Slack Is Turning 10 Years Old, and Wow Has It Changed Everything

February 8, 2024 gear Leave a comment 23 Views

At its core, Slack is a chat app. Every day, millions of people use it to communicate, share files, and gossip with coworkers or friend groups in one organized place. That style of free-flowing interaction—which Slack didn’t invent, but made mainstream—has changed the way we talk to each other online for better and for worse. It’s brought us closer together and enabled global collaboration, but it’s also allowed conversations to follow us anywhere … like when you get a notification at 10 pm that your boss has sent you a DM.

This week, MIT Technology Review editor in chief Mat Honan joins the show to chronicle the history of Slack as the software suit turns 10 years old. We dig into how it helped our work lives bleed into our personal time, and how the company is faring under the auspices of Salesforce and against its competitors.

Show Notes

Read Mat’s 2014 story about Slack founder Stewart Butterfield and his boring startup. Here’s Lauren’s story about the Slack soft return and other office hacks you might want to use. Listen to the episode of WIRED’s Have a Nice Future podcast with former Slack CEO Lidiane Jones.

Recommendations

Mat recommends Airtags and the ChatGPT sticker bot. Mike recommends the Raw Impressions podcast with Lou and Adelle Barlow. Lauren recommends using the soft return in Slack.

Mat Honan can be found on social media @mat. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

How to Listen

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: Lauren.

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Lauren Goode: When you first started at WIRED back in the last century, there was no Slack.

Michael Calore: You mean we weren't given any slack?

Lauren Goode: No. I mean, well, yes, but, I mean, you were not using real-time, nonstop chat apps to talk to people across the newsroom. You had to email them, you had to walk over to their desk and talk to their faces.

Michael Calore: Yes. We used email. We also used GChat for a while, but I think the big one was HipChat. It was the real stone age of journalism.

Lauren Goode: Would you say the introduction of Slack has been a net positive?

Michael Calore: Absolutely. For me, other than the browser, it's the tool that I use the most, and I'm sure it is for many people.

Lauren Goode: It is for me too. Well, Slack is turning 10 years old this year. For this episode, I thought we'd bring in the person who chronicled it from the very beginning.

Michael Calore: I am very excited.

Lauren Goode: Let's do it.

[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]

Lauren Goode: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: I'm Michael Calore. I'm WIRED's director of consumer tech and culture.

Lauren Goode: We're joined this week by Mat Honan, the editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, and a former WIRED one. Hi, Mat. Thanks so much for joining us.

Mat Honan: I'm really excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me. I love this show, and to be here with both of you. It's just great.

Michael Calore: We should note, Mat, that you helped start this show.

Mat Honan: Did I? Are you sure?

Michael Calore: I am. Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Tell the people. How did it happen?

Michael Calore: Well, the Gadget Lab started as a video show a very, very long time ago, and then it shut down. Mat Honan and I, when we were working together here at WIRED, sort of restarted it as an audio talk podcast like it is now.

Lauren Goode: Was it called Gadget Lab?

Michael Calore: It was, yes.

Lauren Goode: Mat, welcome back.

Mat Honan: Thank you. I think the last time I was here, I was talking about that specifically.

Michael Calore: It was, yes. That was our anniversary show.

Lauren Goode: All right. Well, let's talk about Slack's anniversary. Mat, one of the reasons we wanted to bring you back in, aside from the fact that we just adore you, is that you wrote the first big piece for WIRED about Slack. This was back in 2014, and your story was titled, I love this title, “The Most Fascinating Profile You'll Ever Read About a Guy and His Boring Startup.” It really was fascinating. I mean, one, because Slack itself was a giant pivot from another tech product, and two, because it totally changed workplace communications. I don't think I'm overstating that. First though, for people who aren't on Slack, whose companies or jobs haven't required them to use it, I was hoping that, Mat, you would describe it for people and its most simple and also sociological terms.

