157: Being Better
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Are you familiar with the TV show The Bear? No. Are you aware of it at all? No, I paused there because I was thinking like, The Bear, is that where the guy gets eaten by a bear? But that wasn't a show. That was a Werner Herzog documentary. This is about a chef in Chicago. It's very different. Does he get eaten by a bear? There is a bear in it at one point, but I think that's a dream sequence. Oh, all right.

So no, I'm unfamiliar with The Bear. I think that's totally fine. But basically, I was watching this show. So essentially, I think what you need to know is The Bear focuses on a world-class chef and he comes back to his hometown to open a restaurant. And...

He has cooked all over the world and all the best restaurants and he wants to open a restaurant in his hometown. And it's a really good show. Are you going to better point on this, Mike? For our more text listeners, they know that I am very, very poor track record wise on my recommendations to you. So I'm not recommending this one to you.

Because I don't feel confident that you would like it, but maybe you would. Yeah, Mike's gotten real hesitant to risk the reputation points that he has been betting on media recommendations in Mortex. And I will say, in all fairness, in the previous Mortex, when we discussed Fallout, like,

You just had some real bad luck. That was just bad luck. That's understandable. But that's why my ears perk up the moment that Mike starts making any media recommendations because all I'm thinking is like, ooh, is he going to bet a point? Is it a point worthy? But the bear is not. Well, I love it. There's just lessons to be learned from the bear. Is that what's happening? Yeah. And by the way, Severance is coming back next year, January. Yeah, you did get a point for Severance. Well, I bet my reputation on Severance.

Oh, is that where it started? Yes. Oh, okay. That's where it started. Where over dinner, I bet my reputation that you would like Severance. Yes, that's right. Because you were unwilling to take my recommendations at that point. And so I had to like...

up the stakes. I had blacklisted you. Yes. I completely forgot. And so you were like, I'm going all or nothing on Severance. That's how it began. Okay. So really the thing that I wanted to take away from this and the thing I maybe took away from the most recent season is The Bear is about a chef who is a master of

his craft and is basically torturing himself for perfection and what he needs to do to get to perfection.

And I think I took the wrong lesson away from the show. I think I just think maybe you're supposed to be like, oh man, he shouldn't do that. Where I'm like, no, I think he kind of has to do that is where I'm coming from when watching the show. Okay. Go on. Because of what it takes to be the best, right? Like if you want to be the best, you must sacrifice. Like that's kind of what it is about to be the best at anything in any field. Yeah.

But to take it back a level from that, the show has left me thinking a lot about the idea of being better and how I also feel like I'm in this constant state of being unsatisfied with my level of skill in the things that I do and wanting to be better, like meaningfully better. I sometimes feel like I'm in this conflict with myself about...

Wanting to be immediately better at what I do, but then being impatient about the time that it takes to be better at what I do. And then also being very aware of, by the time that I actually get to that level of better, I don't even see it anymore. Because you kind of, you lose the perspective of your skill level increasing. And I think for me, this kind of idea comes from...

The things that I do, I want them to be the best that they can possibly be, but also feeling frustrated at understanding that I'm not sure that I can actually do that. To make these things the very best they possibly can be always feels like it's outside of my skill level because...

I know I'm not the best, right? Like when I think about any of the endeavors. So let's say if I think about podcasting, I think about product design, the two areas of my work that I'm focusing on. I can see things that I want to be or want to do and I can see past those things as well. Like what areas could I imagine somehow getting to?

but knowing that I'll never actually get there. This is a thing I've been rolling around in my head. This is a big, heavy start, boy. It's like a thousand things already in what you've said. Do you feel this way ever? This is a topic among creative people. Like it's a thing that you're just going to run across the moment you start trying to make anything. Even just like...

pure skill at anything. There's something that's slightly different about tasks in particular that involve creativity, like product design, like podcasting, and like chefing, chefing up a storm as you're getting better and better at your chefing. Or making YouTube videos. Well, yeah, okay. So I was sort of trying to avoid YouTube videos, but I guess I'll get to one at like, what's one of the first things that from my end comes up, but might be just a bit

I think it's probably a little bit different because of the nature of my work, but I still think it might be a useful idea to keep in mind. There is a thing that happens when I am, like now, working on a video. You're in the middle of things, like I'm writing this script, and I don't have great language for this. The best I have come up with to describe it is to talk about how you can be working on something and you are...

thinking about what it could be. But what is hard to know is if that thought in your head is more like when your brain dreams.

I think about this with dreams a lot. There is a phenomenon that I always think of as like you wake up and you think you had a great idea in your dream. But what you really had was the idea of a great idea. You didn't have a great idea, but you had all the emotional resonance to it being a good idea in your dream. You're like, oh, why can't I think of the details? It's like because there weren't any details there at all.

It's on my mind right now because I'm in the process of doing visuals for the script. And that's a moment where it can really make it quite clear sometimes where it's like, oh, this section of the script...

I was kind of dreaming the version that is the good version. But the moment we start to try to put visuals to it, it's like, oh, these couple of paragraphs are just terrible. Like they're not really working at all. And I just had some idea in my head of what the better future version would be. But it turns out that idea wasn't real at all. There were no concrete details to it at all.

I think that's partly for me a stronger phenomenon because I'm working across media. I'm producing writing that then has to be turned into something else. And the details of that always really matter and can be kind of easy to not think about sometimes. But I do have it with scripts as well. Like when I'm working on the script, there's often an idea in my head of the amazing version of this script that

And it can be dispiriting at times to work with that in your mind. You feel like you can see the better version of this. But you just can't get to the point where you can

can feel like I got to that level. You know, like, you know the emotional feeling, but then how do you replicate that? But sometimes that really can be a dream. Sometimes there just isn't the better version of the thing. Like, that that's not real, that you can't get the details right because those details don't exist.

and you're having some kind of different response to the thing that you're working on, which is this thing isn't good. I can imagine a better version of it. But can you really? Because the details are what matters. And it's very different to look at something and think like, oh, this could be better. That's always the case when you're working on stuff like this kind of work.

never ends, you can always refine out the last 0.001% of making it better. But there is a different thing that can sometimes happen, which is you are comparing yourself

to just the idea of it being better without any of the specifics. And so I just like, again, that may or may not resonate at all with you or people who are listening, but I think it's a good idea to have in the back of your mind as a thing to pay attention to as like something that can happen. So that's one place in which like I come at this topic a little bit differently.

differently is I sometimes feel like this is a bit of an illusion, but the ability for it to be an illusion becomes less and less true the more you are working in the physical world, right? And so like with product design, with cooking, with like actual skills, the more you get down to something like a

I'm here practicing my pitching, right? And it's like, okay, I'm a baseball pitcher, right? That's what I'm doing. There, it's like you're talking about a pure skill, and it's very clear, like your visualization of like, what is it that you're supposed to be doing? The ball is supposed to be going faster and curvier. It's supposed to drop down at the end, like it's very physical things, right? It goes into the catcher's mitts, and then they're out. That's like, you know what's supposed to happen. Big baseball fan. Yeah, so these are the extremes, right?

