Metamuse

By Adam Wiggins, Mark McGranaghanTechnology

Metamuse episodes

January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: It was important for us that people be able to
reach this level of partnership, which again is a group of peers, even
if they weren’t there at the founding of the company.
00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use a software for
your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast
isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the
small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague
Mark McGranahan, and Mark, I know that, uh, we have to get creative with
our hobbies here in this time of staying home. Uh, what have you been
doing in regards to your piano lessons?
00:00:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I usually take lessons at my
teacher’s house here in Seattle, but now we’re going all remote.
And we actually did this once, uh, last year during some snowstorms
here, which shut Seattle down, and then I just like propped my iPhone up
on my desk and we did our best, uh, but now that I have a little bit
more experience with this podcast and with other AV stuff, trying to do
a better setup, so.
Um, used a, a real mic to record and we set up multiple camera angles
with my laptop video and my iPhone camera, and that’s worked pretty
well. And then I think the next experiment will be actually plugging the
digital output for my, for my digital piano kind of directly into an
audio interface.
As well as getting a vocal mic and hopefully that will improve the kind
of the piano sound quality that she hears on the other side.
00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Well, excuse to play with.
00:01:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a
big factor.
00:01:40 - Speaker 2: We’ve got our summit next week as well, which
we’re doing all virtual we meet in person for that, so we’re also
going to Try to get a little creative. I guess the whole world is is
doing that to some degree.
00:01:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, on the flip side of this, as a
company, we have a lot of experience with remote, so this hasn’t been
too big of a change for us. I’m talking to, uh, for example, people who
are elementary school teachers and I just, I can’t even imagine.
00:02:01 - Speaker 2: So the topic we wanted to talk about today was
hiring an engineering partner and maybe the Muse partnership model more
generally. So I’ll link in the show notes to the job description we’ve
got on the web.
Beautiful design there done by our colleague Leonard.
But, um, I think you wrote most of this, Mark, and, and I wanted to
quote from the, the opener a little bit and, and maybe you can expand on
this or explain it, uh, further. So the the page says this role is on
our partner track, meaning that it has a high level of freedom and
responsibility while earning a significant stake in the business. So,
can you, uh, can you tell us what does it mean to be an engineering
partner as opposed to, say, a soft software engineer as a regular
employee.
00:02:45 - Speaker 1: So, our partnership model is, we have a very small
team, all of whom are intentionally peers, including the founders, and
who are treated more like owners than employees. So, in practice, I
would say a partner is In between a typical startup employee and the
kind of sole founder of a bootstrapped in the startup, it’s kind of in
between.
00:03:08 - Speaker 2: And by typical startup employee here we talk about
in the early days when it’s a small team, people have a lot of impact,
I guess, on the, on the company because there’s just not that many of
them, and option grants are common, which is sort of an option to buy
company stock in the future if it does become valuable, uh, but at the
same time, they don’t really get a lot of visibility into, say, the
financials of the business.
00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the typical model is you have the founders
who are there when the company is incorporated and they get the vast
majority of the equity and they have very outsized responsibility and
decision making ability and and freedom and flexibility, and then you
hire employees and starting with employee 1 and definitely on from
there, they’re kind of a second and lower tier of staff by design. And
what we want with the partnership is more of a model where those Team
members are all peers, uh, in terms of the day to day work, in terms of
their freedom and responsibility, and also in terms of their equity
ownership in the business.
00:04:08 - Speaker 2: And just to make it concrete here, we’ve got 4
partners right now. So there’s Yumi and Yulia, with sort of the 3, that
got started last year. Leonard joined us not too long after. So we’re a
partnership of 4 right now, and we have maybe some contractors and
things we’ve worked with, but for the For the most part, it’s really
those 4. We’re all owners in the business and therefore, essentially
peers. Uh, now we’re looking to fill in this 5th person, uh, who will
come from an engineering background, but we want them to have that same
kind of stake in the business or level of ownership or level of
responsibility.
00:04:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and it goes both ways like you have
this higher level of ownership, you have more freedom, but because this
is probably the last partner that will hire for some time. There’s a
lot of responsibility. Like these 5 people, they need to make the
business successful together. Um, so you really need to have a really
high talent density to make that work.
00:05:01 - Speaker 2: So you’ve used this turn of phrase freedom and
responsibility, and I don’t know if that’s a call back to the Netflix
deck, sort of internal employee hiring and culture deck, but I read
this, I’ll link to it in the show notes. I read this many, many years
ago and it really had a big impact on me and how I think about teams and
hiring and and management.
00:05:20 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, very familiar, a classic. And
interestingly, I think it’s been both very influential, yet it’s still
quite contrarian.
00:05:28 - Speaker 2: Having a lot of latitude, having a lot of ability
to make choices in your daily work, also comes with it, yeah,
responsibility to do the best thing for the business, and you don’t
have someone sitting there telling you what the right thing to do is.
And maybe this comes to the conventional relationship you often happen
have between employers and employees, which is one of the boss tells you
what to do and the employee knows they’re successful in their job when
the boss is happy, so it’s really largely about pleasing what whoever
has the authority says they want. Uh, which produces some, some strange
dynamics, uh, sometimes and some power. Obviously there’s a huge power
asymmetry there as well.
00:06:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and that was a big motivation for me in
designing our partnership model. I wanted individual success to be
measured by the market as much as possible, so it’s not about pleasing
your boss or getting some committee to give you a certain rating. Um,
there’s one or two people who are working in each discipline, so it’s
very clear if your work is having the right impact for the business.
00:06:30 - Speaker 2: And maybe we can talk about the terminology of
calling it partners or partnership, and in particular, in contrast to
the term that you often hear in Silicon Valley, which is founder. So
what, what’s the difference there? Why do we use this term partner?
00:06:45 - Speaker 1: It was important for us that people be able to
reach this level of partnership, which again is a group of peers, even
if they weren’t there at the founding of the company. There’s certain
things like you’ll always be able to call yourself, you know, a member
of the founding team or a founding partner, but we think it’s important
that people can come in, uh, demonstrate their skills, prove their value
to the business and join this group of peers as a full partner.
00:07:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, founder is a funny piece of terminology,
right? It’s not a job title. It’s not like VP of engineering or
something. Uh, it’s a statement of where you were at a particular
time.
And I’ve certainly used that title for myself quite a bit on, you know,
CVs or whatever, just because, yeah, I do start companies, that’s sort
of my, um, my career. And, and so when you’re doing a jack of all
trades, just getting things off the ground, uh, type of a role, well,
founder does seem like the right description for that.
But it does rule out people coming in later and having a really big, or
even a foundational, you might say, impact. Uh, and I think of some
famous examples of this. For example, uh, Howard Schultz, I think it’s
the fellow’s name from Starbucks. He wasn’t one of the founders of
Starbucks, but he, in the sense of being this pivotal person that helped
make it what it is today. He was, or that we just don’t have a word to
talk about that, basically.
00:08:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and typically there’s a very narrow and
rare path for people to say become a CEO externally, and that happens
sometimes, of course, um, but the default path is you read the job
description and it says like employee of X division, you know, doing
this subset of that thing and even before you’ve talked to the first
person at the company, it’s clear you’re going to have a very
prescribed and small impact, whereas if you come in and say with the job
description. You’re going to be a partner in this business, you’re
going to own a big chunk of it, and we’re going to expect and hope that
you step up to that with your contributions. Um, you’re setting a much
higher ceiling for people to reach up to.
00:08:49 - Speaker 2: The one thing I was concerned about when we got
this off the ground and 3 of us, the 3 initial partners had this idea to
have this small talent dense team was that it would really restrict our,
certainly our ability to grow quickly, although that wasn’t, uh,
specifically a goal for us to grow the team quickly. But actually that
we would rule out the ability to hire a potentially really great people,
really great people in that particular craft who don’t have that other
dimension of either their skill set or maybe just their interest. Being
an owner of a business and feeling that responsibility for the whole
thing being successful, versus kind of focusing on your craft and your
specialty. It is not something everyone can or or wants to do. And so we
rule out being able to hire some a really great software engineer who
doesn’t want to be a business owner and be worrying about the
fundamentals of the business. Um, and so I was, I saw that as a risk. I
felt like when Leonard joined us, uh, that was a great validation of
this model because he wanted that. He wanted to. You know, this is a
very talented guy. He had the option to go lots of, uh, very prestigious
big tech companies. And one of the reasons he told me that he, he wanted
to work with us is that chance to have a high impact and be an owner in.
Uh, in a business. And so he’s both really great at his craft, which is
design, but he also has the mindset to care about, pay attention to, and
contribute to all the other aspects of the business.
00:10:22 - Speaker 1: There’s only a subset of people who are
interested in this model, and that’s fine because within that universe,
they seem especially interested in what we’re doing and kind of more
inclined to join our venture versus a typical startup where they’d be,
you know, employee number 76 and earn 0.01% or whatever. Um, so I think
it’s kind of concentrating and focusing our recruiting ability into uh
the type of people who we most want to work with.
00:10:50 - Speaker 2: Now, this works for a 5 person team, maybe you
could even imagine 67. I don’t necessarily imagine it would scale to, I
don’t know, 1520, 25 people, um, but how do you, how do you think about
that if we did at some later time feel like we did want to grow the,
grow the team because the opportunity in front of us or the, the, um,
money we’re earning from customers makes it possible to do that.
00:11:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think maybe there’s separable axes there.
So I think it would be harder to have partners as you go beyond 67
people, although there is precedent for that, of course, and
professional services firms that have big partnerships, uh, but you, you
might be able to separate kind of how many employees, how many staff
total you have versus what percentage of them are are partners, even if
there’s some coupling there. I would also say that we did.
Design the partner model, kind of the current iteration of it,
specifically for 4 to 7 people, because that’s the size of one team, or
maybe 3 to 7. And when you go beyond 6, maybe 7 people, you don’t
really have one team anymore. You have 2 teams that you like, you know,
team divisions and like extra communication and coordination and
decoupling and stuff like that. And it’s kind of a different way of
operating.
You can, you can’t do it totally as modically mind melting like we do
now. So I think it would also change in that respect if we move beyond 7
people, but I’m hopeful that we can um get quite far with this small
team again, because of the talent density and because of the leverage
you can get these days with SAS.
00:12:20 - Speaker 2: And it’s interesting change for both of us maybe
because we do come from that startup background where hiring and growing
the team quickly is seen as an absolute requirement. And uh you were an
engineering manager, ran a team at Stripe. How big was that or how many
people were sort of under your um authority there?
00:12:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I managed teams from like 3 to about 50 at
Stripe, so I saw a gamut and indeed a huge part of your time as an
engineering manager at a company like Stripe, we are growing very
quickly, is actually the mechanics of growing a team.
So it’s like, you know, recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, training,
team, cell division, off boarding. I probably spent like half my time
doing that. And so part of the idea with a deliberately smaller
partnership is you can spend more of your time focusing on the actual
products in the business.
Now there’s anything wrong with doing those other things. I quite enjoy
them. Um, but if you, if you want to grow very fast, you have to invest
a lot in it and it necessarily detracts from your work on the product.
00:13:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly for me, there was an appeal to
being in more of a maker mode, be able to spend more of my time doing
writing, product development, design, and so on.
Uh, at Hiroku, I was my sort of my largest management experience and at
one point had a, yeah, quite large, uh, team under me there and you can
do a lot with a big team of expert people.
It’s, it, it, it can be a really amazing thing and there are super, uh,
opportunities very worth going after that that basically require that.
Uh, but then on the other side of things, yeah, being able to make stuff
and be really close to, I don’t know, I like a pretty close personal
relationship with quite a lot of our, um, our early users and now
customers, and that’s a lot harder to do if you also need to be, uh,
making your team and all of the, the care and feeding of that, uh, your
priority.
00:14:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and to circle back to something we mentioned
earlier, I think you have that. That much more direct relationship with
the customers and the product and and again the evaluation loop is much
cleaner, with a large company, you have like, you know, various
management chains that are quite deep, you have the different functional
areas, you know, you have multiple phases of roadmap planning, the
evaluation process is very complex, and so you end up spending a lot of
your brain cycles like managing that social dynamic, uh, whereas here I
think we have much more focus on our product and our customers.
00:14:51 - Speaker 2: The time that you need to put into getting
everyone on the same page, even if it theoretically we all agree roughly
where we’re going and what the pressing problems are, there’s these
huge sophisticated systems that, um, larger companies use. Google’s, I
think, known for the OKR system. Uh, when I was at Salesforce for a
little while, I got exposed to this thing called V2O. Uh, and these
terrible acronyms are very necessary systems that allow you to take a
large group of people and get everyone on the same page about what
you’re doing and focused around a particular business priority and have
everyone understand how their work can fit into that. And by comparison,
I think you mentioned this, uh, earlier. By comparison with a small
team, we basically have a team summit once every 2 months. We spend a
week going really deep on big picture questions and spending a lot of
time with each other and having casual conversations, and that basically
works great for getting everyone on the same page and aligned to use the
manager speak there. Um, and that’s kind of all you need, plus uh like
a weekly, uh, planning meeting and, and, you know, with a con on board,
kind of, you, you’re all set. The, the meta elements there are much
easier and much more, uh, much simpler.
00:16:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, now I think the flip side of all of this,
uh, freedom and responsibility and minimal management infrastructure is
you really need the partners to take a lot of initiative and to have
good judgment and to have good taste.
And I think that’s reflected in the type of people who uh we tend to
find applying for these partner roles.
They tend to be people like perhaps former entrepreneurs, uh, serial
independent contractors, um, people who have a lot of experience doing
uh open source projects or running things like that. Um, people who have
worked at very small startups, it’s people who kind of just tend to
take initiative and take responsibility for their own career success
that I think finds, um, the most traction with our model.
00:16:50 - Speaker 2: Good judgment and making good decisions, making
wise decisions, I think it’s a huge part of this, and you want to be
able to trust in everyone’s judgment.
When you talk about the split a little bit between.
Maybe founders, employees in the startup world or maybe more classic
business. There’s, let’s let’s call it management and labor, uh, or
boss and employee, that that sort of thing.
Another really influential source of kind of business know-how for me
was, uh, Peter Drucker’s book Management to this giant collection of
business essays from I don’t know, the 1980s or something like that,
which still are remarkably applicable to uh the modern world of tech
companies.
And in management, he talks about sort of the, what makes a manager, a
manager is not. managing a team or the people side of it, it’s feeling
responsibility for and having the suitable authority to make the
business be successful, the whole business, whereas an individual
contributor, a crafts person, what have you, their job is to make a
particular thing.
So if your job is to build a website for the company. You’re gonna
build the website, make it as successful as possible by whatever uh
criteria you’re given. But beyond that, you, you probably have a vague,
certainly strong but vague interest in the overall health of the
business and that you want to make something you’re proud of, and of
course you want your job to continue to exist, and you want all your
colleagues to continue to be employed there, but you don’t really have
any levers for making the business be successful or not outside of your
specific domain.
00:18:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and there are a lot of good reasons why um
companies have this, this management and labor dynamic and it can work
very well and indeed I had spent a lot of my career working in that
model, but I, I wanted with Muse to not be spending so many brain cycles
on like, you know, convincing people they should be doing stuff and like
motivating them to do stuff that wasn’t necessarily stuff they were
interested in and like judging their work constantly. I just want people
to more like do the thing that was right for the business out of their
own initiative, and I think we’ve been able to get that here.
One other thing that this reminds me of is uh dealing with miscellaneous
business stuff.
So for example, expenses. This, this can become a huge mess in big
corporations, kind of, uh, classically, you know, you have the
programmer who can’t get a decent computer or they have to do like a
multi-week uh procurement process to get a hotel, we have to use some
terrible, you know, flight booking software. And here the model is much
simpler. It’s you’re a partner in the business, you essentially own a
piece of this bank account, and you need to make good decisions about
how we use it, and we mostly trust you to do that. And so if, you know,
you think you should buy, you know, I don’t know, a new mic for a
podcast, you know, do that or if We’re deciding where to have the
summit. It’s not like an us versus them dynamic on the expense. It’s,
we can go somewhere more expensive and that’s less runway for for all
of us in the business.
00:19:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that element of looking at the
money in the bank account and seeing, you know, what’s possible or what
is wise to spend money on for equipment is one thing, but a, a very
challenging topic in any model is individual compensation.
That is how much money do you get paid.
I remember talking to Yuli about this early in the The business, which
is, you know, transitioning from the employee mindset, which is one of,
OK, I’m going to negotiate with my employer. Not exactly in an
adversarial way, but you could say you have different incentives, you
have different interests. The employee wants to negotiate to get as much
money as they can, and the employer wants to get the, uh, the employee
to work for as cheaply as they can. And then they hopefully through that
tension, negotiate to some fair middle ground.
By contrast, when everyone’s a partner, you basically look at the Money
in the bank account, you look at the spreadsheet of growth and
customers, and you look at financing possibilities, and you go, OK,
well, if we game this out, like what can we afford to pay ourselves?
00:20:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And related to that, I like that we
have a relatively simple compensation model that also, I think mostly
pays people for the responsibility that we’re asking them to take
versus for their negotiation negotiating leverage. Um, so our model is
essentially there’s some dollar amount that we want all the partners to
be earning roughly and then depending on their situations, the cash
versus equity balance might be a little bit different.
00:21:17 - Speaker 2: So when it comes to the stock compensation, Uh,
you had a, a, a bunch of strong feelings about that, and in particular
the way that maybe option grants for startup employees are a little bit
of a raw deal. You got people get stuck with tax burdens and exercise
windows and things like that.
00:21:33 - Speaker 1: Thought about a bunch of different things, but we
ended up mostly on um options, mostly for legal and tax reasons, um, but
we try to give way, way more than is standard for an employee again to
reflect this, this kind of being in between an employee and a founder.
Um, and also we have this no cliff and uh the exercise window is very
long. So basically the idea is once you’ve Worked at the company for a
quarter, you’ve contributed a lot of effort, you’ve earned this equity
compensation and it’s yours to keep, uh, basically for as long as the
US government will allow us to let you keep it. Um, and the, the terms
are as simple and as favorable to the employee as the staff as possible.
00:22:13 - Speaker 2: And that that was something I was pretty
passionate about as well, because having done a lot of businesses over
the years and divvied up ownership in different ways and that sort of
thing, you often see this thing where you have these typically 4 year
grants, uh, for founders, it’s often even more dramatic where
essentially in the beginning, you just divide the company three ways,
uh, and then you get diluted over time. But the Sort of the ownership
that you have reflects what you happen to negotiate for, what the
circumstance of the company happened to be at the time when you came in
the door. And what I really prefer is that there’s something that is
based on both the contributions you’ve made to date, but also reflects
the commitment that you have made in the, you know, in the near term in
the next couple of years. I think 2 years is kind of a nice time window
on that. And furthermore, that if your life circumstances change, or if
you decide that you no longer have good contributions to make to this
business, you’re not in the what they sometimes call the investing in
peace um situation, which is you’re kind of sitting around keeping your
chair warm because you have this great option grant or this great stock
grant that you want to see out to the end, but you’re not really
actually in a position. You have these weird cliffs and things, you’re
motivated to, OK, I want to stick around till next February because that
will make a big difference for me. Uh, but it’s something that is a
little bit closer to, uh, your, your salary, which is, as long as
you’re contributing, you’re earning, and then at some point, if your
circumstances change and you want to be elsewhere. I guess I don’t like
people being chained to a thing. It seems bad for both parties. It’s
certainly bad for a person to not be moving on from a role that they’re
no longer, no longer want to be in. But similarly, I think it’s bad for
the company that becomes a person who’s not contributing with the same
passion and the same vigor and maybe that is space in the cap table or
space in the sort of the team seats, uh, that could be given to someone
else that’s in a better position to contribute.
00:24:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think the typical 4 year stock grants
plus 1 year cliff plus 30 day exercise windows can really contribute to
that feeling of people feeling locked to the company or compelled to sit
and wait it out and I think both of those are not healthy.
And indeed we’ve tried to do other things to make it feel like People
have their own independent free lives and they’re not like chaining
themselves to this company for 4 to 6 years when they join.
It’s more like you come in and you do this like rotation of this tour
and after 2 years, you can choose to re up or you can choose to go in a
different direction with your career and both of those are totally fine
uh with the company and totally reasonable things to want to do with
your own life.
And you know, another example of this would be, um, we try not to have
Which basically prefer cash compensation to benefits so that if you
don’t have all these like weird tentacles into your personal life in
the form of benefits like you’re earning this compensation and then if
you want to um move in the future, you don’t have to like unwind all
these benefit entanglements with the company that you just have more
cash that you can use to spend on those things as you will.
00:25:28 - Speaker 2: You mentioned earlier the Agency partnership and
this was uh was also something that I think you brought into our
discussion when we were formulating this model that, um, I had never
really thought about before. But there is the case of, yeah, maybe
something like a designer brand agency, uh, maybe something like an
attorney’s office, sometimes maybe medical practices are this way. Uh,
maybe, probably my best exposure to it, although I don’t know how
accurate it is, is, uh, the TV show Mad Men, where they have these
basically ad agencies that that have this small set of people who are
the partners, and then of course, there’s a larger group who are the,
uh, let’s say the standard employees. What exposure did you have to the
partnership model via Uh, this kind of, this kind of business and, and
how did that play into the, the idea here?
00:26:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, mostly via the professional services world,
you know, accountants and lawyers and so on and Uh, we, we drew from
that two of the key aspects for our current design.
One is this idea that anyone can make partner over time. So, when you
form like a law firm, the people who founded the company, they have
their names on the sign, sure, but over time as other people make
partners, they take on that sign and then make a new one with the new
partner’s name on it, right? And I really like that dynamic. Again, I
think it allows people to step in and and for the talent and the company
to rotate um.