Mat Honan: Sure. It's just a chat app at its heart. That's all it is. It's a way for people to talk to each other using text. It has both public channels, or I should say big channels that you can use publicly within your organization, and private channels that you can set to communicate with a smaller group privately, as well as direct messaging that you can use to talk to just another individual. It also has an expanding roster of communication things. You can now make phone calls or video calls using it. You can plug in all kinds of other applications. You can do a lot of stuff outside of that core chat function, but that's what we use it for. It's communications. It's just communications software.

Lauren Goode: There's something about it though that's like candy. The way that people look at iPhone apps on their phone and they're like, “Oh, colors. I'm attracted to it. I can't stop looking at it.” Slack has that element.

Mat Honan: It does. It's well-made software. One of the things I got into in that story a long time ago is the people who were creating it tried to put a bunch of heart into it. They tried to make it joyful in some ways, and it's a pleasant experience to use. I mean, it does a great job of syncing so that you can pick it up on your phone and you're right where you left off when it's on the desktop. It doesn't do a bunch of unexpected things. I don't have to shut it down and restart it all the time, like, say, some browsers. It doesn't run up my system usage. It's great software.

If I have complaints about it, it's that it's changed the way we work so much. I mean, we kind of knew it was going to change the way we worked, but it did it to such a degree, and I think especially because so many people had Slack during the pandemic, it became really easy to just think of work as something you never left, because Slack enables that.

Michael Calore: When you wrote the original profile back in 2014, obviously, we didn't know any of the things that Slack was going to bring into the workplace. What was it about the company that made you want to dig in and profile them?

Mat Honan: I mean, honestly, when I was initially thinking about the story I wanted to write, I didn't have a specific company in mind. I wanted to write about a buzzy startup, and I was especially interested in looking at people who were doing a second thing. I thought about Asana, because one of its founders was a Facebook founder. I thought about looking at what F. Williams was doing. I thought about these other things, but Slack was, at the moment, had so much hype and so much buzz, plus it was also good. I mean, it was a tool that I would want to use myself, that I did use myself, that I liked.

You mentioned HipChat earlier. I thought it was just far and away better than the other things I'd used like it, such as HipChat or Campfire, and it seemed like it was going places. It was one of Andreessen Horowitz's big investments. The startup founder, I knew the guy, Stewart Butterfield. I knew he had an interesting backstory, and so I just thought they would be very interesting in addition to the other stuff.

Lauren Goode: Give us the TLDR on Stewart's backstory.

Mat Honan: Stewart is the child of someone who deserted from the army during the Vietnam War. He initially grew up on a commune in British Columbia, got into computers at a young age, started a gaming company. The gaming company kind of crapped out, but they pulled a product out of the gaming company and that became Flickr, which he and his ex-wife, Caterina Fake, they had founded it together. They sold it to Yahoo for, I believe, 25 million bucks or somewhere in that neighborhood. After a few years of Yahoo, he went back with his original, I think, CTO. I could be getting some of the details wrong, but he and Cal Henderson, who he had worked with also at Flickr and Yahoo became … They started this gaming company again, basically to revisit this original idea for this original game that they had had back in the early 2000s. It didn't do well once again, a second time. It was called Glitch.

At this point though, once again, they had created this internal communication system that they thought was really great. It wasn't that different from IRC, internet relay chat, which is a longtime protocol that you can use to chat on the internet, but it was different enough, and they put enough into it that they thought they had something really cool here. They basically laid off the Glitch team and restarted the company with a handful of folks and that became Slack.

Lauren Goode: Within a relatively short amount of time, it felt like all the companies were using Slack. In media, we used it. Vox, BuzzFeed, Medium, Gawker. We're going to get to Gawker. We're all using it, but then there were bigger companies. eBay, PayPal, Dow Jones, Expedia, Nordstrom, Venmo, Stripe, Venmo, Shutterstock, it goes on and on and on. We were all super into Slack. Do you remember a point at which you started to think maybe there's too much Slack out there in our work lives? One, maybe it would be nice to go back to email and not have such frantic communications, or maybe it's not safe to have all of our real-time thoughts on a real-time chat app?

