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He may have tested every productivity tool in the world, but in the AI era, which ones actually solve your problems and which are a waste of your time?
Casey Newton and David Pierce explore which AI productivity tools truly help and which waste time in the evolving AI era.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- AI adoption varies significantly by region and is influenced by cultural attitudes.
- Not all AI productivity tools deliver real value; some are more hype than help.
- Educators in the US and Canada show declining interest in AI for teaching due to practical and cultural concerns.
- AI can greatly reduce mundane tasks like transcription and email management, freeing time for creative work.
- Thoughtful use of AI as a partner rather than a replacement is key to maintaining job relevance.
What the video covers
- Casey Newton hosts Platformer focusing on AI's impact on jobs and productivity tools.
- David Pierce, editor at The Verge, shares insights from testing over 200 productivity apps.
- Discussion on the cultural differences in AI adoption among educators in the US, Canada, and other regions.
- Exploration of how AI tools can genuinely enhance productivity versus 'productivity theater'.
- Analysis of AI's role in education, including challenges like cheating and teacher resistance.
- David Pierce highlights the evolving landscape of note-taking and task management apps.
- The episode covers practical AI applications like transcription, organizing notes, and automating tasks.
- Concerns about AI replacing human roles and the importance of thoughtful integration are discussed.
- The conversation touches on the future of AI as an operating system and its potential impact.
- The episode is sponsored by Jira by Atlassian, emphasizing AI-enhanced teamwork.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: AI and Productivity Tools
- 04:09AI Adoption in Education: US and Canada vs. Global Trends
- 07:56The Role of AI in Learning and Teaching
- 12:02Introducing David Pierce and His Productivity App Quest
- 18:39Evaluating Productivity Apps and AI Integration
- 28:23AI for Transcription and Note Organization
- 42:15Challenges and Future of AI in Workflows
- 48:59Closing Thoughts and Sponsor Message
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
That's this week on Platformer. This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian, where teams and coding agents get the context they need to do the right work. Try it free at jira.dev.
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That's jira.dev. Welcome to Platformer. I'm Casey Newton. Last season, we talked about what AI means for jobs and the risk that huge numbers of jobs might soon go away. This season, we're turning our attention to what you can do to keep your job. What
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tools and strategies can you use to keep your advantage in a world where AI capabilities continue to advance?
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There's nobody better to help us map that landscape than my friend David Pierce. David is an editor at large of The Verge, co-host of the Vergecast, and the author of Installer, the weekly newsletter where he tells the world what
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to download, watch, and try. He spent his entire career test driving the tools that the rest of us use to organize our lives. And today I'm going to ask him what's real and what is just productivity theater. First though, as
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always, we begin by checking in on the state of AI and the economy. And that means it's time to bring in Platformer fellow and Gen Z AI correspondent Ella Marianos.
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Ella, how are you this week?
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Um, I'm wonderful. I just had a beautiful Fourth of July weekend. I went to a nice cookout and also to a more heterodox celebration of Canada Day, which is apparently on July 1st. Um,
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and how do Canadians celebrate Canada Day?
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There was only one Canadian at the gathering, interestingly. Um, but I think a lot of strangely flavored Canadian sodas were consumed.
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What is the strangest Canadian soda that you encountered?
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I really cannot remember the names of any of them. They flew through my brain.
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Well, perhaps something for our listeners to investigate on their own time and discover the dynamic world of Canadian soda. In the meantime though, Ella, I'm wondering if you have any news to bring us from the realm of
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AI and drops.
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Yeah. So, in fact, I have some news from both the US and Canada about some people who really don't want to use AI at their jobs.
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So, the Digital Education Council, which is a consortium of global university educators, did a survey that surveyed over 18,000 faculty members across 35 countries. And one thing they found is the percentage of faculty members in the US and Canada who
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plan to use AI in teaching has gone down 9% from 2025 to 2026.
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Wow.
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Yeah. So even though the technology has been getting better, the number of Canadian teachers that plan to use it as part of their work is going down seemingly significantly.
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Yeah. American and Canadian.
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Oh wow. Okay.
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Yeah.
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And in the rest of the world, this actually isn't what we're seeing. They have three other regional breakdowns. There's Latin America. There's a group that's Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
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There's Asia. And all of those groups are hovering around 90% plan to use AI somehow in their teaching. And that's about the same as they were last year. But in the US and Canada, it's only 67% of professors. And it's down
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from last year when it was still in the 70s.
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And what do we make of that discrepancy?
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Did they sort of follow up with the American and Canadian teachers and ask them why they felt this way?
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Yeah, unfortunately we do not have direct responses from these teachers right now. So it's hard to tell. I keep on trying to think of wild theories and none of them actually fit regional breakdowns I can think of.
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Like data centers wouldn't be that different or energy use wouldn't be that different in how big of a deal it is in terms of actual data center buildout between regions. I don't know. This has in
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some sense stumped me but also on a vibe level it makes a lot of sense. Like yeah, just when I talk to most of the population I talk to about AI, it's AI researchers and AI policy people.
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And in general, when I talk to AI researchers and AI policy people in the US and Canada, they just are way more negative about AI across the board in a really strong way where it almost seems like this very
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pervasive cultural effect.
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Right. And we know that when we look at the surveys of Americans on how they feel about AI, its popularity has been rapidly declining. And so it sort of makes sense that teachers are just part of that American populace that doesn't like what they're seeing. At the same time, I can also imagine that many of these teachers have now just had a few years of experiences with AI in the classroom, and they're not liking what
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they're finding. They're finding students are cheating. They're finding students are not learning the material.
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They're finding that their place in the classroom feels threatened in a way that it didn't before. So part of me feels like it would be surprising if the adoption of AI were going up in American and Canadian classrooms, but
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what makes you think that it ought to be going up?
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Yeah. So, I don't know. AI knows a lot of stuff.
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Yeah. Like I was a university student last year when the models weren't even that capable. And while I would not necessarily want to be getting lectures from an AI lecturer, like you know, as a CS student while I was not
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vibe coding and I was not allowed to vibe code and I'm actually kind of grateful for that. I do think I learned stuff creating antiquated artisanal code in C.
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I essentially used it as a replacement for Stack Overflow. It told me a bunch of random stuff that I was forgetting. And that was a little bit faster, I think, for memorizing all of the syntax stuff I needed compared
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to if I didn't have AI. That said, I do think most of the places where I've seen myself or students I know actually finding AI useful is when they seek it out in context where
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they're allowed to customize towards what they actually think they need as opposed to teachers intentionally doing some sort of AI integration in the classroom.
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Right. That makes sense. I mean, I do see a world where a teacher could think of AI as a partner to them in the classroom. And maybe it's able to do some one-on-one coaching and tutoring with students that are falling a little
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bit behind. Maybe it could help with grading or evaluating papers, although of course, that could be very fraught. But it's easy to imagine a world where if it worked, a teacher might like it. But again, I think
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all those other concerns that they have are real.
