AI Tools: What's Actually Working (and What Isn't) with Bill McLean

Tom Anderson (00:02)
This is Basic AF episode 86 show notes for this episode can be found at basicafshow.com slash 86. In this episode, we're going to talk about the changes taking place at Apple. Bill McLean is back. We're going to talk about AI stuff, workflows, what works, what doesn't, what's next. ⁓ And there's the doomer. Hello, Jeff.

Jeff (00:24)
⁓ Good morning, All right, how are you? Little snore for the ⁓ snorers. Good. Yeah, no, I'm doing well. I'm doing quite well. I'm pleased to say.

Tom Anderson (00:27)
You don't Doing great. Doing great. Good, good, good.

All right, and welcome back to the show, Mr. Bill McLean. Good to see you again.

Bill McLean (00:43)
Yeah, thanks guys for having me back. Appreciate it.

Jeff (00:46)
Yeah,

Tom Anderson (00:47)
looking forward

Jeff (00:47)
good time.

Tom Anderson (00:48)
to it. And so we finally got an announcement from Cupertino. No surprise, it fell right in line with all the rumors and speculation as Tim Cook... whites... yeah that was funny. I don't know if saw that post or not but that was pretty good. So Tim Cook is going to be stepping down of sorts, not going anywhere. He's going to be on the board as the executive chairman.

Jeff (00:56)
White smoke from the...

⁓ Yeah, white smoke from Apple.

Tom Anderson (01:14)
And then John Turnus, who has been at Apple for ages, will ascend to the CEO. He's been running hardware engineering, so he's going to become the CEO. That's all effective September 1st, or day before a birthday. ⁓ yeah. So, ⁓ we'll have to wait and see. What do you guys think? We're only going to spend a couple of minutes on this.

Jeff (01:29)
Woohoo, happy birthday.

Yeah, I think we all knew it was coming. Something was coming. I'm not really that familiar. don't know if either of you are, but I'm not really that familiar with John Turnis. He probably showed up in a couple of videos that I ignored the man and paid attention to the hardware, but ⁓ we'll see. My only concern always is whether or not

Tom Anderson (01:59)
Yeah.

Jeff (02:06)
the culture of, you know, put this in air quotes, we protect your data. We're not selling you off to the highest bidder, whether that remains a feature of the Apple universe. I expect it will. you know, as you call me, Tom, I'm a doomer. And I don't I'm not always certain that that, you know, any any tech company

including the one I love, is always gonna be faithful to me.

Tom Anderson (02:40)
I'm going to nominate you for the most anti-tech tech podcast co-host of the year award.

Jeff (02:45)
I think so. told you I'm an artisanal ⁓ artisanal tech guy now. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna live. I'm gonna live. I'm gonna live in the woods away from the internet and, ⁓ and, you know, that'll be me, but whatever.

Tom Anderson (02:49)
Something.

Bill McLean (03:00)
I think it'll be an interesting transition because hardware doesn't seem to be a problem for Apple. You know, the choices that they've been making, the products are always high quality. ⁓ I'd like to see some software improvements across the board and across my favorite built-in apps like Notes and Reminders and Calendar, but I'm hopeful. He's a good choice.

Jeff (03:08)
Ha!

Tom Anderson (03:14)
Yeah, it's software side.

Yeah.

Yeah, everybody says he's product guy. So maybe that that'll help.

Jeff (03:27)
I think it-

Yeah, I was gonna say, I think there's something to be said for the fact that he, you know, since Apple does killer hardware, he'll maybe help the software side to rise to the same level as the hardware side. So, we shall see.

Tom Anderson (03:46)
Yeah, seems we've been beating that drum for a long time too. hardware teams are crushing it. Software's. It's okay. So a lot of good, but still some weird stuff. Yep. More on that as we progress.

Jeff (03:53)
And my hands are pretty calloused from beating the drum.

Yeah, so we'll see. We shall see.

Yeah, I have plenty of time to talk about this and to see where it takes us at some point in the very near future.

Tom Anderson (04:13)
Indeed. All right. Well, this is where we say goodbye to Jeff and ⁓

Jeff (04:14)
All right.

I'll be here. I'll

come around. ⁓

Tom Anderson (04:20)
And kind of the meat

of this episode is going to be a check in on AI stuff. ⁓ Primarily what we're using it for, ⁓ where we've found some success, where we've had some issues, good, bad, that kind of thing. ⁓ So that's why we had Bill come in. know he's been working, he and I have been in messages pretty heavily for least a couple of months, it seems.

about our stuff we're doing. So I wanted to have him come on because I know he's been kind of kicking the tires on it a good bit too. So Bill, do you want to go ahead?

Jeff (04:59)
Before, actually,

I was gonna say before we start, why don't we talk about the platforms you're both using. I will say if I'm using AI at all, it's Claude. ⁓ Why don't you tell us what you're standardized on and why, and then we'll go into the workflow stuff.

Bill McLean (05:16)
Yeah, it's pretty much Claude for me as well. I have the yearly pro subscription for Claude. ⁓ We'll get more into whether it's gotten smarter or not recently, if I put it this way, if I don't like the answers that it's giving me, I'll go to Gemini. I have a Gemini, whatever they call it subscription as well because it came with.

2 terabytes of Google Drive storage. That was the main reason I got it. Just happens to have Gemini, Advanced or Ultra or whatever. The plans are also nonsensical at this point. It's hard to even keep up, but Claude and Gemini are the two that I use the most.

