transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:03] Welcome to Mac Power Users, I'm David Sparks, and joined as always by Mr. Stephen Robles. Hello Stephen, how are you today?
Speaker 2:
[00:09] I'm doing well, David, how's it going with you?
Speaker 1:
[00:11] I am having a lot of fun. We have been talking with our guest today before the show, who always makes me laugh. Welcome back to Mac Power Users after a long time, Patrick Rhone.
Speaker 3:
[00:20] Patrick Rhone, that's me, I guess, huh? Hi, hi.
Speaker 1:
[00:24] That is you. That is you, indeed it is. How are you?
Speaker 3:
[00:29] I'm doing great, as we were saying before we started. Life is a roller coaster, and you're along for the ride, you hold on, and when you get to the top, you start going downhill, you just throw your arms up in the air and go, wee!
Speaker 1:
[00:44] Yeah, all this stuff, everything shall pass, as they say. Patrick and I go back, we were figuring, I think 20 years we've been in this racket. Patrick was a lot more visibly in this ecosystem, back in the days, you had the, when you were writing your book, you were doing a lot more podcasting in the day. You're an Apple consultant, but you're also a guy who thinks about intentionality, and you and I are on the same wavelength so often that I just always enjoy talking to you, Patrick.
Speaker 3:
[01:17] Well, thank you, thank you, I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:
[01:19] It's an honor to meet you too, by the way. I went on a crash course discovering who you were this past week.
Speaker 3:
[01:24] Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:
[01:25] I watched you in a short documentary about minimalism that's on YouTube, and we'll link that in the show notes, and also visited your website and all your books. Bought Enough and your other book, and so started reading. They didn't make it all the way through, but I started reading it, and it was wonderful. So it was a pleasure to meet you.
Speaker 3:
[01:43] Oh, well, thank you. That's really kind of you, and now I have to give you 10 percent. For the free advertising you just gave me, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[01:56] Enough is a book that really holds up, in my opinion. If someone hasn't read it, they should check it out. It's an excellent book. But in addition to Mac Consulting, Patrick is a dad who does lots of great stuff with his daughter. He's a circus rigger. He's a home restorer.
Speaker 3:
[02:14] He's a home restorer. I do all sorts of crazy stuff.
Speaker 1:
[02:18] I talked about this when you were on Focus a while back, but you're also my fashion sherpa, I guess. I appreciate that. One of my favorite things. I don't go to Instagram very often, but when I do and I see you there in a nice outfit, I'm like, I need to be like Patrick. I need to dress like an adult. And I appreciate that.
Speaker 3:
[02:38] Well, I mean, it's nice of you to say that. I feel like I've let you down today, because I felt the need to pull out the old Minimal Mac shirt for the podcast here. So I'm just wearing a T-shirt right now and a baseball cap. So I look like any old bro dude that you might run into at the gas station. But yeah, I do appreciate that.
Speaker 1:
[03:02] A sharp dresser in addition to the emergence. How's that? So Patrick, we've got you back on the show. It's been a long time since we've talked technology together. In the meantime, Apple has switched from Intel to Apple Silicon. I mean, you're out there consulting, helping people set up their small businesses and individual setups. So what's your general take on all this stuff going on with Apple Silicon?
Speaker 3:
[03:29] Well, I mean, it's genuinely amazing, and I wonder about the... Because here's the thing. I am recording this now on my primary machine, which is a 2020 M1 13-inch MacBook Air.
Speaker 1:
[03:50] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[03:52] And it's great. It runs perfectly fine. I have no reason to replace this. As a matter of fact, unless for some reason the battery really starts to go or something breaks horrendously or catastrophically, I mean, the only reason I would replace this is because I felt like I wanted something brand new and shiny, but it certainly isn't because it can't handle the task, because it can. It handles anything I can throw at it.
Speaker 1:
[04:26] Yeah, this is something I think of as the iPad problem, right?
Speaker 3:
[04:29] Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1:
[04:32] I remember I had a legal client, this is four or five years ago now, but at the time his wife was running a Generation 2 iPad, which at that point was like 10 years old and she saw no reason to upgrade it. And the Apple Silicon Macs, especially like the Air and now the Neo, are really just a souped up iPad with the keyboard.
Speaker 3:
[04:56] Yeah, they're static, there's nothing moving, there's nothing.
Speaker 1:
[04:59] Yeah. There's no extra cards, it's all in one piece of silicon, so as long as that works, this thing will just run forever.
Speaker 2:
[05:08] It's funny, actually, just yesterday, I was helping someone set up some Facebook ads, and they had a Mac, and they had a Touch Bar, and I was like, oh, this must be an older one. But as I began using it, it was just as good as my MacBook Air, that's an M4, and I realized there it's an M1 MacBook Pro, and they're still rocking it.
Speaker 3:
[05:25] Yeah. Well, and so one wonders like, so my consulting business, I focus on very small businesses, generally five users or less, very small nonprofits, same, and individuals. And here's the thing, right? In general, the things that they are calling me for, the things that they would need to call me for, things like, oh, I need to migrate to this new machine and make sure that everything transfers over, and I need to have you make sure that I'm able to print, and that this is working and that was working, all of that stuff, right? Well, a visit like that, bought a new machine, need to migrate, that was a three-hour visit in the past, easily, three hours. First of all, just the transferring stuff alone, that'd take a couple hours. I mean, in heck, there'd be some cases where it would be like, yeah, I know you're transferring from this, from this five years previous to that machine, to this new Intel machine, and there's going to be a lot of stuff that's going to need straightening out, and we're going to be doing it over wireless, right? And so it's going to take forever. So tell you what, we're going to book two appointments. The first one is, I'm going to come in at the end of your day, I'm going to start this transfer going. Then we're going to go home and we're both going to pray. I don't care what our religious affiliation is, but whatever God that we worship, that's the one we're speaking to. And then from there, I would come back in the next morning, schedule to come back in the next morning and finish up the job and get things working and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Because it would take that long and I'm not going to charge them on the clock for watching what I used to call progress TV, progress bar TV. And so, yeah, now, with Thunderbolt and with Apple Silicone and Silicone, Silicone.
Speaker 2:
[07:41] There's going to be a comment immediately.
Speaker 3:
[07:43] Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Oh, okay. That it was going to, like, I'm lucky if it takes me 15 minutes to get everything transferred over and things just work. They just magically work. The printer works and the networking all just works. And there's literally nothing for me to charge for to do, right? You know, I'm sitting in there like, okay, I don't know how to make this into a, you know, $200 call.
Speaker 2:
[08:13] Patrick, I'm curious. So you're dealing with small businesses, nonprofits. I get this question a lot when someone has a budget, and a lot of time, it's not the kind of budget we nerds might want to spend on a computer. And this computer has to last them for years. And we're kind of in this weird place where if someone's going to spend $1,500, I could suggest an M5 MacBook Air, but then they won't get the upgrades for the SSD and the unified memory, or I can make an M4 or maybe even an M2 so they can get a two terabyte drive. How do you thread that needle when you have someone asking, what hardware should I buy today?