The other was this idea that in these professional services firms that
are structured as partnerships, the partners are not just for example,
really good lawyers, they’re also responsible for the health of the
business. So that’s things like bringing in business, doing recruiting
for the firm, taking care of all the miscellaneous business things that
one needs to do, making decisions about, you know, the office or
whatever, and um again I isolate that model of these people who feel
more responsibility than just their narrow functional expertise.
00:27:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that style of, I guess call it rotating
partnership also fits in with the the tour of duty idea that you
mentioned, which is Someone can be a partner and a prime driver at the
business for 20 years, but then maybe they want to retire, maybe they
want to move on to new things, maybe they want to focus on their
family.
And I feel like sometimes the cult of personality stuff that we get in
the tech world a little bit produces something where key people moving
on to their next thing or in some cases dying, right? Like that happened
with um the Walt Disney Company.
You know, the, the Disney Company basically lost its soul and was
totally lost in the weeds for a pretty long time when Walt Disney
passed, unfortunately quite young, relatively speaking, and it took a
really long time to reform itself because it was so built around this
one visionary genius individual.
And while granted, Disney was a a a unique genius uh and um.
I think it is the case sometimes that if we build companies in a way
that kind of assumes these these founding people who were there at the
beginning, the only people that can ever drive it forward, uh, that
actually doesn’t create a long term healthy business.
And if people can do their tour of duty and then rotate out and others
can take it to the next, uh, take it to the next level and you have
something where that’s a, a normal, um, Normal way that you do business
as opposed to an exceptional event, it seems to me that actually makes a
healthier business over the long term.
00:28:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so, and I hope so. Of course, we’ll
have to see over the next 248 years, how that actually works out, you
know, the mechanics of it, but I’m optimistic. Should we talk a little
bit about how we bring these partners on, you kind of alluded to it with
like the ramp or the process, uh, but there’s actually a quite
deliberate thing that we do there.
00:29:07 - Speaker 2: As someone who’s done a ton of hiring in my life,
uh, I’m pretty passionate about pilot projects. And so just putting
aside the the partner topic for a moment, I think the way that hiring
often happens, which is based on a series of intensive interviews and
then going to a full-time offer that’s contractually or at least
implied to be something that lasts for many years, seems like a very
strange step function that you go from, let’s have some conversations
to now we’re gonna like commit to this huge event. Often coupled, I
think there’s some connection there to the um.
Kind of the um the uh in-office type teams where someone maybe actually
needs to move to a new city.
But yeah, that, that huge commitment based on essentially just some
conversations doesn’t produce great results from what I’ve seen, and I
really love pilot projects, uh, where you basically hire someone on a
contract basis for a week or 2 weeks or a day or whatever, whatever can
fit into their.
Their life effectively and you really try to work with them as if they
were on the team, uh, for a real project and then at the end of that
both sides, you know, the, the potential person being hired onto the
team, they see inside what the team is really like maybe they see some
of the, the dirty laundry that isn’t so visible just from the outside
and they can get a real sense of what it’s like.
And then of course on the employer side you, you see what this person
can really contribute. Be it not just how they represent themselves in
an interview. Uh, but the partner thing adds a whole other dimension.
00:30:39 - Speaker 1: Well, it’s basically extending the ramp.
So, again, in a typical startup model, you basically have this, this
terminal level which is employee, and once you’re hired, you take this
step function and you’re an employee and that’s it.
And our model has uh a couple more steps. So we do this initial. Um, do
initial, you know, phone conversations or, you know, reviewing open
source work on the basis of that, we’ll do a 1 to 2 week trial project
and if that goes well, then we move into a longer contract where we’re
evaluating the person for the partnership and that’s typically 2
months, maybe 10 weeks. And then at the end of that trial period, we
will make a decision together about uh making them an offer for a
partner, and that we found is enough time uh this this two month period
is enough time for them to step into the level of partner. You can
really understand the the code base and the product and the business and
really, you know, get into this mind meld with the rest of the
partnership.
00:31:40 - Speaker 2: Mind meld is a great way to put it. One thing
I’ve found through this process that is really different.
From the kind of hiring I’ve done elsewhere, is I need to basically
emotionally open myself to this person as if they were.
A partner in the business. And for me, that’s actually for me it’s
very personal like my.
My work life and and the things I’m trying to accomplish in my venture
and the feeling of ownership, you know, it’s it’s sort of people
jokingly say things like it’s my baby when they talk about a business
that they own, uh, but that’s, that’s how I feel. It’s, it’s, um,
it’s a very personal thing for me and so to talk about the most.
Difficult challenges or the open questions, uh, within the business is a
kind of vulnerability. Take that leap a little bit and present them with
the unfinished thinking and the open problems that we’re grappling with
and then you see if those conversations. Have a spark or or allow you to
come up to come up with new ideas or better decisions, or go in new
directions that are uh that are maybe better than what they would have
been without this contribution of this this person and that’s a good
sign that uh that they are someone that’s will add something new to the
partnership.
00:33:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that process is really important and
again, you need the time for that to unfold properly. If you just like
surprise the person with their initial interview, like here’s this
weird company, we’re building this wild product, we have this different
organizational model, here’s all the challenges we’re facing. Do you
want to sign up, you know, for the next two years of your life to do
this? They’d be like, uh, I don’t know, how can I tell? Um, you really
need some time for that to, uh, you know, get folded in with the
partnership over the course of a couple of months.
This relates to one other thing that I think is really important, which
is this is a genuinely two-way process. I think companies often think of
interviewing as like we’re assessing this candidate for a fit at the
company, which is true, but I think if you’re doing it right, you’re
also giving the candidate uh the opportunity and the chance to evaluate,
you know, their fit for their life with what this company is up to.
And uh again these conversations help with that and we encourage it. You
know, we say we’re gonna come up with, with our, you know, opinion
about this. We also want you to take an honest look at if this honestly
somewhat unusual company is right for you and it’s not right for
everyone, which is fine. And again, we have because we have some time,
uh, they have a chance to decide before they make a bigger commitment.
00:34:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly so that it’s, it’s, it is really
this intimate relationship you’re entering into.
And you can like what a company does from the outside, you can like its
product, that may or may not mean that you fit in with the team, uh, or
that you have something to contribute or that your unique energy is
going to take the team in new directions that are are net positive.
I like to talk sometimes about working chemistry. It’s this really
ineffable thing and it’s hard to guess from from interviews for sure
because it it doesn’t specifically have to do with liking someone, but
I like to measure working chemistry by when you sit down and collaborate
on a thing together. What comes out? Does magic happen? Does something
amazing that you could not have made individually, um, does the result
of that collaboration have something really special to it?
00:35:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m really happy that we’ve been able to
find great working chemistry with the partnership so far. It gives me,
you know, so much energy and it’s very rewarding professionally to have
that.
00:35:15 - Speaker 2: Well, Mark, would you recommend this model to
other companies? We’re pretty early in the experiment here and maybe
we’ll have to report back a couple of years in, uh, but is this
something broadly applicable or is it just something pretty specific to
Muse, this little indie software development firm doing a pretty nichey
product?
00:35:34 - Speaker 1: So there are things that are specific to our
unique company, but I think this underlying idea of uh trying to
increase the talent density, trying to give your staff much more
responsibility, basically, uh, giving them the freedom and
responsibility to step up. I think you could find that a lot of people
actually do. And conversely, if you treat people as like, uh, you know,
employees with very narrowed roles and very little ability to make
decisions on their own, indeed that’s what they’ll do. Um, so I would
encourage people to see if they can set a higher, higher ceiling and
higher expectations for their staff.
00:36:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, speaking for myself, you know, the,
the proof will be in the output in the product that we deliver and
whether it’s something customers like and whether the business can be
viable, but I’m really, really enjoying working on a small partnership
with people I can really trust where I can.
Be spending a lot of my time making things, but also, uh, we make
decisions largely by consensus, uh, and that I can really trust in the
judgment and decisions that we all make together and I think the
decisions we make are are better than what we would make individually.
That’s been really personally very satisfying for me and that that
matters a lot uh to me is that I have a workplace that is, um, I’m
excited to get up and be a part of every day.
Absolutely. If any of our listeners out there have feedback, please feel
free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at museApp.com by
email. I’d love to hear your comments or ideas for future episodes.
Really enjoyed the chat, Mark. Likewise, Adam, see you next time.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I really wish there are more ways in which we can
let our personality and just the little bits of life that we’ve
experienced ourselves come through online. It seems like nowadays a lot
of the larger sites that we spend time on have all taken an approach for
good reasons to in some way flatten our voices to make everything look
the same.
00:00:27 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s
about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins
here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. Hey Adam. I’m joined today by
Wei Wei Xu of Sprout. Hello. And one thing we talk about a lot on this
podcast for some reason is cities. Weiwei, you’re in Shanghai right
now, and what’s the transit situation like? How do you get around town?
00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I live a little bit outside of the downtown
area, so it takes about 30 minutes by walking to get to the metro
station and. Shared bikes are really common over here, so it’s super
convenient to get around with shared bikes, but I also got my hands on
to one of these one wheel electric scooter lately and I’ve been a big
fan of skateboarding since I was a kid. I’ve tried all kinds of boards,
so I thought it’s just super slick to try scooting around on one of
these electric scooters and That’s what I’ve been doing lately.
00:01:34 - Speaker 2: And in practice, do you end up in the bike lane?
Do you go on the sidewalks? I feel like one of the challenges with the
scooter micro mobility thing is that you sort of don’t have a great
place to go. You’re sort of a little slow for the bike lane, but
certainly probably too fast for the sidewalk.
00:01:50 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely something that everybody’s still
trying to figure out, especially here, the policy here is a lot more
strict and electric scooters are meant to be a toy, something that you
play with in parks and in closed communities rather than on the street,
so. It’s kind of like softly allowed on pedestrian walkways and not
really on the bike lanes, but bike lanes over here are super protected
and they are not right next to cars like in a lot of the cities I’ve
been to in America, so either way, I feel pretty safe, but whether it is
legal or not is kind of a different question.
00:02:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, protected bike lanes or something I I’m a
big fan of as a person who gets around mainly by bike, although even
there when you talk about legal gray areas and new technologies that sit
sort of in between the e-bike thing, which has gotten pretty huge, but
then that also seems to challenge, OK, now you can go really fast and
with not a lot of effort with this motorized thing that at this point is
almost like a low powered motorcycle or something like that, but you get
to ride in the bike lane, that feels a little weird, yeah, so.
Technology that sits on these in between spaces then ends up forcing a
change in not only policy but also just social norms and expectations.
00:03:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I find these in between spaces really
fascinating and that could be in the transportation world. I grew up
with a mixed cultural background and so, Dwelling in the in between
spaces of that has also been something that I grew up struggling with
and have now sort of surrendered to in some way, but those in between
spaces are something that’s really beautiful and also sometimes really
confusing.
00:03:38 - Speaker 2: Makes sense, but also presents opportunity because
you have perspective that no one else has, right? Yeah. And once you
tell us a little bit about your background. You’ve done some very
interesting academic work as well as all sorts of, I feel you’re all
over in the kind of tools for thought, independent research, next
generation computing space.
00:03:57 - Speaker 1: I would say that I’ve been on this journey of
learning more about myself and I’m still trying to figure out who I am
and what I’m trying to do.
Perhaps this is what most people do, but I was lucky enough to study
interaction design, that was a fairly new program in the school I
attended and through that process, I was introduced to the history of
personal computing and That whole genre, that whole world and being
layered into that got me really, really curious about what it took to
get us to where we are nowadays and also where are we headed and I
started looking for places where they’re thinking about the future and
thinking about alternative paths that haven’t really been explored or
illuminated in different ways and That led to working at and also
spending a lot of time at this research group called Dynamicland and
I’ve also been sort of being in a part of the creative design school
environment has also gotten me really interested in the creative process
and also this idea of creative expression.
So being immersed in a group of designers, creatives and also
researchers has led me to where I am nowadays and What I’m trying to do
nowadays is exploring what ways can we take ideas into people’s hands
and into reality rather than having them sitting or like brewing in
research spaces which is also really fascinating but I think I’m just
going through this journey of exploring where I am and who I am and also
what’s my relationship with the world.
00:05:40 - Speaker 2: Hopefully that’s all the journey we’re all
perpetually on, but it’s good you have the self-awareness of it. Maybe
there’s an arrogance of youth that sometimes comes with young people
early in their adult life where they feel they’ve got it all figured
out or they know their path or something when, honestly, it’s just
forever a journey of discovery.
00:05:56 - Speaker 1: I think whenever I feel like I’ve gotten it or I
understand what’s going on, life hits me in a hard way and it’s like,
nope, you don’t have it, you don’t know what you’re doing and then
you go into this other cycle of like learning more about yourself and
understanding that there’s just so much more possibilities and so much
more unknowns.
00:06:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’m pretty sure that’s not something,
at least for a person that has a growth mindset or is forever seeking to
learn the lessons life has to teach. I’m going through that still in my
40s here, I’ve seen my mom who’s in her 70s, also going through that.
There’s just always more, the world always has more to teach, and
there’s more to learn about yourself and about other humans, about our
society and how to live best in it.
So hopefully that never ends. That’s a good thing. Totally.
And you hinted at something we’ve talked about privately a few times,
which is sort of taking ideas from the research space or the big
thinking space or the ivory tower space and trying to bring it to a
practical reality and for sure that’s part of why muse exists, you
know, Mark and I were in this research lab working on this stuff and saw
an opportunity for something that we said, you know, this could be a
product people could really use.
We could bring these weird HCI ideas and see if we can bring them into,
well, a regular app in the app store and see if that would work or be
possible. And I think we talked about it with, I believe it was a former
colleague of yours, Jason Yuan, and the episode he was in, great Meta
Muse episode if you’re interested in design things, I’ll link that in
the show notes.
But he’s talked about that as well, which is, yeah, I think he may have
also done a stint at Dynamicland.
They both worked together at MSpace, and the best thinking big picture
thinking and forward thinking comes from places that are a little bit
disconnected from commercial realities. You’re not about shipping a
product that’s going to make a bunch of money tomorrow, but you’re
thinking longer term. But that in turn can lead to a kind of
disconnection from the world and not really bringing what you’re making
to the world. So I know that’s something you’re thinking about how to
best bridge those worlds, which is one of many reasons I wanted to bring
you on the podcast.
00:08:01 - Speaker 1: I think the phrase thinking about it is a really
nice way to put it in another way to put it is struggling with this
spectrum.
00:08:10 - Speaker 2: Oh, I think those are two sides of the same coin.
Genuinely interesting or hard intellectual or emotional challenge, you
wrestle with it, you struggle with it, you fight with it. It’s not a
civilized activity at all in some ways.
00:08:25 - Speaker 1: No, it’s not.
00:08:27 - Speaker 2: And tell us a bit about Sprout.
00:08:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so Sprout is a product that came out of
MakeSpace and MakeSpace was started with Jason Yuan, Aza Raskin and Mei
Li Ku and it’s a project and also um really us trying to answer a
question of how do we collaborate and communicate. With each other
online and also through computers in a way where we can actually feel
more of each other’s presence where all kinds of media formats and all
kinds of files can coexist with each other rather than being confined by
different apps and different windows that only support its own unique
kind of media files.
So, In a way, Sprout is a canvas-based collaboration tool that value and
also respect video presence and telepresence and we spend quite a bit of
time thinking about this gradient of synchronous communication,
collaboration. Versus asynchronous communication and collaboration
because collaboration doesn’t happen on one end of the spectrum, it’s
continuous and so how do we create space, how do we communicate and
collaborate in a way where it helps us grow and learn together.
00:09:46 - Speaker 2: One of the things that was striking to me about
the initial MakeSpace landing page is, on one hand, it did kind of have
a look of, I guess video and specifically, you know, webcam videos of
people’s faces who are participating in the meeting, let’s call it
virtual meeting. That’s a very front and center idea, so immediately
you think, OK, it’s video chat like Google Hangout or Zoom or FaceTime,
but the reality is the main or if you use the early version, which
you’ve given me a peek at. It is this media canvas in many ways that
shares some of the same heritage that Muse does, which is you can put
images, you can draw, you can put text, you can put links, and one of
the things you can put is your own real-time face, and that’s like a
useful addition to the meeting, but it’s not really the center point.
It almost inverts the video chat thing and then so I’m not sure whether
to think of it maybe coming back to your point of living in those in
between spaces, you could think of it as Zoom, but with kind of a
working canvas, but it really inverts that because I feel the video chat
side of it is just sort of a subset of this larger open canvas or you
could think of it as open canvas kind of collaborative whiteboard space,
a mirror type thing, but it integrates video chat, real-time video and
audio chat in a big way, but I think either. Those descriptions sort of
does deserve us to at least what I imagine your vision to be that is
finding a middle space there that takes elements from both of those but
leaves behind many elements of them could potentially be a more
interesting or future facing or next generation way for us to have
online meetings, discussions, brainstormings, and so on.
00:11:24 - Speaker 1: I’m constantly working on describing Sprout in
better ways because video is the channel or the medium that it sort of
like communicate and share our presence and intention with each other.
So when we’re using tools like Zoom to meet each other. We are
primarily communicating with each other through video and audio, but
when it comes to Sprout, your video is attached to your cursor and so
it’s not really about the video, it’s more about where your attentions
are and it’s more about where your presence is and how you’re sharing
it with each other.
So for example, On the canvas when you’re in Sprout, you could be going
into the opposite corner of another person and that other person could
feel that you’re feeling shy or you’re trying to run away from a
topic, you’re trying to run away from this discussion and that’s
perhaps body language, that’s also attention that’s just the entire
dynamic of collaborating and communicating with each other.
00:12:23 - Speaker 3: That’s interesting. So does this mean if you’re
on a video call and sprout, and someone goes to check Twitter with their
mouse, their face actually like flies off the screen, in the same way
that if you would see someone’s eyes, you know, leaving the room.
00:12:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so you see their cursor going to the corner
and then once they’re in a different tab, their cursor will move around
and so when they switch back to the tab, their cursor will be in a
different XY position and so it would jump over to that new location and
so those are the different ways that you would sense and feel each
other’s presence or lack of presence.
00:12:57 - Speaker 3: That’s funny, nice.
00:12:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, they get tension. We wrote about this a
little bit in our pointing and virtual spaces memo, but I feel like the
body language in group settings or meetings, presentations, that sort of
thing, or even like classroom situations, attention and where people’s
attention are and how focused they are is really important.
And I suppose one version of that is a teacher that is going to wrap you
over the knuckles with the ruler because you’re not paying sufficient
attention to the lesson.
But another one would be if I’m giving a talk somewhere, it’s really
useful to me to see when people are engaged, leaning forward, really
curious about what I’m saying versus their kind of eyes are wandering a
little bit and looking at their other screen and what have you, and that
helps me know where the audience is at and how I can sort of tune what
I’m saying or presenting to better meet them where they’re at.
00:13:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when meeting and collaborating in person,
there’s so much little cues and little signals that you can pick up and
when doing so online, a lot of that are being stripped away. So what we
spend thinking a lot about is in what ways can we bring some of those.
Back and in a way that respect each other’s real presence and just the
fact that we’re not just our eyes and our mouth and we have feelings,
we have our fingers, we have our body and how do we communicate or try
to channel a little bit of that to each other.
00:14:27 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is expressive tools, and I kind
of pose this idea to you Weiwei based on what’s on your personal site.
I’ll just take a moment to quote directly from there, if you don’t
mind, which is, you say, currently I’m gardening at Maspace now Sprout,
because computing environments can and should be more fluid, playful,
equitable, fun, humane, and expressive. Obviously that. Really speaks to
me and Mark and the whole Muse team. We’ve spoken about fluid and
playful, for example, in depth on this podcast, but expressive was one
that jumped out at me a little bit because first I was thinking, OK,
what evokes a strong feeling, but I’m trying to think about what that
means in practice, particularly for me as a toolmaker.
Is it desirable to make my tools expressive? And if so, how do you do
that? So I was curious to zoom in on that. Can you tell us more about
what an expressive tool is for you or what that phrase means?
00:15:22 - Speaker 1: When I think about expressive tools. Perhaps we
can step back a little bit and think about why do we create as tool
makers and when we are trying to create in some way, we’re trying to
express and it’s a different kind of way of expressing, but it’s still
a form of expression. So when we create tools, can we enable others to
express. A lot of the productivity tools that we are familiar with
today, they help us in becoming more productive and they help us in
getting work done, but some of the times they may not enable us in
communicating the feelings or the other little bits and things here and
there that’s beyond the factual part of what we are trying to
accomplish here. So, I’m curious for both of you, are there tools that
you feel like are more expressive than others or less expressive than
others and why do they come to mind?
00:16:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, in the digital world, I’ve been a
huge fan of emojis and all of their offshoots, you know, they have
emojis and texting obviously, but also like ReactGs and Slack and Vote
Gs and Discord or whatever, and they’re great because they’re very
compact, but they, unlike text, they express more of the range of human
emotions, which is so important when you’re working collaboratively.
Relatedly, I also think a lot of gifts and memes are very expressive and
it’s a little bit goofy sometimes, but that’s another fun digital
expressive medium.
00:16:59 - Speaker 2: For me, I think the first place my mind went was a
lot of analog world, I guess crafting type things. I really like
Sharpies and butcher paper, for example, for kind of reform ideation. I
also like calligraphy pens. I took a calligraphy class once a really
long time ago. I’m not particularly good at it, but just this tip where
it’s even the markers which are pretty easy to work with, but they have
this. Angled tip that allows you to, or almost demands that when you
write, your line is gonna be a lot more interesting because it’s gonna
have thick and thin parts.