Right. Clear physical skill that has less creativity. It is just a thing to achieve. And you have like a very clear success metric of what that looks like. And then you can just brush up against physical limitations or limitations in practice time or refining skill like that. That can be the boundary. And then the stuff in the middle is.

I mean, like in some ways, Mike, I feel like product design might be one of the harder things because you are right in the middle of that. There's just actual physical reality that you're dealing with trying to make things better. But there is an element of the creativity and the like dreaming possibilities of what could it be where it is important to not nail down those details because you want your brain to be able to run around and like

put different things together in a creative way. So I do not think that you are even remotely alone in this feeling of like... Yeah. It's frustrating. And of course, there is... I think it's from Ira Glass, but it's like, it's the quote, which the detail of it don't matter, but I think he made the excellent point. And this is why I like working with you, that...

The reason you're able to do a bunch of the things that you do is you have good taste. You have a skill at visual sensibility. Like, I'm just like, I am lacking this skill. It's like it's clearly turned up much more in you.

You also have like very strong and I think correct senses about what makes podcasts good. It's the same thing there. And Ira Glass sort of made the fundamental point that is good to keep in mind that

Your skill at taste and perceiving will always be better than your skill at producing. It's like the one that leads to the other. Yeah. Like when I go visit your studio, there's a thousand notebooks everywhere. Like your ability to discern little details between these of like, oh, this is what makes this one feel good. This is why this one works better. Yeah.

That is what leads you to making things. But it just kind of has to be true that you will always be better at the perceiving than the doing.

It just has to be that way because otherwise your doing couldn't possibly improve, right? Like you wouldn't have something to aim for if you couldn't have that like refined sense of taste of like, ah, this is what matters. And this isn't what matters. This needs to be tweaked this way. This needs to be tweaked that way. So I just found a quote.

Your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer and your taste is why your work disappoints you. It's pulled out from a discussion where he's just talking about this phenomenon in general. I've heard this reference a bunch of times because I just feel like he really cut to the core of what is the problem in this way. Your taste is better than your ability to do, but one is really causing the other. It just has to be this way. Think about a chef.

A chef literally couldn't be better at cooking than they are better at tasting. How on earth could they possibly refine their ability to cook if they're worse at tasting than they are at cooking? It's so obvious in that case that it has to go this way. It's interesting. I feel like for me, maybe this is true for a lot of people, but I think I'm in this situation, the things that I want to be good at

There are lots of people around me that I know are better. I work with these people. They have the skills that I aspire to have. And I think some of the things that I am maybe best at are not as valued as

In my peer group. But it's part of why I'm here. Do you have examples of that? Yeah. Like what are you thinking about there? I think I'm good at business. I think I have a pretty good gut instincts and good problem solving that apply well to business, which is one of the reasons why I'm in the circle that I'm in.

And I also think I have a good understanding of content planning, which that is a skill that, you know, I am happy I have. But I think a lot of my colleagues have that one too. But when I think about like product design, there are people around me like Tom and Dan who are leagues ahead of me.

And I'm happy to be around them. But again, I look at what they're doing. I'm like, you just, that's so easy to you. It's so hard to me. And then, you know, like some of the people that I work with, like on my other shows, they're able to generate better takes than mine faster and more easily, you know? And like, I would like to be able to generate as good takes where I feel like my best takes are,

are further between. Like there is further time between my good takes. Just right there is a great example. Like you have thought much more about podcasting than I have, obviously, because you've done it 10 times more. And like, I never would have pulled out

Like, oh, we're trying to put together a portfolio of podcast skills. Take a Tude is obviously a skill that belongs in this portfolio. And like, yeah, like, it would not have never crossed my mind. But like, it crosses your mind because you're like, you're paying much closer attention across a greater number of podcasts. Yeah, yeah.

And it definitely applies more to podcasts that are about events, whether it's technology news, politics news, or sports, whatever, right? But your ability to have good takes will help you in that scenario. And so your take-a-tuity level is important. Take-a-tuitiveness. Take-a-tuitiveness, yes, thank you, is good to have. And I feel like I have good takes, but they...

are rarer to the point where sometimes I feel like I notice it or another thing I notice is that people write in to tell me my take is good.

in a way that I feel like, oh, Mike, you had a really good take. And it's like, I appreciate that comment. I do. But we're not seeing this for Jason every week, but he's having lots of good takes. So yeah, you know. But this is like a good and bad thing, right? Where like, by being surrounded by these people who I respect and look up to,

look up to and this also includes you of course your ability to create content from nothing is a skill that is almost unparalleled hence why you are one of the most successful in your field but looking at the people that I work with and wanting to be able to get closer to their skill level pulls me forward but it is also sometimes where you're like god damn it you know like because you

Obviously, everybody else is getting better. And it's a conflict that I feel sometimes where sometimes this need to be better can also make me want to give up on something, you know, at the same time, because it's the kind of double edged sword of it, which is at times this desire can actually push you to make the decisions, but it can also

make you want to back away from something and not try as hard because it feels like pushing that boulder up the hill forever, you know?

Yeah, again, I feel like there's just like a lot of separate things to think about here, like get kind of muddled up, right? Because again, that's why it's like the moment you start talking about this, it's like, oh, this is connected to a thousand things. This is connected to everything. I think like even that nature of the topic, like I want to get better at X is very overwhelming because of that connectedness. So like just to try to pull a few things out.

One of the things which you already know, but it is helpful to remind you, is that other people's improvement is always more obvious to you than your own improvement. And this just feels like some kind of human bias. Whatever new level you reach somehow instantly becomes the baseline of the skill. Like that's just...

It's how it feels in your brain. Again, this is harder in a creative field, but it's why it's good to have objective records of progress in any area where you're trying to get better at a thing. It's like, oh, I've been working on my health a bunch this year. It's a similar thing of like, oh, no particular day does it feel like I'm making a ton of progress. But it's like, oh, I have objective records that actually have made a lot of progress. It's just that with creative stuff that's significantly more

harder. And especially in a podcast medium, like that's also very hard to try to like, think about how you have improved. It's like, it is still there. And it may be good to occasionally go back and just like, listen to your old stuff. And just like, see how much has changed. Yeah. I think there's also this problem, right? Like, I feel that I know you feel this too. It's like,

I know I should do that, but I really don't want to look at my old stuff. Like I try to basically like never really watch a video after it's gone up for publication. It's like I just never want to see it again. But every once in a while, I do have to go back and look at some old video. And like I find it quite startling sometimes. Like how?

how much things have improved when I look at the old things because it's like, oh, there's something I need to reference in this video. Like, how exactly did I say that thing? And I kind of like, wow, those old videos, like they hold up real well, but they're just objectively worse on a lot of these like taste metrics that I do care about and I have wanted to improve over the years. So yeah, like I think you would feel that way with

Looking at your old work in podcasting. Oh, yeah. One of the things that's very funny to me and one of the things that I immediately notice is gaps. So like in people speaking, like so somebody says something and then nobody says anything.