Speaker 3:
[08:47] Well, so my secret sauce, and this has been this way for years and for all of my clients, they know it now. They don't even, unless there is a really good reason, they don't even look at brand new. They go to the Apple Certified Refurbished section, right? And they get it there. And that is Apple's best kept secret. It's not really a secret because here's what you need. And this is why I tell my clients about the certified refurbished. In most cases, you're not getting something that has like is used, right? It's not gone out to the field and been like, you know, banged on and whatever. And then they're just getting it back, making sure it works and selling it to you. No, certified refurbished from Apple is, you know, these things, if they have been even sent out the door, it's been in a test sort of situation for like a place that like, well, we're going to buy 500 machines, but we first need to make sure it works with our stuff. So send us one or two so we can make sure it works. And then we'll send those back when you send us the 500 that we want, right? And so it's things like that. Oftentimes it's things that have failed testing at the end of the line. So they've gotten to the end of the manufacturing line. And for whatever reason, some component or some other thing has failed the test. And it is more cost-effective for them to stick that to the side, have another place, another unit, another portion of the factory, figure out what's wrong with it, make sure that everything is up to standard, test the hell out of it, and then send it and sell it at a slight discount. There's a lot of paths to get a machine to certified refurbished, in other words. And so all of that is to say that what you are getting is a better than new machine. I say better than new because it's been better tested, it's been better verified, it's been checked out. The last thing they want to do is touch this machine again. Touching it again costs them more money than they're willing to choke. So they sell it as a certified refurbished. And I have never had a customer get a certified refurbished machine that was anything less than a brand new machine, a better than new machine.
Speaker 2:
[11:29] And it's way better than Amazon Renewed and other places because I've personally bought Amazon Renewed, literally bought an iPhone 15 Pro from Amazon Renewed. And when I got it out of the box, first of all, it's in some random box, random charger. It was actually a 15 non-Pro. Like they literally sent me a different device and that has happened multiple times. I did it with an Apple Watch. And so I don't recommend people do Amazon Renewed for Apple products ever, but the Apple refurbished, when you buy it from them, I mean, it even comes in like an Apple-like box. Like it's very much an Apple experience even opening that product. So I recommend it all the time.
Speaker 3:
[12:03] Yes, exactly. Yeah, and it is certified and refurbished by Apple, nobody else. Apple is refurbishing it to like new condition. It's just that plain and simple. You're getting a brand new thing.
Speaker 1:
[12:17] And while you say there's a lot of paths to the refurbished store, it always ends in a human verifying the machine. So anything you buy refurbished has had an actual technician look at it, measure it, and certify it. So I've owned several refurbished machines in my life and never had a problem with any of them. And they have the same warranty. It's like there's no like...
Speaker 3:
[12:39] Yeah, yeah, the exact same warranty. They're, you know, they're eligible for the three-year AppleCare, the whole nine yards. There is nothing, nothing that would denote that this is not a brand new machine. You're getting all the same, all the same benefits. The only time I have bought a brand new machine for with this includes my new appliance was very recently, like at the end of last year. I, we, I bought a brand new custom, you know, maxed out MacBook for my wife, because though my wife is not a, not your traditional, like, it's not like she's doing film editing or whatever, the way in which she works and the things that she does, and her, her, her, her lack of patience means that she has, you know-
Speaker 2:
[13:46] Her need for efficiency. Let me rephrase that for you.
Speaker 3:
[13:49] Right, right, right. But, but, you know, you look at her Safari windows, multiple with, you know, 30 tabs, 40, 50 tabs on all of them open, every window of every program. She doesn't quit things. She doesn't close things. She doesn't. And what was happening, what was happening was it would take forever for a machine to wake up. Or, you know, because she had, she had a before that, she had a certified refurbished 13 and chair. And, and it was a 512, but it was the mid-tier model. So with the, the, it was the, it had the 16 megabytes of RAM, but a 512, and of course, she's using most of that hard drive. And so, yeah, there just wasn't any memory space to keep up with the demands that she, that she was placing and expecting. So yeah, we.
Speaker 2:
[14:39] At least she was using Safari and not Chrome. If it was Chrome, it'd be over.
Speaker 3:
[14:43] Yeah. Oh, but she's got Chrome open too for all of those things that she uses at various clients that won't work with Safari. All of the weird, you know, weird accounting and human resource management and things that she uses that, that they don't test on Safari.
Speaker 2:
[15:02] What's your tab hygiene? You don't strike me as a 100 tabs open in a window. What do you do, Patrick?
Speaker 3:
[15:07] No, I start to get itchy if I get past 10 in a window. And in general, I only have one window. I don't like to, I do sometimes have two windows open for context purposes, right? For instance, my daughter going to college, was applying to colleges, just went through that whole process. She's a senior in high school. And so I had, the only reason I had a second window open, is because I had all of the colleges that she had applied to, because she gave us the login that she used for the portal. Because quite frankly, she can't keep track of the dozen colleges, while she's in school all day and circus all night, and kind of what's happening with which. And so yeah, basically I had a window open with all the colleges. And that's an exceptional circumstance for me.
Speaker 1:
[16:03] Yeah, I get it. And you can get overwhelmed with too much on your screen.
Speaker 3:
[16:10] I do, easily.
Speaker 1:
[16:11] I wanna get back to Stephen's question. So in addition to the refurb store, there's also, they also sell at a discount prior generations of hardware, like they've got extra hardware. They come out with the M5, they're gonna sell a bunch of the M4's cheaper. I'm assuming you probably use that too.
Speaker 3:
[16:26] Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, but the thing is that in general, they put those in the refurb store too. That's another secret thing that they don't tell you is that some of those refurbs you're looking at aren't refurbs at all. They're just last generation's models. In general, I mean, like I said, the truth of the matter is, is that most people, most of my clients especially, they're using office applications. They're doing email, they're browsing. You don't need the most modern thing for that, unless you're my wife. You don't need the fastest, the best, the most current. You can get away, especially with Apple Silicon, and that's the thing, with a lot less. And that machine that you, I mean, my standard thing for them used to be, yeah, we should probably replace things every three to four years. And there's a reason why Apple provides an additional three-year warranty for their machines. Because the recommended replacement cycle is four years, and in general, the various component parts aren't tested for longer than that. Well, that's not, that's not necessarily cost-effective advice anymore, to be honest with you.
Speaker 1:
[17:49] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[17:51] Because things just tend to work. And this is the reason why my consulting business, my, you know, the work that I do for those people has, has waned because things are just working. There's nothing that requires me to come in and fix it. There's nothing, they buy new stuff, they plug it in, it works. They, I transfer them over to a new machine, takes a half hour, things work. And they're not replacing it at the same rate, you know? An iPad just works until it doesn't.
Speaker 1:
[18:35] Nobody says, hey, I need you to come defrag my drive.
Speaker 3:
[18:38] Right, exactly, you know? Or even to a certain extent, I need you to come and remove this weird piece of adware that I installed when I downloaded Mac Cleaner or whatever the heck it is, you know?
Speaker 2:
[18:53] I used to have a whole little side gig of, you know, some companies would buy a lot of iMacs, and in like that 2012 to the M era, it was always the spinning hard drive when you bought that beast model iMac.
