037: The Future of Email — There is NO MAIL

So we're gonna start off with some promotion talk. Are you are you promoting us Adam? No, it's about your promotion You know this we talked about this. What am I promoting?

Oh your promotion? Oh, oh, yeah, you know, like you got promoted Yeah, I do new things. What can I say? That's what I meant by do you want to talk about this?

Oh, I mean, yeah, I guess I can we could just say that I got a new gig I'm at the same place of work, and I got a new gig I knew new things. So that's exciting I guess I mean I don't really know what else I could say about it of them to say like I Worked hard for this and now it now I get to try my hand at something new and I'm excited about it So, you know, it gives me I like promotions in the sense that like it gives you something else to work on and Something else to master. So I don't know. I'm excited.

Yeah, I just wanted to kind of bring it up So people can give you a virtual pad on the back saying good job blue people could work and yeah Like you said, it's something new something fun kind of pushes the boundaries of you know Your responsibilities and it to do something kind of different for a change and it's always nice So I just wanted to you, you know, bring that up and say congratulations a little give you the pad on the back and then say get back to work Oh, thank you. Thank you for that So yeah, one of the rare moments that I'm nice to you Yeah, it's it is rare. Let's be honest. I honestly think it's just like when we turn on the mic It's like okay now.

I'm gonna be mean but most of the time like I'm not that mean to you though. Yeah, not too bad It's okay So my my movie from from April, I guess I did watch it like I don't know I actually watched I think in time for last week's episode, but I just I guess we totally forgot to put it in But yeah, well, yeah, I totally forgot I was in the follow up and I was like oh I forgot to do the movie thing or the Simpson's Futurama thing But that was on my mind and then I I didn't even think of it because it was still talking to April It was April 28th last time so they'll be recorded so it was still April you still have like two days to get it done Yeah, if you haven't noticed I've been doing this Like end of the month things I don't know I think in the back half of the year I need to like step it up and bring it to the front of the month and find a way to you know get movies done before The last seven days of the week or the month, but yeah, so that's how it's the lambs Oh, man, I don't know where to where to start man. Oh, yeah, this so so yeah, I don't know It wasn't my thing. Let's let's uh, let's just start there and um, I don't know it was it was It really took a lot to keep my attention in this one man.

I was I was getting getting restless Uh, so I definitely was uh was kind of I don't know it wasn't it wasn't for me I could see how this is for some people the type of movie that it is the the the like the I actually thought like I could see where the public or the mass public in general could get excited about this This time of movie, but it just wasn't I don't know. What was it for me, man? I don't know. I would give it my uh, this is this for me is not is not them sideways This is thumbs down for me.

You know one the Oscar, right? Yeah. Well, the Oscars is uh voted on by a bunch of old white men So I don't really like the Oscars. Yeah, well the academy thought it was a good movie at a time and It it made you uncomfortable, right?

And that's the whole goal of basically this movie is to introduce a character that is Thoroughly uncomfortable to like interact with right or when you see him on screen You kind of get the heebie-jeebies, but he's not like a scary villain in the sense of you know a traditional scary villain, right? There's there's a lot of jump scares. He's more just, you know, he's very I don't know creeper is definitely, you know the way I would put it, right? But what's really funny is he's not even you know, the real villain of the entire, you know plot, right?

You still have the other guy who is equally as creepy, right? And uh, you know, I put this one in there because there are so many pop culture references in this movie Or just quotes that they take away and or quotes that people will use from the movie So it's it's important to see it just to know kind of The hand of electric quotes, right? It's like well, hello clairies, you know, and the whole it puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again, right? Like those are classic, you know, movie quotes that tons of people you know to this day continue to kind of use just in pop culture So I think it was a movie that you had to watch and like I said, these weren't gonna be the best movies But these are gonna be the movies that would just give you a crash course in pop culture And yeah, they were gonna be something you don't like and this is probably definitely one of them I knew it wasn't gonna be up your alley, but it's good for you to expose yourself to new things Lou So I have to ask though, what was your favorite part of the movie?

Uh, I don't know man. I think So this is gonna sound really bad, but I was most engaged in the first part of the movie So that first like I don't know 15 or 20 minutes I was fully pretty engaged and I saw that's what I'm gonna say I was probably like my favorite quote unquote part of the movie or whatever, but like I don't know if it was like one scene that like stood out for me but um but the That's where it's like it's tough for me because like this this one in general like so I can see what you're saying about it But the pop culture references and that's where I can like I guess I can tell you a movie like this is because now I will get the Cultural references if somebody drops, you know, a line from this. I'm like, okay. Yeah, I know what that's wrong But yeah, it's like it's like it's I don't know it like I said I was wrestling it in the point where I was just kind of like, all right This is jogging on or I don't I didn't really keep my attention enough to like make me want to just sit on the edge of my seat and keep watching Whereas something um, you know, like Ironman it did a much better job of that for me Like I I I felt like there was another action scene right around the corner or something like that and I was like, okay Cool, like this is going to keep me at the edge of my seat whereas this was like Well, and like I said, I loved you a bunch of softballs in the beginning too, right?

Okay, here, you know, here's a movie that I think you'll probably be entertained by and I did that with Ironman Because I thought you for sure would at least like that as an action adventure movie and yeah Know that there was something to keep you engaged and then you know one too It's like all right, here's me and girls which I know you said you like comedy So I'm just having to be you know kind of themed around Valentine's like those are the softballs like hey, you know Now we're warming up that man was kind of like one of the first ones like hey This isn't gonna be as action-packed as Ironman But it has more depth more things to pay attention to and it's just a different style of movie, right? And now we continue to kind of go down the train was like hey same thing This isn't gonna have a bunch of action. It's gonna be much more, you know, dramatize much more focused on dialogue and plot and just how Characters are interacting with each other and how the character development kind of goes So it's gonna be going down that road and this is kind of what I try to do is I try to you know Build it like your cycle bar workouts, right? Where you kind of start off slow and then you kind of build up to a hill and then you kind of start going down hill again, right?

Just to give you a little bit of rest and then you kind of build up again and then you go back down So you'll kind of see that with the movies too I try to at least give it a little bit of thought as to you know All right building you up to something that you probably would like because if I were to show you this movie like as the first movie You know like all right, we're not gonna do this anymore. This is stupid. I'm not gonna play, right? Yeah, that would have been tough as the first movie.

I've been like, oh god This year's gonna be the end of the death of me. Yeah, so like I said, I tried to at least build it up to where we keep you engaged and I know we have to get to your movie review. So I think we should do that But I think it's important to call it that this coming month is yesterday was made the fourth be with you So Star Wars day, so you have to watch Star Wars and you hope which is the very first Star Wars that they ever filmed So you need to watch that and yeah, so I have a question for you. What is the uh, I'm looking at the uh the outline here for this week and It says you've made an executive decision on uh, what what movie gets cut So I'm kind of curious what this executive decision is that the movie is and my fingers are crossed for Lord of the Rings Okay, so we'll get to that one a little bit um spoiler alert.

It's not that one Uh But so you have to watch Star Wars this coming month I think that's important, but in terms of science of the lambs So it was a movie that you didn't like or a movie that you appreciated or move that you liked I'll put it in those returns. Okay, so I uh, I personally didn't like it I appreciated for the pop culture references that if that makes any sense at all Um, I thank you for the pop culture. I get it and then I wouldn't watch this movie again Exactly. That's a precisely where it's at like I'm not gonna ever sit down and watch this again ever But at least I have some idea of what someone's talking about when they drop any of these points So that that that is I guess a net win.

Also, you learn some new dance moves, right? You learn that you can uh, talk up between your legs and then you know do a nice little dance from the camera Right. You remember that part? Yes.

Yes, I remember yeah, there you go. You can orify, you know You're you can orify Hillary with that one and just go out there and start quoting that And then tuck it in and then just go on to your little dance turn on the song and then then you get to sleep on the couch It's fantastic If if I'm gonna come clean loo doesn't dance so you know Hillary is probably like screaming at the podcast right now if you were listening Like yeah, he doesn't dance. So that's okay. That one happened But then you have to I mean this one it wasn't much of a dance, you know It was more just a little shimmy here and there but she's got to show off your uh your front patch, you know Uh, yeah, so anyway, yeah, so for me.

