Metamuse

By Adam Wiggins, Mark McGranaghanTechnology

Metamuse episodes

January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Being able to do important and deep work in a
world where information is not scarce, but abundant, not only abundant,
but so abundant that it essentially becomes a problem.
Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a software for your iPad that
helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about
Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it.
My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark
McGrenigan. How’s it going, Mark? Alright, Adam, how are you doing?
Yeah, I’m doing well.
Reading an interesting book about the life of Claude Shannon, the guy
that invented information theory.
So this was at Bell Labs circa I guess middle of the last century. Uh,
for example, the, uh, that seminal paper coined the term bit, which I
think I, I almost take for granted sometimes these fundamental
inventions, you think, well, it’s just always, we’ve always known what
a bit is, but in fact, boiling information down to a stream of ones and
zeros and being able to reason about that mathematically is a uh an
extremely significant breakthrough to put the, to put it mildly and
surprisingly recent from my perspective.
Yeah, interesting. So our topic today is the information age, and I
usually put information age in caps. It’s in comparison to say the Iron
Age or the industrial revolution. And I guess the the basic idea with
this is that humanity or society has entered an era that’s defined by
the I guess the massive availability and the free flow of information.
This dates back to, I think the Wikipedia page talked about the
invention of the transistor which kind of made possible things. Like
global telephone networks and radio and TV, but obviously the computer
as well came out of that. I think it’s become particularly cute or the
information age and how different that is from what came before is
really dramatic in the last 10 years or so, uh, with smartphones and the
internet and social media. Uh, one statistic I read recently, I found a
little Uh, mind blowing was that the essentially there’s total
penetration of internet and smartphones, the stat I read was that
there’s 5 or 5.5 billion people on Earth who are over the age of 15, so
adults, and of those 5 billion of them have some kind of mobile phone
and about 4 billion of them have smartphones. So for our purposes.
Again, everyone’s connected, and now this new age is kind of defined by
that.
00:02:35 - Speaker 2: Well, that’s a broad and weighty topic. What’s
on your mind about the information age then?
00:02:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, obviously connects to to muse here
because we see it. As a tool that helps with this, which is particularly
for creative professionals and being able to do important and deep work
in a world where information is not scarce, but abundant, not only
abundant, but so abundant that the it essentially becomes a problem. I
read a nice article the other day called the Information Pathology.
And they make this comparison to how in the 20th century, the abundance
of food sort of slipped our widespread health problems from not enough
nutrition, not enough calories, which essentially is a problem most
humans had faced most of their lives or, you know, most of the existence
of, uh, certainly civilization and flipped it over to now we’re worried
about essentially having access to too much food, that the problems are
obesity and uh diabetes and heart disease and so forth.
And the author here makes a comparison to say, well, maybe in the 21st
century, we have a similar thing with information, where we’re also
hardwired in many ways to seek information, that new information is a
way to be. Prepared for what the future might hold, assess our safety
and do things to improve our lives when you know things about what’s
going on in the world around you that can be extremely helpful to say
the least.
But then you add in this era of hyperconnectivity and the 24 hour news
cycle and social media and newsletters and everything’s being pushed to
you all the time and everything seems important. And that can quickly
turn into more of a gambler at a slot machine getting the the dopamine
hit from that next, um, that next piece of information rather than,
yeah, rather than spending your life on things that are more meaningful
to the point that we have people thinking about things like digital
detox and Deleting social media from their apps and this is, this is
quite a big topic now of how you actually manage this problem of
information abundance.
00:04:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you had shared that article with me, and I
found it very interesting and indeed alarming. The topic of food and
nutrition is one that I’d studied for a while, and that’s an area
where there’s something that’s incredibly important, but over the past
100 years.
So we’ve really lost the plot and it’s caused an enormous amount of
damage to us as individuals and as a society, and we haven’t fully
confronted or even understood that 50 or 100 years in. So if you
analogize that to the information age, it could very well be the case
that we are, you know, victims of our own own abundance here in ways
that we don’t and perhaps won’t understand for another decades or
even. 10 years.
And that’s a pretty alarming thought.
00:05:15 - Speaker 1: It’s hard to know whether it will be on that same
scale, but I certainly feel that certainly the the change in our daily
lives as humans and the changes to our society of the information age
broadly is huge and dramatic.
I, I do think it’s on par with the industrial revolution. We we don’t
know yet because we’re not far enough to do it, but that’s, that’s my
gut feel going from there to, well, such big changes in the world will
bring both positive and negative.
And there’s obviously many positives to having access to essentially
unlimited information all the time, uh, but there’s also many
negatives, and I don’t think we’re going to figure that out in the
next few years. I think it’s going to be an ongoing process of society
adapting and figuring out.
Um, how to, how to manage this and try to get the good parts and leave
behind the bad bits.
00:06:03 - Speaker 2: So how do you start to grapple with that? What’s
good about the information age and what’s struggle?
00:06:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think the, you know, what’s good in
terms of access to all the world’s information at your fingertips is
almost so obvious that it hardly needs stating, but You know, Wikipedia
is amazing, Google is amazing, uh, Twitter is amazing. Uh, you can get
access to information that could be relevant to your career. Certainly
if you’re a person that does creative, you know, you’re creative
professionally do knowledge work of some kind, which probably anyone
listening to this podcast, it’s likely in that category, having access
to so much is extremely powerful for your career.
Uh, and also in your life, right, making decisions about Important life
things like parenthood or adopting a pet or taking care of an aging
parent or buying a home or any health things, and the abundance of
information, you can get personal experiences, you can get academic
information. You can download books, you can watch videos on YouTube,
you can become, let’s say not become an expert, but you can completely
absorb yourself in almost everything humanity knows about any subject at
any time, from the comfort of your own home, uh, even just on your
phone, if you choose to do that.
One personal anecdote I give from my life about how kind of information
and particularly broad, let’s say more like global news has an impact
on your life. Uh, with the pandemic that of course we’re still in the
midst of here in in 2020, but when that came along, I was alerted to it
essentially by basically a lot of people being alarmed on Twitter, and
that caused me to stop and think, yeah, let me look into this briefly
and kind of do my own research, which, you know, for me was making a use
board and pulling out a few relevant bits onto that so I could kind of
poke them around and try to make, make sense of it. And I’m really glad
I did because a few weeks later, someone that I live with basically had
a close encounter where basically her school, her entire school was shut
down due to someone there uh testing positive and then suddenly there’s
all these, you got. quarantine, you got to do this, you got to do that.
And I think that would have been really surprising and disorienting and
upsetting if I hadn’t already been studying exactly what was going on
with this. And instead, I said, oh, OK, I actually have my head around
this. I know what to do and um that information being not just that I
went out to seek, but actually being pushed to me through these, uh,
through social media and through through news channels turned out to be
very helpful in making good decisions and uh. Essentially it was, it was
information that had an impact on my life.
So how do you think about uh the information age? Do you, first of all,
I guess do you agree with me, uh, we, we didn’t talk about it before,
but do you agree with me that it does have, you know, an impact, such,
such an outsized impact potentially, and, uh, where do you see the, the,
the, you know, the, the benefits to you or humanity at large and
likewise the Downsides.
00:09:05 - Speaker 2: Certainly I think there is a big impact from the
information age. I think that’s hard to deny.
An interesting insight I got from a book called The Rise and Fall of
American Growth, though, is that as seemingly as important as the
information age is, it’s, it still hasn’t kind of fully impacted the
whole real economy and our, our entire physical world.
Uh, this book makes a point that if you look at the, the economy of
developed nations, it’s things like housing, healthcare, education,
caring for children and elderly people, uh, things like this comprise
much of the economy, and those have, you know, started to be affected by
the information age around the edges for sure.
You have like Zillow for real estate, for example, but the way that we
build homes is basically the same. As it is 40 years ago, but you have a
nest on the wall that connects to Google. Um, so in that sense, I think
there’s potentially actually a lot more that could happen as computing
and information pervades more of our real physical lives.
Now, now that said, I think certainly it’s already been very impactful
and and in my line of work, I enjoy a lot of those benefits, but
potentially a lot more to go.
And the other thing I would say is, I don’t think we understand the
full impact and implications of all these new information flows. Again,
I think the analogy to food and nutrition is very useful, where it took
us decades to begin to unravel all the weird stuff we were doing to our
bodies and our societies, um, with these new food pathways. I’m afraid
we’re going to go through the same experience with all these
information flows.
00:10:27 - Speaker 1: Well, to bring it back down to the personal level,
I guess one question that I see a lot of people grapple with is how to
have a healthy relationship with, they usually say technology or social
media, but I think of it as the information fire hose being connected to
the whole of humanity and everything that it is thinking about and it’s
going on because it’s a powerful feeling, this feeling of being
informed or in the loop or connected.
And you know, whatever that may mean for you, it might be connected to
your field or connected to a smaller community that has a private group,
but it could also be connected to global news and what you do is you end
up or what I often hear people talking about and and face myself a
little bit, which is how do you, for example, spend less time on social
media and more time reading books.
So for example, um, the YouTuber and podcaster CGP Gray. Uh, did a
pretty substantial, not quite a digital detox, but basically got off
social media and all this sort of thing for some period of time with the
justification of, I want us to take more walks in the wood and woods and
read more books, and I hear a variation of that a lot, people. I don’t
know, maybe in Silicon Valley, people go on their 10 day meditation
retreat, they don’t speak and they don’t bring technology with them,
and you even see things like software specifically made for this, uh,
even as far back as when I was in Y Combinator, which is now 13 years
ago, uh, one of the folks in our batch was rescue Time, which is still
operating today. It’s basically a plug-in for your computer that
monitors how you’re spending your time and helps direct you away from
the You know, spending time on Reddit or whatever and towards things
that you define as productive how you define those things, which of
course is especially confusing for a knowledge worker, I think because
you have stuff like Slack and email being connected to your company’s
sphere and I think it can have kind of the same quality of being
connected to the news cycle or uh sort of the global global news, which
is always some new thing, you know, I open up, I don’t know, notion, I
open up slack, I open up Figma, I’ve got, you know, a little
notification thing. Someone left a comment and someone’s done a new
thing and there’s, you know, there’s someone’s pushed a new thing to
Github. There’s always, there’s always some some new thing to follow
and that becomes even more true as company gets bigger and more mature
and that has some of the same quality where you can easily lose a lot of
time in your day to these more reactive type things rather than the deep
work or the bigger projects or prioritizing your own time.
And I think when Apple came along with screen time, that was also kind
of an acknowledgement of that and I see people doing tricks there.
But I kind of see all of that stuff as as really like mitigation
strategies, um, it’s it’s our short term hack for OK, we’ve
recognized that losing your whole day to being on Twitter or spending
too much time answering email or slack versus focus projects, you don’t
feel good about that, you don’t feel like you’ve spent your time in a
good way, but the techniques we have for managing that feel less like we
found a way to live in harmony with the nature of the world and our
information. flows and more like we’ve just put these little blocks in
place in various places to again to try to manage that. So I’d love to
figure out and I’m still exploring this for myself, but how to, how to
live in harmony with the information fire hose and get the most of that,
get as much from that as I can for my work, for my life, uh, while at
the same time kind of avoiding some of the worst, the qualities of it,
the addictive qualities or the qualities that in retrospect I feel like
I. Spent my time well.
00:13:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. First of all, I think you’re
seeing this emerging intuition that information flows have different
quality. Also, we’re seeing that there’s opportunity cost to spending
your time with these different flows. Any time that you spend checking
Reddit, for example, is time that you can’t spend with your family or
exercising or what have you. But then I think there’s in the last 5 or
10 years, this has all been amplified by the social networks and the
feeds, and there I think the situation is getting more.
Adversarial and intense because you have these companies that are
motivated one way or another to engage you right with these, these feeds
at the same time, the individuals like ourselves who are on the other
end of this, we don’t have full-time people who are working to
represent our side, you know, this harmonious engagement with
information flows. So I think it’s not surprising to me that it feels
like we’re kind of on our back foot, like we’re playing defense, like
we’re trying to mitigate, like we’re trying to put our finger in the
dam. Um, I think that’s a function of the structural situation that
we’re in.
00:14:55 - Speaker 1: Again, that fits with the food metaphor where
it’s easy to just put it all in the individual, and I think each of us
can make healthy choices, but when you have a pretty serious, let’s
call it infrastructural approach to making you want this thing, whether
it’s fast food that’s designed to push all your primal buttons for
sweet, savory and salty, and then on the information diet side of
things, you’ve got. Some very, very smart people working for the
Facebooks and Twitters and Instagrams of the world to get you to come
back, re-engage, be involved in the feed.
So as an individual trying to use willpower to manage that is, is a
challenge for sure.
One thing that my eyes on this quite a bit was I read this book Hooked
back when I was working for a, for a company and at the time the book
was circulating among the product people there saying, hey, there’s
some interesting ideas here with, for example, using push notifications
to help people re-engage with your app and for apps that are focused on
active users and that sort of thing, that’s, that’s a desirable thing.
And I remember reading this book and just having a sinking feeling in my
stomach. This was, you know, I don’t know, 67 years ago. Having the
sinking feeling in my stomach of a wait, we’re engineering things to
sort of create these loops to bring you back according to not what’s
most valuable to you or how you can get the most utility from whatever
this product is, but just according to your, your natural desires of
wanting to be connected or the orientation response or something like
that. And actually the reading that book, which was not was not intended
to be a cautionary tale at all as far as I know, uh, but that had a big
impact on me and the next thing I did, which was, uh, start the ink and
Switch research lab and one of our core ideas that we wanted to explore
is OK, as technology and social media and the internet is taking on this
new quality that’s going to be harder and harder to resist or hold at
bay. How can makers and people who need to focus and get in the zone and
do work, how can you manage that? How can we take back maybe some of the
way that computing is made and the way that software uh works to better
serve, I guess the user’s life goals or work goals rather than
companies, let’s call them engagement goals.
00:17:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, this is an insight from the ink and Switch
lab that’s really grown on me over time.
I’ve come to appreciate how important it was.
There’s this world of call it consumer engagement based computing,
which is really flourishing, like there’s a huge amount of investment
and lots of great services, some of which I spend a bunch of time on
like Twitter, um, and then there.
The enterprise computing world like B2BASS, which again is, is great. I
spent a lot of my career working in that and there’s natural economic
funding for those two worlds, but we really needed to make a deliberate
effort to support this world of computing for creators for having better
ideas.
So I’m glad we, we ended up working on that together at the lab.
00:17:53 - Speaker 1: One of the small areas there that I became aware
of through the research that we did was the prevalence of
notifications.
I think I mentioned earlier, like even something like notion or FIMA
tends to have some kind of a notification thing. Even VS code, which is
a, you know, a programming editor, has a little, you know, has some
little like indicators that sort of uh click here, there’s something
happening, something you need to know about. The red dots, man. red
dot.
Sometimes if they’re they’ll make it a blue dot if they’re making it
a little more chill, but yeah, the red dot badge put that on where
we’re talking with Max recently about the no spinners thing and for me
the no notifications basically respect the user’s attention and focus,
don’t get in their way and Certainly don’t try to distract them or
lure them away with that inbox feeling or there’s something I need to
check. And it’s tricky because of course, there are times you do need
to proactively let the user know something or maybe they they want to
know, but certainly I hope news will never have anything resembling a
notification segment.
00:18:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and speaking of notifications, this reminds
me of another book in this in this genre, which is now a whole huge
thing. There’s a bunch of books, you know, written along this vein, but
this is digital minimalism, part of his thesis is that consumers are
being constantly bombarded now by notifications and re-engagement loops
and that you can, he argues should be more deliberate about how you
engage with those platforms and do less of a notification based model
and be more selective about how you engage in these information streams.
Yeah.
00:19:18 - Speaker 1: Certainly, I put a lot of work into basically
turning off almost all notifications on my devices. I have a couple of
key things that go to my phone. Never want it from my desktop computer.
I had everything turned off on my iPad for my phone, I do have a couple
of things, messages, emails that I do want to be notified about. I think
of that as my communicator device, that’s purpose, so it makes sense
that I would be notified there, but certainly I never want push
notifications for something like breaking news or Twitter mention. or
anything like that. I want to be more deliberate and even email um is
something where I, you know, I like the model of check it in the morning
and again in the afternoon rather than something that’s more interrupt
driven.
But the nice thing about having the phone be the notification box uh is
that I can turn off the ringer and put it face down someplace whenever
I’m going to explicitly go into a work session and not be worried
about, for example, being right in the middle of something and then
suddenly my phone. Tablet and my computer are all chiming to get my
attention for for a single thing.
00:20:16 - Speaker 2: And that perhaps seems like a small change, but I
think managing my notifications has been really important, which is
mostly turning them off, moving to a model where I choose if and when to
engage with these different information streams. A similar one would be
holding social media feeds. Again, the structural pattern there is that
these sites really want you to go there and refresh all the time, which
in some cases it’s, it’s hard to avoid because there’s no APIs, but
wherever possible. I’ve I’ve moved to a model where these updates get
batched, sent to me, and I can review them asynchronously. So for the
Washington Post and Hacker News, for example, I get emails once a day
for those, I check them at some point, but I’m not constantly
refreshing.
00:20:50 - Speaker 1: Now, so far, most of these techniques we’ve
mentioned here are things that let’s say are general, general purpose
that basically social media and news and messages and emails is
something essentially every human on the planet, more or less needs to
needs to manage.
But then bringing it to the realm specifically of the knowledge worker,
the creative professional or someone that is doing something that
requires deep focus and they want to create, either as an individual or
in groups, uh, there I feel like it becomes less clear.
There’s obviously those same techniques that individuals can use of
managing your notifications or measuring screen time or something, but I
was, I’ve also been struck by the number of techniques that I’ve seen
seen emerge for let’s say more maker oriented activities. Which
includes, for example, uh, pen and paper sketchbooks remain not only as
popular as they ever were, but I almost feel like more so because it’s
a place where you can go and write down your ideas and have information
technology, which pen and paper certainly is at your disposal, there’s
no risk of a notification popping up or being tempted to switch away and
pop open Twitter or whatever. Then at the same time in groups, I’ve
seen, for example, Sometimes it’s certainly it’s considered maybe a
good habit to turn off your your ringer in a meeting, but I’ve also
seen things like, OK, there’s a basket in the middle of the table,
everyone put your phone there, and we do this just to enforce the
discipline that we’ll all be here in presence in the moment and
scribbling on the whiteboard and having the group discussion and not
tempted to to switch away. And maybe I get a version of that as well
with um using a Kindle hardware device to do my book reading, um, and
there I like that I do get a lot of the benefits of digital, which is
obviously I can have a lot of books in this one small device and I can
highlight things and highlights go into a database and so forth, but it
cannot do anything other than read books. So I stay really focused.
Those were some techniques that struck me as kind of how you can do
more, say, knowledge knowledge work type things in an information age,
uh, that sort of holds the holds the fire hose at bay. Do you know of
any uh techniques that you’ve seen or that you use for yourself in that
nature?
00:22:52 - Speaker 2: techniques that I use tend to have that same
flavor of pre-commitment, like you do.
Something upfront such that you, you sort of commit yourself and your
knowledge work to doing the thing that you want to be doing, and you’re
not constantly having to make the decision of should I be doing the work
that I want to do, or should I be checking Twitter. Uh, so a big one for
me has actually been reading books on paper. For a long time, I read
books on my phone or my iPad with the Kindle app, which is nice. Uh, you
get a lot of flexibility. Obviously, you can carry a zillion books, but
I’ve always had the temptation. of checking the other apps on the
phone, or even like thinking about it and having to decide not to, it
ends up getting wired very deeply into you. I think if you use these
devices a lot that you can, you know, press the home button and see all
these shiny icons and click on them and get stuff. Um, so I’ve moved to
a model of I read books on paper, even try to go sit physically away
from my devices, you know, put them somewhere else. So it becomes a
session that’s about the reading and the thinking.
00:23:40 - Speaker 1: I’ve even seen different social, let’s say
reactions from others when you are, yeah, reading a paper book with a
pen and paper sketchbook, even with my Kindle hardware, I think there’s
a version of this which is when I, I also read books on my phone just
using the Kindle app for a few years and yeah, people just assumed that
you’re on Facebook. Which is funny, and, and they, they respond
differently. They treat you almost with more deference like this person
is thinking deeply.
So in the lab, we had a track of research around attention and focus and
how that connects to getting into a state of flow and doing work,
particularly difficult maker work. And one of the insights we had there
was that the benefit of the information banquet, of course, is being
able to go out and search Google Scholar and find every paper that’s
ever been written on a subject or go on YouTube, or go down a Wikipedia
rabbit trail and end up with 50 open tabs. That that’s a really
powerful way to gather to collect information, but there’s sort of no
bottom to that.
At some point we found that people need to draw a line around or draw a
fence around a set of information and say, OK, I’m not going to go
further than this. Now I want to take this set of sources, whether
they’re papers, whether they’re websites, whether they’re tweets,
whether they are excerpts, whether they’re photos they’ve captured on
their phone, whatever that material is, and I’m gonna take this set.
And I’m gonna treat that as a fixed set, and now I’m gonna look
through that, read it, ponder on it, look for connections, look for
patterns, and often that or second phase, I think we, we call it in some
of the, in one of the papers that sort of second phase of rumination is
best done, a little disconnected, a little removed. In fact, the ideal
thing would even be going offline, going along train ride or something,
and there’s just there’s no Wi Fi or what have you, um, and being able
to do that. But the thing is you’re either all on or all. There’s no
middle ground. You’re either in digital detox mode, your phone’s in
airplane mode, you’re not using your devices effectively, or you’re
fully connected. You’re on the internet. Basically almost all software
nowadays requires internet connection to work properly. And so the idea,
for example, being able to look through a set of web pages, uh, without
an internet connection isn’t really very viable. So one of the things
that that research and those insights fed into use was this idea that
you’d be able to ingest things into this. Private, safe, sanctuary like
space, know that anything you put in there is not dependent on an
internet connection and then be able to take that set of things and then
go someplace whether or not you’re connected. In fact, maybe it’s even
better if you’re offline and be able to go through all of it and think
about it and draw your conclusions and potentially use those conclusions
in whatever work you’re going to do.
00:26:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that character of where you’re
doing this deep thinking and rumination is really important. Especially
now because the public wild internet is this incredibly frenetic, almost
combative information space, you know, likes, retweets, refreshes, ads,
notifications, uh, and, and the prospect that any of those could change
or you could open a new app. It’s almost like you’re in fight or
flight mode, right, when you’re out there on the wild internet, and I
think it’s just psychologically really hard to relax so that your mind
can do the deep background processing that it needs to um accomplish
this rumination. So I think crafting the space, well that’s physical.
digital or perhaps both that supports that work is really important.
00:27:03 - Speaker 1: You mentioned the technique of reading paper books
as one way to manage this. Uh, we’ve also seen in kind of the
ethnographic studies that printing stuff out is a technique that people
use for that, so it’s the same kind of ideas as the book, which is, OK,
I’ve got these, I’ve got a couple of papers, I’ve got this one
website, and I’ve got a couple of screenshots and I’m gonna print all
those things out and then be able to go and work in a paper workspace
just on a desk or something like that. Uh, with this fixed set of
things.
And of course it seems really funny to be printing out web pages and
printing out screenshots, but in fact it is a good technique precisely
because it is this fixed set because you’re not tempted to to go down
the shiny objects path, tumble off that edge, and you can really stay
focused on what’s in front of you.
00:27:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think printing also relates to your
physical space and posture. I know that some people print out stuff so
they can read it at their desk, like the same place that they have their
computer, but I know that when I like to do this rumination type work, I
prefer to do it basically on a chair or a couch in a sort of semi
reclined posture.
When I’m quickly gathering information on the go, that’s the phone,
when I’m ruminating, doing deep thinking.
Developing ideas in something like Muse, I like to be sitting down in a
soft chair, and when I’m doing like editing complex documents, I like
to be sitting upright office chair at my computer and I found that those
different physical postures are actually really important to encouraging
the right type of creative thinking.
00:28:24 - Speaker 1: The other thing you get with printouts as well as
the ability to put them in say 3D space, physical space. So often when
you go to, I don’t know, an agency office or yeah, certainly an
academic’s office or any anyone who does designers, for example, often
pin up storyboards and screenshots, you know, annotated screenshots of
an application that they’re working on. Obvious movie filmmaking folks
tend to do kind of storyboards on the walls, but there’s something
about not only being able to have that sort of tactile, uh. Experience
and different posture like you said, but also the potential ability to
put it around us in space and to have agency overdoing it.
00:29:02 - Speaker 2: I think this is another really important
psychological state like you feel like you have agency over your
information, your work, it’s really hard to invest your deepest
creative energies when you feel like it could shift out from under you
at any time or someone could take it away or could get, you know,
refreshed or something, the physical printout or desktop style apps that
are very stable. Give you that sense of agency over your work.
00:29:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that agency element is a big part of
why I still like files.
Uh mobile platforms have largely abstracted away files, and I think
that’s basically for the best for certainly the the common case of the,
yeah, consumer that has more limited needs in their computing life, but
for the maker, for the creator that wants to build up their own personal
archives over time.
Maybe I shouldn’t speak for others, but I’ll speak for myself, which
is files have this very simple quality.
They seem very tangible, even though of course they’re they’re
digital, but they’re, they have this, this timelessness and maybe it’s
that they work across platforms, maybe it’s that they’ve they’ve been
around a long time, but I feel like there’s more to it than that.
They have a they have a feel where I feel like, OK, if I’ve got the
file, I’ve got it. I’ve really got it. Nothing’s gonna take it from
me. It’s not gonna change out from underneath me.
There’s this, I guess there’s the ownership quality, but, but it
really does feel like agency.
If I want to have two copies of the file, I can. If I want to delete the
file and know that it’s fully gone, I can also do that files for all
their challenges they maybe create in the computing world for people
needing to, I don’t know what manage their hard drives when they’re
not prepared for that. They do have a lot of qualities that I think are
really promising.
00:30:32 - Speaker 2: I think that’s really important. I think this is
an example of a case where that we’re going to find out in the order of
1020, 30 years that the approach that we’re taking to information
management today has some big downsides.
Personal data, creative data that’s tied up with applications,
especially applications that are like networked on the internet, uh, you
can only load them remotely.
This is very brittle. It works great, you know, now you get this web app
that you can load anywhere, but it’s really unlikely that the Data is
going to be readable and accessible in 30 years, for example, whereas if
you had a text file from 30 years ago, there’s a very good chance that
you could have preserved it, and that would, that would be in your
agency to do so. And so I think this is a trade-off that’s only going
to become apparent as we get a few decades of experience with these
tools. And and my bet is that files and file like data that’s
independent from applications is going to be the right side of that bet.
00:31:17 - Speaker 1: this reminds me of something we talked about
previously, which was. and um command line and that sort of thing and
that particular paradigm and that particular way of interacting with my
computer fell out of being so central and important for me because as
the phone became more uh bigger part of my computing life, plain text is
a great example of something where I’ve I’ve relied on that for a very
long time and I I do love plain text, but increasingly as I find it’s
hard to embed a link, it’s hard to emoji in there. I kind of want an
image and you know, I kind of want bullet points. Those are a hassle and
like increasingly the capabilities it has are not quite enough or not
quite keeping pace with the modern world and so yeah, it’s always a
trade-off there where at some at some point I go, well, plain text just
doesn’t quite cut it for me anymore, but then yeah, we are in in making
choosing to, I don’t know, jump into some. Some app that has all the
modern sleek features, uh, then I also lose some of these qualities of
timelessness, agency, data ownership.
00:32:20 - Speaker 2: And perhaps we can do a whole podcast at some
point about our thinking there and how we’re trying to bridge those two
worlds with Muse, but I think as it relates to the information age just
this idea of retaining your data is really important. I think an
unresolved question for our current set of network-based apps.
00:32:34 - Speaker 1: And maybe another piece of that. That is your
data, so the concept of what your data even is, which is maybe a little
bit like the drawing the fence around things that I mentioned earlier,
but yeah, if I, if I write a paper, that’s obviously my work, but if I
reference a paper someone else has written, if I download that paper, go
through it in detail, mark it up with a bunch of highlights, well, I
tend to think of those highlights as being my. And certainly my Kindle
highlights, I think that way, even though they’re an annotation on
someone else’s work. I think there is this threshold you cross or there
is this better way to put it is that I think it would actually be a good
idea or it is potentially an approach to living in this information age
that could be helpful, particularly for knowledge workers is to have an
idea of what’s mine and what’s the rest of the world’s.
So when I’m just scrolling through a Twitter feed, That’s the, the
flow of the information world. It’s not mine in particular. I don’t
even really want to keep it around. I would quickly my information
systems would quickly get clogged if you try to track every single thing
that you read, which by the way, is a is an idea that came up frequently
when people were talking about this kind of Memex derived lines of
research, which is why, why don’t I just save everything I’ve ever
seen. And it turns out that people have written systems to do that and
it quickly becomes unmanageable, not just in the sense of large data
sets are unmanageable, but in the sense of it’s not useful to me when I
do a search and I find what seems like a bunch of pretty irrelevant
stuff because 98% of what you see, you don’t care about is not
relevant, you’re just, you just keep on scrolling and having this
moment where you decide to actively people use the word curate, but Draw
something that’s that’s a little too, almost a little too high minded.
It’s really just to say, I’m gonna take this paper and read it and
that and and make a few highlights and that in a way makes it mine. Not
the paper, but the the reading of it or the highlights of it or my
personal understanding of it. Now it’s my And it should be in my
information set, in my personal knowledge base, whatever that is, having
a better concept of that.
And yeah, I think the the nature of kind of cloud and web applications
and most mobile applications work this way too is you don’t really have
a concept of that. I guess you have your account, but the reality is
that what’s in your account is very Can shift very significantly
depending on what the people the service decide, right?
00:34:58 - Speaker 2: And so even things that you’ve seen with your own
eyes can be taken away from you.
A related situation here is how enterprise software is often managed. So
again, I think a fundamental psychological thing for creative work is a
sense of safety and privacy.
It’s a very vulnerable act to create something new, especially when
it’s risky or uncertain.
I hypothesize that it’s harder to do that.
When you feel like someone may immediately own or have control or be
able to see that work, I think you need a private personal space.
And I’ve always found that a little hard to do in classic enterprise
software.
So for example, on Google Docs, if you have a Google Docs or for your
company and you go to make a new document that’s only quote unquote
visible by you, well, sort of, right? So anyone Google can see the
document and really anyone at your company can see it.
You know, the administrators who own the company really own the
document. It’s kind of your It’s like it’s your name on it, but not
really yours.
And I think some people, that’s fine, they’re able to do their
creative work like that. But I think other people, either explicitly or
implicitly, have a really hard time putting their full heart into their
work when they know that it’s not really theirs and who can see it when
it isn’t really under their control.
I like the classic academic model. I come back to this analogy a lot,
where you’re a professor and you’re doing creative work, and you have
a personal private office, and the stuff that you write there on pen and
paper is yours by default, um, but it’s still a very social thing. So
you can elect to go out into the hallway and scribble some stuff on the
whiteboard with colleagues or invite someone to come into your office
and look at a work in progress, or you might have a big department
meeting. But all of those actions are explicitly bringing your work into
the group or taking the group into your work. It’s not that by default
anything that you do is on a big, um, you know, whiteboard visible by
everyone.
00:36:31 - Speaker 1: I think collaboration models is a huge area for
potential innovation. We dipped just a even half a toe. of that in the
the research lab.
I know you worked on uh on some projects that explored some of the
decentralized collaboration models, not just the technology, but also,
you know, what does it actually look like to potentially improve on the
Google Docs model or the FIMA model which Which really hasn’t changed
much since since sort of Google Docs first introduced it 15 years ago or
whatever, but it’s a very, uh, there’s these very discreet jumps,
which is, yeah, you’re either in the org, you’re in the company’s
Google Docs account, or you’re in maybe your personal account. And then
once you’re there, there’s maybe very specific work groups. I think
we’ve seen the real world collaboration is much fuzzier than that.
GitHub does OK with this, I think to some degree with outside
collaborators on repos, but it’s rarely that just you have a document
or a set of project files or repo or whatever it is. In something like
Figma, Google Docs notion that just everyone in your company should have
full read and write access to.
And at the same time, you’re often collaborating with people outside
the company, right? So there’s a project you’re working for these two
people in the company, but then you’ve got this outside contractor
who’s doing a few things, and you, you get these sort of shifting work
groups, you know, the enterprise, guess it’s the enterprise model of
control, but I think it’s also just Just a very simplified version of
what work groups and collaboration looks like in practice.
And that’s an area I’d love to see much more innovation on come out
the technology world.
00:38:05 - Speaker 2: Actually speaking of other people in
collaboration, this leads me to another idea on the information age.
We said at the beginning that there’s this incredible abundance of
information out there, almost like everything is online, and I feel like
in some ways that’s true.
So you can see all of the I don’t know weather data from the US online
presumably, but I think it’s important to realize that in a lot of
cases, the stuff that’s online isn’t like proportional. The stuff
that’s true or correct, for a lot of reasons, you know, in some cases,
people are just confused, but in other cases, there’s there’s even
perverse incentives for the wrong stuff to persist. Um, and I think
something that becomes important in this inconsistent information age is
deliberately and actively reading and processing the information and
making decisions about who you’re going to follow on Twitter to get the
better or right information and things like that.
00:38:48 - Speaker 1: Certainly, that makes me think about a lot of the
recent discussions around social media platforms as arbiters of truth
and the element of Perhaps once upon a time, or in the not too distant
past, newspapers and journalists and other kinds of news outlets were in
a way arbiters of truth.
You have journalistic ethics, which are all about trying to represent
things fairly and focus on finding truth and that sort of thing.
And now, yeah, of course, the internet is this wild west where anyone
can share an idea and that’s great in some ways, but it does mean that
just because an idea is loud, uh, or because it’s it’s repeated often
doesn’t necessarily make it true.
That doesn’t give it weight. That’s another thing.
Certainly our society is trying to grapple with is how to reckon with
what is, what is truth and certainly what is a what is a shared
understanding of our reality so that we can all make collective
decisions together.
One group I’ve enjoyed following on that front is the Center for Humane
Technology, and they’ve looked a lot at um they have some interesting
manifesto type stuff on their website that I’ll link to in the podcast
where they they talk a lot about this, the interaction of technology.
These kind of individual choices we make about our information diet and
that sort of thing and how we get the truth as individuals and as
society and how we can hopefully change the technology but also our own
individual habits to again get the best results for this both as an
individual and a societal level.
00:40:11 - Speaker 2: You mentioned this idea of shared truth. I’m
afraid it might be even trickier than we realize. I’m reminded of the
so-called Gal man amnesia effect. This is when you’re reading a
newspaper. Article in a subject of your personal expertise and you
realize that the author doesn’t really know what they’re talking
about. They’re making a lot of mistakes and so on. But at the same
time, you turn the newspaper page, you read the article on some other
topic that you’re not an expert on, and you say, oh, that’s you know
the newspaper, they must know what they’re talking about, right? So
let’s assume it’s true.
00:40:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve I’ve I’ve had that experience
multiple times. It is uncanny how you can immediately switch back to
feeling like the news source of the journalistic sources and authority
once it’s writing about something you’re not. Knowledgeable about,
right?
00:40:50 - Speaker 2: And so I would go back and say, before the modern
information age, when we just had broadcast media like print papers and
cable, we didn’t really have a shared source of truth per se.
We had a shared source of like statements that we just didn’t have a
better shared source to, you know, come to some agreement around, which
is a sort of shelling point of quasi-truth that that’s the best we got,
but with the modern information age, and especially social media, all of
the individual citizens have the ability to analyze the different media
that’s coming out, perhaps in their area of expertise and see the
source.
Details and then go back on social media and say what they’re seeing,
which might be that, you know, for example, I’m an expert on this topic
and this newspaper doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
And this brings me back to a book called The Revolt of the Public,
another one published by Straight Press, and the whole thesis here is
that this is causing a big societal upheaval, because there’s no shared
source of truth, especially around, you know, the classic political
topics and the uh call them information elites, people like the
newspaper editors are being revealed in this world to have less.
Accuracy and authority than they might have been perceived to have
previously and that’s causing all sorts of downstream issues and
complications. And the way that I would tie that back to me in this
podcast perhaps is that leaves individual citizens with a lot of
responsibility for processing the information streams themselves and
making their own decisions and conclusions. That’s a big thing that we
try to support in the app is you bring this all this disparate
information into your sanctuary, your information sanctuary, and then
you have to make sense of that yourself.
00:42:11 - Speaker 1: Well, that strikes a chord with me because one
thing that I strive to do in my life is be a good citizen, be a good
member of society, be a good member of my neighborhood and communities
that I’m part of.
And a lot of that is, I guess knowing stuff, and it’s not just being
informed in the sense of, I don’t know, reading the newspaper or
reading your community bullet. It’s knowing the stuff that matters and
is relevant to the society you’re living in. And so that means both
subscribing to those feeds, whatever form they might. They might come
in, but then be able to pick out the parts that matter and then think
through the parts that matter.
Yeah, so one thing that I try to do with my information tools is to have
a space where I can pull in things that are relevant so that I can be
informed so that I can think it through, so that I can understand the
issues at hand for me and for my neighborhood and my society and
hopefully be able to be a good citizen and there’s too much. Any one
person to pay attention to or know uh in this information age,
information banquet, fire hose, overload thing that we all face, but I
think our information tools, if we chose them well and we use them in
the right way, can be a big help there.
00:43:23 - Speaker 2: Well, that seems like a good place to wrap it. If
any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to
us at museA HQ on Twitter or hello at useapp.com via email. We always
love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes, and in this
case, we’d love to hear if you have a way for managing your personal
information stream.
00:43:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’d love to hear folks’ techniques, the
tools they use, approaches, tricks, hacks, and general principles for
having a healthy information diet, particularly how that connects to
your work as a creative professional, because we’re really only at the
start of this information age and I think we can all help and support
each other as we try to make our way into this brave new world.
0 min
January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think it’s important to deliberately not decide
too soon what you’re gonna do in that situation, cause you need time
for the existing structure of your brain to basically disintegrate a
little bit, like, let those pathways fade away, let the daily patterns
of thinking and doing melt away, and create some space for new ideas and
new ventures to enter.
00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
deep work on iPad and Mac.
This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team
and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague
Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam.
So by now, I think a lot of the listeners have heard the news that the
Muse team is downsizing, talked extensively with Adam Wulf about that in
the last episode since he’s the one carrying the torch forward here.
But I felt like it would be really worthwhile for you and I to discuss,
reflect on this podcast here, because I think it has in some ways its
own life, that’s a little bit independent from use the product or the
company, even though in many ways it’s also intertwined, which we’ll
talk about, but one implication of this news, of course, as you and I
both are not going to be doing news as our day job anymore, and I’ll
ask you the same question I asked Wulf, which is feelings check, where
are you at right now?
00:01:23 - Speaker 1: Well, I’m excited for Adam Wulf and the product
to continue. I think Adam’s a great person to be carrying that torch
and as a very heavy user of news still, I’m, I’m happy to see that for
sure.
You know, otherwise, it’s, it’s certainly a little bit saddening and
disappointing. You work on this so hard for 4 or 5 years plus if you
include the work at the lab, it doesn’t quite pan out the way that
you’d hoped to.
It’s a bummer for sure. But at the same time, it feels like the right
move, it feels like the right time. There’s always a natural 4 or 5
year cadence I found where it makes sense to pick your head up and look
at new stuff.
00:01:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the 4 or 5 year duration thing when I look
back to my career as an entrepreneur and other projects I’ve been
involved in that usually is kind of about the period of time that can
kind of keep extended concentration on one. Particular topic, you know,
you could certainly say the 4 or 5 years I spent on In and Switch were
very closely related to the 4 or 5 years I spent on Muse, but in some
senses like a resetting of the venue, a different, I don’t know,
environment, a slightly different team, even if there’s overlap. Yeah,
I don’t know, sometimes that can be a good thing, even if this isn’t
quite the way I would have wanted to do it, but there is something about
that timeline.
Well, for this episode, I thought we could spend some time reviewing,
retrospecting, and indeed, I think taking a bit of a victory lap for all
we’ve done here on this podcast, which as I said, I think has had
almost its own life and identity that is complementary to but also
stands apart from you. Maybe it’s a little bit of a self-indulgent
episode, but, you know, I don’t know, I think we’ve earned it. Yeah.
So just to start us off, I took the liberty of doing a little
lightweight data science here and just kind of dug in on our episode
history. So, I don’t know, maybe some interesting insights to glean
here. So not counting this episode, there’s 83 episodes currently in
our back catalog, and they total 83 hours, 5 minutes and 52 seconds.
With the shortest episode was episode 4, which was Partnership Freedom
and responsibility at 37 minutes and 20 seconds, and the longest was
actually a very recent one on spatial computing. That was an hour and 35
minutes, and the median ends up being almost exactly an hour, which I
was surprised by. I actually thought it would be a little longer than
that, but I’m also pleased because that’s kind of what I’m shooting
for. We usually record for 1 hour and 15, maybe an hour and a half, and
then trim it down and There’s various schools of thought around this,
but for me, an hour is the right chunk of time. It allows you to go deep
on something, but it’s not so long that, for example, if you listen to
a podcast on a run or a commute or something that you’re going to need
to listen to it in chunks. I thought that was interesting, but I’m glad
we kind of landed there.
00:04:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I really like this length. I can even go
longer. It’s interesting. I listen to a lot of podcasts that are 40
minutes, 30 minutes, even 20 minutes, nominal time, which by the way,
that’s, you listen at 2x so it’s half that in real life. And so often
they’re in a good conversation and I was just like, well, the time’s
up, that’s it for today. bro, it’s your podcast. You can go as long as
you want. How do you do?
00:04:38 - Speaker 2: Right, right, this is a network TV where you have
a slot to hit, right? Yeah.
Yeah, well, there’s very much something to be said for having time to
really get into something.
I’ve noticed, for example, with guests, I feel like the conversation
usually starts to get really juicy around 30 to 40 minutes in, and
there’s probably something there about you have the context, you’ve
hit all the not quite service level things but basic questions, and then
that’s a foundation upon which you can go a little deeper.
And there’s one podcast I listened to for a while that would typically
do like 3 hour interviews and they explicitly say, You know, we want to
go deeper with our guests than, you know, if they’re interviewed on a
talk show on TV or something, you probably are only going to get to
those same talking points and those same questions that they get asked
over and over. But if you do the longer conversation, you spend the
first hour on that stuff and then you kind of go off script or you get a
little deeper.
So I see that, but I’m also a 1x listener and so for me, a 3 hour
podcast, it basically never get to the end, no matter how interesting it
is. So yeah, there’s pros and cons there and certainly we try to let
the episodes be their natural length while at the same time, I guess
respecting the listeners’ time and trying to, you know, kind of make it
information dense perhaps.
Another piece of the podcast I have always, I guess, been proud of is
our show notes, and so this is something where stuff we talk about,
which is often weird obscure projects or articles or whatever, we try to
link that so that you don’t need to just Google around for it. So we
have a total of 1,943 notes, all of which are links, so that’s around
23 per episode.
And then the other thing I thought was interesting was just the podcast
format, the RSS format calls it A, which is a lot but basically the
people who are on the podcast. And so I did a little breakdown there and
it turns out that, well, not surprisingly, I am on 83 episodes, you are
on 75, and then a few of our team members like Leonard and Adam Wulf and
Julia were on a few each, and then we have a couple of guests like
Jeffrey Lid and Max Schoening were on a couple of times, and then, of
course, after that, it’s the one-offs.
And the author thing points to what I would call almost a type
breakdown, which is when we started the podcast, and we can tell the
origin story here in a minute, but we didn’t necessarily envision it as
a guest. Thing we kind of experimented with that early on. It worked
well and we expanded that, but when I kind of did a breakdown, I
discovered that episodes that are just me and you, which I think of as
kind of our baseline or what have you, where the co-hosts, is actually
only 28% of the total, whereas 57% are something with a guest. So when
you look at it that way, it actually seems like this podcast is more
about having guests than it is about you and I. But on the other hand, I
think those kind of non-guest episodes are pretty often touch on pretty
foundational topics. And then the last category, which actually might be
my favorite and I almost wish we could have gotten more of is what I
call the team episodes, and that’s where we bring on someone who is on
the Muse team, so they’re not an external guest, but they are someone who
you don’t normally hear from. And so that’s about 15% of our episodes,
and as we’ll talk about some of our favorites, but I think that
category is the one I in some ways like the best.
00:07:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this makes sense to me because
ultimately the podcast ended up being about ideas. So there are podcasts
that are about the personalities of the hosts, and there are podcasts
that are about the lives and activities of the guests, but ours end up
being more about the ideas around computing and use and so on, and we
have a lot of ideas, obviously, the team members have experience and
things to contribute there too, and then all these different guests. It
kind of makes sense to me in that respect.
00:08:18 - Speaker 2: Now the origin story here is that I’ve sort of
always wanted to start a podcast about something.
I just really like the audio format. I actually got a portable MP3
player, not an iPod, but some other product, a long time ago, just for
that because I always liked, for example, like MR my mom listened to
NPR, but for me, and I have the same problem with broadcast television,
I just can’t do it on someone else’s schedule. I need to do it on my
own time.
And eventually when it became possible to get like audio format through
again, MP3s or even in some cases like audio CDs, you have books on
audiobooks, I just love that format. There’s something kind of, even
though it’s slower or less efficient in some ways than reading.
There’s also something intimate and you get to know the personality or
character of the host in a certain way and it can be engaging and
importantly, it’s something you can do while you’re doing something
else. You’re driving, you’re running, you’re doing chores in the
house, and that’s a really nice way to keep the intellect part of your
brain stimulated while you’re doing something a little more rote.
00:09:25 - Speaker 1: Also, you gotta put that radio voice to work. I
don’t know if we’ve ever mentioned this on the podcast, but I get
comments constantly about Adam’s perfect radio voice.
00:09:35 - Speaker 2: Well, I’m glad I never would have guessed that. I
mean, most people don’t like hearing their own voice recorded and I
count myself among that, and I just kind of powered through it cause I
felt it was a good format and it’s not that important how your voice
sounds.
But yeah, glad to hear the good feedback there.
So yeah, I guess we’ve always both liked the podcast format and then I
don’t know, inspiration struck, it was actually our very last in-person
team summit right before COVID hit. This would have been, I think
January 2020, we were in Sedona, Arizona, and I just pitched you this
idea. We did a little test recording just using the memo, audio memo
apps on our phones up in that freezing attic in that house we were
staying in. It was only maybe 20 minutes long, but we sort of spliced it
together and were able to listen to a little prototype basically.
00:10:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that was funny. I remember my teeth were
almost chattering. It was so cold up there, and then I was really
impressed cause you edited the whole episode on your iPad. I just can’t
do any like production work on iPads, but you did it somehow.
00:10:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can back reference you to our episode on
iPad where we had differing ideas on that. But yeah, certainly at the
time I was excited about the iPad as a place for productivity. There’s
a nice bit of audio editing software there called Ferri that in a lot of
ways I think with the stylus, it’s actually very natural and yeah, I
managed to kind of put it together with some even through in some stock
music at the start just to kind of give it that sense. Yeah, I had one
of our colleagues listen to it and they said, yeah, I think there’s a
spark here, you know, I think you and I have a natural dynamic. We’ve
been working together so long, and obviously we have lots of ideas, and
so, yeah, those two things kind of made us say, let’s give it a go at
this.
00:11:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and you alluded to this when you mentioned
in the origin story, how the idea was to capture the conversations that
you were hearing in the team, but for me, that goes back, I don’t know
what it is, 12 or 13 years. So we’ve been having these conversations
for that long. I remember we went on those ski trips we worked together
on Hioku, we were on the ski lift and we would talk about our schemes
for making Hioku better and stuff and so we’ve been at it for a while,
just formalizing with the podcast.
00:11:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Now I think that in the original
idea I had was that it would be something that was a little more spread
out across the team. We would have different combinations of people and
it wouldn’t be kind of one fixed host and ultimately kind of became my
thing, I would say. I think even in the beginning, you and I traded off
reading in the intro and stuff like that and in the end, I think that
works fine. I’m the kind of organizer, showrunner, you know, kind of
main host, and then we can have this rotating cast of characters, which
indeed even extends out into the guests from the Tools for Thought
community.
One of my big influences from the podcast world is the genre I’ve heard
described as two guys talking. You know, that sounds gendered. It’s not
always two men, but there’s something about two that makes a really
good, you know, assuming that people have good dynamic and and
interesting topics, there’s something kind of nice about that number in
the back and forth. One person looks a little too monotone, once you get
to 3 and especially above, there’s a lot of voices, it’s hard to keep
track of it all.
And one of my favorites on that was a podcast called Hello Internet,
which was not really about anything in particular, but just the hosts
had interesting personalities that kind of contrasted each other, and
there’s lots of others as well, like Gastropod is a great one. It’s
kind of focused on food history and Lexicon Valley, which is a
linguistics podcast back then had these two. Host, but one similarity
across them, I think was that yeah, you have these two people in this
kind of exchange, but then sometimes uh almost a contrast or something
about the dynamic is you have the differing personalities maybe that
play off each other.
For example, I’ve often described you in talking about the format of
the show as being the kind of contrarian philosopher, you know, so maybe
I come in with the more direct perspective or something like that and
you come in with the contrarian and philosophical perspective and
something about that just works.
00:13:25 - Speaker 1: So you mentioned two guys talking. I think
there’s kind of two dimensions there. There’s the 2. There’s also the
just talking.
So a lot of podcasts are heavily produced and they’re like they’re
basically read, you know, you write scripts and then you read them, you
might even have dramatic music going on in the background and
everything, and, you know, there’s something to that, but I’ve always
been a fan, both in podcasting and on YouTube of the just talking
format.
It’s less scripted, it’s more train of thought, thing of life,
whatever it may be. I think there’s something really to that.
Because importantly, there are a lot of ideas that you’re just never
gonna get out of someone if they have to go through production, that
write it down, get to produce it, especially with gas, you don’t know
one has time for that, but everyone has time to sit down and talk in the
microphone for an hour, so you get a lot of stuff out that you wouldn’t
otherwise get.
00:14:09 - Speaker 2: The informality of it, the sense that you’re
listening in on a conversation by, you know, practitioners in your field
is certainly something I was always, always going for. I try to prep our
guests actually and say, look, listen, I’m not, I’m not gonna treat
this like an interview where it’s just like question and answer,
hopefully. It’s the feeling a listener has is there’s sort of a fly on
the wall at a hallway conversation at a conference where there’s two
people that maybe are meeting for the first time but have this shared
interest or this work in a shared domain and you’re sort of listening
in on that.
The highly produced. Style, which I can appreciate sometimes, as you
said, like, This American Life, I think kind of pioneered that and
there’s a gimlet Media has a whole series. I, I feel like that’s a
style now, but yeah, it’s very much scripted, and that’s less
compelling to me.
Now, the other far extreme of that is just turn on a microphone and
start talking, and we do do both prep work, which for me is helpful
because you kind of have some notes we’re working from in a rough
structure. But we also do editing, we’ll maybe talk about the
production process a little bit, but you know, we remove false starts,
we remove people talking over each other in some cases less often, but
we’ll remove the whole sections that feel repetitious or boring, so a
little bit of that editing to try to make it as listenable as possible
and kind of respect the listener’s time and attention, but hopefully it
still has Most of that kind of raw, unscripted, just real sense of, you
know, people talking to each other.
Well, over the years we’ve got so many nice emails, people tweeting
about the podcast, reviews people leave on Apple Podcasts and other
places, and I wanted to read a couple of those on air, again, partially
for the indulgent victory lap, but partially because it’s so
interesting to hear what people find valuable or interesting about what
we’ve done, you know, it gives you a little bit of a mirror back onto
your own work. So I’ll read a few here to you and we can react a bit
live maybe. So maybe I’ll start with this one from Andy Dent Perth, who
says this is the only tech slash design startup podcast I’ve been able
to get my wife to listen to and not tune how well stuck in the car with
me. And I like that one a lot because one of my goals generally with
communications around the work I do, but certainly with the podcast
specifically is to make it deep and specific to the feel. It’s
obviously very much a niche, but at the same time, kind of try to make
it approachable, it’s not like dripping with jargon or, or something
like that, or if someone does use a term that maybe not everyone is
likely to know right offhand that we try to stop and define that or you
can, you know, it’s in the show notes, you can tap on it or click on it
to get more information. So I’ve I’ve tried to sort of keep it
accessible, but also for experts, I don’t know if that works, but I
feel like that review kind of captured, yeah, maybe the accessible part
has been at least somewhat successful.
00:17:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s encouraging to hear. For me, if
there’s one theme that ran through a lot of our episodes, it was
software that reflects the way people actually think. And so, the, the
software piece that can be more technical, but the way people think,
everyone should be able to relate to that if we’re doing it right. So
hopefully that provides some surface area for people to latch on to.
00:17:30 - Speaker 2: Another review here that touches on something that
we’re trying to achieve and sounds like we did, which is when I first
left a review saying, listening to the Meta Muse podcast is like
eavesdropping on a conversation among friends.
So certainly trying to create some of that warmth, create some of that.
I mean, obviously this is, we’re talking about professional topics,
we’re talking about the work we do, but I think for all of us and
certainly for our guests, we are really passionate about it. It’s our
life’s work. We put a lot of our heart and soul into it, even though in
some cases it’s pretty abstract stuff, and obviously we’re doing it as
a livelihood, but also, yeah, we’re trying to make it something we
enjoy from a social perspective is right, the right way to put it.
But yeah, we should be friends, we should be a certain kind of
professional or business friends among all of us here on the team and
with our guests and with people in this community or set of overlapping
communities that we’re a part of.
And speaking of community, we have a review from PPKN that’s titled
Center of the tools for Thought Community, and I think it’s very
generous to call the center, but I do think we have been a helpful
gathering point for folks in this emerging space, and the review
basically talks about guests from the thinking technology space and how
tools shape the way we think, and so on. So, Yeah, a big part of it
wasn’t necessarily our intention when we started, but I think you
called it out from pretty early on that especially once we started
bringing guests into the mix, this can be a form of community gathering,
even though it’s not a forum where people can freely participate, it is
something where we can bring folks who are working in the field, have
again these fairly intimate and in-depth discussion, and then of course
folks can discuss the ideas prompted by that on social media and so on.
00:19:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree it’s quite generous to call at the
center, but it’s certainly been great to be a piece of that, you know,
it’s a very special community. There’s a lot of cool work going on,
and a lot of people who care deeply about software to help people think,
so it’s been fun to be a part of that.
00:19:34 - Speaker 2: And the word community gets thrown around a lot,
commercial companies use it to just describe people who use their
product or something like that, which I don’t think is is quite right.
But I think that a community, especially when you talk about a
professional pursuit like this can be just a set of people who share
values, but if they’re all out kind of scattered on the internet and
you don’t know how to find them or where they are, you can sort of just
feel isolated.
I have these weird interests, no one around me understands or
appreciates those things.
And then when you do find a community, you know, I felt that way, for
example, coming to Silicon Valley and discovering the entrepreneurial
community there, where it was something that previously had only had
known a few people, basically my business partners who cared about or
thought about or worked on the kind of things that I spent my days on,
and then suddenly here’s a whole group of people who are all in touch
with each other and supporting each other, not only intellectually but
also emotionally, to be honest.
So I hope to some extent we’ve helped people discover and become part
of the community and indeed inspire them to, well, realize you can make
a career out of this stuff or at least some very passionate side
projects.
Another one I’ll highlight here is, this is a tweet actually, it’s
from Arnav Gosain, and they say the Meta Muse podcast sets the bar so
high for the time spent to knowledge gained ratio. Each episode leaves
me with so much to research about. Again, I liked this one because,
yeah, I strive to do this, right? I want it to be information dense to
me, that’s respecting the listeners’ time, as well as our guest time
and so forth. And that that also loops around to the show notes a bit,
which is a good episode. I think we’ll have some, you look at the show
notes and you’re thinking, OK, all these obscure, interesting niche
things, what possible conversation thread is going to tie them all
together. So, that was a nice one to read.
00:21:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think this also reflects an important
aspect of modern quote unquote, social media, which is that a lot of the
value is in taste, not taste in the sense of what color is a logo,
although that could be important too, but what is important to pay
attention to, what’s important to look at and to learn about. And so a
lot of the work that we end up doing on the podcast is just collecting
and synthesizing and filtering down. That from our experience, from our
colleagues’ experience, from industry happenings, from prior art, from
theory. And so on.
00:22:00 - Speaker 2: One of the personal journeys I went on in my
career or life even is, I think when I was younger, I would kind of
approach everything blank slate, oh, I need to price my product. I need
to figure out how to roll out, you know, a major data migration, and in
every case, I would just try to invent from first principles like no
one’s ever done this before.
And at some point I realized actually lots of people have done, maybe
not the exact thing that I or my team is trying to do. you can benefit
so much from experience and I feel like learning from wisdom of the
elders is just not a thing that’s really a part of the tech world that
tends to skew young and yeah, maybe startup culture tends to attract
young founders who are sort of almost like take pride in their naivety.
And that’s part of what allows you to do new things as you’re not
constrained by the thinking of the past, but at the same time, it could
be a weakness because well you’re actually naive. And so for me, each
podcast episode is not only a chance to talk about my experience and
what we’ve, for example, been working on it, use around a certain
thing, whether it’s pricing or product launches or whatever else, but
also a chance to go research a little bit in some cases look back at
notes on books I’ve read or yeah, do a little web searching, talk to
some people and try to expand my own knowledge and just sort of realize
that anything you want to do, someone else has already done it, thought
about it, probably written a book about it. You know, there’s knowledge
out there if you want to go, take the time to find it.
The last review I’ll mention here is from Metavi Bay. And this one’s
titled Genuinely Curious, of course curious is a word we like a lot. We
try to cultivate curiosity in our selves and in the product we’re
working on, but this person writes, this podcast is an exploration of
how we can work and think creatively with modern technology. The hosts
approach each topic in an open and philosophical way. And again, that
one caught my attention because I often even joke on it in this show, we
can’t just talk about, hey, we’re launching this product and let’s
talk about the details of that or we’re building a local first sync
engine, so let’s talk about the details of that, but actually I always
want to start with like really zoomed out, philosophical, explain like
I’m 5. Whatever type of thing, like let’s try to really understand in
a big picture way what this thing is and how what we’re trying to do
now fits into that context. So, open and philosophical is quite what
I’m going for, so I’m glad that comes through.
Yeah. Let’s talk about some favorite episodes, and of course there’s
so many, there’s no way we could touch on all the lovely moments we’ve
had, especially with guests. And one thing I did, again, kind of in that
data sciencey realm was just to dig into our analytics a little bit to
see which episodes were most downloaded or kind of reflecting
popularity, and that wasn’t that useful partially because podcast
analytics are quite tricky. You have these downloads, but that by
itself. may not tell you a lot, a given podcast player might download
things multiple times or only once for multiple people, and then you can
kind of filter by unique IP but that in any case, it wasn’t that
revealing. I will say our most downloaded episode of all time, according
to these analytics is episode 30 with Molly Milky, and that’s computers
and Creativity. Which indeed is a great episode and also when I tend to
point people to when they say, OK, what’s an episode I should start
with just because I think that really does talk about certainly the
tools for thought elements, but also the kind of creative tools and
what’s happening in the field there. It’s just a very zoomed out, I
think, look at a lot of things that we tend to circle around on this
podcast. But then the number 2 was actually our sync episode, which you
might be interested in. I think you mentioned that as one of your
favorites, and that’s definitely a much more technical episode, but I
think for helping the local first called community or movement get off
the ground and reporting, you know, kind of our real world experience
there. I think that’s been. A very helpful thing, and I’ve told gets
passed around sometimes in more technical communities as kind of like a
starting place for someone that wants to learn about this world.
00:26:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s certainly the one that I’ve blanked
out the most myself.
00:26:15 - Speaker 2: And then the other one I’ll mention that’s from
the most downloaded list is episode 12. Now, I think to some extent
these tend to be sort of backloaded because of course they’ve had years
to accumulate downloads, but our 4th most downloaded is Andy Mapschzek,
Growing Ideas, and that one was kind of a breakout hit for us.
In some ways that was our first high profile guest. We were still
figuring out the guest format, but of course Andy is such a sparkling,
you know, conversationalist wide mind that can go in so many different
directions. And then, of course, he shared us with his audience and that
in turn brought a lot of new listeners to the podcast. So, that’s in
many ways quite a seminal one for us, I think. So Mark, I’ll turn it to
you. Do you have some favorite episodes or even sort of themes of
episodes that come to mind when you think back on these 80+ hours in
front of the mic?
00:27:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I did look through every episode, and I
came up with about a dozen that are my favorite. I don’t know if I’ll
go read through them all, but there were a few themes. So the first and
biggest theme was this tools for thought, reflecting how people think.
So things like having good ideas, growing ideas, those are right up that
alley.
You know, performance has been a big one for me. We did a few things on
that. That’s one of the topics that I feel like I have much more to say
about.
Then we did a series of episodes on local first, so the sync episode,
the local first episode, I think we had one sync revisited or something
like that, or local first one year later. Those were some of my
favorites.
And then we also had a few, would seem like oddball episodes with the
episode on cities. We had episodes on hiring and our corporate
structure.
And those reflects my interest in economics very broadly defined, and
that’s something that, again, we touched on, but I have a lot more to
say about that, but I was happy to have a few episodes sharing some
thoughts on it.
00:28:06 - Speaker 2: Speaking as the showrunner or sort of editorial
editor in chief, that needs to sort of guide what topics we explore,
definitely some of these, as you call them, oddball ones, yeah, we had
one on film production, we had one on progress studies, we had the one
on cities, as you point out, and I guess I feel, especially since we’re
all about ideas and curiosity, that being a little bit broad. In kind of
not necessarily just tech world stuff or just running a company or tools
for thought or something like that, you know, that that would sort of be
too narrow and indeed we are curious people with wide range of
interests, so that seemed natural to do.
On the other hand, yeah, I think there’s probably points at which you
go too far, you know, you got to have some uniting themes and topics and
things that As an editor, you’re going to sort of draw, OK, this is
clearly in, this is clearly out, there’s things I’m personally
interested in and you’re personally interested in that wouldn’t be
suitable for podcasts like that. So in some cases those were sort of
taking risks and where we could, we also tried to relate it back, you
know, the city’s episode, even though it was mostly about urban design.
And urban planning, the guest there, Devin Sugle is, you know, from the
tech world and product manager slash developer who could put things very
much in terms that I think are familiar to what a lot of listeners of
the podcast will resonate with them, even if it’s in this area that is
something that maybe never even thought about before. So, yeah, those
are some of the funnest to me, even if, yeah, there’s probably
questions about where the edges should be, I guess.
00:29:41 - Speaker 1: And certainly it’s fair to have editorial ideas
about where the edges would be, although I would say that both
performance and economics, those are extremely related to software in my
mind. Like the city’s discussion was basically about externalities, the
economics of externalities and how they manifest in cities, but it’s
also a huge deal in software and coordination problems again, a huge
deal. So I have no problem justifying at least.
00:30:05 - Speaker 2: Hm. Yeah, looking back at a few of my favorites,
looking across guests, and we’ve had so many great guests, but one that
actually really stands out for me was this is episode 48, which is
called Rich Text, that was with Slim, and Slim has worked with thinking
and Switch, has worked at Notion, is now, I think, working in the
academic world. But she is just so deep on this topic of kind of text as
it is represented within computers, and indeed was even for me a mind
expanding conversation because we went beyond just, OK, what you would
think of, which is the text box in your messaging app or even the rich
text editor inside your word processor, but we got into like equation
editors and musical scoring and things like diagram tools, all these
kind of like structured symbolic manipulation. And she’s been able to
go both very deep and technical, but also we talk about why symbolic
representation is just such an important and foundational technology for
human knowledge. So that one was very memorable for me, both to record
and to listen back to later.
00:31:10 - Speaker 1: It’s funny you mention that someone was just
messaging me about rich text, and man, no one does not simply write a
rich text editor.
00:31:18 - Speaker 2: Yes. On the team side, and I mentioned that
sometimes these team episodes are some of my favorites, and yeah, it’s
almost become a little bit of a joke on the team that, you know, I try
to drag one of our colleagues in front of the microphone, who very often
they prefer building stuff and you know, maybe English isn’t their
first language and yeah, in general, just not super excited about being
recorded, but they have so much amazing knowledge to.
My perspective and I get to hear about that and be exposed to that
through our our team discussions, but I think it’s really nice when we
can to get that documented for the wider world and you know I really
like the episode of MacA design, but one I think that I’ve heard folks
come back to again and again is the one we did on Future of iPad, which
obviously in many ways we bet our business on iPad as a platform. From
the beginning as having this potential as a thinking tool, particularly
with the pencil, and this was kind of coming back to that, like, what is
the future of this device, what potential does it have a few years into
it, and it was revealing because even though we’d had those some of
those conversations internally, Having it for more of an external
audience, I think revealed the way that me and you and Leonard, who is
the other team member who was on with us, thought maybe about it a
little bit differently and maybe even our ideas about it had evolved
since we had started the company. It might be a little less timeless
than some of our other stuff because we were talking about kind of the
state of the iPad then, but I also kind of imagine that a lot of what we
talked about then is still applicable.
And then for episodes that are just you and I, I mean there’s so many.
I love that episode 3 on manuals. I think it was one of the first ones
where I got some, you know, private messages from people like, wow,
you’re on to something here. Again, a great example of something we
were developing the first manual for news that caused me to start
reflecting on, OK, wait, actually, what do I want out of documentation,
product documentation? And indeed this also I was able to find an old
tweet here by Mel Parcola, who says, if you’re building a product,
don’t skimp on the manual, it can be so much more than a boring
description of your interface. I feel inspired to dream bigger by this
episode of the MUA HQ podcast. And this to me again speaks to part of
why we’re doing this is not just to kind of verbalize and vocalize our
experience, but also hopefully to inspire others to see, for example,
manuals as something of a product documentation is less of a like, oh,
OK, I guess we have to do this before we ship the product, and more
something that can be an important and integrated part of the product
experience and indeed something good and inspiring just as much as any
other part of what you’re building.
I’ll also highlight the episodes on brand and product launches as being
two that were really good for me personally to be able to kind of
reflect on everything I had learned because a lot of the muse journey
for me has been growing in the areas of storytelling, but also just kind
of general marketing and that side of a business where I’ve
traditionally been more on the product development side. So being able
to in, you know, I’d read a bunch of books and talked to a bunch of
people and then tried to do the work myself and not say that I’m an
expert at it, but in many ways the best person to explain something to
you is someone who’s just recently learned it. And so I think both of
those episodes were for me, I had some light bulbs turned on around
those topics, brand and product launches, and it was for me a chance to
just kind of encapsulate that and talk through it all with you and in a
way kind of lock in that knowledge for myself.
00:34:50 - Speaker 1: I see you also have the Learning from Games
episode on your list, which I did as well.
This is reminding me of something interesting.
So there’s the extent to which I feel like we’ve said what we need or
want to say about a topic, and then there’s the extent to which it, to
my mind, has landed. So, for example, are like tools for thought, visual
interfaces, infinite canvas stuff. I feel like we said a lot of what we
had to say about that. It feels like it’s landed like people kind of
understood what we were saying, and it’s percolated through the
community, but some stuff like the local first thing stuff is sort of in
between.