Mat Honan: Yes. It was probably within a year of this story. When I wrote this, I was a reporter at WIRED, and then I went on and started at BuzzFeed, where I was running their tech desk. I became a manager. In addition to being someone who just used Slack, I now managed people who used Slack. One of my first or very early on at BuzzFeed, I was asked by one reporter to ask another reporter to not put goatse in the Slack anymore. I just found consistently over the next seven years at BuzzFeed, there would just be so many problems that arose from Slack.

They could arise from someone not seeing something. There's sort of this expectation that people have seen things and carefully read them. It could come from someone misinterpreting something someone said. It could come from someone crossing a boundary, like posting goatse in there. You would see just all these workplace behaviors that were miscommunications effectively being amplified by Slack.

It also wasn't that long before you started seeing Slack enabling the 24/7 work culture, especially when it's on your phone, and you get a Slack at 10:00 pm. It's a lot harder to ignore that than getting an email at 10:00pm. That really, I thought, just absolutely took off in 2020, when everybody started working from home. It really went crazy at that point. But to go back to your question, yeah, I mean, within a year or so of writing this, I was like, “God, this is too much. This is way too much.” I mean, I still liked it though. I still prefer it to other software, chat software and things. I think it's kind of necessary.

Michael Calore: People may not know this, and maybe it's apocryphal, but Slack is actually an acronym, the Searchable Log of All Content and Knowledge. Is that correct?

Mat Honan: Did I write that?

Michael Calore: No, I think—

Lauren Goode: It's just known.

Michael Calore: Yeah, it's something.

Lauren Goode: It's just on the interweb.

Michael Calore: Something that's out there.

Mat Honan: But I think that people don't think about it that way, because it is so informal, and it is, at its heart, a chat app. There's this sort of casualness to it. I think one of the things that people forget is that everything they type into Slack is remembered, and it's searchable, and it can be brought up later. We have seen instances in the past of Slack conversations showing up in court cases.

Michael Calore: Yup. I mean, it doesn't always have to be Slack. For example. Gawker, a big thing that happened in that defamation case was that Hogan's attorneys pulled out some of the conversations that had happened among editors in Campfire, a similar tool to Slack. But there's also a really famous … I'm not going to name the two media companies, but I think two minutes of Googling could help you find this. A relatively well-known example where one media company purchased another media company, and they integrated their Slacks. The company that had been acquired, those reporters found things that other reporters and editors had been saying about them after joining.

Lauren Goode: It happened to me.

Michael Calore: It happened to you?

Lauren Goode: Yes. Well, I was part of the Recode team, and then Recode was acquired by Vox Media. We were all users of Slack at that point, and so the Recode team was integrated into Vox's team. I remember all of us running a search for our names to see what folks at Vox had been saying about us beforehand. And I remember—I was not, for what it's worth, not a very good photographer. I'm not a professional photographer. I'm a writer. I found someone in the Verge Slack just totally tearing apart the photos I had taken at a press event. I mean, it was fine. I had a good laugh about it, but yeah, I mean, there could be a lot worse things in there, certainly.

Mat Honan: I was just going to say, I would've thought you would … Not about you personally, but that particular integration that you're talking about, I can see all kinds of fraught things that may have been said by people on either team really.

Michael Calore: There is a mythical event that we often refer to as the Great Slackening, which is when Slack gets hacked and everybody's Slacks become public. You could see a future where you could go buy all of the New York Times Slack logs ever for a price.

Mat Honan: Well, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I almost always do in workplaces now is put Slacks on a rolling delete, which you can do, especially for the type of conversations you may not necessarily want to be tossed out in a leak somewhere, that could come up in discovery, that you don't have made public. I mean, there are all kinds of reasons to do that. When you see leaks that reporters are writing about a company, they often come from a Slack. They come from Slack chats that someone has searched up and found and screenshot it and sent to a reporter.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, yeah. The irony of one of that is I remembered that being part of the narrative about the Away luggage company.

Michael Calore: What happened with Away on Slack?