I mean if I'm sticking with my my like thumb routine, I guess The thumbs down is the thing for me there, but that's where it's like I don't know It's hard because the pop culture is good, but I'm definitely not watching the movie again Okay, here's another question. It's like why did they call the movie silence of the lambs? Uh, I don't know why was it was I supposed to know that answer? Well, if you're paying attention to the movie, I would hope you would know the the answer to that I guess I didn't pay attention enough So it was all Clarice she was she grew up on a farm, right?

And there were all these the sheep that were on there and the sheep would be you know bleeding in the morning And then all the sudden they wouldn't wouldn't be there anymore like she would hear this is happening when she was younger So It was you know just kind of like her being innocent and not knowing what was happening to these lambs Digging into this and you know showing how the signs of the lambs actually meant something right and it meant that the lambs were being slaughtered and That was kind of it's a whole point in the movie and much more prevalent if you if you watch in our paying attention a little things I can honestly say like I haven't watched the movie in a long time to dig into it, but there's a bunch of hidden hidden in you in there Okay, that's I mean, I guess I can see that but it's like yeah, I wouldn't have caught that at like first pass I mean, maybe if I watched the movie like a couple times or something I mean, you know how you watch a movie and you see something different a little bit, you know at different times That's kind of something I probably would have caught but like not on first pass Definitely didn't catch up to that and when you're not gonna watch this movie. So it's not gonna matter Yep, so I just had the Adam cheat sheet and I'm good. There you go. So my executive decision getting back to that Yes, I listened to the episode with you and john and we had mentioned that you know I would cut a movie or we would allow you to cut a movie to Make room for the hoarders episodes that you have to watch And you were waffling back and forth on which one you wanted to cut and then you and john were basically like oh I don't want to watch this one, you know and I was like no, no, that's when you have to watch.

Nope That's when you have to watch so since you haven't made a choice I I followed the executive decision card and said I know which movie that you're cutting And you're gonna cut snatch from the list. So you're you're not gonna watch snatch what genre was snatch snatching is like um I don't want to call it. It's it's kind of like a drama comedy, but it's very focused around like crime So it's from Guy Ritchie and Guy Ritchie does other movies like um, I mean I can't even think of Moxock and barrel There's a couple other ones, but basically what it is it's a British movie So It's all these characters who are basically going after this one, you know item They want to steal this one item or they kind of have all separate stories that all come together at one pivotal point So it's very much a the reason I wanted you to watch that one was to follow different stories and kind of appreciate how A bunch of different stories can be told around the same time that all focus on the same timeline But are being told separately and I'll interact with each other and then kind of all interweave together at one uh focal point or one climax of the movie Right, but I think I don't think you'll appreciate it as much as as I thought you would originally especially because you haven't even appreciated You know like what these other movies are offering so I'm gonna cut that one and then I'll pick out the hoarders episode You have to watch and I think that one's in June or July. I don't remember but you still have to watch Star Wars for me So we're good there.

Okay. Well, I was less concerned with Star Wars. Lord of the Rings was definitely my leaning No, man. You got to sit there and watch three We haven't even said if it's gonna be the extended edition or not, but you're gonna have to sit through three hours three plus hours of walking It's gonna be great.

Fuck fuck fuck It's the best movie ever But yeah in between those three hours, you know like a good two or three minute, you know Soundbites that you have to pay attention to to get the fuckles references. So All right, all right, so uh snatches gone so in a little bit of follow up We also are you through in here that we uh we didn't talk about VPNs at all last week when we're talking at All of the encryption right are the 50,000 foot encryption. So I guess I should ask do you use a VPN I just VPN to my home connection and go out from there Which let's say isn't the most secure way to encrypt all of my traffic, but it at least encrypted when I'm out in public So I trust my ISP more than I trust, you know Starbucks Wi-Fi I'm not calling out Starbucks Wi-Fi, but just any public Wi-Fi So I have a Mac mini here that runs a VPN server and I'll just VPN tunnel through that So I think it's funny because I want to step back and just say like when we talk about encryption I know you mentioned a couple of times like encrypted and transit and encrypted at rest, right? So when we were talking about this, we focused heavily on the privacy aspect and the data aspect Which was just kind of like your data, you know What you're doing what you have physically or what you have stored on your computer But we didn't really talk about like anything in transit And we kind of touched on a little bit with with mail and talked about SSL But uh we didn't we didn't touch on like the VPN aspect So you have VPN basically encrypting all of your traffic So no one around you can basically snoop in on what you're doing So I think that was important just to kind of call out as hey We didn't forget about VPNs.

We still know that they're very important in this the whole encryption scheme Because that is essentially encrypting all of your your transactions, right? Or all everything that you are sending out or receiving from another place So I think it's important to just kind of sit out there like we didn't forget And we'll talk about it more when we do part two Got it. Uh, did you do you ever find uh VPNs are blocked on uh public connections? And if so, do you just not use them?

If I you know sign in and then I try to turn on the VPN and then it doesn't work I'll be like, okay, well, I guess that's not happening and I'll disconnect and use LTE over VPNs, whatever But there's not much that I really need to do like usually the places that I go, the The Wi-Fi that I go to I kind of stick to reliable and when I was you know traveling the funny thing There's like you're on airport Wi-Fi. Yeah, good luck trying to turn on VPN there Like that was uh, that was like hit or miss no matter where we were Like some airports are like, this is fine. No problem. Other airports are like, no That's that's not gonna fly.

Oh, come on Just open up those ports like no one cares No, it's trying to hack anything over those ports just open the ports And I guess I could use like an SSL VPN like I could just set up, you know Just a regular old vanilla SSL VPN, but That's more work And when I just want to you know, like check my email it could wait it can wait like at home Got it. Um, have you ever paid for one? No, never Frugal atom frugal atom Dude, if I can roll it on my own like, yeah, I'm not gonna pay for it and granted like I said This is also going through my ISP So fuck knows like what kind of things that they're looking at through my connection But I trust them more than I trust, you know, the the crazy people around me like if I ever went to a convention, right? You know, like people talk about going to like hacker conventions like that's like God It's like just never ever ever ever ever connect to a public Wi-Fi at a hacker convention because you're just asking for it Uh, but yeah, I just I don't trust that people around me I'll use VPN, but I don't need it to be like super secure and Mask where I'm from like it can still say I'm from the US like that's fine I don't care.

All I want is to make sure that people around me can't sniff the traffic Got it. And are you running this through a Docker container or some other setup? That's not like to do list. It's a roll it into a Docker container Um, right now just when you set that up send me that Docker container.

Yeah, also do the game will configuration file So you can deploy it on your own. Hey, man, you know, you know, I'm one thing I'm really good at You know directing others to give me those things What's funny is like you're directing me to do it. I told you it was on my list like, oh, hey Can you just do you see me that on that when you're done? It's exactly when you're done.

Do you mind just copying that and sending it right over? I don't have to worry about that That's a work smarter not harder thing, right? Like let someone else make that against the wall a little bit So same thing with a logic type of man That's why I was so mad when you know you said that thing because I was like no no I set up the template. I set up everything There was a reason I spent all this time on this template and gave you the template Yeah, yeah, and then I just give you something else to do I don't right.

You just keep adding to my my personal development category and things Oh, just just wait till you're running on me focus three and I can Raise you with just sending you shared tasks I'm not going to accept any shared tasks from you and on the focus three I mean, maybe one or two But if you start sending me stuff because I think you have to accept it, right? Why don't you want to tell me that is like I have to actually say like yes Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's accepted It's like a a handshake thing between the two databases It's a permission and I'm just gonna slap your hand away like no that is not happening Docker container for this Docker container for that Decline declined decline declined rewrite website for this do this Yeah, yep Too funny too funny. So this week we're gonna dive into email a little bit and Man, this is this is gonna. This is gonna be interesting I'm actually a little A little excited about this one because I think it could go a lot of ways really fast But um, so email Adam Give me the like quick and dirty on your email setup like how many email addresses are we talking about?