It's like that is just like such a thing of like, this is solved two ways and you didn't do either of them. Right, right. And neither of them were taken. Yes, yes. And that is one of the things that I immediately notice in like much older work. I should, I feel like I do need to say, because I'm like, I'm not really feeling bad about this. This isn't like I'm disappointed or I'm upset or whatever. Like I'm not really feeling down. This is more just like a thing where...

i've noticed just in reflection of watching this show of actually thinking about how can i be better as opposed to i don't think i'm good enough if that makes sense yeah that sort of was the next part of this is like just keep in mind that you like you you know you make more progress than you think you do it's very hard to see there's lots of frustrations here but this is why i'm saying it's connected to everything i

Thinking about, for example, the portfolio of podcasting skills. How do you get better at podcasting? Well, you can look at any skill or any process and break it down and be like, there's a bunch of sub-processes here. And the trick is trying to figure out

which areas in a sense like can you make the most marginal gain on the fastest like that's really what you should be trying to think about and sometimes that means abandoning one area and just accepting it as fundamentally unimprovable but that's fine because skills exist in a portfolio

And it's a good thing to know sometimes like this is my weakness. I may be able to improve it, but it is just not worth actually doing that relative to where else I could put in the effort in this portfolio of skills. And so.

I think if you kind of like pay attention to really skilled people at what they're doing, we all know that this is the case that they're like skilled people also have like really deep flaws often at the thing that they're skilled at and really obvious flaws sometimes at the thing that they're skilled at. But it's not important because what matters is the multiplication of all of the values in this portfolio, right? Like, you know,

You're scoring like 10 on a bunch of skills, but you score 300 on one and two on another. Depending on how that balance goes, like nobody really cares because like the maxing out on one ability in this portfolio of skills is where the value is. And you're just accepting the cost of like, oh, but I'm bad at this, but I'm just not going to spend any time on this. I think like

That is the delicate trick. And it's particularly difficult in creative fields that are public because, boy, will people constantly remind you the thing that you're bad at. And because you have good taste and good perception, you're like, yep, I sure can see that, too. It's right there staring me in the face every day. I get it.

But you like you just have to make a call sometimes about like, is this worth improving or is this not worth improving? Is this an area where you're going to be making the next best marginal gain in whatever it is that you're trying to do? And it's like an interesting thing where really skilled people, you'll notice that they often will spend like a dedicated time on some sub area of that skill.

I'm going to get better at product design is extraordinarily overwhelming. But like you can narrow down and be like, I'm going to spend a little while just learning everything I can about this one kind of like sub kind of paper. And like that's where I'm going to be like pushing forward the average portfolio. That's a way to get better. But I really do think that it is just crazy.

It is critical to know what to let go of and what to just accept and say like, "This sucks and it's fine. I'm just going to accept that." For me, the most obvious thing is like, I am a slow writer and I spent a lot of years being really frustrated with that. But at some point it's like, it's fine trying to like,

improve the rapidity of the writing impinges on the other things in this portfolio that make the writing good. I have a different ratio of skills in the area of like

explaining and creating presentations. Speed is not one of them, and that's fine. But again, I will be constantly and frequently reminded about how slow I am at all of the things that I do. And it's like, yeah, that's what it is to do this kind of stuff in public. And I guess your problem with the speed is like you get better at other things, which actually makes you slower. That's an excellent point, right? Like it's not even just that it's a weakness. It's like it's a weakness that's sort of gotten worse because...

because other things cause it to be slower. Because if it increases in animation quality, we can talk about things that we never would before, but that slows everything down. The metric paper video is a perfect example. Like it took forever to write, but the only reason that that project remotely happened is because of like a lot of work on how to animate these things and how to make them look good and how can we have this whole process lined up? And so...

Getting better at animation unlocked harder writing tasks, which take even longer. And it's like, yep, as you get better, it can make your worst parts worse. But if you are...

getting significantly better at the good parts you're fine like you're still ahead uh you are like on average better when you're looking at the final product than you were earlier even even if like you're worse at some individual part of it i don't have an end to this like i barely had a start my point for having this conversation today really like for bringing it to the show and not just like talking to you about it was i thought that there could be a value in people that

are listening that are creatives and aspiring creatives hearing that people who are professional creatives still feel like they're not good enough sometimes but

I think that that's okay because I think it is what pushes some people like me, like you, to try and be better and also to accept the things that you're maybe not as good at and get help with them. The best way to handle weaknesses is if you can outsource them and have somebody else do the thing that you're bad at. But the thing that I always bring up is the more you hire, the more you risk losing the magic, which is just a thing I feel very sensitive to with lots of YouTube channels. There's tons of them where it's like, oh, I love them and they bring on more people and it's like,

It's mostly the same, but it's just kind of gotten a little worse in ways that are hard to define. And like that is one of the risks of like trying to compensate for all of this stuff. But.

I don't have an ending either, but I do want to just go back to the very first thing you said, because it always really irritates me, this thing about perfection. I wanted to cheer you on. Obviously, I haven't seen the show, but when you say the show has this message of, oh, he shouldn't aim to be so perfect, and you feel like you're drawing the opposite message, I could not encourage you more in that. I find this real annoying. There's something about...

I cannot pin this down, but there is some cultural idea around perfectionism that I find incredibly frustrating. It is a thing that I see like people who are really skilled get accused of all the time. Like, oh, you're being a perfectionist. But when I look around...

I don't know. This may be harsh to say, but keep in mind, listeners, this is an unarticulated thought. I just I can't put words to it. But the people who I observe are good at things are

are not perfectionists. They are so obviously not perfectionists. What they're doing is they're trying to get better, like this exact topic. They're trying to get better at some skill. And to get better at the skill requires focusing on details that to people who don't know anything about how something is made seem like crazy, obsessive details.

But they really do matter. I don't know the people I see who more often actually talk about like, oh, I have I have like such a hard time getting started because I'm a perfectionist. Those people on average disproportionately don't strike me as very skilled people who get anything done.

I don't know. It's like the cultural idea is somehow backwards here. And I haven't seen the show, but I am very aware of it as a thing in media that it's like presented as though perfectionism is this thing that skilled people should learn how to chill out about. And I just don't observe this in reality at all. Skilled people are not perfectionists. If anything, they're like

understanding of the flaws in their thing and extremely accepting of them. And meanwhile, it's people who don't do very much at all who seem like incredibly concerned with perfectionism. So ill-formed thoughts there. But yes, that's my general frustration. I feel like your gut instinct of this show is trying to tell me one thing, but I feel something else is correct. Because he's a really good chef and I think he has to know

Not be distracted. Like it goes right to the core of a bunch of things like, yeah, there's trade-offs in life. Do you want to be really good at a thing? I have bad news for you. That means you're going to have to be significantly worse at a lot of other things in your life. It's just the way it goes.

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July is here. We're in July. Big month, July. Yeah, it's turned into one. So as of recording, we're about two weeks away from the RelayFM 10th anniversary live show that we're having in London. And it's been a very, very large undertaking. How are you holding up over there? Fine.

