David Pierce
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I had not thought about this until you were just saying that. But given this sort of platform flattening that's happening, you can kind of make a podcast and then turn it into everything else. Like, so much of what I see on TikTok is clips of podcasts. And so much of what's now hitting on YouTube is long form podcasts. So I
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And it's becoming a strangely central part of business in more ways than you might think. It's a strange, complicated web that goes both ways. And it's not getting any less weird or any less complicated now that you can add stuff like crypto and politics to the mix. So I just needed somebody to help me talk through all of it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I have podcast in my head as like hour long interview that I'm listening to through headphones while I drive to work. But actually what you're saying is, is maybe we should be defining podcasts much bigger and broader across media than we have been.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
How do you define it for yourself now? You're a podcast critic. Do you have to have a clear sense of what is and is not a podcast?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Well, and I think if you take it that way and you kind of let podcasts... kind of be everything and nothing at the same time. Then just to keep going back to Elliot management for a second, right? Like the idea of doing that, all you're really talking about is like a new file format in a certain way, right? Like it's, it's a different structure for doing something.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
So I asked Nick Kwa to come on the show and help me untangle all of this stuff. These days, Nick is the podcast critic for Vulture, which is one of The Verge's corporate siblings here at Vox Media. He also originally started Hot Pod back in 2014. So he's been following this stuff for a long time and really knows what he's talking about.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
But it's not necessarily totally different. I'm not saying my goal for this content is to reach you while you're driving to work because that's what podcasts are for. It's just a different way of making the same kind of thing that they've been making forever, whether it's shareholder letters or angry tweets or whatever.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
This is just the next version of that because this is the media that people are consuming now. And they're consuming it not just in their headphones in Spotify, but everywhere. And so if you want to make something that lots of people see, actually making a podcast is about as quick and easy a way to get there as you can.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
We're going to take another short break. And when we get back, we're going to start tying all of this stuff back together. Back in a minute.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Welcome back. I'm still here, still talking with Nick Kwa, the podcast critic at Vulture. Right before the break, we were talking about what even is a podcast at this point? Is it audio? Is it video? No one knows. Do we even need the word podcast anymore? Who's to say? But what we do know is there's still a sense of novelty to it in the worlds of business and politics.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And the newness means something. Let's put that back together with this idea of we came out of the podcast election. And whether you're a business or a politician, where you go seems to be different now when you want to talk to, quote unquote, the people. With now a few weeks of distance from the election and the chaos surrounding it, what do you think we're going to take away from this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
what happened kind of in that last few weeks before the election and where the candidates in particular chose to go.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I really wanted to know what he's seeing in this space in general, but I also had lots of questions. Why would a major investment firm like Elliott Management make a podcast to make a point in a fight over the future of Southwest Airlines? What is the point of starting your own podcast in 2024 in general? Was this really the podcast election, as everybody has been saying for the last few weeks?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Do you think it's as simple in that case as just this is where the audience is now or is there still something about... the form of the podcast itself that feels different. Like, I'm still hung up on this idea that spending three hours with Joe Rogan is different in some meaningful way that I have trouble putting my finger on than even doing a, you know, six-minute TV hit on CNBC.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Even absent the audience stuff, there is something about... Particularly these like long Joe Rogan or Call Her Daddy, these like very personal podcasts that seems to do something that no other media does.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Are all podcasts just videos now? And if they're just videos, are they still podcasts? What is happening? And does Nick have any idea of what's coming next? For now, I think at least this thing we're doing right now still counts as a podcast. But we'll see what Nick thinks. Let's get into it. Nick Kwa, welcome to Decoder. My pleasure.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I think if you can do it, we're learning it's very powerful. And I think what we're seeing with a lot of these things, all the way up and down the line, from huge celebrities who are trying to have podcasts, all the way down to, again, these B2B folks, the upside is...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
To me, at least, you seem real and human and genuine if you can figure out how to hang in those spaces that is really hard to communicate otherwise.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
There's something really powerful about what you gain by being able to like be in those spaces in a way that feels real and human and authentic that I just don't think even your point, like the broadcast radio interview just doesn't seem to allow for quite that same thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
What's your sense of the next turn in all of this? We're in this moment where everything is a podcast and nothing is a podcast. Podcasts have all these new uses. The business is weirder than ever. Are we just headed toward more of this same kind of context collapse and YouTube is going to eat podcasts and that's just where we go from here?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
As all of this grows and changes, especially as it runs into this like big teaming content ecosystem that is YouTube, I find myself wondering if it feels like the thing that has made the podcast industry feel human and authentic and real in the way that we're talking about really risks going away. Like Tim Ferriss, just to name one, is a public speaker and podcast host and an investor and so on.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I'm sorry I'm not Nilay, but I'm very glad to get to do this with you. So I want to talk about a bunch of things because we're at a really interesting moment in the podcasting landscape where we're a few weeks away from what everyone has kind of agreed and then litigated was the podcast election.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And he wrote this blog post a couple of weeks ago about taking a sabbatical from podcasting. The part of it that I'm really thinking about right now are the new rules he set himself for doing it because basically he was getting bored. One of those rules was no book launch episodes because this is what everyone does, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
If you have something to promote, maybe you used to do the TV junket, but now you do the YouTube and podcast junket. Or there's this set of people whose entire job is now just kind of podcast speaker where they're like someone you've heard of mostly because you heard them on some podcast and they make the rounds and they show up everywhere.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And Tim basically said he's not sure he wants to do any of those things anymore because he feels like he used to be able to do interesting stuff because he wanted to. And now it all just feels like a big grind. And so I wonder, as you talk about with politicians and so on, if we're going to see them start to be really choosy and strategic about where they go and who they talk to.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
If podcasts are going to lose some of that magic thing that people like about them, which is just that sensation of two people sitting there chatting together, can we have both of those things at the same time?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
If you're running a company or running a campaign or something right now, you have a brand you need to make people like in some way, shape or form. Is the move to launch stuff or to go to this new place where the audience is, at least for right now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
We're also in a moment where podcasts are still growing really fast, but the business has been really messy for the last couple of years. We have a lot to talk about. But the thing I want to start with is... this new type of podcast that I have been noticing and has started to crop up, which is like the B2B podcast.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Thank you to Vulture podcast critic Nick Kwa for joining me in the show, and thank you for listening. Really hope you enjoyed it. Really glad I got to be here again. If you have thoughts about this episode or stuff you'd like to hear more of, or you just wanna finally explain to me what a podcast is, you can send a message to decoderattheverge.com. The team really does read every single email.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Nilay is also gonna be answering some reader questions for the last show of the year, so if there's anything you wanna ask in the whole world, make sure to send your question as soon as you can. Also, find us on TikTok. Check out our TikTok at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun. It's just a lot of Nilay yelling, which I very much enjoy.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And if you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe anywhere you get podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt, and our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I don't even know how else to describe it, but there was one particular example of Elliott Management, which was picking a fight with Southwest Airlines, and they launched a podcast to make their case. And there have been a bunch of stories recently about venture capitalists using podcasts, not just to sort of make content and get their companies out there, but for much more straightforward,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