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Any other takeaways from this study?
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Yeah, I don't know. There's a really big difference between these groups of people, like a roughly 20% difference in how much they want to use AI in the classroom. People in these different regions have
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access to the same tools. They're teaching different curricula to a certain extent but not completely. And so I think this really does show us that the extent to which people are willing to adopt AI is just
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not some sort of standardized objective sense of how useful the tool is that everybody will agree on. It's very contingent. It's very culturally mediated and I think we should all keep that in mind whenever we feel super confident about
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some assessment we have of AI in a specific context.
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I think it is a great point that the opinions do seem to vary widely around the world.
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Well, it's an interesting study and it speaks to a question that we're going to be asking a lot this season, which is what kind of tools do you want to use in the AI era and which tools do you not want to use?
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And so I feel like today we learned at leas
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enjoy this conversation. So with that, let's bring in David Pierce. David Pierce, welcome to Platformer.
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Hello, sir. I'm very happy to be here. I am thrilled for you to join us for the first episode of our second season.
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We're talking all about productivity and what tools people can use to maybe get ahead, stay ahead at work at a time when some folks at least are worried that AI could take their jobs. And nobody has a better view of the landscape than you.
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Nobody is trying more tools. And with that in mind, I have to ask, I know you recently tried the Trump phone. Is the Trump phone the advantage people need in the AI era? It really is. If you've been
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waiting for the thing that will make you want to use your phone less and go do something more productive, the answer is the Trump phone. Uh, which I cannot I cannot recommend enough as a way to just get you off your phone and back out into
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the real world. It's a it's this is the screen time solution. If your kid is looking at their phone too, just give them the Trump phone. Next thing you know, they're they're on a swing set playing.
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Yeah. They're going to throw it in the ocean and and go back to, you know, being bored the way we're supposed to be. I just want to say, by the way, that I find it deeply upsetting that you
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figured out how to get a productivity podcast before I did. This is this has been a thing that both of us have been running towards for most of our adult lives and you got here before I did and
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I'm very upset about that. Well, you know, as you know, I've been very uh inspired by you and I don't know if I would, you know, even even care half as much about all this stuff if you didn't do all the great work that you do
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with the Verge and Installer. I'm so sorry. And and you should be be sorry because I've wasted a lot of time thanks to you.
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But I've also really enjoyed myself. And that's that's the tension that we're in. So David, I think it's fair to say most people try to minimize the number of new apps that they install. You go out of your way to find new ones. So give us
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your Siko credentials up front. How many to-do apps do you think you personally installed, used, and abandoned?
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Oh, wow. Conservatively 200. Like I think if if you made me pick a number, it's probably somewhere in that range. And that's limited by the number of them that exist, not by the number of them that I'm willing to try.
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Right. If there were 400, you would have installed 400 without question. Yeah. I think really I mean all the way back to like my first experiences with smartphones, you know, 20 years ago, uh the very first thing I downloaded in the app
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store was Evernote, which is just it tells you something about who I am specifically as a person. And this has just been an ongoing journey. And then especially as my professional life has gotten busier and as my personal life
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has gotten busier next to my professional life, uh I think it has gone from a thing I do because I think it's interesting to a thing I do both because I think it's interesting and out of like deep necessity to remain a
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person. Uh and in that sense actually the last like 18 months has been totally fascinating for all the reasons you said up top, right? that we're in a moment where everyone has decided that everything about how we do everything is
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about to change, but actually none of it has changed yet. And so we're in this like complete chaos phase of just trying to figure out what the future of any of this stuff is before any of it has
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settled. And it's it's just delightful. It's so fun. It is. Well, let's dive into the chaos a bit. You're infamous for a kind of perpetual quest to find and use the best notes app. You've, you know, just mentioned installing 200 uh apps. After
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all your years of tinkering with your setup, what has actually survived and how solid does your current setup feel?
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Uh, nothing and incredibly fragile is is the honest answer. I I'm down to the thing that I have learned pretty explicitly is is what I need. Um, I think uh and and I I we should talk about this more broadly too, but I think
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I spent a long time building really elaborate systems that would make sure that sort of everything was in its right place and I knew exactly how everything was going to be organized and everything was tagged and everything was in
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projects and I could tell you all of the lexicon of every single app that existed and discovered that actually the problem was I would make these really beautiful to-do lists and never look at them. Just never. And then I'd be like, "Well,
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that's weird. I don't do anything on my to-do list. maybe I'll get a new to-do list. Uh, and so the biggest change for me has been figuring out sort of what I need to be successful. And the problem
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is I've I've become very clear on that. And now there's basically uh this this incredibly annoying thing happening where there are a handful of apps that all have every feature that I want minus one. Uh, and then they keep adding
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things that are like the thing that I want. So, I go back to that try that app and then realize it still doesn't have the actual feature that is very important to me. So, I leave for one of
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the other ones that has it. And I'm just I'm in this cycle basically between five it's two to-do list apps. I basically am switching between to-doist and reminders at all times um for a variety of reasons. And then I'm I'm
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bouncing between four or five notes apps um depending on which particular painoint I am willing to put up with at a given time.
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So I switched today Ky like this is not a bit I switched notes apps today.
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What what did you switch from and to and why? I'm just an insane person. No no one should ever hear me say this out loud.
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So I switched from an app called Note Plan uh which I really like. Um, Obsidian has become this very popular app by basically just building an app on top of a set of markdown files. I think that idea is very important, right? That
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that fundamentally the thing at the base of it should be a bunch of things that I own that do not exist in some, you know, proprietary format that are not hard to get out, that are not hard to read on
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some other device. I it's I have a folder of files that I can upload to Google Drive, I can put on a thumb drive, I can print out and hand to my wife. Like that's very important. Um, note plan takes that idea and basically
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spins a bunch of really interesting like task related stuff on top of it. Obsidian is very good for writing notes.