Tom Anderson (05:58)
Yeah, same here for me. Gemini at work, because that is our quote unquote sanction tool. So I use it there. It's pretty good. ⁓ I don't like the interface much. It's typical Google interface. Not very exciting. ⁓ Not that a chatbot really needs to be, but it has some things I'm not too crazy about. the

outputs and everything have been pretty good for what I use for there. And then I'd use ChatGPT, the pro account, the $20 a month account and use that for a good while and then shifted over to Claude recently, Claude pro accounts, 20 bucks a month there.

Jeff (06:40)
Why did you drop

chat GPT?

Tom Anderson (06:43)
⁓ So I started to look at ⁓ Claude as they started to, you people were starting to talk more about it with ⁓ code and co-work. And so I started to tinker with it a little bit. Like I had a pro account for both for a while and I dropped Claude, but chat GPT started getting worse for me for what I was doing. Like it was just kind of, it's not that great. ⁓ And so I went over to

⁓ Claude and for a while there I was running the same things in both to try to just compare and contrast and see and so I just kind of like ⁓ the outputs a little bit better over there and so eventually I was like well I don't want to pay for both and I still use chat GPT a little bit here and there ⁓ but not much. And that's as of today I mean it's as Bill said they change so much like they tweak things and then now this one's crap and this one's good and you go back.

Jeff (07:32)
build.

Tom Anderson (07:42)
It's changing a lot.

Jeff (07:44)
Bill, did you use chat GPT?

Bill McLean (07:46)
I did, had a Pro subscription for a while. One of the main reasons was you could connect it to ⁓ Apple shortcuts and run things inside of shortcuts prompting through ChatGPT Pro. ⁓ I'm once again more hopeful that Apple Intelligence ⁓ and new Siri and new Gemini isn't just total garbage when it finally comes out. So for the most part though,

Tom Anderson (08:07)
You

Bill McLean (08:15)
I didn't find that integration as useful as just copying and pasting stuff into and out of the chat windows.

Jeff (08:22)
All right, onward, sorry. I just wanted to kind of get a land-to-land before we talked about your automation. Go!

Bill McLean (08:34)
Yeah, I think there's so much to talk about. And Tom, you mentioned Claude. ⁓ Claude has just, we'll call their main chat window. I'll call that one Claude. Then there's Claude code that originally started in Terminal, and now I've lost everybody in the audience because this is the biggest problem with AI tools right now. It's like a normal person doesn't know what Terminal is, isn't going to open it, isn't going to ever use this tool.

Jeff (08:53)
Ha ha!

Bill McLean (09:03)
⁓ Mainly for developers to help with making applications or other tools that involve coding hence the name Claude code And Claude co-work now exists in the app as well. That's effectively Claude code with a UI so Has all the same abilities it's running inside of a folder on your machine and can do things like computer use and tool use it has a chrome plug-in for example that

You can tell it to go browse the open web and pull data for you if you want and it can pretty much do anything that a human can do on the computer now.

Tom Anderson (09:44)
Do you do much of that, Bill?

Bill McLean (09:47)
I, ⁓ a fair amount actually. I, I set up so you can also do one of the things I loved about chat GPT four was recurring tasks. And I had set up a thing that, ⁓ basically scraped the tech websites that I liked looking at the verge nine to five Mac, any of the rumor sites and news sites, ⁓ and would pull a report for me and put that into an Apple note or a bear note.

at the end of the day and say, here's the top five articles that were published so I could take a look at it. Somewhere along the line, ChatGPT got rid of recurring tasks. ⁓ Again, you know, no warning. It's just like, here's a new model. And by the way, I don't do the thing that I've been doing for you for the past three months. ⁓

Jeff (10:26)
You

Tom Anderson (10:34)
seem like bad

timing to do that because that's right around when like the clod stuff was starting to take off.

Bill McLean (10:40)
Yeah, Co-Work does this now and ⁓ most recently what I've had it do is go in and look at my YouTube analytics data. So I gave it access to Chrome, go into YouTube, pull the analytics data. I had some specific questions about ⁓ posting my podcast on my channel and like is it impacting the views on either the podcast or the main videos and is there data that could back this up? So it went and pulled a bunch of data for me.

out of YouTube ⁓ Analytics and gave me an answer. And so it's kind of useful for that sort of thing, but it was also extremely frustrating at the same time because it doesn't work exactly on its own yet. You can't just kind of set it and forget it. You have to babysit it through every little step, which is the most annoying part about AIs as it stands today, I think, is the marketing hype is...

in many instances not living up to what the tools can actually do in reality.

Tom Anderson (11:45)
Stunning development. If I say so myself. yeah, that's kind of where I've gone ⁓ to. And just to say, like, we talked about coworker a little bit, ⁓ in a running on your computer. One of the distinctions there is in the chat window, right? The typical chat window or it's back and forth interactive. ⁓ you know, you can pick up any device that you're logged into and see those chats.