Highlighters are another one I’ve always, and in a way, actually, a lot
of these analog kind of ideation tools like Sharpies and butcher paper
and highlighters, they’ve been collecting dust since I have used, but
in some cases I pulled them out cause I still like the feel of that in
the same way that I really like the feel of paper books, but in the end,
I haven’t really read paper books since I’ve had a Kindle for 10
years, but there is, of course, something very evocative about the
analog world, and also certain kinds of kitchen tools or like sushi
knives. I really like something like fabric as a material, a creation
material, maybe cause it’s got texture and color and it moves in
interesting ways, those kinds of things.
I guess they’re all roughly grouped under like a crafty kind of
artistic space.
So yeah, then when you come to the digital world, It’s a lot harder to
think of them in a way because yeah, computers are traditionally, at
least there are these pragmatic, mathematical computing machines use it
to compute your quarter to projected earnings, spreadsheet thingy thing,
but of course, certainly in the last decade or so, we’ve seen a lot
more playfulness and fun through social media and memes and emojis and
so on.
There’s a few from my childhood as well, that kind of I thought of when
you offered this prompt, which includes things like deluxe paint or mod
trackers, but I don’t know how much those are.
You know, is it that when you are a child, everything is a more
expressive tool because you’re more expressive as a person and so
therefore I have that nostalgia attached, or is it actually for me there
was something really kind of special and unique about the Pixel art in
the kind of Amiga Atari ST age when you had computers were getting like
just good enough for their graphics and sound. really impressive video
and audio art, but it still was this very constrained format that this
medium had a very unique look to it that you wouldn’t mistake for any
other. So I’m not sure how much that is sort of childhood memories
attached and how much that was a truly special and therefore an
expressive time for sort of computing or medium things. That’s yeah, a
little bit on my list.
00:19:41 - Speaker 3: Adam, I do think there’s something there to our
childhood tools because when you become an adult and you’re working
with serious productivity tools designed by proper professionals, they
tend to really focus on the business process like the goal of the
software is to produce a sales chart or the goal of the software is to
document a flow in a factory.
And I feel like often we like lose the plot in terms of how important
the emotions and feelings and human side of digital communication is.
And we often have to go back to the kids stuff because that’s all they
have, you know, they don’t have any real job, right? We have to go back
to their texting and their Discord emojis, right, to actually bring the
humanity back into our tools. So I think there’s something to that.
00:20:22 - Speaker 1: I find that really fascinating when this past year
I’ve been able to spend more time in Taipei and Shanghai and as a part
of that, I got to be surrounded by more kids than when I was living in
San Francisco and I’m just fascinated by how kids would Dream and just
run around and do whatever they want without caring about what others
are thinking and that’s something really interesting because I almost
feel like I’m forgetting how to do that unfortunately and I’m still
trying to understand and figure that out and As a part of being around
kids, I’m thinking more about in what ways can we bring some of those
back and why do we express or maybe the emotion of expressing is a
result and where it’s originating is Just being ourselves.
We consider kids as they’re expressing or they’re doing things on
their own, they’re being kids, but what they’re really doing is
they’re being themselves and we’re classifying that as expressing and
That’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about and trying to
understand, are we expressing or maybe we expressing is the result of
being ourselves. So when it comes to building tools and also working,
trying to do work through digital tools or analog tools, can we be
ourselves or in what ways can we enable more of us being ourselves?
00:21:50 - Speaker 3: Yeah, interesting. And your comment about there
not being a lot of kids in San Francisco is reminding me of this idea of
multi-generational households and communities, and it’s so nice there
because you get the mix of the incredible energy and carefreeness of the
kids and the wisdom and experience of the older generation and maybe the
Engagement in the productive economy of the middle aged folks, and
they’re all kind of learning from each other. And that’s one of the
things that I like when you can see in software. I go back to the
example of Discord, if you’re actually doing productive work, like give
a serious job that uses Discord. Kind of get some of those young kid,
you know, vibes basically coming through and that’s really cool. So now
I’m thinking, what’s the equivalent of a multi-generational community
in the software world? Can we have a tool that pulls from all of those
different life stages to bring those different energies in?
00:22:40 - Speaker 2: Discord is one of the ones that I had thought of
as well in terms of that it does bring a lot of vibe or style to
particularly this gamer style, even though they’ve expanded beyond
that, and you’ve got Slack, which in many ways is a pretty directly
comparable product, but has a completely different vibe. It’s a
playful, lighthearted thing, but maybe in their own way, they’re each
playful or they each have like a youthful quality, but they just feel
like completely different culturally.
00:23:07 - Speaker 1: And I think that comes back to the culture or the
personality of a team that’s creating those tools or the intent of
creating the tools. So in some way it comes back to what are the
creator’s goal and inevitably we project our own intentions or our own
wishes into the tools that we’re building. Sometimes those are
intentional, sometimes they’re not, but, The ability in which we can
express through a tool is also shaped by the tool makers.
00:23:40 - Speaker 2: And I think that’s for me as a toolmaker, it’s a
very desirable thing that I get to. This is a form of art for me, this
is a form of self-expression, and hopefully the things that I want to
put into whatever tool I’m working on at the time, match up with a
market need, right? When we were working on Pirou, for example, and we
had a particular vibe that came through in that, and maybe that matched
with what developers needed or didn’t need at the time, similarly with
Muse, and we have kind of this, I don’t know what the word is for it,
philosophical, serene, thoughtfulness. Hopefully that connects to a tool
for deep thinking.
So I think you can be a little thoughtful about that is, do the things
that I have to express as a person or the vibe that I and my team want
to put off to those match with the thing that we’re trying to create or
the need that we’re trying to fill.
There is a practical side, of course, but if you can match those up
well, it’s really nice.
And I also like on the flip side, or when I’m on the other side of that
equation, a user or a customer, I really like it when a lot of persons.
of the team comes through, whether or not their exact vibe or artistic
style matches what I personally would do, just the fact that it’s
showing something about who they are as people, and that tends to
happen, especially on smaller teams because each individual can have
more of a contribution, and the bigger it gets, the more it all blurs
together into a homogeneous kind of corporate.
Nothing, which also is fine for many kinds of products that are needed
in the marketplace, but I have this interest in kind of niche, weird,
independently created software. So I like that you immediately went to
the thing underlying expression and expressive tools, which is why we
want to create or in some cases need to create or driven to create as
creative people.
How do you answer that question for yourself? What do you see in others
ultimately, why do we want to expressive tools and why do we want to
create things?
00:25:35 - Speaker 1: I’ve been trying to understand this for myself
and also for collaborators that I’ve been lucky enough to work with.
For me, right now, there is this desire to fill some kind of hole that I
think I have within me and I’m not sure what that hole might be, but,
It may not be related to technology itself or the medium itself, but I
think it may go beyond that a little bit.
I think it has to do with this intrinsic curiosity and probably
intertwined with ego that I have and I think there is also to put it in
a perhaps cheesy way, I think there is also this desire to care about
others and also to be cared by others and Expressing is a way to feel
that.
I think in some way, our desire or my desire to express and to create
comes back to learning more about myself, learning more about others and
also learning more about the surroundings that I’m in right now.
00:26:35 - Speaker 2: That resonates with me partially because I don’t
know if you consider yourself an introvert, but I consider myself a very
extreme introvert, that is to say, many kinds of social interactions are
challenging for me, and I actually find it much easier to connect with
others over creation.
Something they have made that I appreciate, something I have made that
they appreciate, and that becomes the starting point for connection.
A lot of my very great friendships.
I never know entirely what to call them, it sounds too crass to call it
like my network and networking, but there are many folks that I’ve
either worked with as former colleagues, or even maybe I’ve never
worked with him at them at a conference or I know they’re worked some
other way, or we had them on the podcast or something, and then we go on
to just have more of a Friendship, but it’s a friendship that is based
around a mutual passion for some element of product creation or some
artistic endeavor and maybe an encouragement for each other, you know,
sort of like cheering each other on and whatever you know early raw
product or other kinds of creations we are pursuing.
But yeah, that for me ends up being a cornerstone for a lot, not all but
many very great relationships in my life. So, I don’t know if I think
of that as like a hole to fill or a deficiency, it’s just a different
way to relate to others. I hope no better or worse that other ways one
might be able to relate to others.
00:27:57 - Speaker 1: And in some way, I think that’s really beautiful
because when we connect and when we get to know each other, it’s often
through a topic or through a shared. Experience that we’re having
across time or across space. So with both Sprout and Muse, I feel like
we’re trying to create spaces digitally for us to be connecting with
ourselves or connecting with others through objects, through topics.
Rather than just by talking or hand waving about something and that’s
the beauty of being able to create spaces that enable and respect the
variety of objects and topics for us to be talking about and co-creating
together.
00:28:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that speaks to me because I just find that,
especially when I’m connecting with someone new that I don’t know very
well, having a visual aid of some kind, even just a simple napkin
sketch, just makes it easier to make that connection.
As a toolmaker creating the space, you want it to be artistic, you want
it to be expressive, but there does also need to be a practical
element.
This is a product that people will pay for or have some way of
sustaining itself. It exists in the economy. How do you balance or trade
off very pragmatic technology needs or just solving a problem people
have and are willing to pay for kind of needs against your desires as a
creator, to express yourself, to make the kind of thing that You feel as
an artistic expression of the things you value.
00:29:31 - Speaker 1: Earlier we touched on this idea of thinking about
topics and thinking about the dynamic between research and also
commercial work or struggling with these bridges, these gaps.
I think when it comes to building products and also building features,
there’s also this. Process of struggling and understanding what do
people need and what do I need as a toolmaker and who am I creating for
a lot of the times we are creating things by following inklings or by
following ideas that we’ve accumulated from different experiences
through life when it comes to Understanding whether those inklings are
useful or are practical or not, a lot of it I feel comes back to
iterating and it also comes back to being open to what might be there
for you.
So it again comes back to this idea of like letting go of ego and being
open to what the world has to offer and also what people who are using
the tool who are also spending time with the tool has to say about the
tool itself.
00:30:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there’s almost an element of
play here. I’ve heard a definition of play, which is like, you’re
undertaking an activity without so much of a focus on the end goal and
like as much of a commitment to that. And so here the idea is you just
try some stuff. And you’re OK with that thing not working or working in
a way that you didn’t anticipate.
And I think you need to have an element of that, especially as we’re
exploring these new areas of the map, like what does digital mean for
group communication and expressivity and belonging. So yeah, that’s one
of the reasons why I’m so excited about the work that you’re doing
cause I feel like it is very playful and is exploring more areas of the
map.
00:31:23 - Speaker 1: It always comes back to these motions that we make
with each other, so it’s playing, it’s interacting, it’s learning,
it’s dancing and through that process, also through different
stakeholders, so we’re playing and we’re also communicating and
learning with our teammates, but we’re also learning from our customers
or folks that are using the tool. Whether it’s recurring or just one
time, all of that are processes that we go through to really understand
what we’re trying to do and also what we’re trying to offer.
00:31:59 - Speaker 2: Now one thing I’d be interested to dig in on a
little bit is expressiveness of the tool, that is its ability to help
you express yourself versus the tool being something you as in you
Weiwei or you mark, are expressing about the world.
This came up recently on the Muse team a little bit, which is we’ve
always come down on the side of making. Our tool kind of as neutral and
minimalist as possible, really try to get out of the way and make it so
that you make your own canvas and space, and if you like a dark heavy
metal aesthetic, you can do that, and if you like a light and airy
gardening aesthetic, you can do that.
As much as possible, we’re not conveying a huge amount of personality
through the product, and the reason it came up recently is we added this
backstage pass feature, which is basically kind of has a little bit of a
rock and roll style vibe, and we did a little bit more stylization,
kemorphic stuff on the menu, not too heavy, but it was intended to just
be a little more fun and playful and express a bit more of this
character.
And yeah, I’m curious, particularly because at least Sprout as I’ve
seen it so far, definitely has a lot of I think character even just in
the mouse cursors and the way the names are rendered and some of the
default elements you can put down before the user puts in their own
content. So I’m curious how you see the difference between a tool that
helps you express versus a tool you’re creating that expresses
something you see or feel about the world.
00:33:30 - Speaker 1: I think it essentially comes back down to what
opinions we have and are trying to put forth and the current visual
iteration of Sprout is just one iteration that we have and one opinion
we have, we may move on from it or we may stick with it depending on how
people are reacting to it, but currently with Sprout, There’s this
stationary vibe that we’ve added to it, so we’ve been referencing,
we’ve been referencing stickers, different pens and also pencil boxes,
washing tape, all of those tools and also little things that help us
decorate our journals or even just our workspace in real life and What
we hope to do is create further interface for people to customize that
because that’s one opinion. The stationary vibe is one opinion that we
have, but imposing it on everyone may not be the right thing to do, so.
A plan we have is to create toolbars where you can change that for
yourself and also create themes and also create skins or stickers for
yourself to create the kind of vibe you want to set for the room.
00:34:44 - Speaker 3: That’s awesome. Regular listeners of the podcast
will have heard this rant already, but I’m such a big fan of giving
users agency over their creative environment, you know, they’re pouring
their whole heart into this digital canvas. It’s nice if you let them
choose the colors of the walls and the shape of the pens they’re using
and stuff. That’s cool.
00:35:03 - Speaker 2: I feel theming and skins, maybe they fell out of
fashion, maybe like WAmp was the peak sort of theming age for computing,
and I don’t know if that’s maybe because as design and designers got
more clout, let’s say, and then it becomes a platform for them to
express a unique personality.
And I think again people do like that, like coming back to the slack and
Discord examples.
That something that has a lot of personality and expresses itself
through the copy, through the colors, through little animations inside
the UI, but then once you’ve designed that whole thing, adding kind of
skinning capability and letting other people mess with your beautifully
chosen color palette or whatever is something that maybe is a little bit
antithetical to, I think, kind of the current status quo and I don’t
know, software design.
00:35:56 - Speaker 3: I don’t know. I feel like this skinnable future
is already here, it’s back, it’s just not evenly distributed. Look at
things like Minecraft, there’s a big mod and skinning culture there,
even Twitch and Discord, there’s a lot that you can do, and even Apple
has caught up recently and they had this, I’m not a user, so I’m gonna
describe it poorly, but like the customizable home screen.
00:36:17 - Speaker 3: The widgets, yeah, yeah, it seems so basic, but it
was this enormous hit because people like.
00:36:21 - Speaker 2: Control their creative environments, especially
something like your phone, I think that’s not specifically a creative
tool, but it is something that you have with you all the time. It’s
very personal.
You look at it continuously. I think this is a reason why phone covers
are also sort of a popular personalization item, so it’s a very obvious
one maybe to project a little bit in the same way that clothes or
jewelry or makeup or You know, the kind of art you hang on the wall in
your home, these are all things that you’re making an environment that
makes you feel good, but also expressing to others, here’s the kind of
person I am, the things I find beautiful, the things I value.
00:36:58 - Speaker 1: In some way, I also feel like creating and also
setting the tone of my own space, whether it’s digitally or physically
is also a way to slow down.
Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been immersed with a lot more of the
digital spaces that have always been around, but I think the pandemic
has given me a lot more time to spend time on or with the screens and so
much of The internet world is moving at a pace that’s not necessarily
human or that’s not necessarily matching our own human pacing.
I think with us, we are thinking about time at so many different time
frames, so there’s our own heartbeat. But then computers are able to
process things at milliseconds, so we are able to refresh news feeds and
social media feeds at that speed, but being able to customize our own
space and also being able to take the time. To let our own personality,
let our own voice come through a tool or a space that we are a part of,
is also a way to slow down a little bit to perhaps move and stroll
around rather than being on a treadmill and pushed forward all the time.
00:38:17 - Speaker 2: In a way it does seem like we were rushing towards
a world of extremes or perhaps we’re trying to rather than find a
middle balanced place end up with both the hyper fast, exactly as you
said, the 24 hour news cycle and refreshing your feed and everything has
this frantic pace to it. But then on the other hand, where meditation
has become incredibly popular and people are always seeking these
retreats and ways to slow down and disconnect because it becomes too
much.
Certainly my hope, and I think some of what we’re channeling through
the Muse product a little bit, but also, I guess just in my own life, I
feel like it should be less that I’m either hyper adrenalized, jacked
into the news feed crazy thing, and that I need to take a 10 day silence
retreat just to like recover from that, and then I jack back into that.
That instead I could find kind of a middle thing here, just to give you
one small example, Mark, you and I talked about kind of the schedule for
which to release these podcast episodes when we got started, and you
felt, and I think you’re right, we could easily produce enough content
to do, for example, a weekly publication, but I actually like that if
you do a little bit more slowly, we do every 2 weeks. I like that it
gives you a little more time to invest in the episode itself, to prepare
the guests, to make sure the content you have is good, to review
afterwards and see if any edits are needed. And maybe that just means
it’s less work for me overall, but for me, there’s something about
that pacing that is often enough that I feel like it’s fresh and
frequent and lively, but slow enough that it feels almost deliberately
slowed down compared to, I don’t know, a lot of podcasts I’ve
subscribed to that have multiple episodes a week and there’s just no
way I can listen to all of them. And that of course leads you to
listening at the sped up rate, you know, you got all these features of
this, cut out the silence. and skip over the thingy thing and listen to
1.5x or 2X to try to download as much information to your brain as you
possibly can and maybe I’m just a purist, but I just like to listen to
my podcast at regular like I’m I’m in a conversation and I’m
listening to folks talk. You know, I don’t complain when I’m talking
to my friends that I wish they’d talk faster so we can get to the end
of this conversation, so it’s more efficient, you know.
00:40:32 - Speaker 3: And that’s surprising. I’m a 2.5 xer myself, so
we’re very different on this one.
00:40:36 - Speaker 1: I’m a 1.8.
00:40:41 - Speaker 2: Well, do you have ways to sort of attune yourself
just in separately from any software you’re building, just ways to make
your life and especially your digital life, be at the pace that you feel
is natural, is best for your health, is the right one for you?
00:41:00 - Speaker 1: To be honest, I think I’ve been struggling with
it, especially because of the pandemic. I think the pandemic has made
myself in one way more immersed in the digital world and in another way
more aware of how much I’m immersed in the digital world and I think
I’ve been doing a little bit of what you just shared which is
oscillating between the extremes of being hyper online and being hyper
offline and trying to stay away from the screens from the technology.
What I found myself doing a lot of the times is comparing myself to
others and comparing my own achievements and the work I’ve done with
others and that leads to fairly unhealthy places and right now what I’m
trying to do is focus on trying to be in the middle, not oscillating
into the extremes but just being at my own pacing and being myself,
whatever that means and letting go of expectations. I’m curious for you
both, are there things that you’re doing to curate or also structure
your own digital spaces?
00:42:06 - Speaker 2: For me, one of the biggest ones is notification
management and mostly just turning them off a lot.
In some ways that comes in the form of, I don’t have an email address
I’ve used for years that’s the one I used to sign up for services
because no matter whether they say they’re not going to send you
marketing emails, eventually they are, and I just have a separate place
I can channel those, for example, but device notifications, I think are
a particularly sort of thorny area because on one hand, There, I think
the introduction of general purpose notifications first on Android and
later on iOS made smartphones vastly more useful.
On the other hand, they lead to, I don’t know, breaking news alerts and
you know, someone liked your posts and sucking you back in engagement
loops that I find extremely unhealthy.
And so to me they’re right, if I can do for myself a good job with, for
example, I turn off 100% notifications on. On the desktop and on the
iPad, cause those are workspaces. My phone is my notification device, so
I can just silence it and put it face down if I ever don’t wanna hear
notifications.
But then I also very kind of aggressively manage those in terms of what
apps are allowed me to send me notifications, including a lot of the
default system Apple apps I have to turn off notifications for because
they send me junk about photo memories or something like that, that’s
just not what I want that for.
And that’s an ongoing effort there and in a way I think the right
notifications actually can reduce my call stress or increase my ability
to be in the moment because I know that I can be raised by a colleague
if there’s something important that they need me for, then And that’s
good. I can just leave my phone in my pocket and be in the moment doing
whatever I’m doing, not being worried about that there’s something I
need to check, because I think checking of inboxes and sort of the
polling versus the push system of notifications also has its own
compulsive, unhealthy loops, but yeah, that’s forever a work in
progress, I think.
00:44:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I have a tactical answer here, and then I
have a more strategic one. So on a tactics front, I’m just trying to be
really mindful of all the, it’s bad on purpose to make you click stuff,
which is now incredibly rampant. You just got to be really aware of it
because there are so many organizations whose now entire purpose is to
generate bad titles to make you click. And then once you realize that’s
a dynamic, you can, you know, block and filter all this stuff, but it’s
very easy to fall into that hole and that makes you very, you know, mad,
which is the entire purpose, right, of this clickbait. So that’s helped
me a lot.
But on the more strategic front, I kind of want to turn back to our
original topic of expressivity because we’ve been talking mostly in
terms of individuals, right? Like us as individual creators, but I think
there’s this huge element of group expressivity and belonging.
And especially now we had this double whammy of one, we’ve had the
secular trend of atomization, at least in the West, that’s been going
on for a long time. People are more by themselves, and then obviously we
got hit with COVID, which isolated people more. And I feel like in the
last 6 to 12 months, those have really stacked up and people have
realized that they don’t have enough social interaction and group
belonging, and they’re sort of scrambling to get it. And I think
potentially digital tools could help a lot. There’s all kinds of
exploration that we need to do in terms of what are the patterns, what
are the technologies, what are the institutions that help form this
group belonging. There’s all kinds of different stuff we’re gonna
need. So that’s one of the reasons I’m excited to see people explore
the space of how can we use digital tools to help bridge this gap. So
that’s one thing I’ve been exploring personally, like, you know, try
to find the right online communities and ways of building community and
ways of connecting still early stages, but I think that’s gonna be
important.