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Note plan is much more geared towards being like a sort of daily notes and tasks app and does it very well. So I used I used it for a long time and then craft which is the white whale of my
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productivity applications because it is the one that is the closest to doing everything correctly. It's almost a really great calendar app. It's almost a really great note app and it's almost a really great task app. And every time
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they make a tiny little bit of progress in one of those directions, I throw my entire life back into it. Run into the edges again and leave. So the the update literally today was that they've done a much better job of integrating tasks
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around the app. So now you can see all of the relevant tasks everywhere you're supposed to, which sounds like a small thing, but it's just not how it worked before. And so now like if it it integrates with Apple reminders. So I
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can say I can say to my phone like remind me to water the grass tomorrow morning. And now that is in my daily note in craft which is a very important little bit of the synergy that makes this stuff go a long way. So for now I'm
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in craft. By the time anyone hears this there's a strong chance I will no longer be in craft. And and when you say you're in craft you are also in reminders. And does that mean you are also in to-d
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doist as well? So to-doist and reminders are are again two apps with opposite strengths for me. Um my my sort of running theory of all of this stuff is that capture is the most important thing by a mile and none of the rest of it
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matters. And I think AI is actually increasing that fact that you don't have to build a system. You don't have to care about where any of it is because we actually have technology that is making it easy to find and organize these
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things after the fact. The whole idea is just being able to get it out of your brain and into something. It's useless in your brain and it's actually incredibly useful as long as it is somewhere. So reminders I really like
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because it has it's it's unparalleled in its Siri integration, right? You just say, "Remind me to water the grass at 7:00 a.m. tomorrow." And it just does it. I don't have to like remember the weird syntax to say the name of the app
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before. Um, to-d doist sounds like to-do list, so that trips up Siri like every three times. Uh, it's just one of those things that like reminders is the cleanest way I have ever found to get something out of my head and into a
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system. And so I always end up coming back to it because it's just so fast.
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To-doist is a vastly better app for like managing products and and to-dos. But most of the time I come back to what I actually just need is a list of all of my tasks. I don't need it I don't need
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it any more complicated than that. I just need them all somewhere and reminders because it does a good job of sort of percolating around other apps too is mostly the one I've gravitated to.
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Got it. Okay. So, it sort of cartwheeling between this like native system feature of the Apple ecosystem, a really good to-do app and then a like pretty good at everything app. that that is the current landscape of how David,
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you are trying to stay on top of your very messy personal and professional lives.
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There's more there's slightly more to it than that, but that's the that's the basis of it. Everything else sort of flows around those things. Yeah. When you interviewed your colleagues at the Verge about their own productivity systems, my takeaway was that the the
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lesson you learned was that simplicity and a single source of truth beat the perfect system. Why are those two elements so essential for getting work done? I think it's it's the how should I say this? I think having a single source
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of truth solves two problems at once. And and we don't actually think enough about either of these problems. It's knowing where to put it and then it's knowing where it is.
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And I think that is like that that's the whole thing, right? Like I have something in my brain. And I I see this with people all the time because I have I have made myself public as a productivity nerd. So people love to
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talk to me about this stuff. There's like that you can have the sort of best fit solution for every individual thing.
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You're like, well, if I have this link for this thing, I'm going to put it over here. And if I have this thing that I need to do for this thing, I'm going to put it over here. Then if I have this
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other Google doc that I need to put and what actually happens is all of the systems just break down because it's there's too much friction to put stuff anywhere.
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So the idea of just saying this is the place I put things is actually the single most important thing you can do. Uh and then the reverse of that is I know where it is now. Right? And there's you don't have
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to build some elaborate system that will reveal it to you at the right time. You don't have to go and like jump from app to app to app to try to figure out where this thing is that you were doing the
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other day. I think people have this experience all the time, right? You're like, "Is this in my email? Is this in my Slack? Is this in Google Docs? Is it in my to-do list app? Is it in my notes
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app?" Like, the fewer number of places that can possibly be, the more likely you are to actually go interact with that thing. And then this is the newest part of my theory, and I'm curious how you feel about this. M
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I've become a big believer in mess in those spaces that I I used to think I don't want to see any tasks that I don't need to worry about right now. I only want to have the most important things in front of me
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every minute. And then I started talking to authors and very productive people, people who are working on lots of creative projects. And what they discovered is the idea of actually seeing the things over and over and over and over and over again is really
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important. That I'm I'm forced to wade through my to-do list every day makes me more likely to accomplish the things on my to-do list because it actually plants it back in my brain. It helps create connections between things that actually
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you should be confronted by all of your stuff as often as possible. And that's another reason that I think having fewer places for that stuff is just really valuable, right? And this is the logic of like seeing your tasks in an app like Craft
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because you're going there in the morning, you're starting a daily note, maybe you're writing a little bit in your journal, you're looking at your calendar, but all the to-do lists are right there and you're not just sort of
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hunting all over. So, if folks take nothing else away from this uh this conversation, it is that simplicity is your friend. A single source of truth is your friend. And now David and I will spend the rest of the conversation
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talking about how we've worked to needlessly complicate our lives and spread all of our uh writing and content across as many apps as possible. That's correct. Can I give you one really stupid example before we move on?
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So there is this guy named Jeff Wong who wrote a blog post in I think 2022 called my productivity app is a neverending.txt file. Uh this is like a formative blog post in the David Pierce theory of technology. Uh, and basically what what
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this guy did is he started an incredibly long text file and he would have a the the date and then kind of a record of all the things he had to do and all the stuff that he did that day. And every
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morning he would open the thing up, scroll all the way to the bottom and add the new day.
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And I hated the system for that thing alone, the I have to open it and scroll all the way to the bottom. It's just like what what an annoying little tiny bit of friction every time I want to go
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into my system. But what I started to realize as I started to do stuff like this is actually the fact that you stop accidentally like two days ago and then you have to scroll a little bit further down to get to today. That's the whole
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point, right? It's it's this is the thing that makes me go back to what I was thinking about yesterday and the stuff that I didn't finish doing yesterday. That like putting this in front of your face in this very simple
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way is actually vastly more powerful than having some elaborate set of to-doist queries that is supposed to tell me exactly what I'm supposed to do today. because that doesn't work anyway, right? And I do think that like particularly if you work in a creative
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field, having some sort of mechanism for just revisiting things that you have added to your system is a huge part of it and it feels like one of the ways where this ecosystem has evolved in the past 10 years. Um,
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totally. You built yourself a thing like that right? Yeah. Yeah. So um I uh built a system called Blips which was built which was based on this uh blog post uh by a guy named Andy Matushek who's very
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foundational in the my personal productivity universe and his basic idea was like when you start to have a thought like um you know uh there's a backlash against data centers um you want to create a note where you just
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sort of like aggregate every little link and every little thought that you have about that and that at some point in time at least for me that turns into a column that turns into a podcast segment Um, but maybe I haven't thought to write
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it down yet. Maybe I haven't thought to do that podcast segment yet. So, I have a system in capacities, which is how I uh it's the the app that I use that you're using craft for. It just kind of
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collects all all my notes and everything. And then when I open up my daily note in the morning, do a little bit of journaling, I see five random blips and I'll think, "Aha, you know what? I have been meaning to write
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something about that." So, that's good. Does that work a lot? Like, do you actually have the experience of being like, "Oh, I should do something with that today." Yes, absolutely. And you know, the the other experience that it
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gives me is I'll I'll think, "Oh, I know five things that happened about that that I haven't put in that note yet." And so, it draws me back into that note.
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So, it's like kind of helping me keep them a little bit fresh. Um, now, interestingly, most of the stuff that we've talked about so far, I would say it's not really very high tech, right? Most of the tools that you
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and I have talked about, you could have built them in 2010. We've seen a lot of productivity fads uh over the past 15 years, David. Inbox zero, getting things done, second brains. Now, I think we're in some sort of like clawed code,
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obsidian, open claw moment. Um, every week you're asking your readers, hey, what are you using this week? What do you think AI has genuinely changed about the way that normal people work in the last year?