Jeff (11:46)
Hehehehehe

Tom Anderson (12:13)
So those kind of go with you. They're mobile. But with Cowork, everything kind of stays local to that machine that you're running it on, depending on where you put that folder. ⁓ Because what it will do is you can run your projects, and then you can select a folder for it to work into. And that's one of the ⁓ differentiations between them is, so with Cowork, you can give it a folder full of stuff and say, you know.

analyze all the data in these spreadsheets or reorganize these files. Maybe you've got like a like not saying I have this, but maybe you have 873 screenshots on your desktop and you want them to be renamed by what's inside them. You could turn it loose on that folder and it would analyze them and name them and you could you could give it some type of a structure as well. And then the tasks stay in that co-work section as well. I've got one similar build to what you were talking about where I set it up to

Jeff (12:49)
Hehehehehe

Tom Anderson (13:08)
⁓ go out and check, you know, kind of the same sites, Mac rumors and so forth. when I asked it to look on the site or is particularly with Mac rumors, because there's comments, a lot of comments, it's fairly active community there to say, when you're looking, check the comments to see like what the count is on there to see how much engagement it's getting there. Because if you're getting a lot of engagement there, it's worth probably posing somewhere else.

you know, trying to farm some engagement to because that's the name of the game these days, engagement farming. But it also means it's of interest to people. So I've done that too. And also I've done some of that ⁓ analytical type stuff. ⁓ did an interesting exercise. Maybe it was the last weekend or the weekend before. Because now that I've kind of gone in with

Bill McLean (13:44)
Yep.

Tom Anderson (14:06)
Claude and stuff. ⁓ You know, I have it help with some of the podcast work, some of my newsletter work. I don't really use Claude for work stuff, ⁓ just because we don't have the data protections around it at work for like our sensitive data. So I don't use it there. So everything is kind of home and, you know, side projects. But you know, I've done a lot with it. And so I went through and I said, you know, because I'm kind of more

visual like I like to things laid out like that so I went and I was like well why don't you go ahead and build an org chart of all of the roles that I've had you perform since we've started working and so it did and it gave me this is kind of funny gave me three divisions I have quite the empire I'm running over here I have a content division a marketing division and an operations division ⁓

Jeff (14:51)
Hehehehehe

Bill McLean (14:52)
you

Tom Anderson (14:58)
And inside the content division, I've got a podcast producer, newsletter editor, copywriter, content strategist, ⁓ marketing divisions, SEO manager, social media manager, growth strategist, analytics lead. And then in operations, it was a head of operations and an AI workflow engineer. And I found that very interesting because, you know, there's more and more talk about, you know, how is

you know, AI going to be a force multiplier. And, you know, we still don't know what, where we're going to end up with this, ⁓ you know, this good and bad with everything. ⁓ and so I do think on the positive side, like, ⁓ one of the things that I did when you had that SEO manager there in the marketing division and all that was is I said, go look at my website and help me optimize it for search engine optimization.

I don't know Jack about that. I don't want to know Jack about that. Just Google analytics is gross. I've signed into that and I'm like, yeah, this is not this ain't for me. ⁓ and so I went through that whole exercise and made some changes. Some of them I still have probably 50 % left to do. ⁓ but it got into, you know, internal article linking, you're making sure your post titles are optimized for search and your meta descriptions and all that kind of stuff.

So was really helpful. ⁓ and you know, the numbers are taken up for me on the visits to the site and everything. It's still too tuned, ⁓ sorry, too soon to say, it work? Yeah, I don't know. It seems to be, it, it certainly knows more about it than I do. Is it a hundred percent accurate? I'm sure it's not. ⁓ but it, it was very helpful for that.

Bill McLean (16:46)
Yep.

Jeff, what about you?

Jeff (16:49)
Yeah. Well, I just.

Tom sent me some of the SEO stuff for Basic AF and I will say that one of them I thought needed a little tweaking. I know very little and care to know very little about that kind of stuff either. I'm not particularly interested. In fact, I will say that I feel like SEO descriptions are very bland. I know what they do, but there's nothing particularly insightful or clever about them.

So, and I will say that one of the descriptions that it put up, I didn't feel I needed to edit at all. I thought it was pretty decent. And so that is actually what we're using is show description right now. And we'll see if we get any of that. ⁓ I...

I patronize Tom. You know, I'll look at the stuff that he says to me and go, that's really cool. And then as I often do, sit back down and write stuff with a pencil.

Tom Anderson (17:49)
You

Bill McLean (18:02)
There's something to be said about that. I, you know, that's, joking aside, right? The whole AI space is like one big caveat right now. I mentioned to somebody the other day, it's like simultaneously one of the coolest pieces of technology that we've ever invented and also the dumbest thing we've ever invented at the same time. And then there's, you know, a huge caveat in between all of that.

Jeff (18:27)
Yeah, and there's a lot of smoke around it right now, you know, of how it's going to change the world. I mean, in some ways it is changing the world. you look, ⁓ Metta is laying off, what, 8,000 people, I think they said, because of ⁓ investments in AI. Now, whether or not that means, you know, they need to burn cash on the AI side, and so they've decided not to burn cash on the human side, it's a fair question. It's not clear whether or not... ⁓

AI has given them any advantages ⁓ in terms of what the AI is actually doing or whether or not it's doing the jobs of those 8,000 people that are being that are being jettisoned. So it definitely is going to have some implications. And, you know, we won't talk politics, but there are things that that I think if in fact, AI does. ⁓

take jobs we have to look at what are people gonna do. And there we go to my new jobs, right, you just make up some thing, right, new jobs.

Tom Anderson (19:31)
New jobs.

Bill McLean (19:32)
Yeah

Tom Anderson (19:35)
Same as it ever was. They said the same

thing with computing and the farmers and the tractors. it's like, man, it used to take three weeks to farm an acre. Now it takes 30 minutes with the tractor. What are we going to do?

Jeff (19:39)
I didn't say...

Yeah, no, you're not wrong about that, Tom. You're absolutely not wrong. And again, I'm not certain what it is going to do, but I feel like, I think what it's going to bring back, and I hope it does, is your kid going to trade school and becoming a plumber or an electrician or something that cannot be presently automated away with AI. I mean, programming, come on.

