If Netflix can't make live work, can anyone? | The Vergecast - video Dailymotion

The Verge

Richard Lawler joins the show to chat about the Tyson / Paul fight, and more importantly the fact that Netflix didn't seem to be able to keep up. As live sports — and TV in general — move toward streaming, are even the biggest names in tech ready for what's coming? After that, Roland Allen, the author of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, tells us about the history of the notebook, and why we've been writing things down about our lives for centuries. Even in a digital world, Allen argues, you just can't beat the notebook. Finally, a question from the Vergecast Hotline sends producer Will Poor down a TikTok Shop rabbit hole.

Transcript

00:00:00Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Bullet Journal Method. I'm your friend David

00:00:04Pierce, and I am sitting here on a weekday buying candy on TikTok. Like, I don't know how this

00:00:12happened, but suddenly my algorithm is just absolutely overrun by freeze-dried Skittles,

00:00:18which are a thing you can buy, and there's like a sour-coated Gushers thing that everybody's really

00:00:24excited about. But the biggest thing that's happening all over TikTok is Swedish candy.

00:00:29There are these things called Bubs. They're little, like, skulls that are massively popular.

00:00:35People are so excited about them. They sell out like crazy. There's this company called BonBon

00:00:40that has absolutely blown up on TikTok. There's something happening inside of Candy Talk,

00:00:46and I can't figure out what it is. I can't figure out how it works, where all these

00:00:50companies and people are getting this candy from and repackaging it and selling it to people.

00:00:54But I'm now deep down this rabbit hole. I bought candy on a TikTok livestream last night while I

00:01:00was walking my dog. It's a real thing that happened, and I bought it on the stream,

00:01:04and the guy was like, oh, David, thanks for your order. I'm going to give you extra sour powder

00:01:09because you ordered on the livestream. And I was, like, really excited for a long time

00:01:13that this was a thing that had happened to me. It's coming in two to four days, apparently.

00:01:19Is it anything? Is it food? Did I order it from an actual company? I literally have no idea.

00:01:24That's the TikTok shop. But it's possible there is going to be an alarming amount of candy

00:01:29coming to my house very soon. And frankly, that's great news.

00:01:34Anyway, we are not here to talk about candy. I have a feeling I will be talking more about

00:01:38candy over time, but not today. Today, we're going to do two things. First, we're going to

00:01:42talk about the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight on Netflix. I don't really care about the fight,

00:01:47but I care a lot about what it means, that Netflix had this massively popular event,

00:01:53and it didn't go great. And Netflix has some more massively popular events about to happen.

00:01:58And we're also just at a really interesting moment in the sports streaming world, where

00:02:02if Netflix can't do it, can anyone? We're going to talk about it. Also, I'm going to talk to

00:02:07Roland Allen, who wrote a book about the history of notebooks. And actually, what he wrote is a

00:02:13history of civilization told through the notebook. He makes a really fun case for why pen and paper

00:02:20has been so important in history, why it's so important now, and why even in an increasingly

00:02:25digital world, writing things down in a notebook is not going away. Super fun.

00:02:30We also have a hotline question that we're going to get into that sent our producer,

00:02:33Will Poor, down kind of a wild rabbit hole of, again, the TikTok shop. It's a weird world out

00:02:39there. All that is coming up in just a second. But first, I've now been staring at these freeze

00:02:43dried Skittles for too long, and I'm going to buy them. Wish me luck. This is The Verge Cast.

00:02:49We'll be right back. Support for The Verge Cast comes from Polestar. Polestar is an electric

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00:03:21Book a test drive at Polestar.com. Welcome back. All right. So Friday night,

00:03:29Jake Paul, Mike Tyson, it both was and was not the fight of the year. I don't know anything

00:03:37or particularly care about boxing, if I'm completely honest with you. But the thing I

00:03:41heard from everybody is that actually the undercard, all the fights that were before

00:03:45the main fight was great. Lots of good fights. But then Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson. I mean,

00:03:50it was like a YouTuber versus a man in his late 50s. I don't really know what anybody expected,

00:03:56but that is the fight that we got. Anyway, I think the more interesting story here has less

00:04:01to do with that fight itself and more to do with how things went on Netflix and what it says about

00:04:08what Netflix is ready for as it tries to take over live TV and what the whole streaming industry

00:04:14is ready for. Lots to talk about. There's lots of this stuff left to come. The tests keep coming

00:04:18for these companies. So figured it was a good time to check in and nobody better to do it with

00:04:23than Richard Lawler. Richard, hello. Hey, I just saw you the other day. This is very exciting.

00:04:29We were in person and you understood that I exist outside this room.

00:04:32I did. It's useful to be reminded of that every once in a while, but not like for too long. I

00:04:36think we got about the right amount of time near each other. This is good.

00:04:41Yep. All right. So first question, did you watch the fight on Friday?

00:04:46I did not watch the fight because doing anything else was a better choice.

00:04:50I mean, I would say as it turns out, that is largely correct. It is a real bummer that this

00:04:56whole thing was not about a sport. I enjoy it more than boxing between YouTubers and old men,

00:05:02but alas, here we are. As I said on social media,

00:05:05if I wanted to see a YouTuber fighting old man, I would just go punch a YouTuber.

00:05:11I can put that fight on myself right now. It's a beautiful thing. If you walk outside,

00:05:16I'm sure someone is filming a TikTok and you can just punch them in the face. And here we are.

00:05:20And apparently 60 million people will watch it if you do.

00:05:23But I think the reason I wanted to talk to you about this is we've talked a lot

00:05:27over the last couple of years about basically the question, is streaming ready for sports?

00:05:33And it's been coming, it's been happening. Amazon is kind of making it work with football,

00:05:40but the NFL is the thing, right? And every streaming platform wants the NFL. A bunch of

00:05:44them have gotten it. Netflix is going to have it on Christmas day. And I think to me, the single

00:05:51most surprising thing that happened this weekend was that Netflix was not ready for this fight.

00:05:55You'd think they would have been. They have the data. They know how many customers they have.

00:05:59They know how many people were interested in this fight. They know how heavily they promoted it.

00:06:03They know that there wasn't really anything else to do on Friday night, it felt like.

00:06:07And still, they were surprised somehow. They just weren't ready for the moment.

00:06:12Yeah. And am I crazy for thinking that if anyone should be able to do this,

00:06:17just from a pure technical deliver the bits in high quality to people perspective,

00:06:22it ought to be Netflix?

00:06:24You'd think so. But delivering things live is very different. And I think that's what we found

00:06:29basically every time there's a massive event. And every time we've had the Superbowl streaming now

00:06:33for years, they've been available on the internet. Each and every time, it's just a little bit

00:06:37glitchier than you'd expect, even though they know how many people are going to tune in.

00:06:41Because it's hard. Because delivering these things with milliseconds and just fractions

00:06:46of a second of delay is difficult. You can cache streams and videos. And if you have a new series,

00:06:52you can put your little devices in everyone's nearby ISP, and you can put it very close to

00:06:57them and have it preloaded. You can't do that with live. It just doesn't work.

00:07:01Yeah. And it's starting to make me wonder if it is, technically speaking right now,

00:07:08just an unsolvable problem. Because like you said, I think if you go rewind a ways,

00:07:12like Game of Thrones had streaming issues, and there were a bunch of ways that these companies

00:07:18could and did solve them, right? And you don't hear that anymore from these sort of big event

00:07:25HBO style shows anymore. Everybody logged on to HBO at nine o'clock on a Sunday night and

00:07:31couldn't watch their show. I have not heard that in years. We just fixed that. But there is

00:07:37something about trying to do this live and just literally the physical infrastructure of making

00:07:42all of that happen that we're very good at with linear television. And they've been doing it for

00:07:47decades, and they have trucks, and it's a whole thing. And I'm starting to wonder if we just

00:07:52haven't developed the over-the-internet pieces of this in such a way that it's going to work.

00:07:58I think the main issue is just that the internet wasn't made to work like that. And we're kind of

00:08:02tacking things on, and we're creating these solutions to work around a problem that the

00:08:05internet was never designed to solve. Something we talked about last year, but that still hasn't

00:08:09really arisen is L4S, which was supposed to help the latency issue so that when you send a packet

00:08:14and it really needs to get to someone on time that it's the first one to get there.

00:08:18And there are so many other strategies that I think these companies have done to try and make

00:08:21sure that when people are streaming, it's not getting bogged down. It's not getting clogged

00:08:25at the various choke points, but it still does. You've got how many different devices? You've got

00:08:30how many different bit rates? You've got how many different encodings and DRM protection and all of

00:08:35these other things that you're putting on top of this that make it that much harder to stream

00:08:40a live event? And it's just not a problem that we've solved yet. And I guess on Christmas Day,

00:08:44we're going to get another opportunity to see how close Netflix is.