How many do you primarily use what's what's your setup look like? So as far as I go, I only have What is three emails that I check regularly and Those are the only email addresses I have but the only ones that I check are those three Now I have a bunch of email addresses that are kind of like jump ones That I use just to kind of filter through email and I have only forward means select things So I have a bunch of those but I only check actively check three accounts. Okay, so three accounts So I uh, I guess if we're gonna say actively check I have four accounts on my um, foam that I that I can check but I have my email and pretty good lockdown So there's not a whole lot coming in but um So I kind of have a little funny story. I should probably get this off my chest early because uh, you're gonna you're gonna laugh at this but um For a long time I had, um, you know, a Gmail account and um, the Gmail account was not my preferred Uh account in the way that it wasn't consistent with all my I guess you could say my branding Most of my stuff is just my first name and my last name so it's not anything personal and um And so what uh what this Gmail account was was it wasn't that it was different And so I was really really annoyed that Gmail said that somebody had my first name and last name Which I guess for most people probably is like a given that hey, you know They're the first and last name is taken but for me, it's pretty rare So, um, I wasn't happy and I um, I don't know for like a year I kept checking and just they said no, no, it's taken it's taken and so I got really mad one day and I was like, you know what?

Fuck this. I'm gonna go reset the password to this this account that that you know first and last name at gmail.com and I was like Reset password. Okay, cool. Type in, you know, the count you want to reset the password for click here Okay, we've sent a email to this other email to reset your password.

Fuck. That's my account I own that account. That's a different email account. I own so I had this email account the entire time And I didn't know I had my own name at gmail.com Oh my god So I had said it up like years ago and I didn't know I had it and like it just said it to one of my other accounts And I was like damn it So now I have two gmails and like one is like kind of like my red-headed subchild one and then the other ones like consistently the same with all my other ones Just forward all your email to that your vanity and then uh set your reply to you and that to your vanity until everyone like this mail will go away Go and use this one for now on I can't believe it because I remember you actually telling me about this whole gmail thing Like I want this and I don't have it and this is the one thing that doesn't match all my other things and I'm like, uh-huh-huh Like primary river like it's world's time is violent here and come to find out that you on the email view had the entire time It's probably like 13 year old blue that didn't use a password manager.

I was just like, oh, no That's great, man. That's fantastic. Yeah, that's that's pretty much exactly how it went probably I was like, you know, I mean this was like, you know, when you were still like so on top of everything and you would be like You wanted to like Claim your spot, you know, you had to do it at some point and so you were like, you know what? I'm gonna go to this website and I'm gonna get my name in I probably did that and just didn't know didn't use it enough Still using your classic Yahoo email like all my girls know my yahoo email So all my peeps know me.

They don't find me on on aim. So wait, wait a minute. Wait a minute. We should we should definitely go down this alley So what what embarrassing email Uh, do you have that you don't use anymore?

I assume you have some sort of embarrassing email that you don't use anymore It was like your childhood email. Oh snap. So yeah, definitely So I had a couple and mainly they were all for ale instant messengers So I would usually just set up like burner yahoo accounts for them and I don't really have any of them anymore But if you look at my site name, you know how it's like Adam and then blank BMX, right? So blank BMX was like a thing that I was doing like in high school with a couple of my friends That was kind of like our BMX crew, you know, like we were That's what we'd you know, the moniker we would use when we'd ride around um, so I definitely had A couple emails centered around around that and the other one I have and I don't even care if I call it out But yeah, so one of the guitars that I have like one of my favorite guitar brands is a checter So it's kind of like kind of the same as my last name or similar to it So I had checter 172 at yahoo.com and that was like my go-to for like, you know, years and years and years until I realized it I should probably be a grown-up and use uh, you know first last name because putting checter 172 at yahoo.com on a resume doesn't look too good so Yeah, yeah, that that's the sort of same thing happening, right?

You know, so yeah, I don't mind calling mine out and mine is definitely worse than yours Um, so I man I wish this this should be like an icebreaker activity at like, you know, like oh god You like you just get a bunch of people together and you're like, okay, cool. We need an icebreaker activity. All right, name your childhood email um, so My okay, so my dad had a bunch of friends and his friends ended up This is like in the 90s and his friends ended up calling him big daddy. So when I came along Naturally, I wanted to take after my dad because like any kid.

So what did I start calling myself? Little daddy So guess what my first email was it was daddy lu at yahoo.com little daddy 122 at yahoo.com or 22 at yahoo.com. I don't remember but it was some number after it But yes little daddy and I'm pretty sure it was 22 or or 122 at yahoo.com Yeah, man old old screen names are the best like because I remember there was one time, you know I had this metal band and When you're doing a metal band and you like stumble upon like a really good name It's the kind of same thing we're running into for the podcast over like we find this name Oh, this name is so awesome Then you find out there's another band in San Diego. This other same genre that already has that name I'm like son of a bitch can't use that name now So you have to think of another one So what I think like one of the bands we have a civil unrest and that was like the first one that we did and then after that It was um, I mean we went through so many weird names etched in blood was one of them like what the hell and then uh Uh, what was the other there's another one?

Um, I can't remember the other one now. It was gonna piss me off, but yeah, I had a lot of band name ones And they were you know etched in blood seven or like, you know Civil unrest three four two or it's some stupid number around it or you start capitalizing stuff or putting x's in front of it I remember that was a big thing, right? So like lowercase x capital x lowercase x Insert screen name lowercase x capital x lowercase x right. Oh, so good Yeah, it was just a way to like pillar the screen name on either side or you know it was like, oh, yeah, man Oh, all right.

So now that we got through that wretched past, uh, so I guess I would say Do you like email as a medium? Do you not like email as a medium? I mean, I think this is like personally speaking not my favorite medium, but I'm kind of curious I I see email the same way I see I saw the recovery casing from last time So right it's like a necessary evil like it needs to be there like it has a place in the world But do I like using it? No, I I would prefer other methods mainly because we'll get into this a little bit, but it's just so integrated There's it's very very dumb and there's not a lot of features Not a lot of great things you can use, but god It's so damn accessible like you can anyone can have an email and you can send anything you want to email and god It's just get it everywhere.

So It's it's one of the things where it's so widespread that the accessibility of it makes it almost a necessity To have just in your toolbox, but there's so many better messaging platforms out there in terms of security in terms of feature set But it has to be there, but I don't like it. Yeah, it's uh, I understand what you're getting up there It's it's it's kind of a necessary evil, but I I don't know man. I um, I like it in some ways In some ways I really like that it is a very passive medium and There's a lot of times I need to send an email to somebody and I don't need to get a hold of immediately It's not time sensitive and so email is is really really nice And so I think about some of the other contact methods we have today and most of them are extremely instant You know, I mean I can basically you get someone's phone to light up right now and get back to me and Email's one of those ones that that isn't the case and I kind of like that and I kind of would say if email is gonna ever go away It's got to be replaced by something similar But that's just a problem with thinking in society, right? Where you send an SMS to somebody and that's like the world is ending, right?

Or you pick up the phone and call somebody now the world is ending so having these like zones, right? And that's a big thing when you talk about like productivity and in terms of just sorting through massive amounts of information Right, you have all these these different zones to check and things that are world-ending and need to be answered right away Things that can wait 10 to 15 minutes and things that you can get to at your leisure And I think email, you know, kind of just fell into the yeah whenever I get to a type thing But when email was first there, it's like, oh my gosh, you know, this email is fantastic I can send something and immediately have it appear on the other side of the planet And that was the preferred method of communication, right? So I think the reason you like it is just because it's about to, you know, kind of fall off into the edge of existence Where it's like, yeah, it's you know, when you send an email the great thing is like it'll be there You know and people can check it whenever and there's no way to know if they read it and there's no way to know if it actually delivered to their inbox And there's there's no way to know all of these things But because it's so old and it hasn't, you know, kind of grown with the times It's become everyone's like last resort, you know, I'll check it when I get to it type of type zone So I think that's that's just kind of a side effect of it not evolving So I think the reason you like it is because it's so antiquated Yeah, there are definitely things I think we could do better with some of the other mediums Because you're totally right that a lot of the other mediums are a lot richer And there's they offer a lot more but and they're best way better on security But the the notification, you know, sort of instantaneous response that is associated with SMS or that Style chat, you know, kind of communication is something that I think society needs to find a better way to handle because There needs to be still ways I can get a hold of you You know, for example, if I need to get a hold of you ASAP I need to be able to get a hold of you ASAP some way But there there needs to be a way when you send a message to somebody to say like hey This isn't urgent or whatever, you know, and then it doesn't necessarily need to ding their phone right now You know, it can just be a little bit more passive So I don't know if that would be like just a toggle switch or something like that But that's for someone else to figure out not for me Well, and email already had all those things in there, right? They had high priority and low priority and they had all these things kind of built in and yeah SMS the problem like you said is with society everyone treats SMS like the end all be all But in reality, it should be the phone call, right?

