Interview with Ashlee Vance
Ashlee Vance is a reporter. He is the host of Hello World on Bloomberg Television and Elon Musk's biographer.
The Techie’s Tech
Max Raskin: So you cover tech — are you a gearhead? Do you love gadgets and things?
Ashlee Vance: I do love gadgets, although I don't know if I'd say I'm a gearhead. I've always wanted to be a gearhead, but I'm not a very hands-on capable person. And so I like to play with all the gadgets and test things out, but I've always dreamed of being more of the get down and dirty on the real geek layer kind of human and messing with making my own hardware and things like that. It turns out I'm just really bad at it.
MR: When you're testing something new, do you have a sandbox world with a throwaway email or phone number — and then you have your real life?
AV: I used to. I was probably geekier when I first started out as a tech writer. I was not a techie person growing up and in college…I was okay, but I was not super into it. When I first started out writing, I had to cover semiconductors and operating systems and databases and file systems and things like that. So I tried to actually learn a lot of that stuff. I would get Linux and Unix on my computer and try to learn how the command line interface went and read semiconductor textbooks. I think these days I just like to play with fun stuff. So I'm into gadgets and everything, but I'm not a world's expert on the latest and greatest stuff.
MR: I’m really curious what someone like you uses for their random stuff. What phone do you use?
AV: Well, I take a lot of grief for it these days. I use an Android Pixel 7 and I just bought a Pixel 8. So I come from old school appreciating open source software. And even though Android is led by this giant corporation, I still refuse to get an iPhone on freedom principles. And then I got a big ‘ole MacBook Pro, enormous, $4,000, full of memory and storage because I do so much video stuff these days.
MR: If you're just looking around your room right now, what gadgets do you see?
AV: Well, I've got the Opal C1 camera on here right now. It's like a pretty slick webcam. Gosh.
I've got a June Oven that's right behind me in my kitchen with computer recognition for food. And I got my Fitbit. That's about it.
MR: What model?
AV: This is a Charge 5.
MR: What are some apps on your phone that you use that you think most people haven’t heard of?
AV: The thing I found the most useful that I use especially for books and my big projects, is Roam Research. It’s vaguely like a note-taking app, but you can paste anything into this interface like documents, photos, PDFs. You can hyperlink all these terms in your notes. And so when I'm doing a book, I've just discovered this is an amazing way to organize stuff as you're going and it goes with your stream of consciousness. Anytime you're having thoughts, people to interview, things you want to explore, papers you want to save to read…
One last one that I do love that people probably would not know about, but there's this company, Teenage Engineering, that makes the most amazing stuff and they make this speaker called the OB-4 and it's really weird. It has amazing sound. And it records the last two hours of whatever has been playing on the machine automatically and there's this really cool little turntable knob. You could just reverse through stuff. It's a Bluetooth speaker. It does radio. It also plays all these really weird noises like metronome and zen noises.
Teenage Engineering makes the best stuff. It's expensive. So what I'm waiting for as my main recorder is the TP-7.
Frog Poison
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