Here's my thing. As I speak to you right now, I'm equally excited and nervous slash stressed about it. There was a time, I think maybe a couple of weeks ago, where I wasn't so excited about it and was much, much more just stressed. But as we're getting closer, the excitement level is increasing, I think, because the amount of things left to do or the amount of things I can do is just decreasing as we get closer and closer. Right, right, yeah. There's only so much you can do when a thousand guests are coming to town. Yeah, exactly. And...

One of the things that I have really noticed in the last week or so, so we're, you said a thousand, we're in a big theater. It's called the Hackney Empire. We've sold over a thousand tickets and the theater holds up to 1200 people. We do have some last minute tickets available. If people want to come see us in London on the 27th of July at relay.fm slash London, you can go find out more.

The thing that I have come to realize is I think people like us shouldn't try and hire a venue of this size. It's like it's not... What do you mean? Just in the sense that the system is not built in that way. People that hire the Hackney Empire, usually their tour manager or some professional...

is arranging the show. Right, yeah. Where luckily for us, the people at the Hackney Empire have been very understanding of how little I know about putting on a show of this scale. Because they're asking me for things and I don't even know what they are.

let alone being able to provide it. Like we've gotten through fine, but it's just, they're just like, oh, can you send over this thing? I'm like, I don't know what that is. I don't even know what that is. You've just used an acronym that I don't understand. There's been a lot of that. Can you send over the run list, Mike? And it's like, ah, yes, yes, the run list. Run list. I can't move for run lists around here. Typey, typey, typey. What is a run list? Yeah.

Yeah, so there's just been a lot of that, right? And so it's been a large undertaking. I mean, let alone the fact that so many hosts are coming to town and just like working around all of that and planning stuff. And there's a lot going on. And it's been quite taxing to add this to my workload. When we originally planned to do this, I was going to help and Stephen was going to manage it because he's always done the live show stuff.

we realized quite quickly into the planning that that wasn't going to work. Yeah. Because Stephen is in Memphis and I happen to be in the city where the show is happening. It does feel like that was just inevitably doomed as an idea. Uh,

Can you set it up remotely in the place where I am? I mean, the reason is that we've never done a show in Memphis, right? Every show we've ever done, it's always been remote. But it just kind of became a thing quite quickly where there's just conventions everywhere.

in the UK, it's just going to be easier for me to do. And so we ended up, we made a deal where I have not been involved in any of the podcast with home planning that is currently ongoing. So like all of our St. Jude stuff, like I'm not doing any of it and I will join in kind of in August. So then like, I will then, you know, be ready to go. So like there are, I think weekly calls happening about the fundraiser right now. And I've not been on any of them. And so like, that's kind of been the trade, which has worked.

It worked in a sense of I'm not losing my mind because I feel like I would have been if I was trying to juggle both of these. It's been eye-opening, for sure, like trying to put something like this together. But I'm feeling, right now I'm feeling good about it. You know, like there's been a lot of emotional weight and like expectation that I'm putting on this event and kind of coming to terms with what the event actually is has made me feel better. Like basically there was a point where I was like,

There's not enough theatrics for the show, right? Like we're not doing enough. And as I was talking this through with people, I was being reminded a lot of like, this is not why people are coming to the show. People are coming to this show to celebrate with us that we have reached the frankly incredible milestone of a media business that

lasting for 10 years. Oh, yeah. Which is quite a thing. And so the people that are coming to the show, they're coming to celebrate with us. And then that helped me really rebalance it of like, ideally, this needs to be A, as simple as possible, and B, as close to what people expect from the people that they're coming to see. You're not putting on the Erez tour here, Mike. Exactly. Turns out it's not what I'm going for anymore.

Like was dreaming big eras dreams previously? I don't know. I just wasn't sure if there needed to be more like laser light shows or whatever, you know what I mean? Yeah. More costume changes. And again, like I get it. And this also just goes right to the previous thing. Like it's very easy to dream like the ideal version of this in very many ways. Yeah. There was a version of this show that existed in my mind before we ever even thought about doing it. Right.

And it was a very, very different affair. And what I have come to realize is it wouldn't have worked. Even if I could have managed to do any of the things that I'd imagined, it just wouldn't have made any sense for why on earth we all of a sudden were doing this. And what we're able to do instead is, you know, there's going to be something like 20 hosts that are going to be a part of the event.

And it's about actually just making it that everyone gets to share in that moment together rather than like giving someone a solo. You know what I mean? So yeah, it's been a lot of effort and I'm so excited about it now for the same reason that I wanted to do it in the first place where being able to put on a show like this in my hometown is just like...

It's incredible. I just wanted to mention it because this is the last show before it happens. Oh, God, right. Yeah, yeah, of course. The thing that I'm looking forward to the most and the thing that I can't wait for and the thing that I think about multiple times a day, every single day, is walking onto that stage. It was something that I asked Stephen for very early on. Every live show we've ever done, Stephen always comes out first and he will kind of emcee the show in that way and bring everybody out.

And I really, really wanted to come out first for this show because of what this one means to me. It means, I think, something a little extra to me than it's going to mean for really anybody else. And that it is to have gotten to a point where I could do something like this in the place that I grew up and to have all of my family there. Yeah, yeah. I'm counting down the days to be able to get to the point where I walk out onto that stage. And I'm just so excited about it. And I have no...

no idea how it's going to feel and I have no idea how I'm going to react. I can foresee four different reactions from me and I have no idea if I'm going to have any of them or a combination of them or what that combination might be. So it's exciting. All we know for sure is it is going to be loud because everybody hearing my voice now when Mike goes out on stage they are going to go wild in that crowd. That's what I want. That's what I want.

The last thing I'll say on this, which is the other reason that this show is very exciting for me, is my family know what I do for a living, right? Like from a conceptual level, they understand that I have a business where I make podcasts and people listen to those podcasts.

I think it's going to be something very different when they see that. Oh, yeah. When I walk onto a stage and people make noise for me, for as much as these things are, you know, like the first time I ever did a live show and that happened and it was like, wow. I think I look forward to my mom especially seeing that.

I'm excited about that. I don't know what the conversion ratio is, but it's something like you have an audience that is very large, but is very dispersed, literally all over the world. It's like, yes, you can tell people these numbers and it's always abstract. Like, here's how many people hear Mike's voice every week. It's a big number.

But there's like an impressiveness conversion ratio, which has got to be something like 10,000 to one, 100,000 to one of just like getting people in person is just so much more viscerally impressive than big numbers of people dispersed all around the world. So yeah, it's a real effect. It's like...

Just very impressive and I imagine also quite emotionally impactful for some. One last thing that we decided to do that I'm now very thankful. I'm not recording any shows that week. Oh my god, what a relief. It was a decision that was like, oh, you know what? Me and Stephen were talking about this in January. Maybe we should just take that week off. And the closer I get...

I am like, oh man, was that a good decision? Oh boy, was that a good decision? Yeah, yeah, I bet it was. There is a possibility that I'm going to be at one day unloading chairs into a theater. It's going to depend on if you got the run list right. That's what it's going to depend on. You know what it probably does? Running chairs out or not.

