The Vergecast - From the Macintosh to the Vision Pro — and beyond

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of really old computers: 03:54 - Walt Mossberg, former Verge executive editor and longtime Wall Street Journal tech columnist, joins the show to discuss forty years of the Macintosh computer. Mossberg - The Verge The Mac turns 40 — and keeps on moving Steve Jobs Introduces the Macintosh Looking back on 40 years of Macintosh 40:28 - Ali Abdaal chats about his new book "Feel Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters To You" and why overthinking your productivity system might not be such a good idea.  Ali Abdaal - YouTube Feel Good Productivity 1:06:53 - David Pierce answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline about laptops. The best laptops you can get Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of really, really old computers. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently sitting in my car out front of my house. I've developed this morning routine over the last few weeks when it's been like bitterly cold and snowy and icy on the east coast of the U.S. where I live, where instead of coming out and being a proactive person who, you know, scrapes off my windshield and dusts off all the snow and gets everything ready and just gets going for the day, I instead come out, turn on the car, put all the heat up to full blast, and then just sit here for like 15 minutes until everything, you know, melts and goes away on its own, and then I'm safe to drive. While I'm waiting, I listen to podcasts, I drink coffee, I catch up on email.

I like to convince myself that this is like a meditative thing I do to really get ready for the day and not just a thing that I do because I'm too lazy and too annoying about my hands being cold, to actually just get out of the car and get it ready. Listen, it's not a great strategy, but it's working for me, and hopefully it's not going to be this cold much longer. So I'm going with it. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. We're going to talk about the 40th anniversary of the original Macintosh,

which launched this week in 1984. We're going to talk to Walt Mossberg, who has all the stories you could possibly imagine about that computer and what happened in the interim 40 years. Then we're going to talk to Ali Abdal, who is an influence. and creator and YouTuber that you might have heard of about a book he wrote about what it means to be a productive person in the world. We're right at the time of the year where everybody

bails on their New Year's resolutions, and I thought it would be a fun time to talk about how to do better and whether specifically all of the digital tools we have can help us do better. All of that is coming up in just a second, but first, I think the snow is finally going, so I have to run to the store, and then we're going to get to it. This is the Vergecast. See in a sec. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in.

Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. I'm defrosted, cars defrosted. Let's do some verge cast in. But real quick, before we get started, we're working on an upcoming segment about bossware, which is the software that employers use to monitor and evaluate their employees.

That software is getting more powerful and more invasive all the time. You have software suites that are logging keystrokes and taking screenshots. They're calculating active and inactive time. And they can even spy on you with your device's webcam. We're looking for people with firsthand experience with Bossware. So if that's you, get in touch. We want to know how you're being tracked and how it affects your day-to-day work life. Also, we want to know all of the ways you've found to creatively, let's say, work around

bossware. We want to hear all your tips and tricks. You can email Vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866 Verge11. We'll keep you anonymous if you want, but we want to hear all of your stories. All right. Today, first up, 40 years ago this week, in fact, 40 years ago today, if you're listening to this on Wednesday, January 24th, Apple launched the original Macintosh. It was a big deal, in part because Apple launched it alongside one of the most epic ads of all time. Do you remember the one with the woman hurling the hammer at the big screen, shattering it, and then you have the message about Big Brother in 1984?

On January 24, Apple computer will introduce Macintosh, and you'll see why 19. Apple hyped this thing up in a big way, and as it turns out, deservedly so. Here's Steve Jobs introducing the Macintosh at a meeting of the Boston Computer Society. What we need now is the third industry milestone product, and that's what McIntosh is all about. We've been working on this thing for over two years now, and those of us that have been really close to it, will all tell you it is insanely great. and you'll have a chance to see a little bit more of it later on tonight. You can find that whole launch on YouTube, by the way.

I'll put the link in the show notes. It's great. Super fun to watch 40 years later. And 40 years later, I think it's safe to say Jobs was mostly right. The Macintosh was a game changer, and its legacy is actually everywhere in the computers that we use now. So we figured on this anniversary, we'd go back in history a bit

and talk about what the Macintosh meant 40 years ago and what it means now. And who better to do it with than Walt Mossberg, former Verge executive editor, long time Wall Street Journal tech columnist, and probably the person with the most impressive gadget collection you'll ever see anywhere. Walt Mossberg, welcome back to the Verge cast. Always left to be here, David. We're happy to have you. So our occasion this time is the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh. And one of the reasons I'm very excited to talk to you about it is obviously you've sort of seen this thing through its whole history.

But also, the Macintosh came out. If I'm doing my math correctly, six or seven years before you became a tech columnist. That's right. You were a computer hobbyist at the time. So it's not like you were not aware of the Macintosh in 1984, right? What was your experience of that launch then? Well, I was a crazed computer hobbyist. And it was really all I did outside of work.

You know, at the time I was covering Washington for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Bureau. So my first encounter with the Mac was as a customer. But it was a little confusing. I mean, I bought a Mac, not the first one, either the second or the third one, and I can't remember. I loved it, like any bleeding edge person. I thought it was genius, partly because it shipped with capabilities that on an Apple 2 or a Wintel PC, you had to buy cards and put them in to get these things. And the Mac had not every one of them, like I don't think it had a modem, but it had sound that was really good sound. It had a bunch of other stuff. The thing about the Mac, I was going back and trying to think, okay, like, we sort of understand the legacy of it now as it was the first computer that, you know, to use an Appleism just worked, right? It was the first thing you could sort of sit down and intuitively use, which computers had just not been before. Well, that's right. But I'm particularly curious, for your

perspective in 1984, did it feel like that? Because part of me thinks about a lot of what we do with new technology is unlearn old bad habits. And it actually feels bad. Like this thing we're doing with Google search right now, right? Where we all learned how to sort of type the keywords to get what we wanted. And now it's like, oh, we have these better tools. Just ask a question like a person. And that actually feels strange, even though it's an objectively better behavior. But I wonder, coming from something like an Apple 2E, which you would learn how to use and get very good at and it's like learning an instrument, coming to a Macintosh, even if it is sort of better, there's got to be a weird phase of, like, what do you mean? I click on this icon to open the thing. The weird phase

for me maybe lasted 48 hours. It was very easy to make the transition. And the reason was, although I was very proficient in Apple DOS or whatever they, I think pro DOS, whatever they called it, it was DOS. It was like DOS from Microsoft. using Lotus 1, 2, 3. I mean, you had to learn a ton of commands and syntax. And if you got, if you mistyped one letter, you were screwed. I mean, you were writing code in a very real way. You were. And, you know, I became proficient at that. But even before I started my column, which was in 1991, and which was all dedicated to the proposition that computers were too hard to use and everything had to get easier, even before that, that's how I was. And, you know,

I felt. In fact, that bled into my decision to try to convince, successfully convince the Wall Street Journal to let me do a computer column. Well, and even in that first column, if I remember correctly, you mentioned the Macintosh as an example of kind of how to do this better. I don't remember that, but it's possible. I will tell you that in one of my many, many meetings with Bill Gates, he said to me, this is some years later, he said to me, Mosberg, why don't you just headlined every one of your columns, buy a Mac. I swear to God. And with Steve Jobs, whatever I said about the Mac, even if it was, you know, a rave review in my eyes, it was never good enough for him. Sure. Because I would point out some downside of it or whatever, even if I said, this is the one to

buy. But please be aware of these five downsides. He would call me up and complain that I'd put any downsides in. So those were the two polls I had. Which I figured if you've got them both mad at you, you're probably doing something right. Probably doing something right, yeah. So as a hobbyist and a customer, I thought the Mac was vastly superior. I also owned a DOS machine at the time. I had all these computers that I couldn't afford. But I just fell in love with the graphical user interface and the Mac.