Lauren Goode: There were Slack chats that were shared with the press, that were Slacks from the CEO of the company, that were interpreted by some people to be problematic. Now, there's a big question about whether or not that was actually the case. She happened to be a woman CEO. There was also some blowback that maybe people were being unfair to her. Mat, have you personally had any experience where you wrote a Slack or a series of Slacks that you've regretted or that you would be mortified by in the Great Slackening were it to happen?

Mat Honan: I mean, I'm positive I've written stuff that I would be mortified by if the Great Slackening ever happened. We all have. Everyone has. There's no one with a clean conscience for that. I have never had, to my knowledge, any of my Slack communications leaked or used somewhere. Actually, that's not true. Actually, I say that that's not true. I just remember. Yeah, there was something that I wrote in a Slack that was leaked at one point to a reporter at a publication, but I'm not going to say what that publication was, because I wasn't identified. I'm glad to not be identified honestly. But it is such a pain in that regard.

There's a flip side to it too. There's a management side to it as well. Like what we're talking about, you're talking like, oh, you don't want, as a user of Slack, it's dangerous because these things can be exposed and presented in ways which they weren't intended when I was writing them. But there's also the flip side, which is that employers can use it to survey all their employees, and they do, and they can certainly take things out of context, just as a worker can use it to weaponize something against their manager. There are certainly cases where people have been fired because of things they said on Slack, which they maybe thought were private.

I know that one way that comms professionals use to try to identify leakers is if there are Slack screenshots. They look at things, they look for evidence of who's logged in. They can look at things even like the emoji reactions to a certain Slack and whoever can see those and at what times they are. They can help them zero in on who they think the leaker is. There are all kinds of ways that this is not just communication software, it's surveillance software.

Lauren Goode: That is an excellent point. Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk more about the future of Slack, or should we call it Slackforce.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: Slack may have started as a scrappy startup, but it is far from that now. In 2021, Slack was acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion. That's a lot of giffies. Sorry, that's a Slack joke. But as with a lot of acquisitions, that means that things have changed a little bit since the small app was absorbed into the giant CRM company, whose phallic building sticks out in the San Francisco skyline. There have been reports of culture clashes. The founding team at Slack is no longer there, so is this going to change the product that we all love, hate, love to hate, hate to love? Has it already changed? Mat, what are your thoughts on this?

Mat Honan: I think it's pretty telling that everybody who was involved with that acquisition is gone. From a report that I read in the Information, I remember reading that Mark Benioff had distanced himself from that acquisition, that he was essentially … Who's the departed Salesforce co-CEO? I'm blanking out but—

Lauren Goode: Bret Taylor.

Mat Honan: Yup. He was sort of putting it as Taylor's thing, but now, Taylor's gone, Butterfield's gone, Cal's gone. I mean, a lot of these people who you think of as being the architects of that are gone. You would assume that Salesforce didn't spend almost $28 billion on this without some ideas about what they want to do with it, and those might be very different ideas than Slack had itself when it was an independent company. I don't know. I don't have any insight into what they're thinking, but I know whenever I spend $27.7 billion on something, I usually have opinions about what I want to do with it.

Lauren Goode: Right. The last time you did, I think you had very strong opinions about that acquisition that you made. Yeah, I mean, I think, fundamentally, you wonder if it changes the incentive structure, what they actually want their customers to do in the software, how they plan to monetize that. Because my understanding, and Mat, you'd probably know better, of Slack over the years is that ultimately Slack wouldn't really care how much time you spent in the app. Once you were a paying customer, they wanted to keep you in there by just providing a service and providing the best experience that they could. If you were in for 12 hours a day versus four hours a day as a customer, it didn't really matter, but sometimes software billing can work differently than that.

Mat Honan: Yeah. I think one of the interesting things about certainly Slack in the early days was that a lot of their strategy was around making a great product that they thought people would start using from the bottom up in an organization, versus going in and having to go to some, whoever the IT director is at a company, who's been dealing with Microsoft for 20 years and just wants to deal with Microsoft. Slack said, “OK. We can make this software that people like so much that they're going to go to their boss and say, 'Hey, I really wish we'd get this. Everybody's using it,' and the boss makes the case to the IT director and it grows that way.” I know things didn't stay that way, and Slack developed its own huge sales department, all that kind of stuff, but I think you take a lot from that early culture of building something great and getting everybody to use it.