You know what? Maybe that's what the run list is for. It's about running out the chairs. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Did you put that on there? They muted it last week. Everyone's got to stand. I forgot the run list. Should we do some Ask Cortex? Let's do some Ask Cortex. Taylor asks, what is a piece of technology that has the most negative impact on your productivity besides your phone?

Yeah, phone's the obvious answer there, right? I like that Taylor just immediately foresaw the answer and was like, "Nope, you can't get out of it that easy." I think that's a general good advice for submitting Ask Cortex questions is, it's like, "What's the most obvious thing?" And try to be like, "Except for this," right? Which makes stuff more interesting. I remember reading a while ago that it was a professional advice columnist who was writing about their work.

commented how it was just absolutely unbelievable that what people would like write in and be like hey i want your advice on this like you know in old-timey newspapers and then like so the first half of the letter would be their question and then the second half would be like very obviously what they're supposed to do uh and it's just like oh okay well i'll just take the question and then i'll reword the second part and it's like

I'm sure that made the work as an advice columnist very easy, but does not produce the most interesting answers. So I do like this, like, foreclose off the most obvious first thing, like, besides the phone. And I saw this a couple days ago, and it's been kind of on my mind. Like, I think it's interesting because, yeah, eliminating the phone, it does make it tricky. I think I have a weird answer, which...

kind of falls into the same category of the phone, which is I am going to say that the piece of tech that has most negatively impacted my productivity recently is ChatGPT.

And I mentioned this just like in passing on the previous show, but I started out by using ChatGPT as a thesaurus for like, "Oh, I need like different kinds of words," was the main thing I was using it while writing. And it had just been growing on my mind that something about using this

was just increasingly not good for the writing process. I still have a hard time putting my finger on what it is.

But I have recently established a rule for myself. Like while I am writing, I cannot ask ChatGPT for like alternate wording suggestions or anything else. It's like I can just use the Apple dictionary that's on my computer offline. This is much better. And it's like later I can do some of the like fancier question asking stuff if I want to. But it has to be like a very different

productivity mode. Do you find it derails you? What is the impact that you're feeling that for some reason the thesaurus is okay? So, again, it's hard to put into words. I think the best way I can describe it is...

So like it starts with thesaurus stuff, but it like it slowly started expanding and to be like this sentence is awkward. Like, is there a different way to word that? Right. So I started asking some questions like that. But here's the thing. Like, fundamentally, I just don't think ChatGPT is good at this, really. That's why last episode I made the remark of like a lot of the output is like nutritionless food in a way, like food.

The problem wasn't, oh, I'm using ChatGPT too much. The problem was more like, oh, I can use ChatGPT as a thesaurus, which is good. But then I would always go like one further and be like, can I ask like this question? And then it would be like, like this ChatGPT answer is just terrible. Is there a different way I can ask to try to get more of what I want? And it's like, eh, sort of, not really. But it's like,

What am I doing? I just broke my flow where I was like looking for a thing. And it's like, why did I go to the thesaurus? The reason I went to the thesaurus, which is always still hard to say, the reason I tried to find an alternative word is because...

The word that I am looking for is going to directly impact the sound of the next few paragraphs. Like what I didn't realize is when I'm writing and I'm like, this word is no good. I need a different one. Why is that? It's not because it's a one-off word that I want to change.

It's because I'm like setting something up with that word that is going to reoccur. So I do need to know the answer now. Like if I'm going to say it this way, it sounds like this. And then the sentence rhythms are this and whatever. But opening up ChatGPT was kind of like,

instead of opening up a thesaurus, it's a little bit like asking a person, hey, I wanted to do this, but what about this? It's like very hard not to just have some follow-up questions, right?

But those follow-up questions are just immediately derailing from, no, no, what you need to do is you need to make a quick executive decision. Like, here's five options. Which of these is the best? This one is obviously the best. And go with it. But ChatGPT allows you to be picky, right? Where it's like, I don't really like any of those words. How many more do you have? Do you have any more? Could you just like...

scrape the bottom of this half million word vocabulary of English to find any word related to this word that I might like better. It's derailing. That's sort of what it is. And what popped into my head that I realized like, oh, the feeling that it reminded me of, it reminded me of when I used to have Twitter on my phone and I

And just by it being there, some small part of my brain was always like, what's a funny thing you could tweet? What's a funny thing you could tweet now? Take a picture of this thing. That's kind of funny. You could put that on Twitter. And like getting rid of that, just like shut down that part of my brain. And that's kind of what like having ChatGPT around was a bit like. Like some part of my brain at any moment's hesitation was like, you can ask ChatGPT about this. Right.

And in my experience, like, yeah, I could. And then I'm just going to like waste five minutes and more importantly, break flow, getting like a mediocre improvement when if I had just sat there and continued forward, it would have obviously been a thousand times better.

So yeah, that's why I set that as a rule now. Basically, it's like, is it before noon? No AI. You have a dictionary and a thesaurus. Like, it's the year 1600, and it's perfectly fine. In fact, this is the best. So yeah, ChatGPT is my answer. My answer is, it's kind of in the spirit of the question, but not exactly. So like, I would say, A, games consoles. I mean, yeah, I guess I was like, sure, and...

I almost feel like that's a bit saying it's like...

what in your life most negatively impacts productivity? You're like, oh, well, all of my non-working life is what most negatively impacts my productivity, I guess. If that's what we're trying to figure out, what's the most impactful? All the times I'm not being productive. Yeah, but I think it's of the technology that I have, it is the thing where I'm most likely to spend time longer than I intended. Right. Yeah, that's different. So like, oh, I'm going to take 15 minutes and play some Mario Kart or whatever, and then an hour goes by. Mm-hmm.

But for me, I have found in the last few years that it's actually good for me to do that because otherwise I would just sit... What else was I going to be doing? Just sit and refresh my email inbox for an hour? What was the point? And I find for me that this stuff is good even though it is the thing where I'm most likely to spend...

Time unintentionally. Yeah. But when it comes to unintentionally spent time, gaming is preferable for me in a way. Yeah. It's better than that kind of like nothing like you're describing. That's sort of vague. Like I'm sitting in front of the computer. I'm not really getting anything done. And I feel bad about that, which is just like a negative loop. Yeah. It's better to just like take a real break.

I do find it kind of miraculous that you can actually take a gaming break. And even if it lasts longer than you expect, then go back and do something after. I was just like, I'm completely incapable of doing that. It's like, if I'm going to pick up a game, the day is over. So I better have finished everything. Like the,

There's no universe in where I'm playing 15 minutes of Mario Kart. It's like I'm playing four hours of Mario Kart or I'm playing no hours of Mario Kart. Those are the only options. Yeah, but that's one of the differences between mine and your work life where I have more things on the schedule. They're on the calendar. So like...

at some point I have to stop because otherwise I'm not going to the next meeting. Yeah, whereas it's like I just have blown off meetings where it's like, sorry, this can't happen. Maybe there's a combination of...