00:45:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it was in our episode on what we can
learn from video games.
You talked in depth about the Discord phenomenon.
Which, you know, to my mind, I saw it as a group chat product that was
similar in a lot of ways to Slack, it’s a different aesthetic, but you
opened my eyes to there’s a whole huge culture around how these servers
are run, and the custom emojis, and the product may be similar on the
surface, but there’s a whole huge cultural thing around gamers who
unite or find community in games they either enjoy playing or in many
cases, players they enjoy watching. And then they have found very
effective ways to make new kinds of digital meeting spaces.
00:46:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s one area where I do think people are
really onto something, and it does connect back to a classic form of
belonging, which is sports teams.
So back in the before times, people would have local sports teams that
they were really big fan of, and everyone who was physically around you
and you we would spend time with would be a fan of these teams too.
And the game itself wasn’t really a huge deal, and people would say it
was obviously, but it’s more about having a locus of conversation and
belonging where everyone in your community believes that, you know, in
my case it’s like the Packers, you know, the Packers should do really
well. That’s something you can talk about and get excited about and
discuss, but in many cases we’re losing things like that and so what
replaces it.
00:47:05 - Speaker 2: I may have mentioned this when we were discussing
that before, but professional sports and in particular the building of,
I don’t know, tribal affiliation or community around rooting for a
particular team is not something I ever understood. Maybe a classic kind
of nerd thing, whatever. Maybe I just didn’t grow up in the right
places, but Living in Germany, where football is a very big activity,
what you might call soccer, and in particular when there’s these big
championships, the World Cup, just a couple of months ago we had the
European Cup, and it’s everybody, really everybody’s watching, like if
I go to take my dog for a walk when a game is on. The streets are empty,
and you just hear time delayed the game playing out of people’s windows
and local corner stores have it and everything like that.
And it’s actually as a result of that, I’ve gotten into it a bit. I
end up following the matches as they get closer to the thing, and we
invite friends over, and you can have that conversation. Like, oh, did
you catch that game between, you know, Denmark and whatever last night?
Wow, that was quite a, what have you. And I don’t imagine this is the
sort of thing I would do on an ongoing basis, but just for this brief
moment in time where these championships are happening and sort of
everyone seems to be tuned into that a little bit, you know, I kind of
get it.
00:48:18 - Speaker 3: Another sort of pattern here is conversation
pieces, so that you might in your physical home have a sort of weird
object, you know, it was the football used for the touchdown pass on
such and such Super Bowl game or whatever.
And ideally it looks a little weird, or has some sort of demarcation, so
that when people come in, they’re like, oh, what’s that? Well, let me
tell you about it. And then you have a whole conversation and one of the
reasons why I like tools like MakeSpace is they have this kind of
personalizable. environment so you can create a little bit more of that
dynamic, you know, come over to my space on the screen and let me tell
you about whatever, you know, my stickers, and you can see and have a
little bit of a conversation around it. So I think there’s all these
little patterns we need to refigure out in the digital world.
00:49:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the sense of belonging is perhaps one of the
main reasons I think I have a desire to express and earlier I mentioned
this desire to care and also to be cared by others and I do think the
root of that is the sense of belonging that I and perhaps others are
trying to feel.
00:49:26 - Speaker 2: Belonging is one of the most basic human needs in
many ways.
We are truly social animals, and as Mark said, we’ve atomized or
deconstructed a lot of the very traditional structures by which we had
belonging, which I think in most respects is probably a win, at least in
the sense of many times you were stuck with a default structure that may
or may not suit you.
And so now you have more freedom and choice to find the place that feels
like home, or a group that feels like a family versus kind of inheriting
some from your circumstances where you happen to be born, and if you
don’t like it, too bad. But yeah, I think in many ways we’ve blown it
away and have yet to fully find good replacements, or even a way offer
people a path to finding those replacements.
00:50:17 - Speaker 3: So I’m curious then if you all have particular
frontiers of digital expressivity and belonging, they are interested in
exploring different things you’re excited about or looking forward to
trying or looking forward to continue to try. So it might be this idea
of mixing in video with canvases, or it might be customization or it
might be gamer style social interactions. In my case it would be like I
really want to bring emojis to everything, including new they’re so
powerful.
00:50:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one for me that I’m a big fan of is
personal homepages. I think I’ve heard this echoed a little bit and
people.
Reminiscing on the web kind of late 90s, early 2000s, where it was much
more get a shared host and just hack together your HTML and PHP file as
best you could, maybe GeoCities, for example, as one kind of maybe often
maligned example, but the idea that creating a personal home page and a
weird space on the web that expressed what you had to say was
commonplace.
And nowadays, of course you can still do that, but typically people rely
more on their social media profiles, but those are very prescribed. You
can kind of upload the avatar image and maybe you get a banner and you
can change a couple of colors, but it just does not have anywhere near
that well expressiveness. And I semi recently redid my personal homepage
and that felt really good even keeping it really simple because it’s a
chance to stop and reflect on.
At least career wise, who am I, what do I value, what am I trying to
accomplish, what are the things I’ve done already that I’m proud of,
what do I want people to get in touch with me about for more future
facing things, and I often find myself encouraging.
Others, I have friends who are artists or musicians, they have a small
business or something, and I find myself encouraging them to just make a
small, simple personal homepage, because I think it’s as much about,
yeah, it’s nice to have this calling card basically that you can give
to someone before you meet them and they can add a little something
about you, but I think it’s also really that chance for reflection. is
who do I want to be, and it’s not just who am I now, which is obviously
part of it, but that aspirational element.
And if you really need to boil it down to a web page, so yeah, maybe it
has some animations and maybe it has some images and it has some colors
and has some type and it has some copy, you have a lot of freedom in one
way, but in another way it needs to just sort of briefly state who you
are and maybe have your picture and something like that.
I don’t know, I’m just a big, big fan of personal home pages. It
always makes me smile when there’s someone new I’m going to meet, or
what have you, and they can, you know, make me their homepage or have it
in their signature or something, and great, I can go read about this
person and we can get past that initial, maybe this comes back to being
an introvert and get past that initial small talk phase, and we go
straight to what are they about, what do they value, what’s the core of
who they, at least that they want to show publicly to the world. So, I
don’t know if that’s a frontier exactly, it almost seems backward
looking, but more personal home pages, especially for creators and
creative types, is something that I hope the future holds.
00:53:27 - Speaker 1: I really wish there are more ways in which we can
let our personality and our just like the little bits of life that
we’ve experienced ourselves come through online. It seems like nowadays
a lot of the larger sites that we spend time on have all taken an
approach for good reasons to in some way flatten our voices to make
everything look the same and one of my good friend Kicks Condor and I
joke about how a lot of the web has adopted this color of guab, which is
gray with a little blue and nothing else. And so I agree with you and
what you said resonated a lot in terms of are there internet corners
that we can carve out and can we make places online that feel more like
our living room or our bedroom rather than this giant lobby or this
giant stadium that nobody really belong to but it’s big enough for
anyone and everyone to come through.
00:54:27 - Speaker 2: So I guess what I’m saying is bring back my
space. At least the MySpace vision, right? That’s kind of what it was.
Maybe it wasn’t a good implementation, but that was the idea.
00:54:37 - Speaker 1: My hope is that we’re just constantly going
through these different phases, we get tired of simplicity or just the
sameness and then we go back into all kinds of crazy ways to colorize,
to stylize everything and then perhaps that then becomes too much for
our eyes and for our brain and then we sort of like go back to things in
a quote unquote simpler times, but yeah.
00:55:06 - Speaker 2: So maybe a cultural pendulum between weirdness and
explosive diversity versus homogeneity and understatedness.
00:55:17 - Speaker 1: And to go back to your question mark, I think
something that I’ve been thinking a lot about as a part of this journey
of building sprout is Are there more ways for us to create secret
handshake or to show each other our body language in the spaces that we
spend time in and as we collaborate through the internet. Something that
we’ve done by spending time on spatial canvases of different kinds is
we found we’re able to make gestures and also hand wave at each other.
They’re in different ways, so we call it cursor waves where you can
make very small wiggles and very fast wiggles or you can make big waves
where it feels like you’re trying to shout or like get someone’s
attention from far away, but those are moments where it feels like we
can communicate a little bit more or connect a little bit more beyond
just looking at each other or saying hi to each other.
00:56:14 - Speaker 2: It also points to maybe how much this is a
frontier that you’re operating in where the status quo that we’re
starting from, which is the video chat, static squares, you know, if
it’s pretty advanced, maybe you have a menu somewhere where you can put
one of three emojis briefly overlaying your video as an option. But the
room for expressions of different kinds, even the one you described that
as you describe it sounds pretty simple and straightforward, but it
actually ends up being fresh and novel. It just shows how much
unexplored frontier there really is here.
00:56:49 - Speaker 1: The other day I was talking to a friend and
thinking about how the film industry in the 1st 40 years of the film
industry, there wasn’t really sound and there wasn’t really the idea
of montage and we’re only at the early phase of internet and computing,
so it’s always really exciting to think about what might be ahead of us
and what kind of path we can pay for ourselves and also for each other.
00:57:15 - Speaker 2: I love the film industry comparison because
clearly the technology got better over the years, color film, audio,
higher quality images and sound.
But fundamentally going back even 50, 80 years, you have the video
format taking a camera and pointing it at some humans that are doing
some kind of action or telling some kind of story.
You could do most of what you can do now in modern filmmaking, I think.
But most of these techniques had to be discovered, and it’s always
interesting to me when you go and watch one of these culturally
important or sort of like touchstone films, So reflecting on Citizen
Kane recently, just because I watched the Netflix film Mank, which kind
of is a reference to that, and then Jaws is another interesting one,
where it was kind of one of the first action blockbusters. You go back
and watch films like these two, and a lot of things they do just seem
obvious or Not that remarkable by modern, but they invented a lot of
what came to be the modern filmmaking techniques, modern storytelling
techniques. So of course you take it for granted now because it’s this
known quality, but at the time it was breakthrough storytelling. In many
cases it’s about how the camera is angled or where it’s positioned or
how they do the edits or something about how the dialogue fits together
with the way the story is being told. All of those things could have.
And done 100 years ago, they just weren’t because there were techniques
that had to be discovered and learning how to use the medium well took a
long, long time, generations, and there’s no reason to think computing
would be any different, even if you froze all the technology, things
like displays and hard drives and pointing devices and things exactly as
it is today, and then you can assume it would take decades, if not
generations to really truly get the most out of this unique new medium
that’s before us.
00:59:07 - Speaker 1: Mhm. There’s always so much more remixing that we
can do and I think that’s the main reason why I find Nintendo as a
company really inspiring because they’re always working with what they
talk about as withering technology, they’re never using the most
advanced technology. The products that they are building and instead
through remixing and through understanding the essence of the medium
that they are trying to work with, they are able to create really,
really delightful experiences for families, for individuals, for gamers.
00:59:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. Nintendo is one of my favorite kind
of of sort of big long term corporate entities that are one of the most
inspired and reliably inspired over the decades, and yeah, one of the
things they do is in their console hardware, including the Switch, which
I have right now, it’s the only sort of dedicated game.
The thing I have in my home, and in no way is it the cutting edge of
hardware and sort of gamers that care about being the absolute pinnacle
of graphics technology or whatever kind of shake their heads.
Why would you want this? But you slice it a different way and you say,
how do you give a fun, delightful, and approachable experience,
especially maybe for more casual players, and do something innovative,
but it’s not about just pushing the most graphics horsepower possible.
It’s about finding new ways to have fun and play together.
01:00:34 - Speaker 1: So is it fair to say and to conclude that the
reason why we’re expressing and the desire to express is to have fun
and laugh and make giggles together?
01:00:45 - Speaker 2: I will take that. I will take that. That sounds a
lot better to me than filling some kind of hole in my soul slash an ego
thing, but maybe it’s some of both, let’s be honest. Well, on that
note, let’s wrap it there.
Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, you can write us on
Twitter at MuseAppHQ or on email, [email protected].
You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.
We, I want to thank you for working to make computing and our online
gathering spaces more fun, more expressive, and perhaps help us tap that
sense of belonging. It sounds like a heavy set of responsibilities when
I put it that way, but I also think it’s a wide open frontier and the
work you’re doing so far, I think really is promising.
01:01:33 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me, and I hope that
we’ll get to have more fun together.
0 min
January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I view my job here is to essentially aggregate
this group of entrepreneurs that a lot of the world is overlooking,
aggregate them in some way, listen to them, and then build what they
want.
00:00:19 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s
about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins
here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and our guest Tyler
Trius of the Calm Fund. Hey guys. And one thing we talk about on this
podcast with surprising frequency is cities and in particular that
remote work and all these lovely cloud tools make it possible for
knowledge workers such as ourselves to choose where we want to live
based on quality of life rather than where your employer happens to be.
And Tyler, I know you live in Mexico City. Tell me about that decision.
00:01:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, Mexico City is great. The decision
is not that interesting.
I’ve been working remotely and building remote companies for probably
the last 10 years. I spent a lot of time as a digital nomad and then
kind of like a slow mad, sort of, you know, slowly traveling to
different places.
But Mexico City, we’re here because my wife works for the State
Department and she’s got a job at the embassy. So since I’ve been
running what we used to call Earnest Capital, and now the call company
fund. I’ve been sort of just tagging along with my wife. We were in
Brazil and Rio de Janeiro. We launched it. We’re there for about 2
years and now we’re here in Mexico City. So the decision wasn’t really
mine to come here, but I will say I’m very, very pleased to be here.
It’s an awesome city. It’s really becoming like the hub of pretty much
everything to do with startups up and down Latin America, amazing food,
awesome weather, pretty unbeatable quality of life. I’m not gonna lie.
So folks should definitely come down and visit us. We throw a conference
here and hoping to see a bunch more entrepreneurs down here. So, yeah,
it’s good.
00:02:04 - Speaker 2: Interesting, I guess I just assumed because I’ve
just visited Mexico City once, we did an I can switch summit there, but
I found it such a lovely place.
I could very much imagine a person who was working remotely and has any
choice they want might well choose it. But you actually highlight
another good benefit of remote work, which is then you can go where your
partner needs to go for their employment. So I know that it can be a
source of great contention in relationships, long term relationships,
when it turns out that one person’s school or work needs take them one
place and another person needs to go to the other place and someone has
to decide who’s gonna make the sacrifice.
So here you’re not faced with that decision.
00:02:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we see that all the time. Obviously now
knowing a bunch of people living the foreign service life and it is a
big source of tension. Yeah, I mean it’s phenomenal to have sort of
built this company in a way that’s fully distributed from day one. So
it’s like I tell people when we moved from Brazil to Mexico, if I
didn’t tell my team, they wouldn’t have noticed basically, which is,
you know, super helpful. The one thing I think remote work hasn’t quite
solved it is time zones.
00:03:09 - Speaker 2: That’s the last frontier, you know, that’s
definitely a challenge for us between Europe and West Coast US although
again, you have kind of a nice benefit of being fairly central, at least
among those western places.
00:03:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Mexico City is hard to beat. I mean, I think
if you’re able to work remotely, you should seriously come and check it
out and give it a shot. It’s really a world class city, just as easy to
get anywhere, like if you’re sort of US centric, it’s as easy to get
to New York or LA as it is from anywhere else in the country inside the
US. Yeah, super good amenities, everything just works hard to beat.
00:03:41 - Speaker 2: Nice. Well, before this turns into a veiled
advertisement from the Mexico City Tourism Board, we can transition to
hearing a bit about your background and especially what is the alm fund.
00:03:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the Cound some folks may have heard of us
as Earnest Capital, who recently rebranded this year or so, same exact
company, same people, same idea.
Really, it’s one of those scratch your own itch companies, essentially
my kind of personal history involved.
Experiencing kind of both sides of the venture capital and bootstrapped
world kind of communities, at one point in my life, you know, had a
business that I was working on. It was sort of a clean tech software
business in a time when VCs were really, really not funding clean tech
businesses. It’s like a little over a decade ago. And so I kind of
deeply experienced the possibility of having like a really good business
idea that just isn’t a fit for the comparatively small universe, you
know, hundreds of people that do early stage venture financing and
realizing that there wasn’t a sort of 1 to 1 overlap there that you
could have a good idea that probably should use some early stage
capital. But just as for one reason or another, not a fit for venture
and that if you’re building a software company, there’s really no plan
B, right? You basically have to either fund it with rich friends, credit
cards, or VCs and kind of really explore that, hey, there’s a big gap
in the market here in terms of early stage support for a lot of
entrepreneurs. Then I went the other direction and said, OK, I’m not
gonna ask anyone’s permission to get started on my next business and
completely bootstrapped it, which worked out really well. I was just a
straightforward kind of niche B2B sass business, ran it for about 5
years, built a remote team and sold it to a private equity shop, which
was a great outcome, super fun, but when I was launching that, I had to
launch it with credit card debt. It worked out in the end, you know,
that was a positive experience, but those first two years with mounting
amounts of debt on my personal credit cards was Really not the ideal way
to launch a business, both from this capital perspective and also just a
complete lack of any other kind of support. And so those two things kind
of combined when I sold the company, I said, look, you know, I would
like to sort of build the fund or the partner that I would have liked to
have worked with on frankly, both of these businesses. So that’s what
we do. We’re. Early stage funding, community and mentorship for
entrepreneurs building what we call calm companies. And I think there’s
a lot of ambiguity over exactly what that means and things like that.
But if you think of yourself as like a bootstrapper or an indie hacker
or those kinds of things, you know, we’re trying to build the kind of
partner for those kinds of entrepreneurs either who have like Different
ways of wanting to run their company that aren’t aligned with the
traditional venture model or that are building products that just
wouldn’t be a fit, right in the sense of, you know, they have perfectly
good market and they can build a company that does millions, tens of
millions, maybe $100 million in revenue, but it’s really never going
to be like a $10 billion dollar company, you know, we’re trying to
build the partner from the earliest stages for that whole swath of
companies basically.
00:06:54 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and Tyler, I’ve been watching your journey
with Ernest and then calm for some time now. I forget when exactly I
found you online, but you’ve been doing this thing where you’re
building in public, and I saw your work quite early, and I was really
intrigued by it. It did feel like a closer fit for what we’re trying to
do at Muse and what I’m trying to do with my career and some of the
other options out there, and I’m encouraged to see that it’s doing
quite well.
00:07:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks.
00:07:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’ve also been, I guess, following
slash part of the earnest community for a little while, but part of why
I thought this rebrand would be a great time to invite you on the
podcast is that calm companies, I think, match up a lot with something
we talk about in the type of business we’re trying to build with Muse.
We talked about this. In our Small giants episode, I’ll like that in
the show notes, but is a little bit of a reaction, I guess, to, again,
startups and venture capital, which Mark and I have been both down that
road, and we think there’s huge value to a lot of that, most notably
not bootstrapping, yeah, getting investors who help you share the risk.
And then Also ties in well with what we talk about on this podcast, also
because in general funding models for different kinds of things that
could or should exist in the world, things that could improve humanity,
make us all more prosperous collectively, there’s kind of a narrow
number of ways we get stuff funded. There’s government funding,
there’s nonprofits, there’s bootstrapping, there’s venture capital is
kind of a relatively recent, but obviously now increasingly high profile
way to do it. But if you draw the map of all the things that we might
want to build and what the right funding is for them, you find that
there’s really a lot of gaps in that map, it feels like, and part of
what I liked about what I discovered when you were doing that is it
fills in one of those gaps potentially.
00:08:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s gaps all over the
place. It feels like we’re not anywhere near having sort of
comprehensive coverage, especially at the early stage. I think once you
have a mature anything, usually your options do start to multiply, but
We’ve sort of found ourselves in this strange moment where I think the
internet and software and stuff has just started to dominate everything.
I think that the software is eating the world, you know, thesis is
largely correct and it’s playing out before us.
And what’s happened is just through kind of process of elimination, if
you go back like maybe 15 to 20. years, venture capital, which
traditionally was this thing designed to fund like really high risk,
high capital intensive R&D intensive ventures in building CPUs and
aerospace and stuff like that, was also just the only people who would
take bets on software companies when you had to spend $10 million to
rack servers before you could even launch your website. And so there’s
become this sort of 1 to 1 convergence with this like very narrowly
defined asset class and all of this exploding universe of opportunities
from everything from indie game developers to online communities and all
that sort of stuff. It’s basically like, oh, well, if you’re going to
fund them, you have to use this really narrowly defined form of funding,
which is venture capital, which has all these like. Constraints and
expectations from the people who invest in venture capital funds and all
that sort of stuff. And we’ve just sort of backed our way into this
world where everybody thinks that they need to raise venture capital or
nothing, and there’s sort of no other option and I don’t think we’re
going to be the only addition to this space. I think there needs to be
dozens of different permutations of ways to solve this because we’re
essentially refilling the entire economy. With software and software
enabled new variations, and the main driver of this is that most of the
world of funding businesses is based around credit models, right, where
you’re underwriting against assets and things like that. And all of
this stuff has this one thing in common, which is there’s no tangible
assets, right? We’re all just a bunch of people with laptops,
essentially remote working with no offices and no equipment and all that
sort of stuff and so. There needs to be this really broad-based rethink
of, OK, how do we support these kinds of companies, organizations,
nonprofits, co-ops, etc. from the early stage in a way that can leverage
the benefits of capitalism, right? You can access large pools of capital
and convince people to sort of continue giving you that money. So, yeah,
I think it’s still very, very early days and there’s a lot of work to
do for sure.