business purposes. And I guess my first question for you as somebody who pays attention to this industry is how big a phenomenon is this really? Where are these new kind of like ultra business focused B2B, I almost want to call them nefariously businessy podcasts coming from?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
That makes sense to me, but I do think there's some really interesting shift that has happened there where a generation ago on the internet, all of these companies and analyst firms and whoever, they all would have started blogs, and that would have been the thing, right? Or they would have made Instagram accounts about this, and that would have been...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
the thing that they tried to make to reach people. Now, overwhelmingly, I think the trend that is true is that it's podcasts. I think there are more CEO vanity project podcasts than ever. There are more venture capitalists out here starting podcasts. In the same way that if you are a 22-year-old trying to break it in the music business, you start a TikTok channel.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
If you're 52 and looking to become a partner at your firm, you start a podcast. Uh, like that I find, I find so strange and interesting. And I'm, I'm curious why podcasts would be that thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm David Pierce, the editor-at-large at The Verge. As you may have noticed, we're dropping some extra episodes in the Decoder feed this week. You'll have Nilay back on Friday and for next week, I promise, as we run towards the end of the year. Lots of good stuff still coming.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
One of the things I've been trying to figure out as I piece through this is whether the appeal of a podcast... is that it's relatively straightforward to make in that you can just stick two people in front of a microphone and they have a meeting and it might not be interesting, but it is, it is a thing. You will have an object you have made at the end of it, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
In a way that even writing a very good blog post is kind of more abstract for folks who are not used to doing this kind of thing. The other side of me thinks that we're still trying to figure out what it is that is magical about a podcast that makes everything more interesting when it's a podcast. I say everything pretty loosely. There are a lot of really bad podcasts out there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
But there is something to the idea that if you want to reach people and seem human and serious and interesting over a long period of time, that actually a long-form podcast interview about activist investing is kind of the right way to do it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
But I'm really excited to be here with all of you today because I get to talk about one of my very favorite things, podcasts. There's something strange happening these days in the podcasting world. Actually, there are kind of a lot of strange things happening in the podcast world. It's been a wild year in general.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
The venture capital thing, I think, is the one that at least I am most sort of qualified to call a real trend. And I think it is a real trend. And you're seeing it kind of in both directions, right? Like in, in my world, we've seen a lot of VCs start podcasts and then a lot of podcasters turn into VCs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Yeah, totally. And, and these folks are like, they start making content and then they meet the people who are making the things and then they make the money and then they give the people. And then Harry Stebbings, the 20 minute VC guy is another good example. He built this huge thing, just interviewing venture capitalists and like along the way became a venture capitalists.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
there's something in that to me that feels both really interesting in terms of like what a podcast can accomplish for you, but also totally different from the way that we think about podcasts as a sort of fundamental entertainment product.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
It's like, actually what's happening is you're listening to someone interview someone to be a funder for them, but neither of them know that that's what's happening.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
One thing I've really noticed is the way that companies that deal in money have started using podcasts in kind of unusual ways. It's something we've seen actually for a few years now with venture capital firms, just to name one example.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Welcome back. I'm talking with Vultures podcast critic, Nick Kwa, about why so many capital firms and CEOs are spending their time and money making podcasts. Right before the break, we were talking about how making podcasts or YouTube videos for long enough can be kind of a job interview, a way to build your brand and ultimately break into the field that you talk about.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
But there's another way that podcasts work too. It's just good old-fashioned marketing. Do you think about those podcasters as fundamentally the same as like the people who are on Twitter hawking their book all the time, right? Like to some extent, it's the same energy, right? Like I have a thing that I care about that I'm going to probably financially gain if I can make you care about.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And now it's just that podcasts are the sort of deepest way to reach people on that front. But it's not that different from what I would get just by tweeting nonsensically about the crypto coin that I'm hoping will go up.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Not only do most of the top level VC companies have their own podcasts at this point, but also people who do podcasts about venture capital end up going into it after meeting and talking to all of these folks. Have you ever heard the joke that like anytime two dudes go into a room, they end up accidentally making a podcast? It's kind of true.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I think the other thing that we've spent a lot of time talking about the last couple of years is open questions about how big the podcasting business and audience is going to be. There are more podcasts than ever. It's still growing, but it is, I would say, increasingly hard to launch and grow a podcast.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
For a lot of the reasons you're describing, like the upside of if you're a 22-year-old musician starting on TikTok is that TikTok will show your stuff to people. Podcasts don't work quite that way. It's a... Big open space, but it's also kind of a harder nut to crack than it used to be, it seems to me.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Do you think these people are actually making a real effort to, you know, make a dent in this business right now?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And you're seeing the same from a company like Salesforce, which bought Slack so that you spend more time in the Salesforce universe. But these individual apps that exist around them, in many cases, are just so much better that no one else has been able to catch up to them yet. Meet is better. Teams is better. People still really like Zoom. And I don't think that's changing anytime soon.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Okay, I'm going to say this, and I should preface by saying I have very little quantitative evidence for it, but it is starting to be a thing I hear more and more in talking to folks who make this stuff. I think it's coming back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I really do. And I think, again, this goes back to these sort of divergent needs of two group of people, right? You have... The stuff in the cloud is easier to manage in so many ways, right? It's easier to understand who has it where. It's easier to provision on different people's computers. It's easier to manage. You know where your data is. Like from a corporate management standpoint,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's just better in so many ways to have stuff that is based in the cloud. Except, I don't know if you've noticed this, but everything seems to be down all the time now. Everybody is getting hacked all the time. And suddenly, the idea that the cloud is actually a safer, saner, simpler place for your data, I don't think feels true to people in the way that it once did.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And all of that, notwithstanding questions about, is my stuff being trained for AI purposes? Do I want the AI stuff that is coming to all of these things? I think... you're starting to see this shift towards what some people in this industry call local first software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And basically it's this huge sort of re-architecting of the way that we think about files really, away from the idea that like a file lives in the cloud and you and I both open an app and act on that file together. That file can live on my computer as an offline local file that is mine in like a real meaningful way. But still, you and I can act on it together in a collaborative way.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
That's possible to do. It's just much harder software, and we're only getting good at building that stuff now. But I think it's stuff that works offline, which, like, God help you if you're on a plane or in bad Wi-Fi or anything. Like, it's so hard to do anything online. without the internet now. And I think people notice that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And we're coming back to this idea of like, I want something that feels fast, which means it has to be local. I want something that is mine in a real way, like it's a file I can see on my computer. I think that stuff is coming back and it matters to people. We're going to see that best of both worlds where we get the collaborative thing, we get the cloud access, we get the cross-platform stuff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's manageable by your organization, but But it has the same feeling of like, I can just open a thing on my computer and it works.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You could sort of argue that we skipped the correct middle step there, right? We're like, okay, doing the thing where I email you a file that says David presentation one, and then you email it back and it says David presentation two, and then final, final, final dot PPT. Like that sucks. We can all agree that that is bad.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
But we skipped over how do we make it easy for people to share things with each other all the way to what if you didn't own any of your data? And that we sort of left a good middle ground out there. And I think I would not... bet everything that it's going to win.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
