Jake & JZ

It’s the end of Season 1 for Jake & JZ! In this mini episode, we announce that we’re taking a break to publish our new book Click and launch some other cool projects.

Shoot, we gave away the content of the episode in the show notes! Still, it’s worth tuning in to hear our conversation about:
If you have ideas or requests for Season 2, please send us an email at hey@jakeandjz.com. We’d love to hear from you!
Thanks for listening and watching, and we’ll see you soon.

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Creators and Guests

Host
Jake Knapp
Host
John Zeratsky

What is Jake & JZ?

Weekly podcast about startups, design, marketing, technology… and anything else we’re thinking about. 🤓

Hosted by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, co-founders of‍ Character Capital and bestselling authors of Sprint and Make Time.

JZ (00:00)
Jake, I noticed that your camera looks a bit different. Different camera angle? No, different camera altogether, right?

Jake (00:05)
Yeah, this is a different camera and different camera angle. This is a teleprompter that I'm using made by Elgato. This is not a paid product placement, by the way, as you'll quickly find out as I describe my experience with it. Well, my experience has been mostly pretty good, but I set this thing up because, well, the idea is to get eye contact, right? So just in case you have never heard of one of these, you're listening along, it's a little screen.

JZ (00:08)
Yeah.

Jake (00:34)
Like a little, you know, I don't know if 10 inch, eight inch screen or something. And that screen is pointing up at the ceiling. I've got it on kind of a microphone arm. Elgato also makes these great microphone arms that I, that I use and Elgato makes a stream deck. just unpaid product placement plugs for Elgato. Like that stuff is all terrific. teleprompter is a, it's a screen that points up and then there's a little like.

one way mirror kind of at an angle. So I can see the screen reflected on that. then behind the one way mirror is the camera and I bought their teleprompter. And I also went ahead and bought their camera that fits like exactly in there. mean, in a large part, it's terrific because I can look straight at the screen. I'm looking right at you right now, but it's right.

JZ (01:01)
Sure. Okay.

I mean, it is, it's bracing the level of icon.

Jake (01:23)
Yeah. And, and like, and the, and the camera is like right behind your face. So it's, you know, it feels, and it feels better. honestly is like less tiring to be on a call in this way because it just feels. Yeah. Because I know that eye contact is it's a distractor. It's a weird thing when you don't quite have eye contact on a call.

JZ (01:34)
Yeah. And not thinking about like, where do I look? Like, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Jake (01:45)
I'm conscious of it when I'm on a call that I look at the camera as much as I can, then I'm not looking at the person. So there's a lot of like little background cognitive load for me and it's just not as good. I know when I watch a video and somebody's eyes are a little bit off, it's like, it's not as good as when they're making eye contact. So that part's all good. The thing that's not so great here, number one, I wish the screen was a bit bigger. So as I'm dragging windows over, you know, this is connected to my Mac and I've got my display to side of it.

I drag a window over here and it's tiny and I have to like size it down. And if there, if we're on a call as we were when we were teaching the workshop recently, and we've got like a bunch of people on the call, everybody's face is just like three pixels, you know, on the screen. So I'm going to investigate. think there might be a larger this one was pretty inexpensive, so it's a good, it was a good starter set. And then the other thing is the camera quality. I think it's, it's a little bit, feels a little bit more webcammy.

JZ (02:18)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jake (02:43)
So that's something you can upgrade with this one. I can fit in like a proper camera with a lens, but when they showed the feed of like video from supposedly from this camera on the website, it looked a lot better than I've been able to achieve IRL I'm missing the Opal camera, which I couldn't really make it in. Yeah, I couldn't fit that one in in a good way. it's been a fun, fun little experiment.

JZ (02:58)
haha

Yeah, that's your normal camera. Yeah.

Yeah,

two

questions I have for you. One is, have you seen that camera? I can't remember the name of it, but it's like a little camera that drops down in front of your screen and it like...

Jake (03:38)
yeah. Yeah. Well, Michael Margolis, our friend and former colleague, Michael Margolis was, he sent me a note actually. I think I actually failed to send it on to you, but he was like, Hey, I love the podcast. Have you guys ever considered using one of these? because my contact was weak. And that email from him was, and I don't think I've written it back yet either. you know, I got the flu.

JZ (03:41)
Yeah. Yeah.

He's like your eye contact game is like a little off.

Jake (04:05)
I missed some podcasts here. I way behind on email. So everyone, I apologize. I'm always behind on email, but even worse than normal now. but, but rather than like right back to him, like a normal human with like social skills, I just, I was just like, I'm going to use the teleprompter that I bought and never like properly set up. So, so that's, but yeah, I have seen it. So it's a, well, can you describe it? I, it looked like it just drops down over.