So it's fair to say that Apple helped invent the personal computer. It was one of three companies that in 1977 brought up. a sort of mass market personal computer where you didn't have to be an engineer to use it, although really you had to be a techie. And, you know, Radio Shack and Commodore with the others, but the Apple II sort of once it got Vizvicalc, it became the thing that people wanted more than the others. So they helped invent the personal computer. And then they, with the Mac, they completely changed seven years later the way the personal computer is. is used to this day.

I don't know of another computer that's 40 years old. I mean, it's semantics, right? There's been a million different Macs. So you can say the iMac that I'm talking to you on is a standalone computer by itself and shouldn't be counted in the 40-year run. But it's all just iterations of the Mac. And 40 years is sort of incredible.

I do think it's true that you can draw an unusually straight line from that first Mac two. the current crop of Macs, even just what the thing looks like. I always enjoy going back and looking at, you look at early versions of like Microsoft Word and Excel and some of these things that have really endured over time. And in a surprising number of cases, it's amazing how little changes.

And I think part of that is, like, there's one way to look at that that is like maybe a failure of imagination to keep trying and you get a thing that works, and then it's hard to fight success. But also a lot of these things just got a lot of things right the first time. And I think the Mac was one of those things. The basic sort of tenets of the GUI just were there. And I think they were right.

And everyone has tried. We've seen some people try and sort of reinvent that wheel over and over time. And for the most part, nothing has been better than that. Well, I think that's right. And just not to sound like an Apple fanboy, but I mean, I think the iPhone was the same way. It obviously didn't have the same interface as the Mac. But the iPhone touch interface and the, you know, the scrolling. and the different things they had are all on Android.

And, you know, they borrowed back some things from Android. But largely what Apple set down for the iPhone is the way all phones work. And what Apple set down for the Mac is the way all computers, PCs work. But it wasn't that it didn't have flaws. It cost way too much. Right. I was just going to ask what columnist Walt would have said about it in 1984. And I'm guessing price would have been where you started.

I would have said that they got this revolutionary UI or U.S. correct, but it was out of range for most people, and it was outrageous. And I will tell you that when many years later, 2007, we had famously, as you know, Carosker and I had Gates and Jobs on stage together in a joint interview. And part of that interview was telling the story of the Mac. One of the things that Gates said in that joint interview, he and Jobs were going back and forth. Karen and I were going back and forth with them. Gates said, you came to me and you said, this is going to be a cheap customer-priced machine, blah, blah, it's going to do this and that. And when you delivered the machine, I was very excited because the machine really looked good

and I really wanted our apps to work on it. But every time we had a meeting, the price went up and the price went up. And the price went up and the price went up. And, you know, it's not like Microsoft sold its big apps or Windows itself at a bargain basement price. But they couldn't compete with Apple on overcharging. I mean, as we are making this podcast, the Apple Vision Pro is coming out at $3,500. And we all know that's going to come down in price and, you know, maybe lose some feature. or whatever, and it's going to not sell very many at $3,500, but that's what they did. And that's

what they did with the Mac. I think it was partly because Steve Jobs was a perfectionist. His idea of what was a customer-friendly price wasn't really a customer-friendly price. Yeah, I agree. There's definitely been more on the, we're going to make a good thing and you'll pay for it, which has turned out to work pretty well for them over time, I would say. Why do you think the Mac name has stuck around this long? I was just looking back over it. It's, you know, we've had several CEOs. Steve Jobs left.

Steve Jobs came back. The devices themselves have changed. There have been a million new things. And it's like the only constant at Apple for 40 years is that something is called the Mac. Yes. Originally, they used the full name, Macintosh. Right. And I don't know how many years that lasted.

But everybody just called it a Mac anyway, everybody who bought it or a Mac and referred to it or wrote about it, called it a Mac. Even back then, like, you'd be hanging out with your hobbyist friends. You'd be like, oh, look, I have a Mac. Yeah. Okay. Nobody said, I mean, maybe for the first six months, people said Macintosh, and then everybody started calling it a Mac.

And so then Apple called it a Mac. And I don't know when the first of, well, probably during Jobs' exile, when there was a parade of horribly incompetent CEOs and product managers and no real leaps. of improvement in the Mac, they might have started calling it the Mac then. They certainly started calling at the Mac with the IMac, which came out in 1998, and that was Jobs in his second coming. But when Jobs came back to Apple, he started calling my house and maybe some other journalists. I'm not going to say it was only me. And we'd have these hour and a half conversations and we talk a lot about the Mac and about Apple as a company and so forth. But, but, but,

But when I want, I never forget, I went to meet with him around that time, not long after he took over. And he said that he was horrified when he got there to find out how many Mac models there were. This shouldn't have happened. There were like quadras and performers. And I can't remember the other names, but I think most amended with an A for some reason. There were just different Mac names. And it was very hard for consumers to figure out the difference between them. and they had different sales teams,

they had different PR campaigns. It was just ridiculous. They all still were too expensive. They all still were better than Wintel computers, I thought, but they were getting worse because it's getting more complicated and all this stuff. Yeah, that was when Apple started to license the idea out to other companies, right? They were going to let other companies make Macintoshes. That was the other thing.

He was furious. He was fucking. furious about it. He said to me, I can't believe they licensed the OS. And then he went to a whole discourse about how you have to make a choice. You can be a company that licenses, like we now know Google licenses Android, or you could be a company that does vertical integration and sells the whole thing. And, or as he liked to say, the whole banana, that was his phrase. But you can't do both really successfully. So he canceled all those licenses. And then he did. And then he does. He did for me, what I think he did for many people, was he turned to the whiteboard in the room we were

in, which I think was his conference room, and he drew four squares with a marker. And one was called consumer and one was called pro. And in the upper left hand box, he wrote consumer desktop. And underneath that, he wrote consumer laptop. And the upper right hand box, he wrote pro desktop and pro laptop. He said, that's all I want. That's all I'm going to make, which was true for quite a while. Less true now. Less true now. Can I tell you just another random anecdote about the Matt? Please go. Okay, so he comes in, he saves the company, he saves the Mac. I mean, the IMac was genuinely another revolutionary step. Yeah. Revolutionary, because it had every capability you wanted in it.

Part of what I think is so interesting about that is that there are kind of those two distinct eras of the Mac, right? And I think the IMac launch is a perfect sort of middle moment of the story because without it, like not only would Apple maybe have died, the Mac would have maybe gone away too, but then that was like Steve Jobs coming back in and sort of reaching back to 1984 and being like, no, this is, I am going to redraw the line back to that thing from this new device that we're making, which is kind of just from a business leader perspective, sort of remarkable in retrospect.