We said quite a bit, it’s starting to percolate, but it’s still
hitting some barriers, and for some reason it’s not fully out there.
And then some stuff I feel like just hasn’t really landed.
It’s like the performance stuff and the importance of The game industry
and architectures is, I think it’s like a huge deal, and people just
don’t seem to know about it or care or whatever, so I don’t know if
our delivery has been unconvincing or I’m misreading the state of the
community, but it’s a little bit frustrating and disappointing that
some of that stuff hasn’t gotten out there, but I’m glad at least we
gave it a shot. It’s in the record.
00:35:52 - Speaker 2: The learning from games episodes specifically, I
think that was so perfect because we both come at it from different
perspectives but also have drawn a lot of inspiration from video games
and it felt like a non sequitur, but then in many ways I think it was,
you know, quite perfect and we got very good feedback on that one.
Yeah, now when it comes to software performance generally and why people
are putting, you know, the struggles in the industry with computers keep
getting faster, but our actual lived experience of them.
Keeps being more and more spinners and delays and waiting on computers
to do their thing.
Yeah, it’s hard to say whether you know, is it a matter of timing, is
it a matter of say it more, is it a matter of say it better, or is it a
matter of, you know, we perceive something that others don’t like for
me it’s just So clearly better when I use a piece of software that runs
at 60 or more frames per second. It’s so superior to something where
you’re staring at a spinner for seconds, but some other people maybe
don’t experience it that way.
It’s not a huge deal for them. They’re, I don’t know, more patient
than I am or something.
So it’s really hard to say to the extent we want to like, you know,
illuminate this and get people to care and be excited and offer some
positive directions you can go in terms of making software faster and
more responsive to its users’ needs versus our desires and interests
and tastes just aren’t in step with what most of the rest of humanity
and our industry wants.
00:37:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean there’s there’s a lot of factors
there.
My suspicion though is that people do in fact like fast software, but
for systems reasons, it’s incredibly hard to deliver and candidly,
we’ve seen that with views, you know, as much as I care about
performance and you and I care about performance, just it’s hard to
deliver.
All things considered. And so I think the way that it happens is there
needs to be some very deep systems thinking about what from a systems
perspective, ends up making fast software.
In addition to like, frankly, probably a lot of brute forcing in the
form of very determined personalities. Yeah, but if there’s one kind of
regret I have about the podcast, it’s that I didn’t spend more time on
the systems ideas like around the economics of software and performance
and stuff like that. So maybe that’s some topics for future episodes is
either a guest or a transition host or something.
00:38:05 - Speaker 2: Indeed, I do want to talk about some episodes we
want to do or haven’t gotten to or hope to do in the future or
something like that, but I thought it would also be interesting here to
take a little sidebar into the production process. Been in the position
recently that a couple of folks who for various reasons are thinking
about starting podcasts and ask us about our approach, which I don’t
think it’s too wildly different from what folks in the rest of the What
other podcasts folks do, but we do have a particular process and maybe
be interesting to share with the audience.
00:38:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it would be worth just going through
it, start to finish quickly.
00:38:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess there’s the what we call
pre-production, and so this is largely coming up with topics and I guess
I’ve developed a little radar for this in the form of, yeah, we’re
having a discussion on the team about something we’re tackling again,
we’re setting pricing, we’re working on the sync engine, we’re
designing the Mac app, whatever, and then I go, oh, you know what,
there’s a rich vein of discussion to be had here.
But also there’s the guest side of it, which in some cases is driven by
the topic. There’s a topic I want to talk about and I want to go find a
guest, but in many cases it’s just there’s someone I follow on Twitter
or someone whose work I admire or someone who’s working on a product
that I think is interesting or has an interesting philosophy that’s
relevant to our audience and you know basically just cold email them and
say, what do you think, do you want to come do this and get a pretty
good response rate.
Now guests are a whole other thing because they need to be prepped, you
know, maybe you do an initial call if you don’t know them that well and
kind of talk through what kind of topics you might have, what the format
of the show is. We do have a guest guide, maybe I’ll just make that
into a public notion link and post that on the show notes for those who
are interested, but yeah, we try to offer things like mic technique tips
and things about, yeah, just kind of how we approach it.
We’re also quite particular about having the right kind of mic. So we
either get someone to borrow from a friend or most people are able to
find or track down some kind of doesn’t need to be super high end, but
a podcast quality mic, right, not just AirPods or whatever kind of
Bluetooth headset you use and that doesn’t always work. Sometimes
there’s background noise in the room they’re recording or you know,
it’s actually difficult to configure these things to have the right
pickup settings or whatever, but All of this is to say that actually
quite a bit of work happens before we do come on air with guests, a
little less for non-guest episodes there, it’s more like with the
guests, I kind of count on them to say a bunch of smart things. All I
need to do is kind of ask questions and keep the conversation going when
it’s just us, I do a lot more prep work so that I feel like I have
useful things to say for an hour.
00:40:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and for both topics and guests, I go back to
this idea of growing or cultivating, like we talked about in our
episode, Growing Ideas, I think it’s called. You don’t just sit down
and decide, OK, we’re gonna talk about X today. It takes weeks or
months, you start with a possible episode title, and then you say, OK,
can I write 12 bullet points of interesting things about this? Maybe,
maybe not, maybe try to find a guest, they actually want to talk about
something different, so it’s an iterative organic process for sure.
00:41:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, and discovering whether there’s
enough depth to a topic to be sort of worth the recording time and the
listeners listening time is largely a matter of, you know, for me, I
make a blank board in muse and I start filling it out with stuff and
trying to see and, you know, what are the connections here and what’s
related and what’s not, and is this actually two episodes or actually
is there not enough here to even fill one episode.
So that’s the kind of open-ended ideation that of course Muse was exactly
built for, and of course it’s especially nice now that we have the
collaboration capability because you and I and whoever else is gonna
work on the the episode can kind of pull our notes in this very loose
freeform, messy format. How much time would you say you spend on prep in
the cases where I send you a board and say basically, hey, here’s what
I think we should talk about, can you add your ideas?
00:41:58 - Speaker 1: Well, if it’s a topic that I’ve already thought
a lot about, the prep work per se is pretty brief. Maybe it’s a half
hour of getting the bullet points down of things that I want to be sure
to cover and collecting links and references.
00:42:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the citation is big because
otherwise you’re stumbling on air. Oh, there was this book and it was
that, was it called this thing and that, you know, this kind of thing
versus you can just grab the link to the book’s website is right there
on the m board, I could confidently read out the name of the book in the
moment.
00:42:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, but there have been some topics where they
weren’t as much in my wheelhouse and I got to go think about it for a
while, for sure.
00:42:32 - Speaker 2: And in terms of those ideas, what would you say is
sort of the working material that goes into what eventually is gonna
kind of pop out the other end on the recording?
00:42:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the working material is actually
really important. If you go in there and just start talking based on
just first principles, it’s actually not that compelling.
So for me it’s our experience, not only in Muse, but in the decade plus
in the industry.
It’s specifically also the work in progress that we have, the stuff
that we’re currently working through the challenges there, what’s
working, what’s not. It’s everything that the guest has to offer.
And then something that we’ve done kind of uniquely I think is we look
a lot at the prior art, if we go into Google Scholar and type whatever,
local first or whatever it is that we’re interested in, and relatedly
the theory behind it, which can be, you know, computer science, design,
human factors, economics, whatever it may be.
And then a source of material that a lot of podcasts use, but we use
pretty sparingly as current events. We tried to make these episodes
pretty timeless. I think sometimes there’s something to be said for
that, but that is certainly a source that you can draw on that’s very
fruitful.
00:43:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that really describes well, not just kind of
how we go about the ideas for the podcast episodes, but to me what makes
good ideas generally, it’s really getting the whole picture, you need
that tacit boots on the ground, real world knowledge. You need the prior
art and the theory, the theoretical thinking, that kind of provides
context and a balance to the more pragmatic aspects or practical
knowledge, and the timelessness that that you mentioned is also
interesting.
It’s certainly something I have aimed for, and when I do occasionally
hear people, they’ll tweet something like that they discovered the
podcast and then went back to listen to every single episode or
something like that, which is Certainly very nice to hear, but I hope at
least most of them will sort of stand the test of time in the sense
that, you know, obviously like a news podcast reacting to current events
in the news, you know, be sort of maybe historical curiosity, but fairly
boring to go back and listen to a podcast from two years ago, but here,
hopefully, the vast majority of it that’s taking this bigger view, so
therefore it should still be very relevant today.
And also to your point about kind of having good ideas and sleeping mind
and that sort of thing, what also helps me is I dump a lot of what I
think we might talk about on the topic into a board, and then I’m
thinking about what I might say when I’m just, I don’t know, walking
my dog or doing something like that. Because important to me was I
didn’t want it to be scripted. The whole point is that it’s an
open-ended conversation and it can flow where it flows, but I wanted to
just have those seeds, so you have the right place to start and you can
make sure it’s a productive use of the time and the information dense
and you don’t forget anything and that sort of thing.
So then recording in some ways is the, we call it the easy part, but the
fun part maybe you get to have a conversation with your friends and
colleagues, and for that we started out originally using kind of like
asking people to record into Garageband and we want to make sure we have
the local lossless audio for all you kind of audio nerds out there, you
know, just recording a Skype call, which is the way that some people did
kind of like multi-person podcasts in the early days is, you know, the
quality is bad if your internet has a hiccup, you don’t want. That
unfortunately we did have a couple of instances of losing the audio
file, it wasn’t properly recording or it was on the wrong whatever.
Happily now there’s kind of a category of SAS tools. We use one called
Riverside. It’s very good. It has the video chat and the audio chat,
but it also does a clever trick with the browser where it’s essentially
recording your audio in chunks in a lossless format, saving the
browser’s local cache and then uploading those chunks as it goes. So it
might be a little behind where you are in the conversation. But so far
we’ve had very good luck in terms of not losing anything, and it’s
really turnkey for our guests, which is nice, so I think an important
tool like this is a good tool in the tool chain for podcasting.
00:46:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve been very happy with Riverside. It
makes a big difference, especially for guests, as you said. My only
complaint is it only works in Chrome. So every time we do an episode, I
click on the link, opens up Safari, you know, so I’m always 2 minutes
late to these things.
00:46:41 - Speaker 2: And in terms of guiding it, you know, of course,
again, kind of targeting that 11 hour and a half range, and I try to
play host and kind of have a rough structure in mind and try to make
sure we’re sort of moving through all those and we don’t miss
anything, but for the most part, also again, let it be a conversation,
let it flow, often it can just go places I never would have guessed or
wasn’t really part of our prep work and those can often be the best
moments in a lot of ways.
So well that leads us to the post production side of things now in the
very earliest episodes, I did the audio editing. And I didn’t do a ton
on the call the audio quality in terms of like noise reduction or what
have you. I focused more on really it’s called the editorial in the
same way that you would edit a piece of writing by removing filler words
or, you know, fixing the grammar, I would go in and essentially just
kind of snip stuff out, which incidentally made me first of all
incredibly aware of the filler words that I use because I’m in there
having to manually select them as much as I can and delete them.
Actually, you know, like, um, uh. And I think to some extent doing that
process of audio editing has helped me use fewer filler words, at least
in the recording setting. But yeah, this is a really natural thing that
everyone does and you don’t notice it in normal conversation, but I
think it can impact the listenability and the signal to noise ratio in a
more kind of produced recorded format like this.
And the other thing I did there was to just take advantage of that I’m
in there listening to it and I think, OK, this part is boring. I’m just
going to delete this whole minute, which more often than not was me. And
so I would discover that I would start to talk on a topic. I would say
something interesting, and be like, oh, that’s pretty good. And then I
would keep talking after that and kind of say the same thing again, but
worse, and I eventually learned, once you’ve made a point, just make
the point, shut up. Now I did the first few episodes, you later took
over and brought a more kind of professional tool and more levels
balancing and noise reduction, and I’m not sure exactly what, but it
seemed like you went a little bit down the audio editing rabbit hole for
fun.
00:48:49 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I really went down that rabbit hole.
I tried to teach myself audio editing from scratch with a focus on
improving the audio quality.
The modern audio editing software is kind of amazing. There’s All kinds
of filters and stuff you can do to reduce noise and improve the quality
and balance of the audio, but it’s kind of a dark art, so I watched a
bunch of YouTube videos on how to do it, and I think I eventually got
OK, but it’s a lot of work if you’re an amateur. It took me about 1
day to edit a podcast episode, and if you think it’s bad to listen to
your own recorded voice, how about listening to it 10 times on a loop?
00:49:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I was amazed the results that you were able
to get.
Yeah, I think it was somewhere around episode 4 or 5 that you took it
over, and the difference is really notable. And again, I appreciate
that. I think it’s respecting the listener and making it listenable and
yeah, it’s a good thing, especially when you have a guests who, yeah,
their levels might be different or the way they speak might not even be
something the audiences used to, and I think it was really valuable,
also seemed to be a fun.
Experience for you, but yes, so labor intensive, and I think that’s
true for professionals as well. I think for every minute of recorded
audio you hear, it’s several minutes at least of editing. It’s a big
job.
00:50:05 - Speaker 1: Now most of that time is for editing all the, we
need a word for this, but what’s it called you edit all the ahs and ums
out, there should be like this line editing, content editing, what’s
the equivalent for audio.
00:50:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t know if there’s a we should ask
our audio editor, but I just think of it as removing filler words.
00:50:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyways, that’s where most of the time was
the baseline improving the audio quality.
First of all, there’s these noise filters that basically work out of
the box, and I hear a lot of podcasts these days that clearly don’t
apply it, and that’s really leaving money on the table cause it’s
really easy to do this.
You run it through these filters, it sounds much better right away. And
then there’s some basic balancing that you can do, and that you kind of
gotta do it for each episode, at least for each new guest. And for each
new room that you’re in, but once you do that, it’s pretty
straightforward to do for every episode. So I think at least doing that
is really worth it, and you can teach yourself to do that for sure.
00:50:55 - Speaker 2: But yeah, I think then somewhere around, I don’t
know, maybe it was episode 10 or in that ballpark, you realizing that
spending this huge amount of time on the audio editing was not maybe the
best use of your time when we’re also trying to get a product off the
ground, so you went hunting for a freelancer that could help us with
that, and you found someone really amazing who has done every episode
since then, so I have to give a big shout out to Mark Lum or Jay-Z.
He is a really talented professional. He’s done audio work for major TV
shows and that sort of thing. I have no idea how we were able to land
him for our relatively small little corner of the internet here, but he
just does amazing work.
But the other place where Mark’s editing has made a huge difference is
with guests. And so these are folks who, although we try to get them the
right equipment and teach them some basics of how to keep your mouth the
right distance from the mic and that sort of thing. They’re just
probably new to podcasting. They don’t necessarily have the same kind
of techniques and disciplines of all that we do. And in many cases there
are folks who are non-native speakers, some of our really great guests,
you know, you think of someone like Balant from Kraft. He’s not a
native English speaker, he’s not someone who does a lot of public
speaking from what I’ve seen, but that actually made him all the more
someone that I wanted to hear from. Here’s a great operator and a great
person building a great company. Who you don’t hear from that often, to
me that makes him really high value to get in front of the mic, but he,
like many of our other non-native speakers, it’s hard, it’s hard to
sound articulate and intelligent in a language that’s not the one you
grew up with. And this is a place where, first of all, giving folks the
opportunity to know that they are struggling a little bit with an
answer, they can stop and restart you and I do that, of course, all the
time, and then we edit that out so that we always sound perfectly
articulate. Furthermore, if someone has, yeah, the combination of
background noise, mic technique, etc. non-native speaker, etc. and we
can just kind of like make them sound as good as possible and in this
sense not sound in the sense of what they’re saying because their words
are their words, of course, but kind of elevate the audio quality that
gives the best possible stage for their really worthy ideas. And so one
of the places where I think Mark’s editing work I’m most happy about
is when we have guests who come back and say, wow, you know, I was
really nervous about getting in front of the mic, but this sounds
amazing. You made me sound so smart, and then I’m thinking, well, you
know, you are smart, it’s just that we kind of created the right audio
environment for that to come through.
00:53:31 - Speaker 1: Another big deal about the editing work that Mark
does is he does the content editing with, from what I can tell, little
or no direction, and it comes out correct. Like this is something I was
really worried about when we were initially trying to outsource the
editing as part of the reason I wanted to do it myself first is to like
convince myself I knew what really good looked like, but then people
have to navigate, you know, these 2 or 3 people talking about this tech
stuff and figuring out Where to start and stop and how to re-edit so the
content makes sense. It’s quite hard to do without direction.
And if you have to give someone a lot of direction, then it kind of
defeats the purpose, you know, you want to be able to say, please make
this episode good, and you get it back and it’s good. And I feel like,
I mean correct me if I’m wrong, I feel like that’s basically how you
operate with Mark.
00:54:11 - Speaker 2: Completely, yeah, no, we do have some back and
forth, which is he wasn’t sure about should this section be in, it
seems like a duplicate. Was this part of mistake, how should this part
flow? So there is some back and forth there. I’ll also give a shout out
to a more recent addition to our podcast team, which is Jenna Miller. I
think she’s done the last 20 or 25 episodes, and she works closely with
Mark on some of that content editing, making decisions about what should
be in and out, things like description, show notes, she also makes the
audiogram, which is that little kind of video preview thing that we can
embed on Twitter, but she’s also just like another pair of ears to
help. Figure out, yeah, what should be there or not. And that also
includes things like I try to avoid, I don’t know, some kind of like
veering off into like charged political topic, for example, or something
like that, not because I’m afraid of talking about those, but just
again coming back to that editor in chief trying to decide what’s in
and out and I try to make it a kind of calm, and a safe space, quite the
right word for it, but something that’s not going to be too triggering.
And so sometimes it does happen the guests mention things and I go kind
of I don’t know if that quite is should be in there or not, and yeah,
so all those kinds of decisions are things that Jenna now can largely
make with a little bit of input from me, finding links for things and so
on. So that combination, the two of them are an incredible team and
certainly I’ll link to their profiles if anyone wants to ask if they
can help you out on your podcasting journey. It’s still a lot of work
to come up with the topics and find the guests and do the prep, and so
on, but having the whole postproduction thing be largely in the hands of
a talented team of experts has made a huge difference.
00:55:54 - Speaker 1: And did we talk at all about hardware?
00:55:57 - Speaker 2: I don’t think we did.
00:55:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’ve been on quite a journey with
hardware. When we first started the podcast, I looked up this site on
Marco.org. He has this incredible podcasting microphones and mega
review, and he bought like 3 dozen microphones and he recorded himself
with all of them. It’s really an incredible resource.
00:56:19 - Speaker 2: And I bought one of the and he even embeds the
samples of himself speaking in that page, so you can compare the same
person saying the same thing side by side, and it’s amazing how
different the mics sound.
00:56:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so on the basis of that, I ended up trying a
few different mics. I at one point had a pretty high-end XLR set up.
00:56:36 - Speaker 2: XLR being the plug type that’s used by, I don’t
know, DJs and bands and things for like pro audio gear, right?
00:56:43 - Speaker 1: Right, right. In contrast to the typical consumer
mic, which is the USB plug and play mic, which is actually what I use
now, cause I had two XLR arguments, they both broke, so that was enough
of that.
But anyways, my takeaway from that is that actually there are some
Modern USB mics that cost, you know, on the order of 150 bucks that are
really good, and they’re, in my opinion, a plenty good enough for a
casual podcast. So don’t let the microphone thing be a discourager for
you. All you need really is a decent microphone. You need to get close
to the microphone, you need to set the game things correctly and the
mode of the mic, and you need to be in a room that’s not too hard. This
was an issue for me. When we started, I was in Seattle, I was like this
really lush room with a huge rug and these massive currents and
everything, so I was fine. And then when I moved out to Idaho. I was in
this room, it’s a two story room, and there’s just hardwood and glass
everywhere. I remember we tried to record this episode, it was a
complete disaster. So what I had to do was I brought every comforter and
blanket that I owned into the house. You recall cause back behind me I
had these things draped, you know, over the wall and stuff until I got
some furniture in here. As long as you have a reasonably soft room,
it’s fine. And then from there you can handle most of the rest with the
editing, so it’s actually quite approachable.
00:57:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah. The soft room thing actually reminds me of,
I think a lot of pro podcasters that I listened to suddenly in the
pandemic, they were doing it from home. I think something they all
independently figured out is go into your closet and literally record
there, and it feels weird to be like locked in this tiny dark room
surrounded by clothes, but this actually is ideal. You don’t get the
echoeness of the big room, you’ve got soft padding stuff everywhere. Of
course, if you want to get more pro, you can buy that black egg carton
foam stuff that you can put on the walls.
But yeah, that’s key. The echoes are really distracting.
They can be edited out, but that comes at a cost. A lot of software,
including Riverside, has echo cancellation built in, but you definitely
don’t want to turn that on for the live thing because you want the
purest possible signal. You want unprocessed signals so you can do all
the processing after the fact.
Yeah, for me, the solution ended up being a road podcaster, which is a
USB mic but from a company that makes good quality pro audio gear with
the pop filter is a key thing. So I think I didn’t have that some of
the early episodes and all the P sounds and some of the other plosives,
as they call them come across rather badly, and then I have a little
boom arm that kind of suspends it, so then people walking elsewhere in
the house or something doesn’t perturb it as much.
00:59:11 - Speaker 1: The boom arm is nice. I’m a little bit jealous of
the boom arm, and it has that really cool pro look where it has the like
the nested cradle thing where the microphone is held by rubber bands. It
looks so pro.
00:59:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, that’s true. It’s like this
elastic, yeah, exactly like cat’s cradle thing so that the mic itself
isn’t attached to anything kind of hard, it’s sort of like a
suspension.
System for the mic. So even if you do sort of shake the desk a bit the
mic will be dampened from that. And again, it’s not an expensive setup.
I think it’s a few 100 bucks for these things.
And then, yeah, the other trick is, as you said, just get your mouth
close to the mic and try to keep it in a steady position, because
otherwise it’s hard to get it around that.
If you have that good clean signal and a lossless thing and you hand it
off to a good audio editor who knows what they’re doing, like our pal
Mark, yeah, you can make stuff that sounds good.
That’s a little peek at how meta Muse gets made, and that actually
gives me a nice transition into the next thing I wanted to talk about
which is episodes we want to make or we’ve sort of had in the back of
our mind or in our particular file, but we haven’t gotten to or maybe
haven’t gotten to yet.
And one of the first one that I put on the list there is actually just
doing an episode about podcasting and I think we covered a good swath of
it there with the discussion of the process and so on, but I think we
probably have more to say, so that’s one I could easily imagine doing a
whole episode on.
01:00:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we’ve talked a fair amount about
some of the mechanics, but we’ve only alluded very briefly to why
podcasting is so unique and important, and I feel like this is still
underestimated and misunderstood. It’s a very unique medium. It affords
a lot of ideas getting out there that otherwise wouldn’t, and I think
it’s important to understand exactly why that is, and I think we have
some theories about that, but yeah, maybe for a future show.
01:01:03 - Speaker 2: Another one that I’ve wanted to do since ever,
but in some ways is almost too big a topic, I’m almost intimidated to
approach it, which is design.
And it’s right there in our tagline we say Metamus podcast about tools
for thought, product design, how to have good ideas, and indeed we have
had episodes specifically on how to have good ideas and tools for
thought, but we’ve never had an episode on either product design
specifically or design broadly and Part of the challenge there, in
addition to the bigness of the topic, let’s say, is also that even who
I want to talk about that with, I think is a challenge because there’s
a lot of people I’d want to talk about it with.
A lot of my thinking about fundamentally what is design comes from my
longtime friend and colleague James Lindenbaum, who’s been a guest on
the podcast before. And he introduced me to his way of thinking about
design, which is as sort of a series of considered decisions and that
it’s for him it’s almost like a mathematical process, it’s almost
like solving an equation more than some touchy feely kind of purely
artistic thing.
So yeah, that’s very interesting, but you know, we also have these two
talented designers on our team, Leonard and Linda.
Of course I’d love to hear their voices. They probably have their own
perspective on it.
You have your perspective on it. I think of you as more like
architecture mastermind, but you were sort of the head of the product
design for our company for at least the 1st 6 or 12 months. So yeah, I
don’t know, there’s quite a lot we could explore there. I don’t know,
maybe it even needs to be a series of episodes. I’m not quite sure.
01:02:34 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I think we could do at least several
episodes. There’s visual and graphic design, there’s product design,
and there’s technical design, that’s at least 3.
01:02:43 - Speaker 2: Another one I’d love to do is user research. I
think this is something that’s sort of understudied, perhaps
underappreciated. It’s often rolled in with other kinds of, I don’t
know, product management, design, etc. and would also have been an
excuse to get Linda on our podcast, which is unfortunately one of the
team members who I was angling to get on, but we didn’t quite get
around to. And she, in addition to being a very talented designer, is
also great at user research, but regardless of who we had of the guests,
just covering that topic to me would be very interesting.
Now coming to things that are more sort of in the zeitgeist, let’s say
I think AI is sort of an obvious one here. Now, one reason I haven’t
tackled it in addition to my general like interest in timeless topics is
I don’t know if I have a ton to say on it. I’m not sure if you do
either, and indeed if we wanted to take. A deeper dive on large language
models and what that means for creative tools and productive software.
I’d probably reach back out to some of our past guests, folks like
Jeffrey Lid or Linus Lee, who are working directly with that, and I
could just sit back and ask them questions if they were kind enough to
come give us more of their time.
But yeah, I guess. That one’s tricky. It’s so everyone has something
to say about it. I feel like I don’t have that much to say about it,
but then often folks in our audience have asked, you know, what do you
think or where do you stand on this? or how do you think this impacts
everything you’ve been talking about, which is fair, but then, yeah,
I’m not sure if I have a great answer or certainly a podcast sized
answer.
01:04:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I don’t feel like I have a ton to say right
now, and a lot of things, frankly, are gonna be kind of contrarian. I
think if I was to do an episode about AI I would want to get someone
who’s actually done something, like bring in someone who’s shipped in
the AI infused products and tell us about that experience, you know,
it’s supposed to be magic. OK, did it work? How? Why? What didn’t
work, what was surprising? I think that would be valuable. There’s so
much just guessing, conjecturing about AI.
01:04:40 - Speaker 2: Well, precisely because it is so early in so many
ways, yeah.
Another one that I’m not 100% certain would make a whole episode, but
it’s something I’m very interested in as feedback. So this is
something that I think is kind of an art, a fine art, and there’s
getting great feedback from someone on your work or on your career.
It is an incredible gift, and indeed there is also a technique to how
you receive feedback well, use it, incorporated into your work and your
life, but yeah, how to give feedback on a written piece, again, in a
performance review, something like that and For one reason that topic
even came to my mind was I think Muse is an incredible tool for giving
feedback, being able to mark stuff up and circle things and point to it,
and did you think about this, for example, for a written piece, but also
for other kinds of work like user experience flows and visual arts and
that sort of thing. So, I don’t know, might be a weird one, but I feel
like I’d have a lot to say on that, but you would too.
01:05:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, now that you mentioned it, I think
feedback as we traditionally think about it in the corporate sense of
performance reviews and stuff, and I don’t know if I could do a full
episode on that, but feedback with that plus feedback around developing
ideas and strategies for doing it and how to do a layered approach,
that’s really interesting to me. I bet we could do an episode about
that.
01:05:58 - Speaker 2: What are some of the episode topics that you feel
like stones we have left unturned? You mentioned performance, what else?
01:06:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I keep coming back to this idea of the
economics of computing, and by that I don’t mean like the economics of
Sas businesses or whatever, that’s important, but that’s quite well
understood at this point we have much to say about it.
Maybe a better word is ecology of computing and how all these different
interlocking systems and initial conditions and trajectories. Interact
to give us the computing world that we have now.
I still think this is like way understudied and it’s very important,
and a lot of things that we care about, like, OK, you want a program
with a better programming language for whatever that means to you. That
problem cannot be solved by sitting down and designing a better
programming language. Sorry, that’s not the way it works anymore. Like
it’s gonna cost, I don’t know, let’s call it a billion dollars to
make an ecosystem that’s really worth programming in. How are you gonna
get a billion dollars or the equivalent amount of open source labor.
This connects to a topic that I’ve I had in the back of my head for a
few years, which is the uncertain legacy of computers in the cloud, and
maybe the short version is that network computers can be very
centralizing and centralized, and once you have a centralized entity
that can be controlled at a switch of the button, and that can be used
for some very dark things. So I think it’d be worth exploring that so
that we can understand the risks there and how to defend against them.
It’s worth some serious discussion, I think.
So, this is perhaps the most pessimistic or surprising variant of this
thesis. This is due to someone called John Michael Greer, who’s, you
might call him a philosopher or a theorist, but he’s actually quite the
character.
You really should look him up on Wikipedia and see the fullness of his
bibliography, which includes economic history and being a druid, like no
joke, but seriously has some very interesting things to say and One of
his like hypotheses is that maybe computers won’t be economically
viable for most use cases in the fullness of time, say in a few decades,
and that in the same way that we’ve gradually adopted network computers
incrementally for more and more use cases, we might find that More and
more of them become unviable for whatever reason, and it would take some
more time to go into why that might be the case, but I don’t know, I
think it’s actually quite plausible. Like, let me give you an example,
search, unless I’m looking for a specific proper noun and I want to go
to their website, everything else in Google and Duco, it’s all
completely broken. And I think that’s the case for most people. Now
there are alternative systems, you can use Twitter, or you can use
Reddit, or you can use YouTube, for example, to get at some of the same
functionality, but the ecology of that aspect of computing has
deteriorated massively, which is contrary to our notions of we have more
computing power, we have more data, we’re putting more work into it,
everything’s getting better. Well, you know, not really. So, we shall
see. I think the future could be a lot weirder than people realize.
01:08:56 - Speaker 2: It could always make sense to bet on a weirder
future than you can guess.
Yeah. Well, the last one I’ll mention, which is a much lighter topic,
is what I call maker biographies. I don’t know if you remember, but
this is a term you coined and quickly became the name for one of my tags
or shelves in Goodreads.
So maker biography is the inside story of someone who creates something,
including a team perhaps. And this could be an autobiography, someone
telling their own story.
I think you can think of someone like Jordan Machner, who published a
book about the making of Prince of Persia, a very seminal video game. He
basically kind of edited and published all his journals from the time
showing that kind of work in progress struggle of creating what would
turn out to be an incredible piece of video game art.
But there are also biographical works. For example, Walter Isaacson is a
pretty well known author who writes typically about maker types. For
example, he has an excellent biography of Leonardo da Vinci, obviously
told from a historical perspective, but really digging deep into how did
he spend his life, what were his struggles, how did he make these great
things that he did? Why were those breakthroughs important and
interesting at the time? Where did he have false starts and go wrong?
etc. really showing not just the amazing output of a great maker, but
also, yeah, the path they took to get there, which is usually full of
pain and difficulty and mistakes.
01:10:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a very interesting topic. By the
way, I gotta go back and say, if you haven’t read this book, Making of
the Prince of Persia, you have to read it. It’s one of the most
incredible books that I’ve ever read, and it’s almost totally unique
because this individual kept A journal of his work and his feelings
around the work for years.
So it’s not something you can go back and do retroactively, and it’s
very rare that anyone did that and wrote about it, and the topic was
such an incredible and seminal work, so you gotta read this book and
there’s a great new straight press edition.
Anyways, make your biographies, it’s interesting to think about how we
would actually do this episode. I almost want to go back and look at
some of my favorite maker biographies and figure out why they’re so
interesting and important.
You know, you really like biography, like, why isn’t that interesting,
you know, people did stuff, OK, but you learn these incredible details
in the good maker biographies that you’re not gonna get anywhere else.
You’re not gonna get from theory, you’re not gonna get from broad
history, and you’re not gonna learn from your own experience until
it’s too late. So it’s a really unique genre. But I almost want to go
back and like look at some of my favorite ones and figure out why that
format was so important, so that there’s some real meat on the
conversation.
01:11:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, it would be at least 50% of my
motivation I would be getting to go back and review my favorite
microbiography, look up some of my highlights and, you know, flip
through them and remind myself of some of the insights that came from
them.
But yeah, broadly, I think that category also to me, in addition to
providing inspiration and, you know, a reference point for my own work,
I think it’s important because we have so many biographies of, you
know, we would usually call leaders, which usually means like political
leaders or military leaders that we in some ways, the people we choose
as a society to lionize through biographies. We’re sort of saying their
lives are important and worth examination and worth learning about and
understanding. And so we see that for Napoleon and George Washington.
OK, fair enough, but what about the people who create? I think that is a
noble and important thing that can and should be lionized in our
society, and so going to read a biography, yes, about Leonardo da Vinci
or Marie Curie or anyone else who has contributed something useful to
science, to our, to the world in this way. That’s an important kind of
meta point to me.
Well, there’s a place to end, let’s talk a little bit about the future
and I’ll have to be honest and say the future of the podcast is a bit
uncertain. We do think there’s something special here and something
that has a life that is somewhat independent from the work we were doing
at Muse, but at the same time, I think it has really been the animating
force that has driven the topics that we choose, and you talked about
the working materials and what goes into each episode, a lot of it is
the work we are doing together, day to day, building this product and if
we’re not doing that work as directly anymore, then yeah, the podcast
has less purpose.
But at the same time, we’ve heard from lots of folks, there’s a lot of
value to this as a kind of meeting point for the community and for
something broader than use the business and the product. And so we’re
thinking about what to do there, but happily ink and Switch has offered
to kind of step up and help with some of the production costs, as well
as some of the show running and I could imagine a transition under the
umbrella of the lab that lets us kind of use more of the weird and wild
world of research as an animating force for what happens in the podcast
here. So, and I’m certainly interested in continuing to be a host under
that setting, but yeah, we need to kind of figure that out. So Mark, how
are you thinking about a potential future for this podcast?
01:14:13 - Speaker 1: Well, a few thoughts.
One is, I do really think the lab should have a podcast, or they should
do podcasting. There’s an incredible amount of stuff happening there
and all kinds of ideas percolating, and I feel like it would help them
and help the community if they did podcasting. So mechanically, I don’t
know how that might work with what is now the Meuse podcast and the lab,
but I think there’s something there for sure. You know, I think
realistically. Because so much of our podcasting and Metause was about
the working material around the app and everything around that, like, I
don’t think it would make sense to continue to do the same thing going
forward, given what’s happening with the app and the company. But after
doing this episode, I’ve realized there’s some stuff that I still
really gotta talk about, especially around this economics of computing
and ecology of computing, and it just seemed like it would be a shame to
leave that out there. So, maybe we do an epilogue, maybe the lab has me
on to talk about it there. Maybe I go on someone else’s podcast, I
don’t know, maybe I’ll start my own podcast if I wanna talk about it,
but I feel like it’d be a shame if I didn’t get to that.
01:15:09 - Speaker 2: And thinking of the future more broadly, one
question that of course is coming in through a lot of channels from a
lot of lovely folks is wondering what’s next for us personally. So,
Mark, how do you think about what comes in the post Muse world for you?
01:15:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, step 0 is to see views and especially
the sync and the back end stuff that I’ve worked on a lot with Adam
Wulf, make sure that’s in a good spot, and I think we’re getting
really close there, and that’s important to me, you know, just as a
matter of pride and also I’m a big user of the app, so I really wanna
see it doing well for the next few years.
But yeah, beyond that, I think I’m gonna take a period where I open up
the aperture real wide, like I’m not planning to jump right into the
next startup where in 2 weeks. And I think it’s important to
deliberately not decide too soon what you’re gonna do in that
situation, cause you need time for the existing structure of your brain
to, you know, basically disintegrate a little bit, like, let those
pathways fade away, let the daily patterns of thinking and doing melt
away and create some space. For new ideas and new ventures to enter. So
for me, that’s a pretty deliberate process because, you know, you’re
pretty anxious to get back to doing something every day and there’s all
kinds of great opportunities out there. So it’d be very easy to just
start something right back up. But I find there’s a lot of value in
taking that time. You get a lot of value even in a few weeks, but even
better is a few months to let it really percolate.
And in the meantime, you’re doing basically experiments and giving
yourself exposure to new ideas and new people and new projects and using
that as a sort of raw material that you’re gonna rebuild with going
forward.
That said, there’s certainly a few areas that I’ve been thinking a lot
about. I’ll kind of give them from most adjacent to least adjacent. So
the most adjacent would be computing and the type of stuff that we’ve
worked on in the lab and Muse. I do feel like I have more to say and to
do there if I have the chance, especially around local first and sync
and performance, and I had this project that I’ve wanted to do in the
lab for a long time around a squashed. Stack. Like I said before,
there’s all these layers in the stack, and the issues with the previous
layer, but when you stack that up so high, you’ve kind of lost the plot
basically by the time it gets to the top, and you can’t access the
underlying primitives, which are now completely different from when you
started, whatever it was 50 years ago or something. So I think it’d be
interesting to do an experiment where you just squash that all down and
see what comes out of it.
Anyways, I could imagine a lot of stuff like that with the lab.
Then I’ve alluded to on this podcast a few times about having a
premonition that we’re entering into a very important period,
potentially as soon as the next 12 months, but certainly over the next
decade or so, like I feel like a lot of stuff is gonna happen, and I
think it’d be worth spending some time thinking about that and helping
people prepare for it a little bit. I know it’s kind of vague, it’s
kind of potentially vague, but I just had this feeling that There’s
some really interesting stuff that’s about to go down, and being at
least aware of it and ready for it, I think that would be a fruitful way
to spend some time.
And then I’ve had this long running thread around working in the real
world, like making, manufacturing, stuff like that. And it’s not
something that I spend a ton of time with, but I’ve been doing a little
bit with it here and there and I found it really rewarding. And I think
it’s going to be very important, as we, you know, for example, try to
pull more manufacturing out of China and into North America. So I feel
like there’s something fruitful to be doing there as well.
But most of all, it’s take some time off and see what happens is I have
some more breathing room. And if anyone has any interesting ideas or
just wants to chat, I’d love to hear from you as I’m in this period.
What about you, Adam?
01:18:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, similar to you, uh, I want to complete
this transition successfully and make sure that Muse, the product is, of
course, it’s in great hands with Adam Wulf, but, you know, there’s a
lot of knowledge transfer and other things to be done.
Once that’s completed, open aperture, divergent, put your head up and
see what’s going on in the world, how things have changed and the
industry and so on, since the time I started, you know, working on this
specific domain, that thing you describe of the structures of your
brain.
Centigrade and you build up certain structures that are very useful for
the specific focus of the work that you’re doing, but there’s value to
letting that decay to get some, I guess some plasticity that allows you
to then shape yourself to whatever’s going to be next.
And I’ve experienced this a much times as an entrepreneur, depending on
how you count, this is my 7th or so venture and you know, they’ve had
differing ends, you know, some have been great successes, some have
been. Closer to failures, most end up somewhere in the middle, but
regardless, at the end, yeah, you really gotta pause, take a breath,
literally not know what’s next, wander in the world a little bit on
some time horizon that’s probably not years, but it certainly perhaps
the better part of a year. And yeah, I think.
In the end, I’ll probably end up working in this domain of creative
tools, productivity software, improving computing, all the things the
lab is working on.
Indeed, I’m still involved in the lab and very likely we’ll be doing
things in that domain. I wrote this article making computers better a
while back where I tried to document a lot of the different areas that I
think need improvement and perhaps that I have something to say on or
can contribute to.
But part of the value of that open-ended time is, yeah, seeing what
projects are out there, what opportunities exist, and you know, I’m
often start things like you can switch and Hiroku and Muse, but I’m
also open to potentially joining other projects on shorter, longer term
basis or I don’t know why.
I want to be open to what’s out in the world, wander, see what
possibilities exist while I let that brain structure turn a little more
fluid, and yeah, but I’m certainly not done making things and I think I
have much more to say on the topic of creative computing, so this will
hopefully be a more of a chapter change than an end.
01:21:15 - Speaker 1: You know, I and many others will be looking
forward to where you do land, and I suspect our path will be crossing
again.
01:21:22 - Speaker 2: I think that’s right. Well, let’s wrap it there.
Thanks everyone for listening. You can join us on Discord to discuss
this episode with our community. The links in the show notes. And Mark,
it’s been an awesome 45, what is it, 6 years that we’ve been, it
depends on how you count. But it’s been an absolute joy and as you
said, our paths will cross again.
01:21:47 - Speaker 1: Right on.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: We’ll just say that I’m so happy that you are
taking this forward and making sure this product not only continues to
exist and be maintained, but indeed to grow because there really is
nothing like it out there for unstructured thinking.
Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and
Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small
team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my
colleague Adam Wulf. Hey, good to be here again. Well, we’ll jump
straight into it today because we have some important and honestly
pretty bittersweet news.
So New Software Incorporated is the company of course that you and I and
the rest of our team work for Wulf, and we’ve been working to build
this beautiful product.
Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say we didn’t manage to find sustainable
business. This is something we’ve been working on for 4 years now, and
yeah, somehow the particular combination we’ve tried to do hasn’t
worked, so we need to make some big changes.
So in the near term that’s big scale down of the team. I’ll be
stepping away from day to day activities. Most of the team is moving on,
but the potential silver lining here is, well, if you’ve offered to
step up with a lot of passion and vigor to carry on, use the product as
a solo printer. So there’s a lot to unpack there and we’ll dive into
that throughout this episode, but I just want to lead with that news and
maybe we can just start with a feelings check. How are you feeling right
now, Adam Wulf?
00:01:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it’s a weird feeling because I’m
very excited about the future of Muse. We can keep the product alive,
and I know we have a very energetic user base, and so I’m thrilled that
Muse, the product will continue, but of course I’m very disappointed,
frankly sad that I’m gonna be losing my teammates that I’ve enjoyed
working with for the past 3 years. It’s been just a fantastic company
to work for, and a wonderful group of people to work with, and Everyone
will be sorely missed, absolutely.
00:02:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll echo that.
I’m feeling a lot of sadness, particularly around exactly what you
said, the team.
I really feel this is one of the best teams I’ve worked with, just the
perfect blend of skills and personalities, really perfectly suited for
what we were working on, great working chemistry, and yeah, I think I
enjoyed the day to day of my job here at Muse the last 4 years more than
probably any other venture I’ve ever worked on. And yeah, leaving that
behind, you know, you and I will still work together as, you know, be in
an advisory capacity, I’ll probably be a podcast host, so we’ll
certainly be in each other’s lives and I’ll be in the muse world, but
it’s a whole different thing from having a big team that’s, you know,
fully engaged and working together all the time.
00:02:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s the thing that’s
been emotionally so difficult or strange or confusing to some extent. is
so much of the muse I know is Disappearing or changing because the muse
I know is the 6 of you, right? And so it’s all of my team is leaving
and that’s, you know, extremely disappointing. But then the other side
of it is there’s a lot of muse that is staying the same.
It’s the product is staying the same. We have the 3.0 release, uh, that
a lot of our users are on right now and are enjoying, and that’s been a
huge effort for all of us this past year.
A lot of exciting plans coming up to continue Muse and to grow the
feature set, and so, I really feel pulled in kind of two different
emotional directions.
One is honestly a grieving process of the group that I know and the
group that I’ve worked with is moving on and is going to different
chapters, and that’s hard, and at the same time, we use the product is
continuing and I believe it’s gonna keep growing and has now uh
Business plan that does fit, even though our current one, you know,
unfortunately did not fit. I think there’s new. Business stability now,
which is a great thing and really gives it a strong future.
But it’s such a weird dichotomy in my brain. My left brain is thinking
one thing and my right brain is thinking the other thing, and I’m still
trying to, I think, to pull everything together and see it for what it
is, but it’s a lot to process, I think, for everyone, for all of us on
the team and all the new places we’re going.
00:04:36 - Speaker 1: Well, before we get into what the future holds,
what the new era of Muse might be, and why there’s still a long life
ahead of it, I do want to address what I think is going to be the first
question people will have, which is, you know, what happened or why is
this happening? It seems like things were going great. Again, you have
this beautiful product, we do have thousands of customers, tens of
thousands of users, and how could you not make that work and The answer
is kind of complex and I’m not sure I even have fully deciphered it,
but I’ll try to give an executive summary of where I see it now and
then maybe in the future we can dig a little deeper. So I guess to go
back in the history, of course, Muse was born out of the ink and Switch
research lab, and the lab’s charter. to look at how we can make
productive and creative computing better, seeing the ways that computing
has gone in the direction of consumption devices and sort of different
forces, economic and social and so on, pulling on how our computers work
and that having this effect on using computers for productivity
purposes.
And the lab explores a wide range of research around that, and some of
that research ended up turning into, or a subset of that was something
we said, hey, we think there’s something commerciallizable here or
something that could be turned into a product that could be not just a
research project you read about and get inspired, but you can use in
your daily life and you can experience what would it be like to live in
this world that I can switch visions where computing is different from
what it is today. So we took, yeah, all this advanced research on
gestures and tablet devices, things like the canvas and canvas stuff,
and obviously the local first sync, as well as many other ideas, and
said, let’s take this, take a bunch of these weird ideas and see if we
can put them together into this commercial product. And in some ways,
maybe the simple answer there is the ambition of trying to do all of
that, particularly in this emerging category, tools for thought thinking
tools or infinite canvas. It just takes a lot. It takes a lot of time,
it takes a lot of talented people, all of that means money, but we
didn’t want to go down the venture capital road because we felt that
might create some wrong incentives relative to the things we wanted to
express about this next generation, creative or productive computing.
And so we sought out this kind of unique blend, you might call it a
middle ground between, you know, on one hand, we weren’t like an indie
developer just building a one-off app, maybe consulting until they get
to something sustainable, you know, pure bootstrapping, but we also
didn’t want to go the venture backed thing, fast growth, etc. We tried
to go this middle ground, we took a little bit of investment money, but
we charged very early, we charge a premium price, we tried to be
customer funded. And we hoped that there would be this middle ground. I
think you see that reflected in the size of the team, right? We’re 7
today. It took us 4 years to grow to that size. You compare that to a
venture backed company that might be at 30+ people or more at that age,
or, you know, the other extreme, the sort of indie solo developer who
might work for many, many years before even hiring the first person, so
we’re in that middle ground. And I was hoping that would let us do what
we wanted and kind of turned out it was just like a middle ground that
didn’t work.
And so essentially that leads to kind of why we’re doing what we’re
doing now is we’re saying, look, we got to get out of that middle
ground. And so one way to do that is raise a big venture round and we
did explore that a little bit, but another way to do it is scale way
down, make it into something kind of sustainable quickly and for the
long term by essentially making the team down to exactly one person. So
there’s tons to unpack there. I am looking forward to the opportunity
first of all, to personally reflect in retrospect on this, but
furthermore, I’d love to write an article for my personal site or maybe
we explore it on this podcast or who knows, something like that where we
can dig in a little bit more because I think we made a lot of really
good moves and a lot of great bets. But also maybe there’s some things
that didn’t work and particularly about the model of how we wanted to
finance the company and the size of the team and our ambitions and
whatever and so maybe there’s some learning there for either other
companies that might come out of the research world later or just others
that want to follow our model. So hopefully that’s a somewhat
satisfying answer for now.
00:08:44 - Speaker 2: Yes, I think back at the 3 years that I’ve been
with Muse and everything that we had set out to accomplish.
It’s really amazing how much of that we have accomplished.
There’s a new product segment now. Canvas tools and whiteboarding for
thinking tools. There’s 1000 of these now today in in Muse’s footsteps,
and we were really blazing the trail there as we started out 4 years ago
coming out of In Switch.
We have a local first strategy, all of the data is physically on your
device. We built out local first sync, which is kind of unheard of and
is still at the research level but is working in production as good as
any other sync and faster in many ways.
And then that last thing is the shape of the business itself, larger
than a single solo developer but smaller than VC.
And it’s such a difficult thing to do new things, and I’m incredibly
impressed at the number of new things that we’ve done successfully. And
it’s just kind of a shame that one of those new things that didn’t
quite work out was the business side, was just the structure and shape
of how we’re funding this business.
00:09:54 - Speaker 1: Alright, so that’s a little bit about the past,
but let’s look forward to the future now. What does this mean for
current new users and customers? And in particular, this is a very
interesting one because you’re stepping up in a big way here to provide
some continuity and some continuation for this product we all love.
00:10:13 - Speaker 2: I think there’s two questions in my mind. One is,
what can customers expect today? And what can customers expect tomorrow?
And today, everything keeps working. Ms 2 keeps working. We have the
Muse 3 Beta, which is either released by the time this podcast comes out
or it’s gonna be released very soon. That has a whole host of new
features. Collaboration, so you can invite friends and family into your
muse board, you can invite your teammates into your muse board. You have
separate workspaces, so you can separate out the sharing parts of your
thinking versus the private thought sanctuary of your thinking.
So all of that stays the same and is even growing in the very, very near
term, which is great.
And then for tomorrow, looking ahead, what happens 6 months from now,
what happens a year from now, I am eager and excited to continue Muse
development, and that means continued bug fixes, of course, continued
customer support and customer conversations. I’m gonna be talking with
a lot of you. I know a lot of you are already in our Discord community,
which is fantastic. And there’s gonna be lots of new features. Over the
past years, we have had goals and visions, as every software product
does, that are larger than you could build an eternity. And there’s
just so, so much and so many exciting things that we’re looking forward
to building, and I’m picking up that mantle, and I’m gonna keep
building, so it’s more new things, more customer requests implemented,
more bug fixes implemented. Everything you can expect from a continued
software development will be happening.
00:11:54 - Speaker 1: And when we first started to explore, OK, we’re
coming down to the wire here and you know the numbers aren’t quite
working and what are we going to do and it’s important to us that this
product continue to exist and we do right by users and customers and how
can we best do that and you, to my surprise, stepped up and said, look,
I think I can do it on my own and At first that seems counterintuitive,
right? We have a big team working on it right now, but first of all, you
are basically the only person on the team that has the broad base of
skills.
You essentially touch every part of the code, including the back end and
the front end. You basically have led the whole kind of engineering
effort around all the sync work we’ve been doing, including all the
collaboration that we’ve done in the last year, but of course you’re
also a very accomplished iOS client side developer. And you have a
background in entrepreneurship and so forth.
And so the more I thought about it, the more I said, yeah, actually I
think this is possible, and importantly I think it’s that.
The foundation we have built in this product and the kind of ideas that
are embedded in it. I don’t say the hard stuff is done, but we tackled
a bunch of things that would, I think, have been pretty impossible to do
without a team like that Sinclair.
But now that it exists, iterating on that and adding new features is
something that’s in reach for, well, certainly not every developer, but
someone with your exact skills, and that’s why I got excited about that
possibility. So maybe that’s a chance for us to talk a little bit about
your background and yeah, just help the listeners get to know a little
bit, yeah, what led you here to this adventure.
00:13:23 - Speaker 2: Well, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur ever
since I was a little kid and I always loved software in particular, so I
knew going into college that that’s what I wanted to do.
I graduated with a computer science degree as well as managerial
studies, which is kind of like a pseudo business degree. It’s kind of
as close to entrepreneurship as I could get at the time.
And I jumped straight into my own company, so myself and a co-founder
founded Jotlet.net, and that was an online calendar application launched
just before Google Calendar, if you can believe it. That’s how far back
that was, and we were really fortunate. We put a lot of time and effort
and love and passion into building that company, and we had a successful
exit and sold that and was acquired about 2 years later. And so that
really fed the flames for me in entrepreneurship. I loved every second
of it and knew that that’s what I wanted to do. And so ever since then
I’ve been working for startups or starting my own companies.
00:14:25 - Speaker 1: Two that jumped out at me, I think when we first
got in touch with you, which we actually contacted you because you have
some open source inc engines for iOS, quite a unique thing that’s hard
to find and obviously very relevant to what we were trying to do at the
time.
But then digging deeper in your background, some of the stuff you’ve
worked on, including you made an app called Here File file, which was
kind of a syncing-ish connecting to your home computer app as well as
loose leaf, which in many ways feels to me like a proto muse. It was
before the pencil. And that sort of thing, but you were making an iPad,
digital analog paper, kind of sketching loose, I don’t know if you
market it quite as a thinking tool, but you know, you look at that and
you go, this has a lot of the qualities we’re trying to get in use, but
was maybe too early in the sense that the hardware wasn’t there and
hard to do as a single person, that sort of thing, so. I’m looking down
this and other experience and just the UK, this fellow’s like worked on
ink. He’s worked on iPad kind of loose sketching apps, you know, in the
very early days, you’ve done sync oriented technologies of different
kinds. These are like all things that are square and exactly what we
need. So it was really quite the perfect match, I think.
00:15:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I think one really fun thing is in
the era of here file file, which was, gosh, over 10 years ago now.
This was even before or just as Dropbox was becoming a thing. The cloud
was all brand new, which we all know is just somebody else’s computer.
And so at the time, I was really, and I don’t want Dropbox, I don’t
wanna put my files somewhere else, I don’t trust iCloud, I don’t want
things local on my computer and the term local first had not yet been
born.
But in my heart, that’s what I wanted, and so that’s what your file
file really was. It was a way for your phone to connect back to your
home computer, and so that way your home computer was your cloud
storage.
All of your things were in your control on software you control, on
hardware that you control.
And what I loved about Muse when you all reached out to me was how
closely it dovetailed with everything I’ve been doing until then.
That local first intuition with your file file and then all of the ink
work and loose leaf.
And building tools for productivity and building tools to help people do
better, and to help people be better and to think better and kind of
reach their maximum. And that’s what I love about Muse is it keeps users
in control of their own data, and it’s just a wonderful thinking tool
that has helped me be much more productive and much more clear in my
thinking, and I know it has for our customers and users too.
00:17:05 - Speaker 1: And you certainly do, along with Henry as well,
some epic engineering architecture boards, you know, sort of flow charts
and yeah, code screenshots and that sort of thing. So you become quite
an accomplished user of the product as well. You’re often also the one
who runs our team summit kind of planning decision section, figure out
how to like slot all the time boxes and that sort of thing. So, also
helps to be an avid user of the product, I’d imagine.
00:17:33 - Speaker 2: Absolutely, it is my go to tool, thinking through
architecture problems and, you know, difficult coding problems and
everything else, being able to diagram and Think efficiently is
paramount when programming. It is the number one thing I do all day is
just think that’s literally my job description and som is invaluable.
00:17:57 - Speaker 1: You know, it’s like that saying that there’s
typing problems and thinking problems, and typing problems are kind of
the easy one. That’s write the code, not to say that that’s, you know,
it takes a lot of years to build skill as a good programmer, but once
you have that, the typing problems are relatively straightforward. It’s
the thinking problems, the knowing what you need to do before you’re
starting to type the keyboard, and in the code, change the code, that’s
maybe the hard part of the job in the long run.
00:18:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it’ll be interesting because
what I would love to do over the coming months and years with Muse is to
bring even more of that thinking layer out into the public and out into
the community.
And so sharing boards that I’m using to think through problems and kind
of really code in the open.
What I’ve loved about working at Muse is how we’ve done that and how
we’ve been so open in our progress and our process.
Sharing small videos of features as they’re getting built, adding
things to the backstage pass, making sure we get feedback from users and
that we’re solving the problem we think we’re solving.
And my goal is to continue in that same vein. I wanna be building this
in the open with the community, not to the community.
00:19:13 - Speaker 1: I look forward to your Twitch live stream.
00:19:18 - Speaker 1: Don’t tempt me, mostly joking, but also kind of a
suggestion.
00:19:20 - Speaker 2: It’s funny because that’s one of the things I
did in Loose Leaf is I live streamed some coding and some, you know, who
knows, I might end up doing that and Hey, let’s fix your bug life. Jump
into the chat.
00:19:34 - Speaker 1: But yeah, for now, I think certainly our Discord
community has been the place to be in touch and I hope everyone has sort
of a sense, a little bit more of a sense of who you are and why you’re
qualified for slash excited about this work, and yeah, I hope everyone
will come in and say hi and they’ll probably be hearing a lot more from
you through that channel and others.
00:19:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if you’re on the podcast and not in the
Discord, please jump in the Discord, and I think we’ll have a link in
the show notes, so definitely join and come say hi.
00:20:06 - Speaker 1: Alright, well, I think that brings us to the
exciting part of talking about the future here, which is what we’re
calling Muse 3. So we’ve hinted at this already, something we’re
bringing into beta, but tell us exactly what is Muse 3 and how does it
differ from the Muse 2 and Muse for Teams beta we have underway right
now.
00:20:26 - Speaker 2: So Muse 3 brings together everything that’s in
the current App Store version of Muse and everything that’s in the Muse
Team’s beta. That includes new navigation, that includes colored cards
and text formatting that were in the backstage pass, that includes
collaboration is the biggest one. So now it’s not just you and your
muse. But you can create a separate workspace and then invite family
members, friends, teammates into that second workspace and collaborate
live in real time together.
00:21:00 - Speaker 1: Well, I got access to an early build of what was
going to become Muse 3.
Let me migrate forward from my Muse2 personal, bring all my data
forward, and as soon as I saw it, I said, this is the muse I’ve always
envisioned. This is the muse I’ve always wanted. It brings together
everything we’ve done for the last 4 years in a coherent and holistic
way.
And for me, one big part of that is this call it divide or Weaving
together of the private thinking space, the private sanctuary, where you
can explore ideas in relative, let’s call it safety, but also the
shared space where I can collaborate with colleagues, brainstorm, plan,
that sort of thing, and that those things weave together and things move
between it, they may start in private and move to the shared space and
maybe take some of it back to the private space and then having all that
together in one app.
Really makes this be, again, the vision that I always had from you and
the workspace model, which we can explain a little bit, but that allows
you to have any number of collaborative spaces or private spaces, so
that you can have different work groups that you’re collaborating with.
And of course we’ve had them use for Teams beta running for the last, I
don’t know, 9 months, and that is a collaborative space and let us
explore all this thing like live cursors and avatars and presents and
comments and so on, but it’s one fixed shared space with one fixed
group, and I don’t think that quite captures where we want it to go. So
this Muse 3 combination, this unification of these two different tracks
into one beautiful app for all your thinking is just really exciting for
me.
00:22:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, workspaces, I think, are the real jewel of
Muse 3, because you can create a private workspace, you can create as
many private workspaces as you want, maybe for different areas of
thinking, and then you get the full M experience. All of your boards,
all of your content, all of your thinking, all of your ink and drawing,
and it’s just the same use that you know now, where it’s a private,
safe, thinking, relaxing place to be, where you know that you have full
control. We’ve mentioned on the podcast before that thinking is such a
personal action, and you need room to make mistakes. You need room to
just be messy and Think through difficult problems without worrying
about what the thinking process looks like to co-workers.
And so you have all that same privacy with workspaces, and you can
create one to share.
You know, we have one for the Muse team. I have one with me and my wife
Christy with, you know, papers about our car and our house and our
chores and our our to do lists and all sorts of different things, but I
think the real risk, and the thing that we were most cautious about was
making sure that it was very clear when you were looking at something
that was shared, and when you were looking at something that was
private.
Because we did not ever want to get in a situation where, oops, I’m
working on something in a shared space and I didn’t mean to, or oops, I
thought this was private and it’s not. And so the way that we’ve built
out workspaces in Muse 3, I think really respects the way that people
work today and also gives everyone flexibility to expand out and share
that work when it’s appropriate, or pull back and stay private when
it’s appropriate. And that’s a real powerful thing. In a tool that is
built for such deep in process thinking work.
00:24:31 - Speaker 1: Now workspaces are obviously the big banner
feature here for ME 3, but even if you don’t care about workspaces or
collaboration at all, we’ve been putting tons of improvements into what
you might call the core app or Canvas features for the teamspa over the
last almost a year it’s been now, so this includes things that were in
the backstage pass before like headings and colored cards, but you also
have connections between cards.
We have board zooming that lets you fairly freely zoom in and out.
We’ve got a whole redesigned UI including a Tonav bar that has bread
crumbs, which is a really nice navigation feature, a sidebar, and in
general it’s a much more discoverable and approachable interface, and I
think everyone, if you haven’t had the chance to kick the tires on the
team’s beta yet, you’re gonna enjoy using those.
Oh, and by the way, search, one of the most requested features, and that
will be in 3 as well.
00:25:22 - Speaker 2: I was gonna say, I think search is something I’m
most excited about. I don’t think a day has gone by that somebody has
not requested search, and now that it’s in the app, I’m using it all
the time. I think everyone’s gonna love it.
00:25:36 - Speaker 1: So yeah, if you’re a member, you should be able
to find a link to the migration guide to try out the test flight beta
from U3 in your backstage pass, but this actually will probably be a
shorter beta, you know, we’ll typically leave something in beta for
3456 months because we want to really make sure that we have time to
develop it and thoroughly test it before we bring it out to the wider
audience, but in this case, most of what’s here, we’ve tested pretty
thoroughly in use for Teams.
So the beta here can be a little bit shorter, but if you do want early
access to that and help us give us some feedback before we go live slash
just support the new business, we’d love it if you’d buy a membership.
00:26:18 - Speaker 2: And at the same time, like we said earlier, please
jump into the Discord as well. I’d love to talk with you and hear
questions and feature requests and feedback inside the community too.
00:26:30 - Speaker 1: Now, speaking of the muse for Teams beta, and how
that relates to the personal app and this unification.
It is the case that part of the story here, and again I’ll hope to get
into more details in some future retrospective, but in the last year we
have been testing a new market, right, which is essentially Teams or B2B
or enterprise, sometimes is how those things are termed, and this
contrasts to the original audience and to this day still the biggest
user base and customer base.
Of the Muse thinking tool, which is, I usually call those, you could say
individual people, right? These are people who decide they want an app
like this on their iPad or Mac, they download it, they try it, they go,
actually, this is really good for me, I’m going to pay for it.
But I usually would think of those as less consumers because it’s not
really a mainstream or mass market product, but rather prosumers, that
to say, they’re probably professionals, creative professionals of some
kind, and they may be using it for personal life, but very likely
they’re using it for their work in some way, you know, maybe they’re a
freelancer and they’re.
Using it to sketch out projects for clients, maybe you’re a startup
founder and you’re using it to kind of put together strategy, or maybe
you’re an engineer working at a bigger company and you’re using it to
do, for example, architecture diagrams kind of for yourself, but you
chose the product for yourself and you purchased it for yourself on your
own, you know, App Store, Apple account.
And that has different dynamics to a team says we need a product for
shared whiteboarding or however they might think about it, for shared
thinking, for planning and therefore we’re going to go and pick a
product that we are all going to use and probably will be purchased
together on some kind of SAS contract.
And I believed then and still believe now that those two markets, if you
call it that or two buyers are pretty complimentary, and we did see that
quite a bit in the Muse for Teams beta in the sense that a lot of the
people who were bringing news onto their teams were people who were
already avid users of the personal product, but it also had some Split
focus, maybe conflicting needs, you know, for example, making the app
more approachable for or being on different platforms like Windows, for
example, is something that if you want to get your whole team on there,
you probably need that. If you’re purchasing a tool for yourself, the
need to be multi-platform is less pressing. And so that’s part of what
we’re doing over the last year and I think that was a worthy path to
pursue, but at the same time, it did split our focus.
So one detail of this is your plan, and I think part of what’s exciting
about it is this, I think you’ve called it like a refocusing on the
prosumers and essentially the individuals.
And so even though you’re bringing all these same capabilities that we
built for this team’s app into Muse 3, you can still make a workspace
and use it with your team. The focus is less on serving that need
specifically and more back to basics with the prosummers. Am I
characterizing your plan correctly there?
00:29:29 - Speaker 2: That’s exactly right. Going forward, it’s gonna
be a refocus on existing customers.
And what this business model change lets me do is it takes a lot. Less
growth to support one person, to support me as a solo entrepreneur,
maybe a couple contractors, maybe a bit of extra, but it’s a much
smaller revenue requirement. And what that means is that I can focus
100% of my time on existing customers, on our existing customer base,
and growing to the same academics, designers, planners, managers.
Teachers and students, creatives, all the people that came with us in
Muse 1 and in Muse 2, and love the product, that’s the focus going
forward, is build amazing tools for people that the people themselves
are choosing. I think one thing that I think about with team tools, I
think you’re right, I think there is a wonderful balance there, and I
think it can work with both teams and businesses being a buyer and being
a use case. What I love about building tools for individual people. is
that they’re able to take their tools with them. And when you sell to a
company, well, it’s the company’s tool, and you have to use it. And
then when you go change companies, that tool is no longer there cause
the company uses something else.
But when you’re buying your own tools for your own thinking and for
your own work, you can take them with you. In your personal life, you
can take them with you to your job with everywhere that you’re doing,
it’s You building up your own tools for your own garden, and I love
that about uses, and I love that about the existing customers that we
have, and so that’s really the big focus for me is How can I help all
of our existing users and customers be even more enamored with new than
they already are? I can’t, how can I help them see and use what I see,
and how can I bring in new customers? And there’s so many thinkers and
planners out there that might not know that music exists. It might just
be still a bit niche, and that’s OK, but I think what’s wonderful
about focusing on individuals as the target market, as the customer
number one. is that all of these are customers that care deeply about
the tools that they use, and they bring this tool to their job, but then
when they change jobs, they’re gonna bring Muse with them to the new job,
and they’re gonna use Muse in their personal life, and they’re gonna use
Muse with their family, with their friends, with others. And building
tools that people choose for their life is extremely rewarding.
Invaluable.
00:32:18 - Speaker 1: You make a really interesting point there about
the choosing your own tools or taking your tools with you when you leave
a job and go to the next one. And I think that’s part of why you see a
lot of the new customer base are people who are freelancers, for
example, or yeah, founders, but people who are not sort of taking just
what’s given to them but have opinions, want to choose for themselves.
I think it’s something like, you know, In kitchens, chefs bring their
own knives, right, because a knife is so personal, maybe there’s some
knives in the kitchen, but like ultimately for your main knives that you
use so frequently throughout the job, you bring it with you because you
pick one that fits your hand.
It’s a personal choice. And so I always liked that it was part of the
reason why, even if we did see the possibility of moving into the team
space later, I really wanted to start with individuals or prosumers, and
I think it continues to be just the right market for this tool. It also
fits together nicely with local first. And fits together with being a
thinking tool because there I think, obviously there’s a case when
you’re working for an employer, they own your output, that’s the deal
you’ve made. You signed a contract, they give you some money and you
give them creative output around a particular problem domain. But it
always feels a little funny to me when you leave a job and you know, if
you put the artifacts of your thinking into a, I don’t know what a
Google Drive, a notion or whatever else, all of that you’re immediately
cut off from as since as you leave. And I guess it sort of makes sense
that like those kind of intermediate artifacts belong to the company,
but I guess I just always feel like it almost feels like they were my
thoughts. I feel like I should own my thoughts and that fits together
with taking the tool that Sort of feels right in the hand and honing my
data and I don’t know, there’s some nexus of things there that all fit
together really well and I think that is the area where it’s called the
early days idea of Muse, the 1 and 2 days. I think that really worked
and why I think that getting back to that for Muse 3 was a great move.