But I think there's going to be a push back towards the idea of like local on device, but still useful and in sync and collaborative stuff coming back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I'm back with Verge Editor-at-Large, David Pierce, talking about the evolution of workplace software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I was hoping nobody would notice.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Ironically, I hosted the show before I was a guest on the show. I did a thing with Sean Hollister a while ago when you were off, you know, gallivanting somewhere. But now I get to be here talking to you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Yeah, I think one of my great theories about Slack is that everybody uses Slack wrong. Like everybody uses Slack wrong. And I think if you rewind all the way back to that initial launch of Slack, Stuart Butterfield wrote this really great blog post. It's called something like we don't sell saddles here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And he basically outlines like the whole vision for what Slack is going for and makes the argument that the biggest problem is that most people don't understand what they need Slack for. And so Slack's job is not only to convince you that you need this, but that you need something like this in the first place. And their whole idea was basically to be a search engine for all your stuff at work.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
If you really want to boil it down, the idea behind Slack was not to be a chat app. It was to just be a place to put all your stuff. And all your stuff is communication, it's files, it's all these things that sort of you accumulate during the course of a workday. And by having that all in one place that's accessible, you could build something really powerful.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Super cool idea has nothing to do with what Slack is and how it's used, right? We use Slack as an email replacement, right? I think Stuart was serious when he said they weren't trying to kill email. They were trying to like subsume it inside of a different system, but they were always going to be like, look, if you want to send email to talk to each other, that's fine.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
But like when you need to share files, do it in Slack. I think that is much closer to what Slack wanted to be than what it has become. And what it became is this awful system engagement bait app that we all spend way too much time in and never actually get any work done inside of.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's millennials and it's text boxes. There's this long sort of mythological story about Kinja, which was the old CMS that they used to run at Gawker.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And I have no idea if this is true, but it is a story I heard that I spiritually completely believe, which is that they ran an experiment at Gawker where if they changed the size of the default text box in Kinja, it would change how long people wrote. If you give people a lot of space, make the text box big, They're gonna write a lot in it. You fill the thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
If you make it one line, people are gonna write one line and hit enter, right? Slack made it one line. It looks like a thing where you would send text messages. It doesn't look like an email inbox. You don't have subjects. You don't have two lines. You don't have a thing for a signature. Like, can you imagine if you had a signature at the bottom of every Slack message? You'd look like a lunatic.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And so all of these like product incentives taught you to do it really fast. The main thing there was a single line of text and everybody else uses a single line of text in messaging apps. And so we all just treated this thing like messaging apps.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And it was a bunch of millennials who came into the workforce and are used to the type of thought, press enter, type another thought, press enter, type another thought, press enter. If you get the text that is two paragraphs from somebody, either somebody died or you're being broken up with.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And instead, we just trained everyone to talk in work like they talk to their friends in text. And culturally, I think that is really interesting and complicated, but it immediately broke that paradigm that you're talking about, which is Slack even has always said that Slack uses Slack in a much more considered way. People write much longer things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's designed less for like minute to minute updates of what you're doing all day and more for like a, here's what I accomplished during the day. Again, so that someone can go find it later. You're not expected at Slack to be in lots of rooms. There is a norm that if you need somebody, you mention them. And Slack set up all these rules, but didn't bake any of it into the product.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
They built a product that looks like text messaging. And so people used it like text messaging. And Slack has now spent the last decade being like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's all about rules. You have to set up norms. You have to teach each other how to use the app. And it's like, no, stop building me a text messaging app.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Maybe. I mean, I think to be clear, the idea that you should spend a lot of time training people how to use your most important products when they join your company is really good and no one does it. Like you should have to spend a day learning how your company communicates when you join a company. That stuff matters. And we just like hand people Slack and they're like, we use Slack.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And that's as much as you get. Like, do you know how to use Slack? It's like, sure. But I don't know how to use Slack the way that you use Slack, right? And that stuff matters a lot. I talked to this woman, Laura Martin, who is like Google's productivity guru. And one of the things she recommends to everybody is like, just muck around in the settings.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Just go spend 10 minutes clicking all the buttons in the settings just to see how the thing works. And like even one extra tick of understanding of the software goes an incredibly long way. But if you're Slack and you both use this product and run your company on it, the one does not absolve the other, right? You can and should train people on your company's best practices for Slack.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
That doesn't mean that everyone else should figure out your best practices just kind of by osmosis. That's not how it works. overwhelmingly the question is, are we ever going to go too far and swing the pendulum back? Because so far there's really no evidence that we're going to, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
There are a lot of people who complain that everything is moving too fast and we're all too attached to these messaging systems and we can't keep up with everything and it's making us crazy and we all spend time in Slack instead of actually doing our jobs. And there's just no indication that that's going back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You could actually make the case that email represents a much saner, more functional way to run a business than inside of Slack. But like, do you want to go back to email? I don't really want to go back to email. And so far, all we do is faster and bigger and more full of stuff. And we just kind of rely on people to solve it for themselves.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And either we're going to get a set of really clever products that does that for us without killing the idea that people are being productive because... You have to make it look like everyone is productive. And one thing Slack is very good at is making itself look really engaged.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And when it looks lively all the time, which makes managers and bosses feel like things are happening and that feels good. Whereas if you don't hear from anybody for eight hours, you're like, is everybody working? What's everybody doing?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And so squaring those two things is really hard, but I think the only way we get off of this road to insanity that we're on with a lot of these communication tools is to find a way to do both of those things. And I'm honestly not sure what that looks like.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I have, I think I've come to see this as less of a procrastination technique of taking all of the tasks that I have in one place and putting them in another place rather than completing any of them because it still feels productive, even though I don't have to do anything as constantly rethinking the way that I do everything, which again, you could argue that's not productive at all.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's one really good reason to keep building your bundle, right? If I have an expense product that you hate and someone else has an expense product that you hate that you actually already pay for, I can't win that fight, right? That is the great challenge. And so if you're trying to get into that world, you either need to be cheaper to make the people who actually pay for this stuff happy
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You either need to be like vastly better. Like I think even being slightly better doesn't get you there. You have to be like orders of magnitude better. Or you have to do something else that the existing apps don't do. Like I think one really good example is in the expenses world.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I wouldn't swear to this, but I think it's true that Expensify was the first company to really do a good job of letting you take a picture of a receipt and turn it into an expense and upload it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
unbelievable like the greatest thing that ever happened to the product of tracking expenses was being able to take a picture of a receipt and have it like OCR out all the relevant stuff and turn it into expense I think it was Expensify who did it I don't know who it was for sure whoever it was congratulations you you win and they did and that like Expensify became hugely successful based on having like a good mobile app right that's a thing when you can add something meaningful to that that goes a really long way for those kind of
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
middle tier products you encounter but don't really care about all that much. There's just not that much surface area to do that. But then the stuff that people use every day, the switching cost is so much higher because it's so much more entrenched. Trying to get someone to stop using an app that they hate but have used for 10 years is so, so hard.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