And then from there, it just, it has continued on in that same way for a really long time. Well, I would call the first iMac, the funny, rounded one that you could, it was either translucent or in one case, transparent, had all these colors. I love that thing. You're right that you could think of it as the middle,

but I would call it the second, the true second generation of the Mac. I mean, the Mac had a number of smaller generations. Like I mentioned at one point, they put a hard disk in it, and then they branched it out into all these crazy models. But the IMac was really, here's what the Mac is now, given the Internet, given 1998, whatever, you know. Yeah.

And, you know, they did Rip Mix Burn. They did all billboards that said that. They did all those things. But then they did the, after the IMAQ, they did the I book, which was also very colorful, but it was shaped, as many people noted, like a toilet seat. It was, David. You're not wrong. It was. My wife got one and just loved it. She did not get DOS or Windows. She had a Windows machine. She struggled with it. She refused to buy a laptop because she didn't want to struggle with that. And then I convinced her to buy this eyebook and she didn't want to give it up, even when it was long past its sell-by date. I mean, you know, she just didn't want to give it up.

So I'm hearing you say that, I'm struck by how experimental all of that stuff was. There was such a long time where Apple just tried so many things. And some of them were great and some of them were super weird. And I mean, especially in the IMAC line, like, good God, they tried every imaginable shape of computer you could make there for a while. it felt like, hey, the cube was beautiful. It was beautiful. It was. Everybody fell for the cube.

Until it cracked and until you figured out that you were getting an underpowered computer for a grossly high price. But hey, it was beautiful. I'll give you that. But it seems like now there's just much less of that. And on the one hand, I actually think Max in general, they're obviously better than ever, but I think even comparatively better than ever. We're at a point now where the MacBook is so dramatically better than anything you can buy for Windows right now. And I'm going to get a bunch of angry emails for saying that, but I think it's true. And yet it feels like we've spent the last decade or so on this phase of just sort of gentle refinement of a bunch of ideas.

And even the new stuff like a Mac studio is just a slightly different sized box for a thing that already existed. Are we just done with the experimenting phase? Like is the next 40 years of Mac, 40 years of gentle refinement? Well, a couple of things about that. This is a lead into a question about the Vision Pro, by the way. So we're going to get there, too. One is Apple is no longer led by a product guy, no longer led by a product guy. There's a lot of good things about Tim Cook. I personally like Tim Cook.

I've met with him not as much as I met with Jobs over the years, but I have had some one-on-ones with him. He's a smart guy, and he's obviously on the financial side. I mean, the company has never done better. Steve, in maybe 40 hours of meetings with Steve Jobs, he never mentioned the stock. He never, and by the way, he boycotted all the analysts' quarterly phone calls. He never appeared on it. Oh, interesting. Okay.

With one exception, they had a scandal one year. He considered it a fake scandal, but it was called antenna gate. I was about to guess that's what it was. This was on the iPhone, not the Mac, but they put the antenna on the outside, and if you grabbed it in a certain way, you attenuated the signal. The, you're holding it wrong, scandal, yeah. And so he made rubber bumpers. and you could get one for free and all that.

And for that quarter, he appeared on the analyst call, but otherwise he didn't. So Tim is kind of interested in that and operations, which was his job. He was handpicked by Steve as his successor, but he wasn't a product guy. And this leads me to tell you a story when you talk about the Mac sort of stagnating, even after Steve came back and got rid of all the extra models and the licensing and all that. Their biggest seller, and in my opinion, I've written this many times. I'll be happy to say it right here so I can share the hate mail with you. The MacBook Air was the best laptop ever made, at least starting with the 2010 redesign.

The one that he introduced by pulling it out of an envelope, the original one, was fabulously thin. Nobody could believe a computer be that thin. But it had some performance issues. Yeah. Another one in that vein of spectacular idea overpriced and kind of underpowered. But it did well enough that they invested. And in 2010, they made the one we're all familiar with until very recently with the tapered edge. So I wrote four or five times over 20 years. I wrote, this is the best laptop ever built. And the fact is, it was their best selling product. There were some years where it was the best selling PC, individual model of PC.

Obviously, they never outsold the Windows PCs, but individual model of PC it was the bestseller. And for 20 years, the Windows guys tried to chase it. And then they got crazy, right? They started trying once it would fold and become a tablet. And it was always like an inch and a half thick and all this crazy stuff. I once on stage at the very first D conference was in 2003. So two years after the iPod came out, it was just an interview I had with, I don't even think Kara was there, it was just me and jobs. And I said, you know, you've done all this stuff. You've invented the IMAQ and you're still at five or seven percent or whatever it was of the market.

Yeah. I said, how are you ever going to move the needle on that? He said, well, we're moving the needle a little bit by little bit. but he said, we're never going to outsell Windows and computers. But he said, I love the iPod. And I said, why? He said, because I'm really tired of being 5% of the market. And the iPod was like 85% of the market or 75, whatever, at the time.

So that revealed to me that it really bothered him that his baby, his invention, the Mac, he can blame all the bozos, what he called the bozos, who were there when he was. he was off doing another failed company next, he could blame all of them. That was a 12-year gap. But nevertheless, the Mac just never made it. And yeah, and in some ways, it's now more successful than it ever has been. Oh, it absolutely is. It's very successful.

There's seemingly real runway on this idea left, I think, is kind of wild. And it's really the most remarkable thing about the Mac to me is that it doesn't feel like an old idea, even though at this point in tech, it's a really old idea. Well, they just redesign the MacBook Air. Yeah. Radically. I'm not sure I like it. I like the other one better.

Yeah. But I'll just tell you one more story before you get to the Vision Pro. Tim is a guy who knows what he doesn't know. He knew he wasn't a product guy. So he gave even more power to Johnny Ive, their great designer. Eventually, he gave him software, not just hardware. He gave him everything. And here's the difference.

Johnny Ive was a great designer, and he had, I'm sure he had some great designers under him. They probably still have a great design shot. Steve Jobs was his editor. Steve Jobs would pull him away from his crazier instincts. Steve Jobs would say no to some things and yes to other things. Tim Cook didn't do that. I don't think does that to this day because he knows what he doesn't know. And Johnny I've decided, I have no proof for what I'm saying,

except I have a very high-level source who told me this story. But it's a one-source story. This is good. Good journalistic rigor on your part here. I like this. Now, I make it clear to you that it's not full journalism rigor. But this person really knew, really super knew the products. What he said was after Cook had given Johnny all his power and Johnny no longer had an editor

who went to a lunch with him every day, which was what Jobs did, he decided they didn't need to be an air and a pro. He decided he could do the pro and make it as light and as thin or thinner than the MacBook Air. And it would be a higher price machine, so that would be better for their bottom line, and people would buy it even if they didn't need the extra power it gave. And so he could have one laptop that would do everything. And you might say, well, that kind of, even jobs in his four square thing had two. laptops, a consumer and a pro, but Johnny wanted to have one laptop. And there was a big war between the design team and its acolytes, in other words, the Johnny Ive led team, and the engineering and product manager side of the company, which desperately wanted new, improved

versions of the air, because the air was their best-selling product, probably the best-selling laptop in the world, the thing everyone was chasing, and they did not want to leave it on a hill to die. But that's what they thought was happening. And this battle kept up for a while, and finally, the product guys and the engineers managed to yank it back, and they brought out a new MacBook air with very minimal changes, but it was a new model. It had, I think, more storage, faster, you know, whatever. Basically, like a spec bump of a laptop. Correct. And I remember that they introduced it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And this source of mine pulled me aside and said, we finally won.