Well, maybe now we can take a little sidebar to talk about a more
philosophical topic, but a pet one of mine, and I feel like a very
relevant one here now which is leadership transitions. So we’ve been in
the process of a handover from me to you, really from the whole team to
you, but I guess me as the outgoing CEO and someone that had the overall
picture in my mind, or at least hopefully did, and handing that over to
you is something I’m familiar with because I’ve done it a few times
over the years. One really successful example I can point to, or what I
find to be very successful is ink and Switch, right? I ran that as the
lab director for something like 4.5 years, and when I kind of had
reached the end of what I had to say on it, or the end of the era,
something like that, and I had the opportunity to hand over the reins as
lab director to Peter Van Hardenberg, who’s been on the podcast before,
and I’m sure we’ll hear from him again. And what he has been able to
do, taking that and building on, I think, what I and the other early
people created, but really expanding it a lot, taking it way further,
making it way better, and creating a much larger impact on the world and
a legacy that frankly reflects well on me. I could say that I worked on
that for a long time, but then in the meantime, you know, Peter’s been
at it for 3 or 4 years now and has accomplished great things again along
with the rest of the team there. So I consider that to be a very
successful handover in terms of the result, but it’s never easy to be
honest. It’s kind of an emotion laden process. It can be confusing to
try to dig out all this tacit knowledge that you have and of course
it’s important that the new person coming in, the new leader coming in,
be someone that has Their own vision, right? It would not be practical
or effective for that person to just try to continue exactly what
you’re doing. They need to have a new sense of what’s a vision for
where this can go in the future, taking what was good about it before,
but also bringing their own spin, their own take, their own vision into
it and then you can switch example, for example, I think Peter really
had this feeling that like Community that was starting to build up
around this, this sort of research, HCI community, whatever you want to
call that was really valuable. And I was less tuned into that. I was
thinking more about essays and research projects, but he saw that this
is an incredible asset, we should keep doing the research and the
essays, but we should invest in this community piece and that’s been, I
think, an incredible, incredible success. So. Here’s hoping that this
transition will be as successful, but yeah, I’d be curious to hear from
you about, yeah, how you think about this process so far, what it’s
been like to shift gears mentally from owning, obviously a huge swath of
the engineering, the application as well as thinking about the business
somewhat to being just the overall owner of everything.
00:37:25 - Speaker 2: One thing I’ve loved over the past 3 years is Muse
being such a small team, let’s all of us see and hear directly from the
customers. Whether we’re in engineering or whether we’re working on
the website, or branding or planning out future roadmaps, all of us have
been very close to customer feedback and customer support requests.
That said, of course, over my past 3 years, the overwhelming majority of
my time was still code. It was the sync layer in particular. It was
rebuilding the database layer, some of the UI problems or UI features
that we’ve been tackling as well. So it’s been very, very engineering
heavy, and so this transition to me has pulled me back into the
entrepreneur hat, which I have worn before, and I love it. I’m so
excited to Start spending more of my time thinking about marketing and
talking directly with customers in the community, and planning roadmaps
for the next 3 months and 6 months and everything else.
But one big slice of this transition is just that brain shift, which
takes time to think, what have I not been thinking about? For the past 3
years, because it’s not my job to think about it, and I know that
somebody else on the team is thinking about it and is very capable, and
suddenly I need to start unloading all of those thoughts into my brain
too, and shifting my schedule around, which is exciting. But could also
be overwhelming because it’s just a lot to feed into a single brain and
over the previous month as we’re transitioning, it’s just a lot. Of
data to move between biological brains without a Wi Fi or USB port. And
so it’s all of those things that The intuition that you have, and the
intuition that Yuli has, and the intuition that Leonard has, and All of
the unspoken pieces of work that you do, because it’s, it’s your habit
to do, and you’ve been doing it for so many years. The knowledge of the
transition, I think is the easiest piece. It’s all of the unspoken
parts of the transition that are the hardest, and that’s what’s so
wonderful about this team is everyone is extremely experienced in their
field. And so it’s been wonderful to learn from each of you how you’ve
been doing your work, what’s important, what are the things I should
focus on. I think I asked every single one of you, what do I not know
that I don’t know? Cause I, I have a lot of questions and I’ve run
marketing before. I’ve run, you know, very small entrepreneurial
projects before, but every single business is different and every single
process is different. So I’ve loved learning from each of you, yes,
over the past 3 years, but especially during this transition. I’ve
gotten a front row seat to see how incredible each of you are, and this
team has been to work with.
00:40:30 - Speaker 1: One great trick you’ve been using on this is, uh,
as you called the knowledge transfer boards, where you’ve essentially
set up one board per person on the team, filled it with as many
questions as you could think of about their domain and things they own
and work on, and then we each in our own time, kind of fill that out,
including, yeah, exactly as you said, that final question, what do I not
know, which was an interesting.
Thing to think about, you know, trying to like tease out this like tacit
knowledge when you’ve just been doing a job for a while and yeah, it
might not be obvious to someone outside that your role, even if they’re
working closely with you on the team, and then getting on to one on one
calls to sort of talk through in detail on that and certainly our
knowledge transfer board was a really large one spanning the realm from,
yeah, how memos are written and different marketing and growth channels
we’ve tried and Many, many other details, but then also taking a quick
glance at the knowledge transfer boards you’ve done with others, which
are also completely dense with things from the area.
So I can imagine that’s something that’s a little, gets your brain a
little over full at times, but I guess this is also part of the fun of
being an entrepreneur, which is that you do need to hold all of it in
your mind somehow. So that’s a good trick you’ve used.
00:41:51 - Speaker 2: Part of me thinks about ancient historians.
They’re writing out the history, they’re writing out the story, and
they might mention, oh yeah, and then Jack and Jane, blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah, right? Well, we have no idea who Jack and Jane are, but
clearly they were famous at the time, and so there’s knowledge in the
moment that seems completely obvious to the historian. Of course,
everyone knows this. I don’t need to add any context. I’m just gonna
mention the name real quick, and then everyone will understand exactly
what I mean by metaphor.
But then of course distance and time. Make that knowledge disappear. And
so there’s some things that are completely obvious to each of you on
the team, that for me, not being in your job and not being in your day
to day and certainly 3 months or 6 months from now is essentially lost
to me. And so the big piece of what I’m trying to do with these
transfer boards and with this whole process is Find out as much of that
local context that each of you has during your workday, that is
otherwise invisible to me. That is perfectly obvious to you, so there’s
no reason for you to mention it because, of course, but might be
completely blind to me, and that kind of knowledge, I think is the most
difficult to find during a transition like this.
00:43:11 - Speaker 1: Another piece of that that I think comes across
partially through the knowledge transfer, but we’re also trying to do
explicitly is just seeking to simplify everywhere that we can. So
oftentimes you have just the infrastructure things, for example, that
are legacies of something set up a long time ago and you just never got
around to changing it, for example, our website has been in recent
times, a mix of web flow, which we use to build some pages and NetLi
HTML and coded pages, and we have a little Netify proxy that goes
through the web flow.
And part of the problem with that, it’s basically fine for our team
that are doing things on the website because we’re sort of used to it
or whatever, but in order to have like less stuff, you need to hold in
your head, fewer moving parts, obviously fewer services to pay for
we’re thinking, OK, how can we just get this down to one simple way
that this gets built and deployed, that is easy for you to understand
that is, Yeah, just sort of more call it futureproof or just, yeah, just
less prone to breakage, more antifragile or something like that.
And so that oftentimes feels a little bit like, you know, cleaning out
your closets and you know, doing stuff you probably should have done a
long time anyways and related as you did a pretty thorough audit of all
of our monthly services that we’re paying for and trying to determine
which one of them provide real value, where can we scale down, where can
we switch to Less expensive stuff where maybe in some cases we’re just
not getting that much value from it and maybe before, you know, relative
to the cost of all these salaries, I don’t know, we just hadn’t
thought about saving that small amount of money per month, but in the
interest of being a really capital efficient, sustainable business,
it’s worth your while to really take stock of that stuff and make sure
everything it’s pulling its weight, and that’s all part of the process
as well.
00:45:00 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ve really been looking at all of these
different pieces as the foundation that I’ll be able to keep building
Muse on for today it’s Muse 3, tomorrow Muse 4, Muse 5. And what I love
about local first technology is that there’s a lot of complexity in our
Sinclair, that’s fair, but compared to the complexity of a typical web
application, web-based application, In my opinion, our architecture is
so much simpler to manage and to reason about. And so, starting with a
very simple conceptually simple technology layer. And then adding on a
few of our most core services, like you said, the web, the Netify maybe
the, I think Hugo is the template generator.
00:45:53 - Speaker 1: I can’t remember that content system, yeah.
00:45:55 - Speaker 2: So there’s a few of those on top, but the core of
the foundation of Muse and the core technology is strong, and I’m so
proud of what we’ve built over the past 3 years that It’s gonna be
really exciting to continue to build on this very, very strong platform
that we’ve built.
00:46:16 - Speaker 1: And then I guess as a footnote or perhaps citation
here for the transition topic, I want to reference a book that I think
I’ve referenced on the podcast before, actually, it’s just really
quite a helpful conceptual framework for these sorts of things that come
up, I think frequently in the business world. This book is called
Managing Transitions, and the basic concept is that a transition is
something that’s different from a change. A change is before it was
red, now it’s blue, but a transition is how did it get blue? And I
think some of the examples they use or whatever is more like, oh,
you’re an executive at a multinational company and you need to close
down a manufacturing plant and lay off 5000 people. How do you handle
that? Situations that at least I don’t ever expect to find myself in
and I think most people don’t, but for me, that kind of conceptual
framework of there is a transition you need to go through that’s
different from deciding to do the thing or deciding what the best thing
is. in particular, there’s a concept of the timeline, essentially the
process you go through, which is essentially a kind of mourning of
what’s past and a sort of neutral zone, limbo state where you’re very
creative, it’s kind of a confusing and uncertain time. But also it’s
like a fertile territory for new interesting things. It’s a very
creative time, right? Because you’ve sort of like broken down the old
assumptions and new things can arise from that and then a new order can
emerge, and maybe hopefully a better one. But you do need to go through
that process. You don’t jump straight to things are better, you start
with, OK, we’re sad about what we’re losing, and then a period of time
of some uncertainty, and then you find your new reality. So, honestly,
that’s applied to every Certainly leadership transition I’ve ever gone
through every change in job, venture, etc. where there needs to be some
time to say, OK, you know, this is something I’m sad about. We mourn it
in some way, perhaps we have some little rituals or ways within a team
or whoever’s affected by it to say we valued what we had before and we
will miss that and it was special and it’s time and now it’s, we’re
moving on to this new thing. So, recommended book and definitely in this
case, I think it is something that’s applying well, which is we’ve
kind of been doing our morning a little bit on the team, but we’ve also
in this neutral zone creative time, come up with this new plan for the
future and I hope it leads into what’s actually gonna be a new and very
promising era. So maybe that leads us to what’s next. So, we’ve
already talked about the Muse 3 beta and the unification of all this
work we’ve been doing into the one beautiful thinking tool, but yeah,
what comes next after that? What are your priorities?
00:49:07 - Speaker 2: So coming up next, M 3 brought so many new
features, both the navigation, the sidebar, collaboration, workspaces,
of course.
The most immediate next step is gonna be to make sure that those
features take root, to nurture those new plants, and to make sure that
they grow strong.
A big piece of that is with the new collaboration side.
As I’ve mentioned, I have a workspace with my wife Christy. So, I would
like to be able to stay up to date with things that she’s adding into
the board, and she would like to stay up to date with the things that
I’m adding into the board.
There are a lot of tools you can think of the Slack or the email inbox
or anything else that has the giant red blinking, you know, 7 updates,
click here, click here, which is very antithetical to a nice quiet
thinking tool.
And so, one thing that I’m gonna be working on is how can I help people
stay up to date in their collaborative spaces. Well, not making Muse yet
another inbox, and yet another interrupter of deep work. The core
purpose of Muse is deep thinking, and careful thinking, and deep work,
and I don’t want to interrupt that with notifications, but of course,
everyone needs to be updated. So that’s gonna be a very delicate
balance, to make sure that that feature finds its correct home in the
Muse universe.
00:50:36 - Speaker 1: I think that’s a really interesting area to
explore.
There’s obviously lots of precedent, like you said, the red dots, dust
and such been updated, but I also think of things like see new changes
on Google Docs.
We’ve talked about things like heat maps before.
I don’t know how radically you want to go on that, but in the ideal
world, you should be excited to know that, yeah, you’re collaborating
on a board with your wife and you’re doing some, I don’t know, home
decor project, and she was up last night with some fresh ideas and you
get up in the morning and it should be exciting to see, oh, there’s
some new stuff in here, let me check that out.
And to have it feel like something that is inspiring you, which I think
has always been one of the key things we’ve sought in this product that
it is about inspiration, rather than the feeling of, exactly like you
said, an inbox to check or a to do list of things to check off, but
rather a fresh influx of fresh ideas from your collaborator to get you
inspired and for you to build on.
00:51:36 - Speaker 2: I think that’s exactly the right perspective.
It’s about Letting that collaboration be a source of inspiration
instead of a source of to do list, as, as so many kind of inbox shaped
notification shaped applications end up feeling.
And related to that, I think.
In Muse 2, all of my content is created by me, and people have such strong
memory with The spatial placement of their ideas and of their boards,
and of their content. That’s what makes Navigating and use. So
different than navigating in something like notion or Google Doc is use
is spatial by definition, and that triggers that spatial portion of your
memory. But working with other people, of course, that means they can
move things or add things or change things and so suddenly where I put
something might not be where it ends up.
So similar to how can I see the inspiration from my collaborators? How
can we work together efficiently so that way my spatial memory doesn’t
interrupt theirs and their spatial memory doesn’t interrupt mine, as
both of us are, of course, moving and organizing things in our space.
So content organization and discovery is kind of what that box is in my
brain. Some of that is search, some of that is linked cards. The new
workspaces feature is, of course, part of that. There’s many new
metaphors in Muse 3, and it’s gonna be important to make sure that they
take root and grow into strong new features.
00:53:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, another way to slice that would be. These
major new capabilities, things like workspaces and collaboration, then
have implications like, as you said, the spatial memory when you put
everything down yourself is different than if someone else is there
moving stuff around and putting in their own stuff or likewise that When
you have new ideas that are being added to the boards that were not
things you put there, you want a way to know about that. Those are all
implications of these core features we’ve created. So I can imagine you
could spend quite a lot of time exploring the implications and the
follow-ons from those core new features.
00:53:53 - Speaker 2: That’s right, and then there’s of course just
many optimizations and general improvements that I would like to make.
Sometimes ink lag has been, you know, on again, off again problem in
Muse, Muse one, really. So being able to spend time focusing on that,
focusing on battery performance and making sure that Muse is not chewing
through too much of your iPad or your laptop battery, just make sure
everything is running at peak performance. Before starting on what will
eventually become useful, or kind of the next round of interesting new
features.
00:54:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We’ve been in
various ways pushes to do big new things like sync layers or
collaboration or Mac apps, new platforms for essentially the whole time
you’ve been with us, and again, starting from the foundation of what’s
there, it’s very solid and known product, a known purpose, a known
audience, the infrastructure for the local first is all built out and
works really well, that leaves room for both these kinds of quality of
life improvements that you’re talking about. As well as exploring the
implications of those big, big core features, which may be smaller
features, but that can greatly expand the utility of the product. I like
the idea of spending a lot of time on that, especially in response to
the customer requests that undoubtedly you’ll be hearing a lot of now.
00:55:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of the things on my plate are spring
cleaning. Style issues that I see from an engineering perspective
because I know the code, but might manifest in, you know, not obvious
ways or not consistent ways to the user. So I definitely see these very
first steps as cleaning up some of the things behind the curtain. You
know, that we’ve necessarily needed to sweep under the rug.
Let’s finally clean out under the rug.
And of course, responding to customer requests and bugs and feedback and
questions.
The community and users, current customers are my number one source of
direction for what needs to be improved, changed, cleaned up, tidied up,
new features, that’s gonna be my backbone moving forward is What are
the common patterns and what are the common requests that I’m seeing?
Does that mean a new feature needs to be built? Does it mean an existing
feature needs to be tweaked or adjusted? Does something just need to be
tidied up, but all of it is gonna be at the service of That are
thinking, and at the service of current customers and helping those
current customers and current users.
Think better individually and think better collaboratively with Muse 3.
00:56:47 - Speaker 1: Very nice. Well, as long as we’re talking about
the future, I’ll do a little PS here, which is basically folks might
wonder what’s gonna happen with the podcast, and I think it is a lot to
ask for one person to run a product as sophisticated as Muse, but also
being a podcast host would be, I think, a bit much and happily it’s
something I enjoy doing.
So we’re in discussions now. The future here is a little bit uncertain,
but I’m happy to say that the good folks that you can switch has said,
They think that this podcast has been really valuable to the tools for
thought community, for the research community, and have offered to step
up to essentially help with the show running, the funding. I could stay
on as a host, but maybe we’ll find different topics and purposes that
are uh more in the realm of the weird and wild research world of I and
Switch, but obviously that’s very adjacent to a lot of the stuff we
talked about in the past, so.
Yeah, the idea is still evolving there, but I think there’s potential
for some interesting things on the other side of a transition there. But
at a minimum, you can look forward to uh me and Mark doing a little
retrospective on the experience of podcasting and some of the things
we’ve learned along the way working on this. Hopefully we’ll do that
for the next episode and yeah, if you have ideas for what you think we
should be doing with this, feel free to rate us.
00:58:11 - Speaker 2: I, for one, am excited to see where you take the
podcast.
00:58:16 - Speaker 1: Alright, well, I think there’s a lot more we
could say about the past, the future, and hopefully we will get a chance
to do that, but I think we can wrap it up here. I will just say that
I’m so happy that you are taking this forward and making sure this
product not only continues to exist and be maintained, but indeed to
grow because there really is nothing like it out there for unstructured
thinking.
When I began the process of my own thinking about OK, what’s going to
happen in this transition? What do we do? And I was starting to think
about, OK, in navigating a difficult question like this, why would use
Muse for that? What can I do instead? And I tried other stuff. I tried
some text files, I tried some sketchbooks, I tried some other tools for
thought, and I was just Thinking, you know, none of it scratches the
itch to really tackle a big complex, potentially very emotional,
potentially very strategic thing, use as the right tool for that job,
and I want to keep using this product for a long time, maybe ever so.
I’m so happy you’re continuing. I suspect a lot of our users and
customers will be as well, and certainly I’ll give a little plug here
and just say, if you’re not a member already, buying a membership in
the app either now or in the future to support Wulf and his efforts to
make something sustainable for the long term would be much appreciated.
00:59:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah I need to send a thank you to you as well for
even reaching out and finding me 3 years ago. This has been The most
rewarding work that I’ve done in a very, very long time, and I am
excited to continue it into the future and to make sure that MUS
continues for many, many years down the line cause I agree it’s just
the perfect thinking tool for me, for you, and for so many others. I’m
humbled at the opportunity to keep this going.
01:00:05 - Speaker 1: Well, I think we’re absolutely lucky to find you,
and it’s been an absolute pleasure working with you these last 3 years,
and continuing to work with you going forward to the future. And yeah, I
think that there is a silver lining to all this here, and you’re it. So
let’s wrap there. Thanks everyone for listening. Join us in Discord to
discuss this episode with me, Wulf, and our community, the links in the
show notes. And Wulf, well, thanks for carrying the torch forward.
01:00:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for giving me the opportunity.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: With spatial computing, there’s a level of trust
that the user is placing in you as a developer that most software
developers have not had to handle. On a phone, if the app crashes or
freezes, it’s annoying, but it’s not going to make you sick. It’s not
going to viscerally affect the central nervous system. Whereas in the
case of any immersive software, it will. You’re going to directly put
their brain in a state that is uncomfortable or even harmful.
00:00:33 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product,
it’s about the small team, the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins
here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan.
00:00:46 - Speaker 1: Hey.
00:00:47 - Speaker 2: Joined today by our guest Eliochenberg of
SoftSpace.
00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Hey, Adam, hey Mark.
00:00:53 - Speaker 2: And Elio, I understand that you’ve been doing a
little bit of breath work recently.
00:00:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I was just sharing with you some of my
learnings on the importance of breathing, which I feel like a lot of
people maybe have figured out before, you know, way before I came across
this topic, but I started trying some Wim Hof breathing before some of
my like cafe work sessions, which is equal parts actually very
invigorating and effective. I find it helps me focus and also makes me
feel like a complete weirdo sitting in public, like staring out the
window and breathing really intensely. So I recommend it to people who
are looking for ways to, you know, quickly get in the zone and focus
when they maybe are a bit distracted. And if you have any tips, you
know, on different resources, I’m very open. I’m very curious about
this.
00:01:39 - Speaker 3: What does this breathing technique entail? What
are we signing up for here?
00:01:42 - Speaker 1: So, I mean, Wim Hof breathing specifically is this
cycle of very intense breath in, breath out. There’s nothing too
technically complicated about it, it’s more just about sticking to a
certain rhythm and at the end of, I think like 20 or 30 breaths, you
hold your breath for about a minute. There’s a very helpful Spotify
podcast episode that’s like 5 minutes long, that just guides you
through it. And so there’s all this drumming and, you know, Wim Hof is
kind of like they’re motivating you through the whole thing. So I find
that after I do this breath work, I am indeed able to just like really
get in the zone and whether it’s for writing or cracking some other
like tough cognitive problem, I’m definitely more focused afterward
than without doing this.
00:02:30 - Speaker 2: It feels a little bit adjacent to meditation
somehow, but I also know you breath work, I don’t know about the
specific one, but just the topic generally, I’ve known people in the
psychedelic community that basically say you can get unbelievable
altered states. One example here you’re giving here is like, yeah,
greater focus or something like that, and you wouldn’t believe it
because yeah, breathing is so fundamental, it’s literally automatic and
What is there to it? It seems so simple. There’s some incredible
potential there to affect ourselves. I never dabbled myself, but I’m
certainly curious.
00:03:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so one discipline I came across this
holotropic breathing, I believe it’s called, which is you can breathe
yourself into a very altered state that’s akin to chemically altered
psychedelic states.
00:03:17 - Speaker 2: Have to give that a whirl. And tell us about first
what SoftSpace is and then love to hear about your journey and how you
got there.
00:03:25 - Speaker 1: Sure, so I am the founder of a software company
called SoftSpace, and we’re building a product called SoftSpace.
Which is a spatial canvas for thinking. So it is a 3D augmented reality
app that lets you organize and make sense of the ideas, the images, the
websites, PDFs that you are working with in your creative projects or in
your personal or professional projects.
And the way we frame the value proposition is that Soft space shows you
the true shape of your ideas, and there’s a lot of research that has
been done over the years into the immense, almost like superpowers that
we have around spatial memory, spatial reasoning, and up until very,
very recently. which we’re going to talk about in this episode, until
very recently, we didn’t have the technology to really tap into those
innate abilities.
And so the best that we had was like a larger display, a computer
display for, you know, showing you more windows at the same time, but
that’s only scratching the surface when it comes to the brain’s
ability to make sense of and to remember and to think about objects in
space, which we have evolved over millions of years to do very, very
well. And so I started building this company in 2017, way before, you
know, the current crop of hardware, standalone headsets was really even
on the horizon with this kind of, I guess, expectation and faith that
eventually the technology would catch up to this idea, and I think that
it’s starting to, and that feels really good.
00:05:06 - Speaker 2: And my first introduction to your product was we
met in a cafe in Berlin last year and you handed me the, I guess this
would have been the, at the time, the latest version of the Oculus,
which I think has been, or in the last 10 years has really been on the
forefront of this, and, you know, it has this element where I can still
kind of see the environment, so I’m not just completely zoned out in a
public space, but I’m also seeing essentially notes and other ideas
floating in space and indeed I can interact with them and Yeah, the how
viable is it relative to the Hollywood version of virtual reality that
we have been seeing for ages is a huge question and for sure an app
developer like yourself that chooses to not only pick a particular
platform, but the technology in general, you’re making a bet that the
amount of time you’re going to be working on it will overlap with the
eventual viability of it for your particular use case or your particular
market.
00:06:01 - Speaker 1: Correct, yeah, and I mean, I would say one of our
investors said it’s still early, but it’s no longer too early, and I
think that’s getting more and more true all the time.
I mean, even with, of course, the very big news of Apple finally
entering this space, I think we’re still a little ways out from really
mainstream adoption of computers they wear over your eyes, but if It
were ever going to happen, this is the path that I think the industry,
you know, needs to take to get there. And I think one of my personal
motivations for continuing to work on SoftSpace is to offer a vision for
what our augmented reality spatial computing future could look like that
I think we want to want, right? So, I think up until very recently, the
overwhelming popular imagination when it came to VR, for example, was at
best like a little bit goofy and at worst kind of dystopian and not
something you would necessarily want the next generation of humans on
the planet to be living and working in because it felt very
disconnected, it felt very escapist perhaps, and I think that this
technology is So much more than what we’ve been able to imagine up
until this point. Like we’ve been able to imagine a lot with
essentially nothing, right? And fictional depictions of, you know, the
metaverse or fictional depictions of very futuristic holographic UIs,
but those have really only been fictional and now we’re finally
seeing.
The reality of it, and I think that there are many possible paths
technology can take, and the underlying power of it has nothing to do
with the computers or the chips or the lenses.
The underlying power of this is the fact that the human brain and body
are inherently spatial, right? We are spatial organisms. And so whatever
positive outcomes or whatever negative outcomes come from this
technology will be rooted in that reality. And so I’m both optimistic
and also now that the reality is finally here, you know, we see Apple
making a big move for it. I’m a little bit trepidatious about sort of
where this could all go. I mean, we’ve seen with other technologies
that people had very optimistic visions for, right, turned out maybe not
completely positively. So I think this is at least has that risk, if not
a greater risk because of how it works if it is.
00:08:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and we’ll definitely get on to all the
present and future here, but can you tell us a little bit about your
background? What would lead you to, you know, that moment in 2017? What
you said, this is what I want to be doing.
00:08:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So, I was in architecture school
and I was halfway through my second year, and I took a summer job at a
design and art studio here in Berlin called Studio Oliver Liasson.
They had just bought the Oculus DK2, the Development kit 2 VR headset.
It made quite a splash. A lot of people who are excited about technology
had gotten their hands on one. I really wanted to check one out. The
studio got one thinking it would be like any other piece of consumer
tech, you could boot it up and try stuff out, but it really was a
development kit. There was nothing that you could do with it if you
didn’t code something up yourself. And so luckily I got a job as the
research resident, poking around with this thing, trying to figure out
both how it could be used as a medium for artworks, as well as a tool
for the production of artworks that maybe weren’t digital or virtual of
themselves, but would benefit from some sort of like virtual
visualization or some other tooling around that.
00:09:48 - Speaker 2: I mean, architecture is certainly a place where
use cases spring to mind very readily. Let’s walk a client through kind
of a design that we made, you know, in some CAD tool or let’s do some
design work there. So presumably those are the sorts of things you were
exploring.
00:10:04 - Speaker 1: Yes, and I would say much more than that as well
because this studio is very much an art studio first and foremost, and
one with a history of being interested in the body, the human body, how
we relate to ourselves and to others and what different spaces and
different spatial effects like lights, acoustics, atmospheric effects
can do to our sense of ourselves and others.
And so this is actually Maybe where the most exciting promises of
virtual reality at the time, it was only VR virtual reality came in
because you could create effects that would be physically either very
difficult or impossible to do. So one of my favorite demos that we built
was this non-Euclidean, sort of like castle that you walked through. So
it was back in the era of like really long cables that connected you to
a PC. We had the PC in the middle of an open area. The user would put on
the goggles at one edge of the open area and walk in a circle. And as
they walked, they would walk through doors, and around each door was a
new room with an artwork in the center, and as they walked, at some
point, you know, they would realize, wait, I should be back where I
started, but I’m not. I’m actually somewhere else. I’ve actually
entered yet another larger room that shouldn’t physically be able to
have fit into this floor plan. These were the kinds of experiments that
we were doing, and during this period of experimentation, um, I came to
two formative realizations. So the first was that the physical building
that the studio was in, it had about 110 people at the time, and it was
in this old beer brewery in the middle of Berlin. The physical studio
itself was an incredibly important part of the creative and production
process. We walked around and there are models everywhere, images pinned
up on boards, books, there’s like libraries all over the place, half
finished sort of sketches laying around at people’s desks, and this
physical space was in and of itself a framework on which the creative
process hung. And that was something incredible to see, and also, you
know, this is quite a successful studio, and I felt that having that
space was a major asset for the studio to be able do its work.
And the second realization, as I was working with VR was that many of
the same qualities of that physical space actually don’t have to be
physical in and of themselves. So the images that you had pinned up, the
notes that you had laying around, these were actually at the end of the
day, just media for holding information, right, for conveying
information, and you could do something very similar with a purely
virtual environment, you know, you can’t completely recreate it, but
Not everybody has access to a giant beer brewery or even a very large
room, right, to lay out all of their thoughts and their ideas. Maybe
this technology could democratize access to space for thinking, space
for doing your best work.
And once that idea kind of sparked in my mind I couldn’t stop thinking
about it and sort of stereotypical, like I was like laying awake at
night dreaming, you know, oh, if you could also make this multi-user,
then you can like meet with people from anywhere in the world. And so at
some point I thought, OK, this has been great, but I need to go see if I
can build this thing, and I didn’t really know what I was doing at the
time. But apparently I was starting a tech startup, a software startup,
so we got a bit of funding. I was very lucky that we had a wonderful
investor Boost VC make a bet on us, and they flew us out to San
Francisco and we learned, you know, like, what’s a product, what’s a
market, and we’re still around, we’re still around chugging away.
00:13:45 - Speaker 2: of that story where it’s the serendipity which
you know often is a big part of any kind of creative spark, but here
both that they were, yeah, you had this opportunity to work with this
cutting edge technology for a different purpose, obviously, they wanted
to create art or explore the spatial environments that they were working
on and then you also through that exact same opportunity had access to
information in a space. And then making that kind of leap of, can we
make information in a virtual space.
00:14:18 - Speaker 1: Very interesting, right? And, you know, so I was
in architecture school at the time, I ended up dropping out to keep
running this idea, but because of my background in architecture, and
because also of the fact that the tech at the time was only VR, you
know, everything that the user was seeing had to be digitally rendered.
SoftSpace started with a much heavier focus on the design of the virtual
environment, because I believed then, I still believe now that the
environment is a critical factor. And getting you into a certain kind of
headspace, letting you think through certain problems that you just need
the right kind of environment to do.
But over the years of working on the various versions of SoftSpace, of
course, we also then started doing a lot more design and development
work around information architecture and user interface design. And by
now, when we have finally the possibility of pass through augmented
reality, There’s almost no sort of virtual environment design anymore.
I’m not directly thinking about what the digital environment of our app
should look like, although I have some ideas about what the ideal space
you should be in, maybe when you’re trying to get focused on some work,
but we’re now grappling much more directly with problems around. Yeah,
information architecture, the right primitives that the user should be
working with to help the user work directly with their ideas, with the
information that they’re trying to make sense of, and the right UI
paradigm and language to express these elements in.
00:15:57 - Speaker 2: And maybe we can briefly define by virtual
reality, you’re referring to something that is 100% immersive, you have
no awareness of your surroundings, and then I don’t know, it’s
augmented reality and mixed reality kind of the same.
Two words for the same thing, but at least as I understand it, it’s
something where there’s some combination of you still see the world
around you, but you have these additional things from the digital things
sort of superimposed, you might say, and I know there’s even different
technologies on that which include actual pass through goggles or it’s
projected on your retina or something versus you’re still looking.
Scres, we have external facing cameras that kind of bring the reality
into or bring what you would see if you were looking in that direction
into the space that you’re in. So interesting, I hadn’t even thought
about how the mixed reality or augmented reality actually greatly
reduces the amount of, I guess just stuff that you need to be rendering
or think about or design, which is maybe a good feature.
00:16:55 - Speaker 1: Correct, yeah, I think by this point, my sense is
that VR is pretty clearly defined. I think most people would give you a
pretty coherent, similar definition of VR. I think between augmented
reality, mixed reality, extended reality, I think the definitions there
are, you know, you’ll have as many different definitions as people you
ask. I would say that within that spectrum of taking something that is
virtual and then also showing you the physical space you’re in,
there’s also a spectrum of that virtual information being aware. Of
your physical environment. So I guess some people would say true
augmented reality has to engage very thoroughly with your physical
environment.
00:17:41 - Speaker 2: So you would have a file, some representation of a
file, there’s a version where it just floats in the air and some
basically random place and there’s another version where I can kind of
detect that my desk is here, so it sort of puts it on my desk. In the
right orientation.
00:17:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, there are merits and demerits of how
much the virtual system can be aware of or should be aware of your
physical environment, but I guess, you know, it’s in the term augmented
reality that some AR purists would say it’s not augmented reality if
the virtual is not literally adding to your physical environment.
00:18:17 - Speaker 2: So the mixed reality is a little more neutral in a
way. It could be somehow adding or interacting with the environment
you’re in, but it could just be you just have like a heads up display
overlaid on top of what you’re saying, correct.
00:18:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah. So there’s a term that encapsulates all of
these different categories, which I’m a personal fan of spatial
computing.
And spatial computing, as far as I know, as a really concrete concept
was coined by Scott Greenwald at the MIT Media Lab in 1995, and he was
talking about digital systems, computer systems that maintained and used
references to physical objects in physical space, or parts of the user
in physical space.
It was very broad, but over the years and very, very Recently, I think
it’s been taken up by some members, some participants in the XR
ecosystem to mean this sort of very general idea of a computer or
computing system that engages with The fact that you are a human being
in space, and very directly. And I like this because it places the
emphasis not on the technical capabilities of a system, or on the
specific UI design decisions that the developers might have made, but it
really sort of focuses attention on the underlying material of what
we’re designing with, which is Three dimensional space. I mean some
people would say 4D space time, but it’s the idea that you can place
things, you can work with information that has this intrinsic quality to
it, of like being somewhere specific relative to the human being, and
that this poses both great opportunities and new and, you know,
previously unencountered challenges.
00:20:13 - Speaker 2: Well, you teed up our topic today, which is
spatial computing, but certainly encompasses. I like the perspective of
VR and AR as means to an end. They are a way of accomplishing the goal
of making computing more spatial, whether we bring it into our space or
whether we make it just access the spatial capabilities of our minds. I
think starting with the human centered or starting with the benefit or
starting with the user’s mental model is a better way to talk about
really any technology here.
00:20:41 - Speaker 1: I agree, and I think that that’s maybe an angle
to this technology that has been under communicated, and I hope the
community of developers and the big players and small players that we
find a way back to that foundation for any successful product or
industry, right? Like, what is the actual value of this? Beyond the
novelty, beyond the technical wizardry, beyond, even I would say the
hedonic qualities, like maybe it is just really nice, right, to have
this massive surround screen that you can watch, you know, your NFL
games on. But beyond those, why do we need this? What will this unlock?
What does this add to our lives and to our work that We would be poorer
for if we didn’t have it as opposed to, oh, if it wasn’t this, we’d
be still playing games on our phones instead, and it would be all kind
of a wash.
00:21:41 - Speaker 2: So what are some of your answers to that in terms
of what you’re trying to bake into your product or influences you’ve
had from academia or other thinkers who have been pondering this topic.
00:21:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I spoke earlier about the fact that our
brains and our bodies have these spatial superpowers that are not fully
or even really well used by existing. 2D user interfaces, displays,
input systems, etc.
A very telling quantitative metric is that from the original 1984
Macintosh to the, I’m using an older model computer, but the 2020 iMac
Pro, and by now Apple’s latest and greatest are much faster than the
iMac Pro, but the computing power increased by 10 million times, by a
factor of 10 million.
If you count, you know, the CPU, the GPU and the display area increased
by a factor of 10.
And it’s still a rectangle, right, that you click around on with a
mouse.
And now there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.
I mean, clearly the iMac Pro was a very successful product and help you
do a lot of amazing things that the original Macintosh, you know, you
wouldn’t be able to imagine using that to do.
But, you know, you have to wonder what this massive discrepancy in
capabilities precludes.
And I think now that we see at least 2, and hopefully soon more of the
large tech players.
Looking at that question seriously and proposing answers to it, I think
we’ll start to see what computers might have been able to help us do
all along, or already have the computing power to help us do all along,
right, but simply didn’t have the display technologies to make that
possible.
Very concretely, I know that training, any sort of scenario where human
users need to be learning something that’s very experiential. These are
use cases that are already very valuable, so pilot training, a physical
simulator, apparently these are like in short supply and they’re very
expensive to run and take, you know, months to book, and a lot of these
are being replaced now with VR systems and that makes a lot of sense to
me.
There are pilots running with VR surgery or VR surgery planning use
cases. So these very high value, very sort of intrinsically spatial use
cases where, you know, we had all the computing power necessary to do
these things before, and now we have the display technology as well.
What I am personally motivated by in building soft space. Is the belief
that there’s tremendous value to working with 2D information in a 3D
environment.
And I think that a lot of the 3D use cases are in architecture, with
manufacturing, with surgery, you know, A, there are people who are far
more knowledgeable about those specific domains than myself, who can
work on those problems, and B, I think those problems are very well
served because there’s such an obvious connection between, you know, a
3D display and the 3D model or something.
What I think is relatively under explored, but has the potential to
impact a lot more people directly. is giving people a way to work better
with information that’s intrinsically two dimensional or best
represented two dimensionally, but in a spatial context and If you look
at Apple’s marketing materials and the imagination that they’re
offering for what spatial computing looks like, this is actually their
Vision, right? There’s like maybe 1 3D model in all of their hours of
marketing material. Most of the time they’re showing you documents,
they’re showing you photos, they’re showing you app windows or web
browsers, but in this 3D context. And so I would like to think that the
design minds at Apple are pursuing a very similar thesis that there is
tremendous value in letting people work with 2D information, which has
the advantage of being portable to all the other devices that, you know,
we already have. You can print 2D information out on a piece of paper
and mark it up, so it’s a lot more flexible and a lot more universal,
but there’s a lot of value in letting you work with that in a 3D
context, and that is essentially what SoftSpace is.
00:26:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, we’ll certainly come to talking about
the Vision Pro.
I’m sure folks are curious to hear your take on that, but yeah, since
we’re sort of talking about use cases here, it’s often the case for
any new technology that you figure out something new and impressive you
can do with computing or some other technology first and then you sort
of figure out how that can be used and often we’re surprised by The use
cases that end up coming out, you know, I don’t know that the people
that invented TCP IP predicted e-commerce, for example, but often that
has to be discovered once the technology exists and is in the hands of a
lot of developers and end users.
And I do think that’s one where to me it feels like VR and AR has been
pretty impressive for quite a while.
You mentioned using the Oculus dev kit. I think I tried it first around
2013. A friend of mine had it and yeah, you know, very much long cable
connected to a PC, you know, pretty limited, but it had a little, you
know, demo of someone riding down a roller coaster and it basically
became a party trick for him to essentially put this on people who had
never experienced it before and everyone else would stand around and
watch them react to that. So that was fun.
But it doesn’t become a thing that’s deeply integrated to your life.
And certainly my dabblings in the past, which are not as extensive as
yours, is that games and immersive experiences, maybe like sort of
interactive movies or something like that, are kind of a good place to
start, partially because of the immersiveness of the environment,
partially because I don’t know, games are always a good place to
start.
Indeed, if I was to try to name a killer application off the top of my
head for VR, probably Beatsaber is the first thing that comes to mind.
Then you go from there to, yeah, of course those either domain verticals
like surgery, training or pilot training or architecture design or
walking a client through a space or something.
But then there’s this whole world of like collaboration, right? We’re
going to a remote first world, we want to have meetings, we miss our
whiteboards, we miss the body language side of it, and then you have
just productivity software and that’s something where that feels like
it’s gotten the least attention.
And maybe that’s because when you think of productivity software, a
word processor, a spreadsheet, a video editor, a design tool, coding,
yeah, it’s very much about those 2D rectangles. I’m not even sure if
2D rectangles are the perfect or most pure form of representation of
that. It’s just something, yeah, starting from paper and scrolls and
then books and then up to computer monitors and And even phones,
obviously, writing also is a big part of all of that, that’s the format
we’ve always used.
So then you can bring that to. This 3D environment, but in the end it
just happens to be a rectangle that’s sort of like floating or you can
make bigger or you’re sort of mapping the same two dimensional window
metaphor into that environment, but it sounds like you think that one
way to kind of interpret that like, well, if you’re going to bring
productivity software into some kind of spatial computing environment,
OK, let’s just make it a floating 2D window and one interpretation of
that was like, well, that’s really kind of Inspired in the sense that
it’s just a very direct mapping, but it sounds like you think actually
there’s more promise to it than that, that there’s a reason why so
many of these past iterations of our information technologies tend to
revolve around writing and kind of one dimensional or two dimensional
squares or rectangles of some kind, and there’s value to bringing that
to a virtual spatial computing environment.
00:29:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do. And I would distinguish between a 2D
UI paradigm, like a window or a grid for that matter, and information
content that is inherently 2D or is best represented in two dimensions
like text or images or a PDF page.
So, One of the big shifts that I’ve made in my own thinking about how
to design for spatial computing happened when I Came across Rome
research, and at the same time I started using Notion myself.
I never actually got into Rome so much, but I read a lot about the
thinking behind the design of Rome, and in both these cases, Rome and
Notion, these are block-based note taking tools or productivity apps.
The conceptual and technical and, you know, UI primitive is the block of
content, the block of information. And this paradigm in both these cases
works within one app, so the app has control over what its UI elements
are, and it’s decided that OK, it’s gonna be a block of text or block
of an image, but there are others who have been doing work into
Speculating about what an entire computing environment or entire
operating system that revolved around these what are currently would be
considered subunits of computing information, what an entire operating
system that worked this way might be like, what advantages it would have
over our current paradigms.
And once I kind of really wrap my mind around what block was, I
essentially shifted my own development model toward working with blocks,
because Blocks to me, map so much better to the underlying material of
thoughts and of creativity than, you know, a Word doc or an Excel
spreadsheet do.
And so for me, one of the promises of spatial computing is to give you
more Powerful ways of displaying information that is kind of around a
block in size, displaying the relationships between those items, because
for Rome, a big part of its appeal to a certain kind of user was the
ability to represent explicitly the links between the blocks, right? So
back linking and being able to explicitly construct arguments, drawing
from pieces of evidence or pieces of information that are elsewhere in
your database in your notebook. And on a 2D display, there’s just all
these limitations around like how much more other information you can
show, how you represent these links in an infinite spatial canvas or an
infinite 3D spatial canvas, you have many more options.
At the same time, you know, that sounds great and it sounds powerful,
and why don’t we all already work in this like a beautiful mind kind of
memory palace. Well, there are also real constraints on our ability to
process that much visual information, and you do pretty quickly hit a
point where it’s overwhelming, you know, there are times when you do
prefer to just have one piece of text in front of you that you’re
focused on, they’re thinking about, and to have a few other relevant or
Supporting materials close by at hand, but not to have everything
you’ve ever thought about, you know, everything, every topic, visible
at once to you. And so, a lot of the design work and research that
we’ve done has been around trying to probe the edges and map the
landscape of not only what’s technically possible, but what from a
human user point of view is desirable, at which moments.
You know, it’s a lot of fun, it’s very exciting, and sometimes I’m
like, should we be doing this? You know, shouldn’t some large tech
company with billions of dollars be doing this research? I hope they
are, but, you know, we may very well be one of a few group of people who
are doing this research because these questions couldn’t be asked even
a few years ago. There was no hardware platform for which these
questions even mattered. And so now that we do have the hardware
foundation. To start answering these questions, and now we need to
develop software for which having good answers to these questions, you
know, is important, then now we’re doing the work and trying to map out
that territory.
00:34:26 - Speaker 2: And I’m glad you are, but I still think it is a
niche and a niche, right? The kind of interest in not just productivity
software, but specifically thinking, idea oriented tools on this new
platform.
I think the big companies are thinking about the hardware, the operating
system, the much more kind of mainstream.
Can I exactly watch something or shop or do other kinds of things that
are more common operations, and I think you mentioned this in the
beginning. that you see it as something that is potentially very widely
distributed in the same way that like note taking is widely distributed
or email is widely distributed, but I think that’s quite a number of
steps down the road.
So it sort of makes sense to me that maybe only smaller players are
interested in this right at the moment.
And you mentioned the coming across Roman notion after you had started
this company and already working in this space, so it’s quite
interesting because you now mentioned two things. One is the VR to AR VR
to, yeah, some kind of pass through, I can see part of my environment
and how that changed your application. And then yeah, tools for thought
appearing presumably, I don’t know, made you feel like more like you
had a home or a community of people that were thinking about the same
thing, even though obviously, as far as I know, you’re one of the few
who’s thinking about this specific kind of environment and hardware
platform, but in terms of like how do we use computers for thinking and
ideas specifically, suddenly now there’s a thing happening there.
00:35:52 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, I was thrilled to discover the tools
for thought community that it existed, mostly on Twitter, so, you know,
you can tap into it from wherever, because, I mean, people who are
really into, you know, their personal knowledge management into these
tools, it’s never going to be a vast majority of the population or of
the user base, but I think that these people are maybe very Impactful,
you know, they might be working in fields like investment or in tech, or
running product teams, where the decisions they make and the knowledge
they have access to or can make sense of reverberates beyond just their
personal life and work into, you know, organizations that they’re a
part of, into the markets that they are selling to. And so there’s
leverage there, you know, to make an impact and It’s also a larger, you
know, market or a larger group of people than I would have thought
before I came across the tools for thoughts ecosystem. It was certainly
large enough to support at least a few pretty successful venture backed
software companies, and there was a path, you know, you can see a path,
for example, for notion, to go from more of an enthusiast user base to a
larger, broader, maybe more enterprise focused markets. Once they got
the primitives right, or once they sort of better understood who would
be the power users and who would benefit from the power users’ work,
but who didn’t, you know, themselves need to be sort of like crafting
the notion uh wiki for eight hours a day themselves. So, I think that,
yeah, me coming across that community and then also that community being
very open and very excited for some of the demos that we’re showing
with these sort of like force directed 3D force directed graphs of
linked concepts. We got a really good response from that community as
well, and that was a really important source of feedback, and an
important source of just engagements to motivate us to keep going and
also to provide really good signals and like, OK, which features might
matter more, which use cases might matter more and which not. Of course,
the thing that’s happened since Tools for Thought summer was AI and
specifically large language models. AI has upended everything about
everything, but it’s, you know, definitely upended our working
assumptions about what knowledge work was, what the tools would be, what
the roles would be, what the objectives of knowledge work would be, and
I think everyone building. Software in this space, you know, we all have
to have our own theory of change around what impact AI is gonna have and
how our projects will stay relevant in a drastically transformed future.
One of those changes is that, so maybe tools for thought will become
unnecessary in the future because we won’t be thinking for ourselves
anymore, right? We’ll just have this sort of all knowing AI oracle that
will be able to pull out the right answer, the best answer, you know, at
the moment that we need it’s, and the answer will be fed to us through
our super thin Apple Vision Pro 10, you know, glasses. That’s one
version of the future. Another might be that humans do stay in the loop
because, you know, there are still experiences and values and judgments
that we make that you can never by definition replace with an automated
system, and that there is still value in having better tools for
thinking, for having better processes for making sense of new
information that’s coming in. And that AI can lower the barriers to
using those tools because, you know, maintaining a sort of up to-date
Rome notebook is, you know, at least a halftime job, and not many people
have the bandwidth to be doing that, but maybe if some of those friction
points and some of those barriers could be lowered, then we could have
tools that you could on their own be Making a lot of the connections
that previously had to be done manually, but still, you were the one
sort of gardening this knowledge garden. You were the one shaping it and
deciding what’s important, what’s not important, and drawing from it,
you were the one harvesting its fruits and using them in your day to day
life or work.
00:40:23 - Speaker 2: For sure, a lot of, yeah, productivity systems,
note taking systems, settle cast and GTD, etc.
They do attract folks who maybe get just satisfaction from the investing
in those systems, the transcribing of the notes, the capturing of them,
the gardening of them, the finding the connections between them, and
many people certainly get huge value from that, me included, and I think
that long predates the current tools for thought summer, as you said,
you know, I think of something like the Steven Johnson wrote, very
prolific author. wrote some time back about using Devonthink, which is
super old school app that you know you type in a bunch of notes and it
has like a little very rudimentary algorithm for finding connections
between them and how that helps him have new ideas and get value from
that.
But yeah, he is someone who is willing to take that time and invest in a
system, and I feel like the vast majority of people just find that way
too tedious, but maybe there’s some element of These advancements in
large language models can help us with the tedious parts where you can
still get the benefit of the end result.
While you’re not just fully outsourcing the decision making or the
sense making or the judgment calls or the aesthetic calls to the
computer, you’re getting it to fill in some of the more tedious parts
that not everyone has patience for, but in the end, you’re still the
one that, you know, is making the calls.
00:41:50 - Speaker 1: So, there are so many interesting threads in this
conversation that we’ve had so far, and I think there are also many
interesting ways in which these threads unexpectedly overlap and connect
back to each other.
So earlier you had talked about some of the earliest use cases for VR
that you had experienced as a party trick for gaming, you know. Actually
one of my favorite is fitness. I personally do not use VR for fitness,
but I’m very impressed by the apps and by the stories of people who
have found a way to achieve previously very, you know, difficult goals,
fitness goals through virtual reality and through some of these fitness
apps like Supernatural. And I really like this model for how spatial
computing can fit into Our lives and work, or actually any technology
for that matter, can fit into our lives and work, that it’s this really
time boxed and place boxed use case, you know when you begin and you
know when you end, but then, even when you’re not using this app, you
are enjoying the benefits of having that practice of having that in your
life, you know, in this particular case you’re feeling physically
healthier. And, you know, you’re able to hit these goals that you had,
but maybe had difficulty achieving in other ways, like going to the gym
or going for a run, and that’s very much a model I would like to adopt
for our own product, whatever we build, you know, the idea that we make
something that makes you, let’s say, smarter, or makes you more
creative, or makes you talk more. Coherently, you know, about ideas that
are important to you, even when you’re not in the headset, even when
you, you know, you step out and you’re just grabbing a coffee with a
friend or you’re going for a hike, that somehow we find a way to tap
into the parts of your brain that remember complex information that
makes sense of it in a way that your laptop screen doesn’t, and that
therefore makes you like a more interesting conversation partner even
when nobody has any gadgets on them, right? I mean, they’re definitely
sort of, it’s almost like an aesthetic preference of mine, that like, I
would like the future we live in to still have room for unauugmented and
unmediated, you know, human to human interactions. There’s another
future where we just all have these like tiny AI like earpieces, and
they’re telling us what to say and what to think all the time. Sure,
but I prefer a world where our technology is helping us to achieve goals
that we have. For ourselves, you know, whether it’s mental health or
physical health, or creativity, or productivity, or just being an
interesting conversation partner, but then can also get out of the way,
right? They do the work and then we step away like a little bit closer
to the ideal versions of ourselves, but we’re not dependent on a
continuous subscription to like, you know, the software product to stay
that way. So that’s tied back to VR Fitness. Another interesting tie in
here is that there has been some research recently that suggests our
brains use or creatively misuse spatial navigation, neural circuitry to
keep track of concepts and memories. And this I found fascinating
because, you know, I’d always kind of thought of this. The idea of like
conceptual space as a helpful metaphor, as a useful sort of metaphor
because we can’t like, otherwise visualize, you know, what it means for
this idea to be close to this one but far from that one. But it seems
like there is some evidence that this is actually what’s happening, you
know, in our brains, and If that is the case, so a lot of this research
actually came out of interpretability research in AI like computer
scientists trying to understand what’s going on inside a large language
model, what is a latent space, you know, like, what makes one word
closer to another word in this like, super high dimensional space. And
then realizing that there are actually some mappings back to how human
brains work and how human language works and how human beings express
ideas through language, etc. So I’m not a neuroscientist or computer
scientist, so this could all well be just my sort of fanciful
misinterpretation of all this. But, you know, if indeed there is some
concrete underlying mechanism that ties space and ideas together, then I
would say that’s an even stronger argument to Investigates what a
spatial user interface displays for working with information could be
and how that could help us to come up with designs that are better
synthesize the underlying sort of requirements of the user, or come up
with theories that better synthesize the different pieces of evidence
that we’re trying to fit together. Etc. So, it could be that this is
not only a metaphorical connection between, you know, a semantic space
and like mapping out ideas on the big wall and the actual ideas
themselves, there could literally be a real phenomenon going on here.
There are papers that point to evidence that this is what’s going on.
00:47:08 - Speaker 2: And you’ve got a couple of links here you’ve
shared with us that outline some of these explorations and discoveries,
so I’ll put those in the show notes and listeners can follow through
and read those to make their own judgment.
Yeah, well, so far I like that we haven’t talked too much about the
technology and really focused on the user and the big ideas here and
your unique take on this.
But with that said, now let’s talk about the hardware and the
technology and you know, I was interested to go read about the history
of it. I found an interesting link I’ll put in the show notes, but
going back to even the 60. and 70s people strapping these ridiculous
contraptions to their head and trying to figure out head tracking and
all this kind of stuff. I feel like there was some kind of maybe
awareness of OK, the hardware with the miniaturization has happened with
mobile computing and internet and all this sort of thing that lots of
big companies and lots of investment dollars went into Many platforms,
most of which have not panned out, but nevertheless have produced some
very impressive things.
We already talked about that early Oculus demo or kind of dev kit that
we both had access to. One that to me was a really, I don’t know, wow
moment was the Google Glass concept video from, yeah, I think it was
around that same time, 2012, 2013, something like that. And yeah, I
remember people that I knew, not even in the technology world saw that
and just were floored and just said, you know, this is amazing, this is
something I want to have. Now, of course, the reality didn’t live up to
what was in this concept. Video, Microsoft’s got the HoloLens. Magic
Leap is one that, yeah, it was the secretive project and billions of
dollars of investment were going into it. I think they did develop some
genuinely impressive hardware, but in the end, yeah, too early,
couldn’t get there, couldn’t get the two-sided market of developers
and and users, too expensive, too weird, that sort of thing. And then
obviously you’re choosing to build on Oculus, which is now owned by
Meta and has been through many iterations here. So what’s your take on
the kind of currently available hardware? What made you choose this
platform that you’re on now and how do you see the good enough is a
weird thing. To talk about because there’s so many different aspects
head tracking and input mechanisms and that sort of thing, but I think
it also depends a lot on the application. It’s clearly been good enough
for certain kinds of games for quite a while, but maybe that’s
different than what you need for, for example, a more precise kind of
text manipulation oriented productivity. Yeah, how do you think about
the recent history of hardware platforms?
00:49:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a great question. The way I’m
thinking about it is that it’s only been, I would say about a year or
just over a year, that there has existed a hardware and operating system
platform that just barely got over the line of like good enough for a
general purpose computing tool like ours. And I think there’s a strong
case that could be made that it’s not even over the line and we’re
only just now seeing where that line is, which may be quite a bit
further out than what everyone had hoped it would be because to hit that
line today, it’s very expensive, and so, I think that the challenge
with spatial computing. In my humble opinion, has been that the minimum
viable product is actually not minimum at all. It’s actually a very,
very, very high bar. When it comes to The visual acuity, the pixel
density, the motion to photon time, you know, how quickly this system
responds to the user’s head movements and hand movements. We’ve gotten
used to technology that can be quite buggy and not work so well, but as
long as it delivers like that modicum of value and that value is like,
you know, higher than the friction or the cost of like using the thing,
then there’s a path that tool taking off.
00:51:09 - Speaker 2: Do you think that bar is so high for this
technology specifically because, yeah, for example, we’re trying to
like basically trick your brain into something because another way to
think of it might be, well, the bar is higher because computers in
general can do so much more.
We’ve got mobile devices that are amazing, we’ve got computers that
are so powerful, you know, if you go back in time. To, I don’t know,
you know, something like early personal computers where the minimum
viable product was toggle switches and LEDs and like manually, you know,
keying in programs or whatever, but there just wasn’t that much to
compare to.
So here we’re trying to compete with all these other really developed
platforms, but it seems like you think it’s the first thing, it really
is more about the specific problem of the Humans have such a strong
sense of spatiality isn’t the right word, and so digitizing that is
just a very, very hard thing.
00:52:02 - Speaker 1: Yes, I think there are actually probably 3
headwinds. The first and I would think the greatest, is that you’re
dealing with the human nervous system, right? And it’s almost like
thank goodness our nervous system is actually laggy enough, it’s hard
to trick. Thank goodness it’s this hard trick. Thank goodness it has
these buffers of like, OK, if you update the display within like 14
milliseconds or whatever the number is that Apple thinks it is, your
brain does accept it, right? Conceivably we could have a much lower
number. I think there’s been research done on like insects that have,
you know, like super low thresholds, right? And if that were the case,
then all the technology would be, you know, even further away before it
got good enough. So I think that’s Absolutely the greatest factor in
terms of headwinds for getting this technology good enough for
adoption.
We can’t dismiss the fact that everything else in the consumer text
space has gotten so good, right? The iPhone is this like beautiful slab
of glass that can basically, you know, do anything you ask of it, if it
has an internet connection especially, and the competition for spatial
computing is therefore that much greater. I think the third factor is
the market’s expectation of what success looks like here has also
gotten so much. Greater, right? Back in the days of like punch cards,
if, I don’t know, every computer science department at all 8 Ivy League
universities adopted your system, that was like a smashing success,
right. So like 8 purchasing decisions had to, you know, come through.
Now, if it’s not like 2 billion user addressable market, then you’re
not making a coffee meeting, right? So I think all these forces have
been headwinds to this space and it’s only through the sort of
unilateral multibillion dollar. Very long term investments that
companies, individual companies have made that The technology has even
progressed as far as it has, and it’s going to take many more billions
of dollars of investments made in the face of very skeptical
shareholders and press and markets, probably to get to anything that we
consider like mainstream or a success compared to even the iPad or Apple
Watch.
So yeah, I mean, you’re asking about hardware, you’re asking about the
choice of platform. So, the quest devices. So what Met has done really
really well is getting the price right, for this technology, and getting
the sort of like absolutely minimum acceptable quality at that price,
and I do see that they are calibrating the price upward a little bit
from the very, very low cost of the Quest 2 for their next generation of
devices, in order to maybe meet users a little bit more in the middle
when it comes to the quality, and that’s the range that they’re
exploring right now, but from a developer’s point of view, from my
point of view, it’s moving in the right direction, and I think that
what we have right now, the question two is, yeah. Sort of just on the
line of what a productivity app would need the user to have access to,
to, you know, be usable for let’s say 30 minutes or 60 minutes, and for
the user to feel like, OK, that was worthwhile.
00:55:28 - Speaker 2: What are some of the dimensions actually for that?
Because there’s obviously a lot of different things here.
You mentioned like the needing to be tethered to a bunch of cables,
which I think was, you know, one of the problems that various VR
headsets have essentially tackled and solved in the recent past, but
there’s also things like, yeah, display latency or yeah, pixel density,
you know, text legible, you mentioned operating systems, so presumably.
There’s, I don’t know, files, copy paste, all these things that maybe
aren’t important for games, but be important for productivity.
What are the dimensions that have advanced forward to yeah, be kind of
across that line or where is it still weak either yeah, the quest
specifically slash the larger Oculus platform or just all the platforms
that exist today. Sure.
00:56:11 - Speaker 1: In a word, comfort. Hm. I’m using this very
broadly.
So physical comfort, the ergonomics of the device on your head, having
it be standalone, so there’s not a cable coming off of it, which
impedes movement and is uncomfortable, getting the weight distribution
right on the head, making it light enough so there’s not as much weight
to have to distribute in the first place.
The visual comfort of having good lenses and a good display with the
right range of like contrast and brightness and darkness, and the pixel
density not being so low that it’s really straining to look at the
image for so long.
And then there’s social comfort. When Oculus finally opened up the pass
through SDK on their VR devices.
00:56:58 - Speaker 2: They essentially is this where there’s an
external camera that’s sort of taking pictures of your surrounding and
then you can bring that into, yeah, yeah.
00:57:06 - Speaker 1: So they had, you know, originally focused on
making VR devices. The cameras on the outside of the device were never
intended to create an image for a human to look at. They were for
tracking purposes, right? They were for positional tracking purposes to
supplement the inertial tracking data. And to their credit, they
realized, oh wait, augmented reality might actually be the future. We
had been sort of like talking about the metaverse and VR and this full
immersion future, but maybe people want AR and what can we do to instead
of going through another multi-year cycle of developing a totally new
hardware before we can even test this hypothesis, what can we do today
to start understanding the parameters of this? Well, we can take the
really, really, really terrible grainy. Infrared camera feed from our
tracking cameras and stitched together this like binocular pass through
feed, which is so terrible on the quest too. It’s like this muddy
impressionist painting of like what is going on around you more than
there’s like any kind of like image of going on around you, but they
took a big leap in opening that up to developers, but it made this
really important point, which is Even a really muddy and terrible view
of what’s going on around you physically, is infinitely better than
none. I’m someone who spends a lot of time in the headset, and before I
was able to experience a pass through in the headset, I always had this
low level visceral discomfort going into VR, which I was not even aware
of. I think I had sort of like denial about it, because, you know, like,
accepting it would have torpedoed sort of my whole faith and motivation
and building our products. But once I could experience facial computing
without that discomfort. I could never go back. It was night and day,
right? And so that sense of social comfort and of just visceral
animalistic comforts is another comfort factor that quest through purely
software, just by switching the camera feeds on and doing some, you
know, remapping and stitching, was able to alleviate and so. Yeah, and
answer to your question, like, OK, what is it specifically about this
hardware that’s finally kind of like good enough or barely good enough
for our kind of use case? I would say it is that comfort. With gaming,
with fitness, those comfort factors are, I mean, they’re still of
course, like tremendously important, but they’re not gonna be as
critical. Well, maybe I’m, you know, underestimating the importance of
those factors in those other use cases. I won’t speak to them, but
especially in productivity and focus and deep work. You’re not going to
be able to crack the toughest problems or write the best, you know,
piece of writing ever, if there’s just something gnawing at you, if
there’s like, something on your face, it doesn’t feel good or this
sense that like, someone could be sneaking up behind me and Once you
kind of get over that line, then you can suddenly imagine using this
device in all these other ways. I would say that Apple’s approach,
they’re coming in from completely the other end of the spectrum.
They’re saying that minimum bar for visual acuity, for latency of the
pass through video feed, for the feel of the materials and industrial
design of the headset itself. The necessary minimum bar is like really,
really high, because I guess they think Humans are, we have a very high
standard when it comes to visual information that’s coming in, right?
And they’re unwilling to compromise on those standards and would rather
to compromise on maybe the accessibility or the affordability of the
first generation of the device, hence the like, almost comical price,
right, of their first headset. And I’m very excited to see whether
their thesis is correct, or more correct than that is. So, We’ll find
out.
01:01:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I guess now is the right time to be a
little more future facing and to react to Apple’s recent announcement
of the Vision Pro, which is their long awaited entry into this space.
All these other ones we mentioned so far either defunct platforms like
Google Glass or current platforms like MetaQuest or Meta Oculus or not
quite sure the right naming there.
But now Apple said they’re going to do it. They’ve shown kind of their
vision for things and let people try the demo, and now they’re
basically, I think trying to get developers excited to build
applications for it.
So certainly I want to hear your, as a person who’s been working in
this space for a long time, I want to hear your reaction to their
approach generally, the hardware, the software, etc. But I’d also like
to know just how does it affect your business or how do you think about?
Certainly it’s good news to have the largest technology company in the
world to be getting heavily into this space, but what do you expect in
the near future for you business wise? Do you feel invigorated by this?
Does it bring new attention to what you’re doing?
01:02:14 - Speaker 1: Yes, this is only good news. The fact that Apple
has entered in this way that Feels like it’s very central and very core
to their plans for the future of Apple.
It’s not a peripheral device, it’s not a new pair of headphones. It
feels like something that they want to turn into a pillar of the
company, you know, going forward.
That is all very exciting, and that is all very positive for our
company.
I mean, my reaction to the actual unveiling of the device, it’s
complicated, it’s not unequivocally positive or celebratory. I think
that A lot of people, myself included, had been hoping that Apple would
pull a rabbit out of a hat.
That they would be able to circumvent. The laws of physics in some way
that, you know, that no one else had thought of or figured out, or that
they would make some really radical design decision where they would
throw away something everyone thought was absolutely critical to this
paradigm.
And thereby, you know, make this huge step change in some of the
tradeoffs that other companies had to make in order to retain this
thing, whatever the thing was, right? So Apple famously is always
getting rid of features that everyone else is not ready to give up yet,
like the CD-ROM drive, right, the iPhone has no physical keyboard, and
essentially no buttons.
01:03:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah. And so one unfair characterization, but
it’s somewhat captured my initial feeling.
When I saw the headset was it kind of felt like if Apple had released
instead of the iPhone back when they released the iPhone, they had
released a BlackBerry, but it had a retina display. That with the
current headset, it feels a little bit like they decided we’re going to
take essentially the same paradigm that everyone else has been working
with, and just crank the knobs up on every single quantitative
characteristic all the way up as far as the existing supply chains will
allow us to. And that’s their strategy.
I mean, to be fair, they got rid of the physical hand controllers.
They are going all in on an eye tracked input system and like, there’s
absolutely a quality and quantity, right? Just like if you make
something so fast and smooth and reliable and feel so good, you can get
a step change out of it, but I don’t know what it would have been that
Apple would have done drastically differently, which is The whole point,
like, I I don’t work at Apple, I’m not Steve Jobs or Johnny Ive, but
now we know, OK, they decided not to take that route or they couldn’t
figure out a way to take that route.
And so, I think this is incredibly validating for all the existing
players. I think this is very validating for meta, right? It means that
meta can proceed with their hardware roadmap, whatever. You know, it was
gonna be for the next couple of years, and they don’t have to throw all
that away because Apple came out with something that like made all that
roadmap irrelevant.
Yeah, so, like I said a bit earlier, I’m very curious to see what the
actual impacts for user adoption for the market response. Of these
qualitative improvements that Apple has made will be. And initial
reviews from, you know, tech journalists from the media has been very
positive, people saying that it essentially looks like you’re looking
through maybe like a thick pair of safety goggles. It doesn’t feel like
you’re looking at a digital display at all, which is incredible, you
know, if that’s in fact what Apple has been able to accomplish, that in
itself is like a really incredible achievement. Now what we’re gonna
see if that is enough.
01:06:04 - Speaker 2: And as you said, that’s really a continuation
that same insight that the quest had with like, let’s try to repurpose
these external cameras to see if some kind of pass through will work.
And there have been other augmented reality that was more based on the
projections, but then you always have the problem with the digital part
of the display is just too hard to see, especially in environments with
a lot of light.
And so in a way, this is, yeah, something meta had already figured out
and was investing in in Apple.
Took that idea, you know, the timing here exactly, but they came out
with something that wasn’t, let’s throw away what you’ve figured out,
but actually let’s take what you have already figured out and build on
it a lot and make it better, as you said, crank the knobs up, apply
their industrial design and their supply chains and their willingness to
charge a premium price.
And all that sort of thing to see how far we can take it.