Speaker 3:
[19:04] Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:
[19:04] And so people would ask me like, listen, we got five to six iMacs, they're super slow, what can you do? And so I would say, listen, I'll swap an SSD in there, change nothing else, and it will be 100 times faster. And so I got really good with that pizza cutter from iFixit, peeling off that display, swapping the hard drive disk with an SSD, and everybody was happy. But that's not really a thing anymore. You can't even buy a spinning disk in a Mac anymore. And it's probably the best for most people, because now the computer you buy out of the box, refurb or new, you're going to be able to use that for 10, 15 years, and it's not going to, maybe not 15, but 10 years, and it's not going to feel slow like that.
Speaker 3:
[19:39] Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, I'm on a 2020 M1, and there's never a point in my day where it's like, oh, I think it might be time for me to get a faster machine. No.
Speaker 2:
[19:49] So do you have newer devices in your iPad and phone life or like, what else is part of your setup there?
Speaker 3:
[19:57] Well, so anyone who has followed my work for some time knows that I am a big believer in if it ain't broke, there don't fix it. That if you have something that is working just fine for you, if it's enough for you, there's no reason other than pure hubris and greed to replace it, right?
Speaker 2:
[20:26] So you're about to say you're using iPhone 7. Tell me.
Speaker 3:
[20:32] iPhone, this is the iPhone.
Speaker 2:
[20:37] The 11? 11, I think?
Speaker 1:
[20:40] It's got a notch.
Speaker 3:
[20:42] No, this is the iPhone 12.
Speaker 2:
[20:44] iPhone 12? Oh, 12 mini. You're still on a mini.
Speaker 3:
[20:47] It's a 12 mini.
Speaker 2:
[20:48] Okay.
Speaker 3:
[20:50] And this replaced my iPhone 5. And the only reason that I replaced the iPhone 5, in fact, was because Apple went to that period where they did the 5, and then they did these bigger phones. Oh, no, I'm sorry, not the 5. I replaced my iPhone SE, because they did the iPhone SE, which was that size of the 5, right? And so I got the SE, and then they didn't make a phone in that size anymore for a few years. I was like, y'all, I guess I'm with this because I don't want a bigger phone. I'd like this size. And if Apple's not making the size, if nobody's making the size, I have nowhere to go. And then Apple, for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13, came out with the mini, which was that size. And I'm like, well, this is my chance. I know Apple's capricious about these small phones and that I'm going to buy this now, or I'm never going to be able to get it again or whatever. And so that's what I did. And so I'm going to hang on to that until I absolutely, positively can't anymore.
Speaker 2:
[22:03] Have you tried the iPhone Air though? I know it's a larger footprint. But this iPhone Air with the thin and lightness, does that tempt you at all?
Speaker 1:
[22:10] No, no, you want the small screen.
Speaker 3:
[22:15] I want the small screen. I like the pocket size. I like the fact that it's not too much bigger than a three by five card.
Speaker 1:
[22:27] I like that.
Speaker 2:
[22:28] Have you ever been tempted by the minimal phone? Or I actually bought a light phone when that came out a number of years ago. Now, they're on Light Phone 3 where it's like the dumb-ish phone to your smartphone. Have you ever been tempted or tried any of those?
Speaker 3:
[22:41] Yeah, no, I've checked them out and I've looked at them. I got, hmm, that's interesting. But then I think to myself, yes. But I guess for me, and I actually wrote about this on my old site, Minimal Mac, way back in the day, that I have a very Amish approach to technology. What people may not know about the Amish, I'll educate folks real quick, is that they are not anti-technology. The reason that they drive a horse and buggy or don't have a telephone or don't have electricity or these sorts of things, is not because they're anti-technology. They are long-term testers. That's basically what it comes down to. They have to have it absolutely proven that the benefits of this thing outweigh the costs, right? And the truth of the matter is, is that a horse and buggy is easier to maintain and costs less than a car for most things. And especially if you have a place to store the horse, you have a place to feed the horse, and you have the place that, you know, like if you have the ability to take care of that, then yeah. And in general, many Amist communities actually do have a car. It is one car that they all share for that one time that you might need a car for the thing you can't do with the horse and buggy. If it's just going into town to sell your blankets, if it's just, you know, going over down the road to help out your friend with their barn, then there's no need for the car. I can get there just fine with the horse and buggy. That's my approach to technology, right? You know, yes, I've looked at those things. They're appealing. I see their appeal to certain things, but once again, that's a whole new cost I have to pay. That's a whole new way I have to change my lifestyle, change the way that I do things, change around the technology that I'm using and what I'm using it for and that sort of thing. And there might be situations where I really do, really kind of do need this and that I don't have it, and maybe I'm having to use my Mac instead. You get what I'm saying, right? The cost of making all of that change and disruption is not worth what I have and how I've used this now for, I don't know, however long that is. I can't even remember when the 12 mini came out, to be honest with you. Is that six years ago now, five?
Speaker 1:
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Speaker 3:
[27:59] Well, and sometimes it's simple. I kind of did this for a while, I've fallen off the wagon quite a bit. I really kept in my mind that my phone stays in my pocket unless I have an actual intended reason to take it out. That is not boredom, boredom isn't a good reason. That's not a use case. Checking, making sure that I'm seeing my email, got to respond to that right away. Even text messages, no, no, no. I have to take it out to use it for something. And if I don't have a good reason, then it stays.
Speaker 2:
[28:52] So tell me about your, do you use focus modes? How do you limit your notifications? What kind of settings do you have on your phone specifically to make sure it doesn't distract you like that?
Speaker 3:
[29:02] No, no focus modes. Here's the focus mode. I think to myself that I'm only taking my phone out if I have an actual use for it. Notifications though, yeah. Basically, it's this, an app asks me to turn on notifications. That is no. By default, my default is no. My default is always no. I want no notifications. Turn them all off. I don't care. So almost nothing, with the exception of messages, with the exception of voicemail, for instance, or the built-in stuff, almost nothing has notifications turned on. No is my default for notifications. I just don't-
Speaker 2:
[29:49] So what do you allow? Text messages?
Speaker 3:
[29:51] Text messages. And even with text messages in general, it is VIPs, right?
Speaker 2:
[30:00] Right.
Speaker 3:
[30:01] So it's only if they're VIPs. Otherwise, I check them like I do email.
Speaker 2:
[30:07] I'm curious. So I watched your segment in the Minimalism documentary, and I know I've read books like Stillness is the Key. And so there's always this tension of like, how do we be present? And then how do those of us who are passionate about technology, you know, do that too. So tell me more about like, how do you balance? Like I imagine you still have an appreciation and love for like, what's new, the technology that's out there. Maybe it's AI. How do you decide or choose like, what am I going to pursue to see if it's worthwhile? Like you're saying, do I test something that's brand new? Or do I just kind of resist this and be settled with what I have now and not worry about it? How do you make those decisions?