00:11:24 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is calm companies, and part of
why I thought the earnest to calm rebrand was a perfect chance to talk
with you about this and connect it to small giants and how we think
about news and others that might like to build companies in this way, is
there’s the mechanical. of how your fund works, and what kind of
companies you invest in, and at what stage. We talk about those
potentially, but I’m more interested maybe in the philosophical
elements. Even the name gives you a sense right off the bat, which
implies it’s a good brand. I’ll also like our episode on brand. At
this point we’ve got enough back catalog, I guess, we’ve sort of
always have something to reference. But yeah, can you define for me
separately from what you invest in, what is a calm company just
philosophically speaking?
00:12:10 - Speaker 1: It’s actually like a really tough question, in
part I think because it’s kind of a call back to just historical
normalcy or historical equilibrium of how people build businesses. Like
I was at kind of a family reunion thing, bunch of family members, mostly
from my wife’s side where I either hadn’t met them or hadn’t had the
opportunity to like explain what do you do. So I was explaining what we
do, and when you explain it to someone who’s outside of tech, it just
sounds incredibly boring and straightforward.
They’re like, oh, OK, you invest in these entrepreneurs and They build
businesses and they become profitable and they give you some of those
profits, or they sell their company and you get a piece of that and then
you do it again. It’s like, well, yeah, but it’s actually kind of
weird in this day and age, and it kind of harkens back to the idea that
like we’ve actually ended up in this weird spot where the kind of
default assumption in tech is that you’re going to build this ultra
high growth sort of thing that’s gonna raise a ton of capital and move
as quickly as you can and then either IPO or kind of flame out trying.
So cal companies are kind of a way to position ourselves first as not
that.
So what that means is basically growing more sustainably, raising
capitals sort of a byproduct, not the actual goal, you’re really
optimizing for the long term in terms of team retention, in terms of
making sure that folks can work on a sustainable schedule and continue
to have high quality output. For decades, not just years or quarters,
all that sort of stuff. And the reason why we’ve sort of settled on
calm is to sort of affirmatively stand for something, rather than kind
of just only positioning ourselves as not this, not that, not that other
thing, right? Because that was never the right way to think about it.
And so as we kind of Aggregated more and more entrepreneurs that we’re
all just kind of picking up the same vibe, right? Everything from folks
who are investors and mentors to the portfolio companies that we’ve
invested in to the many other folks that are all kind of picking up the
same wavelength that for various reasons we haven’t been able to invest
in, they’re too far along, too early or whatever. And we sort of said,
well, OK, what’s the affirmative version of this that says like, this
is actually what we stand for and calm was far and away the winner of
what resonated with folks there. So it’s basically about being patient
and long-term focused and sustainable and operating and Way where you
can be what I call long term ambitious, basically. It’s not like the
lifestyle business of kickback and passive income and then sit on the
beach in Thailand. It’s about, we want to do something important, we
want to do it in a way that allows us to stay in the game for the long
run. So, yeah, that’s a calm company. I’m still working on the really
pithy answer, but that’s the explanation.
00:15:02 - Speaker 3: I think that makes sense.
To me, these companies also have this element of more degrees of
freedom, and Tyler, I’m curious if this resonates with you.
I think it was you who originally pointed out that when you enter onto
the VC track, you’re basically going on this very narrow path that has
5 or 6 steps in the last 10 years, and you basically have to take each
of those steps, which by the way, is going to be with a different actor
or firm potentially, and they’re all different shapes.
And so you really crunch down your degrees of freedom, whereas with a
com company I see because you’re profitable and thinking in the long
term in other ways, you have the option to do stuff kind of your own way
on your own terms in your own time.
So if you want to go all remote, you can do that. If you want to stop
growing for a year, you can do that. If you want to, I don’t know, pay
out dividends or something, you can do that, but you just have more
degrees of freedom and flexibility, and to me that’s an important
aspect to these companies.
00:15:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I wrote a blog post a while ago, I think it
was called like the Founder’s path of maximum Optionality, which
essentially just talks about how you can sort of move through some of
these phases of reducing uncertainty, de-risking, running experiments,
learning about the market, learning about your customers, learning about
what’s technologically possible, that sort of thing, without kind of
fully opting into the one-way ratchet that can be really getting on the
venture roller coaster and I think More and more opportunities right now
merit that, right? In the sense of there’s a lot of talk around like
pivots and things like that, but I just think that there’s a lot of
stuff right now where, as we’re starting to see less just true green
field opportunities in the world of software and software enabled stuff
where it’s like, OK. Nobody is doing anything remotely like this,
right? There’s various things that are adjacent or solving the problem
in a different way, but we still see a big opportunity here. You kind of
need to keep that optionality open to sort of figure out, OK, what is
the scope of the opportunity here, how are we going to fill this, how
we’re going to build the company that serves this opportunity. And
building stuff that has that optionality baked in, I think is probably
the right strategy for most entrepreneurs is to really kind of keep your
options open.
00:17:17 - Speaker 2: And there’s two parts of that, both of which
connect really well to the Muse story.
One is just niche software, so part of the venture box is you need to be
able to get to a certain size, but not everything that could or should
exist in the world necessarily can get to that size, and we don’t know
how big the opportunity is for Muse, but we do know or we expect it to
be a niche thing. And we want that. We don’t want to have to switch
gears into thinking, how do we make this more mainstream, because we
think that would cause us to lose a lot of the soul in what we set out
to do.
And then the other part of it is, call it the experience for the
entrepreneur, which is if you are a person that is a tech person,
particularly once you have a solid CV as Mark and I and a lot of our
colleagues here do, we have a lot of options, and that’s really lovely,
that’s a wonderful thing, it’s a wonderful privilege. Then you think,
OK, how do I wanna use that and what kind of lifestyle do I want to
live, what kind of products do I want to make, what kind of team do I
want to be on. And so in thinking through that, we realized, yeah, that
intense one-way ratchet adventure is not quite the right fit, at least
for what I want out of my life right now. But then to kind of position
against some other things as well, you mentioned lifestyle businesses,
you mentioned bootstrapping, you mentioned indie hackers.
Something we see a lot of in the iOS haps world is, yeah, I would call
it in the IOS. Developers where they make a single app or maybe they
have a small portfolio of apps, but they’re sort of solo developers or
maybe two, something like that. I think of someone like the maker of
Agenda, who we had on the podcast a little while back, and that works
really well, but you really have to start from nothing. You often are
funding on credit cards, or maybe you have a little money in the bank
from past success or maybe you have a family member that’s lending you
some money. It seems really silly to have to scrape into doing it.
And of course, not even everyone can do that when there’s so much
investment money out there, but all the investment money is flowing into
this one very kind of narrow box.
And so you end up with, I think the two sides of the spectrum is
ambitious to the point of absurdity sometimes, huge amount of money,
narrow constraints, you’re really locking yourself into a certain kind
of lifestyle, getting on that roller coaster, adrenaline fueled,
whatever. And then the other side is slow and sleepy, small, one person,
two people, you just can’t be very ambitious, at least not on the time
scale of some decades, and it just feels weird that there isn’t either
a middle choice or just other choices. Yeah.
00:19:47 - Speaker 1: And it’s not just that there’s a middle choice
and there’s a distribution of, you know, 13, 3, 1/3 between those
options. It’s like the middle choice is 99% of every entrepreneur and
every opportunity out there.
I think what you see is two different ways that people sort of arrive at
wanting to build a calm company and both are sort of valid.
Often it’s a mix of the two, but it’s kind of a blend of what you were
just talking about, which is One is just thinking through the lifestyle
that they want to live as founders, the kind of team that they want to
build. They want to be able to bring like really top talent who maybe
now they have kids and a family and they’re still equally as talented
or more so because they’re more experienced than they were when they
were willing to like hard charge into a venture back thing in their
twenties. But now if you want that person, you got to bring them into a
different environment. So there’s that one element of just kind of
like, I don’t want to create a company and a life around that kind of
approach. And the second thing is just like matching to the opportunity,
right? We’re in a moment now where there are just so many opportunities
like you talked about that are just not perfectly reasonable, maybe
sometimes incredibly sized businesses, especially if you just don’t
raise too much money to begin with. So you still own the majority of the
company, but they’re not going to reach the kind of billion, 10 billion
kind of scale that venture capital kind of narrowly needs. So it’s a
bit silly. And one thing I see a lot, there’s like two failure modes
that you avoid. One is that I think burnout kills a ton of companies,
right? And so that’s where the lifestyle aspects comes into, of like,
hey, we’re actually being long term ambitious here. We’re going to try
and bring this incredible team together that we know can go the
distance, rather than burning out, which I think kills a lot of really
good companies. And the second one is trying to continuously expand the
idea to the point that it sort of collapses on itself. And I see this
all the time from really early stage founders who have clearly been on
the sort of pitch train where they’ve been speaking to 50 or 100 VCs
recently. And then we started with this idea, and the idea they describe
is like great. It’s like the software for this particular industry
sucks. There’s still hundreds of thousands of these businesses and we
could charge them $400 a month each. We could build this incredible
$90 million a year business that we own most of. We started with that
idea. But now what we’re going to do is build a platform for like all
the adjacent industries that are related. And of course, we’re not
going to sell the software because that would limit how fast we grow,
you know, it’s like, OK, wow, you’ve just expanded into the realm of,
now you’re competing with Amazon and you have no customers yet. It’s
like, just go with the good idea. You have this background in this
industry, you can build great software for them. You know, they want to
pay for it. Just do. that idea. And I think that kills a ton of
companies now where you actually have a really good insight into a
market need and there is the opportunity there. And nowadays, you have
this thing I call the peace dividend of the Sass Wars, which is it’s so
much cheaper, easier, faster to start a software company than it was
even 10 years ago, that you can bring together a small team with
relatively small amounts of capital, like hundreds of thousands, not 10s
of millions, and you can launch a product for This market and it can be
the best product they’ve ever seen. You can build an incredible company
and you don’t have to just like continuously expand the scope to where,
you know, you’re explaining how you’re basically going to take over
the world. You can just build a great company. And I think that’s
another appeal of com companies is you can sometimes just do the
straightforward thing. You don’t have to be the all in one fintech omni
platform for a particular industry. You can just build good products and
sell them to customers. Can still do that these days.
00:23:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, which again comes back to why explaining it
to your family members, where you say, well, we invest in businesses
that make good products, sell them to customers, hopefully at a profit.
It’s good business, but the software world has these unusual dynamics
because of its history, and so it’s in some ways, getting back to the
basics of business fundamentals and how capitalism could and should
work, but within the new framing of this software and internet world we
live in.
You mentioned briefly there one thing that was, I don’t know how much
it was, probably was reading some of your earlier writings and be
exposed to folks in your community, but also it was just something I
think was already in my mind, which as I had experienced that don’t
charge money too early, you’ll get locked into the wrong revenue, or
you’ll actually hurt your fundraiser.
Valuations because once there’s an actual number, instead of the
investor being able to sort of imagine how much money you’re going to
make, they can look at your profit and loss statement and the reality is
all companies, no matter how amazing they seem at the start or how much
hype they build, the numbers always start small, or I shouldn’t say
always, they very frequently start small and they just take time.
It takes years to build your revenue, and I’ve been part of startups
that do kind of delay charging money and I think there is a discipline
of the market, or perhaps it’s just that the product validation you get
when someone is willing to pay versus you’re giving them free stuff,
you know, here you go, here’s a piece of software that costs millions
to develop and we’ve poured our hearts and souls into it and it’s got
design and brand and engineering and all these other things, and it’s
free.
Yeah, you say you like it and yeah, you’re using it, but how do you
really know for sure the value of that in someone’s life.
We went through this a little bit at Hiroki where we were giving away a
lot of free stuff effectively through the way the premium product was
set up because we didn’t get the pricing right early on or perhaps.
Ever, and what that meant is it was hard to separate people who were
getting a huge amount of value over other competing things versus people
that just were getting something cheap or free, and they liked that, and
that hides the signal of what the value of what you’re creating in the
world is.
And so that idea of charge as early as you can before you’re really
comfortable with it, is something we brought into Muse, and I think
we’ve talked about this in past episodes, but basically, when I started
pushing for this, when we were 9 months out of the research lab or
something like that, at that point we had a pretty solid product in some
ways, but when I said we should start charging money for this, Folks on
the team, kind of like, wow, I don’t know, you know, I’m used to
working on these products for years and you polish, polish, polish, and
need to have every feature in the world. Partially, this is a sense of
craftspersonship, but frankly, it was kind of a shocking idea if you do
come from the tech and software world, but I’m glad we did that because
it changed our relationship with our now customers as soon as we did
that.
You know, if you screw up and there’s a bug and you mess up someone’s
data, When it’s free, yeah, people are more forgiving in a certain way,
but when they’re paying, they get really angry, and that’s as it
should be, I think. So it creates this filter for people that really
find value in what you’re doing and force you to sort of get real about
the cold hard numbers.
00:26:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s interesting, in part, I feel like
the building blocks of our overall worldview are just kind of The non
galaxy brain take on all of these things, right? What if we just ask the
dumb questions and have simple answers to them, essentially it’s kind
of the basic components of this, which is, yeah, like what should we do
with these products? We should charge money for them. Yeah, that’s
probably it, you know, but I’m curious, how do you think about that now
in retrospect? Because I think we’re right to be kind of asking the
dumb questions and sometimes proposing straightforward answer, you know,
what should evaluations be? Well, they should matter. We should think
about like, will we ever make money on this, you know, that sort of
thing.
But I’m not sure we’re always right. I do think it’s worth actually
comparing them rather than what you often see as folks just sort of
dogmatically assuming like, wow, no, we don’t charge for our products,
sort of thing. Where have you landed right now with Muse in terms of
What would be different if you were polishing and polishing polishing
for several years, potentially in a positive way, like, what’s the case
for not charging right now?
00:27:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if I’m to play devil’s advocate to my own
position, maybe play debate team, right? Take the position you don’t
necessarily agree with.
Charging money brings you into this realm of commerce and transactions.
People expect certain things that really brings it down to earth.
But maybe in a way, particularly when you’re doing, and for music I
make this argument, it’s a really new kind of product.
A lot of people aren’t even really heavy iPad users, and even for
people that are, we actually use the iPad and super weird.
In unusual ways, it’s a really big mental shift to even understand the
vision of what we’re doing and then potentially fit that into your
workflow.
And so the more you can keep that in the realm of mystery and excitement
and less in the realm of just base commerce, I think we could
potentially have more time to build excitement, build a community.
And then of course make a thing that is when it’s more polished and
then if it comes out more to a mainstream audience published on the App
Store or whatever, it’s further along, and so you’re more able to
understand the ways it’s weird and see why the weird things are what
make it good and special, as opposed to just this is weird and seems
bad. That would probably be my best argument for something like that.
00:29:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, I think it’s a no
brainer to charge for stuff when the pain point is just very obvious,
right? Basically, if your target customers not using software to solve
this problem, or they’re using really, really terrible outdated
software and things like that, that’s where it’s just smashed. Button
right away, of course, you should charge for this, no brainer.
I do think it starts to get into an interesting gray area where you guys
are, right, where it’s like, OK, you’re kind of trying to get into
people’s habits with things, right? And maybe change their habits,
like, even if it’s just they have a go to thing that they pick up.
To do that kind of process of brain dumping, mind mapping, strategizing,
whatever it is, whichever one of those hooks, if there’s bugs, right?
Or if there’s one feature that’s kind of lacking that actually would
make that hook work, you can make the case maybe that you only get one
or two tries at that depending on how intense the pain point is.
So I feel like you guys are actually really close in the middle and I
think probably makes sense to charge to get that feedback from power
users to make sure you’re actually solving something for them. And I
feel like you have put together like the team you need to make sure that
it’s not shipped completely terribly.
I mean, one thing you’ll see in our world, right, is we talked about
like we do a lot of investing in vertically focused B2BA, right? So for
industries you’ve never even heard of where like they’re using mostly
Excel or something like that, literally emailing Excel files back and
forth to each other, we’re like, oh we could build some software for
that. You can ship something like that with one developer that takes 3
weeks, and it’s gonna be such a massive improvement for their lives
that you should charge for it right away. You can pre-sell that thing
with a demo. So it’s interesting to sort of identify what exact kind of
opportunity is a match for some of these strategies. And the good part
is, at least we’re actually thinking them through at this point rather
than kind of picking like one playbook and immediately jumping on it.
00:31:06 - Speaker 3: One other potential wrinkle with Muse, and I’m
curious if you’ve encountered any examples like this Tyler is
individual versus enterprise. So an argument for not charging with Muse
could have been give it for free to individuals, get as much
distribution as possible, and expect to eventually only charge
enterprises, that is businesses because they have all the money
basically. And so I’m curious if you’ve encountered a case like that
in your world, probably not, but maybe.
00:31:33 - Speaker 2: That is pretty close to the, what’s usually
called the B2D playbook, which Hiroku used in GitHub and Tuo and now
countless others, which is the idea that you get developers to use and
love something, maybe it’s an open source library, maybe it’s a
service, and they use it for their hobby projects for free or nearly
free, and then they will bring it to the.
Their work, but that does require a long game, particularly if you’re
doing something open source, you know, you look at something like an
open source database or something like that. There’s a very long period
of getting entrenched and winning those developer hearts and minds, and
then only much, much later then you start getting that pull of like,
hey, I’d like to use this at work by my bosses, we need this or that.
Access control thing, do you have this SLA for blah blah blah, and
that’s when you slap a big price tag on it and start breaking in the
box, but it’s a very long game, and the up front of that it’s a big
investment, and that is a place where it is an argument for venture
money because you need those pretty large investments of capital for
many years before you really start to charge money.
00:32:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I was thinking of the same thing with mostly
being developer focused. I was not really sure if there was a sort of
like tool for thought, project management, like that general space of
collaboration with an example of it.
00:32:51 - Speaker 2: The best example there would actually be something
like Gmail. Gmail spread far and wide with this incredibly generous free
plan.
And then they added the Gmail for business thing, and that kind of
connected to Google Docs, which again, similar thing, people are using
it for free, and then they were able to kind of transition that into the
enterprise product.
But again, same thing, there it was just backed by a corporate parent,
they could just say, Yeah, let’s develop this mind blowingly good piece
of software and all this infrastructure that runs it and do that for
years and years and years and get this really wide distribution, and
then we can go ahead and monetize that. But that would be, I think,
impossible to do as an indie hacker, bootstrapper, whatever. Yeah.
00:33:30 - Speaker 3: I also think this playbook could be appropriate
for certain two-sided marketplaces. So one that I’ve thought a lot
about is recruiting. I almost did a recruiting startup, ended up
choosing to do music instead, but there you could imagine offering some
sort of services to the candidate side to get them in and get some
liquidity in the marketplace and then to charge the hiring firms. Yeah.
00:33:50 - Speaker 1: I think one of the core pieces of our thesis is
that a lot of spaces are a lot more saturated than they were, you know,
1015 years ago. So if I was to think about this playbook running it from
use, it seems to me like the thing that you would want to test, right? I
don’t actually know what the answer is I don’t have an opinion, but
one thing I we’re seeing is now when you’re talking about, OK, we’re
only going to charge when the whole company starts to use this product
to collaborate.
The friction point there is going to be probably you’re gonna have like
one or two power user advocates trying to convince a large number of
people in their organization to switch from something and that’s
something might be a little bit more orthogonal, like, you know, we get
on Zoom and we whiteboard on a literal whiteboard or something, but you
need kind of buy in. Whereas like 10, 150 years ago, it’s just like an
open field. It’s like, OK, yeah, we’re gonna roll this out as fast as
possible and then they’re going to pick this because they’re not using
anything and that’s when we’ll start charging.
Now, a lot of times what you find is that you are displacing something
or you’re asking your customers to switch from something, and I think
that increased level of friction would be the key variable, right,
whether you should be just straightforwardly charging the power users
and not Being reliant on them, convincing everyone in their organization
to switch, just like it can be just them as power users or it can be a
small subset of their team that really finds it valuable or the whole
company loves it. And regardless, you’re sort of gonna have a linear
kind of revenue from them versus like, OK, we only really survive as a
company if we’re consistently convincing like whole teams or
organizations to sort of switch. That would be the big question.
For me, that’s something we think about a lot is basically avoiding
that dynamic because a lot of the playbooks that were sort of ran a
decade ago, sometimes don’t work as well because now you’re going into
a saturated market where they at least have some cobbled together thing
on Salesforce add-ons or they have some no code solution or they have
something that you’re competing against for their time in dollars.
00:36:00 - Speaker 2: It’s an interesting picture you’re painting
here, if you can allow me to rephrase or summarize in my own way. It
sort of seems like you’re saying on one hand, the software world is way
more saturated in certain areas.
People are using when it comes to project management tools and other
kinds of general purpose software, even just like, you know, Excel
spreadsheets that get the job done for them.
Most of the productive world is computerized and has their tools and so
on.
And so if you go in to do something really general. Purpose, like email
or a word processor or these businesses of the past that managed to blow
up and fill this just totally wide open frontier, you’re actually in a
red ocean there.
But in fact, there is still a huge amount of uncovered territory that is
just in smaller niches, like you said, verticals, some kind of insurance
software that you wouldn’t have even specifically thought of unless
you’re in that industry. And so on one hand, there’s maybe more
opportunity than ever in all of those spaces. But then on the other
hand, the classic places that you go, or if you look at the businesses
that were successful in the software and internet world in the last
decade or two, those are now in spaces that are very hard to compete in.
00:37:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, basically, I think there’s fewer and fewer
wide open winner take all markets, basically, I think that we’ve
started to fill a lot of the big pillars of software productivity world,
and if it still cost as much to launch a software startup as it did 10
to 20 years ago, we would be in real trouble, right? Because you really
did have to find those really huge winner take all markets to be able to
build a software business.
But we’re very lucky through this entire stack of products and services
and stuff that’s become much more scalable, that you can now launch
these businesses and get them to, you know, not just MVP, you can get
them to like very, very high quality software solutions with a lot less
capital and time and people. So it starts to make sense to fill in all
of these smaller pockets, which can still be enormous, and at the same
time, As entire industries have become more kind of aware of software or
just open to the idea of software finding some of their processes, those
number of pockets are multiplying and expanding all over the place.
