858: Making Educational Videos for 17 Years with Ian Byrd

Welcome to the Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks and joined as always by our intrepid shortcuts master, Mr. Steven Robles. Hey, Steven. Hey, David. How's it going with you? Good. You've been wrangling any shortcuts this week? Always, always describing shortcuts, building them. You know, we might get to do it in this episode as well as we talk to our special guest. Yeah, our special guest today is one of my favorite Mac Power Users guests. and I don't say that to everyone. Ian Bird, welcome back to the show. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. It's always an honor. Ian, for folks who don't know him, is a teacher of teachers. When you and I first met, you had been teaching gifted children and then you kind of got into the business of teaching teachers of gifted children. You did a lot of speaking, did a lot of travel, and you've really built a a content creation business for teachers over the years. And, um, the thing I love about Ian is how thoughtful he is about that business. Now you may be checking in and saying, well, I don't teach teachers. I don't have anything here. Ian has so many great ideas, gang, on how to use your, your Apple hardware to get your work done. Uh, I just really look forward to your show. So thanks again for coming back. All right. Thank you. I also saw, I was reading up on Ian. You play bass. Is that correct? Yeah, I play bass and guitar. Come on, somebody. All right. And you were in a band, maybe? I'm on Spotify. Oh. I put an album up there last year. Yeah. You did? Just me. Yeah. Oh, very cool. Very cool. Yeah. I think we got to put an MPU band together at some point. I mean, we've got some real talented musicians. Jim, come on. Play saxophone. Oh, yeah. Do trumpet. We could do all of it. You'll play sax. All of it. Yeah. I could play piano too if we needed we need a keyboard player I could do that well there you go there you go yeah Stephen do you play anything I do well I actually have a music degree believe it or not so I that was my life before tech and all that yeah I play trumpet and I sing a little bit here oh I've sang on the show actually I say I sang a show tune a few weeks ago yeah you did that's not my ringtone for you see oh wonderful okay I'll set up a shortcut so whenever you plug your phone to charge it just plays my voice singing yeah that'd be great that'd be great this serenade me and i just gotta know if you're playing the bass you got the seinfeld like slap thing down you gotta i can yeah i do you have to learn that because everybody asks about that one it's mandatory a side note i will say i've been seeing on reels this guy is remaking or pretending to make seinfeld episodes but in modern times and he has bits on like i'm dating this girl jerry but She wants my find my location. She wants to share location. And it is hilarious. And so I just want to say there's a modern Seinfeld out there on Instagram. And it's pretty funny. Yeah, I know. My kids and I were talking about how like every sitcom of the 70s and 80s, the plot of every sitcom of the 70s and 80s is solved by the existence of the cell phone. It is true. It is true. A lot of scary movies, too. A lot of scary movies. If you just text somebody to warn them, like it would be over. Don't go in. Don't go in the house. Don't go in. So Ian, I was reading up on Birdseed and Birdseed TV. Tell me a little bit. So you make videos. You made, well, thousands of videos, I think, by this point. Tell me a little bit about that business. Like, what is it about? So my degree is in computer science. And then I never really had a computer science job. And I went and got a teaching credential. My whole family's teachers. So it's just, like, inevitable. and then I got hired in the same school district I grew up in in the gifted and talented program that I grew up in and I taught sixth grade and so while I was teaching I had always been this is like mid 2000 era so I had dreamed of being a blogger so as I after a year or two of teaching I started like writing about you know what I was doing in the classroom and that just it just like took off like people you know that's back twitter was very different back then you know and you could like find the community and people found me and find the like niche um and so just within like a couple years i started getting offers to come like keynote gifted and talented teaching events like each not every state but most states um have like an annual event um so i started going to do that And then it just kind of got too much to do the teaching and I was getting hired to like lead workshops. And so I made the leap to leave teaching and was able to just like get enough of these gigs to go fly out and work with teachers. And I started flying, I was flying like 100,000 miles a year at one point, speaking like all year long. And so I started to burn out from all of that. and I so I as soon as I quit teaching I started this TV version of the blog and I had this idea of putting videos on and it was completely wrong what I first started with because I thought oh I'll just take my like the workshops I lead and I'll just do like smaller versions of that and people can subscribe and watch me like lecture them basically and so that was like very mildly successful. And then I, I made this, I had this like epiphany that like what teachers really need is not meet like telling them what to do, but they just need stuff that's already done for them. So I started taking those like workshops and turning them into actual lessons that teachers could just play for their students. Because a big problem like I had, and like most teachers have, is you always have students who already know what you're teaching, or they get it like right away. and then you either have them sitting through something that's you know they already know or you have to like run a second group or a third group in the classroom and um that gets complicated so my idea was this could be something that you could send those students over to like a computer and then you could watch me and i kind of lead the lesson and so i the big idea i had was i would break each video into these short, like, like three or four parts. And each part, it's only like 90 seconds or two minutes long. And it's like just long enough for me to explain what we're doing. And I always model a sample, and then I turn it over. And so then the students are working. And that was much more popular than just watching me lecture, like lead a workshop. And then, so yeah, so that just started to take off. And then around 2018, I had a kid and I was like, I think I'm going to stop doing the speaking. I'm pretty burnt out and I don't want to be away. And so by 2019, I had made the next leap in my career, which was to leave the speaking career behind and just go all in on the online membership. And so that was November 2019 was my last speaking kick. Kind of timed that perfectly inadvertently. Yeah, it was, I don't know what we would have done like for income. And then I happened to have this video library I had been like working on for years. And it was really at a point where I was, I was like happy with it. You know, I wasn't, I think I was kind of embarrassed by it at first. And then, but as COVID came around, I was at a point where I felt like I could really tell teachers about it. And so, yeah, that's exactly what people were looking for. And so that was a big, a big boost. And I kept thinking, this is temporary, you know, once once everybody's back at school, it'll go back to how it used to be. But, but it's grown every year. And I was able to hire my first employee, who does all my graphic design stuff. And yeah, so it just it kind of keeps growing. And I keep adding lessons to it and trying to fill all the holds in now. But yeah, it's a, my main customer is really districts. And then I also have like self-serve individual teachers. Well, I, as your friend, Ian, I watched you grow this over the years. And like, I remember when you talked to me about getting out of speaking and with the imminent birth of your son and man, it just couldn't have gone better for you. I'm so happy for what you've done, but this wasn't just you being in the right place at the right time. You are so thoughtful about the way you do this and the way you set the system up. And that's one of the things I'm really looking forward to digging into today. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. What is your gear these days, Ian? So my main computer is a Mac Studio. It's the original Mac Studio, the M1. And I remember I was waiting for like a Mac Mini Pro, like the first wave of Apple Silicon computers yeah i had bought one of the i bought one of the laptops which and it was like life changing like moving from my intel like i was ready to leave the mac i was so frustrated with that my last intel laptop and yeah and we had bought our house for the first time and so i had like space to set up a real workspace um and so i was like i want to get a desktop and not have to unplug and do all that yeah so i was like waiting for a better mac mini and then instead of that they announced a mac studio and i was like this seems too much for me but i guess they're not going to do you know the big mac mini uh yeah so i which they've subsequently done kind of i know and i'm like but now i can't i can't lose all these ports yeah same same and david david's got a CalDigit dock with like 1000 ports, but I'm still holding a strong understanding. There's no way around it. Yeah. I know. And it's a space heater too. Yeah. That, that's the thing. I'm always, I don't know about you, Ian, but I'm always like minimal points of failure. And so like, I want my audio interface directly in my max. Yeah. Yeah. In the back. You know what I mean? In my video switcher and everything. So that's, that's why I held, I'm still on the desktop train. Yeah. Yeah. So this thing's held up, You know, I always look at when the new one comes out, but I mean, I don't, I don't do anything super intensive. Like my videos are not, I don't film myself. It's all, it's more like a slideshow where I'm using Keynote. And I don't, I don't know, maybe, I don't even think they're 4K now. I think there's, I still do 1080p. um yeah so it's you know at some point i think i will wish i had a bigger hard drive in it but um yeah this thing's been great it's super stable how big did you get because i don't know if you heard but they're a little expensive now i know it's just the base model i think i upgraded the storage like one notch okay but yeah i love having the desktop um and not having i the laptop would always do weird things with the windows um you know unplugging and plugging it back in so i like i like the desktop i got a i got a studio display um last year so i'd always kind of i always felt like they were too expensive and there's all these so many more flexible options and then i like went to the apple store and i was like this is it looks so good and then the matte screen is what sold me yeah you're a nanotexture guy okay yeah and so i and now i'm in this like this room has like windows everywhere and so it it works really nicely so i like the mac studio um or the studio display yeah i'm curious too um you just said 1080p and we'll get to more of your tech stack but you know as a youtuber myself i do everything in 4k and i have to say i'm envious because it's way more storage way more processing time everything like the cost of 1080p to 4k but in your industry like what you're doing i don't imagine there's a bunch of students watching your videos that would even have a 4k display or be able to watch it in that way so do you ever get someone asking for high resolution or is it like a non-issue for the kind of stuff no no i've never had anybody ask for 4k and yeah like like i said i'm not doing things that it doesn't have a lot of detail. It's a lot of like showing a digital worksheet and like filling it in, you know, and, you know, showing pictures here and there. But yeah, whenever I have thought, cause I did upgrade from seven 20 to 10 80 at one point, but the jump, everything just gets so much bigger. And I just, I, yeah, I don't feel like it. The value is there. And also I would imagine a lot of these school districts don't have the world's greatest wifi. and if this stuff is streaming over a network and you put it in 4K, you may actually have streaming problems in the classroom. So you probably don't want to go to 4K. Yeah, I use Wistia for hosting the videos. So I think they handle all that. So I don't know if they downgrade resolution based on the network. I was going to ask you too, because I've had to deal with commercial video here and there and always looked at what were the providers. You needed security type controls on your video and like vimeo was an option for a while but it's still nowhere near as powerful as wistia and so i'm just curious i mean i'm sure you look at this landscape is wistia still like the go-to for this kind of video delivery with the security protections and all of that i mean i think it is there's no way i'm going to move video providers at this point like that would be quite an undertaking um i think unless you want to roll your own thing and I know some people do that and they they can do it for way cheaper but but they just they offer so many like they had auto transcription like years and years and years ago right you know that's just built in and you can like unlike YouTube like you can switch out a new video and it doesn't change like the URL you know so as I as I go back and kind of you know redo older videos it all keeps working um they even have like i've been sometimes people will ask for like spanish versions of the videos yeah um and that's something they offer you know you can pay to have everything translated so that yeah they just have so many little things built in and i and i was on this cheap plan for so long and then eventually they i think i was paying like 59 a month that's cheap for wistia field on now yeah it was a very old plan and so now they like found me and i'm no longer i was gonna say yeah but it's still you know when i think about how much how much it would cost me to build out my own solution um yeah i'm kind of stuck there and it's also like costs are so relative like when i think about like when i was practicing law how much money i paid every month for my westlaw subscription it's like 59 doesn't even like put a dent in it you know what what is what is that it's like a research system you know online research case database stuff like that and yeah it's i feel like this stuff is you know it's better now than it used to be even on the expensive end of 50 yeah well you know i hired i hired an employee a couple years ago and now that's totally changed how i view any of these like tech services in terms of cost it's like one hour yeah oh this is nothing compared to a person yeah yeah so yeah so i do when i'm doing the video like editing the final drafts and stuff i'm doing it on the mac studio um in descript and then I also have an m2 macbook air that doesn't get a ton of use now but that's I use that for recording music mostly but you know if I need to use a computer on the go but yeah but mostly if I'm not using the mac studio I'm using an ipad pro and that's I've really been happy with I think it's the previous generation that's got the matte screen, which was a lot more expensive to upgrade to than the monitor was. But I love it. One of my favorite moments in the history of the show was we had you on because you are a guy who gets a lot out of the iPad. And I'm always interested in talking to iPad warriors. And one of the statements you made years ago on the show that I still think about is you said, you bought the iPad kind of as a constraint. And you realized that if there was something that was too difficult to do on the iPad, it's probably something that it wasn't economical for you to be doing anyway, that you should be looking for people to help you with that stuff. And I just think that was so insightful. Yeah. So there's this book called The E-Myth Revisited. Yeah. This is like classic business book. The E doesn't stand for electronic. Like it's like predates the idea of E being electronic. It's like entrepreneur myth. It's kind of a weird book, but it's got this like one nugget that I've always kind of come back to, which is that if you're running a small business and, you know, especially if it's like just you, that you really have to be aware of balancing these like different jobs within your job. where your natural thing is to be what he calls like the craftsperson where you're like doing the task, you know, that you enjoy doing and wanted to turn into a career. He's got this bakery thing and the woman likes to bake pies. But if you only bake pies, the business is not going to be successful. So you have to be able to go from the craftsperson to, He has like a visionary role where you really step back and like plot out what is the business's big goal? What are we striving for? And then like a manager role where you're kind of the go between the big goal and then the person doing the work. And yeah, so I always thought the iPad is great because I have a hard time thinking