even if they hate it, they will tell you every single day that they hate it. And you'll say, here's another one. It's better. And they'll say, Oh God, because people don't care. Most people have jobs to do, right? Like most people do not use software for a living. They, they use software as little as possible so that they can go do the thing that they do for a living.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And I feel like that is the exact right balance for those people. And software gets that wrong where instead they're like, here's more stuff for you to do. Come switch to our software. And people are like,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I mean, to some extent, they have run away with this, right? I'm convinced that Excel is the single sickiest piece of software on earth. You see it and hear it all the time that... Like the companies I was mentioning that pay for Microsoft Office, but also pay for Zoom or Workspace or whatever. That's all Excel, man. That is all Excel. Like you can build good presentation software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You can build good document editing. No one can beat Excel. It is just not possible. And who pays for this stuff is the people who use Excel all day. Yeah. Excel is so sticky. And the problem is, yes, it's very hard to do all of these things really well. It's also just a matter of focus and resources.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
For Microsoft, I don't know that adding one more tiny piece of software makes your company more likely to sign up for it. Microsoft is going to keep doing that stuff. But at some point, Office is pretty sticky already. And I think for Microsoft to spend the resources and time and energy to add more stuff is actually a pretty... big bet for that company to make.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's probably not, but I, I have spent probably more time thinking about how I do stuff than than almost anyone I know. I don't know if it's useful. I don't know if it helps. I end up just back in the same apps 400 different times a year, but it is a thing I have spent way too much time and energy on over the years.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's why teams was such a big deal, right? That Microsoft saw all of a sudden pandemic starts. The idea of, I think video chat in particular was like an existential shift in how we communicate at work. It had the potential to just like destroy outlook and become the center of everything. And zoom immediately sets out to build a whole office suite, right? That was the thing zoom was going to do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
They were like, we're going to make video into everything. We're going to start doing yoga classes over zoom, but we're also going to build like Zoom mail and Zoom docs. And that became the center of how people worked. And Microsoft goes, oh God, maybe that is going to be the center of how people work and built teams and crushed it because ultimately the free thing usually wins.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Uh, no, I think it's, it is plausible in a way that I find a lot of AI stuff really implausible. Because in a real way, most of the data that you need exists, right? Like companies have that data somewhere. It is written. Company handbooks get written down. These things are placed somewhere. The problem is that they are in thousands of places, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Again, I was just rereading this Okta thing ahead of our recording here. And the average company in the United States pays for, I think it was 110 different pieces of enterprise software. That's too many. And what it means is if you want to find a thing, God help you. Like, where do you even start?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And so what you've seen, I think, is the beginning of what's about to be another big rebundling as a result of that. Because that thing you just described is super enticing. There are studies everywhere that say we spend a huge amount of our time at work just looking for stuff. And that actually easy access to information would be like the greatest productivity enabler in modern history. And
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
The idea that I could just say, what is our sales history with them? Or like, who's the contact over there and get that stuff quickly. Incredible. And so every company is after this, right? Like Dropbox built this thing dash that searches across all your stuff and all your different apps. You see companies like notion, which are trying to do more and more stuff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
They're building out new features just in service of getting all that information inside of the app. so that you can query it with AI. Microsoft is doing it with Copilot. Google is doing it with Gemini.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
For the first time in a while, being the bundle is more valuable than the sum of its parts in a way that isn't just sort of purely about contract values and it's easier to have one relationship instead of several. Now, your products can all be better because you control more of them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And I think what we're going to see as a result is this rush back to, I don't want to have 50 best in class apps that don't talk to each other. I want to have six things that do all 50 of those things, even if they're not as good, but because stitching them all together makes them more valuable to me. one of the things that AI is actually good at is summarization, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
So you can say things like, not just summarize this email for me, but like in Slack's AI, the thing they're trying to build is you should just be able to be like, what happened today? And it'll be able to tell you like, here are the things people were talking about. Here's the file everybody was sharing around.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Like that stuff is meaningful and goes a long way towards making Slack not like a hell hole of one line communication. So this stuff is coming and I think it's gonna be really powerful. But it only works if it's all everywhere, because this is one of those things that if you solve 70% of my problem, you've solved none of my problem. And getting there is going to take a minute.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
But I think the push towards that has already started in a pretty big way.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I'm hearing a lot of excitement from companies about open source models. I think right now you look at the open AIs and the anthropics of the world, and even like what Google is doing with Gemini. And again, we're in this phase of everything is humongous and in the cloud, but eventually like. these models will run on your device. They'll be able to run locally on your own instance.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Like what I don't think is going back is I think AWS and Azure and Google Cloud are gonna be fine. I think like on-prem servers are not coming back, but at least you're gonna be able to exert some control inside of that, right? So like the AI systems will be something run by your company inside of your company, more over time than they currently are.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And I think it sort of jives with that whole idea of like, I want to have all the conveniences of all of my stuff being online and accessible everywhere and sort of functionally managed by somebody else. But I also want that control that this data is mine. I know where it's going. I know how it's being used and I know where to find it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And that balance has been really hard to strike over the years. But I think especially as these AI models from Meta with Lama and others get better and faster and especially like cheaper and simpler and more local, like my company approved laptop is going to be more important than ever.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Yeah. And not only are the AI companies betting on it, like how many CEOs do you think you've had on this show this year who have not mentioned AI once? I honestly, I would be shocked if it's more than one who isn't out here talking about AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Because again, A, you like have to have a strategy or everybody thinks you're an old fusty company that nobody cares about anymore and your board fires you and that's a whole thing. Yeah. But also, again, the promise is so huge, right? The idea that AI can remove a lot of the busy work that we have to do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
If you turn making a deck out of an Excel spreadsheet into just a command to an AI, like, that's a measurable productivity increase in the world. And the same thing with the finding of the information and even some of the generative stuff that's starting to happen, like... If that stuff works, and that is a bit, like I cannot emphasize the if enough there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's not when, it's if in a very real way. But if that stuff all works, it sincerely changes the way we do just about everything. And it means you and I, we probably won't go to the beach more often, but we get to spend more of our time doing things that are like interesting and rewarding and valuable rather than busy work. Like I spend a lot of my time doing busy work.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You don't because you just have people put printouts on your desk for you to circle things on. But like life is busy work. And if we can get rid of that, there are all kinds of really complicated societal implications to that because frankly, a lot of people's job is busy work and a lot of people do busy work for a living.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
But the question of what could this mean if it hits, if it works, it's just too big for anybody to not try.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Yeah. The alternative is this is going to make you more productive so you can fire half your staff. And like a lot of these companies don't want to say that even though that is both what they're buying and what they're selling is I can fire a bunch of people and replace them with this software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I think in the near term, the actual real thing that's going to happen is it's just going to automate away a bunch of work, right? Like, I think what we're looking at is something much closer to the advent of computers when all of a sudden, instead of sitting at my desk writing out spreadsheets by hand, I could just sit there and
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