Claude code, baby. Whether or not it does good code and whether it does well-documented code, anybody's guess at this point in time. ⁓ But there are a lot of the entry-level jobs that people who went to school to do anything in IT, whether it was becoming engineers, software engineers, things like that, those entry-level jobs feel like they're gonna be gone. So yes, go be a plumber.

Not a data plumber.

Tom Anderson (20:50)
Bye.

Well, yeah, and I've had that kind of opinion too. went, know, Bill and I were chatting about this yesterday. We went from, you know, some people go to college to everybody's got to go to college and the trades kind of fell out of favor there. And I think that needs kind of an adjustment because you look at the debt that you incur when you go off to college and over the long term, yes, you're probably going to get a good return on it. ⁓ But, you know,

Jeff (21:10)
Totally.

Tom Anderson (21:21)
Before it was more of a differentiator when, you know, say 50 % were going, I don't know the numbers, I'd have to look them up. Uh, but now it's like, okay, more people are going. So everybody's got the bachelor's. So that's kind of been commoditized. So now it's like, well, what are you going to do from there? But, uh, that's complicated. That's a whole different topic, but, um, there, are lots of pieces to that, but, uh, I have seen recently and I've kind of gotten the impression and bill, I think.

Jeff (21:24)
Mm-hmm.

It is, it is, right.

Tom Anderson (21:50)
You may too, but I'll let you speak to it. You know, for one, the AI companies like the big ones like chat GPT and Claude. ⁓ Jesus Christ, did they ever not take a PR class? It is like, could you find two more ridiculous sons of bitches to put out in front of people to try to tell people about your product? It's like, cause the angles they're taking are just the absolute worst.

And it's like, that, it's a, and it's like.

Jeff (22:21)
There is something refreshing about that. I just want to say there's something refreshing

about about these guys putting feet in their mouths. ⁓

Tom Anderson (22:29)
It is. Yeah. And it's

like, oh my God, both of them, like the guy from Claude, the guy from Chet GPT. So Sam Altman and Dario Amadei, I think that's his last name, have the two most punchable faces. And it's like, and it's like, oh my goodness, all. it's like, this is, so I see why public perception is in the toilet for a lot of this stuff, because it's like, yeah, we're going to take all your jobs and screw you guys. can't do anything about

Jeff (22:39)
Yeah, that's sort of it.

Hehehehehe

Bill McLean (22:43)
You

Jeff (22:55)
Right, and we're going to have all the money and you're not.

Tom Anderson (22:56)
And it's like, okay, but you're also leading

up to your IPOs and hyping the hell out of your stuff. And I don't know about you, but where I was going with that is the more I use it, the more I'm like, yeah, this isn't taking all the jobs. Because there's a lot of stuff just for the simple things I'm doing. It just can't do like it or you have to do it three, four, five times. And again, all in all, I'm a fan, cautiously. ⁓ But.

Bill McLean (23:08)
Yup.

Jeff (23:08)
Hahaha!

Tom Anderson (23:25)
Because I think it does give a single person the ability to do much more than they could do before. ⁓ Because we get into those, I just laid out that org chart a few minutes ago. ⁓ You know, that's all the stuff I'm trying to do to grow the newsletter, grow the podcast, so forth and so on. ⁓ And again, it is AI, so we know it's not 100%. ⁓ I can't afford to pay somebody to do these things, right? Like I can't afford

an SEO manager or a growth strategist or a head of operations by any means. I mean, I'm not making any money. Um, and so I think there's some positive there that it could do that. Like, you know, we've talked about, you know, disenfranchise, you know, you people coming up with less opportunity, AI and some ambition, you can do quite a lot. And I think you're in position to do more.

Bill McLean (24:01)
Yeah.

Tom Anderson (24:25)
It's going to require some work. still need to be able to think because if you just take it, you know, and I think that's going to be a challenge. Well, the AI said it, must be true. We need to avoid that.

Bill McLean (24:32)
Yeah.

I think that's a big problem. I've started coining the phrase ⁓ outsourcing your thinking. And when you outsource your thinking to AI, you know, ⁓ I agree. I think that's going to be a big problem. And let me just here, I'll ask a hypothetical question here. If you came up with a new technology and you needed to get mass adoption for it, you would all lead with the fact that

You're not going to have a job anymore and this thing might end the world. Those are going to be the top two things that you pick as, your marketing campaign. And, you know, like you, like you said, ⁓ I put this article from, ⁓ Ronan Farrow that was in the New Yorker. It's a big, you know, ⁓ profile on Sam Altman, like 17,000 words. It's, it's well worth reading. He was also on the decoder podcast.

Tom Anderson (25:10)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Jeff (25:15)
Yeah.

You

Mmm.

Bill McLean (25:36)
Basically, in 17,000 words, I could do it in two or three, right? He's a liar. So there you go, right? There's hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours. The guy spent a year and a half working on this article. And it's good to see, I think this is a well-written piece of objective journalism. And it's good to see that there aren't

Jeff (25:44)
Yeah, there you go, right?

Bill McLean (26:05)
people just buying into the hype. There are still people asking the questions about, know, well, okay, this guy's now in charge of all of our future and has the potential to be one of the most powerful people on the face of the planet. Can we trust him? Should it be this guy? Right? These are questions we should all be asking as we go use of any of these guys, right? ⁓ So yeah, the...