And then it was the first, I think it was the first machine or one of the first machines to get Apple Silicon. So I still have an M1 MacBook Air. You, being a professional computer writer, probably have an M3 pro or something. But believe it or not, as a testament to how good this. has been, I'm still very happily on an M1 MacBook Air. I upgraded basically every minute I could new computers until I got to Apple Silicon and I've been happy with the M1 for what three years now. Yeah, me too. Well, good, good for you. Yeah. But wait, what I really want to know is you very famously bought two MacBook Airs before all of the MacBook Air stuff got weird with the

butterfly keyboards and all the nonsense they were doing to those computers on the idea that, you know, when my computer runs out, I'll still have one that I like. That's right. Have you been able to safely get rid of the backup MacBook Air? Has Apple won you back with Apple Silicon that now you can buy the new ones instead of? The backup MacBook Air to my wife's chagrin is still, I think, in the basement, wrapped up in plastic, in the box, in the plastic thing. Just in case. Just in case.

But I love my M1 MacBook Air. It's what I use all the time when I'm. when I'm using a Mac or any computer, I'll be honest with you. I probably do 75% of my computing on an iPad or an iPhone now. But when I need to use a computer, like right now, this is an IMac. It's an M1, IMac, and it's fine. And the MacBook Air is fine. And these are Macs. And the Mac has been better than fine for its whole life. So, okay, before I let you go here, let's talk about the Vision Pro. just for a minute. Because the big question now is like, is this the beginning of a new 40 year cycle? Are we, are you and I going to podcast in 2064 about how incredible the moment that the Vision Pro came out was and how the

world will never be the same? There are some things that there's a new interface idea. There's a thing that is probably overpriced and underpowered, but seems to have some interesting ideas. What do you think about where we are at the Vision Pro right now. Well, I think they think that you're right, that this will be like a new Mac or a new iPhone and last, I don't know how long the iPhone will last, but 17 years for a phone seems like a long time. So pretty good, yeah. That's what I think they think they're embarked on. And they're very realistic. They know this. I, we don't have the numbers yet, but they know that this one is going to sell less than a million in its first year and all of that. They don't expect millions of people to go out and buy a $3,500 thing with a battery that lasts two hours and is separate from the device and, you know, all the other things.

On the other hand, they think what they like to call spatial computing is a real thing and has a lot of potential, even though every major possible developer has refused to build something for it. That was actually true on the Mac too, by the way. Microsoft and Adobe were the only ones that built anything for it, and then Apple's in-house stuff at the beginning. So I think that's what they think. What do I think? I think it depends on how smart and fast they are at getting the price down without too much sacrifice and features, and also at getting the size of it down. And those two things may not run in tandem. There may be a cheaper version of what we have now, this big thing you wear on your face with very poor battery life. And at the same time, maybe a year later, they'll start to shrink the size of it

until eventually they're in their dreams, and this is their dream. I know for a hundred percent fact that this is Tim Cook's dream, that it gets to be these. It gets to be like this. Don't ask me how you can pack a battery and all that power into this. And there's no cord going down and all that. But electricity still can't be carried over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and all that. I think that's their ultimate goal. I don't know if they can ever reach that goal. But it also could be that society kind of gets used to things being worn in your face

as long as they're not as huge as this. And they may be able to go half the size of this and be okay. I don't know. I certainly would not be willing to say it's a 40-year product. But you're not ruling out that they're on to something. I don't think it's a one-year product because they have a lot of money and they already have a roadmap that's more than a roadmap. They're already designing the next one to be less money. They have a roadmap for the next three after that. So it could be a, if it's a failure, it could be a four or five year, three or four year product.

If it's not a failure and they're selling a plausible amount and the margin is good and all of that and they're not losing money on it, they'll never break out sales on it, I'm sure, unless a miracle happens and they sell a million in the first month. Then there will be a press release. A hundred percent there will be a press release. And the stock will shoot up. But, you know, this is a new area. Meta is involved in it in certain ways.

You know, it's worth watching. You guys have covered it very well. My impression so far from everybody, including Nilai, in the first look, is technically it's genius. They've technically done a genius job. But in terms of the price and the overall design, it's not something people will want to buy. I think you're right. And I think, again, thinking about like the 40-year legacy of something like the Mac, I think the iPhone is sort of a clear before and after moment, right? I think the day the iPhone came out, there was this thing that happened. And everybody was like, oh, this is it. Yeah, but they still had to cut the price on it by a hundred bucks. Sure. No, I totally think that's right. That was another example of right kind of overpriced and underpowered. But it was obvious there was something there.

Obvious. Instantly obvious. This one, it's a little less obvious. And so I think the question of the next couple of years, like, I think you're right that evaluating the idea of the Vision Pro on this object is actually not the right way to think about it. So I'm trying to think about sort of the five-year run before we see the five-year run, if that makes sense. And I think there are reasons to think we might look back on this as the beginning of something cool, overpriced and underpowered, but on the right track. But at least to me, it doesn't scream this is the right idea to me the way the iPhone did. I mean, look, the iPhone and the Mac, actually, both had to have price reductions. And in the case of the iPhone, we'll all remember that, you know, it started out without copy and paste. Started out with a bunch of stuff that was missing.

So it might have been the third version of the iPhone or the one where they got off edge, which I think was the 3GS. In some ways, that was the first full-fledged iPhone. And, you know, then the hockey stick began. chart just yesterday, but it was like an Apple chart. It was not from Apple, but it was like an Apple chart in that it didn't have very many numbers for the X and Y axis. Just had lines going on. You couldn't really tell. There were not. It was a color chart. You know, it said yellow is the Mac and green as everything else. I don't know. But so they've about tripled what their share was early. And I assume, I mean, if the Mac was taken out of Apple,

I think it's a $30 billion business. Am I right? Something like that. That sounds right. Yeah. If it was taken out of Apple, it would be a Fortune 500 company all by itself. Same is true, of course, of the iPhone. But the Mac, which was long considered, you know, like almost dying and it was the last thing and all that, it would be a Fortune 500 company.

Yeah. Not bad for being 40 years old. Not bad for being 40 years old. All right. Well, I'm putting 2064 on the calendar for our 40-year Vision Pro retrospective. And between now and then, we're going to have to have lots of reasons to have you back on. Thank you for doing this. This is super cool.