Difference in personality and calendar. I guess I'm trying to say, Mike, you have a more iron will when it comes to gaming than I do. Hannah says, has the two million view Instagram reel translated into a spike in sales at the Sidekick notepad according to grey spreadsheets? There is some context required here, I think. What's the context? Last year, I was working with a variety of content creators and producing videos.

media for Instagram photos and videos and stuff like that and we're trying out a bunch of different styles and I got in contact with a company based in Australia called Yuzu and they made a reel for us they made a selection of reels for us actually using the Sidekick notepad and I really loved them but we couldn't use them because we were waiting on your video right so we were beefing up stock and

And not really messing around with anything because we wanted to make sure that we had stock in place for the video that you were producing. So I kind of sat on them. And then a few months ago, I was like, okay, we're into a kind of like things are stable now. Like we've got our stock back in again. I would like to post these stuff now and maybe boost them on Instagram and stuff like that. And so we posted this reel.

And it's, I think, the first piece of content that I've ever been a part of that went viral in this way. I feel like there's a lot of asterisks around that. But yeah, okay. I mean, this is the highest view count of anything I have been related to for a single piece of media. I guess my hesitation around that is, I feel like it's kind of like shorts. I don't really know how to weigh the view count on Instagram reels. But yeah, I will grant that to you. But I do feel like

You have to think about it in a certain way for that to be true. Yeah. I mean, cut it in half and then that's maybe closer to the actual amount, like the view count. Yeah. Because, you know, people watch reels twice by accident. You know, it just starts again. But it's definitely like from a virality perspective of just the speed and the fact that it was kind of disconnected from anything that could have otherwise really boosted it.

as such. Now, we ended up putting money behind it as a piece of like boosted marketing, but it hit like, you know, nearly a million views all on its own. It just got sucked into the algorithm. And that was that. And this was incredibly exciting for me. Like, it was just fun to watch the numbers go up from a sense of like spike of sales. It was kind of interesting, really.

The sales for like, I don't know, maybe the first couple of weeks of the reel when it was hitting its highest virality, it maybe doubled our daily sales. But that is a minute fraction compared to the response of anything that we're able to generate from either the podcast or from the video that you made. Which makes sense, right? Like I wouldn't have expected anything really different because...

If somebody sees you talking about the products, it comes with like the relationship you have with the viewer that they trust you rather than his like a random piece of media as an ad. It's just another ad you've seen.

But the thing that was very beneficial is it massively boosted our Instagram following, which for me was like the perfect thing that I could have wished for out of something like this, honestly. Because as we've spoken about on the show in the past, it's something that I've wanted to...

over time and this did it. Yeah. The conversion ratio between it's like, oh, we talk about the sidekick on the podcast or I make a video about it. That conversion ratio of like, oh, how many listens equals a sale or how many video views equals a sale? Like that conversion ratio is much higher than the

Instagram views because like you said like quite obviously most people on Instagram are coming to it without any context at all they don't know who we are and there's like there's no background so the conversion is much much lower for like per million views on Instagram into sales but like

This is one thing where it always has been a slight point of disagreement between us because I am just significantly less convinced by a lot of the social media stuff than you have been. It's interesting because on my head of logistics to-do list, I've been meaning to rework a bunch of the data so I can run regression analysis on what are we doing and what's having an impact on sales and what are the exact conversion ratios and how should we think about that?

But when something like this happens, it's like, oh, yeah, I don't need to run some fancy analysis. I can immediately see that like this is converting into sales at a positive ratio. And it's like, sure, that Instagram conversion factor is much worse than other mediums. But like, I don't need to tease out the data when sales double and stay doubled for exactly the duration that this video is getting a ton of views. And that also to me was like, yeah,

It was just a great proof of concept to see, yes, like this is what we want to know that without context, without the background of knowing us and like what's gone into the product and like all of the details and everything else. Even just like listener knows Mike has great taste. So trust to like try out a product that he has designed. Like without any of that, people just see the thing and think, yes, like I would like to try that product. So yeah.

It was very interesting to see. And like behind the scenes, we had some conversations where it was like, I just don't know if I trust any of this Instagram malarkey. And then like along comes a mega viral Instagram video with like obvious impact on spreadsheet sales. And I was like, oh, Mike might be onto something here. I don't know. But this is the thing though, where like, this was actually valuable to me for the same reason. Because...

Our yearly theme for Cortex Brand is the year of basics, right? And one of the things in the year of basics was like,

Let's actually try and get a better handle over this idea. Because the idea of having an Instagram account and it being a sales marketing funnel, it's a thing that I know businesses do, but I don't know how to do it. And I don't know if it actually works, but everybody does it. So surely there must be some value to it was my thinking. But trying to extract that and understand that is incredibly complicated and still kind of remains complicated. But at least from...

this video and then a couple of other pieces of marketing that we've done, I've been able to see that there is the ability to increase effectiveness and get a metric out of the end of it. And that has been really interesting to me for that same thing you're saying of like,

I know that there is a higher conversion over our personalities leading to the sale, like people being familiar with us. But the thing is, we actually can't easily put a number on that. It's very hard to do. And then also, even if we were able to, it's incredibly hard

to just keep putting the money in and getting more people. And that is exactly what Instagram provides, right? We can get the number and we have the number. So like at the moment, I'm running this video as an ad on Instagram with the call to action to go to the Sidekick Notepad website and read more about it. At the moment, this piece of media is,

it's seven pence per click so for every seven pence we put in we get someone to click and go and watch it and this is better than any other piece of media that we've done we had some that were two times three times four times that amount and so like it's helping me understand that like whatever it is about this video people like it it encourages them to go and learn more and we have one other uh thing at the moment like which is um

We made a post about the Inc. magazine article that was written about the Sidekick notepad that is also performing at seven pence per click to go and find out more about the product. I was like, this is interesting stuff to me because it's two things. One, all right, so whatever it is about these pieces of media, they resonate with people. And also, just because of the way Instagram works, it's not like it has to stop

You just keep it going. And we keep getting the same results. We keep putting money in. We keep getting the same result. And that's really interesting. That is not something we can do with a podcast, and it's not something we can do with a YouTube video. We cannot keep replicating the same result because both of those pieces of media, the effectiveness is capped out at the exact maximum already.

Right. Like we can only talk to the same amount of people on this show as we can every month, essentially. And for your video, it's already hit the highest amount of people with the highest amount of effectiveness. We can't just if we took that video of yours on YouTube and put money behind it on, you know, promoting on YouTube, we wouldn't get the same result. We'd probably get a similar result to the Instagram ad.

And I think that that's been really interesting to me to kind of finally have something that broke out a little bit to be able to teach me this lesson about why people do this kind of stuff. Because basically everybody in the world is on this platform. You can just keep reaching them. And also because of the way these kinds of things work, we'll hit the same person like four times and then they'll finally click on it. And now they've become one of the seven pence clicks. So it's been really interesting for me. I don't know what to do with it still, but...