My view is, Salesforce, which I don’t use very much Salesforce software because I'm not in sales, but a lot of it is sort of a different approach. It's bundling software products together when they're selling it. We'll give you this and this and this and this. Slack is one of those things now. It's not this incredible stand-alone company anymore, and so you have to imagine that the incredible stand-alone product is going to start becoming increasingly something that works really well with other Salesforce things and becomes a value-add. That's just a guess, but seems likely.

Michael Calore: I think that's also the playbook of all of their competition. Probably the biggest piece of competition for Slack right now comes from Teams, Microsoft Teams. Microsoft bundles Teams in with all of your other office software needs, and it seems like that is a really good strategy for them, and it's a good strategy for Salesforce to bundle it in, but I think the problem is that there's a lot of money being left on the table for companies that are smaller. I saw a tweet or a skeet. I can't remember which, and I can't remember from who, and I apologize that I'm not giving proper credit here, but they said that Slack is now too much hassle for a startup of five people and way too nightmarish for any company over 50 people. That feels right because it's so feature-rich and there's so much in there.

It's the same thing with Teams. There's so many hurdles to adoption. It's not easy anymore to just open up an application and have a chat with somebody using these tools that were built so that you could easily have chats with people. They're big enterprise office tools now, and they are nightmarish to use, so it feels like they started small. Slack started small, and it got big, and it became a thing that big companies can use. And now, the small companies are looking for a solution for small companies again.

Mat Honan: I'm curious, are you in Slacks other than WIRED's? Either of you?

Michael Calore: Yes. Why do you ask?

Mat Honan: I ask that because I'm in several. I'm in a professional media organization one. I'm in a sort of a extended friends group chat kind of thing. I'm in one which my triathlon club uses it to communicate.

Lauren Goode: Are you also one with your Harvard club and your vegan club?

Mat Honan: No. Lauren, I work at MIT. MIT Technology Review. I hope people will subscribe. You can go to techreview.com/subscribe. It is an amazing tech publication, I'm sure all your listeners would enjoy.

Lauren Goode: Your triathlon, please tell us.

Mat Honan: Well, I mean, my point is just that I think that I've never been invited to a Microsoft Team. These free-level things that people use, like a chat solution for whatever little group you have, people are still using Slack for that. I don't see them using Teams. I don't know. I could be wrong. There could be a whole lot of folks out there doing that, but I haven't seen it.

Lauren Goode: It still has some cool factor, it sounds like you're saying.

Michael Calore: It does, and I think it's a thing that everybody uses for work already, right?

Mat Honan: Yeah. I don't even think of it as cool factor as much as just like it's easy to set up and easy to get people in it.

Lauren Goode: Right. I wonder how much AI is going to change some of this too, because I don't know if you guys know this, but people talk a lot about AI these days. Mat, from MIT Tech Review, I'm sure you're just getting up to speed on that, but Slack already uses AI. Slack uses the thing where when you go into all the people you could potentially direct message, it shows you the people you most often or are more likely to want to direct message. That's a form of AI, even if it's not, quote, unquote, generative AI, or not you queuing up something using an active bot.

But I do wonder, and particularly with Salesforce pushing more and more AI products, you go to Dreamforce and it's thumbnail upon thumbnail on these screens onstage talking about their AI cloud. I do wonder how much of that is going to be infused into Slack and change the experience in the future.

Michael Calore: I have a hard time thinking about what any real applications of generative AI are in the workplace. I just feel like it's so young that it's kind of hard to predict how it's going to fundamentally change something like Slack. I do think that we'll be interacting with bots more in Slack than we already are, because the bots are going to get better. Generative AI tech is going to make it easier for you to submit an IT ticket and things like that in a year than it is right now.