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Not as much as I would have thought, to be honest. I think there there is a certain kind of annoying like maintenance task that I think people are really quickly starting to learn to do with AI which I think is really cool.
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Like I think Claude Co was a really big moment in that that it's like I have I have a folder of stuff and I need that folder of stuff to be different in some material way, right? I need all of these
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PGs to be JPEGs. I need all of these files to be in this consistent format. I need I I need all of this stuff to just be different in some way. And it's the kind of thing that you could do manually
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that is actually not that hard to do manually, but is super annoying and it's the kind of thing you just don't do.
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Like that is that is like chef's kiss perfect stuff to give to AI and I and I'm starting to see people do that more and more and I think that's very cool.
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What I have not seen is any enthusiasm for the idea of like letting AI rule your life. Um, I think there are things that AI is very good at. Um, I think I've heard from a lot of people that one
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of the things that they do that they like is say, you know what, show me all the stuff in Slack and my email and my to-do list that I missed yesterday. Just like, show me some high priority stuff.
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And getting kind of mixed results like that those are great when they hit and they're sort of useless when they don't.
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Um, and that's fine. And it's it's a relatively like low stress activity, so people get something out of that. But there are so many tools out there now that are like we are going to, you know, perfectly prioritize your time for you.
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We're going to base it around your energy levels. All you do is plug in the API keys for five apps that you use and we'll take care of everything for you.
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And there is just absolutely no evidence in my life or anyone else's that I talk to that any of that stuff works at all.
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You know, I don't know how much time you may still be spending on x.com. I feel like this phenomenon only happens on X.com and it is Silicon Valley folks who do these sort of very performative discussions of how they're using AI. Um
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I love to uh pick on Gary Tan who runs Y Cominator. Gary's a very nice guy, but he's always tweeting about his GS stack and how he's used AI to write a 100,000 lines of code to sort of, you know, run
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his entire life. Um again, to me, this stuff seems performative. What do you make of the folks that say like, "No, no, no, no, no. I have the Mac Mini in the closet. It is running my life and
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like this is the way of the future." It's it's mostly productivity porn, right? Like I I remember a few years ago when the Notion community really took off and it was notion went from being like this sort of niche little
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productivity app to like genuinely huge. Like it became kind of a mainstream thing that lots of people knew. the the Reddit for Notion just became completely overrun with people showing off these like gorgeous, incredibly beautifully designed, bespoke dashboards that I hate
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to break it to you, accomplish nothing. They just accomplish nothing. And it's so fun to make that stuff. And so I totally get it. Like I in the same way that I really like building myself elaborate new systems that don't make me
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any more productive, setting up a bunch of agents that feel like they're doing something feels great and it's fun to do. It does not help you get anything else done. I do think a thing I have come to believe relatively recently is
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that there is a lot of like basic day-to-day life task stuff that is very helpful to offload to AI. And it's the same as like the the sort of Claude co-work level of things to do that it's like I need to find a plumber. Just a
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real thing that happens all the time, right? Like I can I can go on to Next Door and I can go on to Yelp and I can like cross research all of these different platforms to find a plumber.
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Or I can just go to Claude or Gemini or Chad CBT and be like, can you find me a plumber that kind of generally has pretty good reviews? And they do a good job. And so I think there's there are a
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lot of tasks like that in our lives that are simple but time consuming. And I think there's a lot of that that is that is useful to do as a way to like run through your day-to-day life. But like
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people are telling you stories about all of the like the agents that they have managing their finances. Like don't don't do that. Just just don't do that.
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Like and if you're offloading if you're offloading your work priorities to AI and and trusting that it will do a good job, it is going to fail you over and over and over again. it just will you may get yourself into trouble. Well, so
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let's talk a little bit more about work. Uh, one of the topics I've been fixated this year is the way that uh many CEOs believe that AI is making them massively more productive, but their workforces tend to be much more skeptical. Um, at
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the Verge, I feel like you sort of straddle kind of the line of like you're a worker, but you're also like in leadership there. What What's the dynamic at the Verge right now? Are y'all AI curious, enthusiasts, skeptics?
Speaker A
We we kind of run the gamut. I would say I think um a a kind of foundational truth of the Verge is that we evaluate the products, right? And I think it is like Neil, our editor-inchief, always likes to say that's the source of our
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power is like you you can give us all the you want, but if the thing doesn't work, I'm gonna find out and then I'm not I don't care what you say anymore because the thing doesn't work.
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And uh I think we've just run into this weird thing with AI over the last three and a half years now where the the gap between what people say and the ground truth of life as a user of these
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products was so enormous for so long that everybody just kind of lost the benefit of the doubt. And now it is genuinely smaller. Like there there are a lot of things that we have been promised for a long time that actually
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now kind of work. Uh a lot of them still don't and they a lot of them don't work all the time, but some of them do. Some of them really earnestly do the things we were promised back in 2022.
Speaker A
But I think is there any Go ahead. Go ahead. Well, I was going to ask if there is anything that AI does for you well enough at work now that you would hate to live without it.
Speaker A
Well, that's interesting. Um, no. No, I don't think so. I think at this point the the number of things uh Oh, no, that's not true. I have a good one for you. Uh, it is very good at um drawing connections between a bunch
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of sources. Um, which which is actually a thing I have come to appreciate. I use Notebook LM from Google for this a lot in a way that I really like. uh and to just basically sit down and read a bunch of
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stuff and uh it's really helpful for finding people to talk to about certain things like I'll read a bunch of white papers and be like is there anyone who was quoted in all of these and like often there is and so it's like oh I
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should go talk to that person and so as a as a way to sort of take a bunch of stuff and reduce it to something much smaller um that's very helpful and I think especially in in the stuff that we
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covered that part of the job frankly is to be kind of a mile wide in an inch deep. And so it's like to to be able to be that wide very quickly and then be more selective about like, okay, here's
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where I'm going to go really spend my time and try to find the smartest people the fastest and try to go do the best work. Um, that doesn't feel irreplaceable. It just would take longer and and it would be there would be a
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certain kind of thing that I don't go read as a result. You know what I mean?
Speaker A
That makes sense. I think for me a big one is like transcription, right? Which like I think maybe most people don't even think of as AI really. Um because maybe it doesn't feel quite the same as like notebook LM which feels way fancier
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but my god the hours that I used to spend transcribing interviews that I just like don't have to do anymore. Um you're completely that's also like that actually is the only one I can't live without. Like I cuz it used
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to I mean I used to spend an hour interviewing somebody and then four hours transcribing it. And now shout out to Turboscribe AI. I just upload it and it spits out a not quite perfect but like functionally useful transcript in
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10 minutes and I don't I God help me if I ever have to go manually transcribe anything ever again.