Jeff (26:26)
of any of these guys.

Yeah,

your title is excellent. He's a liar, asterisk, with sources. We have citations and sources. That article is quite good. And I think we could put an Apple News link to that, because the New Yorkers are free within Apple News. So we can put an Apple News link.

Bill McLean (26:40)
Right. Right.

Jeff (26:59)
And you can read that and highly recommend that you do. It's a really good article.

Bill McLean (27:03)
Yeah, and the polling numbers, know, Neelay Patel and Ronan were talking on the Decoder podcast and, ⁓ well, we won't get into politics, but let's just say the polling numbers on AI, specifically for younger people, it seems like, know, Gen Z and below, the more that AI slop and other AI is pushed into their feeds, the less favorable it polls. And so, you know, now OpenAI has

Jeff (27:14)
Ha ha ha!

Bill McLean (27:32)
they've written a few documents where they're talking about changing the social ⁓ construct, or the social document, how people talk and think about AI. And so they're starting to walk back the messaging of, yeah, well, maybe it isn't gonna take everybody's job. I guess you peasants like having jobs and like getting paid and like being able to feed your families. So maybe we won't take that away.

Tom Anderson (27:55)
You

Bill McLean (28:01)
⁓ Maybe we'll spin the narrative to we're gonna create more jobs and it's gonna be like the next industrial revolution. Now it's so hard to tell what the truth may or may not be ⁓ other than my experience is similar I guess. The more I've used AI, the more I question is what I'm doing useful? It's like a

you know, a broad existential question now of like if I connect Claude code to my, you know, notes app or Obsidian is the big one, Claude code and Obsidian, and I give AI access to all of my notes and I can have it search through everything and come up with the best, most optimized ideas for a YouTube video. I get those results and I look at them and I liken it to when you set a New Year's resolution.

and you go tell everybody your New Year's resolution, what happens? After maybe a few days, you give up on your resolution. You posted on social, you told all your friends and family, you got the dopamine hit through telling people that you were gonna do the thing versus actually doing the thing. And so I'm finding the same sort of thing with AI. It's like, great, I got a dopamine hit. They're like, yeah, all five of these video ideas would perform really well.

Jeff (29:06)
Hehehehehe

Bill McLean (29:25)
but I didn't come up with them. I have no ownership over them and I feel no obligation to go make them then. But it's like, wow, I felt accomplished. I chatted with an AI, you know?

Jeff (29:28)
Yeah.

Yeah, and there's something to be said for it. I think that goes back to my half joking point about being an artisanal IT guy is part of the joy in any creative endeavor, whether or not it's creating a podcast, writing novel or doing theater. ⁓ Part of the part of the the deal is the actual effort that you have to put in, you know, the the thinking of it, the conceptualizing of whatever it is.

that you're creating and then the actual effort that goes into doing doing that work. It creates ownership. You know, it creates a

it creates in you ⁓ something that's different than getting an idea and then going, okay, let's do whatever the algorithm says. So I'm with you on that. Like I said, I don't love AI. I'm not opposed to AI in certain situations. ⁓ But I still...

sounds insane. I still love sitting down with my iPad and some copy or some, you know, some work that I've just written and then refining that with an Apple pencil. You know, it used to be paper, but you know, it's, it's there, there is something very satisfying about actually doing the work.

It's what I love about theater. Theater, know, a lot of people think, oh, it's because you want to be on stage and have people see you. No, dude, I want to actually collaborate with everybody else that's a part of this and have the opportunity to act and interact. And, you know, it's almost always the lead up to the actual performance that makes me happiest in performances. It's kind of like the cherry on top.

Bill McLean (31:33)
I will say I've gone back to just this week actually after crapping on iPad OS 26 for the past three weeks to Tom's demise. I've gone back to writing in the morning on the iPad because I still enjoy the paper and pen thing but the process becomes a little more cumbersome then. I do scan.

Jeff (31:41)
Ha ha ha.

Mm-hmm.

Bill McLean (31:59)
I'll scan the pages in so I can have them in Apple Notes and then the text is searchable that way. So that's like the most enjoyable way for me to do it is still write pen and paper and then try to make a digital copy so I can search my thoughts later. But the iPad is a pretty good close replacement. And ⁓ I've sort of stopped my notes app madness for the time being and, you know, for the next three days or three hours, I guess.

Jeff (32:25)
Good.

Bill McLean (32:29)
and gone back to Apple Notes because of that, because the Apple Pencil and Apple Notes just work so well together.

Jeff (32:36)
Yeah,

Tom Anderson (32:36)
Yeah.

Jeff (32:36)
they do.

Tom Anderson (32:38)
Yeah. And that's still a great way for me to think through things too. I think for me, the, where the AI comes in handy is to take a look at large, larger sets of data, maybe from multiple sources, ⁓ and then try and find out what relationships might be between those. What, you know, I might be able to determine, look at it from ways, maybe I'm not.

Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. But like the other day, I was sent out a newsletter this week, and I was like, OK, well, I've got these couple of ideas that I want to do. it made what I thought was a pretty good observation. It's like, the last three have been kind of hardware focused, maybe do like a go with the one that you for a tip. And so I went with the notes tips this week. Because I hadn't noticed that pattern. I wasn't paying any attention to it. ⁓

Is that a huge monumental revelation? No, but I thought it was kind of neat that it did pick that up. Uh, and so like, was funny, Jeff will be amazed, but at work yesterday, I had a meeting with some people at our health professions program and actually used my field notes in a pen. Jeff. I did left my laptop in the bag, wrote down the things I did take a picture of it put it in the craft note where all their other stuff is I'm working on. Um, so I did that. Um,

Jeff (33:45)
you

What? I love that for you. I love that for you.