00:08:47Well, I think I've been making fun of Netflix for like 48 hours now because they put out that

00:08:54statement on Saturday that was basically like, we think we did a great job after a whole evening

00:09:01and day of people online being like, this looks awful. I can't see anything. This is just like a

00:09:081980s pixelated monstrosity of a picture. And then Netflix is like, you know what? We did it.

00:09:15And I've kind of come around for all the reasons that you're saying. I'm like, honestly,

00:09:18maybe this is literally the best Netflix could have done. And to some extent, that might be

00:09:23more alarming as we think about where we're going, but maybe Netflix is not out of its mind to think

00:09:29it actually did this about as well as it could have. I can definitely see why they would have

00:09:34that perspective. What's interesting is like I'm hearing from people, oh, you know, I was watching

00:09:39a stream of someone pointing their phone at the TV on TikTok and live streaming it because the

00:09:44Netflix stream was 45 minutes behind. And so it's like, it can be done. You can get live video that

00:09:51people actually watch as long as, you know, 60 million people aren't tuning into this particular

00:09:55stream at the moment. Yeah, there is a magic number at which it all kind of falls apart.

00:10:00And I'm very curious. This is part of the reason I'm interested in these Christmas football games,

00:10:05because Netflix has these two games on Christmas for the first time. They're both actually going

00:10:10to be really good games, as it turns out. They're like some of the best teams in the NFL. It's going

00:10:15to be very exciting. It's Christmas Day. Lots of people are gonna watch. It seems unlikely that

00:10:19it's going to be 60 million people on either game. But like, let's say it's let's say it's 30.

00:10:25We're going to get such an interesting test case of at what point have we just hit the capacity of

00:10:31all of this infrastructure? And there's also just not that much time like Netflix can't fix the

00:10:36Internet between now and Christmas Day. So to some extent, I assume there will be lots of things it

00:10:41can learn, but it's not like it can rebuild its whole data delivery system between now and

00:10:47Christmas in order to get these football games right. So I feel like we're going to get a totally

00:10:51different but very similar test. And I think that's a big part of it. It's just that you aren't

00:10:55dealing with just one problem or just one problem in just one place. You have many people in many

00:11:00different places. You have different issues. You have, oh, the network's bad here, or we don't have

00:11:05the the back end node connecting close enough to this many people who are all trying to stream it.

00:11:10You have different kinds of demand in different places. What if it's good in most places,

00:11:14but it's not good in Baltimore, like Baltimore is playing away at this Texans game. And if it's

00:11:20just bad in one city, that is millions of people who are going to be very upset with Netflix.

00:11:25Beyonce fans, not always ready if you are going to cause problems for them to watch their favorite

00:11:33could be an issue. We're going to we're going to find out what happens.

00:11:36Yeah. So speaking of Beyonce, let's talk about this, because the news on Monday was that Beyonce

00:11:40is going to be doing the halftime show at one of these games.

00:11:44It's the second game between the Ravens and the Texans in Houston. She's from Houston.

00:11:48Natural Center. That makes sense. But like it's Beyonce, right? Like I would I would say in terms

00:11:52of like who you could announce as your halftime performer, that's about as big as it gets,

00:11:57right? Like that's it's Beyonce. And so to me, it's like if you've ever wondered how serious

00:12:02Netflix is about doing this, Beyonce is the answer, right? Like this this company is not

00:12:09kidding. And I think Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, you can be like, oh, this is like

00:12:13slightly interesting, but also like slightly silliness to football games is like cool,

00:12:18but whatever. But like it's it's Beyonce, Richard. They got Beyonce.

00:12:22There are millions of people who will not miss that. This is going to be probably their first

00:12:26time to be able to see the songs off of her new album. It just there are a lot of things

00:12:31that are lining up. They are going to be ready. They're going to be prepared for this.

00:12:34And Netflix has to deliver. What do you make of this from Netflix?

00:12:37Netflix is clearly like all in now on sports after you and I have spent years on this show

00:12:42talking about how Netflix was very happy to not be in live sports. They did the drive to survive

00:12:47thing. They were like, we're going to make that sort of ancillary content around games. We don't

00:12:52need to compete in this. Netflix has been saying this. It feels like this company is on a total

00:12:56180 and is now like we have to figure out how to do live. And that means sports. Does this make

00:13:01sense to you? The thing I'm not sure about is how far they'll go into life, because I think that

00:13:04at least in one way, it kind of serves them. How do we keep people from not canceling Netflix?

00:13:09And one of the answers is we have a huge event every few months so that every time you start

00:13:12thinking, man, you know what? I haven't watched Netflix in a while. Do I still need this

00:13:15subscription? Then Beyonce's on there and you're like, yep, can't cancel yet.

00:13:18Fair. That gives me. Yeah, that's true. It like you need to basically have one of those

00:13:23at least announced every month so that I'm like, okay, well, I'll keep it until then. And then

00:13:28like the day after Christmas, they're going to announce the next thing for February or whatever.

00:13:33And then that'll, that'll be that. We grew up with HBO and Showtime playing this game with

00:13:38boxing, with music, with all of these things, our entire lives growing up in the nineties.

00:13:43It's the same playbook. You know what you just made me realize is they're definitely going to

00:13:46announce the stranger things debut of some kind the day after Christmas. And that's going to,

00:13:53that's, that's how we get there for sure. Yeah. It just rolls in on itself. Yeah, exactly.

00:13:59Do you think Netflix has moves in sports here? Like, is this, are you at all as a sports fan

00:14:03interested in what's coming here? Not really. Um, I, I just, I w I wonder what, what they can do,

00:14:10but they have enough money that it kind of doesn't matter because they can get enough events. If they

00:14:14can sign up, say the NBA cup or whoever, if they have enough money, people will create events for

00:14:19them to host Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson. They said, how can we get generation Z generation X

00:14:25and millennials all to watch the same thing at the same time? Got it. And they'll just,

00:14:30they'll just find something else. They will, they will create something. They tried the hot

00:14:33dog competition. I don't think that really attracted all that much attention that seemed

00:14:37to go off pretty well without glitches. Their reality show was the first one that had huge

00:14:41problems. And I think they did the comedy thing that didn't work all that well, but you know,

00:14:45it's been kind of up and down. So it's hard to have these hits, but they're just going to keep

00:14:49looking. They're going to keep digging there. They've got the checkbook ready to spend

00:14:52clearly. And I think the thing I've been trying to figure out is whether I want one of these

00:14:57streaming services to really try and reinvent the wheel. Uh, because I think like you look at

00:15:04Amazon, which has been doing Thursday night football for a couple of years now, it just

00:15:09is football. Amazon has like a couple of interesting stats ideas, but they're even

00:15:14like doing that in a sponsored way on other networks. Like that's just a whole separate

00:15:18thing. But it's like, it's, it's Al Michaels. It is like the most straightforward down the middle,

00:15:24old school kind of football game. And we haven't seen a Netflix football game, but I would assume

00:15:30it's going to be very much the same thing. Peacock is now streaming Sunday night football, but it's

00:15:34just taking a TV streaming and turning it into streaming. So part of me is like, somebody needs

00:15:40to take this and like blow up the whole concept of what it might be and give us new ways of looking

00:15:45at stuff and change the cameras and make it more interactive and whatever else YouTube with Sunday

00:15:50ticket. Another example, like YouTube Sunday ticket is just Sunday ticket. It's just Sunday

00:15:55ticket. And that's fine. But it's part of me is like, what's the next thing? And then the other

00:16:00part of me is like, well, maybe let's spend our time making sure the thing works and then give

00:16:05it a few years. And we'll worry about actually putting this out there. I think that that is the

00:16:10big question here, because what I think what people want is not personalization. It is the

00:16:15same thing, but better because that's one thing that has been pushed out there. Oh, you'll be able

00:16:18to get your personalized stream. You'll be able to get exactly what you want. Maybe you'll be able

00:16:21to tune into whatever camera you want. But what works better is when we're all watching the same

00:16:26thing at the same time, like Paul versus Tyson, which creates a spectacle, which creates a,

00:16:30I can't miss this. And it's not personal. It's together. And that is better. And you don't need

00:16:36like a fake auditorium of people. You just need an event that people want to watch. You don't need

00:16:40avatars. You don't need 3d. You don't need any of those things. You don't even need a good fight.

00:16:45What you're saying is if you had picked the other camera, you wouldn't have seen Mike Tyson's bare

00:16:49ass. And that would have been a problem for you. We could have all avoided that. It just would

00:16:53have been a choice if we had all been able to avoid that. But apparently that wasn't what the

00:16:56people voted for. 60 million people went the other way. So we are wrong. Netflix knows what people

00:17:02want. Richard, like, let's be honest with each other. That was not have the analytics. My

00:17:06conspiracy theory says that was completely deliberate. And, and it is, it is just to juice

00:17:11views. You got to get them how you can every week. This is the world we live in Richard. It's fine.