type one, and when I changed the number, the other numbers would change. Huge societal revolution probably cost a lot of jobs, but was not the like be all and end all of society forever, right? I think we're much more at that era now, where all of a sudden we are about to have this real sort of step change in what technology lets us do very quickly.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And then the question is, what are we going to do with the time that suddenly appears as a result? And with computers, it was we're going to make ourselves busier talking to each other and looking at TikTok. What it will be with AI, I think, remains to be seen.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Support for this episode comes from AWS. With the power of AWS Generative AI, teams can get relevant, fast answers to pressing questions and use data to drive real results. Power your business and generate real impact with the most experienced cloud.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Yeah, and I actually think that is the right way to think about it, right? That it's not that we replaced floors of accountants with nothing or with one magical computer that does all of our accounting for us. We just changed the tools that we use. And in so many ways, the idea of our...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
productivity being replaced by machines turns out to not be true nearly as much as it is the tools of our productivity are replaced by machines. And I think that's what we've seen with software, where we all went from adding machines and paper to doing the same, arguably more work with computers. And the same thing is going to happen with AI, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Like it wasn't that long ago that everybody was like, oh, because of the industrial revolution and then computers, we won't have to work 40 hours a week anymore. We're all gonna be so efficient with this new technology that we're just gonna work eight hours a week and get the same amount done. Whoops, that didn't happen. But I think that transition is exactly right.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And I think the thing that comes after accountants using Excel is the question.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
I think your categorization is almost right. I think I would shift the Microsoft office and Google workspace more into the productivity tool thing. I think the way I've come to see it basically is like there's software you use every day. There's the software you hope you never have to use. And then there's the software you definitely never have to use.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And the software you definitely never have to use is like the stuff that runs the robots, right? There's like a person at your company whose job it is to use that software and no one else will ever touch it. And there's a ton of that software out there. That's everything from like compliance software, which is like vastly big and powerful and important.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And most people should never once in their lives have to encounter compliance software. So that's one side of it. All the way at the other side, you have the productivity tools, right? So that's like the Google docs and Gmail, Microsoft word and Excel and the stuff that people do their jobs inside of.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And then in the middle, there's all the sort of messy stuff that everybody hates the most, like the HR software and the travel booking software and the way to set up IT tickets and all of the things that make a company work, but aren't technically how you do your job in most cases. is that kind of messy middle.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And people hate the software the most, I think in the middle, because it's not the stuff you use every day. So you don't build systems around it. You don't learn the ins and outs of it. You just encounter performance management software four times a year, and you are required to do it, but you don't have to do it long enough to actually care about it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And so I think those are the three different buckets of it that I've come to see over time. And obviously all of them are gigantic businesses. All of them cater to completely different people. And all of them are at varying levels of invisible to how most people actually want to do their jobs all the time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Yeah. It feels like. Every day we get further from the light of printed things on paper.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Well, and I think if everybody worked this way, it would be great, is the great truism and mistake of the software industry, because it's just impossible. The idea that you're going to get an entire large group of people to all understand a single system and process and tool for getting things done is borderline impossible.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And so if you're a software company, you basically have one of two options. You can either build a piece of software that is so unbelievably specific and opinionated that you literally can't use it any other way than that. Seriously. And this is like a non-crazy way to build software that there is literally only one way to use it. It's not that there's even right or wrong ways.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
There's literally only one way to use it. And you can actually get a pretty long way doing that because people will hate it, but they will use it correctly because it's the only way to use it. or what you end up trying to do, and this is, over time, the much more enticing and popular path, but also the path to ruin, is you try to be everything to everyone all the time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And you say, okay, your boss wants to use this piece of software and they wanna use it this way. That's insane, but your boss is the one who pays for this. And so you have to do it because your boss said so. But what we're gonna give you is a million other buttons and knobs to press and twist so that maybe you'll find the thing that you like.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And the hope is you can build this sort of great denominator software across everything. And that's how you build Microsoft Word. And eventually it gets away from you, right? You build the thing that does everything to everybody. And then all of a sudden it becomes this like overwhelming mess of a piece of software and it all falls apart. but those are your only two moves.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And so like, I've really, I've come to feel for these companies over time because you have IT managers who buy a lot of the software, who want one thing. You have bosses who demand a lot of the software, who want something completely different.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And then you have the people who actually have to use this software all day, every day, who are having this, A, foisted upon them and B, dictated to them how they have to use it. I don't know that it's even possible to build something that makes all three of those groups happy. I certainly have not seen one that seems like it works for everybody.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's a strange overlap right now. Actually, there was a long period of time where the bundlers were winning. And you would start, like you said, with one need. And you would say, okay, if you're MailChimp, we're going to make it really easy for you to email a lot of people. And then...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
You see the thing that people leave MailChimp for during their day and you're like, well, we could just build that thing. We can build better CRM software so that you don't have to go elsewhere to make the stuff in order to send it to your emails. And then you just sort of slowly build out from there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And that stuff is starting to win because fundamentally all these companies would like to pay less money for their software and manage fewer things and have fewer contracts to deal with. And the bundling becomes very useful. What is also generally true is that it's very hard to do a lot of things really well simultaneously. Uh, and so, I mean, it's the, the truism of technology is right.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It's bundling and unbundling. And I think we, we were in a really intense bundling phase for a really long time. And then the pandemic happened and we unbundled so fast because all of a sudden everybody was at home. Everybody had new software needs and everybody needed them like tomorrow. And so everybody went like literally tomorrow.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
It was like, oh, I'm not going to the office again for four years. I need new kinds of software. And so everybody just went out and looked for, okay, we need a new way to do collaborative design. We need a new way to do video calls. And we can't wait for someone else to attach it to the contract that we have. We're just going to go sign up for the thing that everybody likes that's the best.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
That's why Zoom got huge, even though other video tools existed, right? That's why things like Figma started to take off, because people just needed these new workflows. And so there was this massive rush towards these so-called best-of-breed things, and Then what obviously started to happen is the big companies started to tack that stuff on Microsoft builds teams, Google invests in meat.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
And so zoom becomes less competitive in its own way. But what's wild to me is the, this company Okta, which does basically like log in and a bunch of other stuff, like you're talking about, they started as a way to log into services. And now there's like a whole giant backend authentication stuff that they do. Uh, they do this really good serve way called businesses at work every year. And.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
The wildest thing in, I believe it was the 2023 one, was that half the people who pay for Microsoft Office also pay for Google Workspace. And half the people who pay for Microsoft Office also pay for Zoom. And so we're in this place where...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
The impossible dream of good workplace software
We are very much in the sense of like, you sort of need the basic bundle, but then everybody is still in this moment, willing to spend the money on at least like a handful of the tools that work around it. So right now, Microsoft is trying to keep building the walls around its bundle.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
The problem with that is people don't like paying a lot of money for crappy things. When you boil it all the way down, it's like, do you want your phone to be good or do you want it to be shitty? Most people are going to say good. Right? And it's like, TVs keep getting bigger for the same reason because it's like, well, would you like your TV to be bigger? Would you like it to be smaller?