That's the one thing that is still needs to be instantaneous. There is no way to Avoid a phone call, right? In that medium you have to pick up the phone to in order to initiate the conversation with the message It's a push-pull system, right? It's not a live feedback system So live feedback is still like your oh shit.

Things are shitting the fan I need to talk to person right now. You call them, right? That's how it goes and text message I think people treat that as a replacement for phone or that's what people are trying to do The whole anti-social generation myself included would much rather, you know, deal with the text message than deal with the phone call But I think that and this is kind of getting off topic But I think that that whole zone just needs to be kind of rethought out and say like hey If someone says me an SMS like maybe it just won't turn on the notifications on the lock screen And then just when I unlock my phone, I'll have you know five text messages or four SMS's or whatever You know, maybe and I can just check them at my leisure Rather than my phone going off in my pocket and me having to check it If my phone starts ringing in my pocket, then hey, like something's happening But same thing with phone calls, right? You have spam and a bunch of other stuff So I think that kind of leads us nicely into the next thing which is we know emails antiquated So how do we how we fix it?

Like what do we need to fix about email? Right. Well, I think the one that really irks me is I guess I would say of the list we've written here That the first two irk me but they kind of go hand in hand which is spam and unsubscribing from email I don't know about you, but I won't give anybody my email Like I don't have junk emails. I don't have like a you know Oh, I go to you know some store Nordstrom and they want my email So I'm gonna give it to them and then they're gonna, you know, give me an ad in my email every day Because I haven't been to their website today.

I won't give it to them It's not worth it to me and like I kind of throw this around like like as a joke sometimes But like I don't think people take me as seriously as I am about it Look unless you're gonna give me like $100 or $500 or something like that It's not worth the crap that I'm gonna have to go through to just get you off my unsubscribe list and or to get a subscribe from you And God knows what you're gonna actually do with my email I mean, you know, maybe a nice upstanding business won't do anything nefarious with it But you know give it to some random person and they go out of business and they sell their contacts list and make money from it And then I'm on 35 other email list So yeah, I don't I don't know like I get probably less than 10 emails a day from my primary email address And every one of them is like legitimate and so I think Rethinking unsubscribing and I'm gonna put like advertising in the spam category is like huge I don't know how we do that, but I think those are huge hurdles to overcome today So I can tell you how I fix this just in today's system So one of the nice things with like iMap right is they let you choose alias it's for your email Right where you can say like here's my email and then here's my email plus like an alias and then something else at whatever.com So if my email was adam is awesome If I wanted to be like all right all my spam goes to or the email address I give out the spam people is adam is awesome plus spam at whatever.com Basically when they send that I'd be able to filter them off of you know that alias It would still come to my my email, but I would be able to be filtered out of that alias because they're sending to that you know That's um that address which is easy to filter off of so I have a I call them burner emails But in reality what they're for is All of these shopping pages right So I have like a my last name shopping at gmail.com And that I have a last name shopping plus notify edgmail.com and basically anything that has the plus notify means that it should be sent to my email So I set up a filter to basically say hey If it matches this alias alias then forward it to my real email address and then I'll actually view it there But if it doesn't then market is read and throw it in the book this box If it doesn't contain like order number or shipped or whatever don't even bother sending it to me So I kind of use this quote-unquote po box right to kind of just hold all this mail and only filter out what I actually want So I agree that there needs to be a better way to fix this, you know Because the workaround that we have is pretty clugey, but I think that's an easy way to do it is just set up a burner email and use aliases to kind of direct Mail to your real address and kind of keep that sacred I think email and I mentioned this you know in our last episode like email is the perfect You know monitor the perfect name for what this technology actually is It's just taking mail that used to get in your mailbox right and making it electronic electronic mail So all of the bad things that went with mail too right getting mailers getting junk, you know Getting whatever when you sign up for said service all translate over to email and since it's not digital It doesn't cost anything to you know do right rather than putting a stamp on something Everyone sends spam. So I think it's I guess my question is is Do you think that you know your sort of alias setup? Is that like a band-aid solution for the problem though? Is that not like to me?

That seems like a um, You know, it's it's a way around the problem Don't give you wrong, but are we not addressing the root cause of the issue of the first place that spam is prevalent huge And like you said it for all intents and purposes, it's free to send an email so you know it costs nothing So you know, either some improvement of server side rules or or you know Just rethinking how you can unsubscribe and it actually does work you get your name moved off a list or something like that Do you think anything needs to change that way? So I think I agree. Yes myself as a workaround and I kind of mentioned it's a very cluedy work around It's not an official way to fix this problem And it may be controversial what I'm going to say But much like we have a do not call registry and a unsubscribe from all advertising email lists that you can apply to as a citizen in the United States Right you can basically say like hey, I'm this person. I live at this address I don't ever want to see any marketing any you know, junk mail any advertising email at all I don't want to see that address to me at this address and you can register on there for like a certain number of years Right you can do it with a do not call and you can do it with the the mail I found the junk mail one if you actually apply for that one that one actually does a really good job at filtering out stuff because Much easier to track, you know, like say hey, you cannot send mail to this individual rather than you cannot call this person Which all the robots go out there and call you anyway?

And there's not really a good way to track all of that But I think there just needs to be a better way to enforce and say like hey, like I don't want spam I don't want advertisements like I do not want them on here And I treat spam and unsubscribe as totally different because spam is spam, right? BAM is someone just going to send you something when you had no interaction with this at all That's what I consider spam, right? If you signed up for a mailing list, that's different that goes with the unsubscribe thing But spam itself There should be no way for a company to send you something without your consent or explicitly signing up for it And that includes like a list that you subscribe to sending your email to someone else So I think that if we had something similar to what we do with junk mail in the mail world, right? Where basically it's a law saying like you cannot send this to this person Then that would help eliminate spam That gets into a whole other discussion of email being a personally identifiable thing that Traces back to one individual and you can technically only have like one primary residence or one primary email So it gets into a bunch of murky water there But staying away from all that, I think if there was a way to basically apply to a list and people would have to Respect this list and if they didn't they would be fined a bunch of money, right?

But how do you enforce that into the world? Fuck if I know that's not my job to figure out. I just think that would help Okay, yeah, so spam is an interesting one I know we're kind of supporting here as a definition of spam But I understand your definition and I totally agree with it 100% I don't know, there's a degree at which I also think it is responsible for a company to communicate with you That you even did give explicit permission to and I wish there was a little bit more like granular setting Sometimes either email side or or the companies had to allow where I mean, you know, you've probably been on these lists where it's like some companies have given their email and They're literally emailing you like twice a day or three times a day And you're like are you kidding me right now? Like, you know, I'm getting 90 emails a month from you because you you're just Bagging me to go to your website and look at something It's like when I gave you my email I didn't I never give my company an email with the expectation that I want them to email me Maybe any more than once a week or something like that Like if it's more than that, man I am I am hot diggity damn unsubscribing from your your shit because I don't want it But you know, I that's where I think there needs to be some more granular controls over things like that And so that's why I consider even a company I give my my explicit consent to like email me To be you know, just garbage if they're emailing me that often because no different than like if I didn't check my mail for a week And I go check my mail and I don't know like credit card offers These are the common like, you know, mailers we get the words like how many considered jump mail from from actual physical mail Is like if I had seven credit card offers from Chase, I would be like it's been a week really You guys are gonna send me seven of these and they're also the same thing essentially like no no I'm I'm so done.