when I'm at the big computer. It's just like so easy to start making things. And it's fun to make things because, like, you know, I'm like the craftsperson by nature. So the iPad I always felt was, you know, at first I tried to do the thing where it's like I'm going to make this be a Mac. And, you know, it just doesn't work. Even today it doesn't work. And so, yeah, realizing that, hey, this thing's really good for, like, reading on. And then once the Apple Pencil came out, you know, having that like much slower input of like drawing and, you know, writing by hand, that became this relief. For me, it became a great tool for the visionary work. And David you and I have talked about going on retreats and like just taking an iPad and getting away from the usual you know day to day stuff for a few days and just like planning what the next quarter that you going to be like And so the iPad has always been great for that. But I've always struggled with that manager level. I think management is really hard at the station you do creative work at. I have the same experience. Like I've got this great video set up here. I make videos all day long. I can't sit here and do manager work because the camera is right there and all I have to do is push a button and I can make something new. And yeah, that is really hard for me. I have to get away from it. This episode is brought to you by 1Password. Ladies and gentlemen, I love 1Password. I use it personally. I use it with my family. I share vaults. 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So I totally identify with that, Ian, because I like going out on my patio with my iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard if I have to do administrative work or creative work, which is kind of a weird thing. But like if I'm going to build shortcuts and I need to like troubleshoot or problem solve or get inspired. Like I do that on my iPad. But I'm curious with your workflow, you mentioned Keynote, you mentioned your iPad with Apple Pencil. What kind of work do you do on the iPad specifically? And like, where does your video go from there? Are you starting on your iPad? Is it brainstorming? And then are you starting a Keynote on there? Like what's that process? So my process has always been to like start with the script and to get the script down first. So it's usually like an outline that I start with. And like I said, most videos are like three parts. And at each part, the student is like doing something that's at a higher level of thinking. So I would usually map that out in an outline and then start to write the script. And so writing the script is something I could do on an iPad. but I would still find it frustrating because I felt like the just typing sometimes isn't as nice like the app I like I would type into notion and notion I just felt like it didn't feel nice step one uh spoiler maybe try a different app to write in I'm just throwing that out yeah but like every you know I would run into these things where the the iPad didn't feel as nice but yeah so i i could write on there and then um i would then i've never been able to use keynote on the ipad because i have so many um like keyboard maestro tools and sometimes i don't even know where the tool is like i feel like i've reached an age where i don't remember how my computer works and i'm the one who set it up you type a shortcut and things happen and that's all you need to know yeah well i've got the two stream decks here and sometimes sometimes i have to like look i'm like what is this even doing you know and like kind of well a lot of this surfaced because of the the new version of keynote they released that has like a different name under the hood yeah yeah did it break stuff that you had automated oh it broke everything oh no all my keyboard maestro stuff was looking for the old app's name yeah and so i'm still running into things where i'll you know and it's not easy to go and just change it all at once like i have to find each whatever that little block is where it looks for that it's usually the ones where it pulls down menu items and pick something yeah so i've never been able to use keynote on the ipad because I just, I don't have any of that power. So are you like just, is a bunch of keyboard shortcuts that you have programmed on your stream deck that's then doing menu items in Keynote? Yeah. Yeah, I found, and I don't know, maybe Keynote has added all this stuff, but there's a lot, there were a lot of things like center a bunch of items. Inserting certain things. Yeah, a lot of like formatting, flip something horizontally. There wasn't a keyboard shortcut. So it was just stuff like that, you know, And it took me years to like build up all these little tools. But then if I push the button and it doesn't do it, I'm like, what happened? Yeah. So that's been something I've had to do recently is like dig through and figure out what exactly, where did I make this little thing? So going back to that statement you made about, well, if I can't do on the iPad, I should hire someone. But the obvious problem with that was you and I have small businesses where we don't have unlimited funds. Yeah. But something has changed since the last time you were on the show where there's some technology now that allows you to automate things without a human. Yeah. What are you doing with AI? Yeah. So part of it has been like doing little coding projects. You know, so like I said, my degree is in computer science, but I haven't kept up with it. And, you know, I'm not a great coder, you know, like I can do little things. But anything that involves like the money system of the business, like I'm too scared to touch it. But using Cloud Code and Codex and some of these tools, it's just really enabled me to like fix some things behind the scenes with the business that have just always bothered me. And so one of the things that maybe a more typical use of the AI has just been building these personal little tools. Like we have our own invoicing tool now that I built. And it's just it integrates perfectly into like all of our systems. And I have a contractor who handles our purchase orders and stuff like that. And it's just like saving her so much time. and all that stuff i can do from the ipad instead of having to be at the mac studio because i'm not really doing like all the coding there was i remember um when the original apple two came out or maybe it was i think it was the apple one and the apple two uh steve wozniak was quoted you know they said well how come you don't have any software for it you know the apple two came out there wasn't much software and he says well people will just buy it and write their own software. I mean, that would, cause his mindset that of course being was right. And I always thought that was so silly, but it feels to me, you know, but now, cause I'm teaching a course on AI and robot assistance. And there are a lot of people that are just making their own, whatever their productivity billing, whatever thing it is that they need, they can't find the right one. They're spinning it up themselves now. I mean, we're actually now in an era where that is a possibility yeah i mean yeah and it's it's helpful having the technical background you know and i mean i find that's kind of knowing what to look for because it's constantly doing things wrong you know so it's not i do think of it a lot as being like an employee yeah where i have to check the work and and you know i can't trust it to do everything perfectly or even like in the right direction sometime. I'm curious, because you talked about scripting being, you know, that first thing you do, that's how you every video starts. And I know for me as a video creator, I try to be very specific on if I'm going to use AI assistance in something, like these are my creative moments where I want to have more influence than the AI. So do you use any AI tools in that early process of the scripting or ideas or where do you insert it in that process? Yeah, so yeah, so there's the coding side but then i've really found it to be useful as like a creative partner um in doing i know david used the like the term donkey work um you know and like just doing a lot of manual labor and then on the creative side like a big thing is just like brainstorming um and like come up with like 20 variations on this idea um you know and and one of them will be like oh that's kind of interesting and then using that, you know, as a jumping off point. One of the things that it's allowing me to do is kind of turn my library from, it's been something where I've just added like ideas as they've come. So the lessons don't really have a