Speaker A
That's that's wild. I don't have to listen to my voice anymore. It's so great.
Speaker A
And that's a dream to not listen to David's voice. No, we love David's voice. We love David's voice. Um, I will also say and and this here's where I feel like this gets a little edgier and like some journalists like I think would
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say like I would absolutely not do this, but I've been using it for podcast prep, you know, like when I have a pretty good I I did it for this episode. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to
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talk to you about. I wrote a long prompt and I walked away and I came back and I had a shell. Some of the questions were stupid and I deleted them. And a lot of them were like directionally right. It's
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like I do want to ask about this, I do want to ask him about that. And I feel like it saved me time in a meaningful way. And then you know what else I did?
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I in the same conversation I said summarize these topics so I can send an email to David to kind of let him know what I want to talk about so he can prepare for this podcast. And I'm telling you this stuff took like 3
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minutes and that would have used to have been like an hour and a half or two hour uh you know process for me. So I'm always trying to find like where am I actually getting more productive as opposed to feeling more productive. And
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that is a space where I just actually feel more productive. Well, okay, talk this one out with me because I've been thinking a lot about this recently. So, uh, I also host this podcast called Version History. You've been on it. Um,
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great. Go check out Version History. Um, and the show is it it's part sort of litigation of interesting products over time. And it is partly just like straightforwardly a history show, right? So, it is like it has to be deeply researched. it has to
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be uh full of like interesting reporting and lots of stuff and I spend an enormous amount of time researching those shows and like on the one hand it's very fun and I sort of set it up as a show because I like doing that work
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but I've also found myself wondering like okay is there a is there a beginning of this process that I could offload absolutely so but every time I've done that I think the show is worse because I think I like
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the less I know the material and I think I know the material less when I'm not doing as much work like I I really do believe the idea that there is a linear relationship between how much of the work that I'm doing and
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how well I know the thing at the end like reasonable people could disagree on that but I I firmly believe that there's a great like Andre Carpathy quote that's just like you can't outsource your understanding you know like there's a lot that you can hand
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over to AI but like if the more that you hand over the less that you are going to understand and that does really matter when you're hosting a podcast. I think for me like if Yeah, go ahead.
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So, I think one thing I've been thinking a lot about is like I will I will go and I will read, you know, for hours and hours and hours and I will talk to people and I will end up this giant like
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giant mass of notes. And one easy thing to do with AI is to basically say, "Hey, I have all of this. Put this in chronological order." Another thing AI is fabulously good at, right? Like here's a bunch of dates. Here's a bunch
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of things that happened. Can you put them in chronological order? And I'll go through and check at the end, but like I wrote all of this. Can you put it in the correct order?
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I don't think I have an intellectual problem with that being an AI thing, but like uh and I don't think I also have an intellectual problem with being like, "Hey, can you recommend, you know, the 10 most cited things about XYZ?" Like,
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if I were to if I were to start researching Nest, where would you think I should start? I don't think that is outsourcing your understanding. But there the it it falls down such a slippery slope into I've actually done
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none of the work and now I have an outline for a show that I've never read and I'm just I'm so terrified of getting to that point that I I don't quite know where to cut it off.
Speaker A
Yeah. And and I think um it probably is worth a little bit of exploration. I do think that yeah, there is a version where you just sort of snap your fingers and it's podcast prep. And there are podcasters that just read things that
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their producers hand to them and they basically are seeing it for the first time when they sit down in front of the microphone. I think those podcasts are mostly not great. Um, I don't want to make that kind of podcast myself. I know
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that you don't either. Um, and yet I can also imagine a world where like, you know, version history follows a certain format. You could take the first 20, 40, however many episodes you've done, sort of feed that into an LLM, say like this
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is kind of the format that our show follows. Our next episode is about Nest.
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Like go out and do some research and like create a prep document that is kind of in this format. And then, you know, maybe that does save you a couple hours.
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I think the tension is the LLM is now going to choose things for you that it thinks are the most important moments and you're sort of outsourcing, you know, to the LLM its judgment of what is important and you might have made
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different choices had you not done that. And so now you maybe are doing a different show than you would have done had you not made that choice. So I think that's kind of the tradeoff. And um and I don't I don't know what the the right
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answer is there. Yeah. Except that you probably want to maintain your own, you know, stamp on it. Yes, I think that's right. And I think I'm also uh more and more suspicious of whatever LLM think is important. Um I've been going through
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this thing recently where uh you mentioned inbox zero at the top. I was for a long time an inbox zero person. Uh I was I was very on top of my email and holy god has that fallen apart on me. I
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have my email is in the worst state it has ever been in my entire adult life.
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And uh I went in I was like, "Okay, let me actually this this will be a useful experiment and also uh actually helpful in my life. Let me see how far I can get having email clean up my life or having
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AI clean up my email rather." And it was the most fascinating experience because it turns out there's a bunch of stuff in your inbox that is obviously not useful, right? Like Lanzen sends me an email every eight minutes and I don't
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need those. And Claude very quickly was like, "David, you don't need those." Uh, and then so it was able to actually go through and cut out a lot of the stuff in my email very quickly. And that's the
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kind of like co-work that I think is incredibly useful. I have a lot of marketing emails in my inbox. I would like them gone. Is a task that would have taken somewhere between a few minutes and a few hours and it took me
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45 seconds. Like fabulous, huge, huge, huge win. uh the minute it turned to my primary inbox, it started getting almost everything wrong because because what it does is it looks at something and it's like, well, this person seems to think that what they're
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emailing you about is very important, so it's probably very important. And it's like, it just made me think of SEO, right? That it's like you can game your way to the top of the search results by making everything seem like a
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five alarm fire all the time. And people are just going to learn to write emails that sound super personal that use my name a lot that make it that you know start with recon something so that it seems like we've been talking before
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like it's it's a completely gameable system and the LLM has no ability to look at this and be like here's what's important to me David right now or even ever and so I just extrapolate that out to like
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yes can you do a reasonable job of telling me the facts in order about the history of Nest absolutely probably very well and increasingly well over time.
Speaker A
Can you actually point out the things that matter in this story? No, I No, I just don't see it.
Speaker A
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. Um, looking at the AI landscape we have right now, there are chat bots, there are co-pilots inside of existing apps, there are agents that will sometimes promise to do the whole task for you.
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which of those three is like delivering the most value for you right now? So this this is not the answer I would have expected to give you, but it's it's the uh AI apps themselves. Um for whatever reason, my own behavior is less
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open the app in which I want to do things and then sort of invoke the LLM into it. I actually think long term that probably is how it ought to work in the same way that like if I'm going to
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search inside my notes app, I should talk to the LLM about my notes inside my notes app. But for some reason the behavior for me has just kind of hardened where I just open up the cloud app to do whenever I need to do things.