That seems good, but yeah, in a way, it just all those other platforms I
listed, it seems to validate their work they put into it in some cases
what seemed like a huge, you know, money loser, well, was a huge money
loser for all those investors in Magic Leap or whatever, but a lot of
exactly what they were doing there is what Apple is now doing, but they
have the benefit of being, you know, technology has moved on a little
bit. And they can, yeah, try to take it to the next level and see if
they can finally be the one to get it over the hump into something that
becomes a must-have device for some demographic of people.
01:07:30 - Speaker 1: I mean, that’s on the hardware side. The software
side, I think, is much more radical, the direction that Apple is taking,
and that’s also as a developer, an area that I think has not received
the amount of attention that it needs for the technology to succeed.
And I hope that Apple is bringing to this area of the investment and the
attention that it needs, specifically.
On the software side, what Apple is doing is We talked about this
before, they’re really doubling down on 2D content. I mean, as an
initial set of use cases, right, they’re really doubling down on
watching movies, on running iPad apps, on web browsing, on maybe photos,
they’re even baking into their core conceptual models for what a
spatial app is, the concept of a floating window, like a floating 2D
window, right, with through their. Window spaces and immersive spaces or
framework. And so that’s a big departure from what, for example, meta
has been pushing for. Meta has been pushing for developers and for users
to go all the way on day one to this fully immersive, fully 3D. Yes, we
have to use the word metaverse that kind of captures what their ambition
is, whereas Apple has made this incredibly powerful. And incredibly high
resolution. 3D, you know, spatial computer for you to look at flat
things on, right? And that is, I think, a very interesting decision that
they’ve made. People have been doing this, like, if you search for the
term virtual reality on Apple.com, nothing ends up. It’s a forbidden
word and instead the term spatial computing is like in every paragraph.
And so Apple is In my mind, trying to make the smallest possible
conceptual leap from what they’re very large and very enthusiastic and
very well trained user base of iPhone users, iPad users, MacBook users,
they’re trying to make the smallest possible conceptual leap for us to
this new paradigm. And my hope is that that is just the first step that
we will have to take, and that it’s the first step of many, which then
eventually leads to a much more fully spatial, a much more natively
spatial operating system and ecosystem of apps, but this is where
they’re starting, and it’s a distinct strategy from Metas.
01:10:11 - Speaker 3: That’s a very interesting observation. I wonder
if it’s in part motivated by Apple’s desire to have a controlled and
therefore consistent framework. They basically don’t want app
developers YOLOing their own things for a variety of reasons, whether
that’s user interfaces or payment rails or whatever, right? And maybe
it was just too much of a bite to Develop a fully general purpose, fully
3D application framework, not just from like an implementation and
rendering perspective, but just like you ask how should it work, how
should it look, making it suitable to all the use cases, whereas
they’re in a very good position to transliterate their 2D UI skills
over to a 2.15D type experience.
01:10:54 - Speaker 1: Absolutely. I’ve been watching some of the
developer videos from WWDC and Apple has many and very specific opinions
on what your spatial app should look like, down to the number of points,
like 60 points is the minimum size for an intractable element like a
button. And even being able to say that, to make a statement like that,
it doesn’t make sense in this like super open world facial canvas app
development environment, cause like, what would that even mean? But in
Apple’s framework, like, they can say that because they expect your app
to always face the user to scale dynamically as the window moves away
from the users so that the apparent angular size of elements remains
essentially the same. And they’re going to make it very easy for you to
follow those guidelines, and I guess, more difficult to break them, or
at least have a very strong and well worked out case for breaking them.
At the same time, they are partnering with Unity to make it easy for
existing 3D software developers to port their experiences over into what
Apple is calling fully immersive mode, where your app, third party app
can take over the entire virtual space. For games or for existing
experiences, you know, they’re going to have to accommodate those kinds
of experiences, but yeah, the sort of default stance that Apple has
toward developers is we have figured out the exact perfect framework for
what spatial software is, and it’s very specific, and we think you
should really consider following it.
01:12:31 - Speaker 3: I guess they might be thinking, we will figure it
out, and in the meantime, we don’t want you trying anything weird. So
you will build the apps like this, and then eventually we will release
an updated framework and then you’ll build your apps like that.
01:12:44 - Speaker 1: I think you’re right. I think you’re right. I
mean, you have much more experience working with Apple and developing
for Apple, and sort of the pros and cons of Apple’s particular approach
to building a platform, right, and building an ecosystem.
Apple has done a great job, you know, it might be frustrating in certain
moments for developers or for users, but overall it works, and so I
would err on the side of like Apple is taking the right approach here.
Even if that means at the cost of more experimental ideas, or at the
cost of certain Paradigms that people who are really enthusiastic about
the past and the future of computing which could come into existence or
become more broadly adopted. I would say that first and foremost, let’s
make something comfortable and good, even if it is not as exciting or as
wide ranging in its capabilities as we might hope, because I think it’s
just to be proven in the space that something like that, that a product
like that can be made, right? And that I can do well in the market. And
in parallel, we do have meta, we do have the Quest devices, and an
ecosystem in which you can develop more adventurous apps and games and
experiences, and, you know, you can very easily take the things that you
learned from those experiments on the meta platform and bring them over
to Apple. If you show them like, hey, this works, it breaks all of your
guidelines, but it works, right? I’m hoping, I’m thinking that at some
point Apple would say, OK, that is valid and we can accommodate that.
01:14:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to be clear, I don’t come at this too
much from the ough angle in the sense of is art, you know, if I had my
way, Apple would spend whatever $10 billion in developing a platform
and then allow me to do whatever I want with it, right? But the is is.
In order to develop a platform of that expense, they need, you know, to
have reasonable economics around it that implies other things and so on
and so forth, right? I think it’s just important to understand and
it’s a key lesson from the mobile era that this is as much an economic
system as a software system.
Because of the reasons that I just mentioned, where it’s now understood
to be an incredible economic opportunity to control a platform like
this, like we kind of got the desktop and open internet stuff kind of by
accident before people really figured out what was going on. And at that
point, the cat was out of the bag and you couldn’t come in and say, you
know, whatever, you can only publish Mac apps through the app store or
something. But for these, the economic situation is very different.
I think therefore implies the difference is of how the system works. I
think it’s just useful to be aware of it.
And on the topic of hardware and performance, listeners will know that
one of my big hobby horses is performance and especially latency. So in
some ways, the AR VR systems are a vindication of that interest because
as you alluded to earlier, they really have to be very low latency.
Another kind of question I had around the human eyes and how it relates
to these systems is Like vision health, and I don’t actually know how
exactly these work. Like, is this equivalent to looking at a piece of
paper that’s like an inch away from your face all the time, or is it
more like looking off into the distance and how does that implicate eye
health?
01:16:00 - Speaker 1: So, OK, I’ll start with the eye health question.
I don’t fully know.
Yeah. So the experience of looking through a headset is kind of like
looking at something in the middle to far distance. I think that’s kind
of how the fixed optics are set up, and the challenge is actually that
you cannot focus on objects which are meter or meter half from you or
closer.
Your eyes try to. Both through the lenses, through accommodation and
through virgin, which is the fact that your eyes point inward to focus
on the same point when it gets closer to your face, but the hardware
does not accommodate this, at least the existing generation of displays
and lenses. And so, I mean, this is bad, like your body is trying to do
something, right, that in reality would result in a clear image and in
this case results not like in a fuzzy image or in misaligned images. And
so there have been experiments that Meta has published prototype
devices, hardware devices that would address some of these challenges,
but these are really far away from any kind of production readiness. So,
I don’t know, and I think this is a really important area for, you
know, platform owners to research and to study and to understand because
Our sense of site is quite important. If you’re gonna get younger
people to use this, it could have developmental implications. These are
all really tricky and like important topics to get right. The
performance, so on the question of performance, I recently Read about
the fact that Vision OS is a real-time operating system. This term has a
very specific meaning. I was kind of new to this, but as a developer in
this space, as soon as I read the definition of this, it made a lot of
sense to me and I was shocked at like, all this time I’ve been
developing, not on a real time operating system. So there’s these very
hard constraints on how long a cycle of processing can take, right?
Like, you cannot have processes that maybe take 10 milliseconds on
average, but then sometimes will stretch out to 100 or even longer. And
the fact that Apple has put so much, cause Apple can do this, they have
the resources and the technical expertise to essentially write up, you
know, a whole new operating system paradigm from scratch in order to
address latency. And responsiveness, that’s something that I know Meta
tried to do. There were internal memos that came out that said, you
know, Mark Zuckerberg really wanted to get away from Android, but they
weren’t able to so far, at least. And so, even beyond the hardware
performance, which of course is superlative, right? Apple has their
custom silicon is ridiculously fast and power efficient compared to
everything else. They’ve crammed the laptop class processor in here, on
top of, like, in parallel to a dedicated sort of like signals
synthesizing processor, the R1. On top of all that, if your operating
system doesn’t make it easy to render the frame rate very steadily,
then it doesn’t matter how good your hardware is, but it’s not the
only factor here. So, Apple has put a lot of energy into making sure
that this thing is smooth and comfortable.
01:19:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the Zuckerberg story is very interesting
because I’ve tried for like basically my whole career to write high
performance software, and I found that when you’re working on large
projects, it’s basically impossible to have really fast software,
unless you have one of two conditions. One is you have basically a
dictator who’s like absolutely fanatical about it. The example that
comes to mind is Steve Jobs putting the iPhone prototype in the fish
tank and seeing the bubbles and saying that, you know, it’s too big
because there’s air inside, like that level of Attention to detail and
insistence that it happens, or you have a system in place that enforces
it. So one of the ideas or maybe fantasies I’ve had about software
development frameworks is you have a framework where to use the VR
example. Like your program gets 10 milliseconds to render the frame, and
if it takes 11, it just gets killed 9, and the game over. You see like a
game over screen and you’re in it to start again. And you can imagine
if you spent your entire time developing software in that environment,
that might be enough to actually make it fast, but otherwise, my
experience is, despite the incredible performance enhancements we’ve
had on the hardware side, software just ends up being kind of slow, you
know, there’s like this equilibrium process where that’s like the
natural resting place and it just gets slowness that accumulates. So I
think the only way to fight it is to have You know, basically a
framework level or a system level enforcement of it happening.
In addition to obviously, you need the hardware support it and obviously
you need the programming framework, programming language, library
support for it, but I think you need the additional like social layer to
make it actually happen.
So I’m curious if they try to do something like that. It’s like a
simple version, what would be they have app store review and a a hard
criteria is, you know, you can’t have any frame misses, which is not a
criteria we know on iOS. They don’t like it, but they’ll still publish
your app, but maybe they say, you know, in this case you’re gonna make
people sick, they’re gonna get motion sickness, you can’t have it, you
know, rejected. I don’t know, we’ll see.
01:21:05 - Speaker 1: I think they will have to have that requirement,
you know, cause I don’t know of a way that you could enforce that on
the software side, right? You could like force the app to render at
lower resolution maybe, like, uh, you know, on a systems level, but
certainly meta has that as one of their non-negotiables for admissions
to their app store, and I’m all for it.
In general with spatial computing. There’s a level of trust that the
user is placing in you as a developer and as the platform owner that
most software developers have not had to handle, because on a phone, if
the app crashes or freezes, it’s fine. I mean, it’s annoying, but
it’s not going to make us sick, it’s not going to viscerally affect
the central nervous system, whereas in the case of any immersive
software, it will.
You’re going to directly Put their brain in a state that is
uncomfortable or even harmful, right? And so, there’s a kind of
responsibility beyond all the others, data privacy around just like pure
functionality, there’s a responsibility that you take on first on the
basic like comfort and well-being of the user, but then also on the
design, the aesthetics, the qualities of the virtual environment and the
virtual objects.
How those things make the user feel because it’s, you’re taking over
their entire field of view, and I think that’s something that Apple is
gonna come in and just really raise the bar on. I think that that’s
something I’m looking forward to.
I think that this space has Adopt a lot of the standards from video
games, because the the underlying technologies are so similar, like 2D
video games. A lot of the sort of like design standards have also been
ported over. They can have these like really low quality environments,
you can have like, you know, miss frames or whatever, but actually you
have a very different relationship as the developer of an immersive
software title than like Fruit Ninja on the iPhone, yeah, does to their
user.
01:23:01 - Speaker 3: Yeah, great point.
01:23:03 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good bridge to one of the last
things I was really curious to ask you about, which is the social
aspects.
I think you touched on this, yeah, talking about comfort, which is, I
think we don’t really know yet, but basically people feel often
uncomfortable wearing headsets, not because of, I don’t know, it’s
heavy or there’s wires or something, but because they know they’re in
an immersive environment that’s cutting them off a little bit from
their surroundings, even if you’re alone in your home, that’s very
weird. It’s a very strange thing. I think somehow at some low primal
level, we’re not that comfortable with that and throw in now the social
side of it, which is putting on one of these headsets in a setting like
an office. Or on a plane, or anywhere else, and the reaction of others
around you because they sort of know that it’s signaling you are cut
off from your environment. And it’s a very challenging thing.
I’ll link out to an HCI paper from a few years back, which was
essentially looking at the social acceptability of VR on a plane, which
you would think, OK, this is a really simple case, right? Everyone’s in
their seats, it’s a long international flight, people are just watching
movies, they’re zoning out, they’re sleeping, who really cares? But in
this study, they determined that someone watching a movie in VR on a
plane was extremely creepy to everyone around them.
And this included that the VR software had a little bit of some kind of
cameras or something that would give you a little bit of peripheral
vision. So if someone wants to get your attention, they can do that
relatively easily, but that didn’t matter. Everyone was just super
weirded out by it. So I feel like these things are a bigger hurdle than
we might think or maybe because we’ve hit the baseline now of input
devices and displays and you know. Emotion tracking works well enough,
you don’t get sick. Now this other piece of comfort becomes a central
thing. What’s your experience of that since you have been putting on
these headsets as a part of your daily work for a long time and what do
you see the path forward there?
01:25:08 - Speaker 1: I think this is actually a very, very critical
question for the technology. What is the future that we want to want,
where head manager to displays our thing, where smart glasses are a
thing? Cause I think, you know, now is the time to start asking that
question and coming up with answers.
I would say I think that there are important values and there’s
important information embedded in those social norms and social
reactions.
Like, I don’t approach this question like, how do we get people over
the hump necessarily, like, they don’t like it right now, what can we
do to like make them like it, you know, I don’t think it’s the right
approach at all.
It might turn out that there are certain rational biases or some, you
know, reasons that don’t reflect any intrinsic underlying values that
are just about familiarity, like umbrellas, for example, were they were
like reviled, right? Apparently when they were first introduced in
London. Obviously that wasn’t a valuable social taboo to keep around.
I think there could very well be, you know, an important signal in
people’s discomfort with head mounted displays that we should respect
and understand, and I wouldn’t necessarily want to try to like work
around or like hack or whatever.
So first of all, there’s a wide range of how comfortable and
uncomfortable both the users and people around feel with people wearing
a headset. So that’s just something to be said, because I’ve had test
users who very happily sat on a plane, you know, wearing a giant VR
headset and were excitedly sending like test notes about their
experience to me about it and took selfies and others who would like
never in a million years, like, do that. I think that the future I would
want to live in and to have future generations live in where smart
glasses are a thing. would be one where we don’t wear them all the
time, and we wear them in very well understood and well defined times
and contexts and places to do things that like, we care about, to
accomplish tasks or to, you know, do work, or to have meetings to
communicate, to collaborate, and then we can take them off and like also
enjoy our life in an unmediated fashion and I think that so far the
technology industry has not been great at making Tech that, like,
encourage you to then stop using it after the appropriate amount of time
has passed or the task has been completed. So that’s something that we
should think about, we should work on. I also think it’s very
interesting, even the distinction between a laptop and a tablet in a
public setting, exists.
01:28:04 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we even get that feedback from new users
where they say, yeah, I just get a different reaction when I’m in a
meeting. And I’m scribbling and use versus typing on my laptop, right?
01:28:14 - Speaker 1: And I think there’s something to be learned from
that, like, what is it about? The tablet that I think others around you
feel so much more comfortable with compared to a laptop. Is it as simple
as the fact that others can see, you know, because the tablet lays down
on a flat on the table, others can see what you’re seeing as well, you
know, is it as simple as that?
01:28:35 - Speaker 3: So my intuition is that it’s basically being able
to understand and therefore approve or disprove of what the person is
doing, because with a tablet, A, as you said, it’s flat and you can see
it, and B, a tablet is less powerful, it’s less general purpose,
including not having a keyboard. With a keyboard you can like type
really fast and people basically can’t see what you’re typing, which
is not the case with handwriting.
And so that theory, to my mind explains why when you put on this really
powerful headset where you can do whatever you want, and people can’t
see it at all, that’s when they get the most nervous, and then on the
other side, something like a book, you basically know exactly what
you’re doing, there’s very little that’s mysterious, there’s no
hidden powers. That’s my kind of theory for how people react.
01:29:20 - Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense to me that like there’s
some like irrational but visceral nervousness from the people around you
that like you could be up to something nefarious, right? If you have a
keyboard and you know, you have this really powerful computer in front
of you and you’re kind of like in it, but also within our proximity.
01:29:39 - Speaker 2: Right, are you typing into a chat? Oh my God, you
wouldn’t believe this idiot in this meeting I’m in right now.
01:29:45 - Speaker 1: Exactly, yeah. I don’t fully understand that
distinction, or I don’t understand that. I very much feel it, but I
don’t know, you know, how to explain it.
01:29:53 - Speaker 2: Well, I guess that’s something for the industry
to figure out as they go again, once you get past these baseline
concerns of can you see and can you point to things and click on them,
OK, now we need to move on to these next steps.
And I do wonder, yeah, talking about the taking it off or the using it
in the right context, you know, certainly there you could talk about,
you know, how an office might differ from a plane, how that might differ
from a park or something.
But maybe there’s also an element of, you know, I think of something
like over your headphones, which you are immersing yourself in a world
and cutting yourself off, especially if you throw in the noise canceling
from the world around you, and there are probably times and places where
that’s rude. Nothing seems weird about someone wearing noise canceling
headphones or over your headphones while they’re taking a run. They
figure they’re listening to music, they’re listening to a podcast,
that makes sense for them to be not that connected from on an audio
basis to their environment, whereas there might be other settings where,
you know, it might be more rude or disconcerting or weird if someone
suddenly put on some headphones.
01:30:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, again, so Apple is really taking
this question very seriously. They sacrificed a lot of weight and
comfort and a bunch of ergonomic sort of trade-offs were made to have
that outward facing eye display on the headset that would show people
around you, your face, you know, and this is another situation where I
think we just have to wait and see what effect this has, what difference
this makes on.
People around you comfort because I find, I think I’m not alone in like
finding people wearing sunglasses as they’re speaking to me a little
bit disconcerting at times, right, compared to glasses, right, or even
like tinted glasses right you can’t see where their eyes are looking.
And so, I mean, we’ve just never had a pair of VR goggles, like the
situation where someone’s talking to you or in the same space as you.
You can see their eyes, but you also know that they’re seeing other
things that you cannot see, like, it’s too weird and new. We have to
kind of just see where the chips fall on this one. I mean, people
presumably inside Apple know, but we don’t yet.
01:32:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe we’ll see some experiments with using
that forward facing display in other ways.
The physical analogy that comes to mind, like imagine if a collaborator
walked up to you, holding a piece of paper, like a fair project, like
vertically, so that you couldn’t see it and then started talking to you
about it, you know, well, look at this document, and meanwhile, your
collaborator can see it perfectly, but you can’t see it at all cause
you’re seeing the back.
That’s kind of the physical analogy of what I’m seeing with these VR
displays, but that could be solved potentially using the forward facing
display. You can render like translucent, even just like outlines of
windows so that you see if the collaborator, you know, control tabs over
the chat screen to complain about you, you can basically see that
without it getting, you know, too in your face. You know, we’ll see.
01:32:45 - Speaker 2: It’s true actually, many of the settings I’ve
had the chance to try VR, which often are art projects or yeah,
something like a basically an arcade where you can go to play games in
or some of the kind of demo set up. There’s very often a monitor
nearby, maybe a big one that’s right next to you that everyone can see
what you’re doing or what’s on your.
Screen and that setting seems to improve that somehow. Now it’s a very
artificial setting in a way because that’s not how you would do regular
office work.
Most people don’t want to see my note taking or whatever it is that
I’m doing, nor do I specifically want to display that to them.
But yeah, you wonder if there’s some variation on that, that is, yeah,
you have some frosted glass version that you kind of have a vague sense
of what they’re up to in the same way that you kind of peek the corner
of someone’s screen without like sort of fully seeing what they’re
doing.
Well, before we go, I’d love to hear what’s the future hold for
SoftSpace.
01:33:39 - Speaker 1: Good things, big things. So we’ve been working on
SoftSpace for quite a while now, always with the idea in mind that
eventually the hardware would catch up to our ambitions, and I think
we’re there. I think especially with this new generation of hardware
coming out not only from Apple, but also from Meta, that we are finally
going to be in a place to put our products to test.
And so we’ll be launching on the MetaQuest store this summer, mid
August, just in time for back to school. And following that, we’ll be
talking to as many users as we can, getting people in the headset, in
the app, exploring their important use cases and letting them work on
the projects that they care about and learning from them how this brave
new world of spatial computing can improve how they create, how they
communicate, and how they do the work that matters most to them.
01:34:35 - Speaker 2: Very exciting. We’ll wrap it there. Thanks
everyone for listening. You can join us in Discord to discuss this
episode with me, Mark, and our community, the links in the show notes.
And Ilio, thanks for seeing the promise in this technology and working
on it for so long, even as maybe the rest of us start to realize what
the potential is here.
01:34:55 - Speaker 1: Thanks, Adam. Thanks Mark. It was really fun
talking through all this with you and I’ve been having such interesting
conversations with people like yourselves and others who up until very
recently maybe wouldn’t have thought too much about spatial computing
but now are finding themselves intrigued or intrigued again and I look
forward to having many more conversations as we learn more about where
all of this is headed.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: We have to make sure that if you’re a brand new
obsidian user, it feels accessible, it has infinite depth, and you can
go as deep and crazy as you want, but that that surface level is
intuitive and inviting to most people, and that’s a really hard thing
to balance.
00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us as a tool for
deep work on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about me use the product,
it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam
Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. I joined
today by Stefan Ago of Obsidian. How’s it going? And Stefan, you’ve
got some nice recipes up on your website alongside various blog posts
about tools for thought and technology. Tell me a little bit about
pillowy Swedish cinnamon rolls.
00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Oh, that’s a good one. So I grew up in France.
My mom is half American, half Swedish, my dad is 100% French, and my mom
is. A teacher, later in life she became a professional baker. She was
always cooking and baking throughout my childhood and taught us a lot.
And she was also trying to infuse the household with her American
culture and her Swedish culture as well, because I lived in France until
I was 17.
And so, One of those things is a Swedish cinnamon roll. I think in the
US, you know, the kind of cinnamon roll that you’re used to is probably
derived from that.
It’s usually made with, you know, cinnamon or cardamom, and I came
across this technique which is common in Asia called tanghong, which is
a technique for making bread out of a, it’s almost like a very, I
don’t know if anyone knows what a roux is, which is also a French
technique, which is a mix of flour and water that you use to make gravy
and other types of things.
You use basically a very Like a slurry of water and flour that you
don’t darken at all, and you put part of that into the dough. And what
it does is somehow, I don’t know all of the chemistry of this, but I
think what it does is it encapsulates some of the moisture into the
flour, and so when you mix that into the main part of the dough.
The dough stays really soft and fluffy and pillowy, and it’s just a
really amazing texture.
And so I discovered this technique and I think, you know, it’s used for
like milk buns and different things in Asia, but I thought it would be a
good fit for the Swedish cinnamon roll that I always love to make around
the holidays, you know, in December, even though I live in Los Angeles
now and it’s not so cold, it’s just a kind of a nice memory. And so it
turned out to be the perfect fit in an interesting fusion of two things.
And so I put this recipe out. I don’t have very many recipes on my
website, but it started to become a little bit of a section, and so I
decided to post more of these because they’re really fun for me and
very iterative. I like to incorporate techniques that I find online and
get feedback from people who try it and. Iterate on them, so maybe it
will become a more important section of my website. I think there’s
only 2 or 3 recipes on there right now.
00:03:28 - Speaker 2: Especially like the I guess cultural mashup aspect
of that, obviously drawing from your own heritage but also reaching
outside of that. I always find, I guess as a person who’s an immigrant
myself and I’m raising my child who has two parents from different
countries and is living in a third country, so maybe not too dissimilar
from your upbringing. And yeah, I think there’s just a lot of, I don’t
know, interesting, you know, if we say everything is a remix now, you
know, this kind of remix of fundamental cultures, I just think there’s
a lot there.
00:04:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, being able to pick and choose techniques,
ideas from different cultures and like bring them together is really
fun. That’s how I grew up, and so it just comes naturally to me.
00:04:13 - Speaker 2: And tell us a little bit about your background in
the professional world.
00:04:18 - Speaker 1: Well, so today I’m the CEO of Obsidian. Obsidian
is an app probably a lot of your listeners will know about in the tools
for thought kind of space.
Before that, I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. I’ve run lots of
companies, probably the most well known of them is called Lumi. We built
a platform that helps entrepreneurs and Teams collaborate with
manufacturers, particularly in the packaging space, so it’s a really
interesting problem of There’s so much manufacturing capability in the
world. Like there’s all these factories that are out there that can
make things, but I find that the interface to access that capacity is
Very confusing and difficult, and the idea behind the company was what
if we could make it as easy to interface with factories as it is to
interface with cloud computing.
And so that was a really fun adventure. We worked on that for about 8
years, sold the company, and then I found myself having a little bit
more free time to think about things. I have been using.
A variety of different journaling and wiki type of software for a while
and Obsidian came along, founded by Shia Lee and Erica Shu back in 2020.
I started using it pretty much right away. It slotted into what I was
doing perfectly and. I was using other tools before that and kind of had
mashed up a few different things together. And Obsidian just sort of did
exactly what I was trying to do by scotch taping all these different
solutions together. And so I just fit like a glove right away, started
using it, became close with the founders and started working on
community contributions to the app. And Eventually, once I was leaving
Lumi, they brought me on as the CEO and it’s a very small team. We’re
only, you know, 6 people full time. So that title probably like yours,
Adam, holds maybe a different meaning within our group, but it’s been
really fun and I’ve been on it full time now for about 5 or 6 months,
which has been really great.
00:06:32 - Speaker 2: And it must be quite a dramatic experience to
come.
You’ve obviously started your own company and scaled that up and been
the leader there, but coming into a tool that’s already established
itself, at least within a particular niche, already has a big audience
of fans, already has an existing team, plenty of culture and values and
all that sort of thing. Obviously you We’re already resonant with that
culture and values coming in, but to suddenly be on the inside and
particularly to have this vested authority, all of a sudden, did you
find that disorienting? How did that challenge compared to the challenge
of starting something totally from scratch and sort of building every
piece of it versus needing to like, I don’t know, bootstrap all the
context or build the moral authority within the team?
00:07:15 - Speaker 1: Well, I’ve never worked at a company that I
didn’t start until now, so it was surprisingly natural because I Had
developed this relationship to the founders over a long period of time,
very gradually, very organically just through chatting with them and
reporting various bugs with the app and, you know, building some
community contributions and things like that. So it was surprisingly
easy and very natural. It was just really like, instead of spending, you
know, a few hours here and there working on obsidian every week.
What if I was just doing that full time, and I do think it’s a At least
in my mind. When I was thinking about what’s next after Lumia, my
default would have been to start another company, but I couldn’t think
of anything that I Thought was more exciting than obsidian.
And so that to me, at least in my own head, it says a lot. I don’t know
if it says a lot to other people, but it does say a lot that I would
rather kind of go and help build this thing, which I think is is such an
amazing app and community than try to start another thing from scratch
right now.
00:08:28 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that
entrepreneurship, you shouldn’t start with, I want to start a company.
You should start with, I want to solve a problem or have an impact on
the world or go to a place where I can contribute the most. Really
starting a company should be your last resort. If there’s really no
other way to accomplish, I agree,
00:08:47 - Speaker 2: that’s what you want to do, then you say, well,
damn it, I guess I have to start a company.
00:08:51 - Speaker 1: Oh well, I have so many people come to me for
entrepreneurship advice and my first advice is don’t do it. Most of the
time. I’m constantly like trying to convince them not to start a
company. And part of it is just me kind of probing to see how much they
actually care about whatever they’re doing that, you know, they can
deal with that because that’s pretty much what you’re going to get
from the world, like 99% of the time is like, why does this exist? or
why are you doing this? But I kind of took my own advice here and I
think a lot of times it’s better to go, you know, put more wood behind
fewer arrows.
00:09:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s also a really unique
opportunity because getting the chance to, for example, I hired a CEO at
Hiroku after we’ve been in business for a few years, and that was a
really great opportunity to work with someone much more experienced and
with knowledge about the spaces we wanted to move into.
For me, that was a new experience, yeah, always being an entrepreneur
and then kind of Leading or being a co-leader in it until I’m done or
don’t have anything else to say and then I just sort of leave. It’s
really tricky to bring in a new leader, but it can also be an injection
of new expertise, new perspective, new direction, new vision, especially
because very often the kinds of people that like to start something are
not the same.
People or don’t have the same skill set or just passions to want to
scale it up, to want to see it grow wider, address, be available to more
people, or just the natural kind of management responsibilities that go
with managing a team, and existing product, a big base of customers who
just seem to have an endless list of bugs and feature requests. It can
take a different personality type. So when that can be done well, I
think it’s really great to bring in an experienced leader at the right
moment.
00:10:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I was so impressed with Erica and Shea.
People might know them as Silver and Leak out, which is their name
online, but they’re a little bit younger than I am and have such a
mature point of view on how they want to build the business of Obsidian
from the start, they Made the decision not to go down the VC path, and
I’ve, in my own businesses over the years have literally tried every
different method of funding any business. I’ve bootstrapped companies.
I’ve gone the VC route. Did Shark Tank, did Kickstarter did every
different thing you can imagine, loans like if I type your name into
YouTube with Shark Tank right now, will I get a
00:11:12 - Speaker 1: clip? You’re gonna find my co-founder Jessie. I
was not brave enough to go on there myself, but she’s great, and you
should watch that episode.
But I think they took a very mature path really thinking about the long
term, which is aligned with kind of what the app is trying to do, and
having the experience of going through all of those different ways of
building a business.
I realized it is really hard to run a bootstrapped company and try to
grow it kind of on your own. And I think that the approach that we’re
taking with Obsidian is definitely hard mode in a way.
It seems surprising that you could just easily get millions of dollars,
but if you have a good enough idea, there’s investors like banging at
your door trying to give you money and it actually takes a lot of
Fortitude to say, no, I don’t want millions of dollars.
We’re going to just do it, you know, ourselves, we’re gonna grow very
carefully and organically and in an almost like selfish way, because
I’m such a fan of obsidian first and foremost and a user of it, you
know, pretty much every day, have it open in the background of my
computer if I’m not using it actively.
I almost selfishly wanted to just kind of help ensure that obsidian
continues on that independent path and continues to build kind of in a
very thoughtful way. And what could I bring from a business standpoint
to the table to create the structure that would enable that to continue
being a priority.
00:12:45 - Speaker 2: And it’s going to lead to this later, but since
we’re sort of on the topic now of the kind of the mechanics, which
includes, yeah, financing, team size, but business model, obviously,
it’s what I would call a prosumer model. There’s the free product you
can download and use, and then there’s the sort of services,
subscription services like Sync that you can sort of add on to that once
you’re getting value from the product.
So I feel like prosumer is something that has like a longer ramp up, but
you need to kind of like do that upfront investment, but it also
doesn’t have a very good shape for venture because it doesn’t
necessarily have that big kind of unicorn in 10 years shape to the graph
that say like a B2BAS company might.
And then the middle ground there often ends up that companies like this
basically finance it through just doing a bunch of consulting projects
in the early days. I think maybe like yeah, the 37 signals folks is one
example. I’ve done that with multiple businesses to the point you’re
willing to reveal how does obsidian strike that balance? Have you been
successful enough that you’re just able to finance on customer revenue
or that early upfront investment feels like it’s got to come from
somewhere?
00:13:50 - Speaker 1: And when you say prosumer, I think in my head, at
least I think of prosumer as a market as a user type, but From a
business model standpoint, I would say freemium is more the term that
I’ve come to. Is that what you mean when you say prosumer, do you mean
freemium?
00:14:06 - Speaker 2: No, because you can have a freemium B2B and you
can have freemium B2C.
So music is one of the main areas like yeah, podcasters and DJs and
whatever.
This is actually you’ve got people who are often hobbyists or aspiring
professionals though realistically.
Maybe many of them are never going to make a living from it, but they
are willing to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on gear on
software, etc.
So classically B2C, you can’t get anyone to pay for anything. You just
monetize with ads or whatever, and then B2B, you know, you get those big
sort of company contracts where they’re paying thousands or tens of
thousands a month.
And so I think of prosumer as being that kind of in between state of
like Dropbox is a classic example, like pay $10 a month. Yeah, you get
access to like, yeah, again, audio and video stuff, etc. I don’t know,
maybe you don’t think of yourself that way, but that’s how I would
slot it.
00:14:54 - Speaker 1: Well, I don’t, but I’m trying to kind of come
around to your way of thinking of it like in that world, definitely, you
know, Apple Notes and OneNote or some of these kind of apps that come
shipped with the OS would probably be the consumer one like everyone
just has it by default and it’s free, it’s bundled in.
Obsidian has a Freeman model so you can totally use Obsidian for free
and for personal use, but it is a little more advanced, it has more
complexity to it than an Apple notes.
It’s trying to, you know, give you a little bit more power user type of
features, I suppose, and maybe that’s where the prosumer angle comes
in.
I think for us in terms of what the kind of broader. Goals of what
we’re trying to do are we’re really trying to democratize these tools
like we’re trying to make it easily accessible for people to think
using these tools and so we don’t feature anything behind a price, so
it’s not like There’s a pro version that you pay $10 a month for. The
capabilities are behind a license type. So if you are using obsidian for
your business, then you need to buy a commercial license. So that’s a
little bit of a unique point of view and it has to do with kind of the
values that we have around really trying to democratize access to these
tools.
The capabilities like sync and publish are paid add-ons, but There’s
tons of free alternatives that are out there that may even be better for
whatever use case you have. And so in a sense we’re competing with a
bunch of free alternatives to our own services and we’re OK with that.
A lot of the people who upgrade into some of those additional services,
they’re doing it because they want to support Obsidian as a company as
well.
00:16:51 - Speaker 2: Interesting, the commercial use kind of concept. I
assume it’s to some extent is a honor system is quite the right word
for it, but yeah, no, it’s an honor system,
00:17:02 - Speaker 2: right? Hard to tell if someone’s truly using
something professionally and I think a lot of software again creator
type software, if you think of like image editors or something like
that, they might have things like water. Marks or something like that,
that maybe an individual who’s just screwing around to make a meme,
they’re OK with that, but a company would never put up with that.
00:17:19 - Speaker 1: So of course they’re gonna, but we don’t do any
of that. Well, hopefully we don’t have to resort to any of those weird
tactics.
Like I don’t want to do that. That it’s surprising how well the honor
system works actually. I think that most companies, we have a lot of
great organizations using obsidian that really care about privacy and so
they tend to go down the obsidian path more so than some of the other
like cloud-based providers that are out there and not encrypted.
And so I think that if you’re one of these organizations. You actually
do care about reading the license, a lot of the software that you use,
and if it says you need to pay $50 a user per year, we don’t get into
that much friction, to be honest, when it comes to that. And the only
friction that would come up would be everyone who’s in between who are
like small, you know, couple people startups who from an honor system
standpoint, they’re just probably using obsidian for free and it’s not
a big deal.
00:18:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and classically, it’s been said that
Fremium is almost an update of the old system which was used piracy as
your sort of free version, so you pirate in Photoshop when you’re, you
know, a university student that can’t afford anything and then later
you have a real job at a real company and they want to be legit, so they
buy you a license.
00:18:39 - Speaker 1: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that was me. If I didn’t
pirate Photoshop when I was, you know, 14 years old, I probably
wouldn’t be doing the job that I’m doing now. But, you know, now today
in 2023, I think it’s probably a better From a top of the funnel
standpoint, piracy is not a great like method of trying to gain users.
You might as well just give your app for free and then, you know, try to
convince the people who can pay to come and join that tier.
00:19:10 - Speaker 2: Another example I’ve always liked that’s kind of
a variation maybe on the the watermark sublime text, where when you buy
a license, the only thing it does is remove the unlicensed text that’s
in all caps from your title bar, which you probably don’t even notice
that much in regular use. If someone’s looking over your shoulder or
you’re pair programming on a screen share, it just, yeah, it looks like
you’re kind of not serious about your tools and not investing or maybe
just remind you of like, hey, this is a tool you rely on, it makes sense
to support the creator or creators of it.
00:19:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so blind text is a huge inspiration to us.
It’s great.
00:19:45 - Speaker 3: That reminds me sometimes you see these YouTube
videos where people have the please license your windows sticker on
their desktop.
00:19:52 - Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, that’s hilarious.
00:19:57 - Speaker 2: Well, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you
think of obsidians fitting into, you know, we’ve talked about the tools
a bit, but we self-identify, that is to say the Muse team and to some
degree could switch as being part of the tools for thought community
scene, whatever you want to call that, you know, your website, you call
yourself a second brain.
There’s obviously the concept of note taking. You’ve already mentioned
Apple Notes, for example, although you know you could argue the degree
to which a very simple notes app like Apple Notes is even in the same
category as a knowledge graph or a wiki. When you think of that sort of
category of software, how do you think of obsidian’s place within it?
00:20:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think that. What most people are
familiar with when I try to explain obsidian to someone who’s never
really thought about using a tool like this, I go back to Wikipedia as
the touchstone because I think everyone’s been on Wikipedia. People
understand that most file systems, most structural systems are
hierarchical or chronological, and so they’re linear in one of those
ways, but they understand. Even if it’s just sort of intuitively or
emotionally that Wikipedia is not organized like that.
I mean there are some hierarchies in there, but it’s a web of links
that you can click through and everything is related to something else.
And I think that is really what I mean, even the term when you say
personal wiki, it’s jargon, but if you say it’s like Wikipedia, then
it becomes not jargon anymore and it’s like creating your own Wikipedia
is oftentimes what I use as a description for obsidian to, you know, non
nerds basically. And I think that’s a powerful analogy that, you know,
somehow hasn’t permeated into tools like Apple Notes though, you know,
I heard recently they’re making a new journaling app, but we’ll be
curious to see what they come up with there.
Um, but it is like one extra level of friction that maybe those like
really basic tools are not looking to do.
And once you start to link ideas together, what can you do with that?
What new structural concepts does it open up? And it sounds so simple,
but at least For me and my thinking, it totally changes the way that I
organize my thoughts.
There’s some people out there who are geniuses who can do this purely
in their mind, but I don’t know. I just don’t have the like RAM in my
brain to be able to maintain lots of different ideas at the same time.
And so having this tool where I can kind of break down a problem into
smaller chunks and then Remix those little chunks, however I want inside
of a note is a really powerful and very basic concept. And then
everything is layered up on top of that. So graph views, canvas views,
you know, backlinks, like all of these different add-ons and things that
can enable some new kinds of workflows, databases, like you can kind of
go ad infinitum on top of that basic concept, but it comes down to.
Links between notes and this kind of bottom up organizational model.
00:23:07 - Speaker 2: I think you actually perfectly teed up our topic
today, which is Evergreen notes, and partially I like this term for a
lot of reasons comes up, but it’s also a back reference to one of our
first guests we ever had on the podcast, Andy Match. We’ll link that in
the show notes, but you have a great blog post titled Evergreen Notes
Turn Ideas into Objects you can manipulate.
00:23:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Evergreen, I think that Andy’s notes about
that that he’s published are really great, and what I like about my
definition is just turning an idea into a memorable chunk of text, but
memorable to you, like a meme that is a meme inside of your own
thinking.
How can you take An idea that you had or read and turn it into a
memorable chunk.
Like sometimes I think what we love about good quotes from like famous
people or from books is that they are in a way an every green note
because they take a feeling or a concept and turn it into this like
memorable little chunk of text.
And at least in the way that I write for my own personal thinking,
having that little chunk of text, like you said, everything is a remix.
That’s an evergreen note in my system.
And I can use that in the context of a sentence that might start with,
because everything is a remix, you know, this thing that I found is
interesting for that reason, and I use everything as a remix as a link
in that sentence.
And it becomes a very natural way to compose ideas together, but I want
to try to make it kind of more relatable to People who haven’t thought
this way in the past, and that was the purpose of that blog post was try
to explain that if you can externalize ideas and you can create your own
little memes inside of your system, then you can touch those ideas, you
can rotate them, you can. Manipulate them in a way that personally, I
find that my brain doesn’t work that way. I don’t have the capability
to just do that purely inside of my head. I have to externalize it in
order to be able to manipulate it.
00:25:17 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s been my experience too. Or at least
I think you can fool yourself into thinking that you can manipulate
these things in your head, because you can hold what, 7 things in your
head? It’s like, oh, look, I have 7 things in my head and I can even
combine them in different ways.
But it’s sort of false because once you write down 20 or 30 things and
have them as discrete objects, that’s when you have the Ability to
rapidly play with new combinations. It’s one of those things that works
unreasonably well, just writing it down, because it takes it out of your
head and it frees up one of those 7 slots to put something in and it
makes it possible for you to quickly pick up new objects to put in those
7 slots from your written down items.
00:25:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you can break your ideas down into
smaller and smaller pieces, you can also build up more complex ideas
that you feel have a stable foundation. Like you can build ideas on top
of each other into thinking more complex thoughts than you could
otherwise think, which I think is exciting. That’s really fun. Yeah.
00:26:18 - Speaker 3: This idea of being able to build up more complex
thoughts because you’ve written them down, it reminds me of this idea
of automation and programming, where sometimes it feels like you don’t
really need to automate it because it’s basically going fine when you
do it manually, which again, is true as far as it goes. But really what
happens is you have some capacity to do stuff manually. So if you
automate it. You can add your manual stuff on top of that, so you
basically open up the ceiling to be able to do more stuff as a computer
user. It kind of has the same feeling to me as this idea of writing
stuff down to free up more mental space.
00:26:51 - Speaker 1: Maybe I should give an example so that people who
are listening can understand what I’m talking about. I was reading this
book by Murakami, I think it’s called What I Talk About When I Talk
About Running or something like that.
And he likes to run marathons and write books. And so he, you know, kind
of compares the two, and he has this phrase that is a very memorable
phrase in the book, which is pain is inevitable, but suffering is
optional. He says, basically, when you sign up for a marathon, you’re
basically signing up for pain. But it’s your choice to decide whether
you want to suffer that pain or not. I was going through a very painful
time at the time and so it kind of resonated with me.
And then an evergreen note that I wrote in obsidian was pain is
information and my thought about pain as information was I think
children learn this at an early age. If you touch a hot stove, you know,
that’s information that don’t touch hot things, you know, you’ll burn
yourself. But in general, like pain is a signal from your body. It could
be a physical pain, it could be emotional pain that gives you
information. And then, There’s this phrase like knowledge is power. So,
you know, if you gain enough information through pain, can you build
knowledge off of that? By the transit of property is pain power? Like
that that was a question that I was asking like if you are able to
understand pain and synthesize pain, is it a path to power? It has a lot
of connotations, but can you become more powerful by having more painful
experiences? So this was kind of just like a train of thought, but like
each nugget is an evergreen note. So pain is inevitable, but suffering
is optional, pain is information, you know, knowledge is power, pain is
power. Like you can kind of try to explore these ideas.
You don’t necessarily need to agree with them. Like there’s tons of
evergreen notes in my obsidian that I don’t agree with, but I’m trying
to turn them into a little meme for myself that I can come back to. And
maybe I’m still trying to figure out my opinion about that thought, and
I’m trying to use that little fragment of text in a sentence where I’m
agreeing with it or I’m disagreeing with it. I’m trying to weigh the
pros and cons of it. I’m trying to mix it with another idea. Maybe this
idea is not as strong as this other variation of the idea. And I just
find it a very useful, you know, way to kind of think about these things
and hopefully that example makes sense.
00:29:27 - Speaker 2: The self memes, including accessing maybe yeah,
books you’ve read, quotations, yeah, everything is a remix, the running
book, I think of ones that I referenced with some frequency like the man
in the arena quote, these serve not only to, if we do think of ideas as
these little notes, which are essentially objects that we can break
apart and then use to do almost like Arithmetic or something like that
and explore in ways that are more complex and interesting than the ideas
would be on their own, but also can build up that pyramid and then
encapsulate actually a lot of kind of sub items under one so everything
is a remix or across the chasm or something like that actually contains
a lot to it and you could read a whole book in many cases or whole
section or think many deep thoughts on that, but eventually if you
bubble it up into that meme, it almost reminds me of like a scientific
citation where if I’m writing a paper about a complex topic and I need
to reference another complex topic, I don’t need to go and restate that
whole complex topic. I just referenced the paper and for a very small
number of tokens I get essentially all of that brought in if you already
know the paper or you know the meme or you know the quote. That
basically can just serve as a reference to all that.
If you don’t know that well, then you can go and explore, go down the
rabbit trail there, which again, I guess does bring us back to that kind
of Wikipedia linked knowledge, knowledge graphs, scientific papers as
citations like, yeah, these are things that exist in other forms, but
this version of it for the personal environment, the personal notes
tool, personal knowledge base that has this highly manipulable
component, I guess that’s what it feels like is truly new with tools.
Likesidian.
00:31:09 - Speaker 1: And maybe the difference there between what
you’re talking about and Wikipedia itself is that Wikipedia will
reference specific books and places and, you know, concepts or terms,
but it doesn’t really have like memes inside of Wikipedia because those
are very personal kind of interpretations of an idea.
One school of thought could have many different like sub ideas within it
and those ideas don’t really tend to make their way.
Into Wikipedia in that same way, but the concept of being able to kind
of like manipulate them is similar.
Am I making sense? Like Wikipedia doesn’t really contain
interpretations of an idea, because it’s not trying to do that, it’s
trying to be an encyclopedia, so it’s trying to be objective and not
subjective, but these evergreen notes are intentionally subjective.
00:32:00 - Speaker 3: The evergreen note examples that we’ve been
talking about have been very granular, aphorisms of a few words. Do you
also have evergreen notes that are huge sprawling pages in which you’re
creating stuff over time, or do you really prefer the granular style?
00:32:16 - Speaker 1: Um, I like really granular, I mean this is just me
personally, you know, I’m not dogmatic about this.
People can do whatever they want. I tend to have small fragments that I
can compose into bigger fragments, so.
Yeah, I can’t really think of, you know, really huge evergreen notes
that I have.
What those turn into is journal entries or stream of consciousness type
of things where it’s like playing with Lego blocks. It’s like I’ve
got these Lego blocks which are my evergreen notes, and then I have a
session where I’m going to think about these like 10 different
evergreen notes and combine them together. But that thing is not an
evergreen note. It’s just a stream of consciousness, a thought process
in my system, it lives as a date stamp with a name, and it’s just like
on this day, I had these thoughts about these evergreen notes, but the
evergreen notes are not time stamped, they hopefully have longevity.
00:33:19 - Speaker 2: Now longevity, I also feel like it’s an
interesting fork to explore here. Some Mark and I have talked about as
some of the listeners will know and talking about software longevity and
sort of digital preservation and the challenge of bit ros and how
quickly files and applications and whole systems sort of cease to be
accessible. He talking about kind of your own personal knowledge systems
and obviously I know that this is a big part of what. built on, which is
just a folder full of mark down files and that’s plain text and now
marked down as an extension of that is something that has really stood
the test of time in a way that almost any other format you can think of
hasn’t. How do you think about evergreen notes, durability, and
especially in the context of your personal notes and how long those need
to last.
00:34:08 - Speaker 1: It’s a very high priority. I would say that we
are kind of plain text maximalists, like even more so than markdown.
Markdown is definitely kind of this system that seems to have permeated
enough and has lasted long enough that, you know, we feel comfortable
using it as the kind of default markup in obsidian, but I think that
we’re in this era that’s a very Unusual time because Digital files
have only been around for 70 or 80 years.
And that’s not very long relative to time. People have been writing
things down for thousands of years and so we’ve started generating a
huge amount of digital data.
How much of that digital data is going to still exist 1000 years from
now? It seems like on the one hand, we’re able to capture a lot more
than we ever have been able to, but how much will be retained is the
question.
And my framework for this is just the Lindi effect. I just want to think
about what has existed for a long time and can we use that as a proxy
for, you know, hopefully something that will last a long time.
And my gut feeling is that if computers are still around in 1000 years,
plain text will probably still work, you know, maybe some other dramatic
thing will happen where computers are not still around, but we’re
trying to make decisions within the context that we know about right
now.
And so that’s also why sometimes I say like files are much more
important than apps. We care about the file that you create in Obsidian
much more so than the app. The app is ephemeral. Like the app is not
gonna last forever.
I think it’s a fallacy to think that you’re gonna design a tool
that’s gonna last forever.
Maybe like a chisel can last forever or something like that, but a
software app is probably. not operating systems change, users change,
things are changing so quickly. I don’t really care what kind of chisel
someone used to, you know, inscribe hieroglyphics on a pyramid or
something like that, but they were able to communicate some information
that has stood the test of time.
And so that’s why Obsidian is writing to plain text files that for now
in terms of what we have for digital information is the you could open.
An obsidian file on a computer from the 60s, which means that hopefully
it will also work for a computer from, you know, 200 years from now.
00:36:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that and it touches on a few things
of very much of interest to me.
I mean, one is, I think that from a user perspective, putting aside how
long of a duration you expect or want or would be desirable in your
data, your work, the things you’ve created, ultimately, I think,
especially here talking about creators, people using tools or
productivity software to make.
Things you really care about your work, not the tool, and obviously
people can get excited about the hot new tool and they do, and that’s a
lot of fun, but ultimately I care about when I’m using a piece of video
editing software to edit a video or I’m using a word processor to write
my PhD dissertation. I care about what I’m creating way, way more than
the tool itself. As software creators, as tool makers, it’s very easy
to have a certain kind of egocentrism, which is the tool is the
important part, or maybe this even just comes from programmers where we
think, well, the program is a complicated, interesting, important part
and all of those bits we write to disk on behalf of the user, that’s
kind of a secondary thing, but I think the user perspective is really
the inverse of that.
00:37:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think That’s why the term tools for
thought kind of rubs me the wrong way sometimes because it’s putting
the tool at a higher level of importance than the thought in a weird
way.
And I think that the question that I’m wondering about is like, what
are we doing on a civilizational level when I say we, like everyone
who’s involved in Making and using tools for thought right now. What’s
happening right now? Because it does feel like there’s something
brewing, there’s like something that’s happening right now in this
area that hasn’t, for some reason it wasn’t happening 10 years ago or
20 years ago. It seems to be happening right now.
And I do think we’re inventing some interesting new tools, and we’re
making some interesting decisions about society or humanity in some way.
And I feel like the things that We’ve been kind of talking about in
this conversation are the things that we’re doing.
We’re trying to unlock a way that people can have thoughts that they
haven’t had before. Like maybe some of these tools can open up ideas
and allow people to think more complex thoughts or accelerate their
progress towards some sort of creative output that they wouldn’t have
otherwise been able to get to without these tools.
So that seems kind of cool and important.
And then the other part is How did those ideas or creations or whatever
you made the outputs of the tool last for a long time, hopefully. I
mean, maybe you make something very ephemeral and it’s not meant to
last for a long time and that’s fine, but if you want them to be able
to, they should. And I think that we’re at a turning point, like the
printing press or something where we have the opportunity to kind of
design these tools to hopefully pursue at least one or both of those
goals.
00:39:27 - Speaker 2: Part of what I find so interesting about this,
yeah, tools for thought scene, whatever you wanna call it, is just
caring about the ability to Use software and computers first of all, as
a thinking tool, which I think has only very rarely been something
that’s on people’s minds.
We’re usually thinking much more pragmatically. Here’s a calendar,
here’s email, here’s a to do list, something of that nature. And I’m
not sure that all the things that these different tools are trying,
whether it’s sort of canvas-based tools, more tech orient. tools,
things using space repetition, all that sort of thing, that those things
were impossible to do with computers 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, but for
some reason, people just got really interested in it right now and
there’s some excitement around it and some sexiness around it and maybe
some commercial opportunity around it as well, and that just has a bunch
of people thinking about it.
And regardless of the specifics of any individual product or project, I
just love that there’s so many people thinking about the problem from
that perspective. How can we use computers to help us all think thoughts
we didn’t have before, like you said, be able to do more with our
thoughts, be able to do more with our productive philosophical and
creative efforts.
00:40:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think what’s new about computers in
this respect is that every paper-based physical based system for
thinking was kind of bound by the limitations of physics and physical
objects, making it more linear, like a book, you know, is linear in
nature.
I’m always amazed when people get into the settle cast and like slip
box concept that this guy literally did what I’m talking about with
Evergreen notes, but just like have these little pieces of paper that
were cross referencing itself.
It’s a nightmare. It’s so cool that someone tried to do that, but
literally, you know, one person did that because it was that
complicated.
And so we have the opportunity now to do things like canvas or graphs or
things that have infinite levels of depth and nonlinear,
non-hierarchical structures because we’re not bound by the three
dimensional space when we’re, you know, working with these digital
files and so that’s a really cool thing.
How does the output of whatever you came up with. Like, it’s a means to
an end still, like the canvas view, for example, in Obsidian or Muse,
like, to me it’s in service of creating something at the other side of
that, that is probably not a canvas in itself, like the canvas is not
the output, the canvas is the kind of playground to arrive at an output.
00:42:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and that has been, I think a challenge in
just marketing a product to a wider audience that is fundamentally for
thinking, which is the output is the epiphany.
The output is the the idea that you wouldn’t have had, as you said, and
there may be pragmatic. something where again you’re working on your
PhD dissertation or your grand idea or your software product or whatever
it is, and the thinking tools help you to achieve that and maybe you’re
copy pasting some things out of it, but in a way to me it’s almost a
feature that Whatever it is that plain text file that canvas or whatever
form the thinking space is taking, or even going to the physical world,
right, the whiteboard or the sketchbook, it’s sort of a feature that my
sketchbook I can’t turn that into the finished artifact because the
sketchbook is the place to have loose thoughts. In a way that’s open
ended, that’s safe and private, that is just messy and combinatorial,
and then when I feel like, OK, I’ve had the aha moment, this is the
thing I need to say or do, now I’m going to move to those more kind of
production tools, but that can seem confusing, I think in some cases
because it sort of seems like you’re doing extra work and why. And I
think of it as you’re doing the work you’re already doing in your
head, but you’re doing it through this externalized form, as you said
earlier, and that that is a help, even though it may in the sense of
like what it looks like to an external person, look like I’m doing more
work, but you have to do the thinking either way with or without the
help, with or without the aid. And then there’s also that, how do you
turn this into like a more Production thing for consumption by other
people or execute that idea and that should just be a separate set of
tools.
00:43:48 - Speaker 1: It is hard to be messy in a digital form, and I
think that’s kind of we’re trying to make that gradient between messy
to finished smoother in a way, at least with the obsidian, it’s kind of
a Implicit goal of trying to bridge those two things in a way that feels
like continuous.
00:44:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I know this is something you’ve you’ve
touched on with some regularity mark is the idea of like not having
there be too discreet of a transition from, OK, now I need to take
something that’s kind of transcribe it or take it from my sketchbook
and move it to, for example, a digital form.
And what’s in there, I’m taking it somewhere else.
I think the reality is most production pipelines, if you want to call it
that, do have multiple steps, right? I write a script for my movie and
the script is in a different tool in a completely different format from
shooting on film and then editing that down and then how I’m actually
going to distribute that to my end audience is also, you know, uses a
different tool, but making those steps less jarring is, I think, very
desirable.
00:44:52 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you correctly point out that in
practice, you’re almost certainly gonna have separate discrete tools,
and now that I’m thinking about it in terms of explaining the products
and marketing can be quite difficult because, OK, in the ideal case, you
have one Uber tool that like magically morphs from a messy idea sandbox
into a finalized, you know, edited movie or something. OK, sure. We know
that in practice you’re gonna have to have a discrete step there where
you say, Develop an outline and use, for example, and that eventually
goes into the film production process.
That is kind of explainable, like you do need to introduce this extra
step that people often skip, unfortunately, but it’s in fact even
harder than that because in many cases, what you’re doing with
something like muse or obsidian, in my opinion, is you’re basically
rewiring your brain, you’re introducing new thoughts into your head and
you can actually throw away that artifacts, but it’s what’s in your
head. So now you gotta explain to someone, oh, you know, it’s actually
just that your neural net weights have been updated. And then
furthermore, it’s often the case that these are not in your waking
conscious mind. You’re updating the weights in your unconscious mind
and explaining that is very, very difficult, you know, source, trust me,
bro.
00:45:58 - Speaker 2: Now I’m curious, you mentioned trying to make
that process of starting from the raw and unfinished and messy and
moving to the more sorted out and organized, smoother, what sorts of
things in practice has that looked like for your product?
00:46:13 - Speaker 1: I think for us it’s being nonprescriptive about
how the tool works and really working on the primitives. So, Obsidian
has a point of view on malleability and extensibility that I think is
pretty unique. We try to get the basic things right like text entry,
just like even that problem is actually really, really hard just
actually making an editor that feels fast and responsive. I think a lot
of people get frustrated with other tools that just don’t give them the
feeling of they can type as fast as they want anytime and that basic
problem is one that we Retain as like one of the most important things
about obsidian.
And so there’s a handful of these things that are kind of like the
primitives like we think links are really important and being able to
quickly link between files is really important. We added a new primitive
with Canvas, which is like spatial relationships. But all of these
different aspects of obsidian, you know, the next priority is
extensibility. So the first priority is like let’s get the basic thing.
The basic experience as good as possible for 90% of the use cases, but
then everything else is a really long tail that is quite unpredictable
and very different from person to person depending on how they think,
depending on the kind of work that they do. Are they academic, are they
creative? Are they using PDFs all day long? Like what are they doing in
their actual workflow and how does the tool adapt to that? And so. We
just accept that we’re not going to be able to, you know, put all those
features into the app and instead what we’re gonna do is just make it
really, really extensible so that people can build those things on top
of Obsidian and take them in all the different directions that they want
and assume that basically there’s going to be very little overlap
between which specific plugins any given person is going to be using.
I think that I personally have an inclination towards making, you know,
these really well designed, opinionated tools that have like a way to
use them. Like that’s what I’ve done a lot of my life. But obsidian
has challenged me to really think the opposite way and say like, what is
core, what is something that everyone needs, and then what is everything
else? And recently, like AI has also been this kind of big interesting
topic that I think a lot of us have been playing around with these
different tools for chat GBT and so on to kind of use them inside of our
tools. Like right now there’s probably like 15 different AI plug-ins
for Obsidian, and they each have their own like little different take,
whereas if you look at some of the other products in the tools for
Though space. They’re each implementing it kind of as a first party
thing into their app with an opinionated point of view. We don’t have
an AI like first party AI integration right now partially because it
kind of conflicts with our privacy and values, but if you want to use
one of those tools, you can use any of the 15 different open AI
integrations that exist. And actually one of the things that I’ve been
enjoying is using Chad GPT to make plugins. So the other day I had an
idea for a plug-in inspired by someone on Twitter had created this
really nifty kind of prototype demo of a stream of consciousness writing
experience where the words fade out as you’re typing them, and it just
like is very immersive way of writing just like basically one word at a
time. And I thought that was so cool. I thought it would be an
interesting experiment to ask Chat GBT to make me an obsidian plugin
that does this, and it’s not perfect, but I was able to get to
something that basically replicated that, you know, within an hour. And
so that really speaks to the malleability of the software. Like, can you
take this thing and shape it to, you know, what you need as a tool for
your process, knowing that maybe your process is even going to change
over time, like over the next 5 to 10 years as you evolve as a person.
00:50:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s been really cool to observe the
obsidian community with the plugins. There’s so much cool stuff that
people have been trying. I’d be curious, is it your vision for plug-ins
that they’re mostly kind of content oriented versus behavior oriented?
So for content, I think of, you know, rendering basically and the
MySpace backgrounds and that sort of customization, whereas workflow
behavior, I could imagine something like every day you take all the
Check items from your to do list that haven’t been done and move into a
new document that you create with today’s date. Do you see both those
as being in play for plug-ins?
00:50:48 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, there’s literally
1000, I think we just crossed 1000 plugins for obsidian, and they do
everything under the sun.
If they don’t do something, if they’re trying to do something that we
like don’t have an API for, that’s something that we should add an API
for.
Um, so I would say most plug-in, at least half of the plugins do what
you’re describing. They’re workflow oriented, they allow. You know,
syncing from other systems, they allow, you know, pushing out to other
things to do lists like different view modalities for like Kanban or
dates or like all kinds of different things. So we try to make it as
open ended as possible as far as what plug-ins can do.
00:51:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and malleability is a big topic for the
researchers at I and Switch, and certainly something I know from a lot
of that research is that you do always have this trade-off as an
extensible as possible system like you’re describing.
If there isn’t an API for something, you should make it, but inevitably
that does mean that people are gonna try and do everything to the point
that the more extensible it is, the more easy it is to end up either
completely shooting yourself in the foot.
But perhaps a little less dramatically than that, deleting your data or
something like that is more like just this conflict between you install
these 5 different plug-ins, the whole interface gets really weird and
janky. Now they’re writing in with bug reports about like this button
doesn’t work right, but it’s because they installed some plug-in that
messed with it in some unexpected way, right? Famously, this is like the
difference between like Apple and Android, right? The iOS world is very
locked down. You want to customize it, we’ll let you change the
background or something, but that’s kind of it, so that they can make
sure that experience is really curated and always kind of, you know,
just works, so to speak, and then there’s the Android world which is
more open-ended, but then is more famous for being basically a little
bit janky. How do you think about that trade-off?
00:52:43 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely a trade-off. It definitely has
its downsides, but I think that There are for the most part too few
tools like obsidian in other spaces that give you that kind of freedom.
So I think it’s also a reaction to what most tools that people are used
to don’t have that malleability to begin with. So we’re OK with
carving out this section of the market where people can have a little
bit more freedom at the cost of, yes, you can shoot yourself in the foot
for sure.
The only thing that we can do is kind of provide the guide rails like
what we try to do, for example, we just recently completely revamped the
developer documentation. I mean, there’s basic things like how do you
capitalize the text on a button, you know, like because we’re
open-ended to plugins, like there’s different guidelines on Apple OS,
the interface guidelines say that you should always title case your
buttons, whereas on the Google interface guidelines it says it should be
sentence case, and those are. Just two different opinions that these two
different valid and viable and large platforms are choosing. So if
you’re a plug-in developer, which one do you use? Like there’s all
these like basic decisions you wouldn’t think about, but they make the
app feel less cohesive overall when you’re using it if people are
capitalizing their buttons in different ways. And so, There’s an effort
that we need to make, which is to kind of help developers have really
good defaults when they’re kind of building on top of obsidian and
guide them towards things that are going to feel intuitive and cohesive
to obsidian users while not limiting their freedom.
Similarly, we have to also make sure that if you’re a brand new
obsidian user and you’ve never used it before, that the kind of like.
Top level, it feels accessible that you can understand how this app
works, even, you know, with no plug-ins, it makes sense to you, but then
it has infinite depth and you can go as deep and crazy as you want, but
that that surface level is intuitive and inviting and accessible to most
people, and that’s a really, really hard thing to balance.
00:54:59 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is such a rich area, like
plug-ins, extensibility, programmability, cause there’s so many
variables that you’re dealing with, and at least with our current
technology, there’s no way to satisfy fully all deerra at the same
time. So you gotta explore the trade-off space and do the best you can
and try to push out the frontier. So yeah, I’m very excited to see that
you all are giving that a shot.
00:55:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I definitely like the idea of the core app
that’s sort of very cohesively designed and it has more of a top, top
down’s quite the right word for it, but it’s designed by one
organization that can, you know, for example, use the standard
capitalization on its buttons, but then there is a wider world or a
deeper world that you can go out to, but you kind of know when you’re
crossing from the relative safety into a bit more of the frontier.
We talked about this a little bit with. The creators of Raycast and
their plugin system and a lot of what they do is because there are so
many of their users and certainly obviously the developers are
developers and they can kind of work with them on the pull request and
their review process is less, telling them what they can and can’t do
and more saying, well, look, it’d be a bit more idiomatic or it fit in
better or I think our users would appreciate it more if you made these
changes, even potentially working with them on the code.
And then of course, obviously you’ve got something like Apple that has
this, you know, very heavy-handed and opaque review process, maybe
there’s something like the browser vendors with their browser extension
reviews are a little bit looser, but how do you think about that
curation of that official List that you can submit your lugging into, is
there really kind of strict guidelines? Is it more of a, you know, just
what you feel is best for the community or you really just trying to
filter out true malicious actors and it’s fine if it’s kind of
heterogeneous in terms of the style and approach.
00:56:45 - Speaker 1: Yes, so we do have some strict guidelines that
have to do with like security, for example, we will obviously like take
plugins out of the directory if they have malicious code or anything
like that. And so those guidelines are part of the submission process.
So we do check for that before we Include a plug-in in the directory.
All of the plugins for obsidian 99.99% are open source. And so there’s
a little bit of kind of community validation around that as well.
There’s certain principles that are important to obsidian, for example,
around privacy, so we don’t allow plugins to collect any telemetry data
within the app because we think that that is just part of the kind of
Set of values that we care about, you know, a different platform may not
care as much about that while still carrying a lot of extensibility, but
to feel native to Obsidian, it really needs to work offline and have
some of these principles built in. So those are the things that we
don’t compromise on where we’re saying no, you know, your plug-in
cannot be part of that directory. Actually, it’s almost never that we
encounter bad actors. I mean, maybe it’s just because we’re small or
the community that we’ve built is friendly and so on, but we don’t
really encounter that many plug-ins that really stray outside of those
guidelines. The next level is like more of a, I guess, of an editorial
question which is what stuff bubbles up to the surface if you’re
someone who’s brand new and is kind of asking the question, what can I
do with obsidian? That’s where things, I think we could do a much
better job and those are things that I’d like to work on over the next
few years is. How do we surface the realm of possibilities that is there
and right now, you know, the most like simple heuristic is just looking
at the number of downloads, like you can see that some plug-ins have
been downloaded way more than others and that gives you some sort of
filter on which ones are better than others. But I think over time, we
probably will get involved in curating a little bit more from an
editorial standpoint, not from a who’s allowed in, but rather what do
we promote, what do we want to showcase some of the interesting things
that people have built and the stories behind them and how they connect
to other different parts of the app. So I’m not sure if I’m answering
your question, but I think that that’s kind of like trying to find that
happy medium.
00:59:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, certainly being relatively niche,
having a relatively tight knit and friendly community is just a benefit
of if you’re either early on or just a, you know, an independent
software company that isn’t necessarily going for the mass market, you
know, now, nevertheless, I do think that those values like for example,
being able to work offline, that is something that is, you know, fairly
unique in this industry right now where cloud software is the norm. And
presumably someone doesn’t want to get in there and write a plugin for
a piece of software if they don’t have some, you know, vibe with the
core principles there, but I could still easily imagine as you grow,
having people come in and just say, well, yeah, of course I’m going to
access this. Cloud service because I can make a useful plug-in with that
and then you come back and say, well, actually this isn’t consistent
with our values.