Little sub thesis of ours is that There’s a whole ton of mom and pop
industries that have gotten used to the idea of using computers, the
internet, not their phone, not paper invoices, etc. by these venture
funded vertical marketplaces, right? So you can imagine lawn mowing
businesses. 30 years ago, right, they’re not using computers at all.
They’re just literally I mean pen and paper and you know, checks mailed
and all that sort of stuff.
The thing that got them over the hump of just using technology into
their business were things like Craigslist and then some of the more
omni channel like thumbtack and things like that, like these
marketplaces that were aggregating up demand.
But now what you have are these folks who are used to getting down to a
computer, and that’s how they generate quotes and that’s how they
close business and send their invoices. So now they’re starting to
think, well, wait a minute, why am I paying this huge 30%, 60% cut to
this marketplace? Like maybe I should get my own software and do that
process ourselves.
And so that’s creating this new demand for B2BAS for lawn care
companies, essentially, and you can basically multiply that across just
like every small industry that you can think of. And now we’re very
lucky that it’s essentially cheap enough and easy enough to build
software to serve that solution that you can’t do it and literally just
serve lawn care companies and you don’t have to. Expand to every single
home care product that exists. Maybe you can, if you’re good enough.
The upside is still there, but that’s not the hurdle. You can just
build a really good software business that only serves, you know, lawn
care companies in the state of Georgia, and that could be like a pretty
awesome business.
00:40:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think an important point here is the
enormous size and fractal nature of the economy, especially in the US,
and so you can go down several branches of the classification tree and
still end up in a huge node. So lawn service, organic lawn service in
Austin, Texas, I bet that’s still a huge market, right? And you can
imagine all the other variants of this, and so there’s corresponding
software business to be built at many of those junctures.
00:40:28 - Speaker 2: Fun, relevant anecdote there is many years back
when I was doing consulting to pay my bills in between ventures, had a
really good client that I worked with for a number of years that is
windows and doors.
Which is a whole huge branch of the construction industry, and they
needed very specific things in their software.
Windows not only have their size and the type of glass, but they just
break a lot. They break in transit, and there’s a whole service process
related to that, and there’s the way you manage the breakage, the
little breakage in your inventory, and you kind of account for that.
I don’t know, maybe there’s some firm now, perhaps funded by Calm, I
don’t know, that makes Turkey software for that, but yeah, we built
really comprehensive, complex software for managing all that, and it was
a real, at least the owner of their business felt it gave them a real
competitive advantage to have all of this computerized in this way.
00:41:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, there’s just endless examples.
Sometimes I get a little nervous because a lot of these are businesses
that don’t really want to shout from the rooftops, what a great
business they are, but. Yeah, there’s just more than you can think of
examples like this that are just comically one little industry only
serving Belgium, right? And they’ve built a phenomenal business with
like 7 people just raking in cash, you know, and yeah, you can just sort
of copy paste that everywhere, yeah, countertop installers and window
washing services and all this sort of stuff. It’s amazing. The economy
is big.
00:42:01 - Speaker 3: I’ve always enjoyed speaking with these small
business owners because they have a certain down to earth and grounded
quality, you know, cause the way you’re successful in that realm, it’s
like you just kind of sweat it out and you provide good customer
service, you make a high quality product, and you get referrals and do
that for 10 years.
And one of the things I love about the commund is it’s bringing more of
that sensibility into the software world. You know, there’s a place for
the Galaxy brain stuff, and I’m glad we have all that, but I’m also
glad we have some of this so-called small business mentality in the
software world. And by the way, these are small businesses that are
worth like 10 to $100 million right? So it’s, yeah, still a very good
business. Yeah. So one of the things that I mentioned earlier was that
you were building Earnest and then calm out in the open, and I was
wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, like, was that
a deliberate decision, how has it worked out for you, so forth.
00:42:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it definitely was a deliberate decision.
One of the early risks that I kind of identified in the plan was that
the target entrepreneur that we were gonna try to Build for historically
has a really strong distrust of any kind of investor, right? Either
they’ve had first or secondhand experience with somebody who had a
great business and then raised money from investors that came with board
control and then they got kicked out of their own company. There’s a
whole laundry list of reasons, but the idea was that one of the first
things we had to do was build trust to say, hey, look, we’re
legitimately trying to do this in a different way.
We’re not just trying to trick a bunch of bootstrappers into taking our
money. And I sort of tell people that I’m kind of a one trick pony when
it comes to marketing, but it just turned out to be the right trick for
this market, which is just really authentically building in public,
talking about our thinking, soliciting feedback. And engaging the
community has the benefit of being really good marketing and also a way
to sort of build trust with that group. So that was why it’s been that
way from day one for us. So literally the very first hello world of
Earnest Capital at the time was we had designed a new funding structure,
basically a substitute for convertible notes and safes and this general
toolkit of early stage investing called the Shared Earnings Agreement
and Basically just published it and said, hey, you know, we’re about to
launch this fund in a couple of months. This is the term sheet that we
are thinking of offering. What do you guys think? And literally just
wrote up a blog post explaining our thinking, put the term sheet in an
open Google Doc with comments turned on, like open comments. Yeah, and
just blasted it out to every like community of entrepreneurs that we
could find on Twitter. Etc. and we got like several 1000 comments. It
turned out to be like really difficult to start to work through, but it
was really fascinating to see the way that the folks would engage and
they would say, oh, I wouldn’t like this as an entrepreneur and
somebody else would pipe in and say, I think you’re not thinking about
it the right way. Here’s what this means and all that sort of stuff and
just that level of saying like, here’s what we’re doing and we’ve got
nothing to hide from day one was pretty valuable. And then from there, I
think it’s sort of continued to be a conscious strategy for building
trust and engaging with folks, but it really has turned into a full-on
kind of community driven strategy where we kind of view or I view my job
here is to essentially like. Aggregate this group of entrepreneurs that
a lot of the world is sort of overlooking, despite the fact that in
aggregate it’s a huge, huge group of of entrepreneurs, aggregate them
in some way, listen to them, and then build what they want. So we do
that in small ways. With our portfolio, at first we took this very
hands-off approach and then we started to get feedback from them that
said, hey, we want a little more structure in terms of how we engage
with folks in our mentor group and with you guys. So we said, OK, well,
what if we took the idea of quarterly board meetings and we made them
calm, we like did it our way and so here’s how we’re gonna. And do
that and the folks like that. And as we think about the future, it’s
like maybe there’s going to be different financial products and
everything just kind of comes from building this community of folks,
explaining our strategy, explaining our challenges, explaining what
we’re trying to do, listening to what comes back, and then trying to
make it happen for them.
00:46:23 - Speaker 3: Nice, yeah, I think there are a ton of benefits to
building out in the open like this and building a real community, not
just of loosely affiliated fans who are really invested and active and
providing a lot of feedback and support.
One of the things that we talk about with building in the open for a
traditional commercial venture is that when you go to bring in new
customers or new hires, they kind of already know what’s up, you know,
they’ve read your blog and they’ve self filtered in, and they might
even be familiar with your lingo and so forth, and we experienced this
both as Potential I guess customers of your firm as well as LPs, where I
had been following stuff on Twitter and I’d read the school doc and I
had seen your spreadsheets of how the seal works, and I’d run all my
own simulations.
So when we were talking about does it make sense for com to invest in
Muse, and when I was deciding should I invest in the fund, I basically
knew all the parameters already. I knew you, I know your work, I knew
the fund versus having to start from scratch. That was awesome.
00:47:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’re in an interesting market position
where there’s a large but dispersed group of folks who 100% get it and
then the vast majority of the kind of centralized gatekeepers completely
don’t.
So for example, like on the fundraising. I mean, we’ve taken like a
completely decentralized approach to raising capital for the fund, and
we basically have raised from our next fund, we’ll have 249 individuals
in it, and that’s almost all entrepreneurs and folks like you guys and
basically just people who Read what we’re about and get it and want to
support it.
We just closed a crowdfunding campaign. We had over 1000 investors join
that from the unaccredited space and we’ve basically just built a whole
process. Like if you go to our website and you’re interested in
investing, you can fill out an email and you get this like 10 part essay
series that just lays out with. Really nothing held back, like exactly
what our strategy is, exactly what we’re trying to do. You could
absolutely just like copy paste a clone of our fund, at least in terms
of from the strategy perspective, because we just put it all out there.
And what that does is it creates these flywheels of folks who show up,
they get it, they want to support it, and we have, I mean, I would say
probably. Even before the 1000 crowdfunding campaign, probably 60 to 70%
of people commit to investing in the fund before I’ve ever met them,
you know, and usually later at least try to have a meeting at some
point, but there’s enough out there that they can put the pieces
together to join and support it.
And now, I mean, with the crowdfunding campaign, I don’t even know,
probably 90% of those folks I’ve never met either.
It’s a different way to sort of bypass the gatekeepers, which would be
like large institutional investors that normally back funds like this,
you know, we didn’t want to kind of run into the same issue that I was
talking about, where like you have a good idea and you pitch VCs and
then you change your idea to try and get money from them. Like I felt
like we were setting ourselves up for the same dynamic, basically
because we’d be pitching the people who fund the venture funds.
So we kind of knew we had. go a different way and that community driven
approach was essential for raising the fund.
And then we also see the same effect on the portfolio side where we have
a lot of folks who show up and say, look, I’m interested to raise money
from you guys, or I’m just gonna bootstrap. This is not a process. I’m
not pitching 30, 40 funds, like I know what you’re about. It resonates.
I want to either raise money and work with y’all or I’m just gonna do
my own thing, so. Again, like the one thing I know how to do reasonably
well is just like explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it from
just kind of like the only way to get it off the ground to like a real
flywheel, I would say of competitive advantage or just making it sort of
self-sustaining if that makes sense. So yeah, it’s been cool.
00:49:57 - Speaker 2: As you explain all that, it reminds me a lot of, I
guess most of the business ventures I ever do, I usually feel like there
is much about, I have something I want to say about the world or I want
a product to exist that is weird and different in some way that I think
will be good and special, that’s up for the market to decide.
But it’s essentially breaks convention or breaks status quo in a number
of ways, and two elements of what you’re describing for calm very much
strike me as similar to what I went through with Hiroku, what we did
with Think Twitch and what we are now with Muse, which is, first of all,
once you start questioning some of these base assumptions that Cascades
and you kind of end up reinventing everything in a way, like you were
mentioning like your board meeting style is going to be different
because once you change those base assumptions, everything else kind of
has to change.
But then you end up with something worse, this whole kind of weird
universe into itself, where everything you do is different from what
people are used to. And so then the explaining is so critical, right?
And so, in Hiroki’s case, I ended up writing tons of blog posts, but
also ultimately this manifesto called the 12 Factor, and that’s when
things really started to click for people.
For years, I’d basically heard people come in and why is this Things so
weird, it doesn’t work like how I expect with other hosting it’s like
this. Why can’t I write to the file system? Yeah, exactly. Why can’t I
ask to say, etc. and we would kind of one off try to explain, well,
actually, if you start from those first principles of what we’re doing
differently, that is a consequence or a detailed downstream consequence.
You know, it takes time to be able to fully articulate that philosophy,
but once we did manage to articulate that philosophy, it’s much easier
for someone to come in, download all your thinking, and then they come
in and see that the product works in a weird way, and it may or may not
fit with what they want, but instead of just comparing it to the status
quo and being confused, surprised, or even angry that it’s different,
they see why it is different, and then they can decide whether that’s
right for them or not.
00:51:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a really good insight.
I mean, there’s this magical thing right about building software is
that essentially you just have to write like clear directions and you
build a product, essentially, like if you really distill it down,
you’re writing this code and explaining very clearly how you want this
thing to work and that’s your product, and I never really set out to be
in finance or to be an investor per se. It wasn’t like, oh if it
wasn’t this, it would be something else.
This is the one idea I have for how to build a fund, but I really like
it now because it even is like reduced down to just zero steps like
clarity of thought is like the whole product basically, essentially just
explaining the thesis to both sides of the marketplace, essentially
people who want to invest and then people that you want to invest in.
That’s basically the entire product. I mean, there’s some ancillary
things around controls and processes and stuff like that, but you really
do just have to produce clear thinking in a way that’s consumable, and
that’s the product, which is kind of a cool business to be in.
00:53:02 - Speaker 2: I’m not gonna lie, so clarity of thought could
not possibly be more on brand for Muse.
00:53:08 - Speaker 1: So I’ve got a question for you guys, which is
around the idea of how you align and incentivize folks who are on the
team, basically employees. I think that for founders, everything about
calm companies and a general approach makes a ton of sense. You own the
company, you want to build a profitable, sustainable company that lasts.
Forever and has great lifestyle for you and your team and as long as you
have this nice ownership and maybe you have some nice dividends, you’re
not super concerned, but one thing I think is sort of an unsolved
problem, both for companies that we’re investing in and a lot of folks
in this space is employees. How do you Incentivize them, how do you
think about the spectrum of options, profit sharing, sharing in the
proceeds if you ever sold, you know, all that sort of stuff, and how do
you do it at the early stage when it’s very risky to make sure they
have some upside and then how do you do it over the long haul when maybe
liquidity events, selling the company is not on the near term road map.
Yeah, I’m just curious how you’re approaching that or thinking about
that with Muse.
00:54:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a great question, and we’ve thought
about this a lot. I would say first that I think a lot of the benefits
or the appeal of being a staff member at a com company come from these
degrees of freedom. It’s like you’re basically able to offer an
employment experience that is at least different and we believe for many
people better because you have this flexibility. So one thing is remote
work, which even a few years ago was not super common, obviously,
it’s.
Much more common now. But another thing is just like general flexibility
in terms of how you work.
So we have a partner who really likes to travel the world and work all
over the place. So sure you can do that. We had someone who wanted to go
to 4 days a week instead of 5, which if you were at a thing would be
like a whole thing with HR, right? Or maybe probably not even possible.
But here it’s like, yeah, sure, basically, seems good to us. And you
have more degrees of freedom to shape the work environment to be however
you want.
Now more on like the financial and compensation side. That is tough. Our
approach has been to try to make all full-time staff members partners in
the business.
That’s the title that you have title Adam and I have and all the other
partners have. And by that, it’s someone who wants to act like an
owner, we expect to act like an owner and is in fact a very substantial
owner in the business, much more than you would be in a typical venture
backed startup.
Now, the mechanics. How you actually convey the ownership are very
tricky. And we could do a whole podcast. I was actually going to do a
workshop at the original Thunder summit on this, like basically the
legal and tax mechanics of partner compensation. It’s a huge mess
basically because of US tax law. But the kind of spirit of it is that
we’ve tried to make the partners substantial equity owners in the
business, so that if we do issue dividends, they participate in that.
And if we do sell the business, they participate in that, and so forth.
00:55:54 - Speaker 2: And maybe part of where that works for us,
certainly because we have a small team, you know, 5 or even if we were
to add a 6 or a 7th, I could see that scaling. It wouldn’t go to 25
partners probably wouldn’t make sense.
Then you do probably need sort of two different classes, that’s similar
to those kind of professional partnerships, like an attorney’s firm or
something where there’s partners, and there’s kind of everyone else
who are employees.
And maybe going back to business fundamentals. It’s OK that we don’t
need to waive this lottery ticket of some options that might be worth
something. It’s like your salary, that’s your compensation, and it’s
not a crazy work environment, that’s all about we’re inventing a
platform to change the world, we just, we make a great product, we sell
it, and then, you know, employees get paid a fair market share.
I feel like there’s precedent from the non-software world for profit
sharing plans and things of that nature potentially as a chance to again
create a little bit of that upside without the complications of having
absolutely everyone be an owner, or I don’t know, maybe there’s stuff
we can draw. From co op models, maybe everyone should be an owner of a
small amount, but it’s not the startup options. OK, we’re going to pay
you less because you have this lottery ticket that might be worth
something if we exit someday. It’s like almost the internal worth is
very clear because you’re paying dividends.
Which is something certainly we will be excited to do if we get to that
point where, and I’ve done this for past businesses in my pre-startup
life, it was just, yeah, at some point when the business is profitable,
you pay dividends, and it’s great, you know, you look at the bank
account, you go, hey, cool, we’ve got like 10,000 left over this
quarter. Let’s take half of that and divide it up according to
ownership among the owners of the business, and it feels very pure and
honest somehow. It’s like our business earned more money than we spent,
so we get to keep some of it.
00:57:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, I do think this is a
big white space that needs to have some more just kind of go to off the
shelf options because you’ve got the traditional like startup RSUs and
stuff like that. I agree that while they overdeliver on knowing exactly
what you’ve signed up for structurally and tax wise, they definitely
underdeliver in terms of knowing how much they’re actually going to be
worth someday, but it is something, right? It’s something where People
can feel like they have some upside in the company and they know exactly
how it works and how the tax consequences are, maybe not exactly, but
they have a general sense of how it’s going to work.
And then in, you know, the world right now, we’re starting to see, I
think, a pretty decent sized wave of basically bootstraps software
companies start to hit, you know, very serious, mature profitability,
and they’re all kind of starting to grapple with this idea of, OK,
well, how do we incentivize our employees now and You’re right that
basically there’s some really straightforward stuff you can do around
like profit sharing and things like that.
The big challenge is that it’s very much at the employer’s whim,
right, like profit sharing agreements are very hard to enforce and if
you somehow don’t get what you think you’re owed, yeah, even just
bonuses, right, the classic end of year bonus is basically your boss
gets to decide who they like the best and give them money.
00:59:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and sometimes we’re starting to deal with
software companies that are very large and very profitable and
completely founder owned and these They’re honest folks, I’m not
saying that there’s anything wrong with them, but as an employee, if
you’re starting to put in, you know, 67, 10 years into a place, you
kind of maybe want a little more solidity to it. But then you start to
get into the tax and legal consequences where there’s just not a lot of
paved things to follow. We were super lucky with Cofund where the main
concept of profits are carried interest from the funds, right? When our
funds do really well, we get this. stream of profits called carry or
carried interest, and the rules around that and the taxes are super
generous. Thank you. Big private equity firms or whatever. But
essentially, like, I can do whatever I want with the carry. It’s
totally at my discretion and also everything is taxed very nicely. So we
just carved out 20% of all future carry of all future funds. So
essentially equity your options and created a system of Distributing
that to employees and also to our like very, very earliest investors. So
that was super nice that I just literally updated our operating
agreement and boom, it’s done. But it still does fall into that gray
area where if 10 years from now we’re deploying billions of dollars a
year, and that’s like really extremely valuable, our early employees
are going to have this huge stream of revenue for them personally
that’s completely Dependent on essentially like, there wouldn’t be a
lot of obvious protections for me just changing them, which is not good.
I would like them to have, you know, more firmness in how they’re going
to deal with that. So yeah, I don’t know, it’s an interesting space.
I’m curious to sort of see how different experiments play out on it. I
think this is something we will probably double down on ourselves and
have like a recommended approach. Nice, but honestly, it’s a
challenging space right now, a lot of opportunity, I think, you know, so
yeah.
01:00:55 - Speaker 2: It occurs to me hearing you describe that set up
as well as obviously all the things like seal and so forth that you’ve
done, you must have an attorney firm that is willing to like do weird
stuff, which is always interesting to me, like, finding something like
an attorney who’s really great at what they do, but willing to think
outside the box in a way that those two things often don’t go together.
The whole purpose of someone in the legal profession is to play it
really safe. Yeah. Have you found someone that somehow plays ball with
all your weirdness?
01:01:26 - Speaker 1: Huge shout out to Joe Wallen, who has been our
attorney from day one. He was the one that first worked with me on the
share earnings agreement.
I do think, yes, like one of the Things that we’ve had to do is a
fairly like grinding process of finding the different vendors and
service providers that want to work with us and are good at what they
do, because, yes, there’s tons of times where the de facto top 5 people
for this kind of thing, we would go to them and they would essentially.
They blow us off, right? Because it’s just they have no incentive to
want to do it.
And economically, it’s like, yeah, we pay well, but you really have to
just be intellectually curious and interested in what we’re doing for
some reason to want to take us on as a client.
I mean, also, we work with an amazing fund administrator called Aurro
Advisors, and they also very rightly should have just told us to look
somewhere else, you know, but essentially they were just excited about
what we were trying to do and So accumulating those folks who are on
board a little bit mission driven, or maybe a lot mission driven, has
been a big part of the process, to be honest, because yeah, I think we
got super lucky finding Joe very early on, but with other things, it’s
been like, OK, we’ve iterated through 15 conversations with folks and
they’re just not gonna be a fit for that very reason that they’re not
heavily incentivized to do experimental interesting things and. Yeah,
it’s probably one of the toughest parts of doing this, but now we’ve
kind of got like the dream team in place, so we can start to roll out
new things like along the topic of how do you help early employees, one
of the things we’re in the process of launching is a product we’re
calling it like Express right now, it might change, but Cofund Express
is for later stage mature companies.
That are in that position. They’re profitable. They have early
employees or early investors that have been there for, you know, 5 to 10
years. In theory, they own some slice of the company that’s now worth
like a house or two, and they would like to get some money, but the
company doesn’t want to sell, so we’re building a product to like
really quickly and easily be able to.
Buy small chunks, 3, 5%, 10% of the company to give liquidity to
basically anybody who wants like to be able to run an opt-in process,
which you see this in like the venture back worlds is something they
have figured out when they do a big round, they will often let employees
or founders sell off a slice of that round.
There’s no equivalent in our world for that. And so we’re building
that and it’s great cause now we have all the people in place, so we
just, you know, go to our tax folks and go to our fund administra folks
and go to our legal folks and we just say, OK, here’s our in crazy
idea, let’s spin it up.