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I open up the cloud app, I give it the folder and we're off and running. Um I don't think that's the long-term answer.
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I also just don't think anybody has figured out the UI of this, right? cuz everywhere else it's just like here's an overlaid kind of slow chat window in whatever other app you were using and that that hasn't that that's not it.
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I'd rather go to Claude which is at least like a better made version of that thing. Um but I yeah for me it's it's mostly been those apps. What's what do you use?
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Um I use the apps as well. I'm not a big agent guy. I don't feel like the agents are working for me yet with with maybe the exception of cloud code which can obviously get a lot done. Um, but I
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don't really have a lot that is being done for me like on an automated basis where like I wake up every day and like a bunch of things have been done for me.
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I've experimented with that stuff. Some of it's sort of fun but like it hasn't really stuck. Um, I think I'm basically with you like I do just mostly use the apps themselves. Um, and I'm waiting for the day when like I can basically just
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install one of them like at the root level of my MacBook and just like let it run my computer. You know what I mean?
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Like I think that feels like the next step is when can one of these intelligences just like start to kind of replace the operating system of the hardware? Um, cuz I think that's going to happen faster than people think. And
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I think once it clicks into place and does work like it it might actually be kind of thrilling. I think I think you're probably right about that. Um have you ever used this app Poppy?
Speaker A
No. Tell me about Poppy. Uh you should. It's it's really fascinating. It's a it's just a a relatively small startup created this app. Um and you install it on your phone and you give it just a just a terrifying
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amount of information about you, right? Like I mean this is the trade you have to make with AI, right? The more it knows the more it can do. But in order to do all that stuff, it has to know
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everything about you. So you give it access to your calendar and your email and your text messages and your location and everything else going on. Um, and then it starts to just sort of proactively text you things that might
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matter. Like one one little thing is you get these long uh when you're doing two-factor authentications, you get the long messages that are like, "We will never send this to you. We'll never ask you for this. Here is your AMX." Uh,
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Poppy then looks at that text message, pulls out the six-digit code, and texts you the six-digit code. So, you immediately get a notification that's like 262317 is the code, and it's like, "Thank you, Poppy. That you have just done me a
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service." Like, good AI. Um, and it's it's good at seeing your calendar and being like, "Hey, I know I know where you are. I know where you need to go.
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There's going to be some traffic. You should leave now." And it it is that kind of lightly proactive thing that actually when it works feels really powerful. Um, I wound up turning it off because I had like three days in a row
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with no tasks and it would send me a thing being like, "Oh, I see that you still have do laundry today." And I'm like, "Buddy, I haven't had do laundry in three days. Like, I did laundry.
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We're good. This is this is I understand that you don't know about this, but it's annoying to me that you're keep telling me to do my laundry." Uh, and there's just all these like little things that aren't quite there. But I had a bunch of
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those moments where it just figured out something that I needed to care about and just sort of put it in front of me that I was like, "Oh, this is this is something." And I think we're we're headed towards more of that. But we who
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knows what the interface of that is. I don't think it's chat bots and I don't think it's text messages.
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It's going to be something else, but I don't know exactly what yet. I think that Siri wants I think that is what Siri wants to be and like the Siri equivalent for other operating systems is like there will be the like Siri
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panel and you'll click on it and there will just be a bunch of like ambient stuff that is that um and you know once they figure it out it'll it'll probably work well.
Speaker A
Um what is an AI workflow that you suspect takes more time to maintain than it actually saves you?
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Everything agentic. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I think realistically any any kind of um go out and you know book something on my behalf or buy my groceries or whatever.
Speaker A
Even these sort of very repetitive tasks, there are easy ways to do this stuff that exists already. Like just one dumb example I'll give you. I I wrote a while ago about the the new Starbucks chat GPT integration. Um, which sucks,
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right? It's like it makes it very hard to figure out what you want to get. I ran out of tokens trying to order coffee, which is the most insane experience I've ever had. Uh, and you go through and it's like menus exist. Do
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you know what I mean? Like the the experience I had with Chachi PT was as if you're there were no menus anywhere in Starbucks and you walked up to the barista and they spoke to you a list of
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every available drink at Starbucks. Like we've figured out better ways to do it than that. And uh and then when you say, you know, I want I want an iced coffee, she goes, okay, well, let me read you
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the possible milk options that you can add. And then you can and it's like none of this works. And then I heard from a bunch of people in and around Starbucks who were like, "Oh, I don't know if you
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know this, there's one button in the Starbucks app that just says reorder." It's like, we have solved this problem.
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We don't we do not need to AI our way through this problem. we have pressed the reorder button through this problem.
Speaker A
And I think there's so much of that stuff right now that everybody is trying desperately to like reinvent the wheels and what we're actually doing is just coming up with needlessly elaborate, needlessly brittle ways to do everything. Like I'm not here to pretend
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that Airbnb is the greatest interface in the world, but it is so much better to use it yourself than to watch ChatGpt try to use it on your behalf.
Speaker A
Absolutely. My my answer to this question for what it's worth and somewhat to my surprise is deep research which seems so cool when I first started using it. But then I just realized like all I'm doing is generating 10,000word documents that I
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am not reading and whenever I zoom in on anything it either feels like filler or something that has a questionable source. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Speaker A
So, you sort of are just better off doing the actual research than the allegedly uh deep research.
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Yes. I think the one of the things that I've thought about AI since the very beginning is that it is a very useful way to do things that don't have right answers um and that are pretty low stakes, right? Like my my first favorite
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thing to use LLMs for was movie recommendations. You just input like I like this movie, this movie, and this movie. What movies should I watch? It's actually pretty well suited to put those things together in a in a useful and
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hard to replicate way to be like here here is a movie you will probably like based on what I know about those things.
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Um is does it need to be the absolute exact platonically perfect answer to that question for me to get value out of it? No. Does it need to does it need to even like get the movie right every
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time? Like no. If it hallucinates a movie, who cares, right? like I just don't watch that movie and then we I go find something else.
Speaker A
So that's the sort of thing that it's like it back to the sort of plumber example, right? Like I don't I do not actually require the single greatest plumber in the history of Alexandria, Virginia. I just need one who's going to
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be good because I'm going to get three quotes and I'm going to go with the one I like best and is the cheapest. Like I need you to start this process for me in a way that does not require you to be
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completely correct about everything all the time. And the problem you run into with deep research is we're operating under the assumption that you are giving me lots of correct information and if I have to go redo all of your work, what
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the hell was the point of any of this? So you're you're sort of you're like you're you're just giving the thing a task you can't actually expect it to correctly complete. And that that mismatch just still feels so real to me.
Speaker A
Right. There's a version of the future where AI doesn't reduce the amount of work we have to do at all. It just raises expectations for everyone.