Lauren Goode: Interesting that that's your use case.

Michael Calore: Yeah. To me, that's the only place that I can really see those technologies being truly useful.

Lauren Goode: I don't know. I think about something like smart compose or the smart reply chips in Gmail. When they first came out, I think I had a visceral reaction to them and thinking, “Oh, I don't know if I would use these. These are a little bit creepy, a little bit uncanny.” Now, I use them all the time. “Sounds good. Thanks.”

Michael Calore: Yeah, I still don't use them.

Lauren Goode: Well, you're a manager and I am not, which is to say, I think maybe this is anecdotal, but perhaps I'm in a position more to respond in Slack to people than you are.

Michael Calore [laughing]: You're saying I just tell people what to do all the time?

Lauren Goode: Yeah. I might be more like, “OK. Let me get that right to you,” or, “Yep, I'm diving into the draft again,” or “Can I push my deadline by another day?” Yeah, I use those chips.

Mat Honan: That's a no. The “Can I push the deadline” thing is where the automatic no comes in, really.

Michael Calore: That's right. That's right. It's a rubber stamp. No. See, so you're seeing the introduction of AI into these tools as something that's going to help you communicate with the people that you already communicate with.

Lauren Goode: Efficiently. Yeah, because … Well, this is the promise of AI that all of the tech optimists talk about, allowing people to level up so they can actually do other more important things. But yeah, if I could spend any more time writing and not Slacking and emailing, that would be great.

Michael Calore: Right. Yeah. Then you're just babysitting AI. You're just spending the time selecting the little chip to respond with instead of just having it respond for you.

Lauren Goode: Right. I mean, it's already pretty helpful when it says to you, “You haven't participated in this Slack channel for a long time, would you like to just leave it?” Yes, please. Right?

Michael Calore: Always say yes.

Lauren Goode: Always say, oh, for the most part, yeah. You're usually leaving too late. But also I agree with you, and that there's a lot of hype right now around general AI and how it's going to change everything, and it's probably something we can't totally envision yet for Slackforce, which is now what I'm calling it, and how it's going to work for us there.

Michael Calore: I'm sure they would love to tell us when they hear this, they're going to send us a long email listing all the things that they're working on.

Lauren Goode: Yes. What do you think, Mat?

Mat Honan: I don't know. I think that when I was just listening to both of you there, I was thinking that it might do well to have something that recommended other tools, and I can see Slackforce definitely recommending us other tools. Like, “Oh, you're trying to open a spreadsheet. Would you like us to import that into a mail merge for you?” Or something. I don't know. Just that hook in with other tools in a more automated fashion, it seems like it would make sense.

Lauren Goode: But what's interesting that you say that specifically, Mat, to bring it back to your 2014 feature, you talked about how they didn't have email, and then I think at the time, Stewart Butterfield said, “We're working on integrating that.” But still to this day, Slack is not an email platform. It just never became that. Or cloud storage, it's not a place. I mean, they now have a canvas, but it's really not a place where you do your Google Docs work or your Microsoft Word work. Is integration for them, just that pie-in-the-sky idea that's over 10 years, been sort of realized but not fully realized yet?

Mat Honan: I think so. I mean, I went back and reread that story before coming on here, and aside from noticing it was really long and thinking, “Man, I really read this story differently now as an editor than I did as a writer.” As an editor, I could see myself whacking a third of that story. Anyway, there's a passage in there that talks about what they want to do is they really want to make it this big platform that works with all these other software and services. You're right, that's never really fully happened, and I do think it's an idea that they have. I mean, they're always pushing their integrations. That is better in theory than in reality. Obviously, the killer app to hook in there is Gmail, and that hasn't happened. It's not going to happen. It is today, 10 years later, what it was then, a great chat tool.

Lauren Goode: Well, 10 years later, it really has changed the way we work. It's changed a lot of workplaces in terms of real-time communications, and I think it's also emblematic of an era in tech of the early 2010s, when things were exciting, things were new, things were frothy—and now, we're living in a world where increasingly a lot of our experiences are just controlled by Big Tech. I think we can count Salesforce as Big Tech. All right. Let's take another quick break, and we're going to come back with our recommendations.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: Mat Honan, as our guest of honor, what's your recommendation for us?