So yeah, it’s good.
01:04:06 - Speaker 3: Yeah, nice, and Tyler, I appreciate that
throughout your process of working through all these things, again,
you’re working in public because that does help pave these paths that
hopefully other funds and entrepreneurs will be able to walk down in the
future. So thanks for that.
01:04:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks guys. This is a great conversation.
01:04:23 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for
listening. If you have feedback, you can write us on Twitter at UAHQ on
email, hello at museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on
Apple Podcasts. And Tyler, thank you so much for helping fill out that
map of possible funding options and helping entrepreneurs like ourselves
feel good about getting to do this work we love to do, but do it in a
way that’s calm and allows us to live our best lives while also
hopefully making useful software products that the world needs and
wants.
01:04:56 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, thanks guys.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Maybe the past generation of programmers were sort
of subjected to a really awful version of visual programming, but it
would be really sad to let that frustration that other people have felt
ruin what visual programming could be in a much better design format or
just done in very different ways, done in ways that combine graphics and
text.
00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s
about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins,
joined by my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest Maggie
Appleton from Egghead. Hello. Thanks for joining us, Maggie. Now,
listeners of the podcast will know that Mark and I are fans of computing
history. We think sometimes the technology industry is a little unaware
of its own history, and I understand you recently visited a museum on
that topic in your area.
00:00:58 - Speaker 1: I did. I got last weekend to go up to Cambridge,
which is about an hour away from London, and visited the Computer
History Museum of Cambridge, which was mostly a warehouse that some
people had put an old N64 in and an old Mac and got to play a bit of
Pong and Space Invaders, which is terribly educational, but probably not
a comprehensive history of computing.
00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Now, depending on what generation you grew up
with, you know, so now I’m old enough that I go to a computer history
museum or sometimes there’s, I don’t know, like the pinball museum in
Alameda there in San Francisco or some of these arcade ones, and I
remember this stuff when it was new, maybe. Kid, so in that case, it can
be as much a sense of nostalgia or a comparison with your sort of adults
perspective on something that loomed large as a child. Were there things
there you recognized, or was this all like essentially stuff that
predated your time?
00:01:52 - Speaker 1: I was definitely of the N64 generation and
definitely the, I don’t know which version of the Mac it was, but I
have a very clear memory of going into a friend’s house who had the
Mac. Windows 95 was maybe what we had had at home. I mean, I was grew up
sort of in the naughties, so I’m that generation.
00:02:08 - Speaker 2: Is that what we’re calling it now? I’ve heard
the knots.
00:02:10 - Speaker 1: I know. There’s no good word for it.
00:02:15 - Speaker 2: I mean the century, maybe we could go with. So,
before we get into our topic, I’d love to hear a little bit about your
background, Maggie, as well as a little bit about what you do at
Egghead.
00:02:26 - Speaker 1: Sure, so, yeah, Egghead is where I currently work
and it’s a web development education platform, so we kind of will joke
it’s Netflix for developers, it’s mostly video tutorials, teaching
anything, mostly on JavaScript, lots of React, Angular view, that sort
of thing.
And I’m the art director, designer, illustrator there. So essentially I
handle most of anything that is visual design, and I also do quite a bit
of UX design there.
It’s sort of a small company, so you get to be a bit of an all-rounder.
And because it’s a very developer focused company, I also develop,
mostly working in React. I like to call myself a mediocre developer, so
I’m not intense, you know, I don’t really like dig into, you know, the
deep code, but I know my way around, you know, front end database. So
yeah, that’s kind of me.
00:03:11 - Speaker 2: And it seems like you came maybe from the, I
don’t know, illustration or design side, and then that led you to kind
of the development side, or was it the other way around?
00:03:20 - Speaker 1: Yes, it was definitely design and illustration
first. So I had grown up in a very technological household.
My parents were both programmers. I had a lot of access to technology
quite young. So I learned, you know, HTML and CSS, but I wasn’t really
introduced to proper programming young and you know, there wasn’t any
like IT education in school.
So I went more into design and illustration in my early twenties and
then learned programming, mostly out of employment necessity, you know,
I was, I was designing websites and, you know, starting to learn
JavaScript a bit and figuring out how to get a model to work.
And then, of course, once I started working at Egghead, got a lot more
into programming and development.
So I very much come at it from, I struggle to learn it. I’m maybe not.
I don’t want to get into natural types of people, but of course some
people have an affinity for being able to do abstract reasoning and
they’re very good programmers because they can hold a ton of cognitive
context in their head about what component is connected to our database,
you know, where messages are being passed, and I am not strong on a lot
of those fronts, so I do development. As someone who needs things
visually displayed in front of me, I need a lot of explicit feedback
from the machine telling me what’s happening and what things are
connected. So my perspective, I kind of bring to programming is, I’m
the person that struggles with it. So I really, really want tools that
actually help you program if you’re not naturally inclined to abstract
reasoning.
00:04:43 - Speaker 2: I think it’s interesting that you saw basic
programming through HTML and JavaScript as being almost sounds like a
table stakes for your career, and I think that’s the nature of the
computing medium.
You can imagine doing visual illustration, design work in print, for
example, and there you probably need to learn some things about
printers, but for the most part you’re fine just doing everything in
pixels on the screen.
You hand that over and There you go, and that’s probably true in other
realms as well, but once you’re on the computer, now you’re working in
a dynamic medium, and your ability to express things is very limited if
you’re stuck with what’s static.
I think that’s going to become more and more true here in the future.
00:05:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was good. I was ignorant of the
fact at the time that I was in the generation where people were
designing websites in Photoshop, and I didn’t know that was an option.
So I went and learned CSS and JavaScript because I couldn’t figure out
any other way to build a website. I didn’t know I could just mock up
pixels and hand it to a developer. So I’m very glad I was ignorant of
that.
00:05:41 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is visual programming and also
to some degree, its relationship to the learnability of programming. And
since you suggested this one, Maggie, maybe you can explain a little bit
for the audience what the basics is. What is visual programming, why is
it interesting area?
00:05:59 - Speaker 1: Sure. So visual programming is sort of a catch-all
name for a whole bunch of approaches to trying to do programming
differently. I want to say I think the name itself is problematic, which
we can get into a bit, but it’s essentially trying to explore graphical
interfaces for programming in various ways and then There’s been a long
history of people trying to do this, and a fair amount of pushback to
versions of it that have gone quite badly, which we can also get into.
But yes, it’s essentially trying to explore ways of doing programming
that is not just based in text, you know, linear text in a text editor,
which is kind of the default nowadays.
00:06:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly when people think of programming,
they think of it as being synonymous with coding. Think of that
Hollywood hacker view where they’re sitting in front of the terminal,
the text is probably green on black, and it’s a bunch of text in this
computer language. Now, is there a well-known example of what would
count as visual programming?
00:06:58 - Speaker 1: The two that jumped to my mind. I’d say most
famous is probably MIT has a programming language called Scratch that is
technically designed for children in order to teach kids programming
sort of as a first programming language.
And I think this gets referenced a lot in visual programming, um,
circles because it gets rid of needing to use sort of arbitrary syntax
symbols to define things like objects and functions.
Instead, it uses drag and drop blocks with colors that correlate to the
type of each element. So it’s a very interesting example of how you can
kind of lower the bar to people coming in and doing programming since it
is designed for children.
So that’s one that gets famous, but others that I would count as being
some form of visual programming that will be very familiar to the
audience are tools like Zappia, if this then that, Integrama now, the
sort of the whole low code, no code movement where people are
essentially building node-based logic flows where they’re saying, you
know, if this happens, then do this, else. Do that, they’re doing, you
know, programmatic logic, but they’re doing it in a very graphical
interface. And I count that as visual programming, but I think there’s
also a wide diversity of, we can talk about, you know, the amount of
power each of these platforms might have, the amount of flexibility and
control they give to the user. But yeah, those would count, I would say,
as visual programming.
00:08:21 - Speaker 2: One that comes from my childhood, thinking of kids
learning programming is there’s a game called Rocky’s Boots. It was
like a 1980s, ran on the Apple II or something, and it showed you how to
put together logic gates, the same kind that you use in electrical
engineering, to make circuits and solve problems.
And that was one of the things that maybe introduced me to this sort of
form of logic that eventually led to my interest in programming.
But one thing I think is interesting about that is In fact, electrical
engineers designing circuits work with a form of visual programming. You
make a diagram that shows where the resistors and the capacitors and the
LEDs and whatever else go in this form that is very much, I guess it’s
less of a flow diagram and more shows where the electricity flows, which
may or may not exactly represent sort of the abstract logic, but I think
that’s a professional context where there’s kind of a visual
programming, at least representation.
00:09:16 - Speaker 3: And we can also talk about examples of visual
augmentation. So with Scratch, kind of the whole environment is
inherently very visual.
Other examples we could look at the spreadsheets where you have the
cells themselves are like text formulas, more like a typical programming
language, but it has this visual element of layout and spatial based
variable naming.
Another example from when I was learning programming is the I think it
was called Doctor Scheme. I think it has a new name now, or maybe it
changed to that from something else, I forget, but it was the scheme
development environment, which first of all was all in one, which is
great. She’s got this like one executable you could run and do
everything, but also when you hit errors, which is the dreaded case of a
new programmer, it just drew lines to everything you needed to look at,
which sounds so basic, but just connecting the dots between this is your
call site and this is your function definition, and there’s something
wrong, you know, check where these two lines terminate and see what’s
up. We could talk about all kinds of examples of visual augmentation as
well.
00:10:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I know you guys are also familiar with a
few maybe more powerful visual languages like origami, and I think X
code is quite visual in the way that it allows people to program. So
yeah, there are fully fledged IDs that have visual elements to them and
might not be fully fledged visual programming environments, but the
hybrid is actually much more interesting than this idea of pure visual
programming, but we can get there.
00:10:32 - Speaker 2: Our colleague Leonard uses origami for some design
prototyping. We even put some screenshots in one of the beta memos we
did.
I’ll link that, but It’s interesting because he’s doing design work
and typically he can do that in a tool like BigMA and pretty static
mockups and then we go from there working with U interface engineers.
They connect the static screens to behavior, but there are certain
things, for example, when we were working on this whole infinite canvas
flex boards feature where just how it felt. and how it behaved was the
whole design and you just couldn’t evaluate that by looking at a static
screen and furthermore, just the standard click prototypes like you get
in a lot of modern design tools just won’t cut it. And so he ended up
doing some fairly complex programs that you could then in turn run on
the iPad and really feel how it worked. It’s quite impressive.
00:11:25 - Speaker 3: You know, it’s gonna be very tempting to market
this episode with a D&D style alignment chart for visual programming
tools. It’s like lawful good is, you know, scratch and what’s the
other corner? Chaotic evil is a meme generator as a programming tool or
something like that. We’ll see if we can pull it off.
00:11:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m thinking of other ones I’ve seen. I
think there’s a category of them that I think was very popular in the
90s, like I’m specifically thinking of Lab View gets a lot of negative
press, I’ll say, as maybe not being chaotic evil, but it’s one of the
infamous ones that I think was proprietary, so you kind of got locked
into the system.
And then there’s a whole Tumblr. We can put it in the show notes when I
find the link to it, but I can’t remember the name now. That is just
screenshots of awful literal spaghetti code because it’s a node-based
visual programming language. So it would just be thousands of boxes and
lines running between all of them, and literal, just a visual spaghetti
that you can’t tell down from up.
But yeah, that would be somewhere in the evil dimension.
00:12:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the boxes connected by lines also reminds me
of another big category that I’ve come across in my, I guess not my day
job would be the way to put it, but music production is something
that’s been of great interest to me, particularly earlier in my life.
And so I worked a lot with software like Logic Audio, for example,
sequencers or something like Reason, which is a kind of an all in one
synthesizer plus sequencer, and these typically have various ways to
essentially wire stuff together, but I I think one reason that the
visual thing works well there is you have this clear kind of input
output flow.
The output is always going to be an audio stream or in some cases
there’s video tools as well where there’s a video stream, but it’s a
single sort of time-based flow and so like a music track or something
like that.
You just got 7 minutes of music output and you can in logic, for
example, To the quote unquote environment and there you can just string
together, OK, I want to take the source material. I don’t know someone
playing a guitar and I’m going to put it through these filters and I
want to fork it off this way and then the end output just goes out
through you know your master volume and obviously that is very much
designed for professional very serious use cases, but these are
non-programmers.
00:13:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve had the visual effects industry has a
lot of those same sort of interfaces, so the node model box and there I
was just connecting different things together and really just showing
data transformation over time, which is when a flow diagram actually
comes in useful.
00:13:47 - Speaker 2: And then another one I think could be remiss not
to mention is iOS has an automation system built in called Shortcuts,
which was originally a very cool indie app that Apple acquired called
Workflow, and this essentially gives you sort of a scratch style model
but probably Even simpler in the sense that you don’t have a lot of
nesting and what have you, you just sort of assemble these blocks top to
bottom.
You can do it on a phone, which actually is pretty interesting.
It’s possible to do reasonable programming on a phone, and again, I
think it does rely on a fairly linear input and output.
You’re going to apply your shortcut to this image. You’re going to do
some stuff to it. Something comes out the other side, maybe it’s a
transformed image, maybe it’s something else, but that’s a good
example of a place where Visual programming maybe is actually the
mainstream in a way that a lot of folks don’t even acknowledge.
00:14:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it kind of transitions us into the idea that
visual programming ends up being this really large umbrella that I think
a lot of the debates around to get into people just not having an agreed
definition of what we’re really talking about.
And so I mentioned that we would come back to it being that it’s kind
of a terrible name because to call something visual programming suggests
that it is something visible with human eyes, which would most certainly
include text or a screen. So that would include all programming. So when
people say visual programming, I think what it’s really getting at is,
this is my sort of opinion on it, I suppose, is it’s trying to take
things that would otherwise be implicit in programming, so parts of the
program we don’t see, so right, data transforming over time or a
variable being passed through a function.
And making it visible in some way.
And this is kind of where it gets into the balance that visual
programming platforms or languages have to kind of grapple with is how
much do you make visible and in what context, because you can’t make
everything visible because the point of programming is abstraction and
working with higher level primitives and sort of taking away things we
don’t want to always deal with, right? Like where memory is allocated,
you don’t want that visible in a higher level programming language.
So I always see it as how we take programming and we make different
aspects of it visible in different contexts depending on what we’re
trying to do.
00:16:03 - Speaker 2: Is there a better name, or if you were in charge
of the rebrand on this somehow, what would you go for?
00:16:10 - Speaker 1: I feel like graphical programming would at least
more accurately describe what a lot of these platforms are trying to do.
I mean, a lot of them are simply just trying to apply better UX and
interaction design to programming, right? They’re just trying to make
it a more enjoyable experience that gives the user or in this case, you
know, the developer what they need at the right time without overloading
them with information, you know, really just being a good cognitive
tool.
For them to get their work done.
So yeah, but graphical programming, I think would more accurately
describe node-based interfaces or drag and drop, you know, ones like
scratch, or even debuggers really, I think are a form of visual
programming in a way, ones that really walk you through how the program
is executing over time, although I think it’s kind of wild that you
wait till something goes wrong until those tools come into the picture.
Like, why isn’t there an inline debugger in every IDE, but you know.
00:17:06 - Speaker 2: Actually one of the first, sort of one of my
mentors when I was getting started with the professional programming, he
strongly felt that you would go and put break points at every
interesting point in the code the first time you ran it, and you
wouldn’t run it and just see what happens.
You’re gonna step through, inspect the variables. Watch every single
point, and only once you’ve been through it all and watched it all
execute from the inside, and everything’s what you expect, then you can
look and see what lands on the screen, if that’s what you expected or
not, but that’s kind of the final step.
That’s more your victory lap, not your first test of whether what you
did worked.
00:17:40 - Speaker 1: I think you mentioned that console logs, right,
are one method of sort of putting out or making the program more visible
at certain points in time. I was trying to think of a good metaphor for
what console logs are, right? It’s like the stream of the program and
it’s like you’re shooting up a small bit of information at a point in
time.
00:17:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s sort of like if you have a map of a
territory and you take a journey along the territory that we go on loops
and you cross back over your own path and you make jumps and stuff, kind
of captures all of that in a linearized form, and I see it as a
compliment to the map, you know, the map gives you the nature of the ter
not people gonna get mad at me on the internet for saying that, but you
know, that the map has some correlation to the territory hopefully, but
also the linear view of everything that you encountered is also very
useful.
00:18:26 - Speaker 2: One idea I would raise for the rebrand question I
asked earlier was on the Ink & Switch piece we did on end user
computing, and we can talk about the relationship of visual programming
to end user computing, but we talked about this property of embodiment
and it’s exactly what you said, the idea of taking something implicit
and potentially very abstract and making it visible. And I think a lot
of times in discussions I’ve seen about this, which are often among
people who are already professional software engineers, and that
includes both people who are very enthusiastic about end user
programming or just increasing the accessibility of programming, but
they themselves are still.
Professional programmers, I have that background mark does as well, and
whether or not they’re pro or con, they’re coming from that
perspective of someone who, for whatever reason found it was drawn to or
was good at holding all of that abstraction in their minds. And so in
some ways, I wonder when I see the objection of, I don’t know, there’s
so much visual spaghetti here, but that spaghetti all exists in symbolic
code as well. You just can’t see it, and you have to mentally model it,
and some people are unbelievably good at that, and a lot of those people
are people who go on to be really great programmers.
I’m probably kind of in the middle on that, my complexity threshold is
Not that great, and I tend to always want to like factor my code in a
way to make it more comprehensible and give myself more visibility and
that sort of thing. So I wonder how much the needs of visual programming
or this umbrella we’re calling visual programming, those serve sort of
hypothetical people that today are not programmers but maybe would have
that capability. Which I think is the other dimension of this, which is
the learnability side of it.
00:20:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I definitely agree with that, that I do like
to be the representative for, yeah, mediocre programmers or people who
aren’t naturally inclined to it. And that I have heard a lot of the
debates around it of people saying, Well, I love them, don’t take them
away from me. You know, if you try to make it visual, I won’t be able
to work in my crazy text editor with all my customized hot keys and
I’ll say like, textual programming’s not going anywhere, you know,
it’s like, this is all gonna be. Additional affordances built on top of
a textual paradigm, you know, text is not leaving.
But people say they can’t understand why we would ever need it. Whereas
my perspective coming into programming, you know, starting when I was 20
or so, when I was first shown VS code and the JavaScript tool chain that
I was supposed to work in an NPM and the command line, I just went, you
can’t possibly be serious. Like this can’t possibly be the way that
I’m going to do this. Pranking you. Yeah, what? My computer looks like
it’s just stepped back into the 80s. Like, I don’t understand. You
know, I’ve grown up in the rich graphical user interface that gives me
what I need visually and it was just shocking. So I do think that people
who are programmers or professional programmers are maybe ones that, I
don’t know if they want to say they’re more willing to step into that
world of invisible connections and implicit logic. And then it is
everyone that maybe would shy away from that or would find that more
stressful or just less intuitive, they end up being like oh OK well
programming’s not for me.
00:21:36 - Speaker 3: That really resonates with my experience, and I
think there’s a few things going on here.
One is this issue of accidental complexity, where you have aspects of
the experience that are just not really essential to doing the actual
programming work. Basically, the tools are designed poorly and
unnecessarily so. There’s too many things going on, some of them don’t
work, they’re unnecessarily confusing.
I had a similar experience when I first wanted to do. Web app at a time,
the state of the art was like these Java serflet things. This is like
full on enterprise Java wildness. And when I encountered that, I was
like, there’s no way I’m gonna do this. Sorry. And so I went back to,
you know, my doctor scheme where everything is in a nice little bubble.
Eventually you got Ruby on rails and everything was fine and so forth.
But there’s this other issue of communication and information theory.
So by that I mean, A lesson that I learned from management is whenever
you’re communicating something, something is said, and then something
else is received on the other end. It’s like a lossy process, and I
think the reason a lot of programmers like text based interfaces is that
they have very low loss there. They kind of understand what all those
symbols mean, and furthermore, they’re very dense, whereas a new
programmer, and I was once one of these, basically it all gets lost. It
just looks like a garble of like alien symbols. So one of the reasons
that visual programming environments could be so appealing is they have
lower underlying information density, but they’re constructed in a way
such the optical clarity is higher, right? More information gets through
to the other side, and I think ultimately that suggests that there’s
this end game of you get both the very high bandwidth potential of
textile interfaces with the augmentation that you can get from other
visual aids. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, right, but I
think there’s something there.
00:23:12 - Speaker 1: I definitely, I think, discovered that when, as
part of my work for Egghead, a lot of my work is illustrating
programming concepts, right? So it’s very much just educational
material. We’re talking like articles or animations that kind of go
along with video lessons, where, you know, I’m visually explaining
things like, you know, how graphQL works or how React’s hooks work. So
it’s just taking concepts. And what I believe I’m doing is making
visible the mental models. I tend to use the word me.
Metaphors, because I’m from more of a cultural anthropology background,
and I’ve read a lot of thinkers like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,
who talk about embodied metaphors and sort of the fact that almost
everything that we talk about in the abstract realm is based in our
embodied experience of the world. So we have this inherent understanding
that like, up is good and is more and is happy, we’ll see the stock
market went up and the stock market didn’t physically move upwards,
right? It, like, had more money, move into it. But we use the term up to
think more, good, better, right? And we’ll say like, you know, I’m
feeling down today, means I’m feeling sad. You’re not physically
moving downwards. But the point is that we have these metaphors that are
based in being humans with bodies that have like fronts and backs and
ups and downs, and we map all our abstract reasoning on top of that.