Bill McLean (33:51)
Wow.

Jeff (33:59)
Yeah.

Tom Anderson (34:04)
Because I really like those, uh, that 1943 series they put out that you could use in any orientation. I really liked that one. The copper one they did as like the second part of the subscription. was okay with that one. Um, they were okay. Uh, but so yeah, I did that and I still like just doing with the pencil on, on stuff, just to kind of, you know, think through things that that's still tops, but, uh, Bill, so right now what

Jeff (34:08)
Yeah.

Really cool too. Yeah, no, I like that one.

Tom Anderson (34:34)
What are kind of your typical things that you're doing day to day still? Like, it sounds like you've ruled out some things as like, okay, this, this isn't working. And some of it's productivity porn where I'm sitting there and it's like, look how productive I am. Or it's not any different really than if you're, you know, looking through Reddit for topics or, or stuff. It's all procrastination really, but.

Bill McLean (34:59)
Yeah, the one thing, so Claude on the phone and on the iPad can actually interface with Apple reminders. It can read and write to reminders. So one thing I did ⁓ just yesterday was I took all of the handwritten notes from Apple Notes for the week, exported them to Markdown, and sent those into Claude and said, pull out all of the ⁓ action items or like

As I'm writing, come up with video ideas and I just jot a note that this would be a good video idea. I asked it to pull all of those five days worth of notes and put them into...

Apple reminders because there's a thing that I would never do. I pretty much write in the journal. I treat this like a morning pages sort of practice and then I close it and unless I'm searching in Apple notes, I may never see this page ever again, which is probably okay. ⁓ But being able to take those actionable bits and pull them out and then, you know, it's...

Obviously I was writing about it, it's something that I would be excited to go make then. It was an idea that I came up with, it's got kind of no AI fingerprints on it, ⁓ was important. So I think that's one thing where we can look forward to a potential, know, Siri or Gemini integration inside of the Apple ecosystem that you can just like, this stuff will just work. You can just.

turn notes into reminders, can tell it to schedule reminders on your calendar, you're not generating AI slop that way. It's like these small touch points and small things of friction that you could do manually and might take you a little bit more time. I think I've been saying that context is the superpower. The more information it knows about you, which Apple...

Hopefully they aren't sharing all this information with people, but all this stuff is on your devices, it's in your iCloud. They have the most personal context of you probably than anybody other than Google. And so that hopefully gives them the ability to personalize these things in a way that ⁓ they're actually more useful than going into a chatbot and getting the same, that's a great idea, as everybody else. ⁓

Jeff (37:29)
Yeah. You're

a genius. Yeah. Well, yeah.

Bill McLean (37:31)
Yeah, congrats!

Tom Anderson (37:32)
golden retriever effect. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah. You mentioned there, Bill, you've got, ⁓ you've done some reminders and notes integrations. What, so with your AI tool kind of mostly in the center, but not necessarily, but what applications do you have tied into yours at this point through MCP or APIs or other ways?

Jeff (37:37)
Sick offense delayed.

Bill McLean (37:57)
⁓ I guess reminders is one, Apple Notes kind of has ⁓ an MCP. It doesn't work that well into Claude. I've been doing kind of an obsidian ⁓ side quest, I'll call it, where... What? That's how it goes, right? ⁓ I was like...

Jeff (38:15)
side quest.

Tom Anderson (38:16)
hahahahah

Jeff (38:21)
No, right, right, right.

Bill McLean (38:23)
I was like, I'm going to use this for, so I'd done this before. I'd used Obsidian in the past. I did another thing where I was like, all right, everybody on X is hyping Claude code and Obsidian. I have to go see, is this just hype or is this valuable? So I spent 30 days with Obsidian basically running Claude, ⁓ Claude code and Claude code work inside of my vault folder with various skills and ⁓ kind of recurring tasks.

So things like, I wrote this video, now I need a title and a thumbnail for it, or ⁓ video description, whatever. Just like ancillary tasks to the YouTube channel that aren't necessarily ⁓ like come up with the idea and I'll just record a video word for word what you say, Mr. AI Overlord. ⁓ And then Claude Code is an interesting one. As a non-developer, non-

non-technical software person, I'll say, ⁓ I did use Claude Code to help me build my personal website. And this is another thing where, you know, I've been saying AI doesn't have a normie solution right now, like the normal distribution of the bell curve isn't picking up this tool to do something like this. But if you have a little bit of ⁓ inkling of interest,

I did replace my Squarespace subscription of $200 a year. We'll ignore the fact that I paid $200 a year for Claude in order to have it help me make the website. So there's some stupid tax in there, but the bill math works out too. I saved my Squarespace subscription and now I have a website that I made with the help of Claude that's a little bit easier to maintain, basically runs on Markdown files. So when I have a blog post, I can...

Jeff (39:58)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Bill McLean (40:18)
I can kind of just write and push it to the site. The hosting is free. And so I thought that was an interesting use case where, know, Squarespace now went private a few years ago. They, in that transition, bought ⁓ all of the Google domains ⁓ infrastructure. you know, they're now a registrar in addition to the place where you can...

build your website and I was just never thrilled with their templates and it's just clunky on how difficult it is to design and just run a basic function like a blog on their website. ⁓ so here, right, here's a guy in the basement who just replaced this, I don't know what their valuation is, hundreds of millions of dollars, know, a hundred million dollars companies, ⁓ sold.