Speaker 3:
[30:49] Well, first of all, I want to talk about the whole being present thing, because being present is a reality, it's a default. Being not present is a choice. You actually have to actively choose not to be present. You have to actively choose to, this is the thing that most people understand is that everything we do is a choice. If it's not an involuntary human reaction, it's a choice. It may be a choice that we're making subconsciously, it may be a choice that we feel compelled to make. It may be the right choice, I don't know, but it is a choice and we have control over those things. And quite frankly, to be here and for me to look at this microphone and be in this conversation and be in this moment, well, that's default. You can't be outside of this moment. You can't think about what's coming next or this thing down the road or whatever. Those are all choices.
Speaker 2:
[31:45] Well, can I play devil's advocate just for a second? Because I think one of the places that people experience the most is with worry or anxiousness. Typically, it's about the future though. It's about an event that hasn't happened yet. It's anticipatory anxiety.
Speaker 3:
[32:01] It doesn't exist.
Speaker 2:
[32:03] Well, I don't think they would say that they are choosing to it. They would have to be more intentional to try and be in the present and push out the worry or figure out some other mechanism to deal with it. So in that regard, how do they not choose to not worry?
Speaker 3:
[32:20] You know what I mean? See, here's where I think people get tripped up, and that is the idea that choices are always easy. They're not. Choices are hard choices. And that sometimes a choice being elsewhere, being out there, thinking about the future, worrying about this thing that does not exist, and that there's nothing your energy and your action can do to control it, right? Is easier than whatever it is that you have to be right here for. And your brain, like I said, is not necessarily an active choice often. Oftentimes, it's the subconscious. Oftentimes, it's just programming, and it's the way that we're built as human beings. I want to be clear about that. I understand it's humanity, it's humanness. These are the things that allow us to be human, and that separate us from a lot of the other creatures on this earth. But I guess my point is that doesn't change the circumstances, and the circumstances are one of these things exists, the other one does not.
Speaker 2:
[33:35] Well, what would you say, like the book The Anxious Generation, read that with my wife, and obviously with the rise of social media and things like that, it's pulling people out of the moment more often than not. Yes. And so, I mean, do you-
Speaker 3:
[33:48] And we love that, we humans, we love that.
Speaker 2:
[33:52] I think we are drawn to it, and I feel like we end up not loving it because we understand the negative effects.
Speaker 3:
[33:59] Sure.
Speaker 2:
[33:59] But like, do you- Are you on social media? Like, do you ever scroll social?
Speaker 3:
[34:04] Yeah. Yeah, sure. Of course. I'm human.
Speaker 1:
[34:07] He's a sharp-dresser on Instagram.
Speaker 3:
[34:09] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm human.
Speaker 2:
[34:11] So what boundary, what guardrails do you put on Instagram?
Speaker 3:
[34:14] And it is that guardrail, like I said, of I found myself feeling like I was doing that both too often and for the wrong reasons, you know, with the wrong goal in mind. And thus, I tried my best to be conscious of not doing that or coming up with, and once again, this is just all in my head. I don't, nobody needs technology to do this for them. And in fact, that's a crush, it will help one never learn how to walk, right? You know, that what one needs is an understanding of the behavior that's happening, a commitment to what they would like instead, and just the internal conversation to be able to, and the self-forgiveness and the self-empathy and the self-compassion, to be able to say, no, here's what I want instead. This is the way I want this. I want to work with this. This is the way that I want to approach this. And anytime I feel myself going this other direction, I'm going to remind myself that that's not the direction I want to go.
Speaker 2:
[35:44] So like I have, I've had friends that will literally put the screen time controls on their phone and their partner or spouse will have the passcode. So they can't even, you know, they can't disable it. So they can only spend a set amount of time on Instagram or whatever. So are you saying like you don't set those kind of guardrails for yourself, nor do you really keep track of maybe how much time you're spending? You just are intentional. Like you'll, if you're going to intentionally scroll, you'll intentionally scroll.
Speaker 3:
[36:14] I mean, that's another one of the few notifications I have pop up is the screen time one that says, oh, past week you spent an hour and a half a day on this device.
Speaker 2:
[36:28] That's pretty good.
Speaker 3:
[36:29] Yeah. I don't know. I find that interesting. I oftentimes find it confusing because it's like, well, how is it counting that and this, that? Well, because here's the thing, right? There are certain things, and I don't know. Maybe there's a way to turn off what it counts and what it doesn't count. I haven't really explored it that deeply. It's one of those things that I just turned on because I thought the data would be interesting and I let it stay on. But now, you've just reminded me, I should really look into this. Because here's the thing, right? Is sometimes we'll take a long road trip, right? So I'll have maps going for like seven hours over the course of every day for the course of a week, and I'll get the note, oh, your screen time has really gone up. Yeah, because I've been using it to get to where I need to go. But you get what I'm saying, right?
Speaker 2:
[37:18] For sure, for sure.
Speaker 3:
[37:19] No, I don't necessarily keep track of that outside of anecdotal information. Like I said, I really do, and I want to point this out, especially for our listeners. I hope that what I do helps somebody. If somebody reaches out and says, hey, you said this, that, and the other, and I've been thinking through and it really helped me, that's great. But none of this stuff, I don't believe that I'm me. This works for me. If you need a screen time thing and give it to your spouse, or what's the one that basically blocks your internet for the brick or whatever. If you need those things, great for you. And I'm glad that you're doing something to try to win back some of your control and some of your freedom and some of your agency. I really do appreciate that and support that and want that to work for you. For me, I guess what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to be the one who understands the choices that I am making and assumes the power and responsibility for making different choices.
Speaker 1:
[38:42] You know, I would add to that, like I feel like Patrick and I have a bit of a generational advantage as a GenXer, you know.
Speaker 3:
[38:49] Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:
[38:50] We didn't grow up with this stuff. And so it's like, that's not, you know, we talked earlier about defaults and choices. A lot of times choices are couched in defaults and you don't think about, you don't question the default behavior, so you do things. But growing up, a default for me wasn't to get bored and I'll take my phone out of my pocket. So to me, it's almost a failing at this point. People text message me and I don't get back to them over a couple days because I just never looked at it. And it's not a holier than thou thing, it's just I'm not hooked up that way. And if I had been raised 20 years later, I think it would have been a lot more difficult for me. So I do think people need tools or, you know, I think being conscious of this, making an effort, whether it's giving your spouse your password or whatever, I think that's a good thing.
Speaker 3:
[39:40] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[39:41] But it's just not a battle I really need to particularly fight.
Speaker 3:
[39:46] Right. Well, and yeah, I agree with that completely. For sure, this is a generational thing, and even my daughter would have different thoughts and ideas and opinions on this, than I would for sure.
Speaker 2:
[39:59] Well, that was going to be my next question because I have three kids, my oldest is about to turn 17, and navigating this in this time period with teenagers and technology and social media is a challenge. Everyone has different, every family has different rules and guidelines, and kids will see other families like, they don't have any limits. Why can't, it's always a challenge. So how did you guide your own child through this process into becoming a teenager? And I assume they have a phone, but you could correct me if I'm wrong, but how have you helped them navigate that tension between is this addicting or not, or what do you do?