I'd love to do it. All right. We've got to take a break. And then we're going to come back and talk about getting things done, being productive, being a person on the internet, and why overthinking your productivity system might not be such a good idea. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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If you've been listening to this show for a while, or if you subscribe to my newsletter called Installer, shameless self-promotion, you know I'm like way over my head deep into productivity software. I've used all the to-do apps, all the notes apps, all the calendars, everything imaginable that claims it'll help me get more done. and make my life better. And you can't spend much time in that corner of the internet without encountering this guy. Full name Ali Abdull, and I guess doctor turned entrepreneur and author. I don't know,

maybe that. Ali is right. He does do a lot of things. His YouTube channel is how I discovered him, and I'm a big fan. Hey, friends, welcome back to the channel. In this video, I want to talk through seven habits that I try my best to do every day, and that save me around three hours every single day. Most recently, Ali wrote a book called Feel Good Productivity, How to Do More of What Matter. How to Do More to you. The book came out just this week, and it's great, and you should totally buy it and it and read it. But it is not at all what I expected. I expected the book to be all about cool tools and sick hacks and tips and tricks and systems for how to get more stuff done. After all, this is the guy who makes videos about his super complicated calendar system and the six AI

tools he uses to increase productivity and how to build your ultimate productivity system. He's done that kind of video a few times, and it always does gangbusters numbers. And in fact, feel good productivity is almost the opposite of that. It's kind of a book about what makes us human as much as it is about how to be productive. And I got really curious about that combination of things and whether all the tools and apps and systems are even solving the right problems for us. I also figured this was a good time. We're three weeks into January. It's the beginning of a new year. This is, I think, statistically right about the time. Most people ditch their New Year's resolutions. So it seemed like a fun time to talk about what it means to actually be

productive and what it really takes. So I asked Ali to come on and tell me about writing the book, his productivity journey, and a whole bunch more. We started with one of the books recurring themes, which is, ironically, the book itself. One of the things I like about the book is how much time in the book you spend talking about the process of writing the book, which is a delightfully meta thing to do in a productivity book. It's like, you could have kind of written the whole book about writing the whole book and it would have, it still would have sort of tracked. But I could feel it in the process of reading the book that it was like, you took this thing seriously in a pretty unusual way that it was like, I want to make a thing that lasts in a way that

I think we're just not incentivized to do that on the internet most of the time. No, exactly. Like, everything on the internet is very, is very ephemeral. Yeah, throughout the whole process, I was like, I want to take this seriously, but not too seriously to the point that it becomes paralyzing, but sincerely enough that, you know, I'm showing up and putting in my best effort. Yeah, sincerely, not seriously. one of the good last things of the book. I like that very much. So part of the reason I wanted to talk to you about this is I feel like if I were to like boil the central thesis of your book down, it's that an underrated way to be productive is to make things more fun. That's literally it. There's a lot more to it and that's obviously like a massive generalization of what you're saying. But I think that's like not a totally wrong takeaway from the book. Is that fair?

That is literally the thesis that we started the book with and the title initially was called make it fun. Oh, there you go. Okay. Or like fun productive as unproductive, fun productive. It's like we play. played around with so many different titles. Eventually, we kind of realized that the word fun doesn't quite capture it. And really, like, a lot of the signs around it was this idea of feeling good and positive emotions. And positive emotions is not necessarily the same as fun, but to be honest, it's close enough that I kind of equate them. And the way I think of it is, if you want to be productive at anything, make it more fun. And you'll probably be more productive at the thing. And you'll also be happier along the way, which is win-win all around. Totally. So the thing that kept jumping out to me as I was reading it is so much of it is about

framing and mindset and kind of the way that you talk to yourself and the way that you talk to other people and the way that you approach things and the process rather than kind of obsessing over just like raw data of how much you accomplish as sort of the end in itself, which intellectually to me makes total sense, right? Like I believe every word in the book and it feels right. And yet I am a person who has spent an alarming amount of my life like testing productivity tools, believing that I will find the right productivity tool that will solve all of my problems and magically work. And I kind of got to the end of your book and was like, okay, the correct answer here is to throw all of my technology into the ocean and rethink the way that

I do everything. And you're also a guy who has spent an alarming amount of time testing productivity tools. So like square those two things for me, those two sides of your brain. Absolutely. So people have like various hot takes on this. Some people are like, you know, the tool really matters because the tool facilitates the productivity. Some people are like, the tool doesn't matter at all because the tool is just a tool and any tool will do, whether it's Notion or Evernote or Google Keep or whatever the hell, new maps, city in Rome, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My approach has always been that the tool that I will use is the one that feels good to use. This is why I still use Notion, because Notion have done an amazing job of making it feel good to use Notion. The emojis, the font,

and the cover images between them make it a delight to use Notion. The reason I use Things 3 as my To-DoList app is because the animations are delightful compared to To-Doist, which is just a bit more like to-doist has more features, teams and cross-platform is all handy, but things are just so nice. And when we find things that are nice to you, people buy Apple products, they're just nice. There's something nice about them.

Like, for me, when an app feels good to use, I'm more likely to use it. And therefore, like, that will make me more productive. Totally. I don't know if you found this at all. Like, what's your take on the design aesthetics, niceness of something? Oh, no, I've found that exactly.

One of the notes I wrote down reading the book was, I bet Ali loves people who design the hell out of their notion. pages. Oh, yeah. I think I'm right about that. But like, it's funny you mention things because it's one of those apps that is like objectively not what I need. Just in terms of like how my brain works and how I sort of run my days, it doesn't do it. And yet every three months, I try to force my life into things again because it's a lovely app with really nice animations. It never crashes. It makes total sense. All the icons are beautiful. Like it feels really good. And so I try to make myself use it even though I know for sure it's never going to work. I just like I want to use it.

And I think there's something to that. But I also think in this space, it's very hard for any digital tool to do the kind of thing that you're talking about. Early on in the book, you talk a bunch about sort of making games out of everything. And it's like, how do we gamify things? And we went through this whole phase on the internet of like, how do we gamify everything? And sometimes it works and sometimes it's like disastrous because you try to gamify things that shouldn't be gamified. And it gets really ugly and problematic. But I think also it's very hard for these digital tools to be.

whimsical and fun and still useful. And so I think we've gotten to this point with so many things where we've leaned into like obsidian is like pure raw utility. Right. Like there's nothing delightful about it, but it is like, holy God, if you want to get things done, will it help you get things done in a certain way? And I guess notions may be an interesting outlier there. And I wonder if that's part of why it's been so successful. But part of what I wonder is like the principles that you talk about in this book, like, can those exist in the kinds of like, productivity apps you and I spend too much time thinking about. Yeah.

And I think some apps have tried it. Like fabulous. Did you come across that habit tracker? Fabulous. No. It was like a to-do list, but you would like build different habits into it. It was like, you start off with a drink my water first thing in the morning and then like do my morning routine. And that was so full on on the design and cute animations and stuff all the way.

But to the point that it was almost unusable because everything then took ages to be like a nice little delightful animation. So I don't know. Like a notion is an exception in that they somehow cracked the niceness thing. but for other apps it was really hard. A wonder list back in the day was quite delightful. And then it sort of died. Yeah, RIP. WonderList was a good example.