That's so like just tasteful I don't ever want to do business with you again But what you don't understand is those are all from actually different sections like different departments different this different that But that comes that stems to you know or goes down to a problem just how companies organize and how they manage, you know Sending email which I agree right some mailing lists are horrible And they will actually you know, people will say they will spam you right it's not necessarily spam in the way that I consider it spam Right, but yeah mailing lists are pretty atrocious and unsubtribing for mailing lists has actually got a lot better And because they basically said, you know, they passed laws saying like hey if someone clicks unsubtribe in an email They have to be able to unsubscribe from your mailing list within two clicks Right, they can't say unsubscribe and I think it's actually supposed to be even just one like once you click unsubtribe in an email list It's like, okay, cool. We're removed from this list, you know And if it's if you didn't mean to this and you can click this to you know undo it But there there I believe has been legislation passed away If someone sends you that you should be able to unsubscribe within one click And to your point a lot of them do offer, you know, pretty granular controls like hey I want to be notified for account related issues only like if my password, you know is reset or Whatever, but I don't want product announcements. I don't want you know, exciting special offers Like I don't want that kind of stuff all I want is account related emails and most companies now Basically give you that if it's a mailing list that you signed up for So if you've ever clicked on subscribe on a mailing list, it's it's really funny to see how those granular controls are actually there And you can really find see what you want to do I think one thing we're kind of avoiding here that I kind of want to just jump to if you're okay with it Is the idea of like you mentioned server side filtering of spam is spam filters, right? Or even mailing list filters like now there are tons of features out there They basically kind of hide this from your inbox, right?

So where you still get all this crap, but we just don't show it to you right away Like you have to actually dig to find it. What do you think of that? Yeah, I don't know I mean, I wish more email companies to this instead of having to a lot of times I feel like at least right now We have to go as far as like You know third party solutions and I don't really see why we need to go third party It doesn't really seem like we should have to go third party to sort of get these solutions And when I say third party, I mean things like same box and and so on and so forth And I want to like to be totally honest. I haven't really used any of those I just think the The rules that are in place for server side stuff from most companies today is pretty like elementary still It doesn't go deep enough far enough But I think it could go a lot deeper And it's pretty clear from companies like same box that could and if companies wanted to invest the the time to do that Man email would be a hell of a lot better to just um zip there on the day to day So, you know, that's kind of where I stand on it.

I really hope this is kind of a changing area over the coming years Yeah, so I think with all those things right We're mentioning all the band is all the workarounds all the things that you can kind of do and the companies have tried to do To make email better And I think the problem is a lot of people's email is a productivity tool Right, it's like, hey, you know, if someone's sending you an email It's something you might need to take action on Something you might have to do like right away, but it's a good way to archive a lot of things that you need to do And a lot of people will use especially like at work right at companies they'll use email As a form of productivity or as a form of record keeping And you know as we kind of keep that in mind I think it's funny how we start mentioning all these things that would be nice to have an email Right and we'll touch on more of those in a little bit But I think it's keep that in mind as we get kind of further into this because I want to come back to the product of the aspect of it Um, but yeah, so I'm subscribing I think There needs to be a better way to Globally manage all of the subscriptions you have like I think it would be amazing But I say hey, here's my email Show me all of the companies that have this email and what they can send to me And this kind of goes with the whole do not send me email list thing right is that there's a way to say like this is my email You know I verify that this email is mine by you know sending an email and confirming then I get access to let's say this portal And in the portal I have every company that has registered to send email to my email address And in there they have to list what they can send it for right? You know how companies will send you like letter saying like hey, you know, these are your privacy options And this is what you can opt out of you know I would love a digital form of that for my mailing list But I can say just go down the list and say oh, I don't remember signing for this one No, I don't want to see any of their email Nope, I don't want to see any of this one's email But having a one-stop shop for that will be awesome because right now you're you know Fighting a hydra right you're chopping off one head and two more pop up later, right? You're you're constantly fighting this monster trying to get this mailing list kind of tuned to where You're receiving what you want to receive and if you miss one god Help you or if you actually go to a place and sign up again and they reset those, you know permissions like oh my god You have now just open the floodgates of mailing list emails again So I think that would be a a cheap way to fix it Like I said there are probably a bunch of things about security and having everything stored and registering with you know This central authority would have to manage all these things, but fuck I don't know I'm just throwing out ideas. Yeah, so one of the hacky things I do and I mean I feel like this episode is going down the the path of hacky, you know band-aid solutions is I have a rule that looks for The word unsubscribe in any mail and when it's in there I can say move to trash So that's a you know like a trivial hack that does work without any sort of you know premium subscription, but Man it just it further underlines like the tools aren't aren't uh, you know sophisticated enough to really support what we really need to do today Yeah, for sure and that's a good one anything that says unsubscribe, you know Give you a little more visibility to those type of things So um the other thing I want to talk about is identity and I kind of touched on this earlier But I mentioned how you know we could all have like 50 different emails and I have you know We have four different emails we have all these different emails, but you know when you and I compare this to you know Kind of the real world which the digital world is much different from the real world Yes, I know but when I move somewhere like they say I hate I live here and if someone sends email to you know Or sorry not email, but mail to my old address and I'm not there and someone else is there Well, crap, you know, that's not cool because that person could open my mail or hopefully the post office You know redirects it, but old concept of identity and email There there is none really right anyone can own email.

I mean look at you ludaddy or a little daddy 122 uh, you didn't even know you had come until you actually went reset the password But there was no way to really tie that back to an individual There's no way to say, you know, this email belongs to so-and-so and we have that with domains and we have ways of masking that with domains But there is no concept of like a one-to-one identity with an email address And I think as we move towards you know quote unquote fixing email right or trying to fix all the things wrong with email I think this is something that kind of needs to play into it It needs to be like hey, I own this email This is my email and there needs to be a way to verify that and right now We haven't really touched on digital identities and what that means in the modern world But I think that's going to be a pretty big thing especially as we move to you know more records being digitized and stuff like that is You having a digital identity and people not being able to impersonate you or steal your you know identity Once it's digital and let's say we talked about encryption last little kind of tie that in it Let's say you have you know the key to your identity and this is your key And this is the way to prove that you are you much like your birth certificate and social security card, you know, prove who you are with with the government I think we're going to at some point have to tackle that whole digital identity issue And I think email is going to be one of the things that benefits greatly from that right sending it to someone that hey I want to send to you so-and-so and it's like okay Well, so-and-so has this email and you can verify that this is so-and-so. It's like cool I want this to only be readable by so-and-so and that gets into the encryption thing as well All right, great. We know that so-and-so's encryption key is this here's you know a key to send it We will make sure that only they are able to read it, right? I think something like that would be a great way to quote-unquote fix email because once you Know that you're sending it to a certain person You can send you know more secure things that way you can have more faith in the system And it will probably cut down on some of the people like trying to send to people and accidentally getting spam Right if you have a popular email and let's say a lot of people have your first and last name And you're the one person to get your first and last name So I'm fat fingers and email address and sends it to you My mom used to get that all the time because she had her first name at the ISP that she was uh She was contracted with and people would send her email all the time like actual legit email Like asking questions and asking for you know, hey, you know, or for this Saturday Or hey, can you look at this draft for this resume or like hey, can you do this stuff?

But little did they know they weren't sending it to the right person So I think that's something that's gonna have to be looked at at some point in time I'm sorry. I just totally like just spewed identity nonsense on the on the podcast. So my apologies No, I think it's a valid concern and I mean I think there there might be multiple ways to Go about you know something like like this. Yeah, I mean you can solve this problem through Some sort of verification system, you know, like I think about things like Twitter You know, they use a verification system that might work or I think about this in the way that you could You could do something like this and I've always kind of wanted something like this I just I know it would be tough to implement and and you could argue people like Facebook or maybe trying to do something like this But in a very slimy way, but like a giant LDAP database for like the entire world In a way that you could sort of just have a contact card that Could be different for different people So that it doesn't have the same information on every card for everybody and You could revoke someone's access to your contact card at any point in time and you could update things at any point in time And it would just update on their phone, you know, just essentially You know, push down to everyone's phone and and off it would go I just think it would be like super useful and it would be a way to essentially verify you are you because You know, I could see a way where a company like that could then, you know, send an email to that email and say You know, you need to be able to click the link in that email to Even add this to your you know, your account or something like that You want like the white pages for the world, you know Kind of but like I still wanted to be semi-private in the sense that like you could request someone's contact card and say hey like You know, I want Adam's contact information and Adam you probably you know, like I mean that your contact card for You know, your wife, you know, that she has in her phone is different than the contact card that I need You know what I mean?