scope and sequence, which is fine for some teachers that like fits what their role is, but other teachers need something that's like, this is for third grade, whereas this is for fourth grade. and so the that's something i've been doing the last few months is like going through and finding where do we have a lesson that we could actually kind of break out into like three variants of that lesson where and then each one is kind of matching that grade's specific standard and so it's been really helpful in that sense of like kind of filling in all these holes and giving me a starting point for where I can kind of see how we can layer up as the students get older, but without having to build a completely new idea. Another thing I find with Max Sparky Labs, I've got like 300 plus videos I've made over the years. And I find that the AI is good to look for holes in the library. I say, well, what are, what's topics that I've failed to cover, you know? And that's like, like that kind of stuff I think it can be really useful for. Well, I will do things where I'll produce a whole lesson and then I go to add it into Word. The whole thing is a WordPress site. Yeah. And then I realize I've already done this lesson like seven years ago, you know, and it's basically there's like no reason they're like 10% different, you know. So, yeah, I don't have like I can't store the whole library in my brain anymore of like all the lessons that I have. have you given an ai you're in because you have a huge backlog library of videos have you given ai just your whole library this way you can ask questions about it or have you resisted training something on that library i haven't like trained it on the library but it has access because we have transcripts of all the videos okay um so i can like just yesterday i was like what what is different about these two lessons that we have you know and it can go look at the transcripts and like tell me so yeah that there's just so much of that kind of things where it's almost like there's just all this manual work i would have had to do before to figure that out and yeah so it can go through i've i've tried to get it to write like me you know but i've it just it always goes back to its goofy little patterns that it uses like no matter how much i try to tell it to stop doing that yeah it refuses it's so it's sometimes it's so confusing i find myself just saying could you just say that like simply can you be a normal person please and then you're like this isn't a creative writing contest like just say it plain you are a robot yeah i actually enjoy the writing process so much i just don't really want to hand it off but the um but there's so many pieces this now one of the things you're doing i wanted to talk about today is remote access so you're a guy who's working off your ipad a lot then you've got the ai running back on your mac or wherever and like how are you making them work together so initially i had i was running cloud code on my mac studio um and i was like really happy to have the desktop because i could um get into it from the ipad or my laptop and all that well what technology we're using for that by the way tail scale is like the tool that kind of connects everything yeah i i do not know what it does or it's free um yeah i have like seven pretty great things connected to it and it's all still free but yeah it basically just spins up what feels like a local network yeah yeah and every computer is just has its own you can name everything nicely and then you can just get in you can access it just like yeah it's like a network at your house um and then i was i was at disneyland last weekend and i was running my mac at home with through my ipad using tail scale it's yeah and it's got that um tail drop you know so it's kind of kind of like kind of like airdrop but you can send a file from one place to another so um that kind of holds everything together and then i just work in like a terminal into the cloud code cli um i haven't i know that they're like actual apps have changed a lot but again it's like one of those things where i i tried that at first and i didn't really like it and now i just i'm used to doing just the plain terminal sure well you're a computer science degree major right that's not you're not afraid of the terminal i'm not afraid of it it looks cool it looks like it looks like i'm really doing work I'm in the matrix. Yeah. Yeah. So I had it on the Mac studio and I had this thought that I should move it to a VPN in case the Mac crashes or something. I'm on a trip or something. And then we had a blackout that lasted, you know, like almost a whole day. And I have my iPad and it's got the cell connection and it's got the battery, you know, and I'm like, I can't get to Claude. he's dead on the computer's out of power and I'm like oh why I was like why didn't I do it and put it on the VPN so once you know once we got through the blackout I was I took it took like half a day or so and I set up it's a Linux machine running Ubuntu and I just like moved all the AI tooling onto that VPN and then yeah with tail scale it's just it doesn't feel any different than when i was using the is that a physical box that you have somewhere the linux machine through uh linode linode oh okay okay so it's gotcha yeah and the i i went too small the first time and so i had to upgrade the box you know but that that's easy to do through them um yeah so i have that and then yeah through the through tail scale it's still easy to like send it a file or have it drop a file to me on any of my devices yeah another way you could do that is like mac mini colo there's a lot of different ways if you don't want to go the linux route but having a remote computer and frankly the way you started for a lot of people is plenty just have a mac somewhere that's always on and ready for a connection yeah i mean running the mac studio just at home would have been fine i mean if it wasn't like my whole business is kind of running off of it now um and then yeah we're in hawaii and the power can kind of come and go i'm going through that right now because i bought a new laptop and i still have my m2 mac studio here um and you know because the amount of storage on and stuff the it's really probably worth keeping just because it'd be more expensive to buy that much storage in this weird world we live in but it's like i'm really going back and forth do i really want to set it up as like a mission control that i can tunnel into or is it just like an accessory machine but um there's so many people i've talked to like you who are running in their ai primary at least their um their frontier model ai stuff because this this mac studio is not great at running local ai but they could run you know co-work or open ai or whatever no problem um and i am i just haven't decided yet but that that's something that's very much on my mind right now so yeah and it's nice it's nice just to have that machine doing that and then if i if i switch the mac out i don't have to change that yeah so i'm curious ian so in addition to ai tools you're using this workflow your videos you talk about keynote what is your process like real quick connect all the dots for me so you make you got the script you make the keynote what do you record that stuff in like what are you recording where and then where do you edit it and where does it go from there? I mean, I started with, what was it, like a screen recording app. ScreenFlow, probably. It was ScreenFlow, yeah. Yeah. Way back in the day. Yeah. And then when Descript came out, it totally fit exactly how I make my videos because they're mostly keynote slides that I'm kind of lining up with narration. So I'll record the narration into the app. So I do it into Descript now and Descript, you know, transcribes it and you can edit the text instead of having to edit the audio. And it's such a time saver. But the really the thing that was awesome for how I do it is I can just copy a keynote slide. And then like in the Mac, it kind of turns it into just like a JPEG when you copy a slide. And then I can select the text and just paste it into Descript. and then like that slide will line up with that text. So I could assemble a video like so much faster just by doing this, like kind of build it in Keynote and then copy and paste it in. And I rarely use animation because I'm mostly showing students like an example of how to do a task. So it's a lot of just like text appearing. And then sometimes I have to scroll the worksheet and so then i would export a magic move from keynote you're hacking keynote to be an animation software i like it yeah yeah that is yeah that's common though i mean because it's i used to animate water intrusion for for jury trials with keynote magic move i mean it just it a bit i mean i had friends that would use Keynote as like their graphic design tool because like it pretty powerful Just like you work with layers, you got all these tools there. Yeah. If you go way back in the Mac Power Users catalog, like probably in the first hundred episodes, we actually did an episode of how all the things you can do with Keynote that are not presentations. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, and I use Keynote so much to build all those presentations I was giving. So I'm, you know, I had all these shortcuts built out. So I'm like very fluent in Keynote. And yeah, if I go to use Photoshop or any of those tools, there's just like way too many options. So I've always appreciated Keynotes like limitations. As a pro Keynote user too, I'm just curious, when it upgraded to Creator Studio, did any of the new features provide any benefit at all to your workflow? I don't even know what the new features are. Okay, okay, I'm just curious. I haven't. I don't think I've used anything. Yeah. It moved some things around. I feel like I've become an old man where I'm like, why did my keynote change? Moved my cheese. Yeah. But the video creation now, I can use the AI tools basically to make like a rough draft of a video. So I can create the script. and then it has so i don't know this tooling but it uses remotion which is like a react tool so it's like using like javascript you know to move things around and then rendering it out as like an mp4 file and then we write the script and then um i have i use 11 labs where i uploaded just like two hours worth of videos you know and it pulled the audio out and synthesized this like weirdly accurate voice of mine and so it takes the script and it sends that to 11 labs and pulls that back down and then it will like line up you know like the filling out the text in these worksheets it lines it up with me saying those lines um and then it like gives me a video that's like saves so much time. It's almost like a temp track, you know, where I can put that into Descript and then start, you know, a lot of it, I have to rerecord the narration because it sounds like me, but you know, the inflection are just kind of weird. And sometimes it'll say a word in the most random way. So I go through and kind of, a lot of times I end up redoing the whole audio. But a lot of the video I can keep because it's just filling in that worksheet. And I'll add some of my own things from Keynote in. But that has really, by having that starting point has really accelerated how quickly I can add content to the site. And for the re-motion, are you using that through Claude or some AI? Yeah. Really? Okay. Yeah. And I was like, Do we need to add like cues or something into the script? But it's just like reading the script and then it's able to like figure out like which, you know, which worksheet we're filling out and where it's going. And a lot of this has been iterating over time where at first it was totally wrong and we just built out rules. And, you know, it's the videos follow very similar frameworks. frameworks so um it's it's kind of amazing how close it can get to what i want by and it's using some tool on the back end that i personally have no idea how to use that's wild and you find re motion because i've tried some ai tools just as experiment to see like can i give it a 60 can i give it an idea and it just make a script and a reel like a vertical 60 second video that you could post on social media? Because you see so many of these videos on social media that are obviously AI generated, obviously it's an AI voice. And I was curious, is there a tool that can actually do it? Do you find that ReMotion is good enough where, not for your use cases, but if someone was using it for a social media clip type thing, is it good enough, the video quality for that? So what it does is it makes an HTML page and then animates it. So I don't think you can do something like generate a person walking through a field. No, but illustration animations? I don't think it can. Okay, I'm going to check it out. Because I'm wondering, just like a map animation, you know what I mean? Like an Indiana Jones style. Yeah, I think you would have to give it the map. I don't know that it can generate. Because one of the videos started with talking about systems, and I was using a bike as an example of a system. And then we moved into like how a story is a system. And so I was saying how you can remove the bell and the system still works, but you can't remove the chain or the bike won't work. And it made the saddest looking bicycle. I didn't tell it to do it because I'm like, I'm just going to go grab an image of a bike from, you know, some image library. And so it's reading the script and like trying to add everything in for me. And it just made it out of like sticks, you know, and it looked like. a bike but sure sure it's very i was like just do the i was like you just have to worry about the worksheets i'll let me handle all the other stuff i think you know i call it um i call it dragons and execution but the um as you use ai you get to a point where you get confident and it does some things for you and you start to give it more authority or more tasks than it's really actually good at and i think it's an easy trap to fall in and like at least maybe right now then things are always in motion but i feel like right now is a very good sweet spot of yeah i can do the donkey work it can check the script it can pull slides and do all that stuff but really you need to be the person doing the recording you need to be like the human needs to be in control of the creative process and i'm actually kind of okay with that in fact i'm more than okay with that you know i feel like it is it empowers me to to just be able to to finish a lot more that i wouldn't have been able to accomplish on my own. I also think that if you're smart about it, it frees you up to do more creative work. I think that's the real approach people need to take towards this is like, what is the donkey work I can get rid of? And if I have that extra time, can I do something more creative? Or can I just take a nap? That's good too. But don't try to leverage yourself to 3X just because it's doing extra work and try to hold on to the creative part. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by Ecamm. Go to ecamm.com slash macpowerusers for a powerful live streaming platform on your Mac and 15% off. Ecamm Live is the all-in-one studio built exclusively for the Mac. If you're a Mac user who creates any kind of video or podcast, you need Ecamm. It's designed specifically to look, feel, and perform like a native Pro app should. Think broadcast-level control with drag-and-drop simplicity for all your podcast recordings, live streaming, or training videos. 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It is Hawaii. Oh yeah. It's Hawaii. Yeah. You live in Hawaii now. And, uh, yeah, but, uh, that has changed your smart home approach. What's up? Well, we're getting back into the smart home. Uh, yeah, we own, we, we bought a house in Astoria, Oregon on the coast during COVID. It was like the perfect, you know, far away kind of spot. and then we vacationed in in hawaii during the winter and my wife was like we should just live here because you know it's like rainy for nine months in oregon and you can't really leave the house and we're all at home we homeschool our kid i'm at home working you know we're all home all day um so we kind of we vacationed to hawaii and we we ended up staying like in the condo we were renting for like a month um that complex had had a spot open up and so we ended up selling our house and just like staying in hawaii um and the condo didn't there's like no need to automate things like it was so small yeah um and i think we thought it was pretty temporary so um about a month ago we moved to the other side of oahu to kailua and we're renting this really cool house that like happened to open up right when we were looking for a spot. And it's really like, it's big, but it's only like a two-bedroom, two-bath. So it's not like a mansion, but there's just a lot of open space. And so now it's like we're back to where I don't want to have to walk around the house and turn lights on and off because it's like switches everywhere. um yeah so we're we're like getting you know we have all the phillips hue bulbs and stuff that have traveled with us now to two different places um so we got our we got the tv light the hue has this the gradient tv strip yeah the