Inbox by Gmail was quite delightful and then it died. Well, that's the thing, right? And I think the path a lot of these end up on is, and I'd love following to do list apps because they all go through the same thing where it's like everybody has sort of one thing, one idea or one mechanic or one sort of feature that makes them unusual. And then people start to use it and they say, well, but I also need this feature and they need recurring tasks. And what if you had calendar integration?

and I really want to take notes. And I do my things this way. I need a priority system. And all of a sudden, you've just built this awful Voltron of an app that does everything and is a mess in the same way that almost every other productivity app is a mess. And then that's when I get to the point

where I'm like, okay, I need out. This is too much. This is making me feel bad. I'm like spending my life managing this system rather than actually accomplishing anything. And then I go find another app and go through exactly the same process. Yeah, this is like my life for the last 10 years,

every few months. Do you feel like writing this? book has changed the way you think about all of that stuff. Like, do you approach new productivity apps and stuff differently? I went back through your YouTube channel and tried to see if I could pinpoint, like, when you were working hard on the book based on how much you were talking about productivity tools. And I feel like I can sort of invent a narrative there, but I am curious. Like, did you have that experience? Like, do you find yourself switching less or caring less or trying new things less because you're like, actually the tool matters a little less than maybe I've thought over the

years? Yeah. I've really come to that realization over time that the tool is almost meaning other than the fact that some are nicer to use than others. We're actually working on a sort of productivity course to release in 2024 with like a community and a coaching program behind it. And that has involved diving into a bunch of research around like goal setting and things like that. And a big goal for this course, which is why I'm thinking a lot about this stuff, is for it to be platform agnostic. I've come up with a bit of it.

I'd be curious to get your take on this. A little sort of framework for productivity, which is not in the book, but who cares about talking about book, which sort of stands for, it's a GPS, goal, plan, system. That's what all the productivity boils down to. Have a goal. That gives you a sort of destination to go towards. Make a plan of how you're going to get there. And then have a system that encourages you to actually follow the plan.

And then you adjust accordingly. Goal, plan, system, GPS. And I've been kind of doing sort of informal productivity coaching for, like, friends and my team and stuff. And it always comes down to that. If someone wants to be more productive, should have a goal, should have a plan, should have a system. And if someone is struggling with their productivity, it is almost always a problem

with either the goal or the plan or the system. I'm just trying to figure out a way of presenting that in a way that does, it's not like, do this in notion or do this in one note. It's like, do this in whatever you want. Use pen and paper, use post-it notes, use notion for like here. The point is, if you have a goal, you have a plan on a system, there's no way you're not going to be productive. The great challenge I have had with like capital P, productivity, internet people over the years,

has been that I think everything you just said is absolutely true and makes for terrible content, which is the challenge, right? And I think I was talking to somebody not that long ago about why Notion grew this huge community. And I think it's partly it's a very successful app because it's a very good app. And also it is a very fun thing to tinker with and make beautiful things with that you can share on the internet. Right? Like, Notion allows for better YouTube videos than a text file. And that has nothing to do with whether or not it's a better app.

But it is a better thing to make content about. And I think so is really elaborate systems. so is, you know, coming up with things that you can sell courses about. And I think I'm as guilty of this as anybody. Like, I've spent a lot of time writing about and covering apps that purport to solve everything. When in reality, like, I find myself sending a lot of people this blog post, I forget the guy who wrote it, but he's like, my productivity system is a single text file. And he's like, I have a 15,000 word long text file that is just, I write down all the things

I have to do that day and then I do them. And it's like, oh, shit. Maybe it's that simple. But I do wonder, like, we're in this place now where, trying to make, you know, quote unquote content about this stuff feels almost disingenuous if the goal is just know where you're going and figure out how to get there. Like that's so much simpler and so much less sort of visually compelling in a certain way. I know. You know, one person who I've really been viving with his stuff recently, Ramit Sethi has been doing a whole new thing on YouTube.

He actually took my course on how to do YouTube and I connected with this team and stuff. And now he's crushing it on YouTube. But one thing that he's doing is doing just like long form. conversations with people who are struggling with their finances and they're just like sharing their screen and going through their numbers. And it's all the same simple stuff like don't spend more than you earn and like put stuff in investment accounts and like don't spend so much on a car payment for your truck that you can't afford. Basic stuff like that. That was in his book I'll teach you to be rich. But there's something about watching him coach a real couple through these problems and seeing how

they deal with it. I'm just hooked on this content. Even though I know exactly what the system is from the book and, you know, I'm fairly familiar with personal finance. It's just really cool watching him, like, coach people through it. And so I'm thinking, hmm, maybe there's something there. Instead of, you know, for me, when I think of the future of my content, instead of it being like, let me try and invent some new productivity system that looks good on a freaking YouTube video, more like, hey, let's just get someone on a call and coach them through how to set goals, how to make a plan, and how to build a system.

And it will converge on the same things. It will converge on figure out roughly what you want to do with your life, turn it into a few goals for the year. Let's break them down. Let's put it in the calendar and let's review it every now and then. But actually, the process of doing that requires a lot of coaching for some people and emotions get in the way. Like fear gets in the way. There's like so much cool stuff. But I think the cool stuff is in the human emotion behind it rather than in the how pretty is my notion page. Yeah. And there's something too. Like I don't mean to denigrate people who have pretty notion pages. Like there is something too, like you said, if you're pretty good notion page makes you

use notion more, like that's a victory. Right. Like that is a, a thing that is successful. And my problem is, the reason I switch productivity apps all the time I discovered is that I just get bored with them. And so I've actually come to take the inevitable switching. I literally just did this yesterday. Like, took all of my notes out of one app and put them in another app, which is an unbelievable waste of time. Like, it's just such a bad use of time and energy. But every single time, I like, the system gets a little different. It's essentially a way to look at all my notes again. I get to sort of move stuff around. I take some things out. I put some new things in. And I've come to see that as like I'm switching apps, but also sort

of reviewing everything that I have. And whatever it takes to get there is a win. But I think that's right that all of this is in some ways simpler and in some ways more complex than it is made out to be. And it's an interesting thing for you as a person who people look to for advice to be like, here are ways you can do this. But ultimately, like, this is about your feelings. It's just a very funny kind of line to have to walk as someone who is trying to guide

people. And especially for you, like a mass audience of millions of people through that process. Yeah. You're like an internet therapist in a lot of ways. I know exactly. I genuinely never thought the conclusion for any of this would be, it's about your feelings. But the three years of research around the book made me really realize, oh, crap, it really is just about the feelings. And if you can deal with the feelings, then productivity is as simple as I write down what I need to do and then I do it. It's just that the feelings get in the way of that.

One of the things that you mentioned with the CEO coach, and I think is true about a bunch of stuff in your book, is how valuable a lot of this stuff is to do in person, whether it's like giving feedback or the you talk about kind of the random acts of kindness that you can do or receive and how meaningful that can be in productivity and all this stuff. And I think my experience has been that that is sort of obviously true that a lot of things that matter and are meaningful happen when you're in a room with somebody. But that's also just increasingly not the world we live in. Like you and I are doing this podcast. We're thousands of miles away from each other. This is the world we live in. Can this stuff work in a sort of digital space?