00:59:59 - Speaker 1: Well, by the way, that’s not a requirement.
There’s lots of plugins like the open AI plugins, like there’s maps
plugins, there’s all kinds of plugins that communicate with cloud
providers like so we don’t prevent that, but we do prevent telemetry
data and we do require plugins to disclose when they’re using network
data and for what purpose. And so, The guidelines are fairly open ended.
Like people can really build things that heavily modify obsidian, and
we’re OK with that, but we do get involved in, you know, making
suggestions on the code when we review a plugin or developers will often
ask in our Discord channel, what’s the right way of implementing
something and you know, if it’s not already in our developer
documentation, we’ll work with them or try to improve the
documentation.
And then there’s kind of a more subtle question that I think we want to
work towards, which is what feels obsidian, like what is going to make a
plug-in intuitive to a user? It partially is the interface, partially
their expectations coming into what obsidian is like as a platform as an
ecosystem, and we definitely want to encourage.
You know, some developers, for example, are amazing at writing back end
software or dealing with like really complex data problems, but they
might not be as used to doing the front end part. And so when they go
about implementing the GUI part of their plugin, they just need a little
bit of extra help with the CSS or something, or what is the right kind
of approach to designing this UI for this plug-in. So, Those are things
that, I mean, we’re still early on, I would say, and how do we kind of
strive towards like making things cohesive um while still giving plugin
developers as much freedom as possible, but we definitely skew more
towards the freedom than the cohesiveness.
01:01:51 - Speaker 2: I’d love also to ask you about a feature you
launched pretty recently called Obsidian Canvas.
Obviously this one caught our attention since Canvas is a kind of
fundamental document type or infinite canvas or spatial canvas,
different terms for it, something that is sort of a predicate or a
foundation of our company, the idea that that’s actually a useful style
of a space for thinking, you know, I think it’s well established in
design tools, illustrator, Figma, etc. but that for.
Yeah, sort of a freeform exploration of ideas that a canvas actually is
a good space and indeed I think as we talked about with Steve Ruiz in
our episode on infinite canvases, I think that actually this document
type has potential application in a lot of places and software now that
sort of computers are sort of good enough to be able to render stuff on
canvases fairly reliably, but I’m curious what drew you to want to
create this feature and especially how you think of it as fitting in
with the otherwise spatial and Yeah, I’m not sure, abstract and
dimensional graph of linking that is the text-based knowledge graph that
is the core product for obsidian.
01:03:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I almost want to go in the opposite
direction, kind of answering the latter question first, which is
there’s a little bit of a why now, like why are canvas type of
Environments suddenly feeling so important and I think FIMA should take
a lot of credit for that because they found a way to make something that
did exist in Illustrator and other tools for a long time and make it a
little bit more accessible to everyone and I think part of that is they
figured out how to, you know, make a browser based infinite canvas that
was performing and Maybe it’s just the Confluence of these different
things happening at the same time that computers are performing enough
that we have, you know, technologies like in browser rendering engines
that are capable of displaying that, that it all kind of came together
at this point.
Where people who are not designers could interact with this type of
interface and get some value out of it, being able to pan around and
kind of understand this new way of working with files, even basic things
like, I think pretty much every candidate. This tool now has like hold
space bar to move around, you know, and that just is something that none
of these tools even bother to try to teach you anymore, but like when
you go into it, if you don’t know how to do that, you don’t even know
how to get around.
But now it’s becoming part of the muscle memory as a society that this
exists in the same way that like. Pin to zoom or something was this
gesture that no one was ever doing, you know, before the iPhone came out
and now everybody’s like pinch to zooming things all the time, or all
the text editor affordances right?
01:04:39 - Speaker 1: that we’ve all been copying and moving the
cursor. Around like all of these things somehow they make their way into
like the knowledge and with kids, a lot of my friends are having like
little babies playing around with these phones like it’s such a
fascinating thing to see how like, what an early age kids can start to
adopt these software features. It’s crazy. And so I think there’s
something about coming back to that idea of like messiness versus
polished kind of finished product. We need more. Ways in the software
world to be messy and canvases can be a place to be messy and to be
collaborative, and I agree with the notion that in the same way that
there are many different text input boxes all over your computer
everywhere, like so many things that you interact with are text entry.
Boxes you send messages, you send emails, you write in Google Docs,
you’re writing all over the place, but then there’s this other thing
of moving stuff around that for some reason has been less prominent in
user interfaces up until this point. So just the concept of taking a
thing and moving it anywhere on the screen. Seems pretty basic, but up
until now we haven’t had that concept be particularly pervasive, like
everything feels a little bit more locked in and like what you’re doing
on a really basic level is giving people a text form, text box that they
can move around and do stuff with or make a different color change in
different ways. You’re giving people a Two dimensional plane to work
with and what they do with that is pretty open ended.
I love working on these like very basic super super basic things because
the open-endedness of it creates the freedom that lets people take it in
all kinds of different directions.
As far as how it came to be with Obsidian, I think, you know, there was
this kind of demand emerging from our users that they were looking for
something like this, and I think that. It speaks to the variety of how
people like to think. Some people are very visual thinkers and some
people aren’t, and Because we want to provide this kind of breadth of
primitives inside of the obsidian ecosystem, we felt that it made sense
to build that feature in, and we came at it from kind of a sense-making
point of view. So I think a lot of the canvas experiences that people
have had in the past came from like UI design with Figma or something
like Mirro where they’re trying to diagram or mind map.
But we started from the point of view that you had these notes already
that had links within them and their text documents that sometimes can
be very long and have many references and many things that they’re
pointing out to. And what can you do with that? And how can you Extend
that with other types of content, like one of the features that we added
early on to Canvas was you can drag and drop a YouTube link in there and
it will do a nice embed for you.
It’s not just gonna give you like the YouTube web page, it’s gonna
give you like a video version of it that you can more easily set side by
side with a note that you have so that you can write in there. So that
canvas now becomes not just a place to Describe relationships visually,
but also to like create a little desk for yourself inside of like a
virtual space where you can make things small or big, and left or right
or up or down around what you’re trying to create in the same way that
When you’re working on a problem on your physical desk, you might lay
out different pieces of paper or, you know, pin them on a pin board or
draw them on a whiteboard and having that ability to go in different
directions, kind of on the X Y axis gives you a lot of freedom to
maintain multiple ideas at the same time.
What we didn’t expect was that it would be first of all, so popular, we
didn’t expect that people would love it so much and we also didn’t
expect that people would come to Obsidian first for the canvas, came for
the canvas and then started writing notes and then started to
appreciate, you know, Obsidian as a text editor too. So that was quite
surprising because We were designing it from the other way around from
uh your writing text, how do you take that text and extend it into a two
dimensional space, but the other way around also seems to be very
attractive to some people. How do you start with this messy environment
and arrive at, you know, maybe some finished text or some ideas that you
can then turn into something more polished. Which makes sense, we should
probably have thought about that all along, but it was a little bit more
of a surprise than we expected.
01:09:27 - Speaker 3: Now to our conversation earlier about plug-ins,
was canvases written as an extension, an expansion of core, or could it,
or was it even written as a plug-in slash if someone wanted to write
their own canvas today, could they do that with the current plug-in API?
01:09:43 - Speaker 1: So Canvas is a plug-in. Actually, most features of
obsidians are plug-ins, so you can turn off like a lot of the features
of Obsidian. You can turn off backlinks if you want.
Basically everything, you know, it just looks like a plain text with not
that much going on if you turn off all the plugins. You can even turn
off the file navigator, so you can really have like a very, very limited
in shell of an editor inside of obsidian.
So Canvas is a plug-in.
And there were a couple of different canvas-like things that existed.
For example, there’s a very popular plugin called Excala Draw. It’s an
implementation of Excala Draw for obsidian, so that is more of a, I
would say of a drawing tool than a canvas because It’s not meant to
embed media, but the author of the Excalaro plug-in also made one called
Excali Brain, which is kind of canvas-like, so you could definitely do
it, but this is where we did feel like it was important to have the kind
of canonical like first party version because it’s such a fundamental
concept.
And then, you know, because we are so focused on plain text and open
file formats, one of the things that we struggled with was there isn’t
an open file format that has mass adoption for Canvas files, so we
created one and opened it up and It’s still very early because we only
launched Canvas, you know, less than 6 months ago, but we’ve made the
type specification open. We’re encouraging developers to build on top
of it, and we even would love for more tools to adopt this file format
if they go on and make their own Canvas and a very basic JSON kind of
file structure that hopefully will be intuitive to any developers who
are trying to build their own canvas type of experiences.
01:11:30 - Speaker 2: And that part of it caught my attention because we
actually have a Muse bundle export format that’s almost the same thing.
I was quite struck by reading over it and because it’s almost obvious.
If you have a canvas, there’s these objects that have an XY position,
there’s the assets that are associated with it.
JSO is a natural choice, but yeah, at the moment there is really no data
interoperability between the canvases, even something simple like, yeah,
copy pasting a couple of boxes and a couple arrows out of a mirror into
a figma or vice versa usually doesn’t work at all or if it does work,
the data is just so.
Now, text editors, especially rich text editors are famous for not being
all that great at copy pasting between them, but at least there is some
sense that I can bring some bullet points, some headers, a chunk of text
from one kind of text entry application or box somewhere to another
one.
The canvases really have none of that, but now they are exactly as you
said, kind of having a bit of a moment in the last year or so. I’m
hoping that that is something that can become a thing and certainly
things like file format, compatibility for import export. I think copy
paste would be another one.
But also just even the UI primitives, as you mentioned, hold space to
move things around so that somehow the parts of the canvas that are sort
of the core of the primitive can be as similar and as transposable as
possible between these different products and these different domains.
01:12:58 - Speaker 1: And I think interoperability is something that is
such a geeky term, and I think that the geekiness of the term has in a
way limited its potential as something that we should strive for, and
it’s in opposition. This is where something like us being independent
and not VC backed allows us to make this like strong decision about
interoperability, but it’s almost aspirational because I think that.
The average person is so used to the lock in factor. Like you just
expect every tool to lock you in, which is so sad when you think about
it that you go into any other piece of software and expect that you
cannot open that same file in another tool. But you know, a lot of
obsidian users like to use obsidian alongside with it, you know,
completely different tool to edit the exact same file. You know, you can
have obsidian open and IA writer open at the same time and edit the same
file and see the same updates at the same time in both places.
And I think when it comes to something like Canvas, the possibilities
are so much broader about the types of things that you might want to do
in a tool that maybe doesn’t even visualize things in the canvas way,
but edits the position and content of a canvas like. A database viewer,
but then like behind the scenes, like stuff is happening on a canvas and
obsidian is where you look at the output, but the manipulation of the
data inside of it is in something that looks more like a spreadsheet.
I don’t know, but people could do whatever they want, but because the
Expectation from users is still kind of living in this world where
everything is siloed. I think it has limited the potential of what kind
of interfaces and tools people have built up until now.
Hopefully, like having this emphasis on interoperability could open up
some other tools that live completely outside of Obsidian that are not
plug-ins, but that are extensions to try and do things that obsidian is
never going to be good at.
01:15:00 - Speaker 2: So there’s a place to end. I’d love to hear
about where you personally and the obsidian team are thinking about the
next coming years. I know you have a public roadmap, but thinking a
little bit longer term. You’ve achieved a lot. People love the tool.
You’ve got the canvas feature now. What’s, you know, what’s your
bigger aspirations?
01:15:20 - Speaker 1: Well, you know, we’re 5 or 6 people. We want to
stay small. That’s one of the big priorities that we have as a
company.
So being small, one of the challenges is like we can’t do 10 different
things at the same time, so we have to pick our projects very
carefully.
We’re right now working on a bunch of metadata related things and I’m
pretty excited about that, but I think we’re gonna stay focused on
continuing to build on these primitives and just sort of.
There’s still quite a few areas that we want to improve when it comes
to the primitives and how different types of information, so like
tabular type of data, you know, facts and things like that, I think have
been less of an emphasis for us.
Up until now, we’ve been a little bit more focused on pros, I would
say. So how do we bring that into the tool as an area that we’ve been
thinking about lately. And so there’s quite a few things like that, and
that’s what you’ll probably find on the roadmap.
The other side of it is what I was describing earlier when I was asking
the question, what do we need to do to make these tools inviting for New
Year’s. I think that if we’re on this arc of And when I say we not
just the obsidian team, but everyone you involved who are building these
tools, how do we invite people into this realm and make these tools feel
intuitive, interesting, worthwhile to invest in? I feel like we’re at
such an early stage in that. I think that over the next 10 to 20 years,
I hope that. You know, hundreds of millions if not billions of people
will start to adopt these kinds of tools.
What does it mean to make these tools useful for the wider population
while still continuing to be able to provide the depth of experiences
and workflows that people want in the diversity of thinking processes
that people want to have.
So that’s probably the big challenge, which is Obsidian has something
like a million users today. What would it mean to have many more than
that? What would Obsidian need to look like to be able to do that, while
at the same time trying to managed to stay very small and like true to
our principles. So that’s the core challenge that we’re gonna be
working on for the foreseeable future.
01:17:31 - Speaker 2: That sounds like a very worthy challenge indeed.
Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. You can join
us in Discord to discuss this episode with me, Mark, and our community.
A links in the show notes. And Stefan, thanks for helping us all to
think better thoughts through Evergreen notes and breaking our ideas
down into objects, but especially just to try to see if we can use these
computers to help us all be better thinkers.
01:17:56 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me. It was really
fun.
0 min
January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: A theme that runs through all of this, whether
it’s a big company or a small team, is it’s really about building our
collective knowledge. We can extract all the most relevant pieces of
information from everyone’s domain and bring them together. From that
comes a plan that we all feel ownership for, and then when we go off to
do our heads down work, we’re working off that shared plan where we for
a brief moment, brief beautiful moment in time, we understood the
problem in a totality that no single human could.
Hello and welcome to Meta Muse.
Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t
about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind
it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And Mark, I
don’t know if I told you, but my Christmas gift was a used guitar,
acoustic guitar, and I’ve been blinking around on that, maybe not quite
at the same level as devotion as your piano studies, but I’m quite
enjoying it and I found myself reflecting on the tacit knowledge
revolution of YouTube theme that you’ve brought up multiple times on
this podcast because the last time I tried to play guitar, I don’t know
if it was in high school or something. And you would seek out these
COVID nuggets of knowledge from just people you would meet or whatever
and lessons were expensive and time consuming, but now you just go on
YouTube and there’s just tons of people who will just show you exactly
what you want to know at whatever pace you want in great detail. You can
watch it in slow motion if you want, you can rewind. That’s a really
incredible way to do self-learning, particularly if you’re not that
devoted to it. It’s just kind of a little side hobby when you have a
few spare minutes.
00:01:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s amazing what you can find on YouTube
these days. It’s so helpful. Now, for you, is YouTube the primary
source, or do you also do an app or do you do Zoom lessons?
00:01:56 - Speaker 1: There is a guitar tab app, you know, essentially a
tab is like the sheet music effectively for guitar. We can look up a
folk song or a popular song and find out how to play it.
Actually, our colleague Yulia, who plays the ukulele a bit, pointed me
towards that.
So that’s nice for learning a specific song, but it’s more about
technique, which is, OK, you know, I’d always got to figure it out with
like plucking with my fingers, but maybe, you know, playing with a pick
could be a good technique to learn, but when I try to do it, it sounds
terrible.
How do I do that? And again, there’s probably a conventional method of,
you know, you sign up for lessons or whatever, but I just don’t have
time, interest, whatever for that. But this very self-directed method of
I can just type into the YouTube search bar, acoustic guitar, beginner
strumming technique or beginner picking technique, and inevitably
there’s dozens of really high quality choices.
Well, I’ve got exciting news to share.
Muse for Teams is now in beta, so it’s open sign up. Anyone can go to
the Museapp.com/teams/signup page and you can pick a team and try it
out. And essentially this takes the thinking tool of Muse that we’ve
been working on for a few years, but adds these collaboration features,
what you would think of from like a Google Docs or a Figma with the
avatars and the cursors moving around the board. But we’ve had this in
kind of an alpha test with a small number of teams. The last 5 months or
so, and we’ve done quite a lot. I’ll link out to the announcement
there, everything from a new NavA and board Zoom and connection tool, as
well as all these collaboration features you expect like comments and
following and copying board URLs. So yeah, we’re really excited to
share that with the world and it was quite a lot of hard work by
everyone on the team, including both of us. So give ourselves a little
back pat for that and we’re looking forward to hearing what everyone
thinks.
00:03:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m really excited. This is one of the big
pieces in our long term puzzle collaboration, so excited to see it
finally land.
00:03:57 - Speaker 1: Indeed, yeah, I think we’ve often spoken about
that long term roadmap as the do the individual thinking tool on the
iPad first, then we go to the multi-device with kind of Mac and iPad and
the local first sync between them, and this is that next step, is being
able to collaborate with others when that’s appropriate.
And yeah, I’ll link out to the announcement post that has all the
goodies and screenshots and videos and everything like that.
But what I’ll direct your attention to for the purpose of this podcast
episode is there’s a whole sample workspace that’s included with the
new onboarding, and there’s also a templates button in the toolbar that
basically lets you add some templates, and if you were to click on that,
you would notice that all the entries are things that are around this
theme of planning.
And so, we’ve decided that based on how people were using the alpha,
that kind of narrowing the use case to or kind of a set of use cases
around the theme of planning or planning together with your team, is a
great place for us to focus.
It’s a place that Muse can. Be kind of best to breed even though it’s a
very general purpose app that can be used for a lot of things in the
collaborative space. We think that this planning realm is where we can
really excel, so we’re excited about that, but it naturally leads into
our topic today, which is planning. So, let me first pose the question,
as we always do, Mark, what first comes to mind when you hear the word
planning or planning your work?
00:05:27 - Speaker 2: Well, I certainly get a lot of emotional
connotations, as I’m sure everyone who’s worked in product development
does, but simply I would just say it’s the team discussing and deciding
what to work on in the future. What about you?
00:05:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think there is almost a knee jerk or an
immediate thing that comes to mind, which is basically long meetings,
listening to laundry lists of details about other people’s work that
isn’t really relevant to you and is kind of boring, and yeah, just this
really kind of nuts and bolts, just let me get back to work. Why do I
have to sit through this doesn’t feel like work, something like that.
Indeed, when we were first discussing on the team, whether planning is
something that we really wanted to focus and use collaborative product
around, there was some level of, I’m not sure what you call it,
groaning or yeah, folks have that same, I think visceral reaction that I
do in some ways, which is planning’s boring, and we don’t want to make
a boring app for a boring thing. Why in the world would we want to make
that be our big focus? And indeed I ended up writing a memo based on
reflecting on this called Against Boring Planning, again I’ll link that
in the show notes here, but when I stopped to think about it, it comes
down to the kind of good versus bad planning. If I can go for such a
direct value judgment there, which is planning your work as an
individual or together with a group, when it has these bad vibes, I
think it is because, so you’re not doing it right, and I have been on a
lot of teams and have had a lot of experience. that are like that and
reflecting back now, I think, OK, that wasn’t a good way to organize a
team’s work.
But when I think of the positive vibes and the good kind, let’s call it
good planning, you know, I think, OK, I’m getting together with a group
of people that I like, or at least I work really well with, to think
about what’s the next step in achieving a mission that I really deeply
care about, and we need to get into the difficult questions and the
trade-offs and think about what capabilities our team. Has to bring to
bear against the opportunities that are in front of us, which you know
might for a product team be as simple as, you know, feature requests and
bug fixes and things like that, and going into it and really hashing it
out and coming out of it with a sense not only of specifics like, hey,
we’re gonna work on this first and the second, but also who I’m going
to work with, what’s exciting about the projects and Just a sense of
being inspired because it makes concrete that next major iteration of
work again against a mission that I’ve signed up for in my career or
whatever team I’m on currently. And yeah, a great planning meeting is
honestly a really enjoyable and inspiring experience and I come out of
it thinking, OK, now I’m really excited for the work that’s ahead.
00:08:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the things I’ve learned, having
experienced a wide array of planning processes and outcomes is that
it’s a very a chemical process by which I mean in subtle ways it can go
very well or very poorly, and a lot of it has to do with inspiration and
motivation and interpersonal relationships and stuff. So it’s kind of a
subtle process. It’s very easy to wear a lens in which you only see the
mechanical stuff, you know, these tasks in this order and this
assignments and so on. But I think the key to good planning is getting
that alchemy right, and like you were saying, getting everyone motivated
and aligned behind the vision.
00:08:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there does seem almost like a, I use the
term working chemistry often, maybe we’ve talked about that in the
context of team building and recruiting and so forth, but yeah, there is
a special magic when you get the right people together, working on the
right problem and you have a good plan.
But it’s more art than science, that’s for sure.
Yeah, when I reflect back on my own career, for sure, I certainly
didn’t think that hard about it in the early days, but I think it was
at Hiroku where I really started to think in terms of management as more
of a first class concern, and the team was growing maybe more quickly
there than other teams I’ve been on in the past, and I did end up going
a little bit down the rabbit hole of say like agile methodology, which I
found interesting or codified a lot of things that I thought were good
about ways to work.
But I also got really into say like project management software. So back
then, yeah, you had probably Jira, there’s all kinds of different kinds
of ticket trackers, open source and commercial that often had like the
ability to do different kind of like timeline road mapping things and
Gantt charts and you could do burn down charts and you could do all
these things that seem to bring a kind of systemization to the work a
group of people was doing.
One that I remember liking was Pivotal Tracker, which was by a kind of a
consulting shop in the Ruby Agile world we were part of and was really
well made and encoded a lot of their processes, but using that product
actually was an eye opener to me because it really encoded their team’s
process and their teams. Way of doing things, which I think was good for
them, but maybe was a questionable fit for us and indeed even through
the course of Hiokku as the team scaled and as our needs changed and as
the business was more mature, we just needed very different things all
the time and so there was no one.
Kind of single process and certainly no one single tool, and especially
the more the tool encoded a lot of process and was really rigid and
structured like a lot of these project management software tend to be,
the more you’re forcing your work and your team’s shape into the
software that encodes this process.
Actually it was probably around that time I discovered Trello, which is
still, I think, a great piece of software for its incredible simplicity,
although I think to some extent the conbo boards built into GitHub
issues and notion end up competing with it, but at least that had a
certain simplicity, the swim lanes and the cards, and there’s a lot of
different ways you can use that. It’s more like building blocks that
you can use to develop your own team’s way of planning things.
So I think it was the whole Hirogu experience that really took me into
first of all, caring about this. As opposed to coming at it from the
crafts person perspective, which is like, I don’t want to think about
planning. I just want a process. I just want to get back to doing my
work and I saw what a big difference it made to, you know, if you’re
really all on the same page about what you’re doing, you just do a way
better job and you go faster and you make fewer mistakes and you waste
less work. And I started to care about it there, including the tools and
the processes. What were some of your early experiences with planning, I
guess, in the form that may have shaped how you think about it?
00:11:51 - Speaker 2: Well, at Rokku, I saw quite a range of both
company scales and teams, so I sort of bounced around within the
company, so I got a little sampling across both of those dimensions, and
I feel like that taught me a lot, and we can talk about some specific
examples if you’re interested. And then later at Stripe, that was a
larger company, so I got more experienced with more involved and
necessarily complicated planning processes, both because of the size and
because of the complexity of a regulated financial services business. So
I feel like I have quite the array of experiences to draw from for
better horse.
00:12:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Well, and if you want to consider
the low end of the scale there, you know, we started Muse, it was just
me, you and Julia. So, you know, we just kind of sat in a room and said,
hmm, what are we going to do? Well, how about this? I actually remember
that at my very first business, even long before Hiroku, we just wrote
everything we were working on on a whiteboard, the end, because it was
me and one other person, right? And that really worked great for quite a
while.
But I haven’t experienced that bigger scale. I think for me the
biggest, well, even company I’ve been a part of is around 100 people
and you know, you can debate. It’s probably more about when you say
team, does that mean the whole company? Probably not. You’re talking
more about the people you work with kind of directly day to day, but
you’re much more scaled up experience with Stripe, particularly I
assume by the time you left there and they were getting a big company.
I’d love to hear some more stories from that because that’s way
outside my realm of experience.
00:13:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, probably my most memorable planning
experience at Stripe was, it was towards the end of my, my time there,
and the company was getting bigger, solidly several 100 people plus, and
we were just starting to grapple with company-wide systematic planning
because the more informal and ad hoc processes that we had done were
sort of breaking down, especially with respect to visibility throughout
the company and dependencies, which are a big deal in a financial
services firm.
And so I ended up actually helping with this process whereby we did a
company-wide planning and there was a there was sort of a template. I
forget the exact form, but the basic idea is that a company had a vision
and metrics and proposed projects for the quarter or the half, I think
it was. And those were reviewed in several ways. Obviously the team
worked on a draft plan. They were also reviewed upwards, so like the
head of engineering or whatever would review engineering plans, but
there was also a pretty elaborate dependency management exercise where I
made a big spreadsheet. I think it had like 25 rows and 25 columns where
each row and column was a team, and if you created a dependency on
another team, so for example, if I was standing up a new payment method
we needed to work with the risk team to ensure that risk was
appropriately managed and the compliance team and the legal team and the
infrastructure team and and the country team and so on. And so you would
like fill in each of those cells in the spreadsheet and then the team
that was kind of receiving that dependency would have to review it and
basically sign off on it. It was sort of a forcing function because the
problem we were having was Basically, product teams and other teams were
quote unquote planning to launch a product and then like not telling
people who are impacted about it, and then be like surprised and payment
method or whatever.
Not only was that a surprise, but often these products will get stuck
halfway cause they didn’t have the full array of teams and support
needed to actually fully launch them, so it’s kind of worse than doing
nothing.
Yeah, and so we had this huge spreadsheet and teams would go by and
review and initially it was really bad because In accordance with kind
of the original problem statement here, a lot of the receiving teams
were like not aware of the dependency or didn’t believe they could
support it or thought it was too much to handle or was out of scope or
whatever, and so we had to iterate across the entire company on this
huge like 25 by 25 spreadsheet over the course of a few rounds, but it
eventually got much closer, like there’s a lot more green on the
spreadsheet, you know, people were aware of the dependencies and could
accept them and After that, we did some work and I hope that they have
continued to do some work to kind of remove the need to have so much
dependency management because the idea is, of course, that you don’t
have so much dependencies. But that one really stuck out at me as one of
our first big company-wide systematic planning exercises.
00:16:13 - Speaker 1: Wow, yeah. Also, I like you’re doing that on a
type of a canvas, which might hint a little bit of why we think Muse is
a good or canvas tools in general are potentially good approach for this
kind of work.
Yeah, well, the stripe example certainly reminds me of what I was
exposed to just a little bit, kind of, let’s say indirectly through at
Salesforce, and they had this kind of cascading top to bottom thing
called V2 mom. Which was similar in some ways to OKRs, the details are
different, but part of the idea is that, yeah, you need this cascade
where things can go, we tend to use the up and down spatial orientation
for, you know, senior management versus people doing the work directly,
but you need this thing where the top level people are away from the day
to day, but they also have maybe some of the longer term views on where
the market is going and what the business needs, and so you need to kind
of propagate information in both directions, and yeah, it is this whole
giant exercise of dependency creation.
And one thing that stuck with me from that time was, I was really trying
to design the Hiroku organization and now we were getting into this like
I don’t know, 75 100 people range where individual teams to kind of
have their own autonomy and dependencies could be kind of expressed
through APIs, but as much as possible, we try to just not create
dependencies because, you know, we all know from software development
systems that you want to keep your dependencies to a minimum.
But I have a very distinct memory of spending time with a fellow named
Jasper Jorgensen, who had come over from the salesforce side and had a
lot more experience working in larger companies, and I was kind of
articulating this to him and he said something that really stuck with
me, which is basically why did you join a company if you just want to
work independently on something. You wanna work independently, you know,
you could be a freelancer or a really small team. The reason to sign up
for a company or a major, you know, department and a company working on
a single product is you can do more with that larger group, but then by
definition you need those dependencies. The fact that Stripe, for
example, has to launch a payment means you need to also think about
Fraud, and you need to think about legal implications and you need to
think about all these different things across the business. That’s sort
of a feature. They can be big and do big things in the world and have
this global impact because of that, but the cost of that is call it just
coordination.
00:18:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and people like to, you know, dunk a little
bit on V2 mom or make fun of it because it’s a five letter acronym
comes from Salesforce, whatever.
But in fact, I think it’s actually pretty close to the archetypal
planning process. Like, regardless of how you do it, we’re going to
talk a lot about a lot of different techniques and kind of methods that
you can actually run the process with. I think most planning processes
need the following, the team needs a vision or a destination, call
whatever you want, but it’s where is the team ultimately trying to
get.
They need something like a strategy or values that is how are you
getting there? They need to determine what they’re gonna do. They need
some way to manage dependencies or obstacles, and they need some way of
measuring if they’re being successful.
And if you happen to read out B2 mom, I think it stands for vision,
values. Methods, obstacles, and measures, something like that, you know,
it basically maps correctly and even companies that don’t adopt such a
formalized and rigid process, they end up more or less there.
Uh, one thing I forgot to mention is you need the cross team dependency
management, you also need the up and down review and harmonization, and
that’s also part of the BTO process because they’re meant to roll up.
So you can kind of call whatever you want, you can make up your own
acronyms or keep it less explicit, but I do think that’s the basic core
of a planning process.
00:20:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, now I guess to contrast it, we’ve been
talking about these very big company, heavy-handed, lots of uh cascades,
vertical and horizontal.
In contrast, on a smaller team, like on the Muse team we’re 7 right
now, and It’s still just as important to plan our work to understand
where we’re going, to know how we measure success, to know how we’re
dividing things up, who’s working on what, who’s working with who, how
we can all help each other best, how our work depends on each other
either kind of in a technical sense, but maybe also just in a sequencing
sense it makes sense to do this thing first and this thing second.
And so, of course, it’s a much easier, and the easy is quite the right
word for it. You just don’t need to be so heavy handed. So if you take
the very far low end is the example I gave before my first business was
me and one of the person we sat in a one room office together and we had
a whiteboard and we just wrote stuff on it and that was kind of the end.
You know, a step or two up from that would be something like what the
news team does, where we basically have a weekly planning, what we call
a chapter planning, which is roughly 1 quarter where we look at bigger
picture things. We like to pair that up often with team summits where we
can either meet in person or really just like set aside a lot of time to
step away a bit from our day to day work. But it also includes, to me,
that kind of umbrella of planning includes something like strategy,
right? How are you tackling the technical challenges of, for example, we
chose to start with building device to device syncing because that was a
subset of the bigger problem of the multiplayer that we eventually
wanted to go to, that’s the strategy, right? And it also includes
something like retrospectives, which I think of as an end cap to a
project and I think are really important and again similar to the
planning upfront, whereas it is much about the energy and the
inspiration and the teamwork, a retrospective is not just about, hey,
did we achieve what we set out to do or some accounting of that, but
also a discussion of what worked for us, how did we feel and how can we
Do more of the stuff that feels good and works well and allows us to be
productive in the future and less of the other stuff. And so there’s
some combination of those things, right, planning and project proposals,
a strategy, kind of the big picture, quarter planning, the weekly
planning, the retrospectives on some regular cadence, um, that all of
that is. I guess it sounds like a lot of stuff, but you can do most of
that in a pretty straightforward way for a team as small of ours. It’s
not a huge amount of time, but it’s incredibly valuable time and also
time, I think I certainly and hope I speak for others, you know, enjoy
this time. We get to come up from our work, you know, the heads down
work, take a breather, look out at the larger vista, think about where
we’ve been, what we’ve accomplished, and where we want to go, and, you
know, get excited for what we might do next.
00:22:53 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and you’ve identified something that I
think is really important, which is a nested periodicity to planning.
So the most common period that teams will have is 1 week, some teams do
2 weeks. So that’s like one phase. Most teams also have something like
we have our chapters, which is once every 2 months or so.
Some teams have quarterly, big companies might have once every half.
Some teams have every day with stand up, and sometimes you have like
every year planning, especially around financials and then.
Typically every 34 or 5 years you have kind of a phase change where you
do a big reset and you talk about a new strategy and stuff, and I think
it’s important to have a variety of periods, and it’s important to
have a notion of cycling and change, cause if you just kind of go at one
speed forever, you never look back, it just doesn’t work well, you get
kind of stuck.
And even if you cycle weekly forever, you get stuck in your weekly
mindset. And so I think it’s important to have these different phases
where you’re accomplishing different things, your daily is very
tactical, it’s unblocking, whereas your big quarterly plan is stepping
back, it’s strategizing, it’s thinking about if you need to make big
changes. So I’m a big believer in having those periods, having them be
different, and having a sense of beginning and end, and resetting with
things like planning versus retrospective at the end.
00:24:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I really like your idea of like a rhythm or
a cycle. It almost sounds musical to me, which is something where
there’s a, or maybe even like the fact that we have cycles and rhythms
built into our lives through the rise and set of the sun and the week
versus the weekend and then something like the seasons or something like
the holidays and the year’s end. It sort of builds in these different
overlapping cycle sizes that are somehow it seems necessary or important
to human experience, something like that.
00:24:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah. So typically with kind of the core planning
around tasks, you need to understand what the possibilities are, what
you’re gonna work on, and who’s gonna work on them.
And so a lot of the mechanics stuff that we’ll be talking about is
basically how do you do that. So with the effort to impact Matrix,
basically anyone could suggest a project to work on, upgrade the postre
version or convert to the new backup system or whatever. And once that
was submitted to the team, the team would discuss where it goes on
this.
Two dimensional graph, how impactful is it to customers or if it was
internal facing to the team, and how much effort is it? And this is very
rough. It’s kind of like a 3x3 type thing, and having more precision
than that is probably false, and it seems very basic, but a, in the
process of Choosing where to place it, the team has to really chew on
the item.
Like, you gotta understand what you’re actually talking about, what the
benefits actually are, a little bit of what’s entailed, so that helps
concretize it for the team.
And my experience was that often it was kind of surprising where stuff
ended up like. There’s been this project you’ve been talking about
forever, and everyone’s really wanting to do it, and then you place it
on the Matrix and it’s like high impact low effort. Well, there you go,
that’s why I never did it because it’s just not really worth it.
00:25:54 - Speaker 1: I’m guessing you meant the opposite of that.
00:25:56 - Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, right.
00:25:58 - Speaker 1: High effort, low impact, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
One thing I like about the effort versus impact scale is another good
example of we’re using some visual thinking to lay something out is a
nice way to have a concrete discussion about it.
And I guess you can do something like story points or you can estimate
the number of days something is going to take or estimate the I don’t
know, percentage increase in active users or revenue you think
something’s going to make, but this all seems just way too specific.
Like that’s not the level of the discussion you’re having, but you
need to be more concrete than just like, I think this project is
important and will be hard or not hard, so that lets you take it a
little better and put a whole bunch of things together and kind of
compare, you can see where just things are grouped spatially in that
sweet quadrant.
And maybe there’s things in quadrants that are still high impact, high
effort that you actually have to do for your strategy or for other
reasons, but laying that out just creates a high level understanding and
a conversation on the team that I think you wouldn’t be able to have
just a like, I don’t know, a plain text list or something.
00:26:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and this question of to what extent one can
estimate a project is certainly a matter of debate.
I have a somewhat contrary opinion, which I think it’s actually pretty
possible to estimate engineering projects. It’s hard and it’s a skill,
but it can be done to a reasonable level of precision.
But yeah, even the low medium high is not bad.
One variant that I’ve used that does lean a little bit more on
estimation is basically having the team work together to draw up a
sequence, prioritized list of projects, and then as a separate exercise,
draw the line.
Now you can just eyeball the line and say, I think this is how much we
can do in a quarter, or you can actually go in there and estimate how
many weeks you think this will take and then add up until you get to 13
or whatever.
I’ve had pretty good luck with that.
Now the most character version of that is, don’t do this, is you have
the product manager write the sequence list, and you have the
engineering team write the estimates and draw the line. I say it’s
character because there’s some truth to that, like there’s some truth
to the engineering team as the best sense of how long stuff it’s gonna
take, and people who are spending more time with customers have a good
idea about what’s most valuable. But as I think we’ve been applying
throughout this podcast, a good planning process is collaborative and
energizing, and it’s not people telling other people what to do.
00:28:10 - Speaker 1: Exactly a theme that runs through all of this,
whether it’s a big company or a small team, is it’s really about
building our collective knowledge.
And if it’s something where the boss is just telling you what you’re
going to work on and you basically say, OK, or add a little detail,
first of all, that doesn’t sound like a great environment to work in,
not one that’s very inspiring, and I think for creative work, it’s
important to be sort of invested and feel ownership in that.
But secondly, it really is about the fact that there is knowledge in all
these pockets or in everyone’s domain.
So whether you talk about the vertical dimension of you’ve got company
leadership who has big picture strategy and markets and you know, what
do we need to do to raise financing or These kinds of things in their
mind, you’ve got something like product managers who are maybe or
support people who are close to customers and know their pain in a deep
way that others on the team can’t, engineers who know what’s possible
with the technology, not just how difficult something is in the sense of
like how long is this project going to take, but also just in the sense
of Yeah, what the technology can do, and you need to put all of those
things and others together to get this like shared brain, shared
understanding of all the elements of the business.
And that can be very hard to do because yeah, we all even in some ways
speak different languages or have different subsets of jargon for our
different areas.
We’re at different levels of zoom on the business, but bringing it all
together and to me a good planning session, and again, I’m using that
kind of as a theme that cuts across all these things we’ve talked about
like weekly or quarterly. A big part of it is for a moment trying to see
if we can extract all the most relevant pieces of information from
everyone’s domain and bring them together, so no one’s telling anyone
else what to do. We’re creating a shared understanding from that comes
a plan of what to do that we all feel ownership for and then when we go
off to You know, do our heads down work or go into our craft, we’re
working off that shared plan where if we for a brief moment, brief
beautiful moment in time, we understood the problem in a totality that
no single human could do.
00:30:20 - Speaker 2: Another technique I’ve seen that leans into this
is embracing individual excitement about projects, so you might start by
having Any candidate projects be pitched, and a pitch is like a new
board or a one-page Google Doc, something like that, you know, it’s a
little bit more than just a project name, but it’s not meant to be
heavyweight, and that’s meant to be.
Exciting and energizing to the team. So you write out this document,
perhaps you review it beforehand with the team. Perhaps you even do some
one on one discussions to get some initial feedback, and then you
basically pitch it during the planning process, and then you can
complement that by using people’s excitement about a project to
determine what to work on.
So the most pure form of this would be basically, you put a bunch of
these pitches on a new board and people put like emojis for their
avatar.
Next to 3 of them that they’re really excited about, and that could be
their excites they want to work on it, they’re excited, they think it
would be good for the company or, you know, some amorphous combination,
and I don’t think you want to use that as like the only mechanism, but
I like you were saying, there is information there, whereas certainly if
no one’s even willing to write a pitch for something, but also if
someone is excited about it, but they don’t want to work on it, you
know, and no one’s excited to work on it, that’s also a data point.
Mm. And you can kind of mix and match these techniques, so you could do
the effort versus impact to get some candidates and then have people
self selecting what they’re excited about, and then you might have some
that are empty, even though they’re high impact low effort, you might
have some there people are so excited about, so you kind of dig into
that and combine the methods like that way.
00:31:56 - Speaker 1: I’m just such a huge fan of driving projects on
what people on the team who have the right contexts, right? If you’re
brand new on the team, you basically just need to be handed something
because you don’t necessarily know what to be excited about. But once
you do have the context, the thing that you are driven to do, you’re
going to be able to do that at both a level of quality and motivation
and instigation energy that is just different from something that’s
sort of assigned to you.
One little anecdote I have on that actually does come back to the Hiroku
Department of Data, which is that was essentially formed when Peter Van
Hardenberg, who now runs Ian Switch, he’s been a podcast guest in the
past. He was an engineer working on some elements of the Roku system,
and he kept coming to me to complain. I think our database needs a
complete overhaul. Our database product is absolutely critical. People
care about their data so much, it’s key to the scaling of the app.
The product we have is not very visible and you know hard to work with
and not very scalable, and he just sort of kept complaining about this
and I kept basically saying, OK, you know, pitch me on a proposal for
what, how this could be different, and eventually that kind of man on
fire energy in him, he just couldn’t take it anymore and basically kind
of in an entrepreneurial way.
Came up with a proposal for what this could look like to have a separate
team that’s dedicated to this, a product that is even sort of branded
separately, has kind of an identity that’s almost a little separate
from the Haruku core platform, and he went on to lead and grow that team
and build what is honestly one of the best parts of the product.
I know lots of folks who use just the database and even the rest of it
in some cases, and obviously we use the whole Hiroku platform as well as
the Hirou postgras database for quite a lot of our muse work and yeah,
it’s really something special, but they don’t always go that way.
But in my experience, the best things come from, yeah, the people who
are going to work on it are also the ones who are really driven. To do
so, rather than the boss identifies this as a business need, they
identify this person over here has the right skills, they say, I think
you should work on this, and then that tends to be a little bit more
work a day.
00:34:12 - Speaker 2: Yep, this reminds me of another tool for the
toolkit, if you will, which is trying to convince one other person or to
get a lieutenant.
What I often see is, especially managers, they want the team to do
something, and then they tell or try to convince the team. Well, teams
don’t decide things, individual people do.
So advice I often give is if you want to do something or you want
something to change, try to convince one other human being that that’s
a good idea.
And often people really struggle with this, and it’s a sign that they
haven’t, you know, fully contemplated their situation, and that can be
used by manager, but it can also be used by an individual.
An individual wants the team to change in this way, I want the team to
take on this project. You just convince one of your teammates it’s a
good idea. That’s really going to encourage you to flush it out, to
strengthen the idea, and once you’re successful, now you have an
advocate who’s working to spread the word on a team. So it seems so
simple, but I’ve often seen it work really well.
00:35:08 - Speaker 1: I’m reminded of this little video from years ago,
I think it’s called Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy, which is
really all about that exactly what you said, getting that first other
person who’s with you, and that that’s the start of all of it, or of
doing anything big or anything great. So yeah, I love that approach.
And you also mentioned kind of related to the finding one other person
to convince or to work with you on it. You mentioned the project
proposals or the pitch and what form does that take? And to me this is a
key part of how I think of the muse way, both in the sense of how our
team works, but also what potentially the Muse collaborative product, why
it is useful for this kind of planning and strategy work, which is You
can sit there and say, OK, I’m really driven to work on a database
product or do something within our company that I think we should do,
but what actually does that mean? And you can describe it in some words,
you can, you know, write a few lines in the Slack channel or something
like that.
Very often I find, I say, oh man, we should just do this. It’s so
obvious it’d be great. And you know, you write three lines about it and
the people who I expect might understand what I’m saying are kind of
like, huh, I mean, Like I trust you, but what? And that additional level
of detail, whether it is, yeah, Google Doc, a notion page, something
like that, and of course we think a new board is a really good place to
do that, but something where it is fleshed out in more detail in the
sense of like, here’s what it could look like, here’s some goals we
might have, here’s some things we maybe are not trying to do. Here’s
some inspiration we’re taking.
Since at least for me, very often I get inspiration from looking at
maybe a product in another domain that solves a problem in an
interesting way and I go, oh, you know what, we could do something
similar to that in our product, and that would solve this long standing
problem we’ve had or customer request we’ve had or whatever. And so
putting those things together and it seems so obvious in my mind, but
you know, other people don’t have the contexts that I have.
But if you can just put that into a little bit more detail, a couple of
pages or a board that explores it a little bit. Now you have something
concrete to talk about and indeed this project proposal we have a
template built into Muse for that, but I think there’s a lot of
different ways to do it. But the key thing is that planning isn’t you
show up and say, huh, so what should we work on? Let’s throw out some
ideas, you know, it’s actually having some developed ideas that you can
look over, contemplate, discuss in smaller groups, and then come
together and kind of compare in various ways, including something like
the effort versus impact matrix.
00:37:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and with these pitches or proposals, I think
it’s critical to make concrete what the customer is going to see,
whether that’s an external customer or an internal customer. It
doesn’t need to be at a very fine level of detail or refinement, but it
needs to be concrete and it needs to be through their eyes.
So easy as an engineer to write. Like we’re gonna make a new API or
we’re gonna make a new feature. What is feature, you know? Show me like
3 little screen mockups. User clicks here, they see this text box, they
press enter, it takes them here, and it could take you like 5 minutes to
draw all that, but it’s so much more concrete when you have that. and
relatedly, I think it’s critical, assuming you’re doing a project and
not like an ongoing program, unless you really know what you’re doing,
you should be doing a project, it needs to have an end. How do you know
when you’ve finished and how do you know that it’s worked? Ideally
with some sort of metrics. Again, I’ve seen so many proposals where
it’s basically a direction and not a thing to do. So in order to be
done, you need to know what the definition of done is. So if you explain
what the customer is going to see, when you know you’re done and how
you know it works, you’re basically gold and everything else is gravy.
One format that I really like is the Amazon working backwards format
where you actually write a blog post of what the customer is gonna see,
and I like this because it actually forces you to confront some really
important things. What’s it called, what’s the name? How is the
customer going to be introduced to it? Like where are they going to find
it? What’s the entry point and what does that initial flow look like?
And the best of these are done with like concrete examples. So if
you’re using the example of AWS introducing a new API, you’re actually
show a call request, you know, you can post V7 slash servers and you get
an EC2 box or whatever. But then doing that again, it seems so simple,
but you’re grappling with, oh wait, what are the parameters here? What
are the different scenarios I need to consider, how does it affect
pricing, things like that, how does it relate to other products in the
suite. Another thing that, especially for internal stuff that I often
see is with respect to other internal efforts, does this replace or is
in addition to existing stuff? So oftentimes I see these proposals that
are proposal to migrate to a new system. Well, critically, does your
definition of done include shutting down the old system or not? And you
have a reasonable plan for getting there, including a metric that tracks
it all the way to zero. But again, the specific format isn’t as
critical as I think adapting the customer’s viewpoint, what are you
gonna do, how do you know when it’s done.
00:40:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the press release driven development, I
think I’ve heard the Amazon method called sometimes.
I’ve also heard a variation on that, which is read me driven
development, maybe for more developer focused thing, but really if you
have to write, not the real documentation or the real blog post or the
real press release, but a mockup of it where you’re explaining. Yeah,
what it looks like, what it’s called, but especially critically to me
there is just what’s the benefit? Why do I care? Right? And it’s very
easy and especially if you get into something that’s infrastructure
related or optimization related or something like that, but there are
almost always is a benefit to the end.
User somewhere or if you can’t find that, then maybe this project
isn’t worth doing.
So sure, the project is actually replaced the caching layer with a blah
blah blah blah blah, but the benefit to the customer is this thing that
you do all the time is now twice as fast as it used to be. And that’s
great because XYZ, right, or it’s more reliable in these situations, a
lot of people have reported frustrations when in this moment they get
these certain errors or it goes slow. That won’t happen anymore because
of this change.
00:41:22 - Speaker 2: Now, this talk about pitches and proposals and
pre-planning artifacts, it kind of raises the question of who does that
and when. So the failure mode that I’ve seen here is if you’re running
a team at 100%, everyone is always booked all the time with tasks from
Jira or whatever, you come to the planning, people are exhausted and
they have nothing prepared. They don’t even have the mental headspace
to think about it. So I think you need to create space one way or
another for this sort of work to happen now. Listeners of the podcast
will know I’m a very big fan of Slack, and this is one of the many
reasons why it’s helpful.
00:41:59 - Speaker 1: If the team is running at say 80s, the concept as
illustrated by a management book we go both like rather than slack the
group chat product.
00:42:04 - Speaker 2: Yes, correct, thank you. So if the team is running
at, say, 80%, you might say, oh, we’re wasting 20% of our time. Well,
for a lot of reasons that’s not true, one of which is now you have some
time to think and write out the stuff, and it might even be worth
scheduling a block of time, you know, schedule a week for someone to
research, scope out, sketch out, gather feedback on an idea. This is one
of those things where it’s go slow to go fast, it’s an investment that
really pays off.
00:42:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the technique we end up using on the Muse team
is something where we have these sort of team summit weeks that are the
break between our, again we call them chapters, roughly quarter time
period where we typically are still doing work on the app, fixing bugs
and There’s always stuff like that to do, but we try to as much as
possible, have wrapped most of the big projects, have plenty of space,
like explicitly in that week, you’ve got 50 to 70% of your time is
slack and your Expected to spend that on project proposals, but also
other kinds of just thinking and high level reflection about like
what’s really working here, what are the big gaps, what is it that
we’re excited to do in the future, what are we worried about and often
that manifests in the form of project proposals, but it could also be
something like a deep dive into, OK, we have all this technical debt in
this area, or let’s do an honest assessment of this whole.
Part of the product has been this way for a long time, but actually I
think there’s some problems here. I don’t know what the solution is,
but I think we should think about it.
That kind of more open-ended thinking and higher level thinking, you
just need the space for it, and we try to explicitly make that in a time
when basically the whole team can be in that headspace at the same time.
I’m curious how far that would scale, probably not super big, but it
certainly works well for a team our size.
00:44:00 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it’s not just wall clock time
but like headspace that you need. So I think we’ve even done it where
the week before you start to create that space like you’re not taking
any big new projects, you’re working on smaller projects, you’re tying
off loose ends, you’re doing bug fixes. And maybe you take Friday off,
you’re starting to build up some distance and perspective, so you can
have reasonable things to say going into the planning and maybe even
starting to prepare some of those artifacts. Again, this is embracing
the periodicity and every week not being the same.
00:44:31 - Speaker 1: One other principle that I think is embedded in
some of what we’ve been talking about is the relationship between
planning and a planning meeting.
And I think a version of it that doesn’t make that much sense to me is
thinking that the planning meeting is all there is to planning, and that
is the thing that probably tends to produce, first of all, very long
planning sessions where it takes a lot of time to get on the same page,
which can, especially if your remote team can lead to zoom fatigue and
all that sort of thing.
But I like to think of planning as a session.
And obviously the what you’re kind of planning for the scope of what
you’re thinking about if it’s a you just finished a huge research
project, for example, thinking of something like the research work on it
and can switch where we have multi-month projects or even longer, and
you want a lot of time. To think about what you’ve learned and how you
can improve in the future and then what’s going to be next, whereas
obviously a weekly plan, you don’t need a ton of time for that. You
have the context already, you’re just kind of organizing the tasks for
the week ahead.
But regardless, I think the session is a super set of the meeting. And
for me, the meeting ends up being, I guess the ideal world is sort of an
end cap, and depending on how good you are at Assync and the tools
you’re using and how much shared context you have and so forth, the
planning meeting can largely be a matter of Reviewing what you’ve
already kind of explored through some kind of asynchronous or
documentation system and basically say, OK, yeah, I think the plan here
is obvious, we all agree, let’s look each other in the eye and commit
to what’s ahead and we feel great. Let’s go, and it can actually be
pretty short in some cases. Now, not always, sometimes you dig into it
together and things come out with a higher bandwidth of, you know,
conversation and Especially if through even just emotional resonance,
you see that there’s something unresolved and you need to dig a little
deeper. So a planning meeting can be very important, but to me, the
planning session is the superset of the planning meeting and all the
other work you do around it.
00:46:35 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. And remember, at least in a larger
organization, you’re gonna have an iteration around reviews and peer
team checks and dependency checks, so it’s definitely gonna take some
time and remember that some of our best and most important thinking can
only be done when we’re asleep.
So if you try to do it all in one shot, you are almost by definition,
not gonna be successful.
Now for like a weekly planning. You can do it in one shot, but for
things that are like what we call a chapter, which is maybe 2 months,
quarterly, certainly longer than that, I think at a bare minimum,
you’ve got to separate the time where you initially read on the
proposals and when you discuss and decide.
I like what we do at Muse where we have like 3 phases, there’s you’re
generating and reviewing the proposals asynchronously as they’re being
accumulated in the news board. And then you have a discussion section
where you basically chew on the proposals together. People present about
them, you ask questions, you know, you poke at them a little bit, talk
about the impact and the feasibility, and then go to sleep, wake up, and
then you have a decision time, which is a separate third thing, and you
know, takes some time for sure, but I think there’s a real benefit to
that.
00:47:48 - Speaker 1: You know, I think it’s one of those things where
the time spent up front can save you a lot of time from going in the
wrong direction, not being on the same page, and just the frustration of
working across purposes with your colleagues or having a bunch of your
work thrown away because you just literally misunderstood each other or
didn’t generate that collective knowledge, that shared understanding
correctly or well enough.
So I do think of it as something that is a small investment, and we
don’t want to spend our whole lives thinking about planning the work
because We need to go and do the work.
Indeed, that should be the bulk of the time that we spend, but the
difference between, for example, those three sections you just talked
about that we’ll do for the longer range planning, in the end, that’s
probably around 3 to 5 hours.
Which maybe could you cram it all into like a 2 hour meeting and just
try to make it happen that way, probably, but I think the benefits over
the course of the coming months or quarter as you’re able to be on the
same page, that consensus about how things are working have previously
dug out what some of the risks or potential complications are, is just
pays so many dividends.
Now when it comes to these longer term plans, yeah, quarter or half a
year or even a year, how do you think about the fact that, you know,
plans naturally change over time or can change, or do you think it’s
important, especially with a larger group that you really make your
plan, you commit to it and you don’t deviate from it unless you really
have to. Or do you think of something as a plan, as something that can
sort of morph and change throughout the course of the time period it
represents?
00:49:28 - Speaker 2: No, I think your plan can and should evolve over
the course of the period, but I think that should be a deliberate act,
because remember, a big part of the plan is having people aligned, and
if you change direction without kind of telling people and agreeing on
it, you’re gonna defeat the purpose.
I also think it’s important to note. And like a durable append only way
when the plan changes or your actions or metrics don’t meet the plan
for some reason, because when you go back and do your retrospective in
your next planning session, and you’re definitely doing retrospectives
as part of a healthy planning process, you need to take in that data to
understand what happened, what was surprising, what went wrong, what
changed, so you don’t have the same thing happen again in the next
cycle.
This also becomes more involved. We have a larger organization, you’re
dealing with dependencies and alignment up and down the staff. They’re
a change in plan or a metrics miss or a goal miss that needs to be
flowed through, basically a whole many process again where it’s
reviewed and it’s flowed out to the relevant teams.
00:50:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, because our work all affects each
other. I mean, it should. That’s why we’re all here working together
on something and you know, you don’t necessarily want to deliver bad
news, so it turns out this is harder or impossible than we thought, uh,
or it’s going to take longer than we thought or has these additional
risks or complications, but you certainly, it’s important to share
those things if they’re real and true because they are going to have
all those ripple effects.
A phrase I like to kind of have in my mind is, when in doubt, revisit
the plan. And I think there’s sort of twofold things. If you get into
it, you know, you make your big plan together, everyone’s excited, this
is going to be great. You get a little ways into it and just the reality
is sometimes. You discover new information that you really couldn’t
have only have gotten by trying to do whatever the thing is you’re
trying to implement an algorithm or do a design or I think it was
something like a home improvement project where you know, classic and
like an old building or an old house, you go to open up the wall
thinking you’re going to install some new electrical thing and then
there’s something completely unexpected in there that’s different from
what was in the blueprint or something is rotted out or whatever and
yeah, you just discovered something new and very relevant that will have
a material impact on what you’re trying to accomplish.
But one of the reasons I like to have that, you know, doubts mean
revisit the plan is that you can either one, take that new information
and as you said, flow it back through the plan and the people and
everything that’s affected and make sure that the updates happen in a
way that allows you to avoid wasted work and confusion.
But also sometimes the other thing happens, which is you get in, you’re
in the nuts and bolts the day to day of it, you’re not thinking about
the higher level thing, finding some doubt or getting lost in there
somewhere, looking back at the plan is often like, oh, actually, you
know, we thought through all this already when we were in a more zoomed
out mode, we actually already anticipated this. We had Basically baked
that into the plan and we just lost sight of it a little bit because the
day to day. So either way, whether you realize there’s information that
needs to be reincorporated into the plan or actually your plan is good,
you just sort of forgot some of the higher level details because you
were absorbed in the day to day. Either way, coming back to that plan
will restore the clarity and help you get back on track.
00:52:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and it’s interesting that you mention
risk.
I think strong project managers actually really lean into this. I like
the information theoretic lens of project management and with respect to
risk that means Really the game is to get risk to zero. So if risk is in
fact zero, you just turn the crank and you win at the end. And the way
you can operationalize that is to identify your, your biggest and most
important risks. As early as you can and then systematically eliminate
them, you know, confirm that they’re in fact not an issue or surface
that they are in fact an issue and why and address it. So often you’ll
see in planning templates there’s like a risks section, and if you
successfully identified the risk, that’s already half the game because
then you can get out in front of it and start tackling them.
00:53:37 - Speaker 1: I agree the risk orientation mindset is a good way
to go about doing at least the kind of work I like to do, which tends to
be in more innovative products, yeah, startup or startupy type things.
The fact that they’re not well known is exactly where the opportunity
is. I always was surprised years ago when I learned that venture capital
is venture is basically short for adventure or shares the same route.
And it’s the idea that, you know, I think of doing a startup or some
kind of innovative product as being a bit like an explorer that’s
setting out in an unknown continent and wants to find something, reach
the ocean on the other side or whatever. And You can’t know what’s
there.
That’s actually the whole point.
That’s the whole reason you’re there is to explore and the
opportunities that that presents, but that also means that you can sit
there and go, well, you know, maybe there’s snakes, maybe there’s a
mountain in our way, maybe we’re gonna run out of food. These are to
work in your plan and plan around and that’s just part of the
experience.
So risk as kind of a desirable quality in the sense of that is the other
side of the coin of opportunity of working in a new space.
And we’ve mentioned retrospective a few times. Do you want to briefly
say kind of how we think about those and why we think they’re
important?
00:54:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, in terms of why they’re important,
we’ve been alluding to it throughout this podcast, but there’s a lot
to be learned from the work that we’ve already done, and it takes some
effort to actually surface those things and to process them as a team.
These things are often stuck in individuals’ heads. Often people don’t
even realize that they’re there, you know, the individuals don’t even
realize that they have these facts or emotions.
So retrospective is a process of getting that out and metabolizing it as
a team.
And in terms of how to do it, we could talk about a lot of specific
techniques. But as with planning, I think there’s a basic architecture.
There’s understanding what happened factually, which sounds like it
should be easy, but with big complex teams, often it’s not. How do we
feel about it, you know, it’s a good, bad, and so on, and what do we
want to do as a team as a result of this information? I can give you an
example, concrete retrospective process. So we would do this on a
canvas. Actually, I think we did it on like the Google drawing program
back in the day, and the first phase would be, you would like draw a
timeline. Where the left is the start of the quarter and the right is
the end of the quarter, for example, and then people would just like put
stuff on a timeline that actually happened. They would like go back and
look at their calendars and look at their emails, and look at the blog,
and see, OK, this is when we launched this, this is when we got this
page of duty alert, and these are other things that happen throughout
the quarter. That’s the what actually happened face. It’s quite
important to have all that raw material out there.
00:56:28 - Speaker 1: And I think even just visualizing it that way or
zooming out and looking back, you might actually realize things just
from that, which is you go, you know, this 3 week period here was full
of like we had these 3 incidents and this thing happened, it all stacked
up at once. Everyone was stressed out and upset around that time, and at
the time, maybe I was feeling. Just hypothetically here I’m saying like
I was feeling like I wasn’t doing my job well or feeling bad about
myself, and I look back at this now and I go, that was a tough time. So
actually, you know, there’s a reason we’re feeling that way.
00:57:03 - Speaker 2: And this leads naturally to a phase two, which is
like the the reaction phase.
So one way we did this would be make a new Google drawing document, and
anyone can put items in the document to represent things that we should
start doing, stop doing, or keep doing. So maybe we want to start
doing.
Have a more robust on-call cycle with backups and stop doing is
deploying on Fridays, and keep doing is using page of duty for learning,
you know, but the idea is that anyone can put stuff that they want, and
then also people can put like reactions basically, like I really like
emojis, but you can also do votes or comments. And you let the emotional
state of the team emerge organically, and very often it’s the case that
there’s a handful of things that like really resonate with the team,
things that they want to do differently based on their experience and
what they talked about in the previous phase.
And then in phase three you consolidate that as a team, you discuss the
timeline and the start stop, keep doing ideas, and if it’s appropriate,
you sort of commit as a team to making those changes going forward.
00:58:11 - Speaker 1: The emotional component of it, I think is really
important. Obviously, there’s a pragmatic thing here, we did this
thing, it didn’t work, we should do something different.
And in the end, the goal of all of this is to execute better the team
and ultimately be a more successful business, but I think that treating
it almost as a bit of a group therapy to not only tease out maybe
potential conflicts between team members or potential good working
synergies between team members, but also how people feel, it’s almost
that can surface things that we haven’t yet been able to really
rationalize or think about in our.
More intellectual parts of our minds.
And so if you pull out, several people are feeling bad about this area
over here, but none of them can really quite say why. Maybe they
haven’t even said anything about it because they don’t know how to
talk about that, but if it’s just like several frowning emojis, and
then you go, OK, there’s something here, assuming as I’m going to,
that you have a team of people who are invested in the work, they want
to, you know, bring They’re feeling emotions about their work because
they’re there to do great work and help achieve the overall mission,
then those feelings very often, particularly if there’s some resonance
between or some similarity between people on the team that can point to
something that maybe you haven’t fully exposed yet through your more
rational approach.
Yeah, I’m a fan of the Orin Taich, one of our Haruka colleagues
approached retros, which is there’s 3 sections. And maybe the way he
phrased it was probably something like what went well, what didn’t go
well, and what are some things we can do in the future. And the idea
there, of course, is not to assign blame or praise exactly, although it
can be a good moment to celebrate wins and things like that. It’s just
to observe and to again establish some both facts, but also feelings
about what actually happened. And have some shared understanding about
that and potentially turn that into action for the future. But even if
you don’t have an obvious idea of like what to do about a problem, you
know there’s a problem if it keeps coming up in retros again and again,
that’s gonna allow people to think about it more directly and indeed
may even feed into those project proposals for a future quarter of work,
for example.
01:00:30 - Speaker 2: And I like that one shot style that is just go
right to what went well, what didn’t, what to change, that sort of
thing. I think that’s appropriate for like a weekly cadence, that’s
basically what we do at Muse, for example, and then I think a more
elaborate process basically like multiple phases of a deliberate
information gathering phase, a deliberate team commitment phase is
appropriate for the longer cycles.
01:00:54 - Speaker 1: Actually, I can switch, we certainly did more
substantial project retrospectives for the whole project, but then when
we kind of at the end of my run as the lab director and when I was
handing things over to Peter Van Hardenberg and it was going to be just
a natural kind of change of the eras, I ran a retrospective process that
lasted basically. week where we broke into smaller groups and did small
group retros on particular areas and then we found ways to kind of
combine those all together and get some overall points of view and
because at that point, you know, the team was relatively big and we
wanted to kind of capture all that knowledge, but hard to just do it in
all one big kind of synchronous session. And that was just incredibly
illuminating for me even though I had been there from the beginning,
obviously as one of the founders of the lab. I’d been there from the
beginning and through most of the projects and felt like I had a lot of
visibility and everything, and I probably did, but still the number of
interesting learnings that surfaced as a result of that, yeah, it was
just such well spent time.
01:01:59 - Speaker 2: And this is reminding me that like with planning,
it’s not enough that everyone knows. Everyone needs to know that
everyone knows. And with these emotional things around retros, that’s
often the issue. Everyone kind of knows that something is wrong, but
they don’t have words for it, and they don’t realize that everyone
else feels the same way and they don’t understand that the team is
committing to addressing it. That’s what the retrospective is meant to
address.
01:02:21 - Speaker 1: And I think you’re talking about the difference
between what’s usually called shared knowledge and common knowledge.
There’s lots of things that quote unquote everyone knows, but if you
don’t realize other people know it or think the same thing, that really
changes how you interact with the group.
So yeah, again, bringing that all out comes back to this collective
knowledge and just shared understanding of what we’re all doing here,
how we work together.
Yeah, what the point of all this is, we have to think about, we don’t
need to all think in lockstep, but there needs to be some moments where
we do form that collective understanding.
That’s what allows us to be really effective as a team.
Well, as a place to end, I’d like to talk about the potential curveball
that remote work introduces to everything we’ve been talking about here
around planning. And I think a lot of our anecdotes here from Rokku,
Stripe, and others are largely office space culture companies. But then
of course, Muse is an all remote team and increasingly that has become a
sort of a new standard, certainly in the technology world and certainly
for smaller teams, but even a larger scale. So, how do you see remote
work is changing everything we’ve talked about? Only a little or a lot,
not at all.
01:03:36 - Speaker 2: Well, the good news is that several of the things
that we’ve been talking about with respect to planning flow very
naturally into remote work. So we’ve talked about how a lot of our
planning processes and retrospective processes work on a canvas, and
this was the case long before Muse, right? And we used to use these
canvases even when everyone was in the same room. Everyone will get on
the laptop and open up Google drawings, so we have the power of
collecting everything in one place or doing a whiteboard together,
right? So that’s very natural for remote work.
The other thing that’s very natural is you need these written
artifacts, especially as you go beyond one team at a company, because
that allows people to process them over time and to get the up and down
checks and to get the horizontal checks, right? So that very naturally
lends itself to remote work. I think the place where it’s trickier is
a, the chewing it over with colleagues, and B, getting inspiration.
There’s a lot of when you’re together and when you’re changing
locations, you know, you’re at the office, you’re going out to dinner,
you know, you’re in different rooms in the office, you know, there’s a
natural change in scenery that I think helps and it can be more
conducive to informal ad hoc conversations.
So I think with the remote team, you gotta decide how much of that you
want to try to reproduce. Now you could go like full remote, never see
this other person in person ever, always work out of your same 100
square foot office forever. I think that’s pretty hard. I’m not gonna
say it’s impossible not to do it, but that’s probably not what I would
recommend. I think you want to embrace these things that are naturally
aligned with remote work like canvases and written artifacts, but then
try to incorporate some of the benefits of in person occasionally, and
again, I like what we do at Muse, which is try to meet once every chapter
or two, so it’s once a quarter, or once a half, and use that
opportunity to get a change of scenery, and it’s surprising how
effective that is in changing how you’re thinking. And spend some time
talking ad hoc informally with the whole group, with different subsets
of the group, with different individuals, and using that as an
opportunity to kind of generate and chew on these ideas.
01:05:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s not a coincidence that this
what we call team summits, others call off sites, getting people
together in person, even for an all remote team is really kind of a
staple, and it quite naturally the big picture planning, the
retrospectives, most of what we talked about here really goes well with
that.
And I think actually that’s something maybe that’s missing from some
of the conversation about remote work here maybe I’m thinking
especially a couple of years back when it was less clear that remote
work would become so pervasive, but when talking about it, people say,
well, but you’re so creative and productive together in an office, how
can you give that up? And to me, the type of work which is this planning
work, strategy and retrospectives and project proposals and so on.