Speaker 3:
[40:36] Yeah, I'll be honest. I don't think we've done anything necessarily all that special. There have been times when for one reason or another, we've needed to quarantine her from the phone, or from certain apps, or social media, or whatever, because of behavior that we thought was not correct. But those times actually have been relatively rare. I could probably count them on one hand. And I think about that. I think about the fact that my daughter has been... I remember getting the original iPad. I ordered one right away. That's one of the few times in my life when it's like I saw the thing. And there was no question that I was like... Immediately after the keynote and the pre-order thing went live, I smashed that button so hard, it wasn't even funny, right? And I remember... I actually have a picture of her using the iPad for the first time. And I put this thing in her hand. And keep in mind, she was like two. You know, didn't have a phone, didn't understand how any of these things work. And I was curious. I might have written about this on Minimal Mac, in fact, back in the day. Which is still live, by the way. Anyone can Google any of this stuff. And it's still up there. But yeah, I was amazed at how I just handed her this thing. And she figured it out in like seconds. Seconds, she got it, right? And I'm just like, you know, wow. Like, I certainly didn't do that with the Timex Sinclair, which was my first computer.
Speaker 1:
[42:35] Oh yeah, I remember that computer. To get the thermal printer to go with it?
Speaker 3:
[42:39] No, no, just the little chiclet keys that were printed on the, you know. But yeah, yeah, you know, and I was just blown away by just how quickly she picked that up and how Apple had finally designed a device that literally, anyone from 2 to 92, you could put it in their hands and they would get it. They just get it. They intuitively, it just like, this makes sense, right? You know, so she has certainly, since she was a very, very, very young child, for as long as she can remember, she has had technology in her life. Technology that has been available to her, that she's been able to use. We have never blocked the Internet here. We have never turned on parental controls. There's a lot of reasons behind that. A lot of them have to do with the fact that I was raised by a hippie and I certainly had no parental controls whatsoever. And if I found Playboys in the trash can, my mom used it as a teaching method to teach me the difference between art and pornography. And so I figured, hey, if she ran across anything that she didn't know or understand, what I wanted to do is create a relationship where she could come talk to me about it. And I could discuss it with her and we could have a conversation. So part of it was I was certainly raised by free love, radical hippie. But all of that is to say that, yeah, I'm probably not the best piece of advice. Just simply because I really, we really have tried to just let her, let her navigate things. And there hasn't been a situation where I have felt that she was spending too much time on her phone and her homework wasn't getting done. Or too much time on her phone and the chores weren't not getting done. Like we've never, like that has never, that hasn't been a problem for us. And even still today, I don't know how it was, how it is she manages to get her schoolwork done. Because she never does homework at home. It's always done by the time she gets home.
Speaker 2:
[45:04] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[45:05] And I look at her grades, I was like, wait, how did, when did you do this? It wasn't at home. I don't know how she works, but she does it.
Speaker 1:
[45:13] My daughter is to this day outraged at me and my wife, because when she went through high school, they had a portal where you could log in to track their assignments. And when she went to graduate, we had to log in to get some paperwork for her graduation. And I said, I don't have an account. And she's like, what? And neither me or my wife had ever logged into the portal in her four years of high school, because we saw the report card and she was getting A's, and I think she's doing the job. And she's so, she's angry to this. I can't believe you didn't have a, you know.
Speaker 3:
[45:53] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[45:55] She's like, my friends' parents were talking to them about their homework. I'm like, but that wasn't your, you were doing your job, but you didn't need me, you know.
Speaker 3:
[46:04] Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, there have been times when an assignment wasn't turned in on time, or she said she wrote it, and the technology ate her homework. And to be honest with you, I was, even in those cases, I'm like, oh, wait, it's Google Classroom? Yep, the technology ate your homework. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. You know better. That's not your fault. Yeah, I believe you. I'm sorry your teachers don't, but if you want me to talk to them, I can tell you all the ways that, you know, Google Classroom, who's supposed to be tracking everything and doing it, that it fails. It fails all the time.
Speaker 1:
[46:41] Stephen, how do you do that with your kids? You've got younger ones too.
Speaker 3:
[46:45] You're the better example.
Speaker 2:
[46:46] Well, so I was not raised by hippies, nor am I a hippie, unfortunately, I guess. But, you know, when my kids were smaller, we let them have the YouTube Kids app because the YouTube Kids app was a thing. And there wasn't objectionable content, but we realized that some of the videos that they would watch is like these present opening or gift opening type videos that are basically like dopamine hijacking videos. It's just constantly revealing this new toy, whatever. And like, as we were watching this, it was like, this is not bad or objectionable content. It's not violent. It's not gory, but it doesn't seem good for the psyche. And so at that point, it was way back then that I started developing this Rube Goldberg machine, where if they wanted to watch videos from YouTube, I have the system that brings them into Plex. And then if they want to watch something, they have our server of videos that we've, they can choose what to download and what to watch. But then when they go to watch it, there's not some algorithm then feeding them an up next or something else. And we generally are talk about the things that we watched. And so that was YouTube. And when it comes to social media, it's been a similar thing where a lot of my kids, I have a 13-year-old, many of his friends of the same age are on Instagram. They just have Instagram, they scroll it, not really many limits. And that's something where we said, you know what, we're not going to do that on the device that you have with you all the time just yet. Not because it's bad content, and we're not afraid of what you are going to do on those platforms. But there was just a recent court case where Meta and Google were found liable to creating algorithms and platforms that were addictive in nature to teenagers. So it's not that we think you're going to go out there and look for something bad or whatever, but the nature of these algorithms is that you will fall into this loop of either dopamine or whatever, and we want you to be more mindful of that. So for my older sons, one's 13, one's about to be 17, we'll let them see Instagram or whatever, but a lot of times it's on a computer. It's like if you want to watch, go scroll it, but on a computer. Instagram has actually implemented more parental controls of like here's a two-hour limit, and then it actually shuts down. They actually can't scroll after two hours of collective scrolling in a day. So we do err on more side of that again, not because we don't trust our kids to not do it, I just don't trust the platforms to not try to hijack that part of their brain that becomes addictive. Like you're saying, I want it to be an intentional choice. I don't want boredom to be the reason to go to something. I would rather be like this. And I encourage my kid, because I do YouTube for a living, like this is literally my job. Like I make stuff for these platforms and algorithms. So it was a bit of like, maybe double standard there. But I tell them like my oldest son, he wants to make videos about skateboarding and music. And so I'll say, I would love for you to make videos and post it. Like do that, go for it, but still be careful on the consumption side, because it can just very quickly turn into, I'm just scrolling to scroll, and then an hour goes by. And like you're saying, there wasn't an intentionality of like, what am I gonna do for the next hour? If you wanna choose, like I'm gonna sit down between 7 and 8 p.m. and scroll Instagram reels for fun, cool, but that's 99% of the time not what happens. What happens is you open your phone randomly, and now you've lost two hours of your day, and you don't know why that happened. And so we've been more, I guess you could say strict or more traditional, ironically, than you are on them. But only because the platforms is what I don't trust. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[50:23] Do you let them bring their devices to their bedrooms?