00:17:16Next version is going to be very interesting.

00:17:19Listen, it's it's Q4. I'll do what I got to do.

00:17:25So how are you feeling as a, as a streaming sports fan right now? This is like, this is a fun time to

00:17:29do this. Cause we're, we're in the middle of the NBA season. We're in the middle of the NFL season.

00:17:32The NHL has started college basketball is going college football is peaking. It's like,

00:17:36this is the best part of the year. If all you want to watch is sports.

00:17:41And yet I feel like my sports watching life is more chaotic and more expensive than ever. I tried

00:17:48to watch the Bill's chiefs game on Sunday night and literally couldn't, I went through 10 services

00:17:53and I was like, Oh, I just don't have this game somehow. And I feel like you feel my pain on this

00:17:58as somebody who also likes to watch esoteric sports that you're not allowed to watch.

00:18:02That is the greatest thing. Like, Oh, Oh, your, your team is playing.

00:18:05You pay for maybe three packages already to watch this particular sport. And you find out, wait,

00:18:10I don't have the one that has this game still somehow. Um, I'm maybe better than last year

00:18:15because, uh, the local monopoly that controls piston streaming, uh, they're still bad. It's

00:18:20still a monopoly. They're named after a different gambling company now, but at least it works.

00:18:24So when I give them my money to watch the pistons, I can actually watch the game sometimes.

00:18:29And then I'm paying for league pass and I'm paying for my local team subscription. But then

00:18:33if the game is on national TV, on ESPN, if, if I'm not paying for, you know, a cable package,

00:18:38can't get it. Or I can't get the good TNT stream. I can get the leak past TNT stream, which, you

00:18:44know, with no announcers and whatnot. And it's just like, wait, how is this better than cable?

00:18:49Cause I used to just have cable and it was like, okay, so I pay this much. And I know that I will

00:18:53be able to see the game. Maybe it'll be on a different channel or whatever, but I will be

00:18:56able to turn on my TV and the game will come in and I don't have to log in and log out and have

00:19:00glitches and have the same ad three times in a row. Yeah. I remember years ago having sort of

00:19:06the mental rubric of like, okay, if it's a good game, it's going to be on this channel. If it's a

00:19:11game, it's going to be on this channel. And if literally no one cares because both teams are

00:19:14trash, they'll just put it over here. And I knew the number of all of those channels. And so I

00:19:18could find the game in 30 seconds, no matter what. And now it's literally like I went on, I went,

00:19:22I was on sling watching red zone, uh, because sling still has red zone for reasons. I don't

00:19:26completely understand. Uh, I sling doesn't have CBS. So when red zone only got down to one game,

00:19:32I didn't have it there anymore. I went to, uh, I went to YouTube TV, which had it, but my access

00:19:39had turned off because I forgot to pay it. That that one's probably on me. Uh, but then I went

00:19:45over to every streaming service I could think of being like, which one has CBS. And by the time I

00:19:49realized it was paramount plus, which sure. That's the one with CBS. Uh, I had, it was over

00:19:56and I had to go in and find my paramount plus password because who uses paramount plus.

00:19:59And it was just a whole, and I was like, I will pay you just to watch the last five minutes of

00:20:03this game. I couldn't do it. Wouldn't wouldn't let me devastating. And as I said, back in the

00:20:08day, I just knew three channel numbers. That was all I needed to know. I didn't have to figure a

00:20:12whole bunch of things out. Yeah. Do you have any sense of whether this is going to get better?

00:20:16You and I haven't talked about venue sports in a while, this supposed like smushing together of

00:20:21all these different companies, right? Well, that depends on what happens in the courts,

00:20:25if they ever actually get to launch or whatever they do, or if it would be any good, if it

00:20:29actually did exist, uh, which will we ever find out if we do not know. Um, also I think there's

00:20:36some interesting things going on because Amazon, for example, like with the NBA, I think in 2025

00:20:41could be very interesting because Amazon is going to have a lot of NBA games directly.

00:20:45They also own a share of the, whatever it's called now fan dual sports networks that have

00:20:51some of these local broadcast rights. And in my area has the local broadcast, right? So maybe

00:20:55they can package it together so I can just use one app to watch most of the games. Unfortunately,

00:21:02the pistons might be good and then there'll be on national TV and I'll have to pay even more to

00:21:05watch more games. So just problems on top of problems. Well, at that point, then you have to

00:21:10pay for ESPN's multitude of streaming services. It's part of venue. It has ESPN plus is the,

00:21:18what's it called? Flagship, right? That's the thing that's supposed to just be ESPN on the

00:21:21internet that's supposedly launching next year. Like in a funny way, we were having conversations

00:21:28a few years ago about how a bunch of really old rights deals were slowing everything down,

00:21:34right? Cause they had all been signed a decade ago. They were, they were really focused on

00:21:38broadcast TV in particular. And so the idea that this stuff could be streamed and available widely

00:21:43didn't really exist. Now it feels like basically all of those deals have turned over. Uh, I think

00:21:47the NBA is probably the last one to turn over and that starts next year. Big streaming shifts. Like

00:21:54you said, Amazon's a big player. Now a lot of stuff is moving to ESPN, which is doing a lot

00:21:58of streaming stuff. And now it feels like the holdup is the platforms, which can't figure out

00:22:03how to launch. They can't figure out what they're supposed to charge. They can't figure out how to

00:22:06serve this stuff to this many people. Like we should be in a moment where some streamer is like,

00:22:13we are going to exclusively stream the super bowl and it's going to be fine. Netflix should be able

00:22:17to do that. There are more people in America who have Netflix than anything else. Like this should

00:22:23be possible. And yet it isn't. And everyone knows it's not possible. So we're in a, we're in a weird

00:22:27moment now where the problem we used to have is no longer the problem. And it's making very obvious

00:22:32this new problem that we have, which is that none of the platforms are ready for this.

00:22:36It turns out that the problem is money. And certain companies have lots of it and they're

00:22:40willing to spend it. So the leagues are going to chase it in however they can. And what the

00:22:44leagues have found is that playing the networks off of each other, or now the platforms off of

00:22:48each other and the networks and the various intermingling of those is the way to get the

00:22:53highest bids to make the most money. And so now we're in for another 10 years or so of switching

00:22:59and swapping between apps. I really hate how aggressively I'm starting to root for Amazon

00:23:05because I think you're right that Amazon has this big idea of being like the one that puts it all

00:23:12together. And I think in theory ESPN wants to be that and is doing some interesting stuff along

00:23:18those lines, but Disney just doesn't have the money to do that. But basically like the companies

00:23:25that could just buy all the sports rights, it's just kind of Amazon and Apple and Apple, I don't

00:23:30think is, is interested in playing that particular sports game. But Amazon, like it could get as much

00:23:38as it wants, right? Like it can afford all of it. And so they have the scale. They also have the

00:23:42scale to deliver as bad as their apps tend to be. They can actually deliver a live stream.

00:23:47And AWS does exist. Yeah. Thursday Night Football works. It's not as big as these,

00:23:52like I would be interested to see 60 million people try to watch prime video, right? Like,

00:23:56again, it's, there is a, there is a matter of scale that we just haven't seen on streaming

00:24:01work anywhere yet. But, but yeah, I feel like if, if someone were going to give us the dream back,

00:24:08it's probably going to be Amazon, which I makes, I hate saying that out loud. Even just that,

00:24:12that felt bad that I'm like, gosh, I hope Amazon wins TV because that would be terrific.

00:24:18But it kind of feels like it. That's how dark the future has gotten.

00:24:21I've been looking at Amazon and saying, save us. Yeah. Andy, Jesse, it's all up to you.

00:24:28Oh, brother. So what, what have you seen this year that gives you hope? Let's end on a high

00:24:33note here. I want to just say, we haven't talked about this on the show in a long time.

00:24:37I thought Peacock crushed the Olympics. When it comes to sports streaming, the thing that I was

00:24:40like, okay, internet sports TV is going to be cool. Was Peacock in the Olympics. All the sports,

00:24:47all the different ways to navigate. They had the gold zone thing. They had the primetime thing.

00:24:51Like that was great. And I don't know how replicable that is for other sports, but like

00:24:56that to me was when it was like, okay, the streaming era of sports might be great.

00:25:00It was there. It worked. The streams were consistent. The quality was high. I didn't

00:25:04feel like I was way behind. It didn't have to feel like I didn't feel like I had to watch a

00:25:07bunch of things on that. I didn't want to it. I got a lot that I wanted. There were some things

00:25:13that could have been better. I felt like, you know, when you were navigating through like

00:25:16archived events, when you wanted to watch something that already aired, it was harder

00:25:18than it needed to be. But I felt like they also made some concessions perhaps to make the viewing

00:25:24experience a little bit better. Like if you jumped out of something and you jump back in,

00:25:29okay. So the ad doesn't play just again, the way that we've seen in previous years and on

00:25:33other platforms. And I think there's some push and pull because I understand, hey,

00:25:39this platform needs to make money from this event. Got it. But I've just want to watch it.

