quite a while to improve their sort of composer or tool. I really think that there's in video editing software or 3D software, there's something called like a patch interface where you kind of like connect little strings from like one block to another. and I really want one of these productivity apps to use these. And I think it would be super powerful. We're doing exactly that. I can't wait to try it.

Yeah, we love that app. And yeah, one more thing that we're going to roll out in Bardeen into this year, actually, is what we call predictive automation. So the idea is that it's if in your browser, it learns the things that you do, and it suggests you automation don't apply. So if it sees that you're copy-pasting things from one app to the other, like from your email to whatever, like GitHub, because you got a user report about some issue, it will tell you like, hey, why don't you do this in one click? And so you don't even, the idea is that you don't have to think and come up with those workloads, but we would detect those for you and offer you those in context when you need them. Wow. I mean, if that works, that'll be definitely a game changer. I mean, in terms of just like conceptually, the idea of having your computer kind of like notice, oh, you're doing this thing. And it looks like you're doing in a really manual inefficient way. I can just do it for you super fast. That sounds awesome. That's great. Yeah. And I think, I don't know why. I actually don't know why it's a mystery to me. But like you mentioned in the beginning, the browser that, you know, I think browser is the Z operating system for everywhere.

and we spend so much time in it. And it knows so much and it's so powerful. And no one is leveraging that. And that's why we're doing this like browser-centric automation platform. And it also, it all happens locally. We don't send any, we don't see any of your data. We don't store any of your data. It's also locally.

I mean, this is, you know, why, like back in 2005 when I was working on Flock, that was the whole concept. It was like the browser would be the point of integration for all these different things. And so, you know, it only took like 15 years and now we're here. Anyways, Ardham, very helpful. Very excited for Bardeen. Let's talk about your product at launch and make it happen. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Thank you. All right, Brian. You want to give us some book recommendations to start out the year and we'll wrap up? I know because we're coming up on two hours, but it is my show and I will blaze the list. Do what you want, bro. I'm just, I just have my Kindle open.

And look, if you want to get nerdy, I finally found a book about the Burgundians that I've been looking for for years by Bart Van Loo. Wait, what's it called? The Great. The Burgundians, the Venish Empire. Okay. There's a great biography of Frederick DeGrate by Dennis Schoalter that I finally said. Okay, but no one cares about that but me. So I'm going to give you some recommendations that people might be interested in.

There is a book called New York, New York, New York by Thomas D.YJA. It's basically the last four decades of New York City, how New York City came back from the brink. Maybe it would be interesting to people that are concerned about San Francisco right now. Oh, good one. The Devil's Candy, which is a book about the making of the movie Bonfire of the Manities, which is one of the most notorious bombs in Hollywood history. The Infinite Machine by Camilla Rousseau is the story of, Ethereum and how Ethereum

happened. Stephen L. Kent has written two histories of video games. The first one, Part 1, I read 20 years ago. It's the definitive history of video games, at least through the Atari era. He has part two that he came out with, I think,

about a year ago. If you're interested in the history of Dungeons and Dragons, Game Wizards by John Peterson, I've mentioned Chris Mims arriving today, about supply chain. Oh, definitely. The best book I've ever read about the Vikings

is called Children of Ash and Elm. Again, another history book. Brad Stones, Amazon Unbound, is his second book about Jeff Bezos. He also did the Everything Store about Jeff Bezos. The Space Barrens, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the quest to colonize the cosmos. I'm almost done here.

The Big Goodbye, which is about Hollywood in the 70s. If you have never read Joe Abercrombie, I have recommended him in the past on the show, and a lot of people actually started reading him after I mentioned him. If you like Game of Thrones, if you like really bloody, gory, dirty fantasy, Joe Abercrombie is the bloodiest and the goryest, if you can handle it. Then what did I also want to recommend? Let's see. Neil Stevenson. I'm seven

Eves, if you, Neil Stevens. Is that his latest? No, but it's maybe three or four years ago, but it's the best from him that I've read from him in years. He's obviously the guy that coined the term Metaverse. So if you want to,

actually, I need to read Diamond Age too. I've been meaning to do that. Okay, last one is, and this is my ultimate recommendation, if you don't listen to me about anything, else. Bill Bryson, who some of you might know, he's a best-selling writer, the best book he ever wrote, and this is another 20 years ago thing, but I've reread this book more

than any other book. It's called A Short History of Nearly Everything, and it is just the history of every science you can imagine. Here's how, you know, physics came about. Here's how like sapiens, but for science? Just for science. So like, you know, here's the people that discovered plate tectonics, and here's how plate tectonics works. Here's like every single thing about a science. If you're like, well, I don't know much about relativity or whatever. Each chapter is just from, you know, biology through physics, through whatever.

It's a short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. I've turned dozens of people onto that book. and it's one of the books that I listen to on Audible to Fall Asleep at Night because since I've read it, it's just, it's the best. So that's my last one. There you go. So, okay, where do you put this list someplace? I feel like people want to refer to those. I certainly do.

I actually have to write it down. Well, you know, you could also just reply to my tweets and just put the list there. Yeah, yeah. Or you could use one of these note-taking apps that we've talked about, you know, at last. That's true. That's true. where I can get somebody, a transcription app to do this. One more, one more.

If you've never read N.K. Jemison, the greatest sci-fi slash fantasy writer of the last decade. What's her? Oh, shit. What's her series about NK. Jemison? Her most recent book is The City We Became. But she's most famous for not the Earth Sea Trilogy. What is it?

whatever. Just look up NK. Jemison. She's won the Hugo Award and all sorts of things. Yeah, that's it. Broken Earth. Broken Earth series. Broken Earth series. Yes. That's N.K. Jemison. Okay. Well, all right. That's it. Brian, this was, I think, our first two-hour episode, and it was just you and me. And I feel like we almost just barely scratched the surface in terms of all the different things that we could have gone into.

Yeah, we could do this again at some point. It's all night as the quote of the Fight Club goes. Right, right. Anyways, well, welcome to 2022. I think I like this format. A little more casual. Just get right into it and go. Indeed.

Thank you, Chris. Thank you, everybody that participated in and gave us good ideas. I've been taking notes too, so, you know, rewind and take notes. And if we miss anything, feel free to hit us up. Let us know. And maybe we'll bring those into future episodes. Yep, yep, yep. Cool.

Later, everybody. All right, everybody. Thanks.