It's been very beneficial. And also just the style of that video and the way it looks visually is something that we're going to start leaning more towards because I really love the style and clearly so do the people that want to buy our products. So that's very good. Like a viral success. They can be inexplicable and they can be irreplicable, but they can also point you like, this is generally the right direction to head. Think about what happened here and what worked here and like,

Now start trying to iterate on that and see where you can go from there.

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Mark asks, how do you handle failure? You often talk about the systems and practices you have in place to succeed in your work. But when things don't go to plan, how do you deal with it and get back to work? I'm a scientist, so it's my job repeatedly to fail and learn from it. But I'm also a human being, so this can be a tough thing to keep doing. Flashbacks to my working at a physics lab days. And it was like, yep, your default assumption at the start of every day is like, well...

None of this is going to work. It's going to be a whole day of like doing stuff and none of it works. I know that feeling very well. I mean, partly for me, I feel like there's a cheat answer I have, which is true, which is just I'm not a very looking backward kind of guy. That is just not the way my personality is. And so...

i am just temperamentally inclined to move on immediately and not care at all about uh failures it's like i've made some like real bad decisions sometimes and it's funny i was just talking to someone about like a thing came up about like something that happened in the past and it was like oh yeah that was real bad decision i was like oh yeah i just like haven't really thought about that at all in forever uh it just like doesn't come up so

I think I am a bad person to ask because it's just like, it's because of temperamental indications. But I do think there's a different thing that I want to pull out, which is like,

expected failures and unexpected failures, particularly being a scientist here. That's like the key example of expected failures. Like, oh, you're going to be running an experiment where you're testing different materials, looking for property X. You know going into that, you're going to have months of just like, oh, none of this worked. Every day, in a sense, was a failure every time. But that's just like part of the thing. And

I don't know. I feel like if it was an expected failure, if you started some process in your work or in your life and you know extremely confidently ahead of time that there's going to be like percentage X of failures,

I just feel like that's not even a failure at all. It's something more like grinding, right? You're like grinding through to get where you want to. And it's like grinding is not a lot of fun, but you just have to do it for certain kinds of things. So, yeah.

If a failure was well expected, I just feel like it should be mentally reframed as, was this part of a grind? Or I guess the other way it can be is like, was this part of a calculated risk? And you had some notion in your head of like, oh, okay, here's the probability of failure. And I just like knew that going in. I feel like, oh, it's like there's nothing to deal with there at all. But the thing that's more like...

What do you want to pay attention to and what do I pay attention to is more like unexpected failures. Something has gone wrong in a way that you didn't predict at all and didn't see coming. Like that is a very different thing that feels more like, oh, this is an actual failure. And...

You just have to do like a retrospective analysis of what was missed in the lead up to this. How did this come out of nowhere? What led to this occurring? And then, I mean, kind of going to the discussion earlier about deciding the things that you're improving on and not improving on. Sometimes the result is like...

Well, that's what happens. Unexpected failures, by definition, they're unexpected. They can be unpredictable. And it just might not be worth changing anything to try to avoid that in the future. I feel like this is one of the many slow poisons and slow deaths of like big companies and big bureaucracies is they ossify in trying to

make it so that every unexpected failure that they have ever encountered can never happen again. This is why you get terms of service. They're like 20,000 pages long. It's like, what is this document? Oh, it's like a historical record of everything bad that ever happened to this company and also everything bad that ever happened to all of their friends that they ever asked about, right? And so you get like this enormous document trying to cover like every possible corner case. And

And it's the problem that bureaucracies get of like, there's a million steps because each one was added because sometime there was a problem and they put in an institutional fix and everything just gets slower and slower. So I know like with unexpected failures, I think it is also just worth considering. It could just be better to eat it as a failure and accept that you're going to go forward and not try to plan for this. But yeah.

It's so variable, right? It depends on the nature of what the failure is. But I think it's good to mentally separate them into expected versus unexpected. And then if it's unexpected, is it worth attempting to prevent something similar in the future or not?

Or is it not? So that's the decision tree for failures off the top of my head. That's what you can do. And then pick one and don't worry about it. That's how you handle failure. So if I have an unexpected failure of a project that I'm working on, whatever, I will be bummed out about it, especially if I thought that it could have led to something more or I had a greater idea for it. And so I've experienced that enough throughout my career. But in having had those experiences early on,

It kind of got me to the point now where my preparations for a project include the ways in which the failure is dealt with. And essentially my kind of two systems for dealing with failure is commitment and experience. So if I'm embarking on a project, I understand that that project may not succeed. What I won't do is just abandon it. I would take it to a point where

in which it will end, but that it won't just be like, well, that didn't work, and then just get rid of it. Because then I feel like I'm not going to learn anything from that project. And if I just abandon everything that fails...

I'm also going to keep starting too many things, right? So this is a thing I've learned over time, which is now why I'm like, no more podcasts, none, no more, done, right? Because I just learned over time, it just became harder and harder to be successful with new shows that are made the way that I like to make podcasts. And to try and get a success now to the level that the successes that I have...

is really, really hard and takes more time than I have to give to a project. And so having that commitment to be like, well, if this doesn't work, I will see this project through to an end state, that is a thing that is a commitment to the people that are there or that have bought into it, but also not to a point where I'm just dragging something behind me forever. And then that also leads to gaining the experience of,

for how to make something successful and or successful enough that you can find the time at which to bail out from it. They're kind of my two ways that I deal with projects now so that they're less likely to fail, I feel like. Like, for example, we've done enough now for the promoting of products to understand that

how to make them successful because we've had some stuff that didn't necessarily go the way that I thought they were going to because I made too many assumptions and now we have like a better idea of how to do stuff and I think it's getting better all the time and it's

it's also just informing that some of the bets that we make on things can be reduced. And like you can start off ordering less units of a product and you can see if it resonates with people and then use that to improve it or change it and or to then build the way to announce it bigger to the world. Like that is the kind of experience portion, which means that like something can succeed, but succeed less and it not be a failure because it you

you're not carrying around the same stock of the same item for like six years or whatever. Yeah, actually, that's a good point because I was, as you were talking, I was sort of thinking like, again, it's easier to talk about with physical products like with Cortex brand, but it's like, oh, our products have done well, but at some point we're going to have like a failure, right? We're just, we're going to have something where it's like, oh, this just didn't, this doesn't go very well. If you keep launching products, it's bound to happen. I mean, look,

I think it already did happen, but nobody else will agree with me or will allow me to agree. The subtle notebook was a failure. I was like, are you, are you still, I'm talking about the subtle notebook. Yes. I'm talking about the subtle notebook. Okay. Listen, everybody, I just completely disagree with Mike about this. Uh,

I feel like Mike's brain is all like weird about the subtle notebook. Subtle notebook is great. Uh, by the way, uh, your head of logistics says we need to order more very soon. For a variety of reasons. It can't happen. So like, we're just going to have to deal with this later on. Listen to me. I will not let subtle notebook die. Uh,

No, but this is the point, though. This is my experience. So, okay. So what happened was we made the theme system journal and I was like, an easy next product is a notebook that is basically the same construction, but blank inside, right? And it was like, this can only surely succeed to the exact same level that the theme system succeeded. No, it didn't. Because we ordered an amount that was way too high and we're still selling from that initial stock amount.