00:25:44I paid for it. I would like to watch it. Give me that. And they kind of crossed that bar.

00:25:50And that's where everyone else should be aiming at, at the minimum.

00:25:54You're a simple man with simple needs, Richard. Just show me the thing that I have clicked on,

00:25:57please. Yes.

00:26:00Fair enough. All right, Richard, thank you as always.

00:26:04All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back

00:26:06and we're going to talk about notebooks. We'll be right back.

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00:27:15Welcome back. So a few weeks ago, I started reading this book called The Notebook,

00:27:19A History of Thinking on Paper. It's by a guy named Roland Allen, and it truly is a book about

00:27:25thinking on paper. He makes this big case that paper is this incredibly critical invention

00:27:41in the history of the world, and that actually, without paper, without notebooks,

00:27:46we wouldn't have modern capitalism, we wouldn't know nearly as much about history as we do,

00:27:50that actually, a lot of the world that we live in is defined by the way that people wrote stuff

00:27:57down and what they wrote stuff down on. He tells a whole history of notebooks all the way through

00:28:03the Renaissance and all the way up to now and even in the future. If you listen to the show,

00:28:08you know that I love note-taking apps. I love thinking about how people write stuff down.

00:28:13I think the systems for all this are fascinating, and this book was like catnip for me.

00:28:18So I asked Roland to come on the show and talk through some of the big ideas in his book,

00:28:22and also why notebooks continue to survive in this increasingly digital world. It's a super

00:28:29fun conversation. I really enjoyed talking to him. And yes, there is more 12th century history

00:28:36in this episode than most, but we're going to go with it. So to start with Roland, I asked him

00:28:41to quickly recap the case that he makes, that paper is a hugely important invention in the

00:28:48history of the world, and that without paper, we might not have any of this.

00:28:53Here's what he said to that.

00:28:54RL – Yeah, permanence is really why. For thousands of years, we've had different ways

00:29:01of writing things down as human beings. So you can carve on stone. You can make little dents

00:29:08in clay tablets, which you then fire and dry out, and they're permanent. But they are clay

00:29:12tablets, so they're not super portable or practical or robust. Then you have papyrus,

00:29:19the reed product which grows in Egypt. And you can write on that. You can draw on that. But

00:29:26papyrus, it turns out, unless it's actually in an Egyptian tomb, completely dry, with no movement,

00:29:33and nothing to disturb it, it will just automatically fall apart. It can't cope with

00:29:37any kind of damp, or it can't really cope with being handled. So papyrus is handy, but it's not

00:29:43permanent. And then you have wax tablets, and these are beautiful things. They're amazing,

00:29:48completely died out in Europe. But for about 2000 years, this is how Europeans retained

00:29:55information, took notes, wrote poems, agreed contracts, bills of sale, whatever, with a layer

00:30:03of wax on wood, which you would then scrape into with a little stylus. Now obviously, that's not

00:30:09permanent. So it's very useful for being in a poet's notebook, for instance, because you can

00:30:14wipe it over at the end of the day when you've finished writing your poem. But for a business

00:30:19record, it's no good at all, because you have to know what you agreed, what you contracted.

00:30:26Then you have parchment, and parchment comes along a little bit later during

00:30:30the period of the Roman Empire probably, and that's a really good writing material. It's

00:30:35very tough, it's completely indestructible, and you can write on it beautifully, and you can also

00:30:41paint on it if you like. So the illuminated manuscripts, which we see, the Book of Kells,

00:30:45and so on, these are all on parchment, and they're very beautiful. But the problem is,

00:30:49when you write on parchment with a pen, the ink sits on the surface and dries,

00:30:54which means you can scrape it off, which means that, again, it's not permanent. You can change

00:30:59it, you can affect the record, so it's no good for business. Paper turns up in Europe around the

00:31:04year 1240, 1250, and very quickly, a few people realize it's a game changer, because anything

00:31:11which is written on paper with ink stays there. So you can have a contract, you can keep a business

00:31:17record, you can do anything legal, you can have a deed, for instance, and you don't have to worry

00:31:23about it being forged. And that's important. So paper is really important because it's permanent,

00:31:29and that leads to its very, very rapid adoption in the business community, in particular.

00:31:36Was that where it started? I was trying to match some of the timelines, and going back through,

00:31:41it seems like if I have the timeline correct, there were two threads. There was kind of the

00:31:48people who use it for business and people who use it for recording things in their own personal

00:31:54lives. But it does seem like business became a real use case for notebooks first.

00:32:00Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And the analogy, which you can very easily draw, is with the modern

00:32:06computer. That comes from IBM, and it's businesses and governments which have it to begin with for

00:32:13the first, how long? 30 years, maybe? 40 years? And then you get people using it creatively,

00:32:18and then you get people like Jobs thinking, oh, you can have some fun with this thing. You can

00:32:22play games on it, but you can also be seriously creative. So now you have Pixar, for instance. And

00:32:27I don't think anyone at IBM in the 1940s was thinking that Pixar was going to happen. Looking

00:32:33back, it seems inevitable that people would do something like that. And it's exactly the same

00:32:38kind of relationship with notebooks. You have businesses come to rely on notebooks utterly.

00:32:44They use them for everything. And therefore, notebooks get into everyone's hands, particularly

00:32:51in a culture like Italy, which at the time, Italy is the richest part of Europe. But it's also where

00:32:55they invent banking, where they invent companies, where they invent accountancy, double-entry

00:33:00bookkeeping, limited liability partnerships, futures markets, all of these things which

00:33:05we know and love. And a lot of that you talk about happens not sort of, that doesn't happen,

00:33:13and then they put it down in notebooks. The existence of those things and notebooks and this

00:33:18new writing permanent technology go hand-in-hand.

00:33:21IAN Absolutely. You can't do one without the other. But then, of course, so they have to

00:33:27have these notebooks. And once they have to have them, in the evening, they take them home. And

00:33:31then they do the fun stuff with them. And that's entirely accidental, I think. But, you know,

00:33:37thank God, from our point of view, it's given us all of this interesting literature and art and

00:33:41poetry.

00:33:41DAVID Yeah. So I confess I am particularly interested in the fun stuff. So let's start

00:33:46there. I think the first thing I had written down in my notes was like, let's go back to

00:33:50Florence. And there's a word that starts with a Z that I can't pronounce. And my gut tells me

00:33:58it's pronounced Zibaldoni, but I could be wrong.

00:34:00IAN You're dead right. Yeah. You just have to imagine yourself ordering a Zibaldoni in an

00:34:06Italian restaurant, and you'll be fine.

00:34:07DAVID Right. A type of notebook and also a beautiful croissant-like thing that I will

00:34:12like very much. Tell me what those were. Talk a little bit about kind of how that spread.

00:34:17IAN Okay, back to the restaurant. Zibaldoni seems to have been a word for salad,

00:34:22and that's exactly what it is. So it's a collection of lots of different things jumbled

00:34:27together. Now, this is a time before print. We're talking about 1300, and it's Florence,

00:34:33and it's a time before print. So if you wanted to have any book or literature or poetry in your

00:34:38house, you had to basically write it down yourself. And therefore, Florence is a very

00:34:46business-like community. They're very entrepreneurial. Everyone's got their own

00:34:49little business. Therefore, everyone's got their business notebooks. They take them home in the

00:34:54evening. And if they hear a poem which they like, or if they hear one of Aesop's fables is very

00:35:00popular, or a bit of Ovid, or a prayer which is particularly resonant to them, or a recipe,

00:35:06very often they're writing down medicinal cures. Anything you want to keep written down in your

00:35:10house, you just write it down in your Zibaldoni. And it's a very personal notebook, but it's

00:35:15completely unsorted. So it's like a salad in this jumbled-up way. And they're brilliant because

00:35:20they're these windows into what Florentine people loved. So we know the poetry they like to read,

00:35:28we know the prayers that they wanted to remember, we know the stories that they like to tell,

00:35:32and we know what they liked to eat when they had a headache. All of this kind of information,

00:35:36because everyone in Florence at this time who could read or write, which was most of them,

00:35:41unusually, they kept a Zibaldoni. And it was a really strange local thing, but it was so fun.

00:35:48AWIN I also get the sense that folks back then

00:35:50were reckoning with the same thing people reckon with now, which is like, what do I do with any of

00:35:53this? And this is sort of the eternal question of notebooks, right? You write a bunch of stuff

00:35:59down, you collect all this stuff, and as a historical artifact, especially in aggregate,

00:36:04it's very cool, right? You get a sense of what people were doing in a community. But if I'm

00:36:10a person in Florence in the 1300s keeping one of these, what am I doing with it day-to-day?