Speaker A
Everyone writes more emails, generates more slide decks, produces more slop for other people's AI to summarize, the workday stays the same length, the volume of content triples. Does that feel like a realistic scenario? And are there any tools or practices you found
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that sincerely give time back to you? Not really so far to be totally honest.
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I think the thing that is true and and the thing that I find hopeful is that in the same way that technology has always taken busy work away, this could happen again, right? Like I I I I think the history of spreadsheets is
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really instructive in the history of AI that it didn't obviate accountants. It didn't change the way that we think about business even. It just changed the tools with which you could do the job.
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And in fact, what it let you do is do the work much faster and it let you forecast more into the future because you could operate with more numbers, changing them more quickly and you could see the outcome of those numbers instead
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of doing it by hand. There's some very good Steven Levy wrote a great thing many many years ago about spreadsheets that I encourage everybody to go read because it it's it's a really interesting cultural study of what happens when suddenly a thing can do the
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work for you. and it it everybody thought we would never have accountants again and then what it turns out is Excel is really hard to use and one of the skills of being an accountant is now proficiency in Excel. I think there's
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going to be a lot of that with AI and I think the the thing that I am hopeful for and frankly already grateful for in the technology is that it can do a lot of the busy work I don't want to do. It
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can go in and clear out the thousand emails from land's end for me every morning. It can relatively successfully surface the the tasks that I have today.
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It can collate a bunch of information from a bunch of different places and put it all into a single text message that I get every morning. Like that's the kind of thing that is useful. It's not creative. It's not it's not even
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thoughtful. It's just administrative. And I think that kind of task there are a limitless supply of administrative tasks in our lives. And so I'm I'm not worried about people who do administrative tasks running out of them to do. But I think the hope is I don't
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think I think anyone who tells you that we're all going to stop having to do work because all of all this and we're going to like live on universal basic income and just live lives of leisure is ridiculous. But I think there is some
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possibility that we're going to get to sort of cut off the like bottom py pyramid of what we do at work and spend more time doing more interesting work.
Speaker A
Which is why everybody should stop firing their workers. Actually, you should hire more smart people to go do smart things because that's going to be the thing that like raises the ceiling of all of this because sitting around
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turning a bunch of paragraphs into a PowerPoint deck is not useful work. Like no one needs to be doing that job. We can all find better things to do than turning an some Excel files into bar graphs in a PowerPoint. But there are
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people who do that for a living because we have to. And so I think if we can automate that out of existence, I am actually extremely hopeful for what we can all go find to do instead.
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You wrote the review that doubled as an obituary for the humane AI pin and you were similarly unmoved by the rabbit R1.
Speaker A
That's right. Uh 2 years later, we're seeing a similar promise minus the hardware agents that do things for you while you do something else. How close do you think we are to living in the future of promise by devices like the
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rabbit? And what do you think the role of AI hardware might be in the next couple years?
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Input. It's the whole thing. Um I think the the idea of having a device that is easier to get some kind of information into than my phone is really powerful.
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I'm kind of out on an island on this one. Like there are a lot of people I work with and in the world who are like, "You're an idiot. Your phone is fine." I actually don't think that. I think the
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friction in I have to get out my phone from wherever it is, unlock it, open an app, tap on a thing, and type is actually quite a lot of friction. And if we can get it down to I talk into my
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ring, like you know Eric Mishikovsky a little bit. He has this thing called the Pebble Index that is literally just a button on a ring. you press it, you talk to it, you put it away, that is vastly
Speaker A
less friction. And if they can build that into a thing that's like, "Oh, you just set a task. Let me put that into your task manager." Or, "Oh, you just set a note. Let me put it into your
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notes app." That is like a powerful new productivity tool. And you know, you know, the other thing that has going for it is when you get out your phone, you also have to navigate through a thicket of notifications and
Speaker A
distraction. 100%. Yeah. How many times have you opened up your phone to do something and you end up on TikTok and you're like, "Wasn't I going to write something down?" Right? Or even worse, yeah. Yeah. You you open up your phone and then 10
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seconds later you have no idea why you open up your phone. It's like like there's never a moment where I feel worse about myself than that moment completely. And so I think where I'm at is trying to figure out how all of that
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is going to actually practically work, right? Because what we have right now is this run of devices that are like, we'll record your meetings and and get out some of your useful information and action items. I think that'll eventually
Speaker A
work fine. I I think that has a bunch of weird societal problems. Like if if you and I sit down to have coffee and I'm like, I'm just going to turn on my AI pin so that we can hang out more
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efficiently, like that feels bad and it will change the way that we are together. But that kind of thing, I think used deliberately is going to be really powerful. I'm not super bullish on the idea that I need another thing
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with a screen in my pocket. Um, but some sort of discrete useful input tool I think is going to be the trick for AI. H and then it's like does it have a camera? Like where do you fall on smart
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glasses which are objectively useful input system? They can see a lot of things. They can hear a lot of things.
Speaker A
They make people feel bad and I don't know that they're ever gonna get past that.
Speaker A
Yeah. I mean th this is one where like I think the brand is so tainted by the meta association, you know, like there was just that whole recent um controversy over the fact that they had installed facial recognition software or
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like the precursors to it in the glasses and then said, "Well, you know, we're not going to use it and it's irresponsible to suggest we would ever use it." Like, yeah, I that's going to be hard for me
Speaker A
to trust. Um, this is one where like I can imagine Apple doing a version of it and I'll be like, okay, like now I'm ready to kind of give it a look. Like, you know, maybe Google, I would take a
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flyer on it. But I do think that all of the privacy and surveillance concerns that people have are super legitimate. I don't love the stories I read about how much law enforcement has embraced the meta glasses. In general, I'm always
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trying to figure out how can we live in less of a panopticon rather than like more of a panopticon. Um, and I think 10 years ago, I would have told you that the panopticon is going to win because everybody will always trade
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convenience for anything. Uh, I don't think I believe that anymore. I think that actually it has gotten to a point now where I think we are starting to see people in real numbers push back and and make deliberate
Speaker A
choices against that stuff and take the hard way to not pick convenience and to say that actually I am going to make intentional choices about my life which you dear big tech have spent two decades systematically taking away from me. So,
Speaker A
I think I I it's that is a trend I actually didn't see coming and I'm really heartened by.
Speaker A
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Me, too. Um, you spend your other podcast version history taking a look back at popular tech from years past. Your thesis is that there's an awful lot to learn from old tech. If you did an episode about Chad GBT in
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2036, how consequential does it turn out to be? Is it the smartphone or is it the hoverboard?
Speaker A
Interesting. It's much closer to the smartphone than the hoverboard. Um, it's to me the question is, is it the smartphone or is it crypto? Um, because crypto captured everybody's imagination and kind of amounted to nothing, right? Like a bunch of people made a bunch of money,
Speaker A
the world didn't change, and we all went about our business. Um, there's a possibility that that's what chat GBPT did, right? Like did did chat GPT kind of all on its own completely turn the tech industry, the US economy and like
Speaker A
in very real ways the world on its head all at once? Absolutely. Yes. Right.