That benefits so hugely from the in-person experience, the high
bandwidth of being able to look someone in the eye, the body language,
the spatial benefits like you said, of being able to change locales, and
for sure the ad hoc conversations like you said, yeah, you have that
session where you discuss all the project proposals and you’re kind of
mulling it over, but then you and one other person go to grab lunch
someplace nearby and on the walk on the way there, you know, the ideas
are turning over in your head and you’re having new ideas. And that
just ad hocness of it and changing setting and whatever just cannot be
done through video chat.
And even I don’t know, there’s, you know, various attempts at trying
to go a little bit beyond just a bunch of boxes of people’s faces on
your screen, tools out there that people use for virtual conferences and
things, and I think those have their place, but I don’t know, there’s
just nothing like that in person.
So to me, when people talk about the productivity, Of in-person office
culture, this is what they’re talking about, but you really don’t need
to do this.
This isn’t the bulk of how you spend your time when you think of that
heads down, creation, execution, work, that is a place where I think the
difference between office and kind of work from home, all remote,
whatever is not only low, but actually may even be better for people
being able to have total control over their own workspaces and be able
to create their own environments.
So, this is, I think a huge thing is that in the end, all remote work is
for the foreseeable future, I think it’s all remote except for these
occasional get-togethers, which will often pair with this big picture
planning.
Now that said, I think this is a tooling opportunity and this is a huge
part of what we’re doing with Muse for Teams that creating something
that has more of a sense of place like an office and more of a kind of
whiteboard, but better feeling to the tool, I think is part of where we
hope to at least a little bit nibble away at some of the advantage of
being in person in front of a whiteboard or a bunch of post-its or what
have you. Something like virtual reality or augmented reality, I think
the potential of being able to meet in a space that gives you body
language, lets you move around, is spatial and has a lot of qualities
that we get from an in-person meeting. I think that technology is still
pretty far away, but you can see how eventually that might lead us in
that direction.
Certainly, I think video chat and audio stuff does continue to get
better.
It sounds minor, but only a few years ago, I felt that something like
just not constantly saying, are you, can you hear me? Are you breaking
up? Wait. This was just a constant impediment to the flow of any kind of
synchronous conversation you were going to have, and more and more,
there’s still problems from time to time, but it’s just way, way less
than it used to be and being able to just reliably jump on a quick call
and talk with a colleague is incredibly helpful.
Yeah, and of course there’s all these collaboration features built into
design tools, built into engineering tools, built into more and more,
built into every tool. So I think it helps a lot as the tools just get
better.
Coupled with that will probably also be just teams learning to get
better at it. We have hundreds of years or something like that of
experience working in offices or maybe more than that if you count just
working together in shared spaces generally, working in virtual spaces,
the tools are evolving, we’re evolving our practices, we’re finding
good ways.
To do things, and I think that it’s possible that the need for those
in-person meetings, well, I hope we will never lose that because I just
enjoy them, but perhaps it will be less critical than it once was as
time goes on.
Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. Join us in
Discord and discuss this episode with me, Mark, and our community. Links
in the show notes. And Mark, it’s really been a joy to be on these
teams with you for all these years and go through these different
planning processes. Maybe I’m weird for getting excited about the topic
of planning, but I just do. It’s a big part of the team experience for
me, and it’s been a pleasure doing with you.
01:10:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, likewise, Adam.
0 min
January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: One of the things that’s really important,
whether you’re talking about product principles or company values, is
you have to be able to negate them, cause otherwise you don’t use them
to resolve conflict.
00:00:14 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a software
for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This
podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and
the small team behind it. I’m here today with my colleague Mark
McGranaghan.
Hey Adam, and my former colleague, now friend Max Schoening. Hey, Adam.
Max, great to have you here. So, Max has an impressive career in the
tech world, both as an indie developer making cloud app years back. The
3 of us worked together at Hiroku and now you’re leading the design
team at GitHub. More importantly, for our purposes, you are an early
user, you are our very first customer for Muse, and you’re also an
advisor, so we get to bombard you with our half-finished ideas once a
month, and you can tell them, tell us why they’re bad.
00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Uh, thank you for that very generous introduction,
and it’s, it’s quite the privilege to be a part of the Muse creation
process, even if it’s on the sidelines.
00:01:07 - Speaker 2: Now I understand you just got back from a camping
trip. That sounded pretty fun.
00:01:10 - Speaker 1: Uh, yeah, I did. I spent The last week completely
off the grid, my wife and I with the dog went and drove up to the Tahoe
National Forest in a 4x4 sprinter van and did nothing but hike and sort
of be in nature, which at this moment in time feels or is an immense
privilege, right? But it was good to disconnect a little.
00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Now our topic today is principled products. Now
this is your idea, Max. So maybe you can explain what this is all about.
00:01:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it might be interesting to to start
at the beginning of how I was introduced to Muse because I think we had
talked, we share lots of interest, sort of end user programming, end
user computing, and also tools for thought and and making tools for
people who make stuff. And so naturally, when you started Muse, you
shared it with me and I think my first, I don’t quite remember, so
please, please correct me here, Adam, but I think my first reaction was,
OK, well, why would I use this? This is not letting me draw the way that
I want to draw.
00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember giving you a quick uh just in
person demo. I think you were visiting your mom here in Berlin. You
stopped by my place. I said, hey, I’m working on this new thing and
just showed you, you know, a pretty early version and you I think you
liked, you had a positive reaction to the zooming kind of spatial
interface, uh, but then when you went off to try it on your own a little
bit, you said, well, yeah, the ink’s kind of ugly and I have a better
sketchbook app. using notability at the time and yeah, for purely for
sketching, that’s true today as well. Notability is a better choice.
00:02:38 - Speaker 1: I think I narrowed in on the on the ink engine
very quickly versus acknowledging the principles that Muse kind of
stands for.
And I think that’s what triggered this entire thought process in me of
to actually consider to make Muse work for you, you have to consider the
principles that the creators in this case, the two of you and the rest
of the team sort of put into the process.
And that’s where I think the train of thought of, OK, what are
principled products sort of came from, as I tried to define what a
principle what we mean by principled, I kind of came to the to the
realization of it’s just a set of rules or laws that guide the behavior
of the people who make the thing, but then there is even a secondary
layer which I think is much more interesting, which is a set of rules or
laws that guide the behavior of the people using the thing. And I think
Muse is you framed it, Mark or Adam, I don’t remember, but as a as a tool
for thought and a tool for rumination. The moment that you gave me, this
is obviously not a very scalable process, but you gave me this
onboarding onto the muse philosophy after I initially rejected the app
and then it clicked.
00:03:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, that’s great to hear.
Now we just need to figure out how to kind of replicate and scale up.
That process, I guess, but in the near term happy to to do the one off,
uh, one-off on boardings, I guess. Now, I’d be curious to hear from,
from both of you, both of you guys, what are other principal products.
And I assume that many, many products are driven by mission or they have
a purpose or uniting set of values, but I assume that when we, when we
say when we really say principal products in the way you just described
Max, that’s, that’s not many or even, that’s not. or even maybe many
products that are out there.
So what are, what are some examples? I don’t know, Mark, do you have
any that come to mind?
00:04:20 - Speaker 3: One that comes to mind for me is SQL light. This
is a classic database that has this principle of being super reliable
and running everywhere. Actually, the homepage is hilarious. It looks
like it’s from the 90s and it says SQL light, it does not give
problems. It just works. I think importantly, it’s a trade-off that
they’re making. For example, it makes it harder and slower and more
laborious to develop the product, but that’s a principle that they’re
really committed to and that you can expect from them as developers and
you can expect as users of the product.
00:04:48 - Speaker 2: And I think we um pointed out and maybe it was the
local first article that SQL Light is now listed by the US Library of
Congress as an accepted archival format alongside other formats like PDF
or PNG being this very Long term hasn’t changed much. The developers
are really committed and show that they’re committed through the
already, I don’t know what it is, decades of maintenance that they put
into it.
00:05:13 - Speaker 1: I think if you think about products that apply
principles very thoroughly, you kind of have to distinguish between the
products that are just very thorough at applying the principles that the
team sort of believes in. And I think one example is the original
iPhone, like it’s very clear. When you use the original iPhone, you
kind of feel almost what the team behind uh the iPhone stood for, like
what they believed in and what they wouldn’t sacrifice, and like what
their principal stack is. And that creates a very distilled experience
and it’s also a great sort of um tool for wrangling complexity. Like if
you smash the iPhone home button enough times, you will return to safety
and then like that’s just it’s it’s a very, very cool design.
But uh I’m actually more interested in products that or I, I think we
have that covered, like you touched on, on this in, in your, uh, I’ll
plug your own show, but uh you touched on it in the, in the manual um
episode for the Muse podcast where iOS development mobile development in
general has created this structure of, OK, let’s just make the products
as simple as possible. Let’s just make them as intuitive as possible,
they shouldn’t even require a manual. Why are you shipping a manual
with the product like the iPhone comes with 3 pages. And I think
adhering to principles is necessary to deliver those kind of experiences
for, you know, very approachable, very simple products, but it’s also
necessary if you want to deliver products with any kind of like, I think
you said any kind of depth.
And so I’m more interested in principles or products where they’re
almost actively confusing or like they seem like they’re poorly
designed on the surface, unless you read the manual, unless you read the
philosophy of the creators.
And so I think they’re an example is clearlyIM, right? If you, if you
use them for the first time, you’re like, how does this even make sense
if you’ve never heard of the principles, right? If you want to use the
mouse to use them, you’re going to have a really hard time. And in
comparison, sort of to pick in the same domain, Microsoft Word is very
much a product that tries to adapt to users’ needs and offers
flexibility, but in a sense of go use it however you want it, it’ll do
that for you. And Vim says, no, no, it’s very composable, but you’re
going to have to buy into our methodology and I think the latter is sort
of really interesting. Muse fits into that category. I would say that.
Uh, we all have a shared background here with with Hiroku, and the
twelvefactor app. I think that falls into the same category as in if
you’re going to consistently want to write to the file system on Hioku
with these ephemeral dinos, you’re gonna, it’s not possible, right?
And so if you don’t change your mind, you will have a miserable
experience using this product. And so I’m, I’m wondering if there’s
other products that come to mind for the two of you that sort of very
much like if you don’t buy into it, it just feels like the people
didn’t know what they were doing designing the product versus if you
read the manual, something clicks and then you’re like, I get it now.
00:08:13 - Speaker 3: I think Git might be in this category for me. So
Git, if you approach it and you just look at the porcelain, that is the
commands that you do to you use to do common stuff, it’s.
Really confusing. So if I want to send you a change to my code, it’s
like, check out a branch and then stage your commit and then push it to
a remote over at like what? But if you take a step back and see that Git
is a system for tracking content, immutable content over time,
everything makes perfect sense in light of that. And so you have to have
that underlying knowledge and model of it’s this tag of code without
it, it’s just very confusing.
00:08:43 - Speaker 2: Talking about the uh the Hiroku example, of
course, there’s sort of what, what came first, the principles or the
product. You know, I think it’s, it is a chicken and egg thing they
developed together and notably their 12 factor app, we wrote well into
the existence of the product. It had existed for 4 plus years. And so
we, we sort of discovered these patterns and these things that made
application. Development easier, particularly in the context of
continuous deployment and agile development and all that sort of stuff.
Eventually, we wrote them into this manifesto to make it easier to
comprehend the product, but the product already existed and already had
these principles that we had over time.
So I wonder for other uh products maybe that some of us have worked on.
I know, Max, you talked about GitHub actions, you know, that was when
you, you drove um early in your year run of GitHub and and you mentioned
that that kind of was also driven by the same set of core principles,
uh, like that kind of these building blocks. But did that start in that
example, or other, others you’ve worked on, did you start With a list
of products that are enumerated and written down that the team can
understand and build against, or do you only realize the products
afterwards that they sort of emerge from the crafting of the product
itself?
00:09:57 - Speaker 1: I think in the, in the case of GitHub Actions,
it’s worth pointing out that GitHub was a 12 or definitely a decade old
company, I think 12 years and so it already had Ingrained principles in
what it believed in.
So I think in that case, you have the luxury of sort of building on top
of them. What we did with GitHub Actions is is actually at the root of
what GitHub believes in, right? Like GitHub is about multiplayer
software development. It’s about saying, OK, how can I reuse and remake
the work of others? How can I stand on the shoulders of giants,
basically, that’s sort of the whole ethos of open source as well.
And so when we looked at Git have actions and workflows for software
automation, CI, CD, and so on, we realized that for the most part, that
principle is largely lacking, right? Like nobody is actually saying,
instead of having one monolithic pipeline that you know, the team
that’s building the app built from scratch with some bash scripts,
there are very few reusable components. And so from day one, we decided,
OK, that’s this has to be part of the uh ethos or the principles that
we have. Applied it to design this.
But then I think, uh, only it, it really only turns into a true
principle once you’ve proven it almost in the market, or when you’re
like, OK, this is just not just a hypothesis. This is truly a guiding
principle where if we continue to double down on this, then good things
will happen. Otherwise, you kind of have to reevaluate it and say, well,
are we wrong about this? And so I think the conviction and the principle
grew stronger as we went along, but it didn’t start from day one.
00:11:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the idea that principles are something that
don’t just come out of the ivory tower, the stone tablets from on high
or whatever metaphor you want to use, but are something an idea you have
a hunch you have, but then they need to be validated, just like any
other part of building a thing. Uh, that, that really resonates strongly
with me right now because that’s a lot of the process we have been
going through with Muse. For example, the modelessness was a pretty core
principle early on that if if you want to make this fast tool and you
have all the screen space given over to, um, you know, no chrome, all
your screen space is given over to your content that you want to move
really fast, like a powerful.
On the desktop, then that implies that you, uh, shouldn’t have a bunch
of toolbars and stuff, but in fact, you should have these gestures and
things and early versions of the product had that say a version of that
principle, but often the implementation of it, which involved holding
stylus in undiscoverable ways and and other things like that, uh we we
found just didn’t validate with users. We couldn’t, people didn’t get
it. It didn’t strike a chord, and then we we had to adapt that over
time. And I guess that core principle of modelessness or the core
principle of try to leave all the screen space for the users’ content,
uh, we did ultimately, as you say, build conviction in that over time,
but the implementation of how we actually achieved that changed a lot.
00:12:47 - Speaker 3: And now I’m realizing that a lot of the most
interesting principled products, the principles aren’t these opinions
that come from nowhere, they’re actually understandings about reality
that you’ve kind of uniquely grasped.
So in the case of GitHub is this idea that basically all software is
developed by multiple people, yet our tools initially were very single
node based and it had a sort of similar story, um, likewise with, with
Git is this idea that code is a, is a. Of content that changes over time
and everything kind of follows from that. Um, so as I think about these
principles that we have in Muse, they often come back to these
fundamental understandings about the human body, the human mind, how,
how the creative process actually works and a lot of stuff flows from
that.
00:13:24 - Speaker 1: Probably also not a coincidence that you already
have fairly strongly formed principles with uh I don’t know how long
you, you sort of think of Muse as existing.
But the work that you did at Ik and Switch was this cultivation of these
principles and the things that you believe in and like that was a very
largely like research driven and I think now with Muse you’re sort of
putting those to the test, but that still means that they’re much
stronger than, I don’t know if you, if you look at obviously the next
door neighbor to principles is something like company values.
One of the things that’s really frustrating when looking at company
values. is you could actually kind of just take all the startups in
Silicon Valley and overlay their company values and I think there would
be so much overlap that they lack sort of they’re almost meaningless,
right? Like everybody says, hey, customers first or empathy with the
customer or build and delight. One of the things that’s really
important, whether you’re talking about product principles or company
values is you have to be able to negate them because otherwise you
don’t use them to resolve conflict.
00:14:23 - Speaker 3: Another way to look at that is principles should
be of the form, given to plausibly good choices. This principle says we
choose A instead of B, where B would also have been a potentially
reasonable choice, but it’s not a principle to do so.
00:14:35 - Speaker 1: Uh, the, I don’t know if you remember when when
Trello Trello launched this feature called Card aging a while back, and
you could even like switch it to a pirate uh sort of uh scrolls.
And the idea behind it is that if you didn’t update a card on your
Trello board for a period of time, it would sort of fade into the
background. And I actually believe that the principles for your products
should have a similar aging mechanism, which is, uh, let’s just assume
that you have an internal tool that lists out all your company
principles and values or or product values.
If people don’t reference the uniquely attributable like URLs for each
of these things often enough, they just start fading into the background
and then only the most in the the ones that actually truly help you make
decisions, right? Like you said, picking between two very plausible
solutions. Pick A instead of B because of this principle, that’s how
they stay alive, right? Like they have to have a shelf life by default.
00:15:32 - Speaker 2: How important is it do you think, to write what
I’ll call an explainer? So the 12 factor was an explainer for a lot of
the Hiroku philosophies. There’s something like the Zen of Palm is a
great design document, developer guide for the original Palm pilot that
enumerates a lot of their principles. But many of these other cases
we’ve listed maybe don’t necessarily have that written down or at
least not in a public form, and you can glean it a little bit from their
marketing material on their website or from following them on Twitter or
just from using the product. Is that important or is it more of a nice
to have?
00:16:04 - Speaker 1: It depends on the product, so. For example, I
don’t think that the iPhone design principles are sort of coherently
written down somewhere, at least not in the way that the 1st 20 people
who were part in shaping this extraordinary product, but it shines
through the product, right? So that’s it’s a, it’s a place where you,
you know that there is an amount of finite amount of principles that
this team has applied. And it’s sort of distilled and crystallized into
the product that is the iPhone.
For the products that are actively confusing if you don’t understand
the principles though, which is usually I think it’s products with a
lot more depth and complexity, you kind of have to write it down because
otherwise you never get to the adoption, right? Like you never get to
the the sort of enough critical mass to say I have figured out how to
translate the principle.
Goals and values that the team making the product believes in, so that
it can be absorbed by thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in a
very sort of scalable way, right? Like that’s presumably, I would
assume that’s why you’re investing so much energy into the manual and
the documentation and the videos that you’re recording for for Muse is
because you want to take the ideas that you’ve spent years now
developing. And crystallizing them in a way that now people can just
onboard and benefit from that.
It’s, it’s not unlike a syllabus for any given subject in a college or
or when you’re studying. Of, OK, I’ve learned this thing and now I’m
compressing the timeline so that you can learn it twice as fast.
00:17:29 - Speaker 3: This reminds me of the comic book that they wrote
to introduce Google Chrome. Oh yeah, and this was, uh, is in the classic
comic format and it was explained that it was this new browser that was
meant to be fast and secure and it was motivating that. And I think
that’s also an example of how these explainers, they don’t need to
reach out to all of the potential users. It could be just that you’re
empowering the. users, the evangelists, the early adopters versus trying
to make a manual that everyone’s going to read because as we all know,
that’s quite an uphill battle.
00:17:57 - Speaker 2: Notably on the Google Chrome comic, I happened to
be on the artist’s website that made that recently, they specified that
it was originally intended only for journalists.
They were going to give it out as kind of a cool press release thing,
and they only made printed copies to give out to them in this format,
like you had to come to the press briefing or something like that. And
then for whatever reason, this uh got so much attention, they ended up
eventually taking the digital and spreading it more widely, but it was
precisely that purpose was to create.
Excitement and enthusiasm among tech journalists who are going to go
spread the word and help them understand it well enough that they could
write about it in their own voice. And maybe some amount of shared
vocabulary giving some naming to, I don’t know, maybe the sandboxing on
the tabs and trying to, you know, something that was very deep technical
topic, but surfacing why they this deep technical work, what the user
facing benefits were and how you could talk about that and how you could
see that that was I think the the thing that comes to mind, especially
right now when we’re thinking about this is sort of you said
evangelists and the super users.
00:18:52 - Speaker 1: And you can have the cynical view of saying, oh,
the influencers, right, like Instagram influencers who are sort of just,
you know, so into your product, they’re gonna and eventually they, it
becomes part of their identity, but I think there is actually some truth
to uh all of the products that we are listing today um tend to create
super fans very quickly. And they tend to create it in a way where the
super fans themselves understand a significant majority of the
principles, and then they go out into the world and they share those
principles because they have adopted them and they’ve changed their
perspective, their view of the world.
I think that is actually a really important part of these principles
which goes back to writing them down or preserving them somehow is
really important.
If we listed out more of them, this is probably going to be a constant
of there are always people who believe almost um irrationally in these
principles and carry them forward.
One great example would be the entire GTD.
00:19:59 - Speaker 2: A market GTD is David Allen’s getting things
done. Yeah.
00:20:03 - Speaker 1: Yes, with GTD it originally shipped as a product
in the sense of it was a book and you can consider that a manual. And
then the product was just so trivial because it was a bunch of manila
folders and index cards.
00:20:14 - Speaker 2: He he advocated you carry index cards around in
your pocket to write down ideas that you had throughout the day.
00:20:20 - Speaker 1: And by now I think.
Index cards are, well, some people still really love index cards and
they’re still a good medium.
But if you look at most of the GTD conversations, they have evolved from
that product, the principles still stand for people. And then now if you
use those GTD design products and think like things, um, omnifocus, if
you don’t know what GTD stands for, at some point those, those topics
or the the the The concepts that they’ve introduced in the application
seem kind of awkward. It’s like, why am I doing this? Why am I not just
making a list of to do’s that is very straightforward? Why are you
telling me to annotate this with projects and contexts and all this
stuff that GTD goes into? And so if you’re not familiar with it, then
it seems like awkward product design choices or unenetrable sort of
product design choices. But once you actually use them, and if The
system works for you. If you, if you share the same principles, it’s
almost like it’s giving you superpowers.
00:21:15 - Speaker 2: Here you’re talking about subscribing to a
particular methodology about how you organize your information life in
order to find value in one of these to do this task keeper type
products. But I guess we’re saying on one hand, we think it’s a good
thing that you adopt cloud native or a particular perspective to use
something like get them or the iPhone or Omnifocus.
But on the other hand, there’s the rigid, I think we all really like
composable, make it your own products have a lot of flexibility, small
sharp tools can be combined in different ways and adapted to different
uses and scenarios and different people’s needs. So it’s. interesting
to think about that tension or I’d be curious to hear how you both
think about the tension of on one hand, opinionated, principled, if you
use it and if you subscribe to a particular methodology or particular
way of approaching your work or um then this product will be a good fit
for you and otherwise awkward. But then there’s also, I definitely
used, I don’t know, like project management tools to prescribe a very
specific process. And if you do that exact process, it’s great, but if
you don’t, it’s, yeah, really uncomfortable and I end up not using
those because of their rigidity. Yeah, how’s that resolved?
00:22:25 - Speaker 3: I come back to this idea that the principles need
to be true. So you can have very specific ideas about how a product
should work and how the workflow should be, but that doesn’t reflect
the reality of what I’m trying to do, of course, I’m not gonna like
it. And on the flip side, if you’re suggesting a structure that exactly
reflects, you know, how the world works, then great, everything fits
into place.
00:22:43 - Speaker 1: There was this episode on the exponent podcast.
Uh, from Mr. Ben Thompson, where they talk about principle stacks, and
in particular they point out that yes, you can make a list of principles
that you believe in, but they have to kind of come in a certain order,
because at some 0.2 principles will kind of be at odds with one another,
no matter what, right? Like and In order to resolve the conflict between
the two, you’re going to have to pick one that you believe in more
strongly than the other.
And I think with designing products that you have that same dynamic, and
I believe that the establishing the order of principles is a little bit
like sediment. Over time, the ones that you’ve applied more frequently
in designing products sort of go to the bottom and end up being the
really solid foundation versus the ones that You are still experimenting
with, they’re still floating at the top and like you’re not fully
committed and you’re like, OK, let’s try this a couple more times. And
then once you get to more conviction, then they sort of get compressed
further down and you start believing them in in the more.
And you mentioned an interesting one because you said, OK, do you want
to be opinionated, opinionated products, like a lot of times, you know,
we say good design is opinion. At the same time, the three of us are
very much frustrated with the inflexibility of modern software and the
fact that it’s not composable, and we believe in the Unix philosophy of
saying you have tools that work really well together, but they’re
special purpose.
So we also want like we want opinionated but flexible, or maybe flexible
is the wrong word, opinionated but composable, and we have two
principles that in theory will come in conflict with one another as
you’re developing something.
And I think there this, this is where the principal stack comes in it’s
OK, which one is more important.
00:24:24 - Speaker 3: And one potential resolution of that in the case
of Unix is the underlying principle is everything is a text stream. So
insofar as you do that, you can have these different tools that might
have different opinions, but they can be composed and recombined in text
editing. Now, the other thing I would say there is everything is a text
stream is like only sort of right. There are things that are obviously
not text, and that’s where Unix starts to break down and that’s an
example of how the principles are only as good as they are a reflection
of reality.
00:24:47 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s notable because reality is something
that changes as technology and society evolve.
So Unix was absolutely the core of all of my computing workflows for a
pretty long time, that included not just server and development work,
but Things like recording a note or a personal to do. I had command line
tools for all that stuff. And then as the phone became a bigger and
bigger part of my computing life, and the command line interface just
doesn’t Uh, have the same utility there, and then increasingly that
approach that Unix put to such good work and it’s still amazing for,
you know, servers and but when it comes to my daily computing, it
basically is much less central and that’s because my reality has
changed.
I think most of the products we’ve talked about so far Unix, Hiroku,
GitHub Actions, Palm Pilot, the iPhone with its single purpose, or
multi-purpose home button. These all feel like the the principles we’re
talking about are things that are say how the product works.
But I wonder, do we, another kind of list of examples I made when I was
thinking about this is products that are more, maybe it’s more tied to
the mission or the kind of world that they want to see exist.
So there, for example, Overcast comes to mind player that I use, and a
lot of the principles come more through listening to Marco Armand,
who’s the kind of solo indie developer and he blogs and has his own
podcasts and stuff, but he’s always talking about a free and open
podcast publishing world where instead of having the massive aggregation
like you have with other platforms like YouTube and Video, for example,
that podcasts are these RSS feeds that anyone can publish and there’s
no central arbitrator and so on, and that obviously ties. Very well to
his business interests, but it’s, they, they go hand in hand, maybe
he’s making the podcast player that fits with the world that has free
and open podcast publishing based on the RSS standard. If that world
exists, his product does well. And I also think of like all these
increasing number of privacy oriented tools like the Brave web browser,
which Mark got me used a little while back on my desktop or messaging
apps like Signal and Telegram, or we use uh Fathom Analytics on the Muse
website which is privacy oriented. Kind of alternative to Google
Analytics? Or do we count uh those kinds of things in this principled
product category or is that more, more like a mission?
00:27:13 - Speaker 1: I think they you have to count them as part of
these principles because it’s all the users of those products are
making trade-offs because they believe in the mission, right? Like, so
for example, in the, in the case of Overcast, you are Explicitly saying
I believe in the open podcast environment enough that I’m willing to
maybe sacrifice some features that other podcast players like Spotify
and so on can build because of the aggregation, like commenting systems,
rating and so on.
Sure, you could kind of build those in a distributed fashion as well,
but it just tends to not happen. So As a user, I happen to use Overcast
as well because I believe in this. I am making the trade-off of saying
it is more important to me that we preserve the openness of the
ecosystem than getting some other feature like bells and whistles.
Imagine if you, if you used signal, signal is probably in many ways
harder to get people to adopt it than Facebook Messenger because
Facebook Messenger is ubiquitous, right? And so, uh, you, without the
security implications or without the privacy implications of Signal, if
you don’t know about them, why would you make that choice?
00:28:22 - Speaker 2: I can see something similar for a lot of these
open orientation communities, Linux, I was a pretty heavy Linux on the
desktop user for a number of years.
Uh, there’s things around, people who build their own PCs or maker, uh,
maker communities, things like 3D printing and and so on, and in many
cases they are accepting worse user experiences.
I don’t know, Linux famously trying to get your laptop to wake from
sleep reliably or connect to the Wi Fi. As just always this struggle,
but if you really believe in the openness, and you don’t like the
walled garden and you want the freedom and flexibility and the
hackability, that’s a, that’s a very, that is a tradeoff you’re
willing to make.
00:29:00 - Speaker 1: The joke always next year is Linux on the desktop
here and for sure are the products like Linux less approachable by
default for for people maybe than like iOS or Android or whatever.
And so people who like, again, they make trade-offs and say, OK, my Wi
Fi will not work reliably or my trackpad will not work as reliably as I
would like it to, but at the same time, I’m getting this other
benefit.
And then we get into these, it’s almost very publicly, I guess you used
to call them flame wars, but like there’s these public debates that are
just deeply rooted in principles and I like to me, I think the actual
thing that matters is that you, if you zoom out, there is a application
of different principles of makers around in the world that are creating
things so that you can find the tool that you believe fits your
principal stack as close as possible.
And of course there’s you can divide any distance, you know, enough
times and eventually something will not fit with your principle, but
broad enough, you’re like, OK, I believe in 90% of this, right? And I
think that’s where the the the one underlying principle I think that
we’re arguing for here implicitly is if we believe that software needs
to be principled and needs to show the principles on the front like sort
of like talk about them almost in a virtuous way, then we need enough
variety in software so that uh people can sort of find the principal
stack that they buy into, versus if you only have one choice, then
you’re then you’re kind of either as a as a maker, as a creator, you
are forced to build a thing that is just uh khaki pants, like it’s just
that like nobody’s going to get angry about anything, any choices that
you’ve made. And I think that just makes an inferior solution and
experience for each person individually. And so I think variety is one
of the guiding principles here.
I think that you need to apply and that’s why sort of encouraging
people to make things and to be creative is almost the base principle
that sort of underlies everything.
If you don’t have that, then the entire notion of principled products
just doesn’t work.
00:31:07 - Speaker 2: Let 1000 flowers bloom.
And people can find their, find their tribe or find what they gravitate
to find what reflects what they stand for, including how the product
works today, but probably also how you want the world to be.
So in the, in the overcast example, you’re using that partially because
you want free and open podcasts when you use use Telegram, you’re using
that because you want messaging between individuals to be fully private,
not snoop by government entities or anyone else.
I think. There’s very much a similar thing with Muse, and certainly the
people I think that are buying the product in these early days when
we’re still in the process of building up the features, part of what
they’re saying with with those dollars is, I want things like this to
exist. I want computing to be more like this.
And when when Mark and I came into it, for example, one of Mark’s say
access to grind is just software being too slow all the time. Waiting on
them, spinners, things to open and we just really are incredibly tight
about that on the team. We, we want everything to be instantaneous all
the time, and a huge amount of engineering effort and and design effort
to a lesser degree goes into making that happen, but that’s just, we
believe that’s possible with computers, the incredible computing
hardware that we have at our disposal today, and we feel sad that we
spent so much humans spend so much time waiting on computers. Even
today, and so that’s something we’re really willing to stand up for
and fight for and invest in, and people who choose Muse, particularly if
they choose to support it financially, are saying, I want software to be
more like this, not just this thing, but I want software like this to
exist in the world.
00:32:44 - Speaker 1: In the context of Muse, it might be a good idea to
also explicitly point out that in applying the principles that you all
stand for the kind of software that you want to make and even further
the kind of business that you’re building. You’re explicitly saying we
are cutting out a huge user base because we are not going for the top of
the funnel like most amount of people on board it and then let’s make
sure that everybody draws at least once.
You’re basically saying this is a professional tool, we’re charging
money for it. And we want this to only be a tool that people who
actually derive the exact amount of value out of it as you charge for
it, right? Like, obviously this is an incrementally correct approach to
finding out what that dollar value is. Um, and I think you believe that
software should really drive the creativity of that. I shouldn’t put
words in your mouth, but like from the conversations we’ve had, the
creativity of the individual, right? So you’re making trade-offs and
saying other things will happen either at a later point, but for now
we’re doing paid software for professional people who want to do deep
work, and that sort of cuts out like most of the pie and to some degree,
but at least the the thing that Uh is is left like the people who are
now diehard fans and you can sort of call me uh part of that, they are
also more likely to make up for that by infusing more energy into the
music equation, right? Like either by sharing it or by just spending
more money on software than they would before. Kind of brings us back to
the the question you asked earlier of writing things down. Like, is it
important to write these product principles down? If you don’t write
the product principles down for Muse, for example, you will just have
sort of the, you’ll have the app in the app store and you’ll have the
price point of the app, and then people will just bring their own
assumptions to the experience of the product and layer them on
incredibly quickly, right? Like they will judge the book by its cover.
Then discarded almost immediately. So then you have to go and by
articulating your thought process over the years of why these things are
important to you to actually capture those people, you have to write it
down or you have to sort of distill it. And I think that is something
that by definition of how you started the company and how you’re
working, you kind of have to do. And I wonder if there is actually like
Hiroku had like it felt very similar. It’s unless you explain it. It
just seems completely irrational. It doesn’t make any sense, and the
people who are working there are all just bananas, right? Like the, so I
think writing things down, if you find yourself not having to write it
down, maybe you’re not exerting enough of the principles that you
actually think you stand for.
00:35:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and that’s definitely an active project in
many ways. I mean, we have done some of that work in the research lab
and the Muse design article, which now is pretty dated because that’s
describing a prototype long before we even had a commercial product.
But we did try to articulate and I think did successfully articulate
some of these things around 120 frames per second, or else, you know,
you use both hands in the stylus, all that kind of stuff. And that’s
continued to be a guiding principle for us as we, as we build the
product and also as, as people come in to try it and they’ve seen maybe
they’ve read that article and they have those ideas in their head and
so they’re more primed to get over that hump of understanding how this
thing works.
Um, but then in the meantime, I think we’ve developed and honed. That
quite a lot.
And yeah, could, could really stand further writing down, although
Similar to, I guess the experience I had at um at Hiroki with 12 factor
and we had a similar thing with I can switch, in fact, where we really
didn’t do the writing until the very end, we had been doing these
research projects for 3+ years and many folks, including within the team
and externally wanted, you know, basically said like we really got to
write this down, and we would go to try to do it and would basically get
stuck. We couldn’t. Do it. We didn’t have the words and you know, if
you’re in a group of people and you’re talking about it and you’re
waving your hands and you’re scribbling on a whiteboard and there’s a
lot of words flying around, but boiling that down into a synced legible
thing that an external person can just click through on and read and get
a powerful, you know, have it effectively convey what, what in fact are
the principles here.
That’s something that’s hard to do.
Upfront, in fact, it’s, it’s in all of these cases, I’ve always done
it retroactively.
And so I’m gonna try to see here if on Muse we can do it more in the,
in the middle of it or while we’re still, you know, still in the very
active early days of development, but my um work on that so far, and
plus, trust me, I have a lot of half-finished drafts, uh, is, you know,
it’s hard, it’s really hard because there are not words for it yet.
00:37:28 - Speaker 1: That’s actually a question that I was gonna ask
the the two of you.
As you’re developing the principles, there’s always more to do when
you’re building a product than you have time for.
Everything you choose to do by definition means you’re not doing
something else, and it’s a very real trade-off.
And if you think about startups and how do you make the argument that it
is OK to slow down the process of product and feature development a
little bit to capture all the deep thoughts that are happening as
you’re building it so that you can hone those principles versus uh
Following the lure of just, you know, ship very quickly just go through
and like build stuff, um, versus deeply considering it and like, are you
making that trade off?
00:38:07 - Speaker 3: Well, I think that’s really important as we were
saying before, it leads into your marketing effort. Now you need this
communication for people to be able to understand what your principles
are and therefore to adopt your product. So we’ve set up maybe 40-60%
time, 40% on marketing and communicating these principles and what
we’re trying to do and how to use the product and 60% time developing.
It feels like a pretty good balance. I think if you just build something
and no one can understand it and therefore no one adopts it, that’s not
particularly helpful.
00:38:34 - Speaker 1: It’s it’s really interesting to me to actually
frame this work, not just as a place so that you build better products,
but it’s also a thing that when done right, attracts more people. And
so it’s a very real marketing.
00:38:46 - Speaker 3: I go back to this thing about reality and truth.
What we’re trying to do is rely align reality, our product and what
people understand. And if any of those three things aren’t matched up,
you’re going to have a bad time and so you have to do both product
development and marketing to get them all together.
00:39:01 - Speaker 1: So this sort of goes towards an area that I think
we can all say we’ve struggled quite a bit with um uh marketing at some
point of scale, like when you, you know, you’re the 1st 5 to 10 people,
you’re a small company, you’re effectively the marketing team, right?
There’s no one who has a title that says I own marketing and I’m doing
marketing.
But at some point, once you get to, you know, 50 people, I don’t
remember exactly at what point in time at Hiroka we started sort of
cultivating a marketing team, but what happens is the people making the
product, and the people thinking deeply about the product and the people
who are theoretically supposed to bridge the gap of saying, hey, these
are the philosophies and this is like we’re sort of creating the bridge
between reality and like the product as you mentioned. Um, are no longer
the ones making it, right, like they’re further apart. And so now you
have to figure out how to bridge that gap, and I personally have at
least 4.
Deep, sort of deeply technical products, never been able to figure out
how to do that, uh, versus obviously for consumer products, it’s
slightly easier for more or or even products that that are sort of more
readily understandable by any sort of uh knowledge worker versus then,
OK, how do I truly explain the virtues and the trade-offs of a
particular database, for example, you brought up databases earlier, if I
don’t actually build it and And, and that’s a really interesting
challenge in scaling principle product principles is is is something
that I think is is is really difficult.
00:40:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. I actually think that the problem
of marketing early growth stage developer software products is like an
unsolved problem in Silicon Valley. Everyone I’ve seen tries and really
struggles. I think eventually companies figure out something, but
there’s there’s no playbook in the way that there is for product
development and customer support and finance, for example. The closest
thing I have to an answer here is I think the head of the company and
the leadership generally needs to respect the problem and respect the
problem domain and invest a lot of energy in marketing, which I do think
we’re seeing with with MS because Adam is uh taking a lead there.
00:41:12 - Speaker 2: Definitely a skill development opportunity for me
as someone who’s always been very product focused, um, but yeah, it’s
been definitely expanding my My horizons. Now, maybe we’re almost on a
different topic here, but it’s an interesting one. So I want to pull
the thread. Max, you and I were talking a bit about, um, yeah,
marketing, uh, and, and to Mark, Mark’s point about there’s no
playbook, you were actually saying that what it takes to do authentic
marketing for an early product is to not follow a playbook, that in
fact, uh, you were giving the cloud app example and so that was just you
and one other person, right?
00:41:48 - Speaker 1: Depending on when we did this, I think we were 3
people. And we started out with something that I would very much frown
upon right now, which is early on when when Cloud A started to join the
public beta, you actually had to tweet about it.
And at that time, no one had ever done it. So it was novel and people
were kind of excited and that sort of, you know, spread incredibly
quickly. But then the more you do, and I really don’t want to take
credit for maybe I hadn’t seen it before, but I’m I’m sure someone
else in the world figured out how to use that uh sort of spread as well.
The more you do that, the more it just becomes noise, right? Like it’s
the same as like the first couple of emails were never spam. But at some
point, once you want to stretch that system, eventually like it gets
indistinguishable whether there’s, hey, I’m reaching out if in case
you need someone, email becomes spam versus not, depending on how often
they they follow up.
And I think with marketing and how you market, how you choose to market
is actually very close to how you choose to build products. The best
marketing is always the one that is most authentic.
How do you know whether uh marketing is authentic? It’s when the person
who actually explains it. is truly a believer in the principles that the
folks who are building the product are building and like when you feel
that sort of viscerally that that’s what they stand for and like almost
to a fault.
The further you go away from that, the less effective the marketing
becomes. And that this happens both very small scale.
So if you look at something that is somewhat of a contentious uh domain
in general, but online advertising. If you go back and look at the deck
network, I think it was and and how daring Fireball and so on used to do
ads, they had these little tiny squares of products that almost all of
them kind of believed in, like they would never advertise for something.
And so that was like sort of the almost Original influencer marketing,
all the way to tricks that people exploit now by saying, look, we used
to have display out ads on the right hand side or on the left hand side
of Facebook, and instead we figured out, no, by putting them into the
feed and making them look like content.
We’re kind of tricking you into thinking that this is also reputable.
And so you can obviously take it to the extreme at scale, but the
principle remains the same of saying you want to make sure that the
marketing feels as honest as possible. And honestly, the only morally in
my opinion, right way to do it is if it is as honest as possible, right?
Like if you’re not trying to trick anyone. And so I’ve seen great uh
applications of this for uh in teams of of your size, and even sort of
small to medium companies, but it gets much larger when you’re trying
to market at scale, right? Like, at some point, someone is going to just
try and tweak the world. it’s just enough so that someone else gets
tricked and clicking the and clicking the link.
00:44:34 - Speaker 2: I also think of marketing as being not just the
outbound communication, let us talk to you in this podcast or send you
an email newsletter or tweet something, but also the receiving
information from the market that it’s it’s a conversation.
Um, and in some cases, that’s a very much a literal conversation. I
think I’ve done for all of us on the team, but probably me. Um, most of
all have done, certainly I’ve done dozens of video chats and in-person
user interviews early on, and then, uh, nowadays tend to do stuff over
email.
I get into email back and forth, you know, if you reply to our email
newsletter, it goes straight to me. If you email the hello at
newapp.com, I think that’s going to mark right now if I’m not
mistaken, and we try to respond to every single person.
I often get into some pretty long email back and forth and really nice
ones, um.
And that’s kind of coming back to that point of testing these
principles against reality or validating them. Uh, you’re often someone
says, why does it work like that? That’s weird. And then you kind of
come back with a, you know, an answer, well, we kind of did it this way
because of X, but tell me, tell me about how you use it or show me, you
know, show me a screenshot if you’re comfortable with that, and then
they, they can kind of explain that and we can explore it. And it’s
that process that’s often for some of our principles really cause us to
double down. On that and essentially feel like we validated it and
sharpened it based on these many, many conversations and others that
maybe we softened on or feel like didn’t hold up as much and we, we
dialed back on a little bit and it it is really these um these
conversations with the market, but they’re individual people, but
people that for some reason are drawn to either thinking they want a
tool like this or the values resonate with them. Um, and then that
convergence over time against what we’re trying to do and what it is
that people that we think are in our demographics seem to need or want
or get excited by.
00:46:28 - Speaker 1: I think with this worldview, you can kind of
describe marketing just as a function of generating principle overlap,
whether You are the customer that you’re trying to talk to is further
away from those principles and so you exert, like in your example with
emails, you exert more energy to like personalize the email and then
actually like try and have an open conversation. Maybe your mind
changes, maybe the customer’s mind change, but essentially what you’re
generating is more overlap in the principles of the worldview that you
have.
And so as long as to Mark’s point earlier, as long as the principles
are in to the largest degree possible, true, then uh you are generating,
uh I think uh um value because you’re basically saying, now one more
person sees the world the way that I see the world and as long as that
is a good thing, then marketing. is essentially not the way that we now
sort of view it as the, it’s almost like advertising and so on is all
about tricking people into something or like sort of exploiting
weaknesses instead of saying, turn it around, if you have really strong
principles that you believe in, then sharing those with the world,
marketing is just about the, the overlap generation of that.
So you talked about Adam, you talked about the the outbound um like
marketing sort of we are talking to customers and trying to generate
overlap with the the company to the principles the company believes in
uh with a customer, but you can also uh look inwardly in a company and
say by having strong principles, we are creating overlap in what the
employees believe in and in what the employees stand for. And if you ask
me like what’s the one thing that is really important in terms of of
leadership, it’s creating clarity and so principles, if they’re good
and true tend to create clarity. So I’m wondering how often and like so
this is full circle, how often do you reference these principles
internally and actually make decisions at Muse and even sort of from from
how you hire, how you uh sort of try to mentor and grow people and so
on, like I’m curious how how that’s working for you.
00:48:29 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think they’re quite important internally.
For example, my old favorite, no spinners, I invoke that all the time. I
think principles in general, they help you make decisions faster,
crisper, more consistently with less thrashing and noise. I think
that’s all very good.
00:48:44 - Speaker 1: The no spinner one is probably an example because
it’s very concrete.
You can kind of say, hey, if I am designing UI that has a spinner, an
alarm bell should go off and I should reconsider my choices. And at the
same time, If you start really deeply thinking about it, like it works
on the surface level because you’re basically just telling everybody
who works on the product, hey, no spinners, and then the product is
better.
But there is even an undercurrent, which is if I am a mindful uh maker
that is part of building new, I will try and evaluate, but why do we
care about no spinners? And suddenly you start going to the next one,
which is, hey, software needs to be fast if it’s not uh fast, it’s not
fully shipped or whatever, it’s actually an old GitHub in. And so it it
it makes you. A better contributor to the product because you now
intrinsically get it. And so you might augment it and say, hey, no
spinners, and at the same time also, oh, by the way, I saw this API call
didn’t return in the whatever milliseconds that we expected to return,
and so you learned something new as an employee as part of the cabal or
the co op or whoever you’re working um because someone shared that
principle and said this is something we believe in, right? Like, so
there’s this transference of skills that happens over time. Um, if you
adhere to principles. Right.
00:49:54 - Speaker 3: And then once you’ve derived that result for
yourself, you can cash it in a way and you don’t need to re-derive it
every time you have the discussion, so you can make the decision much
faster, which I think is important, not just in terms of speed, but in
terms of emotional energy, which is very limited in the world of a
startup and you need to invest that towards making your customer
successful and not making decisions internally.
00:50:14 - Speaker 1: I really like the framing of caching. Um, I don’t
know if you you two have this well, I actually do know because you send
it over.
But there are certain kind of blog posts that are just inherently
linkable and you’re having a conversation and you’re just writing some
text and then you link a blog post.
That blog post usually has really strong principles and what you’re
essentially conjuring up is a cache of saying, you know, we have this
shared worldview. I’m referencing this cache object over there, this
blog post, Clay Shirky is situated. Software is something that I think
there’s no conversation between the three of us that we don’t
reference it. And suddenly we’ve created enough context and saying, OK,
we know we’re talking about the same thing. We don’t have to go down
that that that decision tree anymore. Now let’s navigate and go towards
the new stuff. And so I really like the framing of caching. I think
that’s a very nice parallel.
00:51:03 - Speaker 2: And I like there that it also gives you both a
name. So this shared vocabulary, uh, which was one of my goals at 12
Factor.
I think it was also one of our goals, we wrote Local first, which is
another kind of manifesto piece, and the idea of attaching this name to
a thing that people within a company or a team or even within an
industry, you can use this word to describe the set of ideas that might
might have a very deep be a web of nested ideas or a deep stack of
ideas.
And in addition to that name, whether it’s situated software, local
first or 12 factor, uh, you can also, you have the URL, you have the
canonical URL that’s that’s very linkable. So when someone says, what
is that, you’ve got the, the citation.
And that was one of my motivations with 12 factor and one reason I broke
out each of the factors is their own page is I wanted to be able to,
when I was in the 1000th conversation with someone about, well, wait,
why do I have to specify my dependencies? I could just basically drop
the URL and say, read this.
Um, and so I think that’s another thing you need out of these
canonical, these canonical sources for defining a principle that we can
discuss and, and build on. It’s not necessarily a question of whether
you agree or not. It’s more of, here’s a neat package that has a name
and a URL and we can either use this as a basis to say yes, we both know
this is a starting place and as you said, Max, go on to the, go on to
the new stuff or say, actually, I don’t agree with that. Set of
principles and so therefore, you say, OK, well, now we have a more
fundamental conversation we need to have before we can move forward on
whatever we’re trying to collaborate on.
00:52:35 - Speaker 1: One way in which I’ve started thinking about this
is taking aside sort of the monetary incentives or the intrinsic we like
to make things.
Muse, for example, wants to encourage people to see the world in a
certain way, right? Like that’s why it’s a principled product.
If you think about it, you don’t necessarily actually have to build a
product to make that happen. You could theoretically think of a
metaphorical like I have a bucket of links. So what is the most
distilled bucket of links, smallest bucket of links that I can just dump
on a on a meeting room table and then leave, and the people in the
meeting room will read all of those links and internalize that and
suddenly they have that worldview, right? And uh you can kind of think
of a product as that bucket of of links or references and so on, but in
an even more distilled form than a bunch of articles. And I think that
is sort of the feeling of uh that uh you get where Hioku or 12 factor,
my my bet here and this time will tell. I believe that the principles of
12 factor will outlive Hioku in the same way that I think that the
principles in Muse will very likely outlive the application muses, and
they will live on and get remixed and so on, which by the way, another
good reason to write them down and sort of try and separate them a
little bit from the product. But it is not such that the most effective
way is to try and distill it into a product so someone can use it on a
daily basis versus sort of saying, yes, I am going to care about the
exact same things you care about. I’m going to read all of this, do all
the research that you’ve done. No, I’m just going to use the product,
read the distilled version that you say I need to to understand the
product and then slowly my worldview sort of shifts. Um, and I think
that another reason why I think principal products is just such a
powerful framing for for product development.
00:54:19 - Speaker 3: I think reifying your principles into a product is
also important because it’s an existence proof for the set of
principles. Really the only way that you can know that these ideas match
reality and all of its complexity and nuance is if you actually make
something that has all those things working together at the same time.
That was a big motivation, I think, for doing the lab and then Muse. We
suspected the world could work this way. We couldn’t be sure until it
physically existed.
00:54:45 - Speaker 1: I like that you bridge the gap there between Um,
sort of research and observation of other products and saying, OK, look,
these are the things that we found in other people and and and sort of
in in using them, but then it’s like, OK, well, but now let’s put this
to the to the test and build one with those principles to see how well
does this actually turn out, right? And so. Uh, yeah, a very worthwhile
endeavor if you ask me.
00:55:08 - Speaker 2: I think that’s a nice way to wrap on the topic of
principled products. If any of our listeners out there have feedback,
feel free to reach out to us at UAHQ on Twitter or hello at Newsapp.com
by email. We always love to hear your comments and we’d love to hear
ideas for future episodes. And Max, thanks for coming on and chatting
with us, and thanks so much for being a user, a customer, helping us
along this journey. It was a little rough in the beginning, I know, but
hopefully it’s starting to pay off for you now.
00:55:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you for having me and for letting me
be a part of the creation process of Muse. It’s really, really fun.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: No one would ever write a blog post or a book by
hand or on a typewriter in 2023. Yet reading still pretty much takes
place in the physical world, at least nonfiction, 90% of nonfiction
reading is still paper books, and so our lofty ambition would be, we’ve
created such a better reading experience using software that people are
motivated to switch and read digitally.
00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the
product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m
Adam Wiggins here today with guests Dan Doyen and Tristan Holmesy of
ReadW Wise.
00:00:44 - Speaker 3: Hi, I’m Tristan, co-founder and technically CEO
of ReadW Wise.
00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Excited to be here, Honored to be a guest, huge
fan of the podcast.
00:00:54 - Speaker 2: And I understand you two had some fun with Falcon
recently.
00:00:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s right. We were just off on a team
offsite in Ireland.
We’re a remote company, so we try and get the team together about twice
a year, you know, with scheduling and all that.
We’re about 14 people now, so getting 14 people out of one place is a
little non-trivial these days, but we chose Ireland because we have an
engineer. who already lives there, so you can kind of give us a good
local experience.
And as part of that, we had a fun little falconry event where, you know,
you have the little glove. I think you’ve done it before, Adam, and the
falconry instructor puts a little meat on your glove and then the birds
fly onto your glove and eat the meat.
00:01:38 - Speaker 1: Dan, is that a good overview of, yeah, we were
able to play with a falcon, a hawk, and 4 breeds of owls.
00:01:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so the fun part was the first owl was like
this cute little, I think it was like a snowy owl or something, Barn
owl, oh, barn owl, OK.
So we take turns each like having the owl fly onto our glove. It flew on
to dance, I think pretty successfully, and then we moved on to the next
person, I think like one of our engineers or something, and instead of
the bird flying onto the glove of the engineer, which had me, it flew
back. On to Dan’s glove, which he wasn’t even holding properly or
anything, and kind of gained this funny attachment to Dan. Then the
instructor was like, Oh, that’s weird. Grabbed the bird and was like,
OK, go over here. Go over here. He eventually got it onto the
engineer’s glove, and then we did the next person, and the owl again
flew onto Dan’s glove. And then that basically repeated for, you know,
the next like 10 minutes until Dan had to like hide his glove and
basically hide from the bird before it would stop flying to him, so.
00:02:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I grew up reading My Side of the Mountain,
so I fancy myself a bit of a bird of prey expert.
00:02:40 - Speaker 2: Missed your calling as a bird whisperer. Yeah, I
briefly had the chance to do the glove thing with the yeah, I think it
was a falcon, and they’re just obviously really beautiful creatures,
also very alien in a way, the way they move and the way they Obviously
feathers and all this sort of thing, and obviously we see birds in our
daily life, but birds of prey really feel like a different thing, I
guess, and being that close and being aware of the weapons, you know,
their claws or talons, I guess they’re called, and their beak and that
sort of thing. It’s just, yeah, it can be a powerful experience.
00:03:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the descendants of dinosaurs.
00:03:18 - Speaker 2: Exactly right. And tell me a little about
Reidwise.
00:03:22 - Speaker 3: Sure, so Readwise at a high level, we basically
make software that helps people read better.
There’s a lot of ways we do that.
Most recently, we’ve been working on this app, which we call Reader or
the Readise Reader, which is this piece of software which lets you read
basically any type of content from PDFs to books, to articles, to
YouTube videos, including their transcripts. To newsletters, to Twitter
threads, to a lot more. We let you read that stuff, but more
importantly, kind of save it, highlight it, and just kind of get the
most out of your reading. And before we built Reader, we also built a
slightly more niche app, which we now call ReadW 1.0, which basically
helps you retain more from your reading and kind of manage all of your
digital highlights.
00:04:06 - Speaker 2: And could you tell me a little bit about the
journey you each took in your careers that led you to this venture?
00:04:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the Re Wi story really starts with
Dan, so he can probably pick that off.
00:04:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll start. My journey was a little bit
more non-traditional than Tristan’s or probably the typical guest on
this podcast.
In high school, I was very interested in computers and entrepreneurship.
I actually had a web development agency.
This is in the late 90s, early 2000s, when every Main Street business
was realizing they needed to have a presence on the World Wide Web.
As an expat in Germany, you might find it amusing that we called the
company Glowing Pear, because we were studying German and learned that
light bulb in German is Glue Bena. So that was a funny name.
But I went to school to study business, not realizing that studying
business is really finance, so I took a 10 year detour from software and
entrepreneurship to go to Wall Street, but then in my early 30s, I had
an early midlife crisis, quit my job, sold all my things, and Traveled
the world for a little over a year.
It was during that time that I became a power user of Kindle, because we
were backpacking and couldn’t really lug around all these books.
And it was also during this time that I was reading about one
challenging book per week, and I got really frustrated with the fact
that I could barely tell you the name of a book I’d read a month ago,
nevertheless, the key takeaways.
So, when that frustration hit me, I was just ascending the learning
curve of this challenging flashcard app called Onki, and I had this
idea, oh, I’m taking all these highlights while I read in Kindle, not
doing anything with them. What would happen if I put them into Anki and
review them for 5 minutes every morning?
00:05:46 - Speaker 2: Nke just briefly is kind of the original tool for
thought in some ways, a space repetition system that basically uses this
technique to help you remember things better. Beloved by language
learners for sure, but also could basically help you remember any
knowledge.
00:06:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Onki is a very powerful piece of software,
but it’s a little bit hard to use. I had to read like a 40 page PDF to
kind of get up the learning curve.
So this sabbatical afforded me that opportunity to learn it. So, yeah, I
did a prototype where I wrote a script that would import my Kindle
highlights and then I would review them for a few minutes every
morning.
There was no commercial interest here, this is purely a hobby, just a
personal life hack, but I really became interested when Not only did it
help me remember the books, but there were all these higher order second
level benefits that I hadn’t anticipated, and that really opened my
eyes to what just I now call reading tech or reading technology, which
is this idea that the software is eating the world, but it’s barely
scratched the surface on the practice of reading.
Um, so this was in 2016, and I was in a place where I was looking for
what to do next, and that kind of led me to Tristan.
00:06:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I have a little more traditional background
than Dan, I guess, for software founders, I suppose.
I was studying computer science at the University of Waterloo. I’d
worked at a couple companies, maybe like some startups, a notable one
might be Stripe, and another Superhuman. I was actually doing an
internship at Superhuman.
Even before that, I had a little bit of a background and kind of reading
technology.
I guess it started when I was working at Stripe, you know, we had these
brilliant founders, John and Patrick Carlson, and they’d always talk
about how much they’re reading, how much they love reading. How
beneficial it is for you, how it helped them form the company, how it
helps them be successful, and I was kind of struck by this weird
dichotomy that like here were these like super high tech founders who
rely on and love books so much and find them so beneficial, and
obviously I agreed, I read a lot too, and yet, you know, they were
reading basically paper books, there was basically no innovation whatso
all. From the practice of reading from what, like, their grandparents or
people 1000 years ago would have done. So, I found that pretty
interesting, and that kind of got me onto the vein of reading
technology.
So I had my own side project, similar to Dan, which I called Reading
List.io, which was a slightly different tact, but basically, I was
trying to build a tool which would help you prioritize. what you want to
read. So not discovery and not really trying to be social like Goodreads
or anything, but myself and a lot of people I knew just had lists of
books they wanted to read in a text file or Amazon card or something,
like hundreds of books, but they had no good way of prioritizing them,
analyzing that list, and deciding what to read next. So I actually
posted a comment to Hacker News, I just on some random posts to do with
reading. And I left my email, I mentioned I was working on this product,
and Dan shot me an email, which was how we first met.
And then I happened to be living in San Francisco a couple months later,
working at Superhuman, and Dan was also living in San Francisco, so we
actually met up in person, and we became friends and decided ultimately
to start on the first version of Reid Wise way back then in 2017, and
yeah, that’s how we got started.
00:08:54 - Speaker 2: And how is this vision of reading tech evolved
since you joined forces?
00:09:01 - Speaker 1: In some ways it stayed the same.
Our initial mission, I remember vividly being in San Francisco with
Tristan in 2017, we formed the mission to improve the practice of
reading by an order of magnitude using software.
That’s still our mission, still our vision.
The way we conceptualized it is we broke the process of reading down
into 3 stages before you read, while you read, and after you read, and
we hypothesized that if we could double the benefit in each of those,
we’d get 23 power or an 8 times improvement which would round up to an
order of magnitude.
So, we decided to start with actually after you read, based on my
experimentation with putting Kindle highlights in Anki and the profound
benefits I was getting from retaining more of what we read.
We found it was a pretty salient problem, like, we could talk to most
people and be like, hey, have you invested 10 hours in reading a book
and, you know, ever get frustrated that you are nodding your head the
whole time you’re reading it, and like, wow, this is amazing, this is
gonna change my life.
But then in a month later, nothing happens. A lot of people resonate
with that, and There really was nothing else out there trying to provide
a solution to that problem.
So, that’s where we started with Read Wise, what we call now Readwise
1.0, and it’s a very niche product, don’t get me wrong, but people who
like it tend to love it, and it’s very sticky, and they use it for
Years on a daily basis, and that was kind of the platform for us to move
backwards through the process of reading with our newer app, which we
call Reader, we were now able to get into while you read and start
innovating there, and also to a lesser extent before you read.
00:10:46 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and there’s a long journey between us
kicking off on that first Readwise 1.0, help you remember more product
and to even when we started Reader, but yeah, a long slow journey, but,
you know, we’ve been working on it for basically exactly 6 years now.
00:11:02 - Speaker 2: Our topic today is read later apps. Now, in this
framework you’ve already described, this refers to, I guess, kind of
before and during reading. This is an area I’ve been interested in for
a long time because I have used a lot of Rela apps over the years,
starting with Pocket was the first one I fell in love with.
And indeed that brought me to your product, Reader, which is looking for
that kind of perfect relator app. And so I thought it would be
interesting to talk about the history of those and other approaches to
this, but particularly within this larger vision that you have about
reading technology and improving all stages of this.
So maybe we can start with just how you both think about the category of
rel apps and how you think about why you wanted to enter that category.
00:11:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. So, starting with the history of
read it later apps, there were really two prerequisites that were
required before that category emerged. The first is kind of obvious, but
the internet and This profusion of permissionless content, notably in
the form of blogging, you really needed that content out there before
there would be anything to save to read a later app. And then the second
innovation was obviously the smartphone. This is the first time that
computing devices were less about productivity, right? Like a personal
computer is more about doing work. Of course people would play games or
Watch movies on a computer occasionally, but it was really productivity
first, and the mobile phone, smartphone was a consumption first device.
So with those two prerequisites in the late 2000s, we saw the first read
it later app. There’s some controversy as to who came first, but
according to our conversations and reading of the history, it seems like
Marco Ormant created Insta paper. And was the first person to kind of
check all the table stakes boxes of what makes a real later app, need
the ability to save web pages, to read later from both your computer and
your mobile phone. You need to parse those web pages into distraction
free clean HTML and then you need the ability to read those across
devices. So he really kicked off the category with Pocket as a fast
follower, and they really kind of dominated the category. There was a
lot of enthusiasm behind these. I think Marco became a little frustrated
with the whole competition with Pocket, so he sold Insta paper to a
venture capital studio in New York called Betaworks, and they took the
baton and continued to grow the platform while Pocket raised a bunch of
money. And continue to grow the platform. But then around like 2015, I
think they reached an asymptote in terms of their growth and kind of put
these apps into maintenance mode. Betaworks spun Ins the paper out to
Pinterest, where it kind of lived dormant for three years. Pinterest
then spun it back out to the guy from Betaworks who ran it in 2018,
Brian Donahue, good friend of ours, a lot of respect for him. And then
Pocket was acquired by Mozilla, which is why you see Pocket built into
the Firefox web browser. I share that history because that’s part of
the reason that we entered this category is because we love these apps.
I’ve been a user of Insta Paper since, I think, 2011, I tried to go
back and figure out when I first saved a document there, but from about
2015, 2016 on, they were just maintained as opposed to adding features,
so we felt like there was a little bit of a void in terms of innovation
and continuing to build on to the great foundation that they started. So
we saw an opportunity there, at least for our user, which is very much a
power user to enter that space and kind of carry the baton forward.
00:14:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and you can kind of take the path to read it
later apps forward from us, we kind of start a new one.
I’d say the existing ones this paper and pocket basically been left
alone, just kind of maintained, but you can also go a little further
back, it’s kind of interesting, and this is something that Dan actually
has pointed out to me and we’ve kind of discovered, or at least
discovered the significance of only like rather late into our journey to
Reader, like, there was a fundamental activity that came before Read it
later apps, which was, as you probably know, Adam bookmarking.
There have been bookmarking apps, basically, I think, as long as the web
browser has existed. I’m not really sure what the first one was
probably built into Netscape or something, but you know, there’s this
fundamental habit of just bookmarking a web page or URL that you want to
come back to in the future.
All major web browsers have this built in, there’s a lot of dedicated
bookmarking apps. Such as pinboard and many others.
What’s kind of interesting is that fundamental activity, saving a link
kind of forked when the smartphone came out.
So, One Direction is the one that Dan mentioned, which is that people
took bookmarking, added in, you know, distraction free reading, added in
the cross platform syncing, and you kind of got real later apps. There
was another fork though, which was pretty interesting, which was
basically what Pinterest did.
Pinterest at its core is bookmarking. It’s much more visual
bookmarking. It’s a very different market from the read it later out
market. It’s a lot less of a focus on maybe like the traditional type
of like blog post reading that would happen in its paper rather, it’s a
lot more focus on inspiration, stuff like saving recipes, but at its
core, that’s another fork of bookmarking, so it’s kind of interesting
to see.
And what’s also striking about this category is, we’re not venture
successes at all.
Its paper wasn’t trying to be one, pocket was. And I’m sure the exit
was still successful, but it hasn’t become this like household name,
whereas Pinterest really took that fork and it was massively successful
with it, which is kind of an interesting tidbit.
And of course you could maybe view a third fork as social networking
apps, especially if you focus on news. And just a more social angle,
those are also being massively successful and at their core, a lot of
what people are doing is sharing bookmarks. So there’s some kind of
interesting history there, we could probably nerd out about the history
forever, but that’s probably as deep as we should go.
00:17:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. It feels like the fundamental
building blocks or primitives that eventually became what we now think
of as relator is bookmarking, obviously the web and as you said earlier,
Dan, the sort of permission free, I can just click a link and start
reading it style that exists on the web, putting paywalls aside, of
course.
And then I also feel like RSS readers and the sort of blogosphere circa,
you know, mid 2000s, maybe as part of this equation as well.
But looking at the kind of relative enthusiasm for those early movers
and paper and pocket and then how they both seem to peter out and
eventually go into maintenance mode, it does seem like this is a beloved
category for a certain class of person, 3 of us included, but that class
of person there just isn’t enough of to make a venture scale business
out of.
And so, yeah, when things cap out and then they can’t give the proper
returns to their investors, and I seem to recall pocket kind of
thrashing around a bit and adding social features and adding this, that
and the other thing that I think power users who are focused on their
reading experience didn’t want in hopes of, yeah, trying to achieve
that scale. What have you learned from this history, and maybe it’s
partially just how to think about the market, but also, what are you
gonna do to avoid the, you’re walking down a road and you see these
bodies alongside of it. What does that tell you about the dragons that
lurk in the bushes?
00:18:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the first thing is raising venture
capital into a reading app is difficult, which is one of the core
reasons back in 2018 we actually published a blog post that we
referenced all the time. We decided to bootstrap readwise, meaning, you
know, fund it from Revenue from our customers as opposed to venture
capital, that was one key lesson we learned and we think enables us to
build for the long term. Tristan, you wanna take it from there?
00:19:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, the other is kind of the fact that we
look at the history at all, and we looked at similar startups when we
first started Read Wi, similar companies that had tried to build on top
of the Kindle platform, or what have you, you know, I think there’s
that quote from Alan Kay, where he’s like, computer science is like a
pop culture, where no one ever looks back in time at all.
And we’ve actually just gotten a surprising amount of value, just by
looking back, you know, looking at the history of Insta paper and
pocket, how it turned out, like what People liked about those, what they
didn’t, what growth strategies worked for these companies.
It just says a meta point that’s super underrated in startups.
And you know, we’re not near one of the internet here. This isn’t like
1995 or whatever.
There’s a lot of data to go back on, and that’s not to say that means
these ideas are dead ends. Obviously a lot of ideas that didn’t work in
the past can now work because of better distribution or better internet
speeds or hardware or whatever, but there’s just a lot of value to
going back and looking at those.
00:19:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think another lesson is from a business
model perspective, they were both trying to reach a social scale that
could be funded through ads and just having so much attention and
eyeballs. I think that’s a pitfall that we avoided by making premium
software.
Another thing we noticed is It’s hard to get accurate estimates of how
many signups or users they’ve ever attained, but it seems like around
like 60 to 80 million people have tried insta paper pocket, yet I would
venture, there’s probably a million active users, so there’s some sort
of huge drop off where people fail to adopt the core behavior.
That’s definitely not something we have solved. Let me be very clear,
but that is one of the things that we aspire to figure out and solve at
some point.
00:20:41 - Speaker 2: I do have to wonder whether there’s sort of a gym
membership effect here, which is people aspire to read more, to engage
more thoughtfully with, you know, whatever content they feel is
important to them. But in the end, the low friction path is let the
algorithm pick out a video for me to watch on YouTube or Netflix, for
example. I mean, the entertainment and general kind of media consumption
options we have at our disposal in this day and age are just
unbelievable, and so you have to be fairly dedicated to stick with that,
I think.
