Welcome back to Cortex. Today I'm joined by Jason Shrier. Jason is the lead video game reporter at Bloomberg,

and he's also the author of three books, Blood Sweat and Pixels, press reset, and most recently

Play Nice, the inside story of Blizzard, as you can tell Jason writes all about video games. If you

follow the games industry at all, you will have certainly read his reporting.

Jason has broken some of the biggest stories of the last decade about crunch culture,

studio closures, cancel games and what is really happening inside the companies that make the games we play.

Jason's work has had real lasting consequences and his books have

changed how a lot of people think about the industry. Jason has these two very different

writing lives running in parallel, both the daily rhythm of reporting, one of the biggest

financial news organizations, and the much longer, deeper work of writing books. I want to talk about how he manages them both

separately and how they intertwine. Like, how do you do these things side by side? How do you juggle them?

Do the processes differ? And where? We're going to get into all of that on this episode.

Please enjoy. So, Jason, I want to get started by asking, what is the piece of equipment in

your life, the device in your life that is the most important for you for getting your work done?

I would say it's my MacBook. This is probably a cliche answer, probably when you get a lot.

But yeah, my MacBook Air, I started using a MacBook Air like around 2013 or so.

And before that, I had been using just kind of bulkier PC laptops.

And once I switched to a MacBook and especially the MacBook Air, it was very hard to go back.

Everything about it is just very convenient for a writer.

It's very light, very easy to take anywhere I need it.

Keyboard is great.

Trackpad is great. There has not been a better laptop form factor and it's got 16 gigabytes of RAM,

...