Tom Anderson (40:58)
Mm-hmm.

Bill McLean (41:11)
purpose to create a website. just defeated it with the help of AI in a few weeks. With no prior knowledge. Yeah, you know, screw you guys. And I know and now I'm gonna go, yeah, and then it's even worse. Now I'm gonna go sign up for a $40 a month Beehive subscription and $200 a year will seem like a great deal.

Tom Anderson (41:17)
Stuck it to the man. Come on over to Beehive, Bill. I'm waiting for you. Come on.

Jeff (41:20)
Yeah.

Tom Anderson (41:34)
get a lot build that you got to build out that email list. It was funny speaking of websites, my son did that he's in college and he spun up a little side business and he's like, well, I a website. And so I was like, well, here, I'll buy you a club pro plan 20 bucks a month. I said, you know, do some marketing plans through it, but you could do your website through it too. ⁓ And he'd never built a website had no idea how to do it. ⁓ And so he went into Claude, he did it.

it built it, it went to Squarespace because he got like a $72 for two year promotional thing or something. ⁓ But it walked him through how to, you know, get it into Squarespace, know, he's got his SSL all set up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, about two hours. It all took him and never done it before. I had no clue what he was doing. He just followed the steps and it actually worked. So he was like, that's pretty cool. ⁓ So he had done that. ⁓ Yeah, I've got

MCP, so the model context protocol which allows you to kind of integrate other apps, web app services with the AI tool that you're using. It's usually pretty simple to set up. There's like a little URL you've got to drop in there, that kind of thing. So I've got only a few of those set up that I use. I've got one set up with Readwise and Reader. So Readwise we've talked about before, so that's the service where you can send your...

highlights you've made in books or Twitter posts or x posts that you've seen ⁓ up to this service and then they resurface in different ways. Reader is kind of there are RSS feeds, you can plug those in there, but you can also send other things into it. So it's kind of like a read it later type thing. ⁓ So I can interact with those highlights and everything like that. If I'm working on something, I've got to tie it into craft, which is my notes app of choice. ⁓

Craft has their AI assistant. I used a little bit, but it burned through credits so quickly. And I was like, well, I'm not going to pay for more credits there. so don't use that a whole lot. but Claude interacts with it pretty well. I don't do it a ton, but one thing I did do, like I went through, you know, all of the things that I'd been working on and you end up with like, you kind of work in fits and spurts like everything else. It's like, okay, I want to work on.

you know, SEO stuff for a little bit, I'm going to work on content plan for a little bit or, you know, how can I grow the newsletter stuff? And so I'd done all these different things. And one thing that ⁓ I did probably two months ago, ⁓ like on a Sunday, I was like, Hey, give me a review of everything we've worked on this week, what I've finished and what I've got outstanding. And that was pretty good.

because it kind of gave me like a very thorough list of, you've done these, you've got these six things left, you want to work on one of these now, you want to do it later, whatever. ⁓ But eventually that list got fairly long. So I was like, okay, well, go ahead and put this into a project tracker and craft using their collections, which is like a little database like a notion or something. And did a great job of that. Like it took them all put them all in there, I had it, you know, put a description on it. So if I looked at it later, had at least some context of what it was for gave me

custom fields for like is for the podcast or the newsletter or whatever. So that all worked out pretty well. What I like is you can pick those up at any time and work on them. But I can also, as I work on them, I can say, okay, we'll add that to the appropriate task in the project tracker and it'll drop it into the note there. So I've got that history there as well. I have built a skill for the podcast. And so

kind of the workflow there is, which I'll do here probably in about half an hour is, you know, we record, ⁓ come back after Riverside's process, everything I take the transcript, I download that, dump it into Claude and say, this is episode 86, build the podcast package for that. ⁓ and what I've set that up to do is, ⁓ give me like five potential show titles that are optimized for search or whatever. Give me a nice description.

go out for any products or services that we've mentioned that we want to put in the show notes and grab the links. So it'll do that. ⁓ But then I also have it kind of rate the content for repurposing. is it evergreen content? Would it be retrospective? Those types of things. And so it'll kind of read all the content for that. And then it puts it into the note and craft when I'm done. So that's been very good. ⁓ I took a couple of

⁓ courses for like writing stuff. And I watched a couple of YouTube videos. ⁓ and so I took what I picked up from those and I have built almost like a little editor in there because my problem with writing is for 30 years now, all of my writing has been technical how to at work because it's like, and so it's very dry. Typically it's

Here's how to reset a Mac for repurposing to a new person. Step one, click this. Step two, click that. Step three, click this. And so I set up this quote unquote editor just to review it and say, OK, am I putting acronyms in that I haven't explained? Am I writing this so that it's going to be somewhat interesting to somebody and not looking like a support article on Apple's website?

those types of things. So try to get a little bit of flavor because I've done that for so long. It is that's just where I roll into is that type of stuff. And it's been pretty good about that too. So those types of things are where I tend to get the most use out of it.

Jeff (47:15)
Thank

Bill McLean (47:28)
Yeah, I've gone back to pretty much projects and skills. my, is where I landed my side quest on, on Obsidian basically landed with the fact that, ⁓ I was actually getting better answers out of Claude with more context when I was using projects and skills as than I was directly referencing notes within an Obsidian vault. And so, ⁓ for, guess,

At a high level, a skill is something that you do often. You have a podcast, you run this package every couple of weeks when you do the podcast. Same with like a YouTube video title generation thing. Right, I'm making a video, I want you to come up with titles. Inside of the project, I then have a bunch of analytics data. Here are titles and thumbnails that have worked well in the past.