We significantly overordered and overcommitted to that product. I don't think that the idea of a product like the subtle notebook is a bad one. But whenever we get to the point that we're going to replace it or like reorder for it,

I'm not going to order that same amount again. Like the failure, we bet way too hard on that product and it did not work. Like it did not work. I mean, okay. I guess what you remind me again, that we overbought by literally many years worth of stock. Yeah, I guess that did go back. I just really liked that product.

And I also just think it's kind of funny. I like it too. And we have fans of that product, including some friends of like, not just you. I have other friends who are like, please never get rid of this because I use it all the time. It's like, I get it. But it's going to be replaced at some point with something else. But we will deal with that the same way that we are dealing with variants of the Sidekick notepad, right? So we have the calendar companion. We ordered way less and it's going great.

Because we are less financially committed to that product. Okay, so I concede you're more right about the subtle notebook that I give you credit for. Hashtag Mike was right. But it's just the experience. We learned something from it. Yeah, that's where I was sort of going with that. What I was thinking about, just again, like sort of thinking forward, it's like, oh, right, like projects, like we'll definitely have some projects that are like failures in some sense. But...

Like, I already feel so much better. And partly because of the calendar companion. I'm just like, oh, but the way that we're thinking of rolling out stuff, we've made a bunch of structural changes behind the scenes. And it's like, oh, right. Yeah.

I didn't really think about this, but like we have definitely put a lot of effort into downside mitigation of if it goes wrong while maintaining the ability to get the benefits of the upside if it does go right. Yeah. So, yeah, it's like, yeah, that's that that is a thing that like, yeah, we've gotten significantly better over time with that. So, yeah, that's like totally like learning from failure experience and incorporating it going forward.

And it's also like the commitment thing, right? So when we were struggling handling all of the eels and ordered like just a obscene amount of sidekick notepads to prepare for your video...

there was a conversation that we had which is like okay if this video doesn't work like we will sell these like we will do everything in our power to sell these which is just like not a thing that we thought about before but like that is the commitment part of it to make sure that even if this does not go the way that we hope we won't allow it to like fail because we know we can sell them it's just going to take a different commitment level to make that work i

I have a question for you via Chris. Okay. Chris writes in to ask, given both of your inclinations to track your time and calculate ROI, are you able to figure out the ballpark returns on your time spent watching Lord of the Rings for more techs?

And I feel like, are we, Mike? I actually haven't even, I haven't thought about this at all. I don't know. I don't know if we like have the data to even calculate something like that. I mean, I have the data, but it's about what's the question in a way where like, obviously that was an incredible outlay of time. So if you consider the movies and movies,

The episodes and the editing, you know, it's probably like 50, 60 hours of work, probably. Something like that. Yeah. I will again flag up, I had the funny experience during the time that we decided to do that. At one point, just...

Must have been around the Two Towers time, but I was complaining to my wife. I was like, God, I just feel so busy and overloaded. Why is that? And she's like, you just doubled the recording of Cortex with this stuff where you want to watch like 12 hours of behind-the-scenes footage to prepare. It's like, yeah, you just dropped a bomb of hours in the middle of what you're trying to do. That's why this question is kind of funny because...

it is strange in the nature of our work that it's like, oh, this totally does count as work time. But my brain just doesn't really frame it that way. And so that's why I had like a kind of confused experience of like,

I just feel like I'm so busy and overloaded all of a sudden because my brain was just like, you're just watching Lord of the Rings, man? You're making some notes? It's like, yes, but I was because of time pressure, like doing some of the extras watching, like during what would have otherwise been like normal working hours. But my brain was like hiding all of that from me. But I like this question because it is a funny thing to sort of think about and...

I know people ask this a lot, but I think I don't do the time tracking and the return on investment in the way that people think that I do. So it's like, no, I time track for Cortex just like as a whole. And I do think about that in terms of like, oh, where does this fit in my life? But it feels like I would not have time tracked the Lord of the Rings project and then been like,

Oh, let's see if the ROI was positive on that. Because one, it's a thing that we've just been talking about for years. That was two, a good excuse for me to rewatch the movies, which I wanted to do anyway. And like you wanted to see them at some point. And then like three,

I just thought it was a good idea for the more tech subscribers. Like, here's a bunch of stuff that we can talk about that I think is fun. And like, I think we did a really good job on those episodes. I just think this is a way in which it's like, I always encourage people to time track, but this is the danger is I think people naturally want to over time track that I think can be

you lose the big picture here. Yes, yes, yes. And the big picture is we think this was a good idea for the people who sign up for more techs and it makes sense on like a bunch of axes. We should do it. And like that's sort of the end of the conversation. And I'm very glad we did it. Yeah, so like I know that right now, like to date, no, it has not been ROI positive yet.

and it probably won't be for a long period of time, if all we're basing it on is incremental new subscribers, where to have done that amount of work and then generate a positive ROI compared to regular more techs would be...

it's impossible to do. I guess if I was thinking it through, it's like, what's the comparison, I guess? I guess the comparison would be like ROI compared to we recorded three extra episodes of Cortex and put ads on them. And just because of the economics of the way these things work is like, oh, yeah, those Lord of the Rings episodes will probably never pay off if that's the comparison. Like, no way will they ever pay off. But that's like,

It's just not the right way to think about it at all. Because the way that I considered it and I do consider it is what we're doing with that is making the more text proposition more appealing to people because this content lives there now. Because more text existing is very beneficial to my ROI.

and what it provides for me financially, it's fantastic. And so doing anything to increase that, which is also a fun thing to, like if you can think of a fun thing to do that also makes that part of my business more attractive to the people that are there, fantastic. And if what we ended up doing was by providing that,

that a bunch of people decided to stick around for longer great that was the whole reason to do it but if we were like all right we need to make this 40 hours worth it was impossible to do right if we give like half an hour for each episode

to get to 40 hours. You know what I mean? Like, we would have had to, I don't know, like, 20, 40x the amount. it wouldn't, it doesn't work out like that. But like, this is just kind of the point. It is like a thank you to the people that have subscribed and will subscribe in the future. Like, not only do you get this part, but also that bigger part. And like,

it kind of is one of those things where I wouldn't want to do a hard ROI calculation on that. And neither should you always. I don't believe that that is a thing. It's like for me, I only review as listeners of the show know, right? Like I reviewed my time tracking on an annual basis.

I don't look at month-to-month stuff. I look at a year. And then every year, I do an ROI calculation on all of the various projects that I'm a part of. And that happens once a year. This is a totally appropriate time scale. So it can help me make big decisions, much bigger decisions. I think if you're ROI calculating every little thing you do, you'll never be able to focus on anything because you won't

Allow for big change. So I guess if you want to listen to the Lord of the Rings episodes, go to getmoretex.com. And Mike and I are now, we're now going to transition into Moretex where, I don't know, I guess I could tell you a little bit of what I've been doing the last couple of months. I'm not sure. We'll find out in a few minutes. Getmoretex.com.