The Podcast

Having reached his 40th birthday (and we, The Podcast, our fourth), Michael shares his best bits of wisdom: Finding what you're good at, striving for longevity, knowing when to reinvent yourself, having fun, and nurturing friendships.

Michael talks about what it's like to walk a 260km pilgrimage over a week and a half, why he and his wife did it, how it can be a great experience even for non-religious people, how to pack for it, and why northern Spain is kinda nice.

Discussing The Courage To Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. Giving autonomy to live their own lives, neither prasing nor rebuking, and finding happiness in being beneficial to people around us.

The world is bad, but better. The vast majority of westerners believe the world is poorer, more violent, deadly, primitive, and awful than it actually is. This book beautifully illustrates our ignorance, updates your knowledge, and gives you tools for a fact-based worldview.

Digital Minimalism - A philosophy where you focus your technology use on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that support your values, and happily miss out on everything else.

We discuss Cal Newport's new book on this very topic. Why clutter is costly, optimization is imporatant, and intentionality is satisfying. We explore reclaiming our leisure time.

BREAKING NEWS: Michael pledges to go on a 30 day digital declutter from Twitter and Instagram!

Nozbe 4, our brand new app has a brand new icon (and logo). This week, we talk about what's wrong with ticks and circles, what makes a good logo, why we decided to go for it, and how it almost didn't happen.

What we've learned about productivity and collaboration over the years. How technology improvement allows us to get to the next level. And why starting from scratch is scary, but sometimes necessary.

Pulling back the curtain on the development process of Nozbe 4. When we started, how we progressed over time, and why we had to impose on ourselves the deadline of April 4.

Stories about competition, punishment, and rewards in the classroom and our childhoods. We continue discussing what we've learned from Punished by Rewards.

When we reward someone (an employee, a student, a child) for doing what we want them to do, we think we're doing the right thing, motivating them to keep doing it.

In reality, incentives only have a shallow, immediate effect — and in the long term, we're killing the other person's intrinsic motivation, and making them resent us for being controlling.