Here's the best performing videos on the channel. Here's the worst performing videos on the channel. ⁓ Here's kind of a, I have like a writing and a style guide. You know, this is kind of how I write things. This is how I prefer things to be styled. I found that, you know, those answers to be better. And that lets me, you ⁓ go back to using Apple Notes. So was an excuse to switch tools again, which I love.

Jeff (48:50)
Ha ha ha ha ha!

Bill McLean (48:53)
And just write, we talk about this, don't worry. I can write wherever I want. And ⁓ Apple Notes is pretty distraction-free. I've been playing around with IA Writer, which is another kind of distraction-free writing app that I like as well. ⁓ So my search hasn't completely ended, but Apple Notes is like.

Jeff (48:55)
It's time for therapy, Bill.

Bill McLean (49:20)
It's the home for everything because it interfaces with reminders so well. That's really the connection I haven't been able to shake in any of these productivity conversations. Notion has a good AI built in now. It's annoying that you can't bring your own subscription, that I can't sign in with my Claude account. I have to pay Notion $20 a month too in addition to Claude $20. I'm not paying everybody in the known universe $20 a month. I already do that for Apple.

Like Apple is the one, get your AI together and I'll pay you $20 a month for it.

Jeff (49:54)
I've

got a link for you, Bill. He me 20 bucks a month.

Bill McLean (50:00)
So, yeah, I mean, the reminders and calendar connection, just, don't know, since I left Fantastical, which used to integrate, you know, my to-do list account and integrated reminders, you Fantastical was the thing that got me hooked on having your to-dos on your calendar. I'm still not big on ⁓ time blocking or anything like that, but I like being able to, wherever I am, look at the...

calendar app or the reminders app and know, you know, okay, I might have one or two things that I have to get done today and then a list of other stuff that are nice to haves. And that's been like the only stable building block, you know, anytime I switch notes tools, I haven't been able to get rid of reminders and calendar because if I do, I just feel totally disorganized to the point where I get nothing done, you know, and I'll just chat with an AI and switch notes apps all day.

Jeff (50:55)
You

Tom Anderson (51:00)
I will say the craft daily note and the calendar view off to the side is a pretty good combo for that. Cause I like that too. And so I'll have my things that I need to do for that day show up in the daily notes. And then on the left side of that, I've got, you know, the meetings and everything. ⁓ and they've got kind of like a one click, create note for the meeting there, which then you can backlink to anywhere else you want it to go to. So whole different conversation there, which I'm sure bill would be happy to come back for.

Jeff (51:27)
Absolutely. I'm

sure he would end with that bill. I'm sure actually in six months, six months you will have tried a different notes app and gone back to Apple notes. ⁓ Yeah, exactly. So Bill, first of all, thanks for thanks for coming on with us. Again, really appreciate having you here.

Bill McLean (51:30)
Yeah, yeah, in six more months, I'll have a different notes app. Six seconds. There you go.

Tom Anderson (51:34)
Six months. Six days.

three or four times.

Jeff (51:54)
interesting conversation even for those of us that barely give two rips about AI. ⁓ Where can people find you and what it is you're doing and learn what particular notes app you're on at this particular moment in time?

Bill McLean (52:14)
youtube.com slash at Bill McLean and there is a new notes app video coming soon I'll say. My adventures with Obsidian is in work so I'm gonna package that up and like I said by the time I even get the video out my thoughts have changed a little bit so there we go.

Jeff (52:22)
my gosh.

Tom Anderson (52:25)
Heh.

Jeff (52:33)
So funny. Cool. Tom Anderson, where can we find you?

Tom Anderson (52:33)
You

Tom F Anderson.com is the website you can sign up for the newsletter there and then I'm at Tom Anderson on threads.

Jeff (52:47)
Yep, you can find me at RasPoint at various platforms. Post very, very, very little. Tom cajoled me into posting this last week, so I did it. I'm a good boy. You're welcome, Tom. I know, right, right, I know. Yeah, probably not because I posted all three people that follow me on any of those platforms, like Blue Sky and Threads.

Tom Anderson (52:59)
Thank you, Jeff. We got 10 downloads that day because you posted. I don't know if it's because you posted, but we did. So all credit to Jeff for that.

Bill McLean (53:00)
you

Jeff (53:17)
We can be reached at feedback at basic afshow.com and we do like feedback as always, you know, we miss get sent at the set at the end. But you know, rate us on your favorite podcast app. Apple, Apple podcast ratings really do make a difference. So if you can do that, we'd be greatly ⁓ appreciative. You can send us voice memos and all sorts of other junk like that through the through links that you'll find in the show notes. And there will be show notes on this.

⁓ Once again, ⁓ Bill, super grateful to have you along and ⁓ reminder that our show artwork Random Art Design, ⁓ music, psychokinetics, and Celsius 7. And ⁓ Tom, we've burned more than our usual 45 minutes, People must love us if they've stuck around this far.

Tom Anderson (54:05)
We did.

That's mutual. So that's right. Uh, know Jeff, know you did. All right. Thanks, Bill. Appreciate it. I'll talk to you messages here in a minutes. Everybody else, uh, as we've said, we do appreciate you hanging out with us. Uh, and so we will talk to you again in a couple of weeks until then have a great rest of your day or night.