JZ (04:12)
Hehehehe

yeah, yep.

Yeah, I

think it sits on top of your monitor and then there's a tiny camera, let's say it's a half an inch cube and it's on a little stick and it swings down so that you can use your big screen. You don't have that problem of the tiny screen, you don't have to deal with the mirrors and stuff like that, but the camera can sit right in front of whatever you want to be looking at on your screen.

Jake (04:39)
Yeah.

Yeah, right.

JZ (04:58)
so that you get the best of both worlds. But I don't know how high quality that camera is. If it's tiny and it's on a stick, how good could it be? If it was bigger, it would just obscure what's on the screen. Yeah, right. Well, let me look. I can't see you. Yeah, I haven't tried it, but I have seen it on the internet. So was curious if you had a perspective on that.

Jake (05:04)
can't be great. Yeah.

You got like a DSLR just like BONG!

Yeah. I mean,

this seems like a thing that there's going to be a great solution for at some point. And we're kind of like in the hack solution stage, I felt that one, I was skeptical of the camera quality because of the size. And I, I also just felt like the little, like the stick would sort of just drive me nuts in some way. I, but you know,

JZ (05:32)
Right,

Hey.

Jake (05:48)
Michael's really good at anything involving you're having a conversation with somebody. How do you make it go as well as possible? So he says something's good. Like it's good. Like, so I, that's like, that's why here we are talking about this. Cause that spurred me and he's probably right about the little stick deal.

JZ (05:52)
Yeah. Yeah.

you ever seen the Mama?

Jake (06:06)
I have not.

JZ (06:07)
starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. It's very funny. If you like the two of them, then you like that style of comedy.

Jake (06:10)
No, no.

I mean, they're funny. that's, that's so, so what's the, but I really, I'm really

longing to know how, if that connects to the camera on a stick.

JZ (06:23)
Tina Fey

works at, I think, a fictional business that is, it's either like Whole Foods or it's like REI. I can't remember if natural foods or it's like outdoorsy stuff, but it's like in that sort of universe of like, a business, we're trying to make money, but we're also and you know, a little bit, you know, hippie-dippy, like whatever.

Jake (06:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

JZ (06:44)
And her boss is played by Steve Martin and he has like long hair. And she gives like a really good presentation. And so he says, he says, that was fantastic. I would like to reward you with 10 minutes of uninterrupted eye contact.

Jake (07:02)
really, it's really, it's

JZ (07:02)
It's worth watching. The other question

is about your thoughts on I think of as like workshop camera, which is probably seen this or been on like events where it's like, it's like this. It's like, you know, it's not meant to be like it. Like you're basically trying to say like, I'm not even going to try to do eye contact, right? I'm going to like, I'm working over here. I'm like doing stuff and you're sort of like, you are in the room with me. You're observing me.

Jake (07:20)
yeah.

Yeah.

JZ (07:27)
do work and talk, but we're not trying to like pretend that we're having a face-to-face conversation.

Jake (07:34)
Well, my thought here is that if I could dial in the teleprompter, that the coolest thing would be to have the teleprompter next to the display. And I'm doing one of two things. I'm talking to you and I'm looking at you, or I'm doing what you just described on a note. Now I'm doing something and you know, I'm doing something because like if we were in the room, yes. Big screen doing something, small screen talking to you.

JZ (07:48)
Mm-hmm.

yeah. So when you're looking at the big screen, you're doing stuff. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Jake (08:01)
as if you were here, as if the teleprompter is like the person's head or like the people's heads who are in the meeting. And if I did want to do something on my laptop and we were in a room together or whatever, of course I wouldn't be making eye contact with you then. I'd be typing away and you wouldn't mind and I could still be talking to you. And then, you know, I think that's quite nice. In fact, when we did the workshop recently, I was playing with, I think...

JZ (08:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jake (08:28)
of unsuccessfully, but I had set up my opal camera on like the far side of the, yeah. And I tried to do like, even give a sense of like this camera is pointing and you can see the other side of the room. And then, you know, so I think there's some, think it's kind of think it's kind of fun, but what I don't like is the entire call. The person's looking way away and they're, yeah, they're doing something like it's just.

JZ (08:31)
You had a couple of different cameras, yeah.

looking somewhere else. Yeah.

Jake (08:54)
And it's not, it's not even like I have like a principle about that. It's just that something in like my lizard brain is like, I don't know what's going on. And I'm burning more cycles trying to, God, I heard a crazy thing recently my younger son is reading the the body by Bill Bryson. Usually when I talk about the book, the body, I'm talking about the one by Stephen King. It's one by Bill Bryson. Yeah.

JZ (08:58)
Yeah. You just don't like it.

Yeah, that's where I thought this was going.