00:36:16What's going to happen to these notebooks? Are they thinking about the grand sweep of history

00:36:20and their responsibility to write this stuff down? What was the point of these notebooks?

00:36:25So the Zibaldoni, the only point was fun. They weren't thinking about the grand sweep of history,

00:36:30but they knew that they were a bit precious because they would leave them in their wills.

00:36:34So this is one of the ways we know how many people had them, because the wills often survive.

00:36:40And also, you see these little dedications. Someone will start their Zibaldoni, then they'll

00:36:45leave it to their son. And then the son will have an argument on the pages of the Zibaldoni with his

00:36:50brother saying, oh no, dad left it to me, actually. So you have these little bickerings.

00:36:56And you can see that sometimes they pass down three generations and that people maintain them

00:37:00because the handwriting changes. So that's one thing. So Zibaldoni, they're always for fun,

00:37:06but people definitely know that they have a value. The other thing that they also start doing

00:37:12is viewing their family as a kind of business and then keeping what they would call a libri di

00:37:17familia, or ricordanza is the other word for it, where they keep a family record, which is

00:37:23essentially births, deaths, marriages, investments. You know, we bought this house. I invested in this

00:37:29company. My daughter got married. My son died. My grandson was born. He was baptized, etc.

00:37:35And they're very businesslike. You wouldn't call them diaries because there's no emotion in there.

00:37:41There's no happiness or sadness, but they just record the central, most important events of a

00:37:47family's life. And then that would get passed down through the generations as well. But that's more

00:37:52viewing your family in a kind of quite serious businesslike way. If you were a grammar school in

00:37:59the say 1500s, 1600s in Europe, you were expected to keep a commonplace book in a very rigorous way.

00:38:07And that was a very formal kind of thing. But that was educational. You know, no one ever

00:38:12really did that for fun because it's such hard work. It's a real effort and it's study.

00:38:17But I think that outside of school, you have people like Leonardo who would just draw all

00:38:23over the place. You have people who doodle. You have people who write very intimate personal

00:38:27diaries, people who write very formal ones, people who write about their relationship with God.

00:38:31You know, there's no hard and fast rules.

00:38:35Okay. And that feels like the thing that lingers most over time is that everybody

00:38:41is perpetually finding new ways to fill up a notebook. Kind of more chaotic over time,

00:38:48too. Everybody gets weirder and weirder about notebooks. Da Vinci is an interesting one.

00:38:53You mentioned him and obviously I would say you've obviously done more research on this

00:38:58than I have, but I would say Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, probably history's most famous notebooks,

00:39:03fair to say?

00:39:04Yeah, I would say so. Those ones, when I was telling people that I was writing history

00:39:09of notebook and they were looking baffled, I'd go, you know, Leonardo.

00:39:14Well, one thing I thought was really interesting in your telling of his story was that he

00:39:19did not seem to imagine that his notebooks would eventually become wildly famous. And the idea that

00:39:24these were for public consumption was kind of a thing that happened much later. The notebooks were

00:39:31very personal and very individual. How did that change come about? Like, at what point did people

00:39:37start writing notebooks, even in some of the styles that you're talking about,

00:39:41thinking about other people?

00:39:43Very, very late in the day, I would say. I think what's interesting, Leonardo's notebooks are

00:39:48fascinating for two reasons, I think, very far apart in time. Firstly, because they're an amazing

00:39:54record of his thoughts, his researches, his explorations, and his personality up to a point.

00:40:00So, that period around the year 1500, wow, you know, there was something really incredible going

00:40:05on there. And then, basically, they just vanish into aristocrats' libraries, you know, and no one

00:40:13reads them. They probably pull them off the shelf and just look at them as a curiosity.

00:40:18No one studies them at all until the 1890s, when a German guy called Richter goes around Europe,

00:40:25he looks at them all, he transcribes them, he researches, he writes about them.

00:40:29And then, for the first time, 400 years nearly after Leonardo dies, people actually realize,

00:40:36oh, he wasn't just a good painter. He was also all of these other kinds of genius as well,

00:40:41because he was just known as a painter up to that point. And then, and I think it is a direct

00:40:48result of the publication of Leonardo's notebooks, and people understanding that there's this process

00:40:54behind his genius, then everyone else starts taking their notebooks much more seriously.

00:40:59So, Picasso, for instance, he starts painting in the 1890s at exactly the same time, or

00:41:04learns how to paint. He's a boy. And he, for instance, took his sketchbooks incredibly

00:41:09seriously. He never gave them away. He never lost them. He kept them filed away in boxes

00:41:14in his house in the south of France, and they were numbered, cataloged, ordered. He knew

00:41:19that his sketchbooks were really important. Whereas painters 100 years before him,

00:41:26seems to have been a very casual relationship, you know, or rather, they themselves use their

00:41:30notebooks, but they had no sense that anyone else would ever find them interesting.

00:41:34So, yeah, I think there's definitely a change. And I think that Leonardo sort of accidentally,

00:41:41400 years after his death, prompts it. Yeah. And to the extent, you know, if any kind of

00:41:46well-known writer now will sell their papers to the University of Boston, for instance,

00:41:54you know, collects writer's notebooks, and it will pay good money for them.

00:41:59150 years ago, you know, universities were not doing that. They wouldn't have seen the value.

00:42:03Do you think that changes the way we look at those notebooks now? I mean, I think about,

00:42:08even go back to Florence. Like, you think about those as an important record of real life

00:42:16in a way that as soon as people become self-conscious that someone else might see

00:42:20their notebooks, it sort of ceases to be a record of real life. It becomes an Instagram

00:42:26version of real life where everything is maybe subtly, self-consciously changed to

00:42:33be for public consumption in a way that, I don't know, like, we think about notebooks as these

00:42:38intensely private things, but as soon as you understand that someone else might see it,

00:42:42I wonder if it changes what that thing is.

00:42:44IAN Oh, when it comes to diary writing in particular. So, any number of published

00:42:50diaries, you can tell were written with publication in mind. I write a diary every

00:42:55day and I don't expect that anyone else will ever read it. And it's certainly never going

00:43:01to be published. And it's, I think you're right, it's more intimate and it's, you know,

00:43:05it's pretty uncensored, unfiltered. But then you have the Tony Blairs of this world whose

00:43:12diaries are published, I think. And that's a completely different kettle of fish.

00:43:17CB Yeah. And I guess that's okay. Both of those things can exist, but they are

00:43:21very different things.

00:43:22IAN Yeah. Yeah. Very, very definitely. Yeah.

00:43:25Okay. I am really curious about how you, as a person in a digital world,

00:43:31came to think about notebooks. Because again, there is such a, there's so much about that

00:43:37history that A, feels very modern, like we're talking about the same kinds of things now.

00:43:42And like you said, using computers for the same kinds of things that people were using notebooks

00:43:46for 800 years ago. But I wonder if you're going through and you have to spend time thinking about

00:43:53the thing itself. And like you said, paper is this crucially important invention. And if we

00:44:00had invented computers in 1200, instead of inventing paper, would it have gone roughly

00:44:06the same way? Or is there something about that thing and that time and that invention

00:44:12that made it different from even everything that came after?

00:44:16I think up to a point, the invention makes the time, you know, you said to me very confidently

00:44:23that we live in a digital world, you know, and, and of course, you are right. Yeah, we do

00:44:28definitely live in the digital world. We're speaking to each other, you know, by a digital

00:44:32link up and surrounded by amazing technology. I would also, if I was being contrarian say to you,

00:44:39you're living in a notebook world. Because capitalism, which gives us all of what we see

00:44:44around us, that for 600 years was entirely based in notebooks, we would call them ledgers or

00:44:53account books. But it was an entirely notebook based system until the first IBM machines. So

00:45:00and that was invented at the same time as or roughly speaking, the same time as the notebook

00:45:04arrives in in Europe and sort of in that place in Italy, around the year 1300. They invent all of

00:45:10the mechanisms of capitalism. So really, we are in that world, as much as we're in the digital world.

00:45:17But yeah, and there is definitely a sense of, you have an invention, and then it shapes

00:45:22the world that you live in, but in unexpected, surprising, fun, hopefully ways. No one saw that

00:45:29Twitter was coming 10 years before Twitter arrived. And then suddenly it's everywhere.

00:45:34And then suddenly it's nowhere again, you know, so who knows?

00:45:37So okay, let's let's fast forward a bunch in history to not now but close to now. And I want

00:45:44to talk about the bullet journal. And the reason I wanted to start with the Zibaldoni is that I feel

00:45:48like you can draw a straight line from that thing in Florence 800 years ago, to the bullet journal

00:45:56phenomenon of today. Like, like a dead straight line through almost a millennium of time. How

00:46:05is that possible? Like, why do you think this, this thing, this idea of how we want to record

00:46:12our lives in a physical notebook, has been so insistently persistent over so many centuries?