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And people are like, well, I want the bigger one, sure. And then especially this stuff is more expensive because they don't make it in such large quantities. It's just, it's a really, really, really hard sales pitch to make to somebody to say, I'm going to make gadgets worse because they're better for you. My suspicion is that these are bought more than they're used. I think that's probably right.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I think they're such good aspirational purchases. They make you feel so good about yourself to set up and work with, but then you just run into problems everywhere.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I think Apple was serious that this was a real solution to a real problem. I think Apple is a company that is famous for cannibalizing itself. It built the iPhone and totally destroyed a really great iPod business. It has done that with computers in the past. It has done that with all kinds of devices.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
It was a belief inside of that company that if you're not destroying your own products, somebody else will. And I think there was a real sense inside of Apple Maybe not among everybody, but among some people and some important people that the watch could do that to the phone. And if not do it permanently, then at least do it in spots, right?
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And so the theory is like, okay, well, how do we give you some of that stuff that you crave and are used to and will not go away from permanently? but do it in a way that is quicker and saner and more understandable. Like the team at Apple spent all this time on haptics, which is just basically what it feels like on your wrist when you get a notification.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
There's like that little buzz that's all from this engine inside of the watch. And they spent all this time thinking about, okay, what should it feel like when someone you love sends you a text message versus what does a news alert feel like? And this stuff is like insane, right? Like these are, These are objectively ridiculous conversations to be having, but I think they meant it.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I think that is the idea that they were like, we understand that people are disconnected and want to be disconnected. The question is, how do we insert something that intermediates it a little bit in a way that is healthier? I think knowing what we know now about the Apple Watch, it never really had a chance to do that, but I think the desire was real.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
The short version of the story is that Apple, in addition to making a lot of money every time you buy an iPhone, increasingly makes money every time you use an iPhone. And when you do something like make an in-app purchase on your phone, Apple gets 30% of that. When you use Apple Pay on your phone, Apple gets a cut.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And it has gone from being almost entirely a hardware company to being very much a services company. And so for Apple, this is where all of the incentives get screwed up. And it's especially true with the in-app purchases, right? Because Candy Crush... would like to make me spend as much money in Candy Crush as possible, right? In theory, Apple has no skin in that game at all.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
So my fight now is with Candy Crush and only Candy Crush. But if Apple gets 30% of every single dollar I send to Candy Crush, now Apple has skin in the game. So it's actually now in Apple's best interest for me to spend as much time playing Candy Crush as possible. And once you do that, it's all broken and there's no going back.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And this is the subject of vast quantities of regulatory fights and there's a world in which it gets pulled back and all that stuff, but whatever. But we have gotten to the point where it is now like a meaningfully large piece of Apple's business for me to be playing Candy Crush.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And that's the root of all evil in this kind of stuff, as far as I'm concerned.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Like, what do you think? I've thought so much about this. And I think the reason it's impossible to know is that Steve Jobs never got to say no to this stuff, right? Like, this whole world of software as a service and everything being so important just— really came after he died.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And so I think the counter future of Steve Jobs reckoning with monthly subscriptions to everything I think is so fascinating. But I think everything we know about Steve Jobs suggests that he really wanted to make a lot of money and was maybe not nice to a lot of the people in his life, but cared about really, really, really, really deeply about the experience of people using his products.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And I think it is just unassailably true that being a user of tech products is worse now than it used to be. And there is this constant feeling like I am being milked for every second of my time and dollar that I have. And like, I can absolutely imagine a world in which Steve Jobs just rolled up one day and was like, push notifications are bad for the world. Turn them all off.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Like, do I think he would have done that? Probably not. Money is really fun, and when you have a lot of money, it's really hard to have less money. But I do think there was a sense with Steve Jobs, at least, that there was, like, one person whose taste was the only thing that ultimately mattered, right? Like, all you had to do at Apple was make the thing that Steve Jobs wanted, and...
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Sure. My name is David Pierce. I'm the editor-at-large at The Verge, which is a meaningless title that means I report and write about technology all the time.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
By and large, those were good things. The world has changed a lot since the last thing Steve Jobs made, but like he was right more than just about anybody. And so part of me is like I also hold on to this hope that like if Steve were still here, this would all be better. But I wonder that too.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I think it's 15 years on the dot now. The answer is technically a little longer because I had a tech blog in college that no one ever read. But people have been giving me money to write about technology for almost exactly 15 years.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
So Brick was created by these two friends who were college friends at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Their names are TJ and Zach. They have... grown up in the iPhone world in a way that, like, I'm 36, and I think I'm about the last person who remembers the world before smartphones. For them, like, if you're in your 20s now, everyone has had it the whole time. And
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
They had essentially the same problem that I did with the screen time limits, which is that they're too easy to get past and you can just ignore them. So they pretty quickly came to this idea that what they needed was some kind of separate physical blocker. And there are things out there. Have you ever seen the Yonder case? This is the thing you get at like concerts.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Yeah, that's right. So the Yonder case is one of the things out there, but that's mostly, like you said, used at events and stuff. They wanted something that you can just have in your house. The brick is not some hugely complicated piece of technology. It's this two-inch by two-inch cube. It's gray, it's super boring, and then it's a magnet underneath. And it is...
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
basically designed to be stuck somewhere, like on the side of your fridge or, you know, on your desk or something like that. And you tap it and it quote unquote bricks your phone.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
There's just enough friction there. And it also makes it a thing I have to stand up and go do. Like now, if I'm sitting here and looking at my phone and I want to use Instagram, I have to go upstairs, tap my phone on the thing, and then come back downstairs and look at Instagram. And there's something really powerful in just that moment of, I have to have said out loud that I want to do this.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
that really works.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
So one is it's very expensive. Each of those little tiny readers that don't really do anything is $59. Oh, wow. And so the idea of having a few of these adds up fast. The other thing is it's really, sort of a blunt instrument, right?
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
It doesn't have sort of a schedule that understands like what you're doing and the idea that like, oh, I actually need to check this one thing, but only for two minutes, and then I don't want to be able to look at it again. It's also, I should say, a really... easy habit to break. The reason that it works is that it is really straightforward to do.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Their idea is that you'll like put one brick, I don't know, on your desk at work and another one by your front door at home where you leave your keys, right? And so you like break it when you get home, unbreak it when you get to work, like whatever. You sort of build that into kind of the routine of your life.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I forgot to do it once and completely fell out of the habit of doing it for like two weeks.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
The way I have come to think about it is that our responsibility is definitely to remember what was good about not being on our phones all the time. But the problem that we have, is we think phones are awesome. Like, we also grew up in the time when all of this stuff was just cool. It was just exciting and didn't feel problematic.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And taking 100 pictures of my drunk college friends and posting all of them on Facebook felt exciting and not horrifying. And I think we have... the full spectrum of that experience in a way that almost no one else does. And I think our responsibility is to sort of hold all of that in our head at the same time, which is really challenging. That, to me, feels like the job.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And that's a really hard job.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Oh, yeah. David, there's a new gadget. It's not an unreasonable explanation of my job. So that's fine. I'm not mad about that at all. Yeah, I think it's definitely shifted a little bit. We talk about gadgets as gadgets so much less than we used to. They're like cultural objects in a much more real way. And I think that's been a sort of natural shift of my career. But like...