It's like I don't know it might have a nickname or a birthday or or something like that That I'm like you're like Lou doesn't need to know that information And so you know where Lou doesn't need to know this address or my relationship with my mom or you know I mean like there's just like link things that aren't necessary and being able to kind of grant someone that access would be like hey Limit the information I see. I don't know. I think it would be useful I think they've already started working on stuff like that, right where you can have your contact card and in your contact card You can specify things that are like hey, this is public or this is private or this is You know something that can get shared and this is something that cannot I think they've started working on on stuff like that I'll have to kind of dig into something and see if I can find where that is But I believe there already are some extensions to the existing vcard format where you can have things be public or private Or you know, shareable or not shareable So when you you know share a contact card out, you can include what to send and it's kind of you know goes into what you're saying But rather than having to manually send it out people can you know, just pull what they want to Kind of having a visible profile, but yeah, I think the whole online identity thing Especially when it comes to emails just another way to fix it, right? Because if you know who you're sending it to and people know who they're sending it to I think there's just more accountability and that goes for like corporations sending email to you, right?

So if Macy sends you an email, I know you said example earlier, right? You can know that it came from this Macy's and this is which Macy's it came from which department? This is the person who signed you up not the person let's say but like the store that signed you up But this is the action that got you basically signed into this mailing list And I think something like that right being able to track your identity and track the history of how your identity is being used by others Will be very beneficial. So the last thing I have in here that I put in for just how do we fix email is the clutter And I put this in here because clutter isn't as big of an issue as it used to be Especially with things like searching and now that digital storage is super super cheap And they seem to give you just a look at loads of it nowadays And especially with like namely Gmail, right?

Gmail came up with a concept of not deleting email But archiving it which I'm not a huge fan of especially when we talk about spam and mailing list and stuff like that Like that shit is trash. I don't want that, you know, ever appearing again like I want that stuff gone So I guess the question is how do we fix the clutter and I'll tell you my little workaround So I only archive things that I need to reference another time or that came from individuals, right? So I'll archive all of my Rental you know correspondence with my my property manager or you know correspondence with like Amazon products You know orders and receipts things like that But if I get like a mailing list like hey check out these cool things And let's say something that I'm actually like I'm subscribed to and I'm actively subscribed to so I actually want to see this And I click on it I will delete that and delete goes to the trash and my trash empties after 30 days So I only archive the stuff that I want to reference at another time And otherwise I could care less or I couldn't care less I would I don't want to see some of those emails ever again So I trash them. I'm curious kind of what you do or how you think we can fix email clutter Because that's the way I am is so like to be archiving things But that's a kind of has a lot of overhead to it So when I say I'm really light with email, I'm really light with email So in my main account or even like let's just say collective accounts So all accounts have right now in the inbox five emails If I'm looking at all four email addresses at the same time And when I look at subfolders, there's really only the one account that has subfolders And it's got a just kind of like almost like all this like a temporary or triage folder I just call it important And if I have something like thing tickets or something I need to save or hang on to a warranty or something like that That might be pertinent It goes into the important folder And then everything else gets deleted red deleted.

I don't archive anything So In that right now is one two six seven eight Okay, 12 things are in the important folder right now 12 messages So What they're like 18 emails to my name right now. It is it is really scarce I definitely don't keep anything around everything else just thrown in trash and it gets deleted I have my side at 30 days just to say like oh my god, I deleted something I need to go back and get that but that's about it See, that's a problem is like I have to go back and reference like Rental documentation at the end of the year and I want that sitting in like a folder because I also do something like you right all flag something Or I use kind of a label system for mine. I don't use subfolders. I only have the inbox and archive That's it.

I kind of got away from the whole stuff folder thing because it wasn't worth it But I guess the question comes to is These are all systems that we're doing manually, right? Like we're just saying trash this trash that is do you think there's a better way to kind of address the clutter Do you think that something like let's say someone's sending you an email and this email if it doesn't have like if it's not high priority Or it's not this or it doesn't have a certain flag set that it just expires after 30 days automatically Or if it does have a cell like hey, this is important We need you to see this If there's a way to negotiate that or basically say hey anything from these contacts like I want to make sure it goes to an archive Anything outside of that just can't get trashed after 30 days after I read it unless I make some other action Like I'm curious if there's any other thoughts that you have on that because yeah, we have these band-aids or like you said you're light on email So you trash everything but blue What if you need to you know pull up that lululemo order that you did You know because they didn't charge you the sale price and you definitely know that that it was on sale So they charge you know $70 rather than $50 for your pair of shorts Like how are you going to be able to prove that you did this or you're just gonna rely on the system But they're not gonna be honest. I can say oh, yeah, we see here that you know you definitely paid $70 And it was definitely $70 But what about the email that said it was 50 those shorts, man save the $20 Alright, man So I'm gonna be honest like I really haven't had too much problems with this But I I trust that the you know the systems that I could like log into an account and view my order and reprint the receipt Essentially if I needed to so I don't worry too much about that It's like really long-term storage you brought up something like rental agreements I don't know if I had to store something like that long long-term I would probably either print a PDFs And you know save those PDFs on the computer or I mean, I don't know if this is a really great solution But throw them all in a in a folder and then you know like export that folder as like, you know A you know an archived copy of an like on the Mac and box folder, you know, and then just store that somewhere Lou Lou you gotta think outside the box, man I'm talking about how do we fix this now? How do we work around it because yeah?

I do all those things too and those are workarounds, but I don't want to have to do those things How can I get mail to actually just do all this or what's an elegant way to have mail do this? I want you to come up with a solution for that. That's what I want, man That's what I want. I don't want I don't want to know about like statements at the PDF because like yeah, I do that I got that I want to know how mail is going to do this for me If I tag something as this or if I say like hey, this is legal stuff Then will it can it like automatically save it?

Is there a way for me to like immediately just pull all that stuff from somewhere? I mean, I want a magical solution Well, so the wondrous world is that like every email provider ends up getting like essentially gmail's level of search and understanding You know like intent and so many things and then you know It just basically everybody has unlimited storage you send it for every mail thing in the world Like you don't have to worry about that And you just it just trashes it all as soon as it comes into the inbox and you just search your inbox You never even look at an email You just open your inbox and and there's a there's a search field Adam, what would you like to look for today and and you just you just search everything You're like search search lu. What does lu send me recently that I haven't read because it just got trashed right away It just all sits in trash or essentially it all sits in archive, you know or whatever you want to call it like some hidden folder You always open your email and you get a search box That's the futuristic world Adam. It's just I only pull what I need there is no like Central repository.

It's just what do you want to look for today that I can show me like a list I like that I can I can get on board with that You're just open email and it's just like a search box It's just like there's like there's no message you ever see it's just like the Google homepage Yes, exactly. It's the Google homepage but for email and you're just like, oh, okay. Cool. Just this giant search bar Is there I'm feeling lucky button like I put in like Amazon order.

I'm feeling lucky. Hopefully it pulls up the last order that I made Oh, man. Yeah, I don't know. That's the way I see it is like the future of email is you don't ever read an email You just you just search for everything.

It just marks it all is read the future of email no email Yeah, it marks it all is read you search for every little thing you ever need the future of email search Yeah, Adam's like, I'm like, did you get my email? Uh, no, no, I didn't search it. So I didn't I didn't get it There will never be a search like show me emails from lu That search will never exist Oh, man. Yeah, so that that's how we declutter.

That's how we do it right there Is that there is no you don't even get to look at the clutter. You don't get to see what's behind the curtain Gotta can be a hoarder situation behind there. You won't even know all you do is search for what you want It's a rosy world you live in. It's a rosy world you live in.

You know, hoarders never has to come if you uh, don't show them you're drunk Well, you see the problem doesn't exist. Don't is it exist if don't can see it right? Problem's not there. You can't see it.

It doesn't exist. That's logic, right? Maybe logic Object permanence, right? Uh-huh.

So I think that's funny So we mentioned all these things all these band-aids and I know you kind of touched on it that there are a lot of like Mail clients that try to fill these gaps or try to like implement these band-aids So I've used kind of a fair number over the years So I don't know if you want me to kind of outline the ones that I've tried or if you want to go yours first I'll leave that up to you. Uh, yeah, I mean, I guess so I can try to summarize this is uh, the ones I've tried So I have and I'm kind of half cheating here because I'm definitely looking at your list and picking One of these that I've tried so I did use mailbox for a while Which was a drop-box company that was the whole idea was the zero in box lifestyle. Um, I have used Another one called spark, which is made by a company called riddle. Um, or redo I don't know how the hell you say their company name riddle riddle.