00:21:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we love that fitness gym membership
metaphor. We use it all the time internally to describe what we do.
00:21:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and it’s pretty motivating, right? Because
we are often eating time from, you know, somebody scrolling reels on
Instagram, or scrolling TikToks or scrolling through their Twitter
feed.
We aspire to do better than that, and it’s very motivating when you
know that you’re helping people read stuff that they’ve consciously
picked out. It’s a lot harder, absolutely, it’s a huge challenge and
to be clear, we lose to these.
Addictive social media apps all the time, but we can feel good about
building a future which really grows engagement, which really makes the
app sticky, which really, you know, sends the user a push notification
every morning, and we don’t have to feel bad about it, and the user
will generally leave a session of the reader app or the Read Wi app
feeling very happy about the time they spent. And I think While it is a
little bit of an uphill battle, just like a gym membership. Once you can
do it, I think people become very loyal customers. They have very high
retention, and they really like coming back to you. It’s just a a lot
harder, but, you know, in the same way, we can feel good, just like a
gym membership. Maybe most gym members won’t end up using that, you
know, you can go and invent like a Barry’s boot camp type of class. Or
something, or you can go invent a new workout machine or workout process
or workout plan, which really does help people actually get better
outcomes and read more and spend more time reading and feeling better.
It’s super motivating to get up every morning and work on that problem
as opposed to how can we make reels, you know, 1% more addictive and
extract, you know, 5% more ad revenue. We’re not like these huge social
media haters. We go on these tirades, like they’re tearing apart
society, especially Twitter, definitely has its place, and there’s a
lot of value to very like low information latency communication and
stuff like that, but there’s also a place for long form reading that
there’s probably a suboptimal amount going on there if you would ask
most people how they’d like to spend their time.
00:23:01 - Speaker 2: Well, actually, since we’ve mentioned social
media a few times and I think this is probably also related to that
proto aspect of linked discovery, which was RSS feeds, for me, there’s
actually a very natural pairing between the social media that I do use,
which includes Reddit and Twitter and Re later because I find that when
I’m in that linked discovery mode of scrolling or grazing at the
content. It’s a little bit too disorienting to then dive really deep
into a longer article.
And actually I noticed this in my career as a writer on the web, and
particularly when I’m writing content for Yeah, like a blog somewhere
where we are thinking about, OK, people are going to follow this link
from Twitter hacker news, whatever, and we want to keep them engaged and
there’s somewhere around 2000 words is kind of like your maximum.
No matter how interesting it is, people are going to drop off, not
because they’re not interested, but because they’re not in that
mindset of going deep in the long form reading.
And one effect, you know, if you don’t have a tool like this or some
kind of discipline built into your consumption habits, is that just gets
lost, you know, maybe you bookmark it or you leave it in an open tab,
you know, I’m going to read this later, and I think that system
doesn’t often work that well for people, but for me, it works really
well.
To have a place to put something that I want to read, I do want to
engage deeply with, but I want to be in a place and a mindset where
that’s what I want.
I’ve just settled down into my seat on a long airplane ride, and yeah,
of course I can get a book, but I also might want to get out a long form
web article, for example. How do you see reader fitting together with,
yeah, social media, the linked discovery problem generally, and how does
that fit in also to that framework of the, you know, before, during, and
after reading.
00:24:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there are a lot of interesting topics there.
I’ll start with first, the type of reading that we’re focused on.
So in books, which is where we started, believe it or not, before read
it later, they typically bifurcate reading into nonfiction and fiction.
We think that’s a little bit of a crude dichotomy. It doesn’t really
apply to this reading.
We break it into reading for betterment and reading for entertainment,
and our mission is to improve the practice of reading for betterment by
an order of magnitude.
Reading for betterment might be learning knowledge, learning know-how,
which would be like a skill, trying to better your career, your
relationships, listening to a podcast in your industry like Meta Muse,
reading a newsletter about your career. Those are examples of reading
for betterment.
Reading for entertainment would obviously be the kind of reading you
would do instead of watching Netflix, like maybe reading Harry Potter,
listening to a fun audiobook about science fiction.
And news is one of these that kind of falls somewhere in between. In
many cases it is just a form of entertainment. Occasionally it is a form
of reading for entertainment, so we often see it like things blur for us
when we’re talking about news and RSS.
When we started Reader, we spent a lot of time trying to come up with
these really robust abstractions that would enable us to build for a
long time, and we tried to anticipate all the pitfalls and the dead ends
and the idea maze. I think one area where we were a little naive was the
pairing of read it later with RSS. That was probably one of the hardest
challenges.
For me, it’s one of the hardest challenges we faced, because you have
so many different RSS use cases.
So, you have this old school generation of RSS readers, people who are
around back in the golden era of Google Reader, who are just absolute
infovores. They’re getting like 1000 new links a day, and they just
want to churn through them. We haven’t yet built our RSS feeder to
accommodate them. We’ve really Built it towards the more modern RSS
reader, which is born out of substack and email newsletters, where
you’re getting maybe 2 or 3 long form pieces per week, and that’s more
the volume you can deal with. But obviously RSS has been a category that
had a lot of enthusiasm in the late 2000s, early 2010s, but from our
perspective, I think most people would agree, social media kind of
replaced or supplanted RSS. So yeah, we’ve not been trying to go back
and recreate what RSS used to be and kind of fight against that current.
We’ve really been building for the more modern RSS use case, which is
less about like getting your TechCrunch and yournggadget, 100 links a
day, and more about your substack writer who posts 3 times a week, more
to that like blogosphere era.
00:27:40 - Speaker 2: Substack is an interesting one to talk about.
I think Reader and Substack at the moment are sort of my two apps on my
phone that are the ones when I think, OK, I want to go for an in-depth
piece, I have some time to sit down. I’m eating lunch, I’m, yeah, on
the plane, I’m whatever, those are the two apps I’m likely to go to,
but they’re completely different. Reader is part of, yeah, open web,
open protocols, you can save any link. Indeed, you support media types
outside of the web, including PDF and Video and others like you’ve
mentioned, whereas SubStack is a closed network that includes the
publishing, the content, the linked discovery, the whole, you know,
subscribe and follow the payment as well as now because they have a
really nice mobile app, the reading experience. How do you think about,
I don’t know, substack fitting into your world, part competitor, part
adjacent complimentary product, I would imagine. Yeah, how do you think
about that?
00:28:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, we definitely have a lot of respect
for those guys. The quality of content coming from them is off the
charts.
One interesting thing that Tristan and I always talk about, and maybe he
can expand on this is one of the opportunities we saw when we started
working on Reader is, but for ins the paper and pocket, there’s really
never been a reading app that’s been built for the reader.
Most reading apps come from the supply side, and they’re really Trying
to benefit the creator of the content as opposed to the consumer of the
content. So we saw that as an opportunity for us in a point of
differentiation, where we’re putting the interests of the reader first,
as opposed to the interests of the creator. Now, oftentimes there’s an
alignment of interest there, but not always.
00:29:22 - Speaker 2: Right, you can think of Substack like medium
before it as something where it’s a two-sided network, and they want to
get the readers and they want to get the writers or the content creators
and put them together, but even, yeah, for example, part of the
substack, call it reading experience is that when you’re scrolling
through an article, you know, it’s prompting you to subscribe to their
newsletter, either to get the emails or to subscribe as and become a
paying subscriber or even once you are a paying subscriber. then it
still says, do you want to give this as a gift to someone else, that
sort of thing. And obviously all of that serves the interests more of
the platform and of the content creator, and it’s a minor
inconvenience, so I don’t worry about it, but it’s obviously not
putting the reader experience first the way that you can.
00:30:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to be clear, there’s great value in
serving the writers. I think they are an important part of the
ecosystem, you know, with writers, there’s no reading, but just for us,
we’re like laser focused just on the readers, you know, we don’t want
to offend the writers, we’re not gonna do anything that takes money out
of the writers’ pockets or try to hurt them at all, but at the end of
the day, every day we wake up and we build software for the readers. We
think about how does this reader want to spend their day, how do they
want to spend their time reading, how will they feel good about their
reading time after, and how can we help them do that? And ultimately
there are customers too, we’re just very, very laser focused, and I
think that allows us to go a little deeper in the IDAs of reading. We
just solely think about how we can make reading better, and I think that
helps us a lot. I think we’re pretty lucky to be able to do that. Of
course, you know, it’s arguably a worse business model. Dan and I can
go on and we have for days and days about the challenges with consumer
sass and charging consumers money and how much higher the bar is there
compared to enterprise and all the unique challenges like having churn,
non-negative churn for your business. So there’s a lot of downsides to
it, but at the end of the day, at least we get to have that benefit. So
we try and enjoy it as much as we can, I guess.
00:31:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m generally a big fan of prosumer
software and indeed that’s what Muses, but yeah, it comes with a lot of
challenges. You get the fickle behavior of consumers and the desire not
to pay any money. Often in a surprising contradiction where what
they’re willing to pay for physical goods or experiences like eating
out at a restaurant, don’t seem to match up with what they’re willing
to pay for digital goods.
Happily, I think that has changed a lot and actually maybe this is to
your point about your ability to succeed where some of the earlier folks
didn’t, you know, I remember when Pocket experimented with, I became a
paying subscriber, they had a, I can’t remember what it was, $40 a
year or something. Subscription, I was happy to support them, but I
think at that time, this would have been, yeah, 8 or so years ago, the
idea of prosumer software paying subscriptions at that price point,
which is kind of what you need for the number of people in your
addressable markets. I was just like offensive, somehow and people were
just like, you know, up in arms because they were used to getting all
this free stuff from, you know, Facebook and Google and everything like
that. Happily, I think that has started to change both as software
developers, especially in the software developers realize subscription.
are a way to make a sustainable business and do well by your customers
and increasingly I think customers are starting to recognize that.
But yeah, when you compare to the ease of getting a business, a B2B
customer to pay, where if you can do something to improve their
efficiency and help them do their business better, they’ll happily pay
for a tool, an individual will hesitate on that a lot more.
00:32:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s always funny how I’ll slap down the
corporate card to buy a $30 a month form building software without even
thinking, but many times we’ll get users right in that this is kind of
like a family decision. They, they have to talk to their significant
other about whether or not they can afford this expense at dinner.
Completely different psychology around these expenditures.
00:33:09 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and while you’re right that there is a lot
more willingness to pay and subscriptions have become a little
normalized, I think, whereas in the past, you might have got more of a
comparison to Google or to Facebook and be like, oh, online software
should simply be free. Now we get a lot more of the comparisons to
Netflix or Spotify, and they’ll be like, well, Netflix gives me
millions of videos, Spotify gives me unlimited music, and, you know,
they cost the same per month as your product, so like.
How can you justify that? And of course the optimal amount of like
pushback you’re getting from these customers is not zero. If you’re
getting no pushback, it’s probably because you’re charging like
something so ridiculously low that your company is not sustainable. So
you kind of have to take a lot of that feedback and stride and be like,
oh, well, if you value Netflix more than reading better, then, you know,
you’re probably just not our target user, and that’s OK. Maybe you can
go use the free pocket version and that’s actually better for you.
00:33:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the place where we succeed is when we’re
dealing with someone who views reading not as a form of consumption or
entertainment, but as an investment in themselves, almost like a form of
education, and when it’s framed that way for them, the expense is a no
brainer because they can get such a higher return on time invested in
reading than they can otherwise. So that’s where we really win.
00:34:21 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and that is the sweet spot, right? I think
there are a lot of apps out there, like, you know, Pocket is better for
the price obviously, than Reader.
You could argue maybe like Pocket Earns paper has a very simplified,
streamlined, very simple approach, and maybe that’s better for some
people who just want something dumb simple, and that’s fine.
There’s a lot of aspects in my life.
I might prefer an app like that, but if you are someone like Dan
mentioned who views reading as an investment, and you’re kind of coming
into the same frame with it as you would a online.
Course, you know, they have these online courses that teach you to write
better, to be more productive in your job. They’ll usually be like
$3000 4000 dollars for a course.
And, you know, a lot of people consider that a worthwhile investment in
themselves, and it probably is, it probably is worthwhile.
So for people who actually value that investment, I think we can say
Reader is the best product. For those types of serious readers and
people who are reading for betterment, and that’s kind of the sweet
spot we aim to be at.
Again, because we’re bootstrapped, we’re not trying to get a billion
users, probably like Pocket was trying to do, I would guess. We don’t
want a billion users, we want the million, the hopefully someday 10
million people who really, really want the absolute best reading
experience for productivity and betterment.
00:35:33 - Speaker 2: Now speaking of comparing to free alternatives,
how do you think about what’s now built into the sort of iOS and Apple
operating systems with there’s a reading list and the readability mode
for websites, that’s kind of one tap away and yeah, it gets all these
first party advantages in terms of it’s a single tap to say something
to your reading list versus needing to go through a share sheet and set
things up to reach your app. How do you find customers compare you? How
do you think about positioning on that?
00:36:01 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a great question. That actually
speaks to like the main benefit of reader, you know, we’ve talked about
we want it to be better, but how is it actually better than other ways
of reading right now.
The main value prop that we pitch, we basically call all in one, and
this goes back to comparisons to substack 2.
The main goal we had for reader as a product for the 1st 2 years of
building it was that a user can save absolutely any type of content they
want to read. As long as it’s reading for betterment, they can save
that to readers. So, again, that’s from books to articles, to email
newsletters, to RSS feeds, Twitter threads, YouTube videos. Basically,
you can get all of that stuff into one place, so when you’re, you know,
sitting down on a flight, like you mentioned, Adam, you have everything
that you’re consuming in one place rather than say in Safari, you’ll
just have your web articles, or on Twitter you’ll just have your
Twitter bookmarks or something. The reader can support all of those
things and more. That seems to be the thing that users tell us they like
the best of our reader.
00:36:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is kind of like a classic substitute.
What’s a substitute for what you’re building.
And I will say the biggest substitute is just having a bunch of tabs
opening your browser. And I’d be lying if we said we had figured out
how, not with a power user, but with more of what we call like a normie
user, we’d figured out how to persuade someone that it’s better to be
saving those things to reader and aggregating them in one place and kind
of taking control of that fire hose of content.
In reader, but that’s probably our biggest aspiration for the remainder
of 2023, trying to figure out how to make that value prop more tangible
and the onboarding experience to experience it much faster and smoother.
00:37:42 - Speaker 2: I’d be curious to ask about a few technical
aspects of how you’ve built this product, and the first one that comes
to mind is, yeah, let’s call it that readability mode or the parsing,
the stripped down view.
You’re not just a bookmark where when I call up the article that then
it’s displaying it exactly as I would see it in my browser. I get this
simplified view, everything’s kind of in the same typeface, etc. and my
experience with read letter apps has always been that.
Even a very well made 1, 80%, 90% work perfectly and then there’s also
a pretty big list that worked pretty well, but for some reason, the
first paragraphs missing or the image should be there that isn’t or
there’s an image that’s actually part of an ad that is, and then on
the far end of the tail there somewhere is articles that just don’t
work at all or whatever and you need to open in your browser. How do you
implement that parsing, whatever it is you call that part of the
product.
00:38:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a great question, and it is a really
hard problem. It’s definitely one of the harder problems we had to
tackle. You know, there’s a lot of secret sauce there. There’s a lot
of just manual work over a long period of having the right libraries to
do the right type of extraction, the right type of labeling, third party
providers, machine learning. There’s a lot that goes into it, but I’d
say there were Maybe a couple like interesting decisions we made that I
think have made us pretty successful at this. Obviously, we still have
parsing issues, and I’ll explain in a bit how I know this. Like, I
think we have basically the best parsing of any read itator app that
we’ve tried.
So the first major decision I think you have to make is, do you do the
parsing on device locally or do you do it in the cloud? And we decided
to do it in the cloud. There are a lot of libraries. There’s a pretty
popular readability.js one that I think Firefox maintains that they use
for their reading mode, and I don’t actually think they use it for a
lot of pocket, but it is used for the Firefox reader mode, and who knows
what else. Google Chrome has their own version too, that’s even a lot
simpler than Readability JS, so we could have done it on the client, and
there still might be situations in the future where we want to do it on
the client, but We just found them really lacking. So ultimately we
decided to join the cloud, which gives you a lot more ability to debug
what went wrong, to improve your process, to fix the parsing from our
side when it’s broken, and just really collect the data we need to
build this ongoing process.
So that was one decision we made earlier on, which we really have no
regrets on.
We do a lot of other stuff on the client, you know, our reader as an app
runs what we call offline first, basically, most stuff can happen
offline and the user’s client, but this was one thing where we’re
really glad. We did it on the server.
Another thing we did early on, which I guess we just took for granted as
like a software engineering thing to do, but has really helped us is
basically, before we even started building parsing, we went into
Readwise, we found the top 100 articles that people had highlighted the
most. And read the most. And basically this is just like a proxy of the
types of articles that our users would want to read. We went into Insta
paper, we went into pocket, and we basically manually labeled every
single one, like, did instant paper succeed at parsing this article
perfectly. If it wasn’t perfect, what did it have missed? Did it miss
some images? Did it miss some text? Did it include stuff it shouldn’t
have included, and you can have different. Tables for these kinds of
things, you know, including stuff you shouldn’t have included isn’t
nearly as bad as missing content. So we label it that way, and it was
basically just this giant Google sheet, very manual things that don’t
scale process. But then when we were trying different prising solutions,
we would just evaluate them against the spreadsheet, which really,
really helped us. And now, you know, we can confidently say, at least
with the types of articles that our users read. By this benchmark, we
actually definitely outperform ins paper and pocket in almost all cases.
Obviously there’s still a few that I will miss, but, and then again,
we’re able to go onto that spreadsheet and prove the parsing and fix
even more. So that was a really awesome decision we made early on, is
just building that manual benchmark and manually going through early on
and building that.
00:41:28 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s great to have like a really clear
benchmark because there’s no such thing as perfection, but I’m
reminded maybe of like the web standards acid tests or something like
that where engineers and builders in general are really good at, you
know, working towards a clear targets, but when it’s just like, I
don’t know, try to parse most articles on the web correctly, hand wave,
hand wave, that’s not an achievable thing or a measurable thing. So
yeah, I can see why that would be a really nice way to concretely
compare the approaches you’re taking. And also seems like a natural
just integration test, basically.
00:42:02 - Speaker 3: Yes, so that’s the benchmark, and then the last
thing I think we did that was maybe unique to us, I don’t know how
pocket Instapa did it back in their day.
Instant paper was basically just Marco, so I know he didn’t do this,
but basically we have a dedicated parsing engineer.
Started off just a role that one of our engineers took on part time, but
now we have a contractor who basically works on fixing parsing issues
full time.
We have a whole test suite. We know that like when we update parsing,
it’s not breaking anything that was previously working, and we just
have this engineer working full time on going through. We have a whole
system where we have users report parsing issues, so that goes into this
like database we And then we sort them by the things that are most read
that are reported broken, and then things that are most reported broken
by our users, and we’re able to just kind of privatize that way.
And so we still have an engineer going in every day and fixing the top
websites, fixing the top articles that the user report are broken, and
that has been pretty good. There’s still a lot left to do, but at least
we can have this confidence that it is getting better over time rather
than slowly decaying, which I think is the norm with this open web kind
of stuff.
00:43:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, to that point, it truly is a game of cat and
mouse. There are some platforms out there, particularly the old school
media outlets that really don’t want people to take content off the
platform and read it elsewhere.
So, you may have good parsing for a month, but then something changes
and you have to go back and fix it. So, it’s a constant battle, you’re
never done. One final thing we did from a product perspective as opposed
to, well, it’s heavy engineering, but from the user experience level.
We also have a powerful browser extension that enables you to highlight
the native web page. So we consider that our failsafe in the event that
parsing fails, you can always open the original, and then if you have
the reader browser extension installed, you can highlight on the native
page. So that’s good for these parsing exceptions, it’s also good for
instances where the original creator put a lot of effort into formatting
or creating a reading experience that It is actually better than the
distraction free clean experience. I’d say the distraction free is
better 98 times out of 100, but there are some times where the website
is like, truly unique and special, and you want to read it there.
00:44:14 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if you ever read like a bread Victor post or
article, yeah, explorable explanations was the first thing that came to
my mind.
But yeah, I also know that exactly some people put a lot of effort into
the typography into the diagrams, so the things I actually want there
are bespoke.
Experience, particularly if they made it work reasonably well on
mobile.
It’s just as a default and it’s both the sort of actively user hostile
aspects of ads and irrelevant junk that I don’t want to see and clutter
up, especially a mobile screen, but also it’s just like, I don’t know,
there’s many pieces of good content that are also on a website that
just doesn’t have legible typography.
And I just want to be able to read it.
That’s all, and this, you know, basically pulls out the content and
puts it into a kind of a standard size box that’s often better than
whatever wild west is out there on the internet.
00:45:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and luckily for us, the web page you do
actually want to read the author’s version of is quite rare, you know,
like Dan was saying, I would say it’s, you know, definitely single
digit percentage, often less, and then that actually extends to other
format types too. For example, we support Twitter threads. A lot of
people prefer saving their Twitter threads to reader and just being able
to read highlight across tweets, for example, in the thread, be able to
read it, you know, without having to scroll through and There is some
cool benefits to Twitter threads where you can click into a specific
tweet and see the comments, but for the most part, that’s better. And
then even in PDFs, PDFs are kind of like notoriously annoying to read on
mobile. You have to kind of like pinch and zoom to like read a sentence
and then scroll it across.
00:45:42 - Speaker 2: The two column academic format was never made with
the mobile form factor in mind.
00:45:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, just PDFs weren’t in general,
right? And so we do. Have a feature now where we’ll parse your PDFs
basically into clean HTML. So when you’re on your phone, you can just
switch to that. It doesn’t work great for graphic heavy PDFs,
obviously, but, you know, if you’re basically just reading some text
exported to PDF, it works a lot better. And so, you know, there’s
really no shortage of benefits for the clean view. Luckily for us. Maybe
in the future, all websites will be formatted so nicely and have such
great interactive experiments. We’ll need to change that up. But for
now, it works quite well.
00:46:18 - Speaker 2: Another technical area that listeners of the
podcast will know I’m very interested in is everything having to do
with sync, and I know you’ve mentioned there being offline first and
maybe I’ve even heard you use the term local first or seen that in your
marketing somewhere, but certainly coming back to that personal example
of the reader app and the substack app.
Both do pretty well at allowing you to read stuff offline, but even
there I can see where you put some effort into that that goes beyond
what substack folks do as one small example that I run into pretty
frequently, I read something on Substack while I’m, yeah, again, on a
plane or in the elevator in my apartment or some other place where I
don’t have network, and the archive button just basically freezes the
app if you tap it, so you can’t archive an article while you’re
offline.
You could read it, but you can’t archive it, whereas that does work for
readers. So I’m curious to hear, yeah, how do you do the syncing?
Obviously the cross-platform element is actually an important part of
the relator experience because you do often read on mobile, capture on
mobile, but the desktop is also really important. Tell me about all
that.
00:47:24 - Speaker 3: Yeah, of course. So there is a lot there. I will
say our app is in technically local first, and we’ve taken a lot of
product engineer, especially engineering inspiration from what you guys
have put out the Ink & Switch. So hugely thankful for that. It was
actually really, really useful reading through all of that, and Reader
isn’t. Technically, local first, I think by the proper definitions,
your client will need to sync with the server to start. You can’t just
start using it offline. For the first time you use a new device, it
needs to basically sync some state from the server, but after that you
can basically use it offline indefinitely.
And there are some things, you know, obviously syncing documents saved
on other platforms, etc. parsing, all that stuff only works online.
There are parts that require working online, but for the most part,
yeah, you can do everything offline for as long as you want, and then
just when you come back online, all your changes will be synced.
00:48:13 - Speaker 2: Well, I mean, it’s pretty fair that parsing only
works online because if I save a web link, somehow. Now I don’t know, I
had it in my copy paste buffer into my relator app and I’m offline. I
can’t load the webpage regardless. So it doesn’t really matter if I
can parse it or not.
00:48:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that was our thinking there too is there’s
a lot of stuff which is just naturally paired with online activity
anyways. Another thing that doesn’t work is adding an RSS feed that
won’t work offline, where obviously you need to connect to the external
RSS feed. So yeah, it mostly works. So that’s why we kind of tried to
say offline first rather than local first. It isn’t quite the vision of
maybe like some of the demo apps you guys have shown us, like an app
where you can take notes, and that could just work fully offline and
never need to connect to the server. It’s not quite that, but basically
once it’s connected up front, you’re good to go. So syncing is
actually interesting.
Believe it or not, we actually tried to use automerge was one of the
things we first tried when I was first building the first version of.
Reader. Unfortunately, Reader supports a lot of data. Our users will
commonly save thousands, tens of thousands of documents to reader. And
at the time, automerge performance was just too slow to load that stuff
into memory. I do know there’s been like a whole new version of Amerge
recently, I think, written in like RT or something, which actually might
work great. I don’t know if we could switch to it at this point, but
yeah, so we evaluated automerge, didn’t really work for us at the
time.
We evaluated CRDTs, we’re like, oh well, you know, we could use some
other type of CRDTs and actually because our app isn’t multiplayer,
it’s really just single player. We actually just settle on a very
simple syncing solution, basically, a user will make a change locally.
The whole local state is basically just JavaScript objects, JavaScript
arrays, etc. So what we do is we take the state before, we take the
state after, we generate a JSON patch between the two, and we generate
the reverse JSON patch, which is very important as well, and we bundle
those up into an update object which we then cache locally on the client
and send off to the server when it’s ready, and just the JSON patches
which are There’s still going to be some conflicts sometimes if you do
some stuff offline, then change the same data on a different client, but
conflict resolution is very easy for us because it’s just the same
person twice, so we can kind of just do last right, almost always wins.
And so, yeah, Jason Patch’s simplicity for the win, I guess, has
actually worked out great for us. Now, if we ever do build multiplayer
features, which we’re not really planning on, but if we did, maybe that
would bite us in the butt, but.
00:50:36 - Speaker 2: Now that makes sense to me, and I think the domain
you’re in as well, almost all the operations that just come to mind,
whether it’s saving a link, whether it’s archiving something, whether
it’s highlighting something, these are mostly items operations, right?
If I archive on my desktop, but I had previously done that offline on my
phone, and then I come back online with the phone and that syncs up,
just the two archive operations don’t matter that much.
So it seems to me like a really simple solution there is a good one, but
ultimately is a syncing. Solution rather than a classic cloud solution,
which is I don’t want to tap on my article to read just as I settle
down in my comfy chair and get a spinner. I want the whole idea. I mean,
I think the product brand pocket was an excellent one and instant paper
also encompasses this. Both of them seem to capture the sense of like,
it’s a thing you have or you can hold. Rather than the web is a place
you, you go out to, you visit a web page, but I don’t want to visit a
web page. I want to take this link and save it into my pocket or my
instant piece of paper and have it. So then when I sit down to read, I
know it’s there and I’m not subject to the whims of the network for
that.
00:51:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and that whole notion of capturing or
archiving or saving is another value prop of read it later that we
haven’t talked about, but it’s very important to people to kind of
snag this content and a place and time and know that it’ll be there
when they come back, which you don’t always get with just the URL.
00:52:02 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I wonder also if there’s an element of
personal curation here somewhat, which is one effect of the call the
mainstream sort of digital media consumption places is that you
typically have this stream of stuff that doesn’t belong to you in any
sense when I’m browsing through TikTok. None of this is like mine
unless I actually create it. It’s just a stream of stuff that’s
started going by, and even something like my Twitter feed or whatever,
doesn’t have that sense. I guess you can like your bookmark things
there and hopefully those are retrievable later, but I think there’s
something to, I want to pluck this thing out of Again, my late discovery
mechanism, whether that’s hacker news, Reddit, Twitter, whatever else
it may be, and say this is mine now, it’s something I want to read.
And then furthermore, maybe this goes to your kind of after reading part
of the experience. I want to say I’ve actually highlighted some things
because I’ve got some value from some of the concepts in this article,
and these highlights are mine. The article was written by someone else,
but these highlights were for me, the things that mattered or were
relevant or sparked some insight in me. And then furthermore, then I can
tag it as a favorite or something like that and be able to go and search
that.
Later, what was that article I read, I think it was like a month ago
that had this concept, I want to share that with someone else, but I
can’t remember the name of the article, and searching the web for it is
a much bigger haystack to search for that needle than just searching
articles that I’ve read or favored.
So I feel like this curation aspect, which I think again is a downside,
most people don’t want to do that curation work. They don’t want to
curate even a playlist on Spotify, they just want to turn on the radio
thing and just say play stuff I like for me, whereas maybe again coming
back more to that power user, you’re investing in your reading
experience. In the kinds of content that you want to read, and it’s
worth doing a little bit of effort, especially if it’s a tool you enjoy
in order to get that curated set of stuff. This is my stuff. There’s a
whole internet versus full of stuff, but here’s stuff that I’m gonna
say is mine.
00:54:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’ve definitely benefited from this whole
knowledge management or second brain movement. Uh, those weren’t really
in effect back when instant paper and pocket were around, so another
framing of reader is kind of a read it later app for that community,
which is exactly what you’re talking about, this desire to kind of
create your own library and anti-library that’s bespoke to you in the
digital realm, not just the physical realm.
00:54:32 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I will also say from the technical side, we
did make some decisions that kind of reflect that. So, just if you’re,
you know, building a table, say, you know, you have an external web
page, and then you have a user, and then you have the fact that this
user saved this web page, and so maybe you represent that as like a user
save model or something, would maybe be the traditional way you do that,
and that’s super normalized, that’s super efficient. We didn’t
actually really do that, and maybe Dan can get into more why we did
this. It’s more of like a product philosophical thing, but we have this
model that we just call the document. And everything you save to reader
becomes your own document, so it has its own title, its own author, its
own URL, its own metadata, it’s own reading progress, all this stuff.
So when you save an external web page, we do have like a cloud
representation of, say, uh, Ink & Switch blog post. We have the cloud
version of that and we say. You know, 10 users have saved that version,
but then each of those users gets their own document of that external
URL, and of course the document points at the cloud version in our
database, but each user gets their own version of that document, which
they can then change, they can change the author, they can change the
title, they can add highlights to, they can make progress on. It’s
largely a product. Decision is largely led by product decisions, but
it’s also just a little bit of a denormalized database solution and
it’s actually served us quite well, because now we basically allow
users to modify those documents however they want. They can go and edit
the author title, they can change the reading position. The client is
actually agnostic or the server is agnostic. The client can say they
want to change any field on this document, it’s just possible. The user
is just updating their own version of that document. Now, of course,
there’s some complexity there because You have 2 copies. What if the
cloud version actually changes? And what if you make an update to your
ink and Switch blog post? Like how does that propagate down to the 1000
people who read that blog post? Do you have to go and update all
thousands of those documents? Like, yeah, you do, but the benefits there
of users having a document which really is their own, which kind of goes
back to the emotional feeling you mentioned Adam, of really saving
something and it becoming your own, is very different compared to what a
Twitter bookmark is, which is for sure just, you know, two foreign keys,
one to the user and one to the Twitter post.
00:56:47 - Speaker 2: Philosophically, this brings to mind commonplace
books and marginalia, what people did with their physical books, where
precisely as you say, when I buy a physical book, I can rip out the
pages, scribble on them, highlight things, and that’s my version of it
actually, you know, sometimes the marked up books of famous authors or
whatever can go for a lot of money at auction because it represents how
they related to the work and their experience of learning from that and
their reading experience. But everyone understands that just because
I’m scribbling in the book isn’t in any way an attempt to change the
source material. This is just my copy of it. To me, that feels just kind
of natural and right.
00:57:30 - Speaker 3: Definitely, that’s a great analogy. We think
about commonplace books a lot too, but yeah, the document is like
actually this core abstraction, probably the core abstraction we have in
Reader.
Sometimes we get compared to these like new age of note taking apps, so
notion or Rome research or obsidian. You know, a lot of people will ask
like, hey, we have these really powerful writing tools. Why can’t I
just dump everything I want to read into these note taking apps and just
read the content there, and, you know, uh highlight them there, like,
you could kind of imagine your own commonplace book in these kinds of
apps too, but anyone who’s actually tried this will tell you it
doesn’t really work.
It’s hard to exactly say why, you know, not he gives are a little too
fluid for the practice of reading.
So, you know, when we were deciding how to build reader, we were like,
well, we could build reader block based just like notion where, you
know, say every paragraph in an article you’re reading is like its own
block and a document is a parent. Block or like an article as a parent
block or something, but instead we chose to go with the document and and
Dan and I went back and forth on this decision for a long time before
deciding it.
Dan is the more prolific writer than me, so maybe he can explain why
it’s so motivating from a product perspective, not even a technical
perspective.
00:58:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when we were starting work on Reader, when
we were thinking about it, this was back in 2020 when there was a lot of
enthusiasm around this new personal knowledge management evolution, and
there were a lot of people who are like, oh, I’m going to do everything
in Rome research or notion, like this is the new internet.
So we were definitely wondering like, oh, is the block-based
architecture foundational here for us, but like Tristan mentioned, we
went back and forth and Kind of got kind of philosophical about it and
where we settled was that the abstraction of a block would not be the
right abstraction for us as a reading tool, in contrast to a writing
tool.
And where we started there was first with the observation that writing
and reading, and when I use reading here, I’m referring to reading for
betterment, are two sides of the same coin. And really what that is is
the writer is transferring knowledge to the reader’s mind. And the
medium of transfer is through this abstraction we call a document. And
if you actually look at the Latin etymology of document, it means to
show, teach, cause to know.
And there are some fundamental differences between a document and a
block in terms of abstractions.
I don’t know, have you ever tried to read someone’s wiki link or
outliner based page of notes that isn’t your own? It’s very difficult.
So I, the first difference is these notes or these blocks, they’re
really internally focused, whereas a document is externally focused, a
document is written with another person in mind. And then the other
difference is that document is the coherent object, it’s held together
by connectors, whereas a blocks might just kind of go from one block to
another, but the effort hasn’t been made to connect those or link them.
And so we started there, and we kind of came up with this idea that
reading and writing are creative destruction. Writing is the creation
point. You take blocks and you turn them into documents, and then
reading, again, reading for betterment is destructive. You’re taking
this whole object of a document and then decomposing it into blocks that
you can then use for some other purpose, and that’s served us pretty
well.
01:00:53 - Speaker 3: Yeah, another approach we could have done is like
had different conceptual models for PDF versus book versus article
versus newsletter.
Instead, we treat these all as documents, of course, they have different
types, so one is type PDF, one is type article, one is type Twitter
thread, but at the core they all will mostly have the same metadata
fields, they all try to have a title and author, and, you know, some
will have an external URL.
All of them will have reading progress. We try to basically give them
all a clean reading view of clean HTML. There’s a lot more similarities
there than there are differences. Luckily, of course, when you get into
PDFs, you obviously have to render those in their own way. YouTube
videos the same, but even those have their own clean text layers that
the user can highlight, even those have both titles and authors, etc.
and so by abstracting away the differences between these documents. We
don’t have to build archiving 5 times for 5 different documents. We
don’t have to build reading progress, updating logic, and Rendering
logic inside of a list, and filtering 5 different types or 5 different
document types instead, you know, they all these shared fields, of
course some are empty, but it’s made building the product. Of course
there are a lot of technical challenges to building an all in one app
where you support all these different content types, but at least, you
know, the user can feel confident knowing that all of these are
documents that they can perform basically all the same actions on. And
it gives the product kind of like a pretty comfortable feeling, you
know, once you’ve dealt with an article, you can also deal with a book.
There’s again a lot of challenges there, and, you know, maybe a book
should be treated slightly differently, but, you know, maybe it’s not
the fact that it’s a book that means it should be treated differently,
you know, maybe it’s the fact that it’s 8 hours long to read, and
maybe you want to treat an 8 hour long article the exact same way as you
treat a book. That’s kind of what we’re betting on, and that all these
different content types really have a lot more similarities than
differences.
01:02:45 - Speaker 2: Well, a place to end. I’d love to hear about the
longer term ambitions, both for the ReadWise 1.0, the Read later app,
and in general where you want to take this business over the coming half
decade, decade in the context of your mission about reading for
betterment and building software tools that enable people in that.
01:03:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in the short term, we’re definitely in this
what we call intermediate awkward phase where we’re perceived as having
two products, which we lovingly call Readise 1.0 and Reader. We’re
actively working now on unifying them. I’m sure you’ve read that
famous Joel Spoolsky article, Things You Should Never Do Part one, which
is rewrite an existing piece of software.
So we didn’t want to start Reader by rewriting Readwise 1.0, but now
we’re in the process of Adding that functionality to reader and making
them one unified product, so.
Our hope before the end of the year is that Read Wi will collectively
refer to both reader and Readwise 1.0.
But in the longer term, I’ll answer first and then I think Tristan
might have a different take, but our hope, you know, in 5 years is that
we’ve created a new category of software.
You’ve got this notion of a word processor, no one would ever write a
blog post or a book by hand or on a typewriter in 2023. Yeah, reading
still pretty much takes place in the physical world, at least
nonfiction, 90% of nonfiction reading is still paper books, and so our
lofty ambition would be. We’ve created such a better reading experience
using software that people are motivated to switch and read digitally.
01:04:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is what Dan was saying, but it goes
back to our mission that Dan I started with a little over 6 years ago,
which is we want to improve the practice of reading for betterment by an
order of magnitude.
And you know, what’s kind of encouraging is users do tell us that we do
this for them. It’s definitely not everyone, it’s not even everyone
who subscribes to Reader, but there is a significant chunk of these
power readers who read a lot, who tell us that we have actually
transformed the way they read.
There are a lot of people who tell us, as Dan was saying, they
previously read. Uh, mostly on paper or half on paper, and now they’ve
switched entirely digital just because Readwise and reader make reading
so much better for them.
But again, that is a very small narrow group of people, and, you know,
our aspirations over the next half decade is to expand that group, we
started. With probably the most demanding readers possible, and we want
to expand that group to, you know, more normal folks who, of course, are
still reading for betterment, they still want to better themselves
through reading, and we think if we can bring these tools to a broader
and broader group of people, we’ll feel like we’ve done our job pretty
well.
01:05:29 - Speaker 2: Well, it’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for
listening. Join us in Discord to discuss this episode with me and our
community. The link will be in the show notes. And Dan Tristan, thanks
for pushing us all to read more for betterment.
01:05:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you for having us and thank you for
everything you do.
01:05:45 - Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s been awesome.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: To borrow the Hobbit, one does not simply build a
new sync layer. You start with a product and you want to build a sync
layer, and now you have two products. You had a huge undertaking to
build this kind of a system on the server and on the client and should
not be a default answer, I think, for anyone, and it was not our default
answer, but I think it worked out and was the correct decision for us in
the end.
00:00:27 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product,
it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam
Wiggins here today with my colleagues, Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Adam. And
Adam Wulf.
00:00:44 - Speaker 1: Hey guys, it’s great to be back.
00:00:46 - Speaker 2: Now Wulf, you took a little staycation recently,
and I understand you’re working on a little side hack project there
called Developer Duck. Tell us about that.
00:00:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was kind of nice because the vacation
just happened to align with all of the chat GPT AI magic that’s been
released lately.
So I spent a fair bit of the vacation just working on a prototype for a
developer tool that uses AI to help developers kind of build faster to
take over some of the tedious tasks so the developer can work on the
more meaningful tasks. So it’s been a really fun adventure. It’s got,
you know, X code integration and it’ll edit your source files for you
or add comments or explain code you don’t understand or fill out code
and replace comments with code and it’s got a chat feature as well,
just like chat GPT but it’s focused and prompted more specifically for
developers, so it’s a bit less for both and a code highlighting and all
sorts of stuff. So it was just a really fun. Yeah, adventure to kind of
see what can these AIs do now and is the hype real or is it really just
someone behind a curtain?
00:01:59 - Speaker 2: And I think the name there is a reference to the
uh rubber duck from the pragmatic programmer, am I wrong?
00:02:07 - Speaker 1: No, that’s exactly right.
It’s a really common metaphor for programmers to talk to a rubber duck
and just verbalizing the problem out loud and kind of pushing it through
the language center of our brain helps us clarify what it is that we’re
actually looking for.
And so this is that sort of a thing.
You can chat with the robot, express your problems, it’s able to prompt
and kind of guide you towards solutions sometimes. But it’s really a
great first step before you go interrupting a coworker and pulling them
out of their flow state. You can stay in your flow state and talk to the
rubber duck and hopefully get a solution without much delay in either
your day or your coworker’s day.
00:02:52 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I found rubber ducking to be unreasonably
effective, and so I can only imagine with the supercharging of Jet GPT
it’s even better.
00:03:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s actually been really fun because a lot
of times I’ll know what I need to do, but I don’t know the right
jargon word to search Stack Overflow or to search Google.
And so sometimes even just that, you know, the 1st 5 or 10 minutes of
searching around is just understanding what is this problem actually
called? Like, what is it that I actually need to do? I know the problem
I need to solve, but I don’t know what the name of the solution is. And
so just typing the problem into something like developer duck, it
actually prompts back with, oh, these are actually great bunch of
keywords and ideas and even possible solutions that I should go try, and
then it’s something I can go and dig deeper on on Stack Overflow or
Google or whatnot to find the final answer.
00:03:44 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is local first, one year later.
So this is a reference to or let’s call it a sequel to an episode, the
3 of us recorded about a year ago where we dive deep on the technical
architecture from Muse’s sync system, and I’ll link that episode and
show notes.
Now, as a reminder, local first is this idea that we want to get the
benefits of cloud software. Think of Google Docs, where you can share
and collaborate really easily with other people. But also gives you the
benefits of call the more traditional style of just saving a file to
your hard drive, right? It’s always fast, it’s available offline, and
then you just have more data ownership generally.
And part of how we do this is using a technology that comes pretty
recently out of the computer science world called CRDTs. So at the time
we we recorded them, we were still in beta with this device syncing,
we’ve launched Muse 2.0, which included that and lots of people are
using that in production. And now we have our next iteration, which is
Muse for Teams, which uses the same local first sync technology, but now
for multiplayer that you can have many people on a team, each with
multiple devices that are all in a single board or single workspace. So
I guess the prompt for this episode then is what have we learned in the
past year of running this system in production at scale? And maybe as a
starting question, I’ll ask each of you, how does it compare to your
experience working on call them traditional client server apps like a
web app or an iOS app that calls out to a retrographQL API.
00:05:11 - Speaker 1: I think the biggest difference. Just using it day
to day on the client. I how nice it is to just be able to work with data
as if everything is 100% local on the device.
The network has been almost entirely abstracted away, and so there’s no
waiting for the rest API call. There’s no error handling if the API is
down. There’s no HTTP error 404 verse 401 verse 500, like none of that
exists, which is So pleasant to work with because you just, oh, I’m
gonna load some data, and then I edit some data, and then I save it back
and I’m done, and all of the network stuff is handled.
At a lower level, completely abstracted away, which meant that building
new features. Has been dramatically faster than when I build stuff with
a traditional rest API or traditional server-based API. It’s just let
us iterate. Much, much quicker than we could otherwise, I think.
00:06:17 - Speaker 2: That was a surprise to me, which was Julia
reported, you know, she does more of the interface engineering, she’s
essentially a client of the persistence layer you’ve created.
So when we use that persistence layer to replace core data, which of
course is so well established and has decades of development, it’s well
hooked into all of the iOS interface APIs.
She’s worked with it for a long time and I thought, OK, well our
homegrown system is going to be Almost certainly less nice to work with,
but she was really pleased with how easy it made everything and how few
error states you need to deal with, and it just simplifies things
because it exactly as you said, it feels like writing an old school
program that just loads and saves stuff to the disk and hold things in
memory, and just all of the complexities of distributed systems that
you’re essentially forced to deal with one way or another through
network errors and things like you mentioned. Aren’t a consideration in
building your client side software.
00:07:15 - Speaker 1: Right, exactly. The core data has a number of just
kind of programming niceties for how to annotate which data gets saved
in the database and which data is just kind of ephemeral in memory.
And The way that we architected this sink layer is Really modeled on a
lot of how the developer interaction with core data works. It ends up
being almost the exact same.
Interaction at the code level with our sync layer as it is with core
data, which is really nice because then it meant that we could just
Switch some model files from core data annotated model files to now sync
annotated data files, and it was almost a 1 to 1 mapping, so it was
really easy to get in on board.
It’s really easy. To take a lot of the experience that developers
already have after years of working with core data, a lot of that mapped
almost 1 to 1 with a new system. And so that minimizing developer
learning. I think it’s been probably just as important, if not more
important than Some of the technical details of how it physically works
behind the scenes, making sure that that interface for the developer is
easy and convenient. It’s let us work much faster than we could
otherwise.
00:08:37 - Speaker 2: Mark, what have you learned in a year of running
these systems? Particularly interested in things that maybe were
surprising to you.
00:08:45 - Speaker 3: Well, the good news is it hasn’t been that
surprising. And by that I mean, I think we’ve realized all the benefits
that we expected and hoped for.
It’s, you only need to update code in one place. It obviously doesn’t
require the device to be online. All the data is there on the device
when you need it, and so on.
And also, we’ve been working through all the challenges that we
expected to deal with versioning differently, performance becomes more
sensitive, you’re downloading a lot of data, you know, all these things
that we basically expected from our research in the lab. So, I think
we’ve got a lot more texture around all those benefits and challenges,
especially the challenges.
But no, to me, real big surprises.
One thing that has played out a little bit differently than I had hoped
and expected was how content aware the server is. So the very earliest
research prototypes we had, the server really had no idea what was going
on. You created these very abstract like channels and mailboxes, and the
server had no idea how that mapped to people who were collaborating or
documents or anything like that. You basically just shuffled bits around
totally the direction of clients. And the motivation for that was to
keep the server as simple as possible and to retain the option of doing
straightforward and and encryption. And we tried going down that road
for a while, but it’s proven really tough. I think the two reasons are,
one, it does put a very big burden on the clients to have to basically
route all their own mail everywhere and not being able to rely on any
server, for example, saying, you know, these people are working together
on this document that’s where these packets go to these people. And
also, of course, it does become challenging if the server can never know
anything about the content. You know, if you want to send an email
notification about an update, server needs to know about that unless you
do something really wild. So that’s been a little bit different. It’s
not a huge difference, but Something I wanted to mention.
00:10:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we’d hoped both from the
perspective of call it general kind of privacy principles, but also from
the perspective of the simplicity of the server that it could be a
completely dumb pipe for the data and we talked about this in our
episode with Martin Kleppman about even the idea that someday you might
bring your own sync service, that you know, AWS and other providers
offer you kind of a pipe or a sync service that you could plug into any
application the same way that a file system could plug into any
application.
And I still like that idea, but it does restrict things you can do
server side.
You mentioned the emails notifications is another one like, I want to
get notified when someone replies to my comment thread when none of my
apps are logged in, but like there needs to be some system somewhere on
the back end that can make some kind of basic interpretation of the data
in order to offer features like that.
00:11:26 - Speaker 1: I think one interesting thing that I’ve seen from
kind of the outside of the server. Is that a lot of those abstractions
are still true.
It is in still some ways a very simple pipe that just routes data back
and forth. Just now it’s kind of a pipe with a window, so to speak, so
you can kind of look inside the pipe on the server and look at things
that you really need to look for.
But the other thing that, as I understand it, has been challenging is a
traditional server architecture will have The state of the world inside
of its database, done. So you just kind of query the state of the world
and you get the answer back and you know exactly who’s talking about
what. But because we’re working primarily on local data, It means that
the server doesn’t necessarily have one single view of the world, one
single, what’s the latest state of the world for any particular client
or team, but the server needs to actually kind of Go back and read all
of the logs from all of the different devices recently to kind of
recreate the state of the world and determine what’s changed. Mark,
maybe you can talk a little bit about that and just kind of what’s been
different. And how it’s architected versus kind of a traditional rest
API architected to do things even as simple as notifications.
00:12:46 - Speaker 3: Yeah, OK, so there’s two things going on here.
There’s, do you have an event-based or a state-based view of the world,
and is it a push versus pull? So in a traditional database you have a
state-based view of the world and it’s pull. So for example, you have
an object that represents a cart in a database and what’s in the
database is basically just the current value of the cart.
00:13:13 - Speaker 2: And then when a client needs a car, it will ask
the database for this card snapshot, and the surfer will reply, select
star from shopping carts where card ID equals whatever and you get back
a bunch of products at the end, right.
00:13:19 - Speaker 3: So the event-based variant of that would be
instead of a cart, you have a log of cart changes. Add this item, remove
this item, change this quantity, and if you roll up all those changes
over time, you can build a view of the current cart. You don’t
necessarily persist that.
And so we use this event-based approach. I found that to be fine. It
does take a little bit of work and as we’ll talk about in the client,
it does become more challenging if you want to do queries like select
all cart where it contains pencils or whatever, that becomes more
challenging.
That’s not too bad in my mind.
Then there’s also this push versus pull thing. So it’s I think
relatively easy on standard servers when you get a pull request, it
says, give me the cart with this ID while you go to your index on disk,
you crawl a bee tree, and there you are, you’re at a cart with an ID,
whereas in our model, what happens is you receive a cart change event.
And then you need to figure out all the devices in the world that are
potentially interested in cart change events for this cart and send each
of them that update. And by the way, they might not be logged in right
now, so you gotta do it, you know, now versus later and keep track of
who’s received it and when and stuff like that. So that that part has
been challenging, you know, it’s basically it’s an engineering
problem, it’s not insurmountable, I don’t think, but I do think it’s
harder than traditional poll style database.
00:14:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, perhaps partially harder just because it’s
less well precedented. We’re operating on a model that is, I think in
the long run is and could be superior, we’ve already seen benefits from
that, but we don’t have the same tooling or knowledge about it that we
do on these more classic state-based systems.
I’ll give a little anecdote where sort of there’s a let’s call it a
user benefit or as a person on the team who’s not part of the
engineering and but I am testing internal builds and things like this.
I’ve been very impressed by how good the data integrity is, and I think
we talked about this in our first episode because essentially you’ve
got the servers just shipping around these bundles of data. That it
doesn’t have any insight into what’s in them, but even on the client,
there seems to be a network layer.
Wulf, you can probably correct me if I’m interpreting this wrong, but
it seems like it receives those bundles and then once it saves them,
then it figures out what to do with them.
And in some cases if you have a new app schema, so that is to say we’ve
added a new data type or something or changed the data type, the newer
clients can interpret that, but actually if you’re on an older client.
It doesn’t know how to interpret it, but it still leaves the data
laying there and so you may be able to interpret it in a future client.
And so we’ve had situations, obviously we’ve had internal builds for
testing, whatever scheme has changed, etc. etc. and so you might have
something where you’re on the wrong version of the client and you
can’t see some of the data because it can’t interpret it, but it’s
all there.
It’s receiving it through the network even if people are in real time
doing edits and your client is receiving them, it doesn’t know what to
do with them, but it just sort of leaves them sitting in the local data
store and then when Get the new version of the client, now you can see
all the new stuff and that’s basically resulted in any time there’s
been data problems, it’s always transient, it isn’t like people being
on different client versions results in some kind of data loss. It’s
just sort of confusion and how it’s viewed. And that actually it is
really nice from the perspective of me having more trust in, OK, the
data is always there, it’s just how it’s interpreted, how it’s
materialized, is going to depend on sort of the client version and the
current code that’s showing it to me.
00:16:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s exactly right.
I think one of the really important things we did really from day one
was clarify how the client talks to the server and make sure that that
what we call the network schema was well versioned so we had a very
clear definition of kind of how we ship boxes to and from the client.
And then we also have the app schema version, which is how do we version
the data that’s inside of the boxes. And so what that lets us do is
change and upgrade how the app understands the data model, regardless of
how that data is sent to and from the server. And similarly, we’re able
to upgrade and make more efficient how the data is sent to and from the
server, regardless of the type of data that the app is sending. And so
having a very clear definition about how the data is shaped in the
application versus how the data is transmitted has been very helpful to
make sure that everything that arrives on the client is in a very well
known state, and if the app doesn’t currently know how to interpret
that state, that’s OK. It just saves on disk. Next time the app updates
it checks again, oh, I’m a new app. Look, I have some data here that I
didn’t know how to look at last time. Let me try again. Oh yeah, now I
understand it. OK, great, and it can continue on just fine, and that
lets old clients on maybe a V9 or V10 of the app schema, continue to
operate just fine cause they’re talking in The version 10 of their
language, and whenever a client logs in with a version 11 of the A
schema language, It can still understand all of the V10 things, and it
starts talking in V11 language, and all of those V10 devices that are
still on the network, hear that and go, I don’t understand this yet.
Let me just save it. And then once they upgrade, then everyone’s
talking the same language again and everything works fine. So it lets
each device speak in the way that is comfortable to the other devices,
interpret in the way that is comfortable from the other devices, and
when it gets confused, that’s OK, it can just wait, and having those
three states. Has meant that it’s been important as we’ve planned for
new features to make sure that we’re planning with regards to those
three states, that we’re planning with regards for backwards
compatibility, and potential future compatibility, and What happens when
two devices are talking with two slightly different languages and making
sure that the correct updates are still visible while then fancy new
updates, it’s OK for them to be invisible, and to make sure that the
application still behaves in a correct way.
00:19:30 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and looking back, we’ve had a lot of
dynamism on the so-called app schema. That’s what’s in the boxes, the
boards and the ink and the text blocks and all that stuff. The network
model of binary data plus transactional data plus ephemeral data, which
I argued you could like intuit from first principles cause all
applications look like that. That’s proven correct, like that basically
hasn’t changed. Some small stuff around the edges to make it a little
bit more efficient and support collaboration. But we’re still shipping
stuff around in the same boxes we used to, more or less, even while the
the application has changed pretty dramatically inside the boxes.
00:20:07 - Speaker 2: Maybe the comparison there is wire protocol to,
yeah, database schema, but I think it is the case in the kind of cloud
style client serverE applications that I’m familiar with and I spent a
good bit of my career working with in the last couple of decades where,
OK, we’re gonna add a way to turn things red, so therefore we need a
new field called color that goes in our back end database which is SQL.
The back end code needs to handle that. We need to add it to the API,
which might be a crowd API, might be graphQL or something like that, and
the client needs to interpret that.
It’s going to display that in the interface, and the reason that we get
that dynamism, as you said, Mark, is the client can essentially update
its app schema, add that thing in there, but know that it will be
transmitted through without needing the back end to change, know
anything about it.
And so you essentially only need to really change it in one place, which
is the client side code. Now I think it does create a locus of
complexity on the client for us, whereas maybe those client server
applications, standard cloud applications we’re familiar with, to end
up with more balanced complexity between the back end and the front end,
but the not needing to coordinate. You know, OK, the back end engineer
is going to design the API and the front end engineer is gonna build the
interface and needs to consume that and all that back and forth for
every little thing we wanna add. I think that’s a real boon to
development speed.
00:21:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do too. I think that’s been so important
for us to be able to completely abstract away how data is transmitted to
and from the server versus what that data means.
And the complexity is almost all entirely on the client, instead of
being shared between the client and the server, but I don’t think
we’ve ended up with double complexity on the client.
I think we have essentially halved the complexity of any app schema
change, and so the client complexity ends up being kind of the same
amount as it would have been with a rest server, but now we’ve could
just completely removed a lot of the server complexity, and so the The
actual amount of work, the actual amount of difference. Ends up being
about half, in my view, compared to a more traditionalru-based classic
server architecture.
00:22:28 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think there’s
a little bit of additional complexity on our client versus the typical
one, but that’s due to the client being stateful versus stateless. And
if you had a stateful arrest client, it would have the same issues with
migrations and so on, which we’ll talk about.
00:22:43 - Speaker 2: Let’s talk about the operational side of it, so.
I’ve spent a good bit of my career, say, carrying a pager, although
mostly that’s metaphorically, it’s notifications to my phone, but you
know, you write code, especially in the early days of a startup, you
don’t have a dedicated ops team and you set yourself up to receive
notifications for your monitoring systems or your pingdom or whatever it
is, that’s kind of just tracking whether the systems you’ve built are
online.
You also have things like migrations where you need to, OK, we’re going
to do it. I don’t know, let’s do it at 10 p.m. at night because we
know the system needs to be offline for 10 minutes while we do this
thing and it’s kind of stressful, and we don’t want to stay up too
late cause we’ll be tired, but we also want to do it at night when
volume is low.
And so one thing I’ve observed just kind of again from the On the
inside, but outside the engineering team perspective that I have is,
first of all, just the operational cost in general has been lower, that
we spend less time on that. We have pager systems and what have you, but
they don’t just seem to occupy as much of our teams. Mental and energy
bandwidth.
But the other thing is, I think we’ve had to do one or two downtime
just for migrations.
There was one recently and yeah, I remember it was longish, I think it
was like 20 minutes, but when the only impact is your little filled-in
circle turns to empty and Your devices don’t sync for a little bit.
Maybe that’s annoying if you’re in the middle of something that you
wanted to use between two devices or a collaborative session, but
you’re not stopped from working, you can access everything. It isn’t
the whole O is slack down as notion down as GitHub down, my work is
completely interrupted. You can really continue as is, it’s much more
of a low-key event and both of those sides of it, like the team needing
to spend less time and energy and the impact of customers for downtime.
Being a little bit less. Both of those seem like dramatic wins to me,
but I’m curious how you both see it.
00:24:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, from my side, I think that’s been one of
the really nice things is that the downtime that we do have has almost
no client impact at all.
Certainly from the code perspective, because I can just save and read
from the disk and the network is entirely abstracted away.
There are not any new error handlers that I need to cover. There’s no
alerts or Error states with the data that need to be managed. I know
that everything will eventually sync and everything will eventually come
back down, and the state will be shared between all devices. And so a
lot of that complexity is just kind of gone from the client, which is so
nice. And like you said, the users can still work, they still get, you
know, certainly more than 80% of the the benefits of used by having all
of their data locally. So downtime is While still rare from use, very
rare, it’s certainly not an impact for users when it does happen.
00:25:36 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the server downtime is less common than it
would be otherwise. It’s less impactful on users and it’s much less
stressful for the operators.
Which I think is actually quite valuable when you’re a very small team,
you can’t actually staff a full standard pager rotation with a team of
the size, so you either need to let that slip or have more flexibility
like we do with the local first set up.
And I would emphasize something Wulf mentioned, which is In our client
architectures, the offline case is the standard case. The way the client
works is it basically saves data as if it was offline, and if it happens
to be online, it goes and like does another step, which is send it to
the server. And I’ve long been an advocate of this idea that if you
don’t treat the error cases as a standard case that happens all the
time, they’re just not gonna work. And we have the flip of that here
where it’s the thing we’re doing all the time, so it works fine when
the server goes out.
00:26:28 - Speaker 2: I like how again another reference to our episode
with Martin Kleppman, he phrased it as, you always have latency, and
that latency might be 50 milliseconds. If you’re lucky, it might be.
second or a second if you’re further away, your network’s slow or
something like that, but it might be 3 hours because that one of the
systems in the way is offline.
And in a way you can treat those as all classes of the same problem,
which is you just need to queue up what you want to send and send it and
merge it in when things are back online again. That sounds so simple in
concept, but in practice, when you have systems that are built around
the expectation of things being online and needing a central server to
resolve conflicts. Then you end up special casing all these different
things, but if you treat it as classes of the same problems, which we do
by assuming you’re offline and then saving it to a place that it can
later be streamed, and of course in a format that it can be merged
together, that’s a really Key element that’s obviously the CRDT
technology, but it’s also to some extent this separation of the app
schema from the data packets that are either on disk or in transit as
something that can be completely disconnected from the application
function transmitted at any time.
Well, maybe it would be a good time now to get into what we’re working
on now and have been working on for the last 6 months or so, which is
multi-user. So when we started on this path, we knew that we wanted the
single player app, then it syncs to your devices and then it’s
multi-user, and that indeed the same technology that syncs between your
devices in this local first manner kind of offline as the default case
could also be used for multi-user to get that either in real time that
Google Docs figMA type experience, but also something more asynchronous
and Indeed, that is what we have working now. So what was some of the
big changes or what was some of the big architecture decisions to make
going from, OK, we can sync reliably between a person’s Mac and iPad.
Now we want to have several people connected to the same board or
workspace with their Macs or iPads and have all that fit together. What
did that transition look like?
00:28:52 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so we retained our same basic model, but had
to add one layer of indirection. So recall in the single user case, the
model was a user’s muse consists of basically all the edits they’ve
ever done in one big log. And if you have a copy of that log, say on a
different device, you can replay it and get the state of that news
corpus on that other device and therefore, when one device writes an
update, the update needs to be conveyed to the other device and so on.
And when a new device comes online, it gets a full copy of just that
log.
With the multi-user case, basically have two logs now, every user still
has a log, which is like all the edits that they’re supposed to see,
you know, all that’s dated, of course, but also at the edits that
people who are on documents that they’re collaborated on made and each,
let’s call it document for now, each document has a log that consists
of all the edits ever made in, say, a board. And now the job is you need
to maintain the logs for each of these users by like stitching together
all of the logs of the constituent documents they’re collaborate on.
So that’s the layer of the direction. So you still have the same core
model of you have immutable edits, you have logs, the users have a log,
the devices catch up by maintaining a high water mark in the user’s
log. That’s all the same, but then the addition is you now have this
additional layer of abstraction with the documents and then threading
those to all the constituent users.
00:30:23 - Speaker 1: The way that I’ve thought about it, having not
worked on the server code, I’m curious, Mark, how much this is accurate
or is a fairy tale.
But if there’s 1000 users and they each have 1000 records, then when a
user talks to the server kind of in the old world, it was relatively
easy for the server to say, oh yeah, you’re user A, great, you’re
definitely within these 1000 records, no big deal. Let’s figure out
which of these 1000 records you need to talk to.
But now because any particular user can be on a team with any other
particular user, if you have 1000 users and 1000 records and a user logs
in, instead of looking at just 1000 records, now you have to look at all
1 million records because you don’t know which other user might have
written something to that person. So it’s really a huge kind of order
of magnitude harder problem to solve now in many ways just because of
that one extra layer of indirection that we ended up adding.
00:31:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the engineering is quite a bit harder on the
server now because as you said, it used to be that you had N or N is
equal to the number of users, totally isolated islands of data, you
know, all the users’ data, their devices, the high water marks,
everything could be siloed off. Whereas now, if you think about these
entries in a database are basically overlapping islands because you
have, you know, a document is shared by many users, but then those
users, some of them are also on other documents together, but those
aren’t exactly the same. And furthermore, we’ve wanted to keep it
general so that we can support future product changes, so we could have
made it a little bit easier on ourselves by saying that there are K
islands where K is the number of teams and used for teams, but then
we’d have to go solve this problem again when we went to the fully
general case so you can collaborate across teams. So yeah, it is pretty
challenging.
One other example I’ll give here to add a bit of texture.
So it used to be that the only types of updates in the system were
edits, like when you add a text or whatever, but now we have updates
around the configuration of teams and permissions, so you can add a
member to a team and you can add a team to a document and so on. So it
used to be the kind of hardest thing for the server to do would be to
get a new device online cause then that device needs to be caught up for
all the Entries ever written for that user, but at least it’s already
in one log, it’s not too bad.
Now the hardest case is you have a new user added to a team. So for
that, the server needs to say, OK, who are all the users in this team,
and what are all the documents that have ever been added to the team and
what are all the updates in any of those documents and then zip together
a huge log and send it over to that new user to be added into their
existing huge log. So it’s just an example of how it can become quite
challenging even though there’s just one additional layer of
indirection.
00:33:04 - Speaker 2: The one thing I’m really interested to learn more
about is what we usually call the unit of sharing.
Some of the things we’ve explored on the product side include things
like sharing an individual board the same way that you can with a lot of
products like a notion or craft or something where there’s a big share
button and you can share kind of just that one document, something like
a complete team workspace, which is the main thing we’re supporting
right now.
But ultimately, as you said, there’s those islands, those overlapping
islands that we need to think about it. I’ve heard terms fly around
like scope and scope set, and I haven’t fully followed all that. So
maybe you guys can be up to date, not just on how we think about the
unit of sharing, but maybe what were some of the things we tried that
didn’t work or how do we land on the architecture that we have now, I
guess is what I’m curious to know.
00:33:48 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so the thinking with designing the sharing
protocol was we wanted to keep all appropriate options open for the
product, because this was before we even had sharing at all, you know,
much less the variations of sharing that we’ve thought about, including
sharing individual boards, whole team spaces, subspaces, boards, but
their children as well, right? There’s all kinds of variants possible.
So the idea was to keep that option open and we did that by creating
this unit called a scope, and a scope is the smallest possible unit of
sharing. It’s sort of like a physical analogy might be a book. And
let’s do something crazy like go and cut the book out, you kind of got
to give someone the book or not, but you can also choose to form those
in the libraries and give people access to the whole library, right? So
it’s not like the only thing you can give someone access to is one book
at a time, there’s there’s ways to aggregate those things, but that’s
sort of like the smallest unit that you would plausibly lend out.
And we specifically designed them and named them such that they weren’t
any of the things in our system. They’re not boards, they’re not
teams, they’re not nested boards, they’re not spaces. These are all
things that might be defined as a set of scopes. But that’s not baked
in. And then to emphasize when you’re sharing a scope actually in the
system it’s what we call scope set. So you basically bundle up a set of
scopes, which of course in the degenerate case can be one scope, but in
full generality it could be any number of scopes up to and including the
whole team corpus. And furthermore, the system does allow those
currently to overlap, so you could share a team space with some set of
people and then share a subset of that with a larger group of people,
for example.
So basically the idea was to allow this full generality.
And so the key decision that we had to make at the beginning, which
would be hard to reverse, as we’ll talk about, was what is the smallest
unit that we might plausibly want to share in the future.
That is, this is the unit that’s kind of all or nothing when I share it
with another person, and what we decided was the board. So you’re not
gonna be able to share, or we didn’t foresee the need to share like a
subset of a board. That seems plausible to be all or nothing, but we
didn’t want it to be bigger than that, so we wanted to retain the
option of being able to share just a board, even if we didn’t exercise
that option in the short term or even ever. And I think that decision
has proved pretty much correct. We have one little nugget in there with
text blocks which Wulf can talk about. But I felt pretty good about that
decision. I should say that there’s a bit of a downside if you allow
for all this generality and then never exercise it. So say you had this
scope system and you can share it down to a board, then the only thing
you ever did was allow teams to share their whole workspace. Well, then
you’re basically doing a lot of this accounting with scope sets and
scopes and, you know, it’s a lot of records to deal with for never
taking advantage of it. So you would hope that you would eventually get
to using most of that granularity, but you don’t have to.
00:36:33 - Speaker 1: As you alluded to, I think the text blocks are an
interesting case, and they are an interesting case only because of the
history of the Muse database and the fact that we came from core data.
00:36:45 - Speaker 2: Maybe I’ll just interject here quickly and
mention the text blocks are basically double click anywhere on the
canvas and you can just start typing, including a copy paste, like a
long form article. I’ve written a lot of longish articles this way with
the concept of blocks is something that appears in Notion, Rome, others
where you can kind of freely reorder them, drag them around. So in a
sense it is sort of like an exploded long form text note, but it’s a
really important data type for the use canvas.