gradient that was the first thing we got working again um it's so cool in a dark room to have the tv glowing so are you all hue bulbs kind of guy do you do switches too or yeah we had in the old house we had like everything was hue bulbs and then we had a lot of like motion lights so like the bathroom and the kitchen things would just turn on when you walked in but this place this house is like everything is custom um so there's no none of the light fixtures have bulbs um and then everything is on a fader and there's usually like at least two faders in every room and it's so weird you're renting it so you can't we're renting it yeah so yeah we can't just take everything out um and so i'm like dying to automate all this stuff and there's fans we have like there's like a fan ceiling fan in every room because um yeah we keep all the windows and stuff open and there's the breeze going through um so people are always leaving the fans on or you gotta the fan switch is in a weird place but you could switch the switches out right even though you're renting you just have to put them back at the end yeah it's so expensive because there's so many switches in this house so i've been going through the most middle-aged man thing i have a label maker and i'm i've been going through and labeling what every fader and switch does because there's like no logical connection to anything um there's like an outlet you know like outlet switches but some of some of them are faders oh my word yeah so i don't know what that even does but trying to figure out just yesterday we've been here a month just yesterday i figured out um that the switch controls an outlet because i realized there was no wi-fi in this part of the house and the euro was the euro was off and i was like what the and i realized oh this switch turned the euro so i put tape on it it's like don't touch yeah um so yeah so there's all this stuff that we can't use our you know hue bulbs for um so i bought my first um switch bot oh yeah do you know what this is the robot finger the robot finger i was like this is the answer to some of our problems uh so it was like prime day so they were they were discounted so i bought like the hub so now i have this is my 17th hub that i have um and a couple of those switches because i was like i don't know if these things you know i don't want to buy 20 of them yet and yeah we tried it my wife wanted some outdoor lighting on a schedule sure um and yeah so we it's like a little rectangle it's smaller than i thought it would be yeah yeah yeah um and you know it's got some kind of motor in it and it comes with adhesive on it and you just peel it off and you stick it on whatever you want to automate and then it's got yeah like a little finger that's it that's what people put those on their coffee makers yeah yeah anything that has a button and it has an attachment because we have these like rocker switches so you had we had to put another adhesive thing onto the switch so now the finger can pull it pull it down yes i will say and i will say on switchbots website which i've been very familiar with switchbots for a long time they call them the fingers so if you go to like household or uh you know all their devices there's finger robots and there's a switchbot original and then there's the switchbot that's actually rechargeable now we'll put a link in the show notes yeah that's what i got okay now but with the hub because i know switchbot has had various hubs over the years are you able to connect that to apple home are you just like switchbot apping it like what do you know so i got yeah so i got the hub because we use alexa as our like central thing um i think this is another thing where i think i tried apple's thing and it wasn't any good and i'm sure it's gotten a lot better you need to come back to the light come back to the light that's right yeah yeah it's been a long But I have this story with all kinds of Apple, like first party stuff where it was just so missing, you know, missed all these pieces when it first came out. And then I got something else going and now I don't want to have to switch everything over. But yeah, so it can connect through. So my plan is to use like we've got these Philips motion sensors and then I can use the SwitchBot, you know, to turn like the ceiling fans on and off. when people are in the room or not in the room. Yeah, so that's been our, we've solved part of our problem. I will say, it seems like the SwitchBot hubs, the newest ones, they do support Matter. So you could put this into Apple Home. I will say a caveat. I've tried to add SwitchBot accessories to Apple Home. And it's a little weird because, you know, Apple Home has limited accessory functions. And so it's basically an on-off switch, but the switch bot finger it's not really on off you know what i mean it depends how you position it on the switch right and how you have the thing so it could get a little weird for people to try but if you want a robot finger turning your coffee on in the morning you can do that you can yeah i actually need one of these because i've got a my my key light is can only be turned on with the physical button press and right if i turn if i cut power it won't when i return power i still have to push the button so i've always thought of switchbot as a possible answer but it's the same thing it doesn't look to me like it's particularly home kit friendly or apple yeah so right now it's just running in the switchbot app it's just on a timer but every day it is delightful that that thing pokes that pokes that switch i'm like it worked it worked again look a lot of people really love their curtain openers too i don't know if you have blinds or curtains but yeah i saw those Yeah. Yeah. Back at our old house, we had roller blinds. And so we bought these like Acara blinds. I think that had to go through Apple Home because I know I used it at some point. So you said you got outdoor lights? Were those smart lights? so that my wife and i were just talking about this no none of the outdoor lights are smart lights and there are three different rooms that have outdoor light switches so and like nothing so this is my label maker i should put that as one of my like cool tools is this label maker um but my wife and i were sleeping like in the first week and this motion sensor light in the backyard was turning on and it's like brighter than the sun and so you know it's like midnight and i'm going through this new house trying to figure out which switch turns on the motion but it's not obvious if it's on or off because it's a motion sensor but we found it in my kid's bedroom on the other side of the house was the switch that turns that it is like this could be a youtube video is you could come to this house and try to figure out how to automate everything i'm up for the challenge i'll automate anything i'll do it Yeah. So the faders, I don't know what we're going to do. Honestly, I think my wife is going to pull out some of these custom fixtures and just put a bulb in there. I can see you doing that. I know your wife. She could do that. I do think you should take another look at Apple Home. I recently have been reconverted to it because I kind of had drifted away as well. But I find that it's just so useful for the whole family. If everybody has an iPhone. Yeah And with the arrival of Matter so now most of the hardware works with most of the platform so you don have the limitations you used to Yeah And it just kind of surprising to me how easy it is for everybody to be able to access everything if you go into one platform like that Yeah it might be worth like because I kind of have to rip everything out as it is um so yeah it might be worth rebuilding it and there have been uh there multiple options like so if there's sliders or dimmers there's a bunch eve has actually a dimmer switch that's like thread matter doesn't require a hub if you're good with a hub i'm all in on lutron all the time uh most rock solid i use their ceiling fan control everywhere around my house and so that works great for the ceiling fan and some ceiling fans are a little weird because you know some of them are on two switches some of them are on one switch and so it depends you know how that setup is but but lutron eve and akara has some dimmer switches now that are less expensive but even the less expensive ones now will have thread and matter and that means it'll have pretty solid connectivity so Yeah. Okay. Stephen, if people are an Apple Home and they want a SwitchBot-like button, is there another vendor making something that's more Apple Home friendly? SwitchBot really makes the only robot finger that I know