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Do I look back on, like, my great enthusiasm for the first iPad and wonder if maybe I should have thought more about what it means that I'm just going to spend way more time sitting on my couch looking at this thing? Probably, yeah. I think we should have asked the, like, what if this takes over the world question a lot more often about technology over the years. But that said—
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Like, new gadgets are awesome. Especially if we're going to get into this phase of how do we make these things not just attention sucks, but actually start to do useful things for us again. I think that's cool. Like, I think we might be at the end of a particular phase of the internet where... the whole idea of a social network is just dying.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, they're just streaming services now. We should talk about them more like Netflix and less like text messaging. And I think we're coming to that. And so the next question is gonna be, okay, It turns out people just want to hang out with each other in group chats all the time.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I don't know that I had a individual specific moment so much as kind of a collection of things over time, right? I think the story you hear from people a lot is like my five-year-old kid came up to me and said, dad, why do you love your phone more than me? And that was the moment I decided. And my kid is two, so he's like not aware enough to know to say that to me yet.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
So how do we make that stuff more useful instead of trying to disrupt that and put ads next to it? Maybe there is a next turn that is like, okay, we spent 20 years pushing everything into our phones. Can I build better stuff if I build outside of it again?
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And if all that starts to happen, we're going to get this really weird boom in weird gadgets, and we're going to figure out how to make things work again instead of just shoving everything into my pocket so that it can notify me 100 times a day. And that I'm very excited about.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I'm sure that's coming, but I haven't really had moments like that. But I think one moment I think back to a lot was several years ago, my wife and I got, asked on this very last minute vacation. My friend Jason was like, I'm going to the Sequoia National Forest for the weekend, do you want to come? We were just like, cool, big house in the Sequoia National Forest, sounds awesome, let's go.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
We had no idea what we were getting into, we just showed up. It turned out we got to this place and it had no connectivity of any kind. They had a backup satellite Internet thing, basically in case of horrific emergency. But there was a Post-it note on the router that was like, if you use this, we'll charge you $50. Oh, wow. So we just all decided, like, we're not going to be online at all.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And the three days I spent not looking at my phone, not looking at screens, just like... sitting around a fire with my friends was the single most rejuvenating vacation I have ever had in my life. That's not hyperbole. I felt like a different person at the end of that weekend, which doesn't normally happen at the end of a weekend. So I'm like, okay, maybe there's something to...
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
screen-free stuff.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I think your point about the internet being a place, I think is exactly the right one. Like, I think you and I are about the same age. Do you remember having like a computer room growing up? Like, was there a place in your house where the computer was? I think about the computer room
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I'm assuming you had a computer room. Oh, we definitely had a computer room. It was also, it was the den where the couch and the TV were because my parents were very deliberate about that. basically making sure that you couldn't use the computer in private. Which, you know, fair. I was a 12-year-old boy who had just discovered how the internet worked.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Like, I wouldn't trust me on the internet either. And it was like, it was the family computer, right? And everybody had the stuff that they did. We all had to sort of fight for time. And there was like a schedule of who could use the computer and when. And it was a place. And I think people of a certain age have a real... fondness for that thing because it became a thing you did on purpose, right?
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And that to me is the thing that has changed and the thing that I have spent a lot of time trying to get back. It's like, how do I make my phone, social media, Reddit, like whatever, how do I make technology a thing that I do on purpose and not just a thing that is kind of happening to me all the time.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Like one of the things that really bums me out about my own technology use is I work in my basement. I just sit here all day and there's a bathroom in my basement. It's eight feet down the hall. When I get up to go to the bathroom, I pick up my phone and I open TikTok just instinctively every single time. That's awful. Like it's insane.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I can't spend the 12 seconds that it takes me to walk to my bathroom without looking at TikTok. And I don't notice that I'm doing it, and that feels bad.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
One thing I did a long time ago is I bought a really long USB cable, like a 10-foot long USB cable. And I said to myself, when I am home, my phone is going to be plugged into this USB cable no matter what. And it's going to sit next to a comfy chair. And if I want to use my phone, I have to go sit in the phone chair and use my phone.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I made my phone a landline. Yeah, literally. And it feels stupid. And there's a certain amount of discipline in it that is just like, I know I could unplug it if I want to. And I have many times. But there is something to just the fact that if I'm sitting here and my phone is over there, That little bit of change helps.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Like there was this study a bunch of years ago that found basically that proximity to your phone gives you a relationship to your phone. They did a test where basically it turned out that if you were in a room taking a test and your phone was really far away, you did better than if you were sitting in the same room taking the same test and your phone was in a bag on the other side of the room.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And you did even better still than if your phone was right next to you. Not even looking at your phone, just if it's nearby, there is this like latent awareness that we have of these devices and this pull that they have on us that is like physical. No, totally.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Charge your phone somewhere other than your bedroom, right? Like just make it so that it's not the last thing you see at night and the first thing you see in the morning. And... I found that actually mostly pretty easy to pull off. I am upstairs and my phone charges downstairs. And do I instinctively reach for it every single morning when I wake up? Yeah.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And is it slightly disappointing that it's not there? Yeah, it is. But it's also nice. And instead, if I have a few minutes to lie in bed, I read a book. And I think that's better.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I am a slightly unusual case in that I have a two-year-old who... That is your alarm clock? He is my alarm clock. He is not interested in allowing me to sleep past, like, 6.30 in the morning. So, that solves that problem for me. But there is a certain amount of, like, I had to dig out a Kindle and put it next to my bed so that I have something to read. And... You can buy alarm clocks.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
There are a lot of actually like really interesting alarm clocks that will do things like stream music. Like I know a lot of folks who use the sort of smart speakers, like the echo speakers and stuff like that next to their bed. I don't love that because the microphone of it all kind of freaks me out.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Yeah. And I've heard enough stories of the things like waking up in the middle of the night and Alexa all of a sudden is like, I didn't hear that. And I just, I don't need that.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I don't need that in the middle of the night.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
There are basically two approaches to the dumb phone. One is... to give you a phone that does less stuff. So this question of how do I take all the things about my phone that are clearly problematic in my relationship with my phone? And that's social media, that's endless doom scrolling of news. It's all the kind of stuff that you spend a lot of time doing that feels bad.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
And there's a lot of that on smartphones. How do I get rid of that? And that's where you get to things like the Light Phone. And the Light Phone will, it'll let you send text messages. It'll let you make phone calls. The new one has like a very basic mapping tool so you can even kind of use it to get around. You can upload music to it iPod style and listen to music.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
So it's trying to find this perfect middle ground of like, okay, what are the things you require on a phone and how do we get rid of the rest? And how do we not even give you an option to do the rest? And That's an interesting strategy, but getting that line right of what are all the things that I need and none of the things that I don't, I have come to believe is essentially impossible, right?
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Because you go from phone calls and text messages and you're like, okay, I need navigation for sure. That's obvious, right? Like that is a core part of being alive. And then you're like, well, maybe I need Uber. I don't need it all the time, but it's nice to have when I need it. So like, okay, now I'm going to put an Uber app on. And it's like, well-
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
I talk to a lot of people over text, but I also use WhatsApp for a lot of things and I use Signal for a lot of things. And I kind of want my Instagram DMs because that's actually where a couple of my group chats are. So now I've put a bunch of messaging apps on and you just go through piece by piece and all of a sudden you've just made a smartphone that doesn't let you download TikTok.
