Metamuse by Adam Wiggins, Mark McGranaghan

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

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

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

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.

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