00:46:21Um, it's a really great, simple, minimal tool, I think that it with with any kind of technology,

00:46:27there's this, there's a bit or any kind of invention, there's a real virtue to simplicity,

00:46:31you know, so your your knife and fork or your chopsticks, chopsticks are great, because they're

00:46:37minimal. Yeah, you can't, once you've pictured them, you've invented them once you cannot improve

00:46:42on them. And a notebook, I think, is a lot like that it came to a kind of very quickly, it became

00:46:49kind of perfect in terms of its how practical it was, how cheap it was, how available it was

00:46:53to everyone. And you can't really improve on that as a bit of technology, you know, because

00:46:59and then people will use it in different ways over history. And bullet journals are, I think,

00:47:04a really good example of how you can take this really simple thing and just use it in a slightly

00:47:08new way. And suddenly opens possibilities for people which they never appreciated before.

00:47:13Like, there are a lot of people who's genuinely there are a surprising number of people whose

00:47:19lives have really been improved by doing bullet points to organize their life. And it kind of

00:47:26helps them to rationalize things and make proper decisions and act more intentionally and therefore,

00:47:30thereby live happier lives. I think I find it constantly incredible how this really simple

00:47:36thing can be reinvented. So regularly, but you're right, there is a continuous line all the way

00:47:41through. I think it's just because it's incredibly simple. And it doesn't require batteries. It

00:47:46doesn't require system updates is, you know, if you drop it, it doesn't break.

00:47:50What was it that was interesting to you about the bullet journal and its history? Like,

00:47:55why did that jump out to you as a thing worth adding to this history?

00:48:00It was important to me because, firstly, because it was a real thing. It was a real trend,

00:48:06you know, when I was starting to think about the book, and it gave me sort of confidence that there

00:48:10was going to be an appetite of people who were interested in this stuff, which is really key

00:48:15in terms of building my confidence. And then what was interesting was, I've never bullet journaled

00:48:21myself, I've never done the Ryder Carroll method. But I got his book, and then I spoke to him,

00:48:26interviewed him. And he's really thought about it quite deeply. And he's thought about the

00:48:33implications of writing stuff down and of organizing your thoughts on the page and having

00:48:37this notebook which you carry everywhere in which you write everything down on. And that kind of

00:48:42encouraged me to think deeply about it, too. You know, he's taken it very seriously for a long time.

00:48:47And he's thought about it in a particular way. And I've got a more historical angle,

00:48:50and I think about it in different ways, but they're completely compatible. But just the fact

00:48:54that he had taken it seriously, I found really interesting. And hence, giving him a chapter,

00:49:00I think, was kind of fair because he was really about the only person who had written a book about

00:49:07notebooking before I did. And he also had some really interesting things to say about

00:49:14notebooks which aren't bullet journals. He was really inspired, for instance, by

00:49:18kind of artists' scrapbooks and sort of collages and sketchbooks, which were sort of more than

00:49:26sketchbooks, which had elements of diary in them. So not pure bullet journal stuff, but stuff which

00:49:31is a really interesting expression of your experience. And Ryder definitely put me onto

00:49:36those things. Why do you think that way of thinking about notebooking and journaling and

00:49:43keeping track of your life lagged so much the business side of things, which, as you chart in

00:49:50the book, got really systematized and really specific and like we built capitalism on top

00:49:56of these things, right? Double-entry accounting became a worldwide phenomenon and people

00:50:01understood how to do it. And there were kind of accepted rules on how to keep these kinds

00:50:06of notebooks. But in people doing it in their own lives, like you said, there have been bits

00:50:11and pieces of this over time. But somebody like Ryder Carroll comes along hundreds of years later

00:50:18and really thinks like, okay, how can I break this thing down into sort of understandable,

00:50:23repeatable pieces? That just happened much later. Why do you think that is?

00:50:26IAN Honestly, I have no idea. There are questions you can't answer. Another big

00:50:33question, which I just have no idea, is why did people start writing diaries? Or rather,

00:50:40why did they start writing diaries in England in around the year 1570 when they'd never done

00:50:47them anywhere else in the world before? I've looked really hard at trying to find out what

00:50:51was so special about England at that time, which made people start to keep an emotional diary of

00:50:58how they felt about the day's events. Sorry, not very good podcast material. I'm making a baffled

00:51:03expression. Listen to the picture of that. I have no idea. And I think my answer to your question

00:51:09is, it's a good question. I have no idea. I have a theory and it's based on nothing,

00:51:16but it's a theory. And I'm going to give you my theory as a way of asking you another question,

00:51:20which I also have about that. I think, especially as we became more enmeshed with digital tools,

00:51:31life took on a new level of informational chaos. There is just more stuff coming at us now than

00:51:38there ever has been. And that's true in our professional lives, but it's also true in our

00:51:44personal lives. I think in a new way in the last, I don't know, several decades, that there's just

00:51:52more happening around you and to you all the time. And we're still reckoning with that as people,

00:51:59right? This question of like, we understand what is going on in the world in a way that we are

00:52:04evolutionarily not equipped to do. And what do we do with that? All these really interesting

00:52:08questions. But I think one thing that I see all the time is people crave systems. There is this

00:52:14idea that if I can just find a way to make this make sense, everything will be better, right?

00:52:21And I think, and you mentioned the getting things done method in the book also. And I think that

00:52:26speaks to the same thing where it's like, there is this swirling mass of stuff in my life. And

00:52:31if you can just tell me where to put it and how, my brain will get quieter. And I think that's

00:52:37meaningful to people. And again, there is a definite sort of we are people of our time and

00:52:44technology thing that is all kind of swirling together there. But I feel like when I see

00:52:50people who really love bullet journal, what it says is the world is insane and messy,

00:52:55but I have made this thing that is my world and it is beautiful and looks like me,

00:53:00and it just feels good. And it's why people get mad at all the bullet journalers who are

00:53:05spending all of their time organizing their pages and not time getting stuff done.

00:53:08And it's like, no, the organizing the pages is actually the point of the thing as much as

00:53:12anything else. Right? Like making the notebook is the point. And I feel like that was one of

00:53:18the things that just keeps coming up throughout history in your book is like the act of making

00:53:22the thing is as much the point as anything else. Going back and reviewing it is fine,

00:53:27doing stuff with what you put in it is fine. But the act of making the notebook in the first place

00:53:32is maybe the most important part of the whole process. And I feel like there's so much of that

00:53:36happening right now that we need structure around that more than ever. That's just a theory.

00:53:41IAN That's it. And my answer to that is yes. That's the short answer. Slightly more involved

00:53:49example to sort of back up what you said. So I have a day job and I do this. I write books and

00:53:57talk to people about it. And so the level of inputs into my life in terms of communication

00:54:04and things flying at me from different directions. I've got two email addresses. I've got the

00:54:10Instagram. I've got the Twitter, which I'm switching off shortly, but I've got the Facebook.

00:54:15I've got WhatsApp on the phone, etc, etc. It just goes on. And that's before I'm in a room

00:54:22with anyone actually talking to them face to face. And my way of dealing with this is to write

00:54:26a diary. Yeah. So at the end of the day, I will put it all down in here. And it's under control,

00:54:34as you say. And I've turned this ephemeral, nonstop flow of craziness, most of which is

00:54:42completely trivial, but has to be managed somehow. And I've just turned it into a calm thing on the

00:54:49page. Yeah, I completely agree. And as to how that makes me feel, the analogy I use is it's like

00:54:57having a shower. Yeah. Showers are lovely. Just great. I like to have a shower every day. But if

00:55:03I can't, if I have to go a day without, that's fine. No one really minds. Two days without,

00:55:10mentally I start to smell. And that's what I'm like with the diary. I can miss a day.

00:55:16I can't miss two days. I start to smell mentally. And it really cleans me out,

00:55:20sort of that process of just dumping it on the page really, really is refreshing and

00:55:25cleansing in that sense. Yeah, I like that a lot. Why do you think we haven't found a way to do

00:55:31that digitally in the way that is satisfying and valuable in the same way that we have in

00:55:39notebooks? Because we pretty much do business on computers now. There's not a lot of paper

00:55:45notebooks out there responsible for how capitalism runs anymore. But I think I am someone who has

00:55:53tried every note-taking app on planet Earth. I obsessively use them. I build these systems,

00:55:59and overwhelmingly the ones that feel the best. And as I talk to people, the answer is you try

00:56:05them all, and you eventually just get a nice notebook and a pen, and you start filling it.

00:56:09And there is something about that that we have not replaced. And I'm curious if you

00:56:13have thoughts on why it has been so hard to replace. I have lots of thoughts. I'm going

00:56:18to give you the deepest one, because I think your listener can cope with a sort of high-level

00:56:24bit of neurobiology. So, when you write on a notebook page, and they've done this with

00:56:31MRI scans and a very clever way of using multiple MRI scans called voxel-based morphometry,

00:56:36when you can look at multiple brains at once. When you write in a notebook, you use different

00:56:41parts of the brain to when you type, or when you write something on your phone or your tablet.