Like, I keep coming back to the idea that, like, I agree with so many of the ideals in your book. And I think they run into what it means to be a person in the world in 2023 and 2024 in these really complicated ways. Like, can we get that stuff through digital tools. Yeah. I think we can definitely get some of it. One of my favorite things to do is to work in an environment where there are other people working, which is why right now I'm in a wee worker rather than in my hotel room. Because I find it very depressing just working in a hotel room. But during the pandemic, when all of these co-working spaces were closed,

I found this writers group that would just meet on Zoom four times a day for like an hour. And it was so nice. It's like I think it's still going, a London writer salon. And it's just sick. It's like a Zoom call with a few hundred writers. They spent five minutes at the start, giving you a motivational quote, five minutes at the end. Everyone's like posting in the chat what they accomplished. There genuinely is a feeling of community in being on a Zoom call with a couple hundred people

and like all working on the same general thing. So I think that definitely works. I think similarly, you know, our team has just gone remote because I've decided to travel the world. Previously, we were in person. And so we've been trying to figure out, like, okay, how do we apply these principles of, like, how do we make work feel good in a remote world? Even, like, simple stuff, like, we have a channel on Slack now for, like, nice comments that we say to each other, or nice comments that we post from, you know, people in our audience and emails that we get. And we didn't really have that before because we were in person. But now the fact that there is a Slack channel dedicated for pleasantries and feedback and nice things.

It's kind of cute. And we've got this like Matter app on Slack that gives you points and you can redeem them for a Starbucks gift card. And it's just, you know, there's something about that. That's kind of nice. Does that stuff work for you as a person? It really does. Yeah. Honestly, I love it.

I love that shit. Like I used to be skeptical of motivational quotes and I used to be skeptical of affirmations and stuff. But I think as I've gotten older, I've realized the value of reminders. You know, even something like, you know, back in the day when I had a computer monitor, I used to have a Post-it note. what would this look like if it were fun? Just written on it. And I think in the past I would have sort of scoffed that thinking like the fuck, like how would that be helpful?

But it's actually a really helpful reminder. If you ask yourself, what would this look like if it were fun? It's like, oh, I'd probably take it a bit less seriously because it's not that deep. Hmm, haven't got any music in the background. Let me put on Concerning Hobbits from Lord of the Rings because that always like, you know, cracks me up. It's a vibe.

Well, I haven't said hello to someone in my team in a while. Let me just go say hello and give him a little massage in a non-weird way. I haven't said a nice message to someone on the team today because, you know, as a CEO, I should do that. So let me just do that. And it's like, great. Now I'm getting back into my work, but it feels more fun. So I love little reminders like that. I'm a sucker for emotional quotes.

The part of the book that resonated with me the most actually was the part at the very beginning where you're like, like, everybody talks about discipline and everybody talks about this idea that sometimes you don't want to do things and you should just do them anyway. And that's all well and good, but also like, screw that. Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do. Like, sure, that's life. but what if there were fewer of those things? Like, that's what this book is about.

And I was like, that's such, like, thank you for that because there's so many and so much of the, like, hustle culture of the internet is like 24 hours a day, just get it done, no excuses, play like a champ. And it's just like, it's just boring. And I'm tired. And I don't want to. Like, leave me alone. Yeah.

And I think, I'm guessing that was intentional because if you've read all the productivity books that it seems you have read, you've heard that message more times than most, which is just like, shut up, do the work. and buy this supplement and you'll win. And I think that is a bleak world to live in. And I feel like your version of the world is significantly less bleak on purpose. Yeah, I think I've benefited a lot from, you know, as partly through the journey of having this YouTube channel,

I just happen to connect with loads of people who are like really rich and really like sort of business successful. Like Decker millionaires, 100 millionaires. I've met two billionaires. And I love asking them for advice because I'm always like, okay, this is cool. Cool shit. I get to hang out with people who are like way further ahead of me in their careers and also stupidly rich and like, let me just ask them for life advice. And basically all of them sacrificed to their health and relationships and well-being for the sake of growing

their business. Yep. And literally all of them regret doing that. And they're always like, bro, you know, if there's one thing you do, trust me, like recognize when enough is enough. Don't sacrifice your family and your health and your well-being for the sake of growing your business. It's not actually going to make you happy even though you think it will. To have some balance, man, I wish someone had told me with this before, have some balance, do all this stuff, enjoy the journey. The journey is the destination. The goal is not going to make you happy. The journey makes you happy. And I've just been hearing that. So I've been reading the books about it, reading all the stuff about it and hearing it enough times from people to, I think I really have absorbed it into my heart.

So my whole thing these days is like no achievement is actually going to make you happy. The thing is going to make you happy and feel content is having that balanced life where you're enjoying the journey. So why not start now rather than when you hit some arbitrary income milestone or whatever the thing might be. So, and speaking of that, actually, one of the things you mentioned in the book that I've been thinking about ever since is this idea of, like, adding friction deliberately to your life. And as somebody who covers software, this is a thing I've been thinking a lot about, like, especially in this age of social media and stuff, right?

Like, we spent a whole generation removing friction from everything, right? We made it really easy to connect with people. We made it really easy for people to track everything. We made it really easy to do everything online. And we, like, kind of broke society in the process. And now I, the more people I have... talk to them where they're like, well, what if we made shopping a little harder? Like, what if, what if shipping was slower? Like, maybe, maybe that would suck, but also be better. But I think

we've hit a point where that's really, it's just hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube in that front. And I think the people who do things like you describe in the book, like, buy feature phones on purpose are like, there's a world in which they're like smart forward thinkers and there's a world in which they're like borderline insane people. I guess I wonder, like, for you as somebody who is both writing about this for an audience and trying to live it yourself. Do you have a good sense of the balance there of like we have we have so many tools that make it easy to do so many things. Smartphones are so good for so many purposes. There's all these upsides to all these things like the friction that the avoidance of friction that helped you get

a giant audience is also the avoidance of friction that is a problem for a lot of people trying to like successfully live their lives. Do you have a sense of kind of how to walk that line the right way? Yeah, I think I struggle with this like everyone else. The thing I think I always bring it back down to is intentionality. So I have no qualms about spending time

on social media because I also do it for a job. But one thing I found enormously helpful is just getting rid of all of all social media apps from my home screen. Because before, I would just sort of swipe, swipe, open up Twitter and scroll and almost do that on autopilot without even thinking about it.

Now the way I open up Twitter is I scroll down on my phone, I type in Twitter, I realize it's not called Twitter anymore, and I type in X, and then I go on the thing. And that's enough friction for me to be like, I have to intentionally decide to go on Twitter for me to actually go on Twitter. It's not just to click on my phone. The things that are clicks on my phone are Kindle, Audible, Udice's Day 1,

a new app that I've just released called VoicePal, which is like voice notes for steroids, and like my workout tracker. So it's like the only things I have access to at my fingertips are things that I would like to spend more time on, and that I think are good for my body and my mind and my soul. Everything else, I have to actively seek out. And that is a good thing. That means, you know, I still watch YouTube videos, but I watch them when I have decided I wanted to watch a YouTube video.

And I think one of the issues that so many people have is that, you know, if you're, for example, drained of energy, you just find yourself scrolling through TikTok or Instagram or whatever. And when was the last time you got off a scrolling session and thought, wow, I feel so energy. I energized as a result of that. Never. Whereas going for a walk or, I don't know, playing the guitar. You know, there's towards the end of the book, like generally creative things or things that like help us flex our sense of autonomy or things that help us sort of separate from work.