Speaker 2:
[50:29] We did not instill those rules ahead of time. And so my son, my middle son, I think he charges an iPad in his room, he doesn't have a phone yet. That's something that we've kind of pushed off. And so he charges an iPad in his room, our daughter who's nine, we kind of started those rules, like let's charge your devices in our bedroom. And then my two older sons, my oldest son's about to turn 17, they charge their stuff in the room. And that is an interesting distinction. I have parents that are my age and slightly older who have changed that. But I also have screen time controls for times of day. I also have my unified network restricting certain content at a network level. So even if screen time fails on their device. And again, just because, it's not that I think they're going to go out to see it, but just content comes to you in so many different ways today. So yeah, we've different rules on that.
Speaker 1:
[51:23] It's easier to bump into things they shouldn't see on the Internet.
Speaker 2:
[51:27] And to Patrick's point, I do want teaching moments to happen, and I do want us to have open dialogue and conversation. But if they want to search for something, it's different than just them being presented something seemingly unprompted, for whatever reason. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3:
[51:43] Yeah. In other words, follow what Stephen does, don't follow what I do.
Speaker 2:
[51:47] No, it's different. It's so hard, and it's so hard. My wife and I so often tell each other, man, this has got to be harder than raising kids in the 90s, right? Because you just didn't have to deal with this. I don't know, David, you tell me. You didn't really have to deal with mobile devices, did you?
Speaker 1:
[52:03] Not really. By the time they were getting them, the biggest risk was that they would play Angry Birds for four hours.
Speaker 2:
[52:09] That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:
[52:11] I mean, there was no social media stuff. And my oldest is a high school teacher now. And she's been doing it several years. And she's like, she told me the biggest problem is the phones. She's like, the kids cannot, they literally cannot put them down. Her school now has a very strict policy. They're not allowed to have them. She found kids that would hide the phone under their pant leg and then they would cross their leg in class so they could scroll while she was teaching without her noticing. And she said, and you'll talk to them, and they genuinely don't want to be using the phone, but it's that addiction. They literally cannot help themself. And one of the biggest insights she's got since they had this strict policy is a kid's tell her, oh, I'm so happy we have this policy. I mean, the kids like it too, but it has to be across the board. That was the problem. If it was just one class, she did it before the school adopted it. She realized early. But the kids now really appreciate it. So long as everybody has to put them away, they're totally cool with it. And they enjoy their days more. It's like that anxious generation, Stephen, both Stephen was talking about it, really kind of tells the story here.
Speaker 3:
[53:24] Yeah, yeah. And Beatriz's school too, right? Should they have a fairly strict no phone policy and what was hilarious about it, it was implemented three years ago, really. They started with a, we're gonna just pilot this for a little while and see how it goes and see where the kinks are. But the biggest people against it weren't the kids. It was the parents. And the reason being is that the parents were like, well, but if I have to like, pick her up for a doctor's appointment in the middle of the day and let her know that I'm there, like how do we, you know, or if there's something that's changed with after school, how do I communicate? Like it was the parents, so many of them who were like, how do I communicate with my kid when they're at school?
Speaker 1:
[54:12] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[54:13] You get the office to announce it on the speaker. I remember being in elementary school. If your parents showed up and announced, they would go, Stephen Robles, please come to the main office. I mean, there was ways to communicate.
Speaker 3:
[54:22] You are in fact 10 years older than you look apparently. Yeah. Because that was a thing in our generation for sure.
Speaker 2:
[54:29] I had those. I had those.
Speaker 1:
[54:30] That was the reasons that my daughters go to the parents, not the kids. And same thing. And they're like, hey, we have a system. If you need to get all your kid, let us know. We've been doing this for a while.
Speaker 3:
[54:42] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[54:46] This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by Ecamm. If you're a Mac user who creates videos or podcasts, you need Ecamm. Ecamm Live is the all-in-one studio built exclusively for Mac, so it looks, feels and performs like a native pro app should. Whether you're live streaming, recording a podcast or producing training videos, Ecamm gives you broadcast level control with drag and drop simplicity, switch cameras, share your screen, cue overlays and control audio, all without ever leaving your Mac. I've personally used Ecamm for years. I actually just had a huge update and it's even better. But for live streaming, you can even schedule events in your YouTube channel. And Ecamm, once you connect to your account, it'll see those scheduled events. Plus you can multi stream to things like Twitch, RTMP destinations, and you can get high quality recordings and do all the overlays and layouts, all with that native Mac app. And it works incredibly well. You can brand your show with titles, graphics and lower thirds. You can even pull in guests via interview mode or record multi track audio for perfect post production. And if you're into automation, Ecamm works beautifully with tools and apps like Stream Deck and Loopback, as well as many Mac tools you already know and love. Then you can upgrade to Pro and unlock Ecamm for Zoom, letting you feed your polished setup straight into Zoom meetings or webinars, share Zoom comments on screen, and even capture each participant's audio and video separately for easy post production work. But don't wait any longer. Go and check it out now. To get 15% off, go to ecamm.com/macpowerusers and use code MPU15. That's 15% off at ecamm.com/macpowerusers with code MPU15. Thanks to Ecamm for sponsoring this show and all of Relay. Can I ask you about calendars, Patrick? Because I know you like calendars.
Speaker 3:
[56:40] Oh, I love a good calendar.
Speaker 2:
[56:42] And so we've talked a lot about focus. I'm curious, do you schedule times of work or focus on the calendar? Is that something that goes on a task list? How do you because I see people use calendars as their task list, and that drives me nuts because I'm like, don't put it to do in your in an event. Don't do that unless unless it's like go to the gym and you want to put that. OK, so will you tell me what's your strategy?
Speaker 3:
[57:08] So, and I'll try to distill this, because this is a whole episode on its own. But basically, and this is the rule in our whole family, if it's not on the calendar, it doesn't exist.
Speaker 2:
[57:26] Right.
Speaker 3:
[57:27] It does not exist. It's not happening. It's fiction. It doesn't exist. I don't believe in it. And therefore, if it's something that you want to happen, especially if it involves a thing called time, and the truth of the matter is all things involve time, then it is on the calendar, because the calendar is where you block, manipulate, and otherwise relate to time. And so, for instance, actually while we've been recording this, my daughter messaged me using the phone that she doesn't have in school. Wait a minute. Yeah. The truth of the matter is that the kids do use their phone from time to time, but very, very specifically for things like this. And against the wishes of the teachers and faculty. But she let me know that she does in fact have theater rehearsal after school, because it wasn't on the calendar. And so, she knows that she texted me to let me know that, and the next action is she puts that on the calendar.
Speaker 2:
[58:52] Yeah, I'm thankful. We've initiated that in our family. This is where we're on the same page here, because even my kids will be like, we have shared calendars with me, my spouse and the kids, shared calendars with me and my spouse, with extended family. We have calendars, we've run our lives. And the kids will even say, hey, this wasn't on the calendar. So, we get very specific. But do you-
Speaker 3:
[59:10] I get called out.
Speaker 2:
[59:11] Right, right. But do you block out, if you're going to work on your book or you want to time block, do you block out those times on the calendar too?