of. Honestly. It's a monopoly. Maybe there's some conspiracy here. They've cornered the market on it. But I mean, the SwitchBot will work with Apple Home if you get the SwitchBot hub with Matter. And I'll put the right hub in the show notes, but it's kind of the only one doing that. And the way, the other way I get around this, like if you have a coffee maker, if this works or something that's plugs in, like I do use smart plugs in a lot of places, uh, for things like my coffee bean grinder, which I've talked about before, where it's a dumb grinder, but I want to make sure it turns off after a certain amount of time of grinding. And I use a smart plug for that. And I set up a shortcut that It waits two minutes. And then after I turn it on, it turns it off. And so, you know, some devices, if it will work with a plug, like my key light, like yours, David, but I have it on a smart plug. And when it powers back on, it returns to the brightness and temperature that I had set. And it's unfortunate. Yours does not. That's unfortunate. So that's how I get around some of the things that would use a robot finger, but I try to put a smart plug where I can. And it takes me all the five seconds to reach down and push the button. You got to reach down and push the button. let the finger do it for you that's right maybe that's it maybe switch bought bought all of the supply of plastic fingers for the next five years so nobody else can make one there you go run on the market yeah but it's it's very fun to see that thing turn on um so do you do you know anything about sliding glass door locks like smart locks oh my you might have because we have category i'm not familiar with we have no regular doors in this house and five sliding glass doors that's an interesting question i i do not um okay this is not going to send me on a tear i'm curious apparently there are some companies that make certain things but it seems very like model specific you have to have the perfect sliding door for this i have ideas i have ideas Robot fingers? No, I was just thinking, just spitballing here. They make the regular master lock, the deadbolt style lock. What if you just hung one above the sliding glass door right beyond the closure point? So it just dropped the deadbolt down when the doors closed and that stopped it from opening. Does that make sense? Oh, like behind? Yes. Or maybe mounted it like facing downwards. Exactly. Exactly. So the deadbolt comes down. You shut the door. The deadbolt comes down behind the door. Right. And those are a dime a dozen. There's a bunch of people making those. Then if you try to open the door, it's going to hit the deadbolt. It's not going to open. I like this hacky way you're thinking, David. That's the kind of stuff I do. If you walk around my house, there's a bunch of stuff like that. That could work. It's killing me. I haven't had to carry a house key in so long. And now I have to remember to take a key to lock the house up. You would have to trust the deadbolt to be able to like stop someone trying to open the door. You know, it has to be able to stop the entire glass door, but maybe it would. Maybe it would. Yeah, but we like right now we just have a lock that's just like kind of, you just put it on the track and kind of screw it into place if you want. I got something even better, guys. I got something better. Okay. Here we go. Here we go. All right. You get a dowel pin, you know? a wooden rod right yeah and you lay it in the track when the door is closed so now the door is locked we have that then you find an automation something like a switch bot curtain opener and you tie it to the to the uh to the dowel you drill a hole through the dowel oh you fix it okay and the switch bot just spools up the wire and the dowel lifts and then you can open the door how's that this is very kiwi herman i i don't know i think i can go further i don't know i used to i remember growing up we used to have just like the wooden dowel that you just drop in the track to like stop it from opening and maybe if you get enough robot fingers they can all lift together and the wooden dowel lifts high enough so you can open the door or yeah or get a dog and teach him how to fetch the dowel this this is power users to the max right here pro max users we're getting there guys that's it that's it and we always like to end up these shows with a few favorite apps and services things that are bringing you joy and delight these days that a listener may be interested in what is helping you out these days uh so probably the app i use the most on the mac is called trickster um and it i trigger it with a shortcut and it's just a floating window and it's it has a list of the most recently accessed or modified files. So like if something gets downloaded or if I like just worked on something and I want to open it back up again, I can just open Trickster and it has, you know, a list and you can filter it and you can do all kinds of stuff that I don't do with it. But I just use it as like, here's the last 10 files that I've been working with. And it saves me so much time. I will add to that endorsement. I met the developer of Trickster, I don't know, a long time ago. I think it was at Macworld or WWDC. And I started using it after I met him. And it's just such a great little utility. And if you're a setup subscriber, you already own it. Just go download it. I've always think that I will eventually have heard of every Mac utility and app. And it's, I don't know. I don't know if you ever will. Stay on the Mac power users, man. You will. this is like an app that i don't know how much it costs 20 bucks or something you know and now if they like took it away i would pay like a hundred dollars to keep it you know i don't know if there's a business model like that where you threaten to take it away and then you know you realize how valuable it is um but yeah it's it was not an expensive thing and then i just use it constantly instead of having to go hunt for stuff now you said you use keyboard Maestro, do you use Spotlight or other launchers or what do you do there? I have Alfred, which I've used forever. Yeah. I've tried to resist changing that because I feel like there's always another option. I don't have like a lot of custom like workflows using Alfred. I use the clipboard manager in there also. But yeah, that's another one where it's just like if it's not on the Mac, I'm completely confused. But I'm interested because I've heard that Spotlight has gained a lot of those kinds of abilities. Well, I would say, I mean, with Mac OS 27 and iPad OS 27, if you're on the iPad a lot, Spotlight and Siri AI is one thing. And so I would be curious, you know, if you start, you know, if you try to start using Spotlight and Siri for some of that general knowledge stuff. Or I ask it a bunch of stuff and Siri AI has actually been pretty good. that is exciting. Like if that works, I would be very excited by that. You can pull Alfred out of my cold, dead hand. We still got to do that challenge. I got to do Alfred versus Raycast versus Spotlight. I'm using the new Spotlight. I guess it depends how much you're using Alfred for, but it's the new Spotlight is not Alfred. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. On your iPad though, it sounds like you're on your iPad a good deal. Are there any apps that you use on the iPad that are kind of critical to your workflow or? It's pretty basic. You know, I use Blink is the terminal app that I use. And I use that on the iPhone also because you know, sometimes I have an idea when I just have the iPhone and I can get onto the VPN through there. Yeah, I use Blink as my terminal on iOS and then Ghosty on the Mac. But they all have persistent connections so i can go to any of those devices and i have my my existing like cloud conversation going um yeah i use so i use that i use i mean safari is like probably the main thing i use and then i use notion in my business my designer and i use that for like meeting notes and collaborating you have a dictation controller in here that we must talk about oh yeah so So a lot of the coding or like the AI interaction, it's better just to dictate it. But then if I'm at my keyboard, I just start typing. And so I was trying to not type so much and just use the dictation, which I know you have always done that, David. And I've never been able to resist just typing. So yeah, once I realized I can just tell it what to do and it's actually a lot easier, I started looking for some like Bluetooth, like not a full keyboard, but just a few buttons. And so I tried a couple things that didn't work right. And so I ended up with this tiny game controller from 8BitDo. 