Speaker A
Like that there is a world before and after chat GPT. Uh will there be another world after that? Probably. But I think in that sense its influence has been just gigantic. Uh right or wrong it did that. And so I think there's no question
Speaker A
that it is it is going to be massively influential. I think the question of is it going to completely remake society in the way that the smartphone did? Like I I honestly think we're going to spend what did you say 2036?
Speaker A
Yeah. I think by 2036 we are still going to be unraveling the ways in which the smartphone changed us as people. Um I think we're only at the very beginning of understanding that and like you start to I mean there are then these
Speaker A
studies that are connecting like falling birth rates to the rise of the smartphone. I mean it's it's nuts, man.
Speaker A
Like the world everything about what it meant to be a person in the world changed because of smartphones and and that that is good and bad in thousands of ways on both sides. Uh I think it is too early to say if AI is
Speaker A
going to be that consequential. I think there are a lot of people who stand to make a lot of money on AI being that consequential and so they have a lot of incentive to tell you that it's going to
Speaker A
be. I actually don't see a ton of evidence in the world yet that it is going to change who we are as people on that level. I think there's there's a certainly a world in which we get there,
Speaker A
but uh I'm I'm skeptical of it being the next smartphone at least for now.
Speaker A
I don't know. You talk to these like kids who are on character AI from the time that they're 12 and having all their most important early relationships with like you know a version of Harry Potter um that will have cyber sex and I
Speaker A
feel like yeah we're we're we're probably going to um change a lot as as a result of this.
Speaker A
It's very possible we are running in that direction in in a lot of ways.
Speaker A
So let me sort of bring back to the kind of central question that I want to try to answer in this series and just get your perspective on it. I don't think there is any right answer to it. But for
Speaker A
the people who are having the anxieties about AI and their job, how would you encourage them to think about that? And how would you encourage them to think about how technology could be helpful to them as they try to navigate that? Does
Speaker A
this feel like a case where staying open and curious and willing to try new things is going to um help you stay ahead or is it uh something else? I think staying ahead is wildly overrated, first of all. Um, I really do like I
Speaker A
think this this idea that everyone is selling that you have to either get on the AI train or get left behind is is kind of pernitious and and just frankly wrong. Um, but I do think you're doing yourself a disservice not to at least
Speaker A
goof around with these tools if for no other reason than because it is genuinely helpful to offload some really boring tasks to them. like you have a bunch of photos that need to be organized in some way and you'd like to
Speaker A
rename them all or like the thing that happens to me all the time is I go out with a new SD card and I take a bunch of pictures and it's like the date on all of these is September 13th, 1982 and
Speaker A
it's like do you know what Claude is really good at is fixing those things, right?
Speaker A
Yeah. So take all the dumb tasks and offload them. And I actually think a thing that has started to happen in my brain, and I don't know if it's happening in yours, is I'm starting to notice those things
Speaker A
more in order to give them away. Like the kind of thing that I used to struggle to think about what are useful tasks for me to offload because I I just don't really notice those little bits of busy work that I do all day or the like
Speaker A
little tiny bits of repetitive actions that I take over and over that are kind of annoying. The more you see those, the more you can just pump them to something else that can do them. So, like don't give it creative tasks because that's
Speaker A
good for you and bad for AI. Don't don't rely on it to do things for you because it can't and it won't and you should learn how to do things for yourself. But like, can it be a helpful tool just like
Speaker A
any other tool? Absolutely. Like, think of AI the way you think about your laptop, right? Which is like a thing that I can do things with, not a replacement for my brain or my family.
Speaker A
And I think you're going to be fine. If you take nothing else away from this, don't make ABI replace your family.
Speaker A
It's a Listen, man. You'd be surprised. No, I I it's a it's a legitimate thing to say cuz some people are trying. Um, now it's also true that some people have terrible families. So, I'm you know, I'm sympathetic to the, you know, the folks
Speaker A
who are looking for support elsewhere. But, um, what I if you just if you read a thing about AI and you just find and replace the word AI with the word software, everything gets a little more understandable and a lot less scary. And
Speaker A
I think we should all maybe do it that way. Like it's just software and that's okay. It's sometimes it's very good software, but you should treat it like software.
Speaker A
I like that. Well, speaking of software, David, last question. I can't let you get out of here without giving us a recommendation. If a listener is in the mind to turn over their life to a new piece of software tomorrow that does
Speaker A
anything in the realm of making them more productive, what might you tell them to check out? There's an app called My Mind that I really love. Um, it's spelled like it sounds, M y m i n d. And
Speaker A
they developed it as a really beautiful sort of visual reference guide. So, the idea is like I'm a designer. I I don't know. I guess designers like read magazines all day. I don't know. Uh, you I like wander through beautiful museums
Speaker A
and I take pictures of them and I upload them and it it does a really interesting job. This actually I think is a fascinating and great use of AI. It automatically categorizes everything that you put in. It sorts it by color.
Speaker A
It sorts it by type. It sorts it by like all the pictures you take of cars, it understands are of cars and it will find all the cars for you. It it is just this sort of endlessly reorganizable
Speaker A
set of stuff. And again, when I come back to like you just need to know where everything is, my mind is a really great place to put stuff. So, the way I've been using it is it is just an endless
Speaker A
compendium of things that I like. If I read an article that I like, I save it into my mind. If I watch a movie that I like, it goes into my mind. If I read a quote in a story that I like, it goes
Speaker A
into my mind. If I take a picture of my kid that I like, it goes into my mind.
Speaker A
And so now I can go through and be like, "Oh, this is I have a just a running set of my favorite pictures of my children." And I did I read a great article in the last 3 months. All of them are in my
Speaker A
mind. Like this is there's a very old idea of a commonplace book that people have been using for forever, which is essentially this thing. you write down little snippets of things that are important or relevant to you. Uh this is
Speaker A
that but in a way that is sort of searchable and remixable and you can find lots of stuff and it's also just beautiful and lovely and available on every platform. It's expensive. I think it's like $15 a month but it is maybe my
Speaker A
favorite piece of software that I use every day. So there's my recommendation. I love that. That's a wonderful recommendation. I've also tried it and can confirm it is very fun and cool app.
Speaker A
David, thank you for the recommendation and thank you for joining us today on the platform podcast.
Speaker A
It's been a blast. Platformer is produced by Lindsey Chu and edited by Fitz Harris at Story and Sound. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/casey newton. My email is [email protected] and we'll see you next week.
Speaker A
Jira by Atlassian is where your team and your agents work for the same context.
Speaker A
Try it free at jira.dev. That's jir.dev.
Topics:AI productivity toolsDavid PierceCasey NewtonPlatformer podcastAI in educationproductivity appsJira AtlassianAI adoptionnote-taking appsAI and jobs