Speaker 3:
[59:19] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, what's interesting about that is that, you know, so for the record, for the nerds, I use Busy Cal. I use Busy Cal because it's the actual real natural successor to a program on the Mac that was ancient called Now Up to Date and Contact, and now up to date being the calendar portion of that. So, it is a direct successor of Now Up to Date. So, in other words, I've been using this particular calendaring program for as long as I have been using a Mac, which goes to the Color Classic that is on my desk right over here. It's off screen, so I won't bother pointing to it, but I'm telling people about it. And so, all of that is to say that, yes, I've been using the same calendaring program for decades now. And, yes, I use, because it's got both personal and shared calendaring integrated, oftentimes, I block things out, but they're just blocked out on my personal calendar. And the reason for that, no one else, it's not like my wife or my daughter or whatever, see those time blocks and whatever. I do that for me to block out my time, realizing that they have priority. If I were to make that a shared calendar and make the things I put on that a shared calendar, they would see, and rightfully so, they would see something on the calendar and would not want to schedule something there. But that particular calendar, those events change more than anything else on my calendar because, for instance, had to take my dog to the vet earlier this morning. That wasn't on my calendar. That wasn't blocked off on the calendar. I had something else on the calendar that was something I wanted to do. Guess what? That got deleted. Taking dog to the vet got put on. My choice.
Speaker 1:
[61:17] And I think, Stephen, there's different angles to this. The idea of having a block for each one of your individual tasks is kind of bananas. But having blocks of time to get types of work done, I find very beneficial because, like Patrick was saying, there's things that you say yes to that are very important. And yet, you never do them if you don't make time for them. So I use that to that technique. But usually those blocks are like a couple hours. And it's not tied to one particular task, but to an endeavor that's important to me. That like, okay, I really want to do this thing. I can't seem to find time for it. I'm gonna say Wednesday morning, that's it, it's happening. And then when people ask me to do things Wednesday morning, short of an emergency like the dog to the vet, I actually do make that time happen. So I think it's an effective tool if you use it wisely.
Speaker 3:
[62:12] Yes, yes. So like, for instance, on my calendar, you'll see a two-hour block that says this errands. And I know, I know on my list, what errands I'm gonna run during that time. I don't have to spell it out.
Speaker 1:
[62:31] So Patrick, what are you doing with artificial intelligence, Mr. Minimal Mac?
Speaker 3:
[62:37] Well, I'm trying my best not to do much with it outside of the things that it just keep popping up that you can't seem to avoid because it's being stuck into everything. And I think that, you know, we really need to kind of start to understand like, that, you know, for instance, the whole, like you're typing out an email and it's predicting the next thing that you're going to say, the next word you're going to type. And you hit the tab bar, and it automatically does that for you. Well, it's using AI to do that, right? You know, that's a manifestation of machine learning, AI, you know, certainly predictive, you know, predictive reasoning, all of that stuff, right? Like, so that's, you know, so I guess you could say, yeah, I'm using AI as much as a lot of people are in that context, right? In that kind of, it's there sort of way, or when you go to search for something on Google or DuckDuckGo now, it gives you the little summary up at the top. And for some things, if you want a quick answer that is likely correct, that's fine, right? You don't have to...
Speaker 1:
[63:54] Possibly correct, yeah.
Speaker 3:
[63:55] Possibly correct. You don't have to click further, right? But if you want to, you know, how long to cook white beans in the instant pot, you know, what's... If it's too long or too short, you're going to know, right?
Speaker 2:
[64:12] Do you have any on your phone? Like, are you ever, like, using Chagiputti or Claude on your phone or are you just...
Speaker 3:
[64:17] No, no, no. I haven't gone that direction. And to be honest with you, I don't really... Here's the two times I have most recently used it and most extensively used it. One time I was talking with David about was, you know, my daughter's going off to college. Sarah Lawrence, for anyone who cares. And she... I do the vast majority of her logistics, as it were, and care and I do all the cooking for the family. Like I said, my wife wears the pants. I'm the house guy, the house husband, as it were. The support. The grocery shopping, the support, all of that stuff.
Speaker 1:
[65:05] I would say you're a very engaged father. That's great.
Speaker 3:
[65:08] Sure. So I'm a very engaged father. And what that means is that I'm going to have a lot of time on my hands coming up here in about four months. And so I was starting to have a little bit of an anxiety attack about that, a little bit of a freak out. Let's just say I wasn't being very present about the whole thing. I was worrying about, holy crap.
Speaker 2:
[65:32] Did you choose to worry about it or did it just happen to you?
Speaker 3:
[65:35] Oh, no, that's a choice. That's definitely a choice. Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:
[65:37] I'm just curious.
Speaker 3:
[65:38] You know, because I chose then to channel that worry into productive, like, okay, well, I can sit and be like, oh my God, what am I going to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And sit and worry about, oh gosh, what's my wife going to think because pretty soon I'm just going to be sitting around twiddling my thumbs while she's working her ass off. I better find a way to work my butt off too. And so yes, a friend of mine who I trust, a friend and mentor, he said, you know, I recently went through the same thing with a job transition and trying to rethink like what I was offering from a consulting standpoint and that sort of thing. And I used Claude to help me with that. And I found it very beneficial for, you know, for opening up new ideas, you know, new ways of thinking about things or pathways or what have you. And in some ways validating like thoughts and directions that I, you know, was already having and at least helping me like, at least plan some of that stuff out. And, you know, he's like, here's, you know, I gave it very specific permissions about like, here's what I'm looking for, here's how I want you to interact with me, here's how, you know, because in Claude, there's like a, like a preferences area where you basically go and write out preferences. You can say, I want you to be firm with me, or no, I want you to be a little bit gentle with me. And like, and it does it, you know, which is kind of cool, right? You know, it's like the therapist you can go to and say, oh, don't tell me what to do. But no, it's... And so I used it to kind of explore some of that. And basically what it said was essentially, yeah, give up this whole technology consulting thing, because that's basically a dead-end road. You should just fix houses and sell them.
Speaker 2:
[67:32] I told you to do that.
Speaker 3:
[67:35] Wow. But I was thinking, like, okay, well, I guess I could devote more time to this, and I'm getting towards the end of one house project that I might be able to put on the market come fall, and then I'm going to have some money that I can maybe make the next move with, and that maybe I should just keep doing that. Yeah, so I used it for that. I also used it, we went to Greece, and we had some ideas in mind for itinerary, some things we wanted to do. We already had tried to spell out that itinerary. So I just stuck it into ChatGPT in that particular case, and I said, we're planning to go to Greece. Here's what we'd like to achieve with the trip. Here's the reasons why we're going. Here's the sorts of travelers we are. Take a look at this itinerary and see if there's any suggestions and ways you have to, does this work? And it was super helpful. It was like, well, March is kind of a slow time for travel in Greece. And there's a lot of things that you want to do that just plain are not open, because no one travels to Greece in March like you are. And instead, you know, you should maybe consider this. And yeah, it kind of rearranged our itinerary that gave us everything that we wanted. And it's pretty much what we followed. And it was fantastic.