Mat Honan: I have two. I have two recommendations. One is super boring and the other maybe is less so, but the super boring one I'll go first with, which are AirTags. OK. I know they've been around for a while. I know that people are accustomed to them, but when you have kids who you want to keep track of and you don't want to get your kids smartphones, and you want to see where they're going or what they're doing or make sure that they actually, yes, got on the bus, man, they're pretty great. Especially when you have kids and the kids also lose things that are valuable. Man, I really love these incredibly invasive little devices called AirTags.

Lauren Goode: That's a good one. Do your kids not have smartphones?

Mat Honan: They do not. My older daughter has a flip phone.

Michael Calore: Nice.

Lauren Goode: Cool. They have surfboards, but not smartphones. Rad.

Mat Honan: They do not even have an Apple Watch. Yeah.

Lauren Goode: What's your second recommendation?

Mat Honan: My second recommendation is the ChatGPT sticker bot. It is great. I've made so many stickers that you can now find around San Francisco in various places. The one that I'm sitting here holding is one for my kids' little surf team. Not little-surf team, but they have two different surfing groups they're in, but one of them is called Sunset Sirens. It's just a bunch of kids who surf together, and I made them all stickers with a terrifying skeleton surfing and had them printed up, and they love them. It's really easy, and your orders are fulfilled through Sticker Mule. It's the only useful GPT plug-in that I've tried.

Michael Calore: It designs a sticker for you based on whatever your prompt is. Can you do revisions?

Mat Honan: Oh, yeah. For this one, I just kept saying make it scarier, make it scarier. Actually, this is for a 13-year-old, please don't make it so sexualized, type of stuff.

Michael Calore: I see, I see. And then, when you get one you like, you just hit the button and they send you 50 of them or 100 of them.

Mat Honan: Yeah, it sends your order off to Sticker Mule. But actually, I usually make a few revisions myself in Photoshop and then send it.

Michael Calore: Nice.

Lauren Goode: Excellent.

Mat Honan: But it gets you 90 percent of the way. It's great.

Lauren Goode: You do have to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus to use apps like that, right? You'd pay $20 a month for that.

Mat Honan: I think that's correct. Is it 20 bucks? I was thinking it was 25, but yeah, it's paid.

Michael Calore: Well, I'm not paying anything. I'm just going to ask Mat to do it for me.

Lauren Goode: Sure. I can do it for you too.

Michael Calore: OK. Thank you.

Lauren Goode: You're welcome. Thank you for those, Mat. That's great. Because we like you so much, you get two. Mike, what's your recommendation?

Michael Calore: I just have one. It's a podcast. I've been obsessed with this podcast lately. I have been listening to almost nothing but it in 2024. It is called Raw Impressions, and it's a husband and wife show. The hosts are Lou Barlow and his wife, Adelle Barlow. If you know Lou Barlow, you're probably ready for Centrum Silver. Lou is a member of the band Dinosaur Jr. He's also a member of the band Sebadoh. Both of these bands were very big in the 1980s and 1990s and are still big today. But Lou, he's a celebrity in the indie rock world, and his wife, Adelle, is a crafter and a creator and his cohost. They have wonderful on-mic chemistry. They talk about their family, their kids. They talk about music, they talk about Lou's tours that he goes on with his various musical projects. They went on tour themselves this fall. It doesn't really have a theme necessarily, it's just a fun hang.

It's my favorite kind of podcast where you just get two hosts who can talk to each other and let them go. They do sort of have many themes within the show. They do Mini Music Mondays and Tiny Tunes Tuesdays, where Lou plays music on the show, and they talk about the songs that he plays. Sometimes they're original songs, sometimes they're covers. But Lou is an archivist, so he saved a lot of things. Audio clips, songs, first drafts, phone messages from his life. Sometimes on the show, they just play those and he talks about where he was in his life at the time. You don't necessarily have to be a big Lou Barlow, Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr. fan in order to dig Raw Impressions, but it helps. But even if you're not, I recommend giving it a try because it's very cozy. It's a cozy cast.