These are really the things that recharge our energy. And we all know that. We don't do it because it's too easy to look at the notification and like click on the thing. And now we're scrolling before. Yeah. Well, and that brings me back to, I hate to keep harping on the like, can we do any of this online stuff? But it's telling to me that like you had a section in the book where it was like the two columns, right? Like the things I do when I'm tired and the things that are actually restorative.

And it's like the things you do when you're tired are look at screens and the things that are restorative are basically like don't look at screens. Yeah, pretty much. And to some extent, I think maybe the answer is just what we need is more balance. I think that's absolutely right. That like the touch grass joke on the internet is like, it's right, right? Like, we should all spend a lot less time looking at screens. Like, that is objectively true.

But I also wonder in this like phase that we're in where like can we solve technology with more technology, is there a sort of digital answer to this? And I think like I talk to a lot of people who do art on the eye. iPad, and that I think is like a perfectly valid restorative use of screens, right? Like, you're still looking at a screen, but it is like a fundamentally creative activity. I've been learning how to play guitar using an app called Musician. I think that counts. But I do wonder, like, do you have versions of those things? Like, are there things you can do still looking at your phone or a computer or a screen of some kind that recharge you in that same way? Yeah. So I don't know

if this is just me, but one thing I love doing is listening to a Lord of the Rings ambience type soundtracks on YouTube while working. Because I was doing some research for the book, and there seems to be this weird thing where hearing the sounds of nature has this weirdly energizing effect on us. So you can, obviously, walking through nature is like the best, but you can even just listen to birdsong

or listen to like the sound of waves or something. And that taps into something in our brain. No one quite knows what it is, but it seems to be quite energizing. And so people have put these like playlist together, like three hour-long videos on YouTube where it's like Harry Potter music or Lord of the Rings music, but with the sounds of rain or the sounds of birds,

I just love that. It's so nice. And it's like anything becomes more fun and more energizing when doing it with that sort of soundtrack in the background. So that's a way in which I try and recharge while also looking at a screen. One thing someone should do, someone needs to make an app that lets you listen to podcasts, but with background music. You know, like with some meditation apps, like waking up by Sam Harris, it's like you can listen to the lectures with some background music. And the background music makes it so much more immersive. That's pretty good. I need someone to make this app.

Like listen to this podcast in the rainforest. It's like, I would do that. I would listen to that. Yeah, rainforest or epic or like classical or whatever, like lofi, and just make the podcast more engaging. That's a problem AI could solve. Figure out how to score the beats of a podcast like that, it could do it. Oh, that would be cool.

That's a good idea. Ali, I think we just started a company. This is very exciting for us. I think we did. Yeah, we've got to register a domain soon. All right, Ollie, thank you. Again, everybody by Ollie's book, Feel Good Productivity, How to Do More of What Matters to You.

Great book, highly recommend it. We have to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and answer a question on the Birchcast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid-compliant, enterprise ready and built for the AI era.

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Asymptomatigas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early early this morning. And we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over.

Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think that the world can be much better,

that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. Like that doesn't, that's not a priority.

That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. Welcome back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-Vurge 1-1, and the email is Vergecast at the verge.com. We love all of your questions, and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. We have some super fun things coming in. Thank you to everybody who writes and calls. It's my favorite thing about the Vergecast. This week, we have a question from Erland from Norway, which seems relevant to what we've been talking about today. Erlund sent us an email that says, I need to get a new Mac. My last one is from 2014. It is a MacBook Pro. but now I'm thinking of a Mac Mini to have it home and maybe later a MacBook Air for travel.

Or should I just get a MacBook Pro again? I'm a hobby photographer and videographer, but mostly I use it for presentations for my job as a teacher. So that's the question. I have gone back and forth on this question a thousand times, both in my life dealing with my own setup and also just in general trying to think through the best way to use a computer. Basically, it's like should you have a workstation at home and then a thing you take with you or should you just have one computer that you kind of dock in and out of various setups as you need it? I will say personally, I'm in a one computer at home and one computer on the road phase.

I'm actually on a Mac Mini right now as I record this, and I have a MacBook Air that goes with me whenever I leave the house, which is increasingly rarely, but that's for another day. So I think for most people, though, if this is what you're debating, this specific thing, I think the answer is the MacBook Pro. And I went through just to spec it out real quick and see what the cost would be. So you have a 13-inch MacBook Air, just the M2, 256 gigs, the base model MacBook Air, for $1,99. I desperately want to upgrade your RAM here for $200 more, but we'll leave it alone for now. And then you have the 8 gigabytes, 256-gibytes, M2, base model Mac Mini for $599.

So you're at like $1,700 all in between these two machines. two great machines. They do a pretty good job of talking to each other. One of the things you run the risk of with having two separate machines is you have stuff on one device that's not on another device, but things like ICloud Drive make that easier. I personally am just religious about uploading stuff to Google Drive so that it's everywhere. It's a relatively easily solved problem, but it is a thing that can happen. Or you can get a base 14 inch M3 MacBook Pro. Again, base model, I want to spend $200 to upgrade your RAM, but you can just get the stock. base model for $15.99. So for all intents and purposes, the price is not that different, but it's a

little bit cheaper to just get the pro. And I think that's the answer. It's the newer computer. It's going to last you longer. It has the better processor. It has Apple's latest stuff. I think the pro is probably the single most versatile computer that Apple makes. The M1, even MacBook Air, and especially the M2 MacBook Air, are going to be plenty for all of the sort of standard presentation stuff, but you'll notice the difference when you're doing things like editing photos and especially dealing with video, the speed increase you'll get on the pro is meaningful. It's not going to totally change your life, but it is noticeable. And then on top of that, the MacBook Pro gets just outrageous battery life.

It's not super heavy. It's noticeably heavier than the air, but it's not like going to weigh down your backpack in a super brutal way. And I think if the question is, should I get an error? or should I get a pro? Most people, I would tell to get just an error. But if you're debating, do I get an air and then a mini? I think the pro actually overlaps what's good about both of those computers in a pretty good way. So I think if I were in your position, I would just get a 14-inch MacBook Pro, speck it out as much as you can, and plan for that thing to last you an awfully long time.

You got 10 years out of your last MacBook Pro. I wouldn't be surprised if you get just as long out of this one. So that's what I do. But Erland, tell me what you decide and how it goes. And also, if you have thoughts on this setup question, let me know. Call the hotline, send us emails. This is a thing I think a lot of people go through, and I'd love to know what you think. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from the Mac anniversary to productivity stuff

all over theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes to Ollie's stuff and Walt's stuff and everything else, but also readtheverge.com. It's a cool website. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other old Macs, you want to see if you can stump me with. You can always email us at Vergecast at the verge.com. Or call the hotline. It's 66, Verge 1-1.

We love hearing from you. Send us all your thoughts and feelings and questions and ideas. We do a hotline question every week, and we're going to start to do even more of them. So keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Willpore. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Eli, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about Ford's weird new ideas about Android, Elon Musk, and Mr. Beast, what's going on in the streaming wars, and a whole bunch of other stuff. We'll see you then.

Rock and roll.