Jake (09:18)
So the thing that came out, there's just like, Bill Bryson is always full of like amazing facts, know, interesting research, great And the crazy thing recently what you're seeing, what I'm seeing, like right now is actually a time delay of a fraction of a second from what's happening. So there's a fraction of a second difference it takes a while for our

brain to process the light that hits the eye. And to keep things current so that there's not a lag in what we see, we're actually, the brain is what it would see in like this which is if that's true, and I don't have no reason to think that's not true, but that's bananas. But suppose that's going on, right? Like, yeah, yeah.

JZ (09:44)
Wow.

Yeah.

Wow. It was basically like a GPT that's like predicting like, this is

probably like based on our training data, this is probably what's going to come next. Yeah.

Jake (10:10)
Probably what would happen next. And it's

sort of like, was, I was thinking about him like, I guess that sort of makes sense. Like we all know already about the blind spot, right? And it's like, there's like, there's a blind spot and you can kind of do some things to trick yourself. So you see it, but most of the time your brain is filling in the blind spot where the, it's where the nerve connects the eye. And so you really can't see there. And so the brain just sort of is like, like using the Photoshop, you know, the healing brush and just kind of like, ah, think this is kind of what that would look like.

JZ (10:17)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yep.

The magic fill or whatever it's called. Yeah. The

clone tool.

Jake (10:39)
But apparently that's happening on the entire field of vision on the current frame all the time. And I guess what must happen is if it drops a frame, if something unpredictable happens, the frame rate is so high that it just corrects and you don't quite catch it. But maybe sometimes you're like, you know, sometimes maybe something was like, did I see something or something weird? Like maybe it's just. Yeah. But anyway, the wild part of it. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it could be all kinds of things, although maybe.

JZ (10:50)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that probably explains a lot of ghost sightings.

Jake (11:08)
Maybe that frame rate is so small that you can't even parse it. And it only makes sense. It's like a fluid in mind that the brain is doing all that work, just imagine how much work the brain is in a conversation because we're also spend a lot of mental power assessing how's this going? What's the social so tuned into faces. We're so tuned into voices and.

JZ (11:20)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jake (11:31)
all of the social stuff that kind of makes us able to animals who live in groups together and cooperate and, you know, have jobs and stuff, right? Like, when something's a little bit weird, you just have to think like, well, no wonder it feels weird. Cause the brain has to work so hard this illusion of, you know, smoothness. And so when stuff is in zoom, stuff's going to be weird and like, your brain's going to be, it's going to be

JZ (11:42)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jake (11:55)
saying it just say, all sort of makes sense to me. So anyway, hopefully. Well, no wonder, no wonder they are right. The audios gets a little off and you're like, I are trying to, your brain's working to adjust it. The video's a little off. The eye contact isn't there. So your brain's like, ah, like, are we okay? Are we like on the same page? You know, it's doing all this work. The person's like this big, you know, they're flat. Yeah. It's like, So this, I will say the teleprompter feels better.

JZ (11:58)
No wonder Zoom calls are so exhausting. Yeah.

Like, what am I looking at over there?

Jake (12:25)
Like it just, does feel better, even though it's, super weird. So I'm going to keep trying to dial it in and get it better. And maybe next season we'll have an update on the teleprompter.

JZ (12:25)
Yeah.

Awesome.

segue because believe it or not, this was not supposed to be an episode about cameras. guess we couldn't help ourselves. This was just meant to be a quick announcement episode, a mini episode say that this is the end of season one. we thank you for listening and for watching. And hopefully you found some, some useful stuff somewhere in this podcast.

Jake (12:36)
It's like, yeah.

JZ (12:56)
We're going to take a little bit of a break. We're going to focus on launching Click. We've announced it already, but we're going to focus on getting it out into the world officially. It'll be available in April. And we've got some other cool projects that we're working on in the next couple of months and we'll be back. We have a bunch of ideas for things that we can try. And if you have any ideas for topics or formats or just things you'd like to see us do share.

Let us know. Hey at jakenjz.com. We'd love to read your emails.

Jake (13:24)
Yeah.

Yeah, and who knows how amazingly lifelike our video feed will be upon the return of Jake and Jay-Z for season two.

JZ (13:33)
You

Yeah, yeah,

like Steve Martin in Baby Mama, just uninterrupted eye contact. That'll be our gift to the world. Oh man, visual ASMR. It's just like, just sitting there. Maybe with some soothing ocean sounds in the background as a reference to the sleep episode.

Jake (13:43)
Yeah, no speaking. It'll just be a whole time.

Yeah.

Thanks for watching and listening you guys. We'll see it next time.

JZ (14:04)
Thanks everybody.

Yeah, talk to you soon.