8BitDo. 8BitDo. So this is the Micro. And it's teeny tiny. And it's like a little Super Nintendo style controller. and so it has enough buttons where you know so I have one of the buttons is just like open the microphone and then one of the buttons is like press enter but then like the shoulder buttons will switch apps you know and so you can using better touch tool you can like set up all the buttons to do all sorts of things so wait a minute you have this connected to your Mac via Bluetooth and then it's like basically dedicated buttons for dictation or whatever yeah I kind of love this idea I know me too I mean you would think my first reaction was like well why don't you just have keyboard shortcuts doing this stuff what's the benefit of having the dedicated device well you can leave the desk so part of this was because David you had some like clip on microphone that you were using the Hollyland Mark 2 I love my Hollyland Mark 2 because you put it on your your shirt and you can walk around the room and dictate to your computer yeah so being being able to step away yeah i'm part of it is like i'm always like hunched over i mean i have a really nice setup but i still you know i still end up kind of frozen in the same place all day yeah um yeah so so walking around and talking but with i'm constantly going back and forth with it so um yeah so i thought i needed something to carry around that i could um i could activate the dictation and stuff and then being able to to like delete and things like that so that i don't keep coming back to the um keyboard this this like has enough buttons to to be able to do that yeah and they they feel natural because it's like a video game where like one of the buttons feels like it should be canceled you know and the the little the d-pad like moves things left and right yeah so david you have the mark i'm sorry the hollyland mark 2 s or is it which one is it well i've had it a couple years now so they probably don't even sell it anymore but it is the um if you look at it it's like a nickel size transmitter and like a half penny size microphone and it just clips on your shirt and then they've got a little usbc receiver that you just plug into your computer and uh it also works with your phone so like if you want to dictate into your phone or your ipad it it does them all i bought the cheapest one they have them that have like the sdslr connections and a whole bunch of other stuff all i needed was a usbc receiver and these little microphones and i use them all the time and they're really good quality and for dictation completely adequate if you look at max barkey videos a lot of times you'll see just a little tiny black thing under my shirt and people like oh is that your microphone for the recording i'm like no i have a good microphone for the recording but but i was probably dictating earlier that day and i forgot it's there i've washed them two or three times you know and they're great and i i really uh it wasn't that expensive i think it was about 100 bucks when i bought them and it's another one like ian if they took it away i'd be like oh how which is going to cost me because I want it back. What are you, both of you using on the Mac for the dictation? David, are you doing Whisperflow directly? Yeah, I'm a big Whisperflow fan. Right. I use Monologue. Yeah, they have an iOS app too. I don't really use that, but. There's so many now, there's so many, because the Whisper model is open source, so everybody makes their own thing, you know? Yeah, it's hard to know what the difference is between them all. I need to find a use case for this little Nintendo controller thing because I kind of love it. It's only $25. I've got one in my bag too, Stephen. Do you? Let's talk about it next week. Okay. What? Okay. What do you use it for? I want to copy Ian. I want to do it. I want to. I mean, because I do the same thing. I lean over the keyboard. I hit the button in Whisper Flow to open the mic, and then I pace up and down the room and write a newsletter or whatever. you know i'd rather be able to control that and then like some my wife will walk in and she'll ask me a question in the middle of my newsletter text it says yeah i took the trash cans out you know and then you know it's like so i i would like uh i i'm gonna follow the path set by ian once again all right so you i'm sorry david quick question your newsletters you just walk around the room dictating those dude i was a lawyer for 30 years i know i know yeah i i can rip it out pretty fast. Okay. All right. So your little blog posts and stuff that I get in my emails, those are all dictated. Nearly 100%. Yeah. I got to get on, I got to get on this train. I got to start. And it actually changes the voice of it too. You're very much more conversational, the posting. Like if you read something I write properly, it doesn't read the same. Right. Right. Hmm. Okay. I'm going to get this little $25 controller. We're going to see, maybe this will start getting me to dictate more yeah the other thing you could do with it though just think you know because with um better touch tool you could map it to anything you could app it to f map it to f19 and then you could make just a killer keyboard maestro script or shortcut launcher or whatever you know okay all right yeah all right and tell us about your uh you got a sleep mask on here yeah the manta sleep mask uh so this thing is a very nice sleep mask I like using a sleep mask but I don't like it touching my eyelids so it's got these padded O's so it keeps the material from touching your eyes and then it has Bluetooth speakers built into it so I can fall asleep to a podcast and you can lay, I sleep on my side And so this is totally comfortable. It's like flat on the sides. So you can listen, you know, listen to music or whatever as you fall asleep. You do have to charge your sleep mask, but it holds it holds a chance USB-C, which I was pleasantly surprised by. It's a very high quality sleep mask. Wait a minute, honey, my sleep mask needs a firmware update. Exactly. Exactly. So are there speakers on both sides of the mask? Yeah. and like leaning like laying on your side that's not uncomfortable with the speaker there no they're like designed to be like that they're flat and they can you can move them like left and right um to if you want it like right by your ear or less less right on the ear i have this problem so i i have had glaucoma since my 20s i oh yeah it's just a thing you know we all have things and And, but the, I've been taking the drops for 40, almost 40 years. And the, the drops give you very thick and luscious eyelashes. Like, and the, like the doctor always says, I know you're taking your medicine. Look at them. Oh my gosh. Eyelashes. And like supermodels take glaucoma drops because they want those eyelashes. And, but I have always had a problem with sleep masks because my eyelashes are too long. you know so like i think you just solved a problem for me and okay i don't know i mean i gotta see how big are these cups i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna stress them i really wish we could title this episode david the supermodel yeah i know we have to figure out i have supermodel eyelashes but that's it the rest of me we're just saying i don't even have george costanza hands i just got the eyelashes that's amazing i might that sleep mask is actually tempting and i'm curious because my two sons they go to sleep listening to stuff but they have their airpods in and there's been multiple times when an airpod goes missing yeah you know if they're on the top bunk who knows where it might have fallen so sleep mask yeah that's that's the exact problem i was using airpods and then i'd have to switch ears if i like rolled over the other way yeah yeah i left one at an airport or at a hotel and had to go back. So yeah. Well, and you always deliver the goods to the Mac power use audience. Thanks again. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Congratulations on your continued success and, and then, uh, all the great work you're doing over there. Just think of all the kids that are growing up and they'll say, remember that guy that used to talk about the bicycle. Cool. Thank you guys. And where, where can people go to, to see if they want to learn more about you and. Yeah. Everything's at birdseed.com, birdseed with a Y, which is my last name, birdseed.com or birdseed.tv. All right. Very cool. We'll put those links in the show notes as well. Thanks for our sponsor this week, 1Password, Ecamm, and we're going to go record a More Power Users episode. But thanks for joining us. We'll catch you next week.