Speaker 1:
[69:17] This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by One Password. Protect the accounts that power your life. Go to onepassword.com/mpu and get 20% off your plan. The internet can be a great place, but if you're not secured, it can also be a dangerous one. All the crooks have tools to try and compromise your secrets. You should have a tool to protect them. And you can do that with One Password. With One Password, you always know your password, even when you don't. So lock down your life's most valuable essentials. One Password makes it easy to create, manage and use an unlimited number of strong passwords. One Password generates and memorizes secure passwords so you don't have to. Not only that, they have completely solved the sharing problem. With One Password, you can securely share logins, credit cards, Wi-Fi codes, and other sensitive data with your family, friends and co-workers without risk. They don't even have to be One Password subscribers to benefit from that sharing. And my favorite feature of One Password is probably the watchtower. It scans your saved items and flags known data breaches, weak and reused passwords, and websites you use that support pass keys. It helps you actively have good security hygiene on the Internet. The plans are simple. They've got individual plans to protect just yourself or a family plan to protect you and your family. They've got apps on all the major platforms. And they are constantly improving this product to help protect you. Both Stephen and I are active One Password users. You should go check it out yourself at onepassword.com/npu. If you go to that link, you'll get 20 percent off. And let me heard about it here on the Mac Power Users. Thanks One Password for all of your support of the Mac Power Users. A point you raise that is something I'm dealing with right now. Because unlike you, I am very aggressively using AI for what I call donkey work. It's like all the background stuff of maintaining the web and dealing with some of the customer support stuff. A lot of that for me now is managed by an AI doing the grunt work for me, so I don't have to do that. So I'm not foreign to AI. However, I have that productivity field guide, which teaches the system of figure out your best self and your various roles. And I've got so much positive feedback from people who've gone through the course, and now they've built agents to help them to in effect pursue the course. And one of the big ways that you do this is a reflective practice, through your monthly, quarterly reviews, even daily journaling for some people, to really reflect on, am I pursuing the life I'm meant to lead? And I think it's great that people are using AI for it, and they're all saying, you've got to do this, this is really powerful. And I am so resistant to it, because to your point of, if it ain't broke, I have had a very personal reflective practice I've been doing for 20 years. And the idea of adding a robot to that mix just doesn't, doesn't compute for me, even though I am an aggressive user of AI. And I think that it probably could give me some insight I might not see otherwise. But if anything, this makes me more than ever want to go back to just doing like almost all analog personal journaling and just be completely away from the computer for it.
Speaker 3:
[72:44] Yeah, well, and, you know, here's, here's the thing, right? It's a tool, right? It's an automation tool. And there are, there are reasons why, you know, I might want to use a drill to screw in, you know, to screw something in. It's faster. It's, it's, you know, but it also has the potential to strip the screw, right? It has the potential to, like, you know, if you don't, if you're not using it in a way that, that makes sense or that's proper, or if it's too powerful a tool for the job at hand, you know, there's a million ways that it can not, it can go wrong and where a screwdriver would be better, right? And not the least of which is that a screwdriver can also be kind of far more accurate. You can get exactly the tension you want and not too much, you know, it can never be too tight, right? It can only be as tight as you're able to, you know, screw it. You know, things like that, right? And so, yeah, there's, there's times when you choose the screwdriver, there's times when the drill is fine. And I'm not here for anyone to, you know, I'm not anti AI. I just, once again, you know, that Amish approach to technology. For me, I have found exactly two use cases where A, it made sense, and B, I found it helpful. I have yet to have any use cases for myself where I think, oh, that will be better, will save me time, and I don't have to follow up with it after the fact to make sure. Because here's the other thing too, is that oftentimes, just like my Google example, where 90 percent of the time is going to give you the answer you're looking for, maybe. But if you want to be sure, you actually do have to click through those links. So you do have to see the context and where it pulled that information from. You do have to maybe see, maybe there's another better way to cook white beans than the Instant Pot. Maybe doing it in the Instant Pot is not nearly as fast as doing it on, I don't know. It's not answering those questions for me. And I can only find that out by actually doing the work. And if I'm going to end up having to do that work anyway, why don't I just start doing it? And I'm definitely involved at all.
Speaker 1:
[75:26] Yeah, and that's the big reminder, is we all make our own choices. Like this thing I was talking about. If it's working for someone to feed their journals to it and get that feedback loop going, I do not begrudge them. I think you should do that if it's helping you make yourself a better person. But for each one of us, as we go through this, this is a massive transition. For each one of us, we just kind of have to draw our own lines. And like, for instance, when Beatrix goes to school, if you become a house flipper, you're gonna want AI, because it's gonna be able to track all those documents for you and like all that stuff you're doing that you don't want to do. I mean, I can see ways you'll find new tools for it, new uses for the drill. But we're also at this point where it's a good, healthy thing to be thinking carefully about any time you decide to embrace it. Think carefully. Is that?
Speaker 3:
[76:18] Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's true of all technology, right? I mean, that's true of every piece of technology we touch, and we need to remind ourselves, when I say technology, I mean that the broadest of the word, the truth of the matter is, is that this is technology.
Speaker 1:
[76:32] A little note card.
Speaker 3:
[76:33] Right? The note card, the pen, the pen is technology. These are things that were invented to make something better, longer lasting, easier, replenishable, right? All the things, right? Like all of these things are, they're technology too. And so when I say technology, we really need to think of how something improves our lives, and also in what ways it might make things, might not be as good or make things worse, or may cost more or whatever. I mean, the truth of the matter is, is that I can get a pencil a lot cheaper than I can get a refill cartridge of ink for my fountain pen. So is the pencil better or is the fountain pen better?
Speaker 2:
[77:23] I think it's also asking your question, what are you giving up by letting AI do a task for you? And in my own workflows, like when I make a YouTube video, at the very end of the process, I'll give my transcript to ChatJPT and ask it for like title ideas and description ideas. And then I'll take those as inspiration because I don't work with anyone else. I don't have a copywriter, I don't have an editor. And so that's at least something to bounce ideas off of. But one thing I have never done is ask AI to give me the first part of the process, which is that give me a video idea. Because I feel like that is the part that is probably the most human part of the process for me is like, I want what I make a video about to be something that's original, it's my idea. And if ever I've tried, because YouTube has all these tools where it's like, just click this button and we'll just give you 10 video ideas. And I've done that and I'm like, I don't want to make any of these. I don't care for any of these. And so, but even if the quality was better and they were good ideas, I still feel like that would be removing the human too much from the process and in one of the most critical points of the process. Whereas writing the description, who even reads that? I think that's a lower stakes, less of a cost of giving that to a helping hand of AI versus the original idea, I want to control that.
Speaker 3:
[78:42] Yeah, and I think that that's important too, right? Is that it's important to remember that AI will oftentimes, and I would say can only give you someone else's ideas.
Speaker 2:
[78:54] Right. So I have a bonus topic I want to ask you both about, which we just talked about Notepad and taking notes, and it's related to that about the outboard brain. We get to do that, David?
Speaker 1:
[79:04] Yeah, let's do it. All right. Thank you to our sponsors, Camm and Fundera, and thank you for Patrick for coming by today. And more Power Users, which is the ad-free extended version of the show, we are going to talk about the outboard brain, the second brain. Should we throw the second brain overboard? Stephen's got some interesting ideas. I'm looking forward to talking about that. But thanks again, everybody, for listening, and we'll see you next time.