Okay. The other they're a good company I definitely like uh their email client. Um, it's it's uh, definitely probably like second place for me for current versions out there Other ones I've used notable. I guess I would say is I've used the gmail app I've used microsoft outlook at different points and I've used, um, airmail Um, other than that, I don't think I've ventured out too far beyond those that I just named but I'll be honest.

I keep coming back to just the standard apple mail. It's something that's like So one thing that's really hard is to get go across platform to find one that does back ios and and you know can do that Well, um, and then it's just been a key sometimes I there's there's something just so basic and primitive and that's the hardest piece to like get right And that's why I think you know, some of the even like the web client that you know offers is so good because it's It doesn't have tons and bells and whistles and it just works which you know, hey, keep it simple stupid, right? So, um, that's kind of my uh, my uh, my take on what I've actually used and where I am today Cool. So I'm in the same boat I tried a mailbox before they were bought by Dropbox because once Dropbox bought them I was like, no, I'm off this train I also uninstalled Dropbox today.

It'd be very proud of me and it feels so so good So good no more Dropbox. This is awesome. Oh my god claps for adam uninstalled Dropbox Holy shit, it's been a long time come and getting you out of remission. I know I know so I need to be happy about that I should put that and wrap up so we can come back to that later, but I finally Did it and I actually look at the article.

All right, where's all these hidden Dropbox folders? Because I want to make sure this thing is gone. I just don't want to touch it Oh, yeah, because like they say like just trash it and that'll fix it and then like but they're like if you look at the support article It's like no go empty this and then go delete the cash folder It's like there's something in root library and then there's a helper over here And then there's also something I hidden folder in your home directory and I'm like, yeah, okay I knew there was some crazy crap everywhere and rather than just searching my whole drive for anything in Dropbox I luckily just kind of went there. But yeah, that was that was funny.

Do you uh, do you not use a hazel's version of this though? Hazel did not pick these up. It didn't pick up the ones It didn't pick up the ones that the support article mentioned and I thought about that too Because I was like all right hazel is gonna do this for me right and I looked at the list that hazel brought up And there's all the cash files and stuff like that like that's fine Like cool, but it didn't get rid of the root library folder and didn't get rid of the hidden folder in my user folder So two folders that they explicitly call out so I'm like dang hazel. What the fuck you let me down We're here, but it's okay.

I know um so but I think it's funny is you you called out like in box zero So really the only reason I used You know other third-party clients was to get like an easier way to live in inbox zero lifestyle without Kind of killing the whole idea of mail, right The idea of snoozing a message like saying like hey give this out of my inbox and show it to me in like an hour Because I want to make sure there's nothing on my plate that I need to do But this if I read this right now and I don't need to take action on it immediately and I'm doing something else I'm gonna lose track of it and I love not having badges and notifications So anyway, I can get rid of those live better So I love triaging my mailboxes I definitely tried to live that inbox zero lifestyle and Mailbox definitely gave me a way to do that whether it be snoozing email until a certain day during that email in a different list Um a bunch of other things and I've tried other apps like mail butlers one of them Which kind of is just an extension into uh the mail app on you know the Mac Which will let you do these things There's also like Gmail ones that you can like attach your Gmail account to the service and it will go into your Gmail account and kind of do these things for you And interface through their client you can say like hey show me this email in you know Oh week or show me this email, you know in an hour or show us to me, you know later today So I think those things are kind of important because when I mentioned you know, I want to bring a productivity This is kind of where I want to do it Is because the whole reason of reaching out and trying some of these third-party clients was I wanted to be more productive with email And I felt like what I was doing was trying to come up with all these crazy workarounds That I feel like some company would have already tried and many companies have and kind of to your point is that You keep falling back to the stock thing the stock you know mail app and I do as well Is because shit just works and shit's cross-platform and I don't have to worry about someone else, you know Like going through my mailbox because there is something kind of like that feels slimy about that Much like with the Dropbox thing, right like I don't like You know a service having to go through my email and having to do this I would love these features to be baked in But I think like out of all these I've tried kind of the same as you have I haven't got into Spark and I haven't got into airmail But I definitely used Outlook I've definitely used Gmail's app and their inbox app right when that came out for a hot minute And mailbox but mailbox by far was my favorite Maybe because of living that inbox your lifestyle like I would love to have As you mentioned, you know kind of that rosy scenario Just no email in my inbox and when I open mail There's nothing actual that I need to do I can just search for what I want Or if I open it, oh shoot, there's two things in here But there's only two things and I can control what I need to do with those two things So I think for me the biggest feature that I want in email Is just the ability to snooze man Like just that alone would make email five times better for me Like cool, this email came through Show me this again in an hour Because right now it's like all right I get this email and I say cool You know I put it in omni-focus or things And I say remind me about this in you know an hour And omni-focus is much better at doing that But I have to resort to a third party tool to do this And I would love to be able to just click a button You know or insert said keyboard shortcut here To be able to have that email just come back to me In a set it's a specified amount of time I think that would be just amazing So I'm in a mission I'm really bad with things that allow you to snooze So I would like snooze indefinitely And that would be my like Achilles heel So I really like apps like Like there's a to-do app called do And it just like repeatedly nags you until you do something Because that will actually get me to do it if I'm If I'm you know not gonna follow through I'm pretty good with omni-focus Because what I put in omni-focus has to be done But man email snooze Oh that would be bad Select all snooze indefinite Well like you said at that point just delete it Right it's not my problem But there are things I think where that utility for me Like god that would be amazing So my TLDR of how to fix email is snooze man Like I have work around for everything but snooze And I guess I could make something Like I guess I could you know make a special folder Or if I assigned a keyboard shortcut and it got moved to this folder And that folder you know just somehow Basically retrigged a notification and moved the message to the inbox After a specified amount of time After that message is put in there Ah that sounds like a lot of scripting I don't want to do Yeah that doesn't sound pretty I mean I'm not gonna make any money off that so I don't think I'm gonna do that Anyway do you have any other thoughts on email? No man I'm pretty good I think it was funny when I brought this topic up You know to you it was kind of like Hey what are we talking about this week and it's like I don't know man I haven't really thought about it We talked about email last week and I had thoughts on email And I didn't think it would go anywhere but I'm surprised we went as far as we did Yeah I think we did a decent job It's a it's kind of a hot mess now that we're like in the middle of the discussion So yeah I'm looking at my email right down at four unread emails And I'm like ugh I don't even want to deal with it now After recording this episode I don't want to touch email I'm just gonna quit that and have the badge go away and never check it again So yeah I won't have a job next week if I never check email So I'll be unemployed Yeah you might want to actually check your email at some point But it could probably wait a little bit So anyway so in some wrap up you got an Apple pencil sleeve I see here Yeah so I do have an Apple pencil that I picked up And I liked it and I loved kind of you know drawing on things But the question was always like where do I put this when I'm not using it And I know that there are a bunch of cases you know that have like built-in you know pencil pouches and stuff like that But I liked the smart covering keyboard you know that I had And I kind of just wanted a way to attach a pencil to you know to the iPad And I'm like there are magnets there's got to be some product for this So I went on Amazon and I bought just a pencil sleeve right It's just a little silicon sleeve you know with some some metal magnets And there are some rarest magnets in it That will you know just attach to the side of the iPad or anything metal So I now I got that and I have to say that it's probably one of my favorite dumb impulse buys that I've ever made on Amazon Because dude now that pencil just goes everywhere Because the pencil is always on the case I can always just take it off the case I can just like slap it on the side of you know the iPad anytime too Because the magnets are right there And I never lose it and it's always with the iPad like right next to the iPad Because I always have the smart cover on it So I have to say that you know the pencil is great And I loved feeling it you know just by itself naked But much like with cases on phones I feel like this was like almost the essential case that I needed to put on this pencil Because it would never come off and just gives a little more you know Direction when you're holding it or a little more comfort when I'm holding it like I don't know man It was the best $10 that I ever spent because there was a lightning deal and a coupon And I kind of had you know four minutes to pull the trigger And I definitely did and I just want to share that like dude that thing is awesome I think if I used my pencil more I would consider something like this But in in all fairness I don't break it out Often enough to probably justify even the ten dollars What was funny is like I was like oh well I don't use it that much either right Like I use it for some handwritten notes and diagrams every once in a while You know if I'm in a meeting then I'll jot something down Or if I'm you know at home and I want to you know just break something out Then I'll draw something or the kids will want to draw something But the problem was it's like it since I didn't have the pencil on me I had it like in my bag or somewhere else It's like that opportunity or just that friction of having to go in my bag and grab the pencil Was enough for me to say like I'm not even gonna do this Especially when I didn't use it that much right It's kind of same to your point where well I don't use it that much So there's no point in me you know spending money But I have to say this has made me use it probably Five times more than I ever would have just by putting this $10 accessory on it So so I'm gonna take about all right I'll uh I'll consider it So the other thing I discovered I guess to wrap up this week since you didn't include anything But for one little tidbit at the end it's just all my like Amazon purchases lately You know just hey what's new for you this week is like well I just bought some more Amazon stuff And I guess I'll talk about that So uh the other thing I bought is because the weather's been warming up here And we've started going to the beach more and more Is if you ever try to take electronics to the beach It's kind of a shit show Because like sand gets everywhere and the last thing I want to get sand in is Anything electronic like getting sand imports granted You know with inducted charging these days while they're starting Everything you know cool But I still don't want to get sand anywhere So uh they have these waterproof bags and I've seen people I saw people on the cruise You know this is kind of where I got the idea These people on the cruise would just have their phone like Plastered in this like Ziploc bag you know it's just a waterproof bag And I was like well that looks like really shitty you know like that doesn't look great Like I know there are live proofcases and things you can get but I didn't want something all the time So I found these little waterproof bags right So I throw my devices in there and I'll do that before we leave the house So that way they're in the bag you know just sealed and there's no Sand anywhere no sand got to these things And then I'll just go to the beach and since you know you can still interact with the touchscreen through the Through the plastic bag I'll just go and I'll use the device there and I don't have to worry about any sand getting on my devices I don't have to worry about any water getting on them I got a bag that's big enough for my Kindle as well so Dude another one of the you know best ten dollars I ever spent thing because We go to the beach every weekend when it's sunny And not having to worry about my phone or my wife's phone getting any sand or sunscreen or anything on it is awesome I don't know I mean like I kind of like these things these things are probably higher on my list But I uh I don't know like when I go to the beach I honestly just put the phone away I'm not there for the phone So the phone like lives lives in the backpack and doesn't come out of the backpack until we leave the beach That's kind of usually my M.O But what if they're getting sand in your backpack and then the sand gets on your your device Okay, so why is there sand in my backpack in the first place? Because there are kids running around on the beach and kids kick up sand Jerkhole kids who you know don't know how to run around the beach away from people's stuff are running next to it and they're sand So this is something we should point out you know that like Santa Cruz beaches are very different than Southern California beaches Oh, totally It's like there's like 500 people within like 20 feet of each other like you know It's it's it's way more crowded So you're gonna run into jerkhole kids. They're running around kicking up sand where in Southern California If you really think about it like you've told you know what it's like You really don't have that problem Like grew up on beaches in Southern California and the difference is yes that there's so much beach So much nice beach everywhere that people spread out a lot more Like you can drive next to 10 minutes and then you'll be at a different beach and that beach is way less crowded than the other beach And in Santa Cruz, yeah So so this problem doesn't really exist for me where I live You know where I think I totally see the necessity for you where you live Yeah, I still think as a preventative man like I knowing when I know now I think I would always take this no matter what even if I was going to Southern California Even if I was leaving my bag just on the beach and I was the only one next to it Because the last thing I want is for a freak windstorm or whatever to have sand get somewhere The last place I want that sand is on my device so It's just an insurance policy for me And like I said, it's $10 another $10 spent on Amazon and another way to make out and feel better about not ruining stuff All right, cool.