00:56:47And one of the different parts you use is the hippocampus. Now, this is right in the bottom

00:56:52of the brain, and it's your mental map. So, when you drive to your place of work,

00:56:59you're using your hippocampus. When you know where the coffee cups are in your kitchen,

00:57:04you're using the hippocampus. Taxi drivers, cab drivers have amazingly well-developed hippocampi.

00:57:11It was an early case study in brain plasticity, actually. So, this is very interesting. Why do

00:57:17you engage your hippocampus when you're writing in a notebook? And it's because your notebook

00:57:22is a place, right? And it has its own geography. So, when you write things on the pages of a

00:57:27notebook, you remember, or I certainly tend to remember, oh, that was on the left-hand side at

00:57:30the top. I wrote that in blue somewhere. Now, that was at the back of the notebook. That was

00:57:34at the front. And I'm thinking about the notebook in quite a different way to how I think about a

00:57:40digital note. And what they think, the people who research this, is that when you scroll,

00:57:47or you carry on writing, and what you've written on a screen just scrolls up at the top of the

00:57:52page and vanishes off the top of your screen, it just vanishes. It has no place in the geography

00:57:58of your lived experience, unlike stuff which you write down in a notebook page. So, I've got my

00:58:03yellow notebook, and I know that if I open it halfway through, roughly speaking, I'm going to

00:58:07find what happened in July. And I can't do that with notes I've made on an iPad, but just because

00:58:14my brain hasn't thought about them in that geographic way. So, that's one reason why you

00:58:19feel more comfortable and you navigate those notes more happily than you do when they're digital.

00:58:26Other reasons are to do with, I think, the sensory experience of writing, fingers on the page,

00:58:31the pen in your hand, being a slightly richer experience. It's more difficult as well. It's

00:58:36very easy to type. You could, roughly speaking, type everything I said to you right now.

00:58:43You'd get it all pretty much down. You can't do that with a pen and ink. You have to filter,

00:58:48you have to parse the ideas, you have to process them and paraphrase. And that gives you a much

00:58:54richer, deeper understanding of what you are actually listening to. You can type whatever I

00:59:01say without actually listening to what I'm saying at all. But to write it down, you have to paraphrase

00:59:06it, and therefore you have to actually interact with the ideas. So, this is why teachers and

00:59:11academics much prefer their students to write notes rather than to type them. So, those are a

00:59:16couple of answers. Do you think there's a marriage there that we can make work? I mean, I keep

00:59:21thinking about, you start the book with Moleskine, which is probably the first notebook most people

00:59:26think of when they think of notebooks. And Moleskine, for years, has been building digital

00:59:32tools. And they have a really beautiful calendar app. They have a really interesting journaling

00:59:38system. It's all very good. Nobody cares about it the way that they care about physical Moleskine

00:59:43notebooks. And, you know, there's this phase for a long time of like, maybe we're gonna do

00:59:49smart pens, where I'll write in a notebook, but it will transcribe it digitally. And now there are

00:59:55things that are like, okay, you can write with a pen, but it's on your iPad, and it will recognize

00:59:59the text and make something out of it. And it feels like we're poking at this thing where the

01:00:04act that you're describing, I think, is absolutely the best one. But having a notebook that is a

01:00:10bunch of words on a page that sits on my bookshelf waiting for me to do something with it

01:00:18feels like it's missing something. Like, there is a best of both worlds here that I think I

01:00:21desperately want to exist. And I don't know, maybe it just doesn't and can't and won't.

01:00:27But I am curious, do you think we can marry those two things?

01:00:31I'm not gonna say never. I've not seen it done yet, in a way, which I think some people that

01:00:39the Moleskine magic paper, the dotted paper, whatever, they make it work for them. And good

01:00:44luck. And that's great. And some people also managed to make those kind of posh tablets,

01:00:49the remarkable tablets, work in a similar way. And again, go you. Personally, I haven't ever

01:00:57managed to. Okay, last thing, and then I will truly let you go. Tell me just briefly about

01:01:03Moleskine and why you started the book with Moleskine. I want to end our podcast with Moleskine.

01:01:08Why is Moleskine so ascendant? What is it about this company and this thing that has made Moleskine

01:01:16the brand, the notebook, the thing in our sort of modern world?

01:01:21It's the complete refinement. She took, and I say she, Maria Segrebondi, who was the woman who

01:01:28conceived the Moleskine notebook, who took the very simple, basic notebook that we knew.

01:01:34She added to it, she added this little elastic strap, the pocket in the back,

01:01:38the little page at the front saying, if you find this notebook, please return it to.

01:01:43She added all of these things to a very minimal product, and she somehow made it seem

01:01:47even more minimal. And the analogy I make, she made it minimal and she made it black. And that

01:01:55was the most Italian thing you could do. It's like pair of sunglasses, Prada, little black dress,

01:02:00espresso. You know, that's what they do. They make it minimal and black.

01:02:04And she did that. And somehow she just, she tricked us, if you like. She fooled us. And

01:02:10thank God that she did. I wouldn't have written this book if it wasn't for Moleskine, I think,

01:02:13because she made us look again at this simple notebook and think of it as something which had

01:02:18some material value, that had some material beauty and was, could be there for inspiring

01:02:23in a way that your school exercise book couldn't be. So she's, from that point of view,

01:02:28she's my heroine creatively. She's also for me, a figure of all, because if you look at

01:02:34Moleskine's numbers, the company's numbers through history, that company's profit margin

01:02:40is ridiculous. It's like 43% profit every year, gross profit. And it's a manufacturing company.

01:02:46No company does that. You know, how did they do it? So I take my hat off to her and I can forget

01:02:53quite easily about all of the ridiculous collaborations with Evernote and Adobe and

01:02:57things like that. Yeah. Listen, you got to do some weird stuff.

01:03:00Because the key product is amazing.

01:03:02Yeah. Well, and to that point, actually, one of the things you say kind of as an aside in the

01:03:07book is that there are a million other notebooks that are like, they give you ideas and prompts

01:03:14and they put stuff inside and they're like, this one's for your recipes. This one is for your

01:03:18travels. And what actually turns out to be the case is nobody wants that. They want the blank one.

01:03:22Yeah.

01:03:22And I think that is like as a perfect metaphor for all of this,

01:03:26that just carries with me through the whole thing that like, you can make it,

01:03:30whatever you want, you can gussied up and people will want the blank one because then they can

01:03:33do what they want with it. And there's something very powerful in that.

01:03:37Yeah. Freedom.

01:03:38Yeah. I mean, that's the story of the notebook, right? It is permanence and it's freedom

01:03:42in very real ways.

01:03:43Lovely. Yes. I'll take that. Can I have that? Yeah, I'll take that.

01:03:49All right. We got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and take

01:03:52a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

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01:05:03All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email

01:05:08is vergecast at theverge.com. Please send us all of your questions. We have a couple of specific

01:05:13hotline-y things we're going to do in the next couple of months before the end of the year,

01:05:17so keep an eye on our socials. We'll mention it on this show, but all of your questions,

01:05:22send them to the hotline. We love it. This week, like I mentioned, we have something slightly

01:05:26different. We got a question that sent our producer Will Poore down a pretty wild rabbit

01:05:31hole inside the TikTok shop. So here, let me just play you the question, and then Will's going to

01:05:35take it away. Here we go. Hi, everyone. This is Sean from Ohio. I know that Nealey specifically

01:05:43hates CarPlay, but one thing I've been seeing pop up on TikTok a bunch lately is these CarPlay

01:05:51adaptable screens that they plug into your car somehow, and it's kind of like a retrofit for

01:06:00old vehicles to use CarPlay or Android Auto. I've been seeing them all over TikTok

01:06:04lately. I don't know if this is vaporware, if this is real, until the other day I saw one out

01:06:09in the wild in a car next to me, and I wanted to wave them down and ask them if it's good or not.

01:06:14So, wondering if you guys think they're good? Is this just crazy Timu technology or whatever?

01:06:21Anyways, love to hear your opinion. Thanks. Bye.

01:06:24So, I am the proud owner of a 2006 Toyota Prius, and I would love to have CarPlay. So,

01:06:31as soon as I heard this hotline question, I went on TikTok and I just searched for CarPlay screen,

01:06:37and I found exactly what our listener Sean was looking at.

01:06:41If you're like me and you have a much older car that you want to feel more expensive,

01:06:45you need this portable Apple CarPlay.

01:06:48Once you connect it to the CarPlay, it has your phone, your messages,

01:06:51all your different apps on there as well.

01:06:53And it's a great price. Don't sleep on this. Shop at the link below.