Lauren Goode: You sent me something recently about Taylor Swift.

Michael Calore: Yes. They celebrate—

Lauren Goode: He's a Swiftie now. His daughter is.

Michael Calore: Well, like many people, his daughter is a Swiftie, so he's a Swiftie. Yeah.

Mat Honan: Can I ask a follow-up question?

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Mat Honan: What's the best Sebadoh album?

Michael Calore: The best Sebadoh album?

Mat Honan: Yeah.

Michael Calore: Bakesale.

Mat Honan: Wow. Wrong answer. OK.

Michael Calore: No, it's not the wrong answer. OK. What is your answer?

Lauren Goode: Violence.

Mat Honan: That's the only one I know. I just wanted to say wrong answer, because I figured I'd set you off.

Michael Calore: I mean, number two is probably Bubble & Scrape, and number three is probably Harmacy. Although the new stuff is great too. The 21st-century Sebadoh is excellent, but Bakesale is the album that I own on cassette and on CD and on vinyl.

Mat Honan: I was just guessing that you could actually fully swap over and have a Sebadoh podcast out of the gate here. That was just a guess though, but I don't know.

Michael Calore: I probably could. Anyway, Raw Impressions, get it wherever you pod. Lauren, what's your recommendation?

Lauren Goode: I'm going to recommend that people make use of the soft return in Slack. This means instead of just hitting return to send every single message that you actually hit command return, which is just one extra keystroke, which means it gives you just a little bit of a pause to think about what you're saying before you say it. It would be really easy to just fire up. By the way, some people do this kind of staccato messaging in Slack too, where they have a lot of thoughts, and so they send you seven different lines of thoughts at once instead of putting it together in a cohesive graph.

Michael Calore: Annoying.

Lauren Goode: It happens. We've all done it. We do it sometimes in iMessage and WhatsApp and all those apps too. Usually, that happens now in most chat apps where you just hit Send and it sends, it returns. It happens in LinkedIn messaging, I think, now. If you make it so that you create this friction before you're sending, you're just giving yourself, it's literally an extra second to look at what you're about to send and be like, “Do I really need to send that?” Sometimes you'll still hit, even if you're used to it like I am, you'll still hit just Return by accident and it doesn't actually send, and then you take a pause and you look at what you wrote and you're like, “Oh, OK. Do I need to edit that or just think about it a little bit more?” Yeah, I recommend that. Don't be so hasty in your messaging.

Michael Calore: Is this something that we have to enable or is this just a habit that we have to form?

Lauren Goode: It's both. You enable it first in your Slack, and then you just form the habit of doing it. Occasionally, I'll say, something happens where the X key is right next to the command button that I use on my keyboard. Sometimes, I'll write a message and then as I hit the command key, I accidentally hit X. Some of my messages look very British. I look like I'm attaching a kiss, an X to all my messages. I'm like, “Oh, this is really inappropriate. I have to just go back and edit that. Take out the X.” Like, “Great, thanks so much. Sending copy now. Kisses.” Yeah. But other than that, I wrote all about this in an article in WIRED. I think it was last year. It was 2022. The soft return and other Slack and Zoom hacks you need.

Michael Calore: Nice.

Lauren Goode: Just to keep it, I don't know, clean, efficient, and safe as you're Slacking and Zooming away.

Michael Calore: Love it.

Lauren Goode: That is my recommendation, and I hope I've saved your life and your lawsuit. All right. That's our show. Mat Honan, thank you again for joining us. It's been such a pleasure. Where can the people find you?

Mat Honan: They can find me at MIT Technology Review, which is online at technologyreview.com. We have a great app too. Hope to see you there.

Lauren Goode: Thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on the socials. Just check the show notes. Our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth, who's busy Slacking away. Goodbye for now. We'll be back next week.

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