So is your Third thing in Amazon purchase too? Yes, it is It's all Amazon. I told you all the other things that I had where Amazon so I mentioned last time that uh Protein shakes didn't really get along with my with my body, right? And they they weren't they weren't doing too well with the with the old stomach and intestines and that whole digestive area But uh, that was kind of the pre-made ones that I had I bought from Costco So I just bought a bunch of pre-made ones just kind of get an idea of what it was gonna be like But I also, you know, bought my own protein, you know, like powder mix and then I love peanut butter So one of the things I always wanted to put in there is peanut butter and I was putting in just like Like spoonfuls of peanut butter and like one of those blender bottles But that's a nightmare because it's all messy So I found this basically just you know like peanut butter mix or just like dehydrated peanut butter essentially And uh, oh my gosh You put in your protein powder and then a giant keeping spoonful of this peanut butter mix Shake that up with some almond milk Dude like it's dessert and it's a bunch of protein and it's it's awesome And I see your note in here and I am appalled Because peanut butter is delicious and makes everything better Yeah, not really my thing man Peanut butter is uh I've never been a fan Never did PB&J never did never got on board with any of that Do you like peanuts?

Nope Do you like like any form of nuts like pistachios, cashews, almonds, walnuts? Uh, nope Dude, what do you like? I don't know. I mean like I definitely like stuff There's like, I don't know, nuts are just something that never Never really like got me.

I don't know. I was like Sometimes they're okay if they're like in something I just don't want to like, you know, if they're in something it's okay I guess I would say that's a little better But like if I have a dessert and it's just caked with nuts on the top of it No, not going for it I don't want it But like if it's like Like here's a prime example something that I like with nuts in it Pesto Like it's got pine nuts in it And they're like ground up coarsely like that does that does not count That doesn't count as eating nuts That's a nut That's a nut but it's like you know what I mean? That's something if it's in something that way You're not eating that nut at that point You're just eating pesto Well, I mean you aren't to a degree So like I don't know they're like cookies Like there's um Some types of cookies where it's like the whole nut is not in it But it's like maybe like round up like that I'll probably be okay with it Like I won't really notice I'm eating the nut and be okay with it But yeah, if it's like a whole nut on something dude, uh-uh Nope Like peanut butter cookies, no peanut butter pie, no Nope Like god, man That's nuts that you don't like nuts You're nuts All the nuts all the time Email is nuts And I don't like email Yeah, so one thing I did learn this week though Like they're around peanut butter And there's like such a hack about so so creative Is um If you're trying to give your dog a bath Because the dog doesn't like the bath Which news flash in mind doesn't like the uh the bath Is you can take a little bit of peanut butter And just kind of smear it on the wall Of the shower And your dog will sit there And just continually lick the peanut butter off the wall Which gives you ample time to wash the dog Win-win Yeah, you don't know the peanut butter trick I mean There's a lot of places you can put peanut butter and have your dog Just continue to lick Uh, where else should I put the peanut butter Well bend over and I'll show you Oh god Oh Have you never heard that? You've never heard of a joke Like they could have put peanut butter on his balls Or peanut butter on his butt Nope There's definitely some pop culture movies Or some references and movies where people have done that So take peanut butter and Because yeah man If you ever seen a dog with peanut butter on his mouth They're just continuing to lick over and over and over again So I used to get animals to talk like for the whole doctor do little thing Well yeah, I definitely know that That's like the dog will react in that way But like I just thought this was like such a clever hack when I saw this week I was like oh man That's totally like I mean you know I've done the whole like just give him a spoonful of it And watch the lick for like a half hour And then you know Quickly provide them like a gallon of water to try Keep them to stop licking And then you never put two of the others like Where could I else get up with this with a dog to lick the whole time?

The shower wall is definitely the first place I would have thought of I don't know what you were thinking of Sure, sure Uh all right Well uh Excuse me I have to go get some peanut butter I'll be back in half an hour Like we've had enough fun for a week So uh I uh I will talk to you again next week And just send me an email when you're ready And I'll snooze it until next week So I know to be on time Sounds good I'll get that out to you now Awesome Oh wait Unread email count is still four Okay, not important Moving on The day we went to a goat farm So that was fun They used to raise goats Well that sounds Right up your alley Yeah, it was great With all these goats And everyone's like all timid And like afraid to touch the goats And I'm sitting there like Oh, we'll hands on Like what's up goat? Boop Oop Solid Well, sometimes it's not Yeah, this is true That episode's gonna have some Interesting naming conventions It's like nuts nuts Email is nuts Hey, did you like my checksum In the episode description this week? Uh I didn't catch it it was a checksum But um Yeah, I like the episode name Oh yeah, we talked about that one last time Is the checksum for the file or what is it for? Just Yeah, just for the file, the audio file