01:06:58You could save yourself hundreds of dollars.

01:07:00There are at least a couple of different models for sale on the shop.

01:07:05The one I saw the most was made by Hieha, H-I-E-H-A.

01:07:11It's a seven-inch color touchscreen.

01:07:13It comes with a couple of different mounting options for your car,

01:07:16and they throw in a backup camera.

01:07:19And all of that is $37, allegedly marked down from $120, which is a very suspicious markdown.

01:07:28I also found a lot of really similar listings for similar products,

01:07:32similar prices, similar markdowns.

01:07:35I've never bought anything on TikTok.

01:07:37It was all really overwhelming and all a little bit sketchy feeling.

01:07:42So, Sean, I completely understand your feeling of,

01:07:46is this real? Is this not real?

01:07:48You know, it all kind of reminded me of the, you know,

01:07:52page seven of an Amazon search result page for a gadget.

01:07:56But it's $37.

01:07:58That is an amount of money that The Verge can put on the line on your behalf.

01:08:02So I ordered it.

01:08:04Okay, I got my CarPlay screen in the mail.

01:08:09The brand on the box is UniUni, but it says from TikTok Incorporated.

01:08:16It came very quickly.

01:08:20Let's open it up.

01:08:22My first impressions of it, seven inches is actually a pretty big screen.

01:08:26It kind of has an iPad mini vibe to it.

01:08:29It seems solid enough.

01:08:31It comes with a power cable that goes out to a cigarette lighter,

01:08:35or it's a USB-C if you happen to have that.

01:08:38There's an aux cable that it comes with.

01:08:40It's got the backup camera and the wiring

01:08:43and two different suction or adhesive mounting options for your dashboard.

01:08:48The screen itself is kind of heavy and the mounts are pretty cheap plastic.

01:08:53So I was a little bit worried about how well it was going to mount stably to the dashboard.

01:08:58But I gave it a shot.

01:09:02Let's figure out where to put this thing.

01:09:07One tricky thing for me was just figuring out where to put it.

01:09:11Like my Prius has a screen and I need that for the existing backup camera

01:09:16and for AC and for other stuff that I don't have physical buttons for.

01:09:21So it needs to be a second screen that I put on the dash

01:09:25somewhere that is not going to block my view of the road

01:09:28or my view of the speedometer, etc, etc.

01:09:31Mounting itself turned out to be fine.

01:09:33The suction and the adhesive worked out well.

01:09:37And once I turned the car on, the screen worked fine.

01:09:42Okay, it's turning on.

01:09:44I've got options for CarPlay, Android Auto, phone link, and audio output.

01:09:49Setup was really easy.

01:09:51It was reasonably bright and responsive.

01:09:54I don't know.

01:09:55It was a little laggy, a little bit washed out.

01:09:58But again, $37.

01:10:00And for what it's worth, it is a ton better than my existing Prius screen.

01:10:05Head south on 30th Avenue Southwest towards Southwest Cambridge Street.

01:10:09I drove around with it for a while and

01:10:11I don't know, it did all the CarPlay things.

01:10:14Google Maps is amazing on a much larger screen

01:10:17if you're used to a phone that's in a holster on your dashboard.

01:10:21It was easy to see texts when I was parked.

01:10:23There's a lot of little perks to it.

01:10:26Audio was a little bit more complicated.

01:10:28It comes with a bunch of options to send audio.

01:10:32One, there's a standard aux jack,

01:10:34which for me means a long, awkward, snaking cable to the port in my car.

01:10:38You can use Bluetooth, which is just horrible on my Prius.

01:10:42So that's a no.

01:10:44You can send audio to FM radio,

01:10:45which I kind of love and is an amazing throwback.

01:10:49Or it does have an internal speaker,

01:10:52which is crappy, but it's actually fine for directions

01:10:56if that's the only thing you need the audio for.

01:10:57And the light, turn right onto 26th Avenue Southwest.

01:11:02And by the way, if you ever wanted to know

01:11:04what the Verge cast would sound like on FM radio,

01:11:06So, like I said, I drove around for an afternoon with it.

01:11:10And there were things I struggled with,

01:11:12but they don't actually have much to do with the device itself.

01:11:16The screen is cheap, but it's functional.

01:11:19But a couple of things stood out.

01:11:21The first thing is to get the most out of it,

01:11:24I would need to install it on my dashboard,

01:11:26and then I would need to install it on my phone.

01:11:28And then I would need to install it on my computer.

01:11:30And then I would need to install it on my laptop.

01:11:32And then I would need to install it on my computer.

01:11:34And then I would need to install it on my dashboard.

01:11:36And then I'd need to snake the power

01:11:38to the cigarette lighter in one part of the car,

01:11:41and then snake the audio cable to the aux port

01:11:44in another part of the car.

01:11:46And if I wanted the backup camera,

01:11:47I'd have to wire that to the brake light and to the screen.

01:11:51It's all just a lot of cable management.

01:11:54Like you're putting a screen in the car

01:11:56where there wasn't one,

01:11:57or in my case, finding a place for a second screen,

01:12:01which is all doable,

01:12:02but it's not something that TikToks show you

01:12:05because they're all trying to sell you this thing.

01:12:07Like if I did a TikTok review,

01:12:10100% of it would just be really awkward cable management.

01:12:14And then the other thing that I realized

01:12:17all at once as I was driving down the street

01:12:20is that, oh, wait,

01:12:21I live in a neighborhood where car break-ins

01:12:24happen kind of a lot.

01:12:26And I now have what looks like an iPad mini

01:12:29just sitting on my dashboard at all times.

01:12:31This thing 100% is going to get stolen at some point,

01:12:35which again is not a knock on the screen itself,

01:12:37and it might not be a concern for you where you live,

01:12:41but it's kind of a deal breaker for me

01:12:43because there's no way this thing is worth a broken window.

01:12:46So Sean, what are we to make of this thing?

01:12:50Well, at a really basic level,

01:12:53it does what it claims to do.

01:12:55I don't know how long it will last.

01:12:56It's certainly really cheap,

01:12:59but it all works.

01:13:00It gives you CarPlay in your car

01:13:02if you didn't have it before.

01:13:04And the rest of it is just up to you

01:13:06to make work with your car.

01:13:09For me, I've always been jealous of people with CarPlay,

01:13:13but now I'm faced with this question,

01:13:15is this actually better than just putting my phone

01:13:18in a holster on the dashboard?

01:13:20And I think my answer is no, honestly,

01:13:24but your answer might be different.

01:13:28All right, that is it for the Vertcast today.

01:13:30Thank you to everyone who was on the show,

01:13:32and thank you, as always, for listening.

01:13:34There's lots more on everything we talked about

01:13:36from all the Jake Paul Mike Tyson Netflix stuff

01:13:39to Roland Allen's book

01:13:40to all the stuff about the TikTok shop on theverge.com.

01:13:44I'll put a lot of links in the show notes.

01:13:45There are a lot of links this week,

01:13:47but as always, read theverge.com.

01:13:49It's a good website.

01:13:50And if you have thoughts, questions, feelings,

01:13:52or other good ideas of notebooks that I should buy,

01:13:55you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com

01:13:57or call the hotline 866-VERGE11.

01:14:00Again, we have some fun stuff coming

01:14:01for the hotline in the next few weeks,

01:14:03so keep an eye on our socials.

01:14:05Keep it locked here.

01:14:06We'll keep you posted.

01:14:07This show is produced by Liam James,

01:14:08Will Poore, and Eric Gomez.

01:14:10The Verge Cast is a Verge production

01:14:11and part of the Fox Media Podcast Network.

01:14:13Nealey and I will be back on Friday

01:14:15to talk about all the news happening this week,

01:14:18all the new gadgets, all the wild stuff with the FCC,

01:14:21and maybe we will have named show and tell by then,

01:14:24but frankly, I wouldn't bet on it.

01:14:26We'll see you then.

01:14:27Rock and roll.

01:14:31Support for the Verge Cast comes from Polestar.

01:14:34Polestar's first all-electric SUV, Polestar 3,

01:14:37is now on the roads across the US,

01:14:40and it's ready to make an impression.

01:14:42It's got a sleek aerodynamic exterior

01:14:44and a spacious, minimalist interior.

01:14:47Its custom-developed Android Automotive OS

01:14:49is totally integrated,

01:14:51made to enhance your driving experience.

01:14:53That includes an intuitive infotainment screen,

01:14:56smart voice controls, and over-the-air updates.

01:14:59And you can have Google turn on your favorite podcast

01:15:01whenever you want to be immersed

01:15:02in 3D surround sound by Bowers & Wilkins.

01:15:05See what else Polestar 3 has to offer

01:15:07when you test drive at your local Polestar space.

01:15:10Book yours today at Polestar.com.

If Netflix can't make live work, can anyone? | The Vergecast

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