00:37:13 - Speaker 3: Right, and furthermore, because they tend to be
like lines or small paragraphs, you can have a lot on a board, you know,
dozens, hundreds on a board.
00:37:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. I think having scopes as the unit
of sharing and translating that to boards has made a lot of sense for us
because it’s given us enough flexibility while not being kind of too
strict in what we need to do.
The way that we initialize those scopes is for boards, it’s very
obvious it’s a board, but we also have lots of other data types. We
have images, we have files, we have PDFs, we have note cards, we have
text blocks which are kind of paragraphs of longer form text.
So there’s lots of different content types, and each one of those
content types is a scope. And for historical reasons, back in the old
core data database world presync, each of those types inherited from
kind of its foundational document type. And so when we migrate it to
sync. The most natural connection between core data and this new scoped
sync world was to say, OK, every single document in core data now gets
its own scope in the sync world, which works great because the scope and
a document are essentially the same thing. A document was aboard, now a
scope is a board. A document was a PDF. Now a scope is a PDF. But where
that fell down for us was that text blocks, each paragraph, each kind of
sentence on a board. was technically its own document in core data. And
so then that meant we had this explosion of scopes in the sync world
where a single board with a fair bit of text on it might suddenly be
hundreds of scopes that we would need to synchronize.
00:39:00 - Speaker 2: And I assume that each scope comes with a certain
amount of bookkeeping because of its ability to be a shareable unit.
00:39:08 - Speaker 3: Right, you gotta say this little bullet point
needs to go into a set that can be shared with the users, this little
bullet point, and so on.
00:39:15 - Speaker 2: Right, and really there’s no world where you’d
want to be able to share these 3 text blocks, but not the 3 that are
under it, you know, or share them with different people there from a
user perspective, we know that those are going to be all or nothing.
00:39:28 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and furthermore, unlike big binary blobs
like movies, there’s also no incentive to try to avoid copying, so you
might want to put a blob in a separate scope, so if it moves to a
different board, it can be changed by pointer only, whereas with the
text block if it’s 10 characters, you might as well just, you know,
rewrite it under the new scope.
00:39:49 - Speaker 2: OK, if I pick up a heavy video and move it to
another board, including one that’s even shared with other people, that
doesn’t require reuploading the video or something like that because
it’s referencing that same blob, whereas if I copy a paragraph of text
that just under this new system where a text block is not a scope, we
might as well just bring all the text across. It’s fine that it copies
it because it’s just a trivial amount of data.
00:40:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and importantly, all of that
bookkeeping for text box being scopes needed to happen on both the
client and the server, and so that explosion of scopes kind of Add a lot
of extra headache for the entire development team on kind of every
aspect of the Sinclair. And so that’s what I would consider a major
migration of the app schema is unscoping all of these text blocks, so
that way they become just very simple kind of attributes or many objects
inside of the board, instead of an entire document and all of the kind
of the heavy weight that goes with it, that it was before.
00:40:56 - Speaker 2: Well, speaking of unit of sharing, I’d also like
to hear about, let’s call it edge cases. So in this local first world
and this almost offline by default point of view, and Mark you described
this event-based model and alluded to maybe that sharing, adding or
removing someone to a unit of sharing a scope, I assume is itself an
event. What actually happens or how do we handle, I’m offline and I
remove someone from the team, but in the meantime, they’re online and
they’ve been making changes. How do those things that are not really
data edits, but are really more permission changes get handled in this
world.
00:41:36 - Speaker 3: Yeah, there are quite a few interesting edge
cases, and generally the way that we handle it is that the server
decides the sequence of events. So unlike content edits, where we use a
vector clock to allow clients to resolve them without the server needing
to make any decisions, because semantically it’s kind of fine for
people to be concurrently editing things.
With respect to permissions, there really needs to be one order that
everyone agrees on, and the only place that that can happen is a server.
So when events come into the server, not when they’re written on the
client, when they come into the server, they’re sequenced monotonically
and the server can use that to decide who can do what. If you think
really carefully about it, you can get some weird behaviors out of that,
I guess, but like with our experience on distributed handling of content
edits, it’s just not a practical problem for us right now. As far as I
know, we haven’t had any of these weird edge cases in practice. The
real problems that we have are much more mundane. But it is there.
00:42:36 - Speaker 2: There are other things we’ve learned from,
obviously we’re not running the multi-user stuff at anywhere near the
scale of the multi-device stuff that’s, you know, live in a production
product in the App Store, but still, we’ve had a good number of users
and edits come through the system over the last few months that it’s
been live, including our own team’s use, which is pretty heavy. What
have we learned from that? Have there been surprises? Have there been
things we’ve wanted to modify as part of, you know, working on this
alpha slash beta software?
00:43:06 - Speaker 3: I’ll give you one little use case, it’s been a
challenge in multi-user. This is what I call the link click experience.
So it’s very common with SAS that you’re working with a team on like a
weekly planning doc, and the team leader in the morning goes and
prepares the document, and then they paste a link, a URL to it in Slack,
and then everyone goes and clicks on the link. So I really didn’t like
the behavior of this in traditional SAS apps where what happens is when
you’re a team member clicking on the link, what you see is a spinner
for 3 seconds. I was incredibly annoyed by that.
We’re gonna fix that by doing local first. Well, sort of.
So now there’s a potential problem where you click on the link, it
opens up your muse app and it downloads the whole weekend of updates
from the entire team, right? Or the whole day of work from people in
Europe, if you’re in the states. And you click the link, you expect
like a normal SAA for it to go to the weekly planning board, but at
first has to basically download and process all the updates for the day.
And that’s an extremely critical flow for a SAA, and it’s one that, to
be totally frank, don’t handle great yet. So that has been, that’s an
example of a challenge that’s unique to local first.
00:44:10 - Speaker 1: I think that’s a really interesting one because I
think the superpower of local first is that you always have your data
and you can always work offline, everything always works as you expect.
But that same superpower becomes your kryptonite when you’ve been
offline for a weekend or offline for a vacation, and you need to come
back to the office and suddenly you have to wait for, you know, even if
it’s just 15 or 30 seconds. When all of the rest of your work has been
almost instant, suddenly that 30 seconds feels like a lifetime.
And cleaning up that user experience, I think is certainly on our list,
but it’s definitely one of the weird kind of edge KC things of this
type of architecture.
00:44:51 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to be clear, it’s absolutely fixable.
It’s not really a flaw of the approach, it’s an engineering
deficiency, and we will fix it eventually. But you are quite susceptible
when you’re trying to bring all the content in locally. If you are
slow, for example, that becomes very apparent when you’re trying to
bring in the whole corpus versus when you’re just trying to bring in a
page in a traditional set up.
00:45:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we anticipated this in the research
phases many years ago, and we always speculated that in our dream world,
and we’ve talked about this with not only among ourselves, but many of
our guests here, including folks like Martin Kleppman and Jeffrey Litt
from the local first world that something built into the operating
system where you essentially had a syncD, you know, Damon that’s
running in the background or it’s part of your file system that it is
always syncing those changes whether or not you have the app open.
And so when the app opens, it can just interpret kind of what’s already
there on disk, that sort of thing where subscribing to events is
something that’s part of the this kind of next generation file system.
I think that’s what we always hoped for, and you could basically get a
similar effect with Muse if you just left it open all the time and
minimized so that you’re always streaming down the changes, as long as
your computer’s kind of awake and online, and then when you click on
the link, it just sort of brings it to the foreground versus needing to
go get a bunch of updates.
00:46:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, although, well, I feel like we need to look
into this, cause whenever my muse is running in the background, the Mac
has like no problems looking for system updates and all kinds of
ridiculous stuff that I don’t want to happen, but I’m not sure if
it’s always getting the updates from the sync server when it’s
sleeping, basically, so we should look into it.
00:46:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, it’s one of those, uh, many
things on the list. But certainly, as you said, a solvable problem,
which is always nice.
00:46:32 - Speaker 2: This is a downside to pioneering a new
architecture is that, you know, you gotta kind of build a lot of the
foundations yourself and you might run into things that are sort of
handled or solved or just standardized, let’s say clicking on that link
and getting that spinner is pretty well established for the classic web
sass, but we’re sort of reinventing some of the primitives of the
universe that we’re working within, so that creates an ongoing stream
of work for us.
I’ll also mention kind of on the user experience side, I think another
closely related thing is not just the weekend, but if you take a
vacation and you have a team that’s very active generating a lot of
content, particularly again, if you use video or heavy PDFs or lots of
ink, that sort of things, you can essentially fire up your iPad, fire up
your Mac, and find you have a gigabyte of updates to download. And
again, it’s not a huge deal, but it may be surprising for, you know, if
you’re compared to cloud software where you can open any page and
notion without needing to download all the rest of what has changed
since the last time you opened it. So that’s a benefit to that like
really shallow cache of the web kind of standard model.
Now of course the flip side of that is I go to open a page that I had
opened 30 seconds ago and my browser’s already forgotten about it, but
notion’s offline or I’m offline or something and I can’t load it and
I just get a spinner. So you know there’s trade-offs there, but the way
I see it is that part of what we’re doing here is seeing how this local
first architecture can work in practice, what it means for users, both
benefits, but also these edge cases or downsides, and what can we do to
mitigate those, or are there places where there’s just truly trade-offs
where this is going to be sort of a worse experience than other
approaches like client server or even classic desktop software. So
we’re in the process of exploring that and it’s part of what’s fun
and exciting about doing this work.
00:48:24 - Speaker 3: One other fun one that I’ll mention that’s
become apparent with multi-user is the dancing cards. So when you come
back from vacation and you’re receiving this big sink down at the data
layer, it’s pretty clear that we should be telling the user, like
there’s a sync in progress, the little indicator on the bottom right
can be flashing or whatever, and then when it’s done, it’s done.
But then what you display on the actual boards is a pretty interesting
question. You could like make it impossible to interact until it’s
fully caught up, but that doesn’t feel great.
What we currently do is that as we’re getting updates, we’re like
replaying them and the cards are literally dancing around, reflecting
the moves that they’ve made in the last week and the additions and
subtractions and so on. So it’s kind of funny to watch. We still need
to figure out what the exact right user experience is there, not to
mention the technical problem of how often do you to bounce the
re-renders and so on.
00:49:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of interesting things
that we could end up doing that we’ve certainly talked about and
planned for, compaction being one of them, where if I move a card and
move a card the second time, then that first move, we really don’t need
to store anymore because it’s just never gonna happen.
And so being able to remove old content that we know is going to be
overwritten from the database, that’s gonna dramatically reduce the
number of things that a user would ever need to download.
I think we can probably reorder the types of updates and so that way,
instead of going from past to future, we can Possibly send back updates
from future backwards to past, and so that way the most recent arrives
on the device first. So I think there are a lot of technical things that
we can do to minimize kind of the strangeness of some of these updates.
But yeah, it’s definitely a new frontier and so we’ll find strange new
experience. OK, now we have the technical solution, let’s implement
that and then that just moves us to a different strange experience
that’s slightly less common, that’s a little bit further down the
road, and it’s just a continuing adventure.
00:50:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well then I’m looking forward to working on
there as prioritization.
And we kind of alluded to it. Right now we do some prioritization
because we prefer to download the packs relative to the blobs, which is
good because packs are much smaller and they’re more important. They
tell you what boards are where and what cards are where and so on.
But I would also like to see us prioritize blobs. You can imagine
constructing and continuously updating a priority tree based on how
close a blob is to your current position in the hierarchy, or other
factors like how often do you open up a known board, and based on that
be constantly prioritizing your blob download so that You, for example,
prioritize the ones that are on your board, and also on the board
that’s like 1 hop away and then 2 hops away, and that’s always being
reshuffled according to where you are on the board. I think that’d be
cool.
00:50:58 - Speaker 2: So as a closing topic or a potentially very
substantial closing topic, a question I get fairly frequently from other
teams is basically what should we do? We agree broadly with the
principles of local first, we need to sync our application data as
basically everyone does in this modern world.
How should we do that? What should we use? Should we build it yourself
the way you’ve done it? There’s now an increasing number of commercial
products that offer off the shelf solutions like replicache and live
blocks and party kit. There’s libraries like Amerge that we worked on
at Inco Switch or YJS.
But then of course, we chose to build our own and we talked a little bit
about the motivation for that back in the first episode.
So yeah, I guess if a team came to you today and said that they’re
working on a piece of application software that is in the productivity
space and wanted to implement syncing between devices and multi-user
collaborative support, both real time and asynchronous, what would we
recommend them or what would you both recommend them in terms of the
best way to do that today?
00:52:08 - Speaker 3: I’m shaking my head on the podcast cause it’s
really tough.
There’s not an easy answer here. There isn’t, as far as I know, any
satisfactory, fully integrated solution.
Now, we haven’t developed that ourselves, even for our internal use,
and I can explain what the gaps might be.
And there are also some existing commercial offerings and maybe some
open source offerings, but as far as I know they’re still quite a ways
from the full solution.
So it’s tough.
What might I do if I was starting again? Well, first of all, it’s very
hard to recommend that someone roll their own unless perhaps they’re
extremely interested in it and they’re an experienced systems
engineer.
I think if both of those aren’t true, you’re really asking for
trouble, and then what do you do? I think it’s worth trying out the
existing open source and commercial implementations and doing like a
smoke test or a bake off where you try to build a basic app, like a to
do list or something like that, and each of these things, I think you
would find that none of them are there yet, especially if you do some
reasonable anticipation of the things that you’re gonna need in a
sophisticated production app.
So it’s tough.
I want the industry to keep trying, but there really isn’t an off the
shelf solution that’s satisfactory right now. And I think for that
reason, you’re just wearing your business hat.
I don’t think it’s fair to make the immediate turn on the decision
tree towards local first, as much as I like it, right? I think you got
to be open to the possibility that it’s not appropriate to spend your
innovation tokens there. We can link to the talk for this, to spend your
innovation tokens on the persistence technology. You might want to spend
it on a new business model or a new market or something, right? Yeah, I
mean, it’s a bummer to say that, but it’s still early.
00:53:41 - Speaker 1: I agree. I think there’s a lot more options today
than there were when we started, what, almost 1.5, 2 years ago now, on
our own sync engine.
00:53:50 - Speaker 3: I mean, I’ve been working on this for like 5
years.
00:53:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And it’s such a tough thing, it does
keep getting better and, you know, like you said, every product has its
own needs and will be able to accept slightly different trade-offs or
dramatically different trade-offs than any other app, and so it’s In
building anything, the should I roll my own question is almost always
answered with, of course not, that’s generally a bad idea. You know,
leverage what other people have done.
I think because it is such a young world for sync and for CRDTs and for
local sync in particular, it is a reasonable option. I think if I went
back and talked to ourselves a number of years ago, I think I would
still recommend that we do this, cause we’re able to decide. Which
trade-offs we care about and which ones we don’t, and make something
that works really well for use and for our use case, but You know, to
borrow the Hobbit, one does not simply build a new sync layer. You start
with a product and you want to build a sink layer, and now you have two
products. You had a huge undertaking to build. This kind of a system on
the server and on the client and should not be a default answer, I think
for anyone, and it was not our default answer, but I think it worked out
and was the correct decision for us in the end.
00:55:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m, I’m happy we did it, and I think it
was a good call. I just think it needs to be, you know, appropriately
tempered for people ask us that question of what should we do.
Wulf your comment reminds me of something that the Hoku postgrads team
told me back in the day, which is, I, I hope I’m quoting this right,
but they said something like, plan for 10 years to build a database, and
I’m not sure if that was their original coinage or if that’s due to
the post grass community, but it’s been my experience that’s basically
correct. I, I’ve seen now quite a few database projects attempted and
You know, often in year 5 they’re kind of just getting their sea legs
and starting to figure stuff out. So it’s not too surprising in that
respect.
This is basically building a database of sorts.
I’ve been thinking in anticipation of this episode, like what would a
satisfactory commercial solution look like, like what problems would
need to solve, and I think it’d be fun just to enumerate my list here,
so just to quickly run through it, I have.
Obviously you need basic persistence and networking to be able to get
the data back and forth, but importantly, you also need built-in batch
line pipelining and compression. It’s something that I think a lot of
systems miss.
You need compaction and excision. Eventually you need anti-entropy. We
don’t have that yet. You need the ability to handle this on in the
background. You need some sort of two-way interface like an ORM
comparable for both crude and rendering. You need versioning,
migrations, handling all those cases that we’re talking about with the
disjoint worlds. You need something around like queries, indexing,
declarative views, something like that. You eventually need
prioritization and for similar reasons you need the ability to
declaratively load and unload, so everything isn’t either all or
nothing on disk or memory. That’s a lot of stuff. It takes a long time
to build. It’s actually quite hard to get all of that right, I think,
unless you’ve seen the very specific problems in production. So it’s
tough.
00:56:51 - Speaker 2: And I’ll add to that list developer experience,
right? You’re designing an API, you’re often asking developers, you
know, in the iOS world, they’re used to working with say core data or
maybe something a firebase in the web world, they might be used to
working with something like local browser storage or, you know, in the
rails world, you do yeah ORMs on the back end, that sort of thing, and
those things are really well established.
And developers know how to get their data out of whatever persistence
layer they happen to be using and turn it into their rendering layer,
and now you’re offering them this new as exactly as you said, a new
database with new contours and new capabilities and behaves in different
ways, hopefully better ways in the long run in terms of user experience,
but that is a whole new surface area, a whole new API, a whole new
experience for the developer, and certainly I know that that’s
something that a lot of these projects like Amerge and YJS and the
commercial ones I mentioned.
Spend a lot of their time on it’s just like what’s the right API that
feels familiar and can be used in a way that’s maybe similar to other
ORMs or persistence layers, but also offers the things that make this
sync-based approach and local databased approach unique.
00:58:01 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and this developer experience thing reminds
me, we’ve done this whole podcast basically talking about this world of
Swift, which we use both for iOS and Mac, and we’ve also implemented a
little bit of this client side protocol and node for testing purposes
and on go for doing server side content inspection, but you gotta
grapple with the idea of in a full Typical production Sa app, you need
some answer for whatever language and environments you’re using, which
typically will include at least the web, the Apple ecosystem, the
Android ecosystem, and something like server backend.
And to be honest, we’re a ways away from a satisfactory answer there,
especially when you consider that this needs to plug into the rendering
side and that those rendering environments are unless you do something
pretty wild, they’re all completely different.
So I don’t know what the answer is.
Maybe it’s something like a lip sync, which is written in C or rust,
then you have a layer on top of that for the other environments. Maybe
you basically have a template that you hand transliterate into the
different programming languages. Yeah, a lot of work to do.
00:59:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that was one of the biggest efforts
initially building this sink was some of the things you already
mentioned, Mark, which was threading, and how do you make sure you’re
doing things on the background thread versus the main thread and queuing
things appropriately or balancing what’s in memory and what’s on disk,
and how often do you load and save to make sure that you’re efficient.
We’re still a long ways from the complete solution there, but getting
that initial foundation for a strong developer experience, that’s easy
enough for a new developer to use, but also efficient enough that we
don’t, you know, shoot ourselves in the foot. Every other line of code
is a very difficult balance to make and it’s something we’re still
getting better at and There’s still a lot to do.
Core data, for instance, handles collections of objects, kind of the one
to many relationship, much better than our sync layer currently does.
There’s a lot of Code that we need to write to handle cards on a board
or ink strokes on a board or some of the other collections that we have.
And I think going on what, 2 years now, that 10 years for version one of
a database sounds about right.
Even though we’ve done a lot in these 2 years, I think there’s a lot
left to do to get to. Kind of a production, fully scalable, abstract
Sinclair.
01:00:25 - Speaker 3: One positive note I’ll mention we’re glooming a
bit here is I do think we’ve correctly landed on SQLite as the
underlying sort of data storage layer.
01:00:36 - Speaker 2: All roads lead back to SQL light, right?
01:00:38 - Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, SQL is an incredible piece of
software, one of my all-time favorites, as I said many times on this
podcast, but you need some foundation to be able to persist the data
reliably, and like one does not simply write to the file system, it’s a
complete disaster trying to write directly to the file system for
anything other than perhaps large blobs.
And obviously get all kinds of primitives like in the season and the
stuff that are very useful in sequel light. So it’s a little glimmer of
hope like you can imagine a lip sync that goes on top of sequel light,
which of course runs everywhere, it’s very portable. So I’m glad at
least we’ve got that little piece nail down at least.
01:01:13 - Speaker 2: Your mention of language bindings. Mark reminded
me of the really great work the automerge team has been doing. You know,
we evaluated automerge for use in use again when we started this, which
was quite a while ago, and at the time they really didn’t have any good
solution for non-JavaScript, non-web world stuff, which obviously we
are.
Since then they’ve come out with a 2.0 release. There’s a really great
blog post detailing the history of the project and where it’s going and
everything like that in the show notes, but this includes a complete
Read and write and rust by our good friend and colleague Orion Henry and
many others who worked on this project to essentially not only make it
many orders of magnitude faster, but also make it possible to link
essentially with those C language bindings and potentially be accessible
from any. Language.
So still, I think a long road to fill out all the rest of the
infrastructure that goes with that since automerge just covers the CRDT
part, not the networking, for example, and it’s still quite a challenge
or you still need to be a real expert to integrate that into your app,
but I do think there is a world where automerge plus some kind of
networking layer, plus like an electron or Atari on the website or
something like a native app on the.
Kind of MacSwift side is a plausible way to build a new type of
application. So I think that kind of off the shelf best practice,
whatever you want to call it, has come a good ways even since we were
last talking about it. So I’m hopeful with a number of great folks
working on this both in the research world and on the commercial side
and the interest in it.
That given another year or two from now, it could be much closer to
something where the average application developer could just say, yeah,
of course I want to add local for sync between devices and real-time
collaboration that works seamlessly and handles all the offline cases. I
just plug in component X, Y and Z and bam, I can just go and work on my
application and I get all this stuff with relatively low effort.
Definitely not there yet, but I could see a world where that could come
true. Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. Join us
in Discord to discuss this episode with me, Mark Wulf, and our whole
community, the links in the show notes. And you can follow us on Twitter
at MAHQ. Mark Wulf, I’m really pleased with how far we’ve taken this
so far, how well it’s performing in production, despite the challenges
you inevitably discover from being on the frontier. And well, I hope we
can do another episode a year from now and see what we’ve learned about
multi-user since then.
01:03:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for having me on. It was fun to be
here again.
01:03:52 - Speaker 3: Yeah, right on that. I’m looking forward to it.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think you can think of writing on the internet
as a beacon, as a way to signal yourself to other like-minded people.
These pieces of yourself that you put out on the internet, and they
allow you to create this that serendipity engine where like-minded
people can find you.
00:00:26 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
deep work on iPad and Mac. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the
product. It’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m
Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan.
00:00:39 - Speaker 1: Hey Adam.
00:00:40 - Speaker 2: And joined today by Francesco Di Lorenzo of
Typefully.
00:00:44 - Speaker 1: Hi, I’m Mark. Thanks for having me. Hi.
00:00:47 - Speaker 2: And I understand you’ve been learning Portuguese.
00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I moved to Portugal, that’s been almost a
year. I haven’t tried to learn a new language in a while. It has been
humbly. And a real challenge.
00:01:00 - Speaker 2: And your native language is Italian, correct?
00:01:03 - Speaker 1: Italian, because they are very similar languages.
00:01:07 - Speaker 2: It’s a little less of a jump than, I don’t know,
learning Japanese or something, I would imagine.
00:01:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely.
00:01:14 - Speaker 2: Well, certainly I can speak to the challenges of
immigrant life and obviously there’s the surface things like I don’t
know, the food’s different or the, you know, the trains are organized
differently, but for sure the language, particularly because that’s so
important for official things, right? Working with your bank, filing
your taxes, interacting with authorities, and indeed you have a far
greater amount of this. Official administrative trivia as an immigrant
than you do as a person that was native to the place. So, yeah, for me
at least, the language has been a cornerstone, both challenge but also
thing to invest in in my immigrant journey.
00:01:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, but more than that, I think it’s even,
it’s very important to fit in in a place, you know, just live there, go
with your day, only talking with experts like you. So this has been a
big motivator for me in trying to learn it.
00:02:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. The reason you go to a place is
because you want to be part of it, to integrate, I think is.
Even the official word for it, and that doesn’t necessarily mean
adopting every custom, but I do think there is a degree to which if
you’re an English speaker, either as a first or a second language.
You can get pretty far with that, particularly if you’re in tech
spheres, you’re in big city, where you have young people that, you
know, everyone probably learned English from when they were pretty
young, etc. You really can get by with that for a long time if you want,
but I think there’s virtue, let’s say, in learning the local language,
even aside from the utility. Absolutely. And tell us a little bit about
you and about Typefully.
00:02:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m a software engineer by trade, turned in
the actor turned CEO of a small company. We make Tali, which started as
a small side project to write Twitter, but now as the project and the
company scales, we are scaling our ambition with it and are trying to
build the general purpose writing up for the internet for creators.
00:03:19 - Speaker 2: And you also come a little bit out of the, you
mentioned indie hacker, but also the calm fund world of companies
starting small, trying to get to revenue quickly, not necessarily
targeting hypergrowth, and folks interested in that can listen to our
podcast episode with Tyler from Calm, but you mentioned scaling your
ambitions. Was this something where you see a path to the bigger team
and the bigger opportunity because of the response to the product?
00:03:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we subscribe to the company mentality and
basically we’re trying to build a small team of individual
contributors, and each one of us, even the two founders, we work every
day on the product, trying to improve it. And yeah, we see this pattern
that all great products, most of them are built by very small focused
teams. Partly started by very small focused teams, so we won’t keep
working this way for as long as we can.
00:04:18 - Speaker 2: And you describe typefully, at least in the
moment, as a way to write better tweets and build your Twitter audience.
Tell us what does the product do today, and then maybe give us a little
hint of what the bigger vision is.
00:04:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. It started as a way to write
Twitter trends, right when Twitter threads were starting to become a
thing, not right now that they’re been turning into the cringe
territory.
So it started that way as a way, an easy way better to interface than
the one you have on Twitter.com to write trends.
But from there, it turned into a way to allow Twitter creators to manage
their presence with their schedule content, see their analytics to
understand what’s working and what’s not, and manage multiple accounts
with ease, even in a team context.
So you can create a team and work on Twitter accounts together. And this
is where we started in a way where we are right now, but we are at a bit
of an inflection point.
So, where we stand today, our vision for Stifle is to create this tool
to empower creators to write on the internet and own their own audience
by using each available platform to their own advantage.
So starting from Twitter, which is our favorite platform, we’re
expanding our platforms like LinkedIn, Soon, Mastodon. And many others.
We want to make it to like a general purpose tool where you can iterate
on your ideas, and all of them in one place and work on them with your
team, refine them with AI and publish them whatever you want.
00:05:58 - Speaker 2: And one of the reasons I found the early pitch
compelling when you first launched it was I think, yeah, the Twitter
threads maybe is sort of an inflection point because before that, OK,
Twitter has this like really simple box for typing what was once called
the status update, but you know, now it’s just the text, and when it
was a really short amount of text and it was just one chunk, right, you
do one tweet at a time, I don’t know, the equivalent of just a text
area in your web browser or the equivalent of that on the phone.
It’s totally fine. Then, if you are going to write longer form content,
there may be media there, and then you get the threads, and now it turns
into almost like a small blog post or something like that, and now I
start to feel uncomfortable when I’m building out this thread. I go,
wait a minute, like this is actually a piece of writing. I’m investing
in it, like I do with any piece of writing and it feels like a very
weird thing to be just doing this in this little pop up text area box.
It’s like clearly not a dedicated writing tool. And so it just feels a
very natural thing to say, let’s make a, yeah, I don’t know if you
want to think of it as a word processor, that’s not quite right, but
there are a lot of dedicated text tools that exist for other types of
writing we want to do in our lives, and that can be a first class thing,
managing that over time and making the writing experience good and
having multiple drafts, collaborating with other people. And really
something like Twitter is a publishing platform. The little text area
they give you for typing your text, just increasingly to me doesn’t
feel quite up to the job of at least the way that some folks uh use
Twitter.
00:07:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, also because in a way it’s a completely
different form of writing, this idea of atomic atomic writing, writing
these short snippets that somehow are connected together, but they are
their own thing. We have found that many users, many people love to
write that way also when they’re not writing for Twitter. So I think
by, in a way, by chance, We stumbled on a really interesting idea, novel
way of writing. That’s helpful even when you are not targeting Twitter.
00:08:08 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is writing on the internet, and
I think that speaks very directly to or rather is inspired by the vision
you just outlined there for typefully, and it’s a huge topic, of
course. There’s where you write, there’s why you would want to write
in the first place, there’s the way in which we even construct the
words and speak is different from maybe a lot of classic style of
writing which you would find in a book or a homework essay or something
like that.
But maybe we could start with the where piece of things, the medium or
the channels.
We’ve spoken about Twitter a little bit already, and I’d certainly
love to dig in on that, especially since there’s both a lot of, it’s
called drama happening there right now and you’re building a business
on that, and I do think it is really unique one.
But if we go back in time a little bit, you know, the first thing that
comes to mind for me is blogging things like, yeah, or even something
like LiveJournal, but like I had a WordPress blog decades ago, that sort
of thing. Do you think of that as being the genesis for writing on the
internet?
00:09:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, especially considering like the
history of the people that founded Twitter, that’s for sure playing the
parts that idea right there.
00:09:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s a good point, right? Ed Williams had
founded Blogger, which was certainly not the first blogging platform,
but was a significant early player.
00:09:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
00:09:29 - Speaker 2: Well, I certainly found that early blogosphere,
whatever you want to call that, late 90s, early 2000s to be a pretty
unique place.
This idea of combining publishing to a potentially infinitely large
audience with the informality of, hey, I’m 15 years old and I’m just
writing how I feel about like my favorite pop song into my live journal.
Uh it’s like quite an interesting combination.
I think historically, when you look at pre-internet writing, To even get
that channel to be able to speak to a larger audience, you’re
publishing something in a magazine or a newspaper or a book, to even get
access to that channel, you have to be a professional, you have to be
building up your career, all that sort of thing, and then individuals
will do things like writing letters to their friends and maybe essays
for school, but I feel like that’s one of the things that comes to mind
right away as being core to the writing on the internet is the
potentially reaching. This huge audience, but being completely informal
and casual, it’s quite a unique combination.
00:10:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you can see the whole evolution of writing
on the internet, things getting easier and easier with the next video,
one after the other, starting from blogging. In a way, I’m still very
attached to blogging.
Makes me really nostalgic when I stumble on a really good blog. I try to
keep one myself, but yeah, I think blogging is still going today.
And we see many of our users keeping personal blogs and repurposing the
same content also on Twitter and medium.
In a way, a block is this platform you own that nobody can take away
from you, and that’s reassuring. It’s very common today to see
creators still owning a blog with an attached newsletter as a way to own
their audience.
Many people are in a way using social media to attract people to a
platform they own. And that’s I think the role of blogs and newsletters
play today.
00:11:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah that makes sense. I think of our friend and a
multiple guest on the podcast, Jeffrey Litt as being very good at this.
He tweets and posts to his mastodon things that essentially are sort of
summaries or sort of like a few key takeaways from articles that he
posts on his personal website, and then in turn, he also has an email
newsletter that he sends out that either contains or links back to that
same kind of content, but a platform like Twitter ends up being a place
to publish and find new people through. You know, the viral algorithm or
just the ease of sharing there, but you know that if you want to, like
you said, build an audience, you need to ultimately bring that to
something that is a little more under your control and less in the hands
of a platform whose needs and goals may change over time. Indeed, we
spoke about that in depth in our platforms episode where we spoke to
someone who’d, you know, built a business on Slack and saw ways that
changes in the platform can Hurt your business. So, there’s a similar
thing, I think, for someone who’s a content creator on the internet,
whether you’re doing it kind of casually or to support your career or
actually professionally as in like, you monetize, but in the end, I
think that over the very long term, you can’t be completely dependent
on one platform, you gotta kind of take control of your own destiny
more.
00:12:53 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, and we’ve seen this a lot from our
users since we started as a Twitter only platform. People have been
asking us from day one to expand to other platforms, and we were like
these Twitter creators, really, they’re paying when Twitter changed the
timeline algorithm and they saw like their tweets reach 10% of their
followers. And I think that was a wake-up call for many of them. They
started to diversify, maybe create a newsletter, maybe start posting the
same content to LinkedIn as well, to Mastodon. And that’s, I think
where we might fit in in the helping with that. And make it easier.
00:13:39 - Speaker 2: Let’s zoom in on, yeah, Twitter really
specifically for the moment because obviously you know quite a lot about
the dynamics there, building your business on it and having your users
and customers be on that platform. I don’t know. I guess it’s hard to
summarize like what is it that makes Twitter special or unique compared
to, yeah, blogs or Facebook or LinkedIn, but how do you think about
Twitter’s role in the world both historically and maybe going forward
with changes that are happening there now?
00:14:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think what Twitter brought to the table
is reach, like being able to write a simple idea with amplification that
the algorithmic timeline gives you. I think allowed many people to build
enormous audiences and basically, it created a whole generation of
writers. How we. But more than that, I think the thing you can do on
Twitter that you cannot do on any other platform is this dynamic groups
of complete strangers with the kind of similar interests get to slowly
know each other. Day after day, And eventually, maybe they end up
collaborating on something because you go from a mention to at the end
and then to maybe a call. And I think this is one of the most
interesting aspects of Twitter, this ability to create these close
connections with the complete strangers on the internet and being able
to then explore this more. Yeah.
In a way, Twitter made it easier to share, easier to consume content,
and with much hated algorithmic timeline, it made it possible for people
to build huge audiences very quickly. And this changed the things quite
a bit for writing on the internet. In a way, these creators building
huge audiences, and this is a way to look at it, these people with
hundreds of thousands of followers. And another way, the one I like the
most actually is this other way to use the tool where you don’t care
about reaching a huge audience, but you follow a small niche of people
that have your same interests. And yeah, there is this dynamic that only
happens on Twitter where you have a group of strangers that slowly gets
to know each other and You go from a tweet to a mention to at the end to
a call, and then you can end up collaborating on projects and I think it
can take your career and your life in very interesting directions.
And a fun and I thought on that is that my co-founder and I met that way
I started collaborating on projects that way a few years ago, and then
also the whole team was hired through Twitter. We had this same dynamic
that I just described.
00:16:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that is a really special thing and
fairly unique to Twitter as far as I know. I, you know, I think of
Twitter as a place to go to connect with my field, and part of that is
about generating specific opportunities.
For example, I source most of the guests that we’re likely to have on
the podcast here through that, and I’ve also been invited on podcasts
myself through that platform, but Even nothing as pragmatic as that. I
just want to know what’s going on slash be inspired by other people
doing interesting design work and HCI research and so on, and just feel
connected to that in a lightweight way, much more lightweight than, for
example, going to a conference and exactly as you said, it can also not
sure what you call that escalate, but you sort of get to know someone so
to speak, through these casual interactions in replies.
And that can turn into some really interesting kind of call them like
business friendships or industry friendships and eventually potentially
even collaborations. Yeah, I feel like that is a truly unique and
special thing that as far as I know, really, or for me anyway, is only
really happened on Twitter.
00:17:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I also think Twitter is a very interesting
social network.
Actually, several of the most important changes or events in my life
were basically sourced through Twitter, so I’m quite thankful for the
platform actually.
And it is an interesting question of why it ended up, where it did. I
think there’s some interesting mechanical choices that they’ve made
that we alluded to, asymmetric following a combination of an algorithmic
timeline plus the option to purely self-select your timeline, the small
bite size pieces, obviously, but when it did, it ended up being the
social network of ideas. And as much as we live in a multimedia age, the
ideas that are still really important, and it is a place where people
go, including world leaders, top people in various fields to discuss and
connect, so it remains very important for sure.
00:18:36 - Speaker 2: So we mentioned these different mediums for places
you can publish on the internet like blogs, medium, Substack, LinkedIn.
What is the nature of writing for Twitter specifically or maybe this
microblogging format if you want to give it a more general purpose term,
especially that you’ve seen Francesca through your users, like, what is
so unique about writing for Twitter that makes it that a specialized
tool is needed or desirable or there’s something different from, you
know, why not just compose your tweets in Google Docs, for example?
00:19:07 - Speaker 1: I think the, the special thing about Twitter is,
no matter what you want to write about, you can build a small audience
around that in a way that you couldn’t as easily with blogging, and you
can’t on LinkedIn, which is a place much more focused like on business,
and we are seeing creators create content really on as many topics as
you can see. Of course, it’s mostly tech, but we see people really
covering all topics you can think about.
00:19:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s a way in which Twitter.
Enables and supports that to happen gradually and organically. I’ll
give an analogy, which is the discussion that we had about hiring, where
the status quo on hiring is, it’s all or nothing. You either, you know,
don’t know the company or you sign up to spend the next 4 years of your
life there. And one of our ideas with hiring at Mu and Inc and which is
you want to be this gradual organic, incremental process where you
slowly ramp up the level of commitment and interaction. And you get the
same thing on Twitter where If you go back to the world of blogging,
it’s a very heavy weight to interact with, say, the world leader in a
field via blogs. Like you couldn’t really get them to write on your
blog, they probably wouldn’t even bother to read a blog that you wrote,
it’s a whole heavyweight thing. There’s kind of no way to get started.
Whereas with Twitter, obviously the pieces of content are small, but
there are also these built-in mechanisms like asymmetric following and
being able to reply and quote tweet where it’s natural for, say, the
world expert and the person who’s interested in the topic to meet and
if there’s Uh, mutual interests based on these little bits that people
are admitting, they can increase the commitment by following each other
or by quote tweeting or replying and so on. So I think that’s kind of
mechanically why Twitter ends up being so interesting in that respect.
00:20:53 - Speaker 2: the gradual escalation of interaction rather than
having such huge discrete stepping points such as being hired by a
company or even writing a whole long form blog post, whereas you can
read someone’s one sentence reply and then tap like and it’s this
incredibly lightweight interaction and that over time that can grow into
something more.
00:21:16 - Speaker 1: And also this uh dynamic where everything is
public and a reply or a quote tweet has the same dignity of the original
tweet itself. I think it adds pressure and actually makes people
interact even if maybe the power dynamic in the real world or in a
blogging contacts will be different.
00:21:39 - Speaker 2: Now, how do you think about the current, yeah,
change in management and drama, upheaval, whatever you want to call
that. There’s obviously the element of you as a person who is both a
reader and a writer on that platform and how you feel about that, but
also more critically now you have a business that’s based on it, and I
know you said you’re diversifying a little bit, but do you see the
current changes as being something that’s a A bump in the road, but not
something to worry about that much, or is this a significant kind of
concern for your business right now?
00:22:10 - Speaker 1: It is a significant concern.
We were always kind of partially aware of uh platform risk, but
overnight, we were intensely aware of it, especially because the new
relationship like that, the new management established with the third
party developers by shutting down third party clients, making
unannounced changes to the API. We are still waiting on the pricing of
the Twitter API.
And yeah, uh, it has been a roller coaster in our internal chat. We are
all tread on the Twitter situation, as we like to call it.
But apart from that, from the business side, zooming out, I think that
Twitter needed a change. It was a stagnating as a product. I was
optimistic on initially about the way things would have gone with this
acquisition. But where we’re sitting right now, I think whatever you
think of Elon Musk, I think it’s a bit unfortunate to have the public
town square of the internet as he likes to call Twitter. Be in such a
tight spot where we don’t know if it will be there in a month and uh we
don’t know how it will be changed. What are your thoughts on that?
00:23:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s interesting. You could say that even
separately from whether you agree with any particular change that’s
happening now or in the future with the platform, the instability itself
and the unpredictability of it is itself a problem, and people have
talked about some of these larger social networks as being almost like
telecom.
Infrastructure that it’s actually very important for public life and
for how society understands itself and how we decide who to vote for and
things like that, and obviously they’re in the hands of companies, in
some cases publicly traded companies, but still companies with their own
business goals and management can change and that sort of thing. And
I’m not sure if I quite agree with the level of thinking that, you
know, we should be regulating the big social networks the same way we do
electricity providers, for example, but I think that that argument comes
from that source of saying that we want these things to be stable and
steady and reliable now because they are important enough for the world
or for our society. Obviously important for your business as well.
00:24:37 - Speaker 3: Well, I’ll throw in my two cents, which is that I
think the acquisition was an enormous positive. I think it’s gonna
prove to be a positive of world historical proportions, and I think
it’s gonna be very messy, and a lot of people are going to be upset.
And I think actually the third party situation is one of the weaker
aspects of how it’s progressing, but I think it will end up being good.
00:24:55 - Speaker 2: What is it that leaves you? Obviously the general
vibe has not been positive. What leaves you optimistic in the longer
term.
00:25:03 - Speaker 3: Well, I don’t know, speak for yourself on that. I
think some people have been quite unhappy about it, but some people have
been positive about it, so.
As for why, well, I kind of don’t want to go on a whole rant here. I’m
reminded of the meme, please elaborate on that. No. But I’ll throw a
little nugget in there, which is, if nothing else, it is a move that
separates Twitter from what had been a very homogenous and further
homogenizing set of practices and people and things around all the
social networks.
Basically, they were all being, I would almost use the word co-opted
into a single approach or ideology. And if for no other reason than to
have some different Approaches out there, I think it’s a good thing. I
think there’s a lot more to it. But yeah, I’m glad he’s doing
something different with the network.
00:25:53 - Speaker 1: I guess the answer there and what really concerns
me is what we do we lose it by tweaking the Twitter we knew, we end up
breaking it. What replaces Twitter in that case? That’s something that
has been, like, in my mind a lot these past few months.
00:26:14 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I do feel that it’s not just the
current change in management that has created some instability and some
changes that essentially for as long as it has existed, Twitter has had
this really special thing that makes it unique. It makes it the social
network of ideas, exactly as you said, Mark, it’s always been the
social network of choice for me, far and above the other options that
are out.
There, but I think there’s always been a little bit of a struggle to
find exact, I mean, obviously you talk to the business aspects and the
business model, you can talk about the strange element of there’s this
really outsized impact, right, journalists and politicians and all these
sorts of things.
Use it, it’s more likely to be quoted on the news or whatever, but then
when you look at actually the total active users, it’s a fraction of
the size of something like Facebook.
And I kind of feel like even the people who made it and or or the
different people who have made it over the years, quite a lot of
contributed obviously, don’t even fully We know what they have because
almost no one can really define it.
What makes Twitter Twitter exactly. There’s some combination of
elements and you can point to UI things and you can point to the people
who are on it and cultural conventions have emerged, but it’s hard to
kind of like pin down precisely here’s what it is in the form of
here’s how we can make it better, here’s how we can duplicate it
potentially if we wanted to do that, if someone wanted to clone it. And
it actually creates a weird kind of instability. So I guess I would say
I feel some empathy for the creators of the product, which is, I think
it’s hard to double down on what works about it, because what works
about it is so mysterious in some way.
00:27:50 - Speaker 3: One other thing that I’ll mention about Twitter
that I think is very important is pseudonymy.
It is something that Twitter does support very well, and I think most of
the platforms don’t.
Facebook has the real name policy, for example.
I think this is incredibly important in a world where the information
environment is so, let’s say, contested, where it actually becomes
extremely risky and dangerous and in many cases, governments would like
it to be impossible to speak in ways that are You know, contrary to the
interests, but in terms of things that you think are true, and I think
Twitter by supporting pseudo enemy in combination with these mechanical
aspects that we talked about, makes it the natural home for what I call
like information synthesizers. I actually have a tweet about this that
we can link to, but basically, The best place that I’ve found for
synthesis on complex topics that are contentious is literally Cartoon
Abbey Twitter accounts. Because the information environment is so
contested, if you stick a real face on it, you face an enormous amount
of real world pressure of various types, so much so that basically
people can’t have honest discussions or analysis in my mind about these
things. So I hope that Twitter continues to support that. There’s been
some back and forth I’ve seen from Musk about whether he, you know,
basically continue to allow that on the platform, but I think it’s very
important.
00:29:10 - Speaker 2: I think even reaching back to Friendster, which
might have been the first social network that I ever participated in,
and people started creating non-people accounts, you know, what today we
might call bots or brand accounts, anything that’s not a person, and I
think the platform basically got mad about that, I was trying to crack
down on it, but that’s a huge feature to me. There is the ability for a
person to create multiple accounts so they can, like you said, Talk
about contentious topics and firewall that from other things that they
might want to talk about, but also the ability to have bots and the
ability to have companies represented or other kinds of organizations
that a Twitter account is a channel or is a persistent identity for
broadcasting about some set of things that you may want to say and the
mapping from there to a person.
Doesn’t need to be 1 to 1 in any way. I think that’s a big feature,
but of course it’s also something that creates problems in many ways,
and so it’s sort of maybe always in the platform makers’ interest to
basically have less of that or remove the anonymity.
00:30:18 - Speaker 1: In a way, it’s what made this bot problem a bit
intractable, the fact that the platform supports actively supports these
pseudonymous accounts that you can’t really identify.
00:30:31 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I, I think it’s easy to combine several
things that are going on here.
There’s synonymous human users, there’s bots in the sense of
computers, there’s potential foreign interference, there’s companies,
honestly, going back to our discussion of the positives and negatives of
the acquisition.
I think the reason they had such trouble with bots is they just didn’t
deal with it effectively.
Like you had all these tweets like wherever you mention
cryptocurrencies, you have a bunch of like super obvious bots in the
replies. They didn’t even write a rule that’s like, you know, someone
replies within 10 seconds with a free BTC or whatever, you know, it’s a
bot.
Anyways, I do think it makes it more challenging, somewhat for the
platform, but the people who it becomes very challenging for as
governments and other people who want to enforce basically speech
regulations. So that’s, I think the ultimate reason why it becomes.
Very difficult, at least outside the US to support that long term, but
we’ll see if Musk can keep it alive.
00:31:19 - Speaker 2: Another feature I think is really unique to
Twitter are quote tweets. I know these can be contentious. There’s a
lot of people that feel that that is related to negative elements in the
platform. For me, I find them pretty positive in the sense that you can
essentially make a new top level post referencing another post.
And when speaking to my audience, for example, I can include a note
that’s why I think this is important, this is why I’m passing it
along.
Maybe this is the digital equivalent of when your grandparents clip out
a newspaper article for you and they put a little post-it on it saying
why they think you would be interested in it specifically.
I actually think that’s a very powerful thing and similarly, I like
consuming quote tweets more than retweets because a person I’ve chosen
to follow, so therefore I’m interested in their voice or the way they
think about the world or has said this is interesting and here’s why,
whereas a retweet is without that context. But yeah, how do you think
about tweet in terms of how your users use it and how you use it
yourself?
00:32:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in a way, it’s an evolution of the idea of
the link of the blog post. And again, I think a common theme of this
discussion, it’s a very uh fast for us to quickly add the comment and
iterate on an idea. So conceptually it’s a beautiful thing, where there
has been trouble is a, the where, where it took the platform. Especially
with political discourse and tribalism. I think it really changed the
platform for the worst in a way. Which is also the reason why some new
platforms that are becoming popular today like Matodon explicitly
decided not to include this feature.
00:33:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, quote tweets are interesting because
they’ve been so transformative to the platform and even internet
cultural generally.
But of course, there’s nothing new about quoting another piece of
media.
We’ve had this forever, but it’s so powerful on Twitter, that is, you
can do it so quickly, especially now there’s a first class quote tweet
button, and critically, there’s first class tracking in both
directions. You can see.
You know, obviously you can click through to the underlying quote tweet
and the profile for it, but people can see all the quote tweets for a
given tweet. You can see all the mentions and quote tweets that you have
against your content, and so on.
So there’s, like we were saying earlier with comments and discussion,
generally, there’s this encouragement to gradually build up a network
among the participants that people can crawl in various directions.
Yeah, I agree it’s really cut both ways. Although one thing I did back
when I was tweeting was I adopted a strict no negative vibes rule.
So I, I found that I just like felt bad whenever I would dunk on
something or, you know, just admit bad vibes on Twitter. So I said, OK,
no more dunking. And also I’m just gonna stop following all people who
are basically chronic dunkers.
It actually really improved my experience with the platform, so just one
idea people to try out.
00:34:20 - Speaker 1: If everyone did that, Twitter would have a
completely different vibe. And I think it’s also the appeal of these
new platforms popping up, like Matoor where people are signing up. It’s
all good vibes, posting about uplifting stuff. Uh, some others sometimes
dunking on Twitter, of course, over there. But yeah, I try to tweet the
same. Yeah.
00:34:44 - Speaker 3: And speaking of implications of quote tweets, I
think there’s the first order bad vibes of, you know, you just get
someone dunking on a tweet and kind of feels negative, but there’s also
important second order effects where it makes content on Twitter very
susceptible to pylons and witch hunts.
Almost to the point where it’s hard to have open discussion of
contentious ideas because the ideas on Twitter are so susceptible to
this kind of, you know, basically attack, which is why you see a lot of
people operating in the most contentious ideological spaces going
private, and then you have some protection from poetry grades in that
world.
This is actually why I think podcasting is so important, because
podcasting is like the polar opposite in terms of susceptibility to
dunking. It’s actually a huge amount of work to dunk on a podcast, you
got to like, you know, listen to the podcast first and then transcribe
it, I guess. And then how do you even do the dunk? Do you like replay
it? Or do you copy the transcript into your tweet? And then it’s kind
of hard for people to like follow it to the source. So that’s a big
reason why I think podcasts have become a really important medium for
Discussing contentious or disfavored ideas.
00:35:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in a way, it’s what we lost when we
switched to this really condensed format. It left no no space for
nuances.
And I have a somehow funny, somehow tragic story about this, like a
friend of mine a couple of days ago, and you may have seen this around
on Twitter. I shared this tweet where it basically said, it was a very
controversial tweet.
My friend only has a couple 1000 followers. And basically this tweet, it
was saying that. You shouldn’t hire an engineer if his GitA
contribution graphs looks like this, and it was a picture of the GitA
contribution graph with only one colored the dot. And this was super
inflammatory. The tweet got like 10 million views. Everyone caught red
tweeting him. And uh, I, to this day, I still see people stop tweeting
that tweet. It has been, I think, 3 days. At the beginning, this was
really, really fun because, yeah, OK, you make like a down the take and
you get some meat. But out of context, people don’t know him. It has
been really hard for you, like you even received some hundreds of
emails. So I think this is the darker side of this amplification we were
talking about.
00:37:11 - Speaker 2: Here I definitely have to reference the book So
You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which covers a lot of cases of people who
have exactly that scenario.
It sounds like what your friend experienced there was bad, but it can
get much, much worse for sure, and they document a bunch of cases of
this and actually an interesting case of this public shaming.
In the modern era, but maybe a little bit before, certainly a little bit
before Twitter was the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and she has a great TED
Talk about that experience of being shamed by all these strangers who
don’t know you and make a bunch of assumptions about your character and
who you are based on this one really tiny little fragment of information
they have about you.
It’s quite a powerful thing to read and hear these stories, and I hope
would cause folks to think twice before joining the Dunk brigade.
Now, you mentioned Mastodon a couple of times. I’ve been using that for
a few months and kind of enjoying it as a, I don’t quite call it a
Twitter alternative, but it is a similar type of kind of microblogging
format, it has a lot of the same. Affordances, you might say, although
the quote tweet is not one of them, for the reasons you said, you
mentioned potentially want to support that in your product. Have you
been using Mastodon? What do you think of it? Do you think it is a
viable Twitter alternative or just another new type of social network?
What’s your take on all that?
00:38:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve been using it as well, both for
personal interest and also because of title, we want to support it
eventually.
I think it’s an interesting place to be right now, and we are not
seeing the same problem that we see on Twitter, but I had my doubts on
why is that.
I think there is not really a core difference there.
I think with scale, we could actually see the same problems, and case in
point, I think they are actually thinking of implementing the quote
tweet button. I’ve seen some discussions on some its. So I think we
might actually end up in a very similar place if Mastodon blows up and
many people end up moving there.
Another interesting thing about Mastodon is that You have this, yeah,
it’s decentralized, but the server admin of your master the instance
owns you basically. It can ban you. They can do whatever they want with
your account. So in a way, I think some of the problems we see on
Twitter have the potential of being amplified on master them.
But then there is also the positive side. I’ve seen many people asking
their own distance, and that’s super cool. I want to do that myself.
And in a way, we go full circle and it becomes much more similar to a
blog than to a social media profile. Something you want, something you
control, and something you can do whatever you want with.
And of course, like, I think that my biggest concern with it, why I
think uh right now it’s not a viable alternative. Is the user
experience and usability gap that you have with it, even signing up and
following a user from another server than yours. It’s really difficult
and takes some time to understand. Yeah, with this much friction, I’m
not sure how far the platform can get. There are many smart developers
working on improving this, but I don’t buy the narrative that everyone
should move or will move to Malona should just ditch Twitter. That’s
not happening right now.
00:40:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah maybe a pro and a con is those elements that
make it more like old school blogging, you know, setting up your own
blog, even if it’s installing WordPress, configuring your RSS feed,
configuring your RSS reader, managing your reader, all of that is. is
you kind of have to be a power user, if not a full-on developer, and
that on one hand, filters the kind of people that can be part of it and
maybe that’s part of what people are enjoying about Mastodon right now
is the feeling that it is smaller and it is more limited.
But in the long run, to me that’s a downside, something being
accessible to everyone and you don’t necessarily want to fuss with
configuring your own blog, for example, is a huge benefit to these
social networks where anyone can join.
It’s pretty low friction to get started and you can build up over time
and obviously social networks have value the more people that are on
them. And so there’s a natural well, network effect. So, yeah, that’s
an interesting thing. A lot of the qualities that maybe people are drawn
to about Mastodon and the Fedive verse broadly, me included, are
actually things that in the long run are really strikes against it.
00:41:58 - Speaker 1: Yes.
Another point on this is that using it, like, uh, very intensely for a
couple of weeks, I actually ended up missing some of the most
controversial features of Twitter, like, for example, the algorithmic
timeline, which many people like to wait on and use the chronological
timeline or even Twitter list.
But the algorithmic timeline is really good to discover new people, get
discovered by new people. And we didn’t touch on all uh bubble issue,
ending up in your bubble without being able to break out of it, always
reading the same things I mean your opinion confirmed.
I think that’s even worse without the algorithmic timeline. I think you
end up like in this local maximum, yeah, your timeline doesn’t get more
interesting and there is no novelty there, and it’s very hard to
discover new people to follow.
And form those connections we were talking about before. And this has
been a challenge for me on Matoon and also the reason why I kind of
stopped the actively using it. Don’t know about you guys.
00:43:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, my experience is the algorithm makes your
feed lively.
It helps you discover new things. You don’t have to do the hard work
of, for example, curating lists or whatever.
Of course you want to pick who you follow and unfollow. That’s
important, but it’s not a super active thing you need to do. You can
kind of count on the platform to surface potentially interesting content
to you and if the algorithm is.
Well done. I actually would reference YouTube as having actually an
incredible algorithm, and it suggests really interesting things that are
totally relevant to me all the time and very rarely suggests something
that I don’t like or find unhelpful.
And actually that’s a lot better than managing my own playlist of
things to watch or I have a fixed set of subscriptions that and maybe
starting to get a little stale. I want something new, but I’m sort of
too lazy to go like search for it. I just want something to watch. And
so having the computer do that work for you.
To me, the big challenge with the algorithm is always the extent to
which they’re optimizing for the goals of the business and the
platform, the extent they’re optimizing for my goals as a user.
And again, I feel YouTube, at least for me, and maybe others have
different experience, gets this pretty right in the sense that it mostly
shows me videos that I want to watch, and I feel I have gotten good
value from my time from the things that it surfaces to me, whereas the
Twitter algorithm has I don’t know, changed this way and that way over
the years, but sometimes it just surfaces the weirdest, just clickbait
stuff. I’m just so uninterested in. And I just have no idea how I can
think based on my history of likes and interactions over the 13 years
I’ve been using the platform or longer actually that I would like that,
and I assume some of the answer may be the other of them isn’t perfect
or could be improved, but I think some of the answer is sometimes they
want to surface things that are valuable for them to show to me or to
Twitter’s business rather than as valuable for me in the sense of the
kind of meaning I’m searching for when I read writing on the internet.
00:45:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is why I really like that idea that
Musk talked about a while ago. The idea of open-sourcing their own
timeline algorithm, and in a way also allowing people to customize it,
choose the algorithm the best aligned with their goals. And what makes
me really excited about these new platforms like Mastodon. And even more
with more decentralized ones like forecaster is that this, this actually
becomes possible. Like there are services that allow you to get a
completely different view on your timeline of the people you follow. And
I think this is uh really powerful if we get to fix the usability
issues.
00:45:54 - Speaker 2: Now one area that’s very interesting to me is
we’re talking here about writing, but I think one of the benefits of
these many different channels we’ve talked about blogs, Twitter, and so
on is they’re really multimedia, right? The text is kind of the
baseline thing, you know, a tweet is mainly text, a blog post is mainly
text.
But especially as computers and browsers and phones and things have
gotten more powerful, media, especially multimedia, has become more and
more a piece of it, right? So, I mean, Twitter certainly when I scroll
through my timeline, probably the majority of tweets are either an
image, multiple images, a video, or a link, and of course links get
these rich previews here, these unfurl cards that also make them, yeah,
sort of a multimedia component.
And this is also true in yeah, publishing a web article, for example. So
one interesting thing there is, you know, I could switch, the research
lab that Mark and I have been a part of does these long pieces that in
another world or another life or something could be and sometimes are
turned into academic. that are PDFs, but if you look at, for example, a
lot of the recent publishing that switches does heavy, heavy use of
video or in some cases interactive elements that are built into the page
and you just, you know, you could never do that in those traditional
formats. And that’s something unique to the internet and part of what
makes the internet special.
But yeah, how do you think about or how to both of you think about the
role of writing and text generally. In a world where not only do you
have something like Instagram or TikTok, which are obviously, you know,
images and videos kind of first and writing and text only second, but
even on a place like Twitter, Mastodon, or a blog post. That
increasingly multimedia is a huge part of it. Is that a trend that’s
going to go on indefinitely to the point where eventually we just don’t
have all that much writing on the internet, or is this a yes and kind of
situation? The media only enhances the writing, it doesn’t replace it.
00:47:57 - Speaker 3: Well, I think this is a largely a done deal
already.
I bet if you looked at the brain hours invested in online media
consumption, it would be overwhelmingly images and video.
I think we’re kind of in a weird part of the internet where we spend a
lot of time on these niche platforms like Twitter, where there’s still
a lot of text, but most people are watching YouTube and TikTok all day,
right? And that’s still on Instagram. It just is what it is.
Now, it’s not to say that those totally supplant or replace texts,
especially given the importance of texts for conveying ideas on
platforms like Twitter. But I think this ship has already sailed.
The one thing I would say though is that I think that the specific type
of medium, you know, text versus image versus video versus the
combination. I think it’s actually a less important bit than the How
the rest of the information ecology works, you know, for example,
whether there’s an algorithmic timeline, how that works, what the
signals that are fed into that timeline, the mechanics around following
and comments and retweets.
You’ll notice that as we’ve talked today about writing on the
internet, we’ve mostly been talking about these mechanics, right? We
haven’t been talking about, you know, how to write a topic sentence or
whatever. It’s really important how these mechanics work. So I think
that’s actually the highest order bit and then below that is the type
of media, but yeah, in that case, I do think it’s video and images.
00:49:13 - Speaker 2: Although maybe I’ll add on to that that there is
a co-opting also of the video and image format, quite a lot of the
images, at least in my Twitter timeline, are screenshots of text, and
this is also the case when you look through Instagram or Instagram
stories, you have these text annotations.
Snapchat has a version of this, which is adding little text captions and
emojis and things that support or enhance, you know, annotate and
describe what’s going on.
In the video or in the image is actually an important part of it as
well. So perhaps these two things just end up weaving together in
different ways and even the person who is a video platform content
creator for them writing on the internet is how do you craft that
perfect annotation. The right emoji and the right tone when you have
such a small amount of space, right? OK, I can do 5 words. I’m not
going to use any capitalization or punctuation, and I get 2 emojis. How
do I convey exactly the right message in this moment?
00:50:12 - Speaker 3: Another interesting thing about text versus,
especially video, is that I think most of the internet out there that
isn’t.
Kind of owned or reputationally ascribed to an entity has become a bit
of a wasteland.
Like, I don’t know if you guys use Google or other search engines these
days, but most of the results are terrible, and that’s because it’s
just easy to generate SEO garbage, and indeed that’s what most of the
results are these days. And the only repris from that are one on
platforms like Twitter and Substack and email newsletters, where you can
accrue reputational capital, and there are platform facilities for
basically leveraging that over time, you know, email subscription or
followers on Twitter and so on, or a video where there’s a lot more
proof of work. It’s actually quite hard to generate the equivalent of
SEO garbage on YouTube, although people are certainly trying. And so
that kind of is a dual of your comment Adam about these other media
types having a lot of text embedded. I think even in the case of video,
I mean a lot of times I listened to YouTube, I’m not watching the
video, I’m just listening to the audio, right? Because it’s basically
a script that’s being read to you, but it’s a lot harder to generate
fake content on that platform.
00:51:20 - Speaker 1: I think the new AI developments we’re seeing,
which right now are mostly focused on text, will soon come for that as
well and maybe change the game there too.
But I agree that, yeah, most of the stuff I see on Google these days is
garbage. That’s why people are appending like Reddit or YouTube to most
of their queries. And it’s also why I think Google is in a very tight
spot and Stuff like GPT maybe could replace it, providing better
results. But going back to media, I think, uh, so Adam was saying, like,
I think text and media have a place together.
Even on Twitter itself, we see that the best tweets, the most engaging
ones are the ones with media. And I don’t know if you noticed, but in
the app, or on the Twitter app, if you open a video, you kind of get In
this mode where if you scroll down, you go to the next video.
They’re trying to be TikTok. And I think that’s not the way to do it,
but for sure, I think they will try to do more of this. They were
talking about long form video, the Twitter app itself.
I’m really positive about this and curious to see where they take it,
because, yeah, every time people have had a new medium to express
themselves. It enrich the discussion and if you pair this with the
dynamics, we already have on Twitter, I think it’s a really interesting
development.
00:52:53 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I recall that we said a lot of the things
that are unique and magical about Twitter. It’s not just that they have
these 120 or 240 character text entities, it’s all these mechanics. And
you know, a lot of the interesting stuff like you guys were saying that
we’re already seeing on Twitter is, is that these different media
types. So even if the world were to move strongly in that direction,
there’s still going to be a lot of value in Twitter.
00:53:14 - Speaker 2: Well, there’s a place to end. I’d love to just
ask the simple question, why do we want to write on the internet?
00:53:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you can think of writing on the
internet as a beacon, as a way to signal yourself to other like-minded
people.
And there is this interesting word that I came to know by reading a blog
post from a friend of mine, a friend of mine on the internet, that
discovered him through his writing.
And it’s this concept of friend catchers.
And friend cultures are these small bits, could be projects, could be
tweets, could be blog posts, these pieces of yourself that you put out
on the internet, and they allow you to create this that serendipity
engine where like-minded people can find you.
You can discuss idea, you can form friendships.
And I think ultimately, this is why you should write on the internet.
00:54:14 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, that has been huge, you know, I talk
about things like meeting guests for this podcast, but also just making
connections with interesting people that yeah, become friends or or
somehow add value to my life, but I also think of that as being
something that works really well for me as someone who is not only an
introvert, but has Very weird niche interests. So finding others who
have those weird interests and connecting over that is for me, that’s
the way that I want to, yeah, make friends, find potential new
collaborators and so forth. And the best way to do that is is more of
the exactly the metaphor you described this beacon that you put out to
the world, and I’m also searching for the beacons that others put out,
and that is, let’s call it a comfortable or certainly more fun way to
do it than other more conventional approaches.
00:55:06 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I can say from experience on both sides of
this that it’s unreasonably effective. The truth is there’s a dark
world out there in terms of contents, and even putting just one piece of
writing on the internet, it could literally be a single tweet, can do a
huge world of good for you and your work and your career, so it’s worth
investing in.
00:55:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I hadn’t seen this friend catchers article
before, but I was just skimming it briefly here.
I like this one sentence, Friend catchers are small, contain less essays
or apps that solve resonant, emotional, relevant, tractable, and
underserved problems.
I like that a lot.
If you think about putting up that blog post that is the one time that
you tried to install XYZ and hit a problem and You found the solutions,
so you wrote a little blog post about it, and one of the person in the
world has that exact same problem, Google for it, finds your blog posts,
and yet it’s resonant because not just that you offered them a
solution, but you both had the same problem.
You’re trying to do something similar in your life, and that can be the
basis for connection.
Well, maybe it’s a place to end.
Francesco, I find myself wanting to go back to something you mentioned
at the very beginning when you’re talking about the overall vision for
Tightfully, which was this kind of allowing creators to own their
audience, right? We know that these platforms are great for reaching new
people and they’re a great place to start, but then over the longer
term, you get a little trapped there in some cases. How do you think
about that problem and what are you going to try to do to solve it?
00:56:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, as you said, I think the way people writing
on the internet today should think about these platforms is as tools.
To use to build an audience, to get their ideas out there, form
connections, but they should not be relying on them because as we have
seen, the timeline algorithm can change on a we follow our count,
YouTube subscribers means nothing.
So what we are trying to do. I help people along the way of the journey
starting by allowing them to build that audience. What we focus more and
more nexttily is building tools that make it easy for individual
creators to more easily publish the content to more platforms and
actually retain and own personally the connections, the followers they
get and the content they publish. And if you want to build a career on
the internet, I think you should be thinking hard about that.
00:57:50 - Speaker 2: So this is something like, if I only publish in
one place, medium, Instagram, Twitter, whatever it is, and I just
essentially put it there and that’s it. For example, I don’t even have
the archive of my past posts. If I wanted to recreate those someplace
else, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Is that the kind of thing you’re
thinking about, or does it go beyond that?
00:58:13 - Speaker 1: It’s more along the lines of the fact that you
could be banned from a platform. You have no button to DM all your
followers on Twitter. You don’t really own your audience. If you don’t
have an email address or a way to directly contact them. And this is
huge if you want to really use these tools and do interesting things
with them.
00:58:41 - Speaker 2: Indeed, and I think that was certainly part of the
picture for Substack is that you have that email list that you can
export at any time.
And of course email is the original Fettiverse, right? This is a
federated system for as much as Gmail has a pretty substantial chunk of
the market.
The reality is there are many choices for email servers.
It’s something that can’t be controlled by one single single entity
and Yeah, it just gives you more control and more stability over the
long term, which again matters if your audience matters to you, if it’s
actually your business because you’re yeah, creator that monetizes your
content, but also if you’re someone that just has spent a long time
building these connections, maybe it’s relevant to your career at some
level, and yeah, it’s important to you and you don’t want that to be
something that completely depends on the whims of a company who again
has their own motivations that are often aligned with yours, hopefully,
but not always.
Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. Join us in
Discord to discuss this episode with me, Mark, and our community, the
links in the show notes, and you can follow us on Twitter at museAppHQ.
And Francesco, thanks for helping us be more thoughtful about writing on
the internet. It’s something we’ve been doing for a long time.
Platforms come and go, but I think writing on the internet is something
that’s here to stay.
01:00:00 - Speaker 1: Thanks guys.
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