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Like you get there so quickly. And at that point, I'm not actually sure what problem we've solved. But that's one direction. The other direction is what if smartphone but bad? And I find this so fun. It's just imagine if your smartphone could do all the things it can still do. It just sucked at it. Wait, so what does it mean? Like it just like operates very slowly?
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Yeah, so let me, I can give you some examples. So there's this company called Books, B-O-O-X, that makes a bunch of e-readers and tablets and stuff. And it runs full Androids. You can download every Android app, but it's an e-ink screen. So it refreshes really slowly. The processor really sucks. It doesn't have a lot of memory. And so it's like, can you run TikTok on this thing?
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How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)
Yes, technically you can run TikTok, but it is so unpleasant and bad that you won't.
Today, Explained
From TikTok to 小红书
It is federated and universe and it's a problem because nerds are bad at naming things. But the idea of it is very exciting. And the idea of it is to take social networks out of being these individual platforms where Instagram is its own thing and Facebook is its own thing and Twitter is its own thing and TikTok is its own thing.
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and just smash all of those things together into something the size of the internet and make it work. Something very big. It would be huge. And that's the thing that's so exciting is that instead of having a bunch of followers and posts and content that lives inside of a little box that some nefarious billionaire controls,
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you have something that is so much bigger than that, that is open and chaotic and that anyone can build tools for and anyone can participate in and anyone can decide how they want to participate in it. It changes the whole dynamic and it's a complete shift in how we experience the internet now. But let me just give you one sort of concrete example.
Today, Explained
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Think of the Fediverse as basically just a giant bucket of posts. They are a bunch of text or a video or an audio clip or an image, and they come with who sent them and when. You in a Fediverse world can choose any app that you want to make those posts. I can read them any way that I want. In a Fediverse world, you have Snapchat and you post something on Snapchat.
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I open up Instagram and I can see the thing that you posted on Snapchat. And if I comment on it or like it, it goes back to your Snapchat where that information lives. And you can be on Snapchat and I can be on Instagram and we can have that relationship. And that's just cool because it means that, A, if you stop liking the app that you're using...
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Leaving it doesn't mean losing all of your content and losing all of your followers and losing everything that you've ever done there. You can pick that stuff up and move it somewhere else. And given what we've seen from these social networks, that's really important. There are a lot of people who make their living on these networks now.
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And then Elon Musk shows up and changes the algorithm so that if you're not spewing right wing propaganda, there's no way to get reach on the platform. That hurts people's business or TikTok shows up and says, well, instead of doing dance challenges, if you're not selling stuff on the TikTok shop, we're going to bury you in the feed. That just kills people's livelihoods.
Today, Explained
From TikTok to 小红书
And so being able to pick up and say, my followers, my content, my experience on this platform is now portable somewhere else is powerful on its own. The other side of it is that what it does is it takes a social network and just sort of explodes it into a thousand pieces. So right now, if you sign up for Facebook, you're signing up for Facebook's app.
Today, Explained
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You're signing up for Facebook's content moderation ideas. You're signing up for Facebook's photo compression experience. You're signing up for Facebook's executives and how they feel about advertising. You could break those things into their component parts and essentially say, OK, I want to read posts in this app because I like the way that it looks.
Today, Explained
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But I want this version of content moderation because I think that fits better with how I see the world and what I want my experience to be. You get to just build your experience of the Internet sort of piece by piece rather than having to sign up for someone's entire idea about how it should be. Do we have smaller scale Fetaverses out there already?
Today, Explained
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I think the best example right now is probably an app called Mastodon, which had its real moment in the sun right after Elon Musk bought and immediately started ruining Twitter. So right now, if you have a Mastodon account, you can follow any threads user Which means I could see your threads posts from my Mastodon app. Without even having threads. Correct. Your stuff is part of the Fediverse.
Today, Explained
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It's just in this giant bucket of content that I am able to read and respond to. That's pure Fediverse stuff, right? Like that is the beauty of this system is that I can be on threads and you can be on Mastodon and we can hang out. And that's great. Is there an incentive beyond like...
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Yeah, we're not big on idealism in this country at this point. I would say the ruthlessly capitalistic take on this is that if we do this right, the opportunity becomes gigantic. And again, if you build something that's not just the size of Instagram or the size of Twitter, but is the size of the internet, you can build all kinds of things on top of it.
Today, Explained
From TikTok to 小红书
I mean, you can think of Google as just a tool on top of the internet. All Google does is search a bunch of web pages for you. That's a pretty good business, it turns out, because you can put ads on those search results and then you have to go to court about how successful your business has been. If we do the Fediverse right, there are going to be lots of those things too.
Today, Explained
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There will be lots of companies that get to build and charge for tools. There will be companies that get to charge for really cool algorithm ideas about how to sort things or really great apps for how you want to read or watch or listen to the things from there. The moment we're in right now feels like idealism because it's a bunch of
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happy developers coding against several trillion dollar companies. But if we can make that turn, the opportunity gets really big and much wider for companies.
Today, Explained
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Oh, wow, that is a big question. I think it is a little bit of a metaphor for our democracy. It's a question of who's in charge, right? And I think the story of the last two decades of the internet is that we gave away everything in exchange for convenience and cool features. And we picked the things that were easy to sign up for. We picked the things that made it easy to talk to our friends.
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We picked the things that shipped to us fastest. And we didn't reckon with any of the consequences of that. And then I think really over the last decade, the consequences of that started to become really obvious. And what the Fediverse promises is to give us some control. My information, my content, my followers, my network becomes mine again, and I get to choose what to do with it.
Today, Explained
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The process of getting there, like democracy, messy and weird and full of mistakes, but it is the right goal. And before we get there, we have to rename it. Can I interest you in open social web, which is the other thing the nerds like to call it? Yeah, please. There we go. It's the people like the social web, which I think is fine. I just call it the internet.
Today, Explained
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If we do this right, it's just the internet. The internet. Now there's an idea.
Today, Explained
From TikTok to 小红书
I think if you made me boil it all the way down to one thing, I think it's that social media is not for you anymore. I don't know that it ever was, honestly, but this idea that these were networks full of people connecting with each other and that that was like a good thing for us and for the world... No, we're past that now. Social media is about engagement. It's about money.
Today, Explained
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It's about monopolizing your attention. It's about somebody's agenda for what to do with that attention. It's not about you having a good time. It's about you being there so that things can happen to you.
Today, Explained
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And I think to some extent that has always been a part of these networks, but as there has been more money and as these things have become more central to like how we live our lives, those incentives have gotten so intense. and so lucrative for these people that they've just broken the whole system. And it's easy to despair.
Today, Explained
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The world can be better, Sean. It doesn't have to be terrible and horrific and full of people trying to sell you stuff on the TikTok shop. There is this thing called the Fediverse. Say it again. It's called the Fediverse.