And when you have to draw like a programming function. You really have
to look at the language we use around programming functions and really
figure out like, OK, there is a physical metaphor baked in here because
all things are based off physical understanding, um, and then drawing
it, you know, you draw, OK, there’s a component that’s a higher order
component in terms of a lower order component it’s passing data, so
it’s, you know, mimicking this idea of physical objects moving through
space.
So it was very obvious to me in trying to draw programming concepts that
it’s based in physical knowledge. And visual programming languages or
visual interfaces, just make that explicit, right? They like actually
draw a box that is above another box or it is to the right of another
box, which suggests it’s in the future because we think the future is
to the right and the past is to the left, at least in English, Western
speaking countries.
That’s how we map time. So I’ve always just been kind of fascinated by
how We can sort of use these embodied metaphors to help people
understand programming concepts because everyone has a body, so you get
these things for free. Like we all get the concept of front and back,
and we can use those in interfaces to communicate to people, you know,
the relationship of these otherwise very abstract lines of code that are
just encoded things on a hard drive that would otherwise be
incomprehensible.
00:25:41 - Speaker 2: That’s super interesting and also it actually
connects to our design ethos for Muse. A lot of our concept there is we
want to tap more into, for example, your spatial reasoning, which is
very strong for most humans, as well as things like the direct
manipulation and touch and so on, basically taking advantage more of our
bodies and our minds, natural, you might call them talents or just built
in capabilities because of course so much of what we do with computers
we are really Bringing ourselves into an abstract intellectual realm,
and we can learn to do it, but it is very much a learned and a learned
over a long period of time skill.
00:26:20 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this idea of understanding,
whether that’s through metaphors or physical embodiment or mental
models is really important because ultimately most programming errors or
failures are ones of understanding and not ones of like mistyping, and I
think a lot of our tools, they focus on The mistyping issues, and it’s
much harder, yet more important to get the ones of understanding.
Like if you think about the most gnarly bugs you’ve dealt with, it’s
usually because you misunderstood something about the world you’re
modeling or how your program worked, not because you type out something.
If you did something that kind of gets fixed quickly.
So anything that can help us understand what actually is, is very
powerful, which, by the way, is another reason why I’m a huge fan of
logs because they are a sort of ground truth with very high information
density of what actually happened in your program.
00:27:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve actually recently been working on a
project that really sort of emphasized to me how important this is,
right, of the mismatch between the program creator’s mental model and
the person trying to write the programming language.
So, of course, I’ve mentioned JavaScript because that’s just kind of
the world I work in. So this is a collaboration project that I worked on
with a programmer named Dan Abramoff, who’s a really wonderful kind of
well-known JavaScript developer who’s on the React core team. And so
we’ve been collaborating to help create a course that visually,
diagrams and a. Mas the underlying mental models of JavaScript, the way
that it actually executes, which helps people get over a lot of the bugs
that are written into JavaScript code simply because they don’t
understand what happens when you say, let banana equals fruit or
whatever. And then you reference that later, but if it’s been
reassigned or it’s inside an object and it’s been passed through a
function, they aren’t tracking in their head exactly where the
variables gone and how it’s changed over time because it’s not visible
in the program. So anyway, this project is all about showing people
literal, explicit diagrams, showing them what happens when certain types
of code executes in JavaScript and it corrects a lot of the mental
models that are incorrectly taught in a lot of JavaScript textbooks. And
this is where working with Dan and being able to help visualize this
course, I completely reformed my understanding of how JavaScript code
executes. But there’s no IDE that was going to show me that. So it was
just one where I went, it’s great to make educational materials for
this stuff, but it’s not built into the tool. Exactly.
00:28:35 - Speaker 3: It reminds me one of the earlier programming
courses I took was in C and it was kind of notorious because there was
this one point in the course where a lot of people hit a wall, which was
when you introduce pointers. You know, it’s this incredibly important
and fundamental thing that totally changes how the variable behaves, but
just a little star, you know, in front of the variable name or whatever.
And it kind of resonates with what you were saying about the mismatch
between how people are thinking about what’s happening versus what is
actually happening, the importance of correcting that.
00:29:04 - Speaker 2: How do you go about coming up with a metaphor when
you’re working on something like the just JavaScript course or any of
these egghead pieces? Presumably you need to develop your own
understanding of it either from your own experience or from the course
materials, but then you want to go to translate that to some kind of
visual thinking or create a metaphor, hopefully when that’s correct and
useful. How do you do that? Can you give us an example?
00:29:29 - Speaker 1: Sure. I’ll say there’s sort of a spectrum. I
mean, I like spectrums anyway. There’s a spectrum of visual
programming, and there’s a spectrum of metaphors, I’ll say.
So the just JavaScript project with Dan probably leaned a lot more on
very direct spatial metaphors. It was very much like what is connected
to what, what is above what. So it’s sort of circles and our. in a very
classic diagrammatic way.
But a lot of the other work I’ve done for Egghead is illustrating
programming concepts and what I would say is on more towards the poetic
spectrum of metaphor, where it’s not technically, like, you know, the
most accurate, it doesn’t exactly match to syntax showing what happens
at each point. But I’ll make a lot of illustrations that will be
metaphors that give you an understanding of like, oh, OK, if it’s a
waterfall image, it’s like, OK, this is something about data flow, that
sort of level of poetic metaphor that gives you more of the gist of an
idea more than the literal syntax interpretation.
I’m thinking of one of like, I did one for Redux, which is a state
management system for React. And I use like a little joystick with space
aliens, like shooting, cause it has actions, so it’s like you can like
shoot out actions from redux from like a single state source. So that’s
one way, it’s a bit more fun. Obviously, it’s a lot more visually
interesting than just doing a box and arrow diagram, but it gets the
concept across to people that you have a central place and it’s
shooting actions out from it. And the the process I kind of do for that
is whenever I’m given something to design a metaphor for, I will read
docs, you know, I’ll read programming articles, I’ll go see what
people are talking about on Twitter related to the thing, stack overflow
questions, and sometimes if the community is already speaking about it
in certain metaphors, I just use that because they clearly already
understand it. If they’re trying to explain it to each other on Stack
Overflow and they’re using these metaphors, that’s usually what I’ll
base them on. But a lot of the time, I’m just kind of doing basic
reasoning of going, OK, what are the functions of this thing, what are
its qualities, and then you do a bit more creative lateral thinking to
say, OK, what else in the world has those functions and those qualities.
00:31:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that that points to another reason
to have this kind of illustration in learning materials, which is just
to make it fun and break things up, and yeah, visuals to break up, for
example, long streams of text, or, you know, if it’s more of a video
format, long strings of speaking, or you’re just looking at a screen,
that kind of looks the same the whole time, you know, it’s just a code
editor window or something. I’m reminded a bit of Wi Poignant Guide to
Ruby, which was a beloved introduction to programming for the Ruby
language and had these adorable cartoon characters and kind of a web
comic style, and, you know, a lot of it was not specifically helpful for
helping you learn it. It just made the thing just more fun to consume
and more memorable because you connect chunky bacon with, you know, some
of these more practical concepts that are being taught to you.
00:32:17 - Speaker 3: Chunky bacon, that’s a throwback, man, wow.
00:32:21 - Speaker 2: Now, I can’t believe we got this far without
mentioning Brett Victor’s seminal piece, Learnable programming, and
maybe somewhat to the point you’ve both made in various ways, which is,
it doesn’t have to be either or. The idea of creating embodiment or
visualization or showing more of what’s happening, the abstract pieces,
how things are connected, how things flow in time can also go. With
symbolic code and this piece from some years back now, but I think has
been influential in terms of, well, people lamenting we don’t have
programming environments that are a bit more like this, but demonstrates
lots of interesting and inspiring ways to potentially make, for example,
control flow more visible.
00:33:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the Brett Victor piece has kind of been a
seminal launching point for this whole visual programming industry.
Of course, it was alive and thriving well before. I mean, you can kind
of trace it back to, of course, Alan Kay and Xerox Park and Small Talk,
and there’s a lot of precedents for this, but the learnable programming
piece, I think, is the one I’ve seen referenced the most and has gotten
the most people, you know, maybe in the last 5 to 10 years, more
interested in it and to get them to go exploring and to go, OK, maybe
the way we program now doesn’t have to be the way we’re always going
to program. And the thing I really loved about Victor’s piece, I mean,
of course, it’s a long article and there’s many aspects to it that we
could kind of dive into.
But this idea of just that because code when it comes down to it, it’s
something being executed in full on machine code and bytecode, and with
so many layers of abstraction up from there, it’s not like we only have
to represent it in one way. When you get into the higher level
programming languages, syntax is one way of displaying what that machine
code is actually running. And right in the rendered UI is another way of
displaying what that machine code is running. And I don’t know why
there’s not a reason why we can’t flexibly display the same set of
machine code in different ways and turn it on and off and, you know,
say, OK, I want to look at it in visual data flow, set. Or I want to
look at it in a way that shows me the component architecture, if it’s
like a component tree kind of context. So just flexibly displaying it in
different visual formats, rather than saying, OK, syntax is the only way
I’m ever going to interact with this code until it becomes the final
output.
00:34:39 - Speaker 3: Yeah, interesting. And now that you mentioned
that, I feel like, as is often the case, the gamers are ahead of us,
particularly the game designers, like I’m not an expert in this, but my
understanding is that the game engine environments, like they’re very
sophisticated. There’s like the code view, then there’s like the
object graph view and you can like, you know, turn on different pieces
of the visual environment and there’s all kinds of performance based
views for looking at memory and CPU and GPU usage and so on. So there’s
perhaps something to learn from that industry.
00:35:07 - Speaker 1: I also think the data visualization industry is
one we could really draw a lot from, like I know Brett Victor had
mentioned he had researched a lot in Edward Tufty’s work, who’s a
information designer I suppose is the best term for him, but he’s
written a number of books like visual explanations and beautiful
Evidence that cover.
Kind of the best practices for how you can represent data as visual
charts in a way that it actually respects the original data and presents
it in an accurate way that isn’t bending it or being too manipulative
about the way that you’re presenting it.
But he has, yeah, a wonderful set of sort of principles for how to do it
well.
And Victor had talked about how he read him before writing learnable
programming. But the data this community in general has done a ton of
work on thinking of different ways to visualize numbers, and they are
fairly well known for it.
Do you guys know on dashboards you can sort of turn on line chart or you
can turn on bar chart, you can sort of jump through different modes of
being able to look at the same numbers and that’s sort of in my head,
what.
We might be able to do with syntax in sort of maybe IDE plug-ins in the
future.
Of course, there’s plenty of IDE plugins that do help you look at your
code in different ways. But more of that is kind of what I would love to
see is like more plugins that just are like, I’m just gonna show you
the architecture side of your code. I’m just gonna show you how this
variable changes over time in your code. I’m like one of those where
you’re kind of like, am I missing something? Like, why isn’t this
happening?
00:36:32 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I totally love to see more of it, and I
think it can come both from the IDE language plug-in layer, but also
bottoms up from individual projects. I feel like I must have at some
point done one of these things where you write a little script that like
takes your code or your system and compiles a dot graph so you can
visualize nodes and edges with one of these standard dot visualization
tools. And I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to do that in
individual projects like you feel the need to have a different, more
graphical view into your project. Well, you’re a programmer, you can
make it so.
00:37:01 - Speaker 1: And it kind of to bring us back to what end user
programming. I mean the the strange thing about programmers, right, is
they are end user programming, like of all the industries, they’re the
only ones where they are both the users who have the ability to actually
build their own tools and to actually get in and change their own
applications and no other, I guess, community that uses computational
tools is able to do that.
00:37:22 - Speaker 2: Here you’re talking about a programmer writing
their own VS code plugin, something like that.
00:37:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Or even if you use a certain
language or a framework, you can build a library that adds on to that,
right? Even if you’re not on the core team and you aren’t going to PR
into the main repo of that framework or tool, you can build extensions
off it, you know, it’s the beauty of being able to fork and change and
collaborate on these things means that there’s so much flexibility in
in developers having their own authorship power.
00:37:49 - Speaker 3: Maybe we need more culture of jig making and
software as there is in woodworking. Woodworking is interesting, it’s
one of the rare fields where maybe the only one I can think of where
they have that ability to kind of build their own tools in wood, and
there there’s this whole culture of making jigs to help you build the
furniture. In fact, you might spend most of your time making the jigs
and the furniture is kind of this final, you know, culminating step.
Perhaps we need more of that in the software world.
00:38:12 - Speaker 2: Some of the ways to visualize your code or your
program differently that you both have mentioned like in the game world
maybe something like Unity where you tend to build stuff into the game
that lets you look at the scene graph in different ways and I think we
have that a little bit in the web world. Dev Tools is one that we tend
to give a lot of love to. I think we talked about that a good bit with
Jeffrey recently here on the podcast, but there it is an example of what
you said. You see the output.
But there’s also the kind of hover over elements and highlight which is
where and what the extents are, and then there’s also the margins and
padding stuff that kind of goes down in the lower right corner, but then
you’ve also got an expanding hierarchical graph and you can see those
all at the same time and even as you’re musing over its highlighting,
you’re looking at exactly the same thing in three different ways, and
you can spot different problems or understand by visualizing it in these
different ways.
And I would further argue that we see that a little bit in more the
native development world with toolkits like Flutter and SwiftUI where
there often is even a live side by side. Here’s your interface output,
here’s the code, and often you can change things on both sides and it
flows. Bidirectionally, but I think in all of those cases it’s already
something where it’s a visual output and so you’re interacting with
some of the under the hood stuff around that visual output. It feels
very natural to visualize that. When you come back to the more abstract
things like program flow over time, that’s where maybe it’s less
obvious to do that, or maybe it’s just less clear how you would do it
in the first place. But yeah, I think that visual debugging or visual
understanding of something that is already a visual output to begin
with, is actually a pretty rich place for the stuff.
00:39:55 - Speaker 1: And especially, I mean, you’d mentioned the two
way or bidirectional aspect of it is super important. I mean, one thing
I’m really liking is there’s kind of a new rise in state charts and
state machines, but visual ones that are flow both ways.
I’m specifically thinking of there’s a tool called X state that works
for React where you can change either the diagram or the code and
they’re side by side and they mirror each other.
Whereas if I want to debug some CSS thing in the browser, it’s like,
I’ll go test it out in the browser. But then I still need to go back to
my ID and like actually change the actual code. And it’s just that like
slight friction of you’re not actually changing the thing itself.
You’re like mocking it up in one, and then you go back to the actual
source. We’ll know and, you know, interaction design, any amount of
friction you put into a tool or an interface is just causing that much
more cognitive load on the user.
00:40:42 - Speaker 2: I’m looking at Xtate right now. I hadn’t seen
this before. It is very cool, like, uh, code and flow chart diagram side
by side.
We’ve done a bit of research on the bidirectional editing capability as
part of Incanwitch, and it can be very, very hard to do that well if you
have something like maybe a tool like Apparatus would be a good example.
I can link that in the show notes, but something where you have the
ability to do direct manipulation with dragging something with the mouse
or your finger in one kind of pain, and the other you have code that you
can update.
But having not one be the end state, the output, I don’t know the bad
version of this is Dreamweaver, right? What the output it writes is just
completely incomprehensible and you can’t kind of go back from there.
So that bi-directional thing I think is sort of a holy grail in one way,
but also it’s very hard to do technically, and I think it also depends
a lot on the nature of the programming language itself and the tools you
use to edit kind of the symbolic representation.
00:41:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I usually take the long stream of, maybe, I
don’t want to say failures, but disappointments in the wuzzy wig world.
You know, everyone that’s ever dreamed of, yeah, dream era, you draw
the website and you can change the size of the div and the code, you
know, reacts appropriately. The fact that no one solved it after this
long and that many, probably billions of dollars, I’m not quite sure.
It shows that it must be an incredibly hard problem, you know.
00:42:05 - Speaker 2: Yeah, indeed, and I know in the X code world where
it ships with this interface builder, which is essentially a drag and
drop GUI system for setting up your interface, but very often I’ve seen
iOS developers, they prefer to say just don’t use InterfaceBuilder,
write everything in code because Or or later you’re going to be
basically working in code anyways and if you have some of your program
is represented in this visual thing that’s edited one way, some of your
program is represented in code, the two interact with each other in a
bunch of complex ways, you’d rather have just the one medium that’s
actually better long term.
Now another great article that I came across by total coincidence, just
as you and I, Maggie were talking about, possibly doing a podcast on
this topic, is an article that is called Hackeroo’s Folk Wisdom on
Visual Programming. And it essentially is a pretty large scale analysis
of every single time something visual programming related has come up on
Hacker News and sort of like distilling out the common themes and then
starts with the really common and fairly shallow reactions and then goes
into some much more nuanced and interesting discussion. So there’s lots
of here including some we’ve already talked about, but is there any
pieces of this article that are especially interesting to you, Maggie?
00:43:20 - Speaker 1: It’s funny, I had been following a lot of those
same threads, and there’s a fair number of them, and they’re the sort
of hack and news topics that go for hundreds of comments, right? People
who just go deep on this stuff. I had been reading a lot of those same
ones and passing through them right when that article was published, and
I tweeted the author, I said, you know, thank you so much for doing the
hard work of distilling that all for us.
But I think the thing I found most interesting about it, and just from
reading the threads is, I mean, the strong opinions people have on it,
or you really get into people have very Emotional, I want to say, like
reactions to visual programming and sort of the cultural anthropologist
side of me just finds that quite an intriguing thing to look at, where
many of them, I want to say, have almost been like emotionally scarred
by past visual programming languages, like the stories they’re telling
in the comments of the time they had to work on the most horrendous
proprietary visual programming platform, and no one could find anything
and the literal spaghetti code is just all over the Place and they just
wanted to go back to text.
So I think there’s some very legitimate critiques that should be
acknowledged that maybe the past generation of programmers were sort of
subjected to a really awful version of visual programming, but it would
be really sad to let that frustration that other people have felt ruin
what visual programming could be in a much better design format or just
done in very different ways, done in ways that combine graphics and
text. Yeah, so that was my main takeaway from it.
It’s almost like you have to do some historical healing before you can
kind of move forward with this concept.
00:44:47 - Speaker 2: It is interesting that it can be such an emotional
topic because I think if we were to boil it down to a bit of a duality,
you have both people like I think those of us here talking right now who
really believe in some kind of end user programming future or
programming being more accessible or just computing as a medium is so.
Important for humanity’s future, and we need just more humans and a
broader array of types of humans, different perspectives and different
backgrounds to be able to access this medium.
And so that’s maybe something we feel strongly about.
Certainly I feel very passionately about.
On the flip side is maybe as you said, first of all, the bad experiences
that have scarred people, but also you do come back to this again, the
hacker news comments are people who many and most are probably
professional software engineers. There are people for whom the pure text
model and classic text editors and IDEs and so on serve well, or maybe
it’s less about being served well and more than they’ve had to go
through the pain and suffering to get over that hump, to learn all those
abstractions and manage a whole. All that stuff in their head, and then
in a way, maybe they would feel robbed if someone else can just kind of
skip over that.
I actually had that feeling. I learned a little bit of electrical
engineering many, many years ago doing Burning Man art projects. So I
wanted to make stuff that lit up in cool patterns with LEDs and so on.
And I had to go through the whole kind of classic electrical engineering
process, and I found it very challenging. It didn’t really fit with how
my brain worked. I thought it would be relatively easy because I’m a
computer programmer, but circuits are a whole other thing.
And just a few years later we had the raspberry Pi and the Arduino, an
increasing number of these kits and Ada fruit and all these much more
accessible things. I remember talking to a friend who said, Oh, you
know, I’m going to set up my project that will have, you know, these
LEDs or whatever. It’ll color cycle like this, and I’m like everything
you’re describing there, that’s going to be a lot of work. I hope
you’ve really budgeted some time. And he bought these kits. You know, I
ate a fruit, and a week later he had this amazing thing working and I
went in and asked him about it and I realized that he just didn’t need
to learn all this stuff about debouncing with capacitors or whatever
that I had to fight through because there are these just more accessible
platforms. And there’s a knee jerk, I think I had that then, a knee
jerk kind of like, wait, I had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to
learn to do this. Other people should have to too, or I wasted my time
or something like that. But of course, I think it’s much better that
there are much more people that can now do things like make cool light
up projects because these technologies are more accessible. I feel like
there’s probably a version of that for today’s programmers versus
people that might access it in the future if it was a little bit more
learnable.
00:47:32 - Speaker 1: Definitely, there’s also another I suppose trend
in people that are a bit anti-visual programming or I’ll say resistant
to it or have some, you know, skepticism and reservation around it. Is
this, I have found this sort of a duality where people lump themselves
into going, OK, I’m a math logic person and art people are on the other
side of campus, and I am not an art person, and everything visual is
art.
And this idea that they’re not visual thinkers, I hear that all the
time from people who are in programming, and I can’t really fathom what
that means in a lot of cases because I go, Well, visuals are about
embodied when you have a body, and I think, you know, you could probably
draw a box and an arrow and communicate some visual stuff if you And
trying to draw some detailed drawing.
But yeah, I think the, the, I’ll say yeah historical divide of art from
science and visual from logic and this idea that math happens in textual
syntax is a bit of a hangover that people just think, well, visuals
don’t belong in math and programming.
But I mean this is why I think cultural anthropology, one of the sort of
points of it is to sort of show people the vast diversity of expressions
that human. Life and culture can take and that everything we have was
invented at one point in history, and we are one very specific narrow
manifestation of possible human culture, and there are many others, and
we could switch to them or move towards them and we don’t have to live
in some world where math and art live on alternate sides of the
dichotomy.
00:48:54 - Speaker 2: That’s a really powerful point, Maggie. I feel
like we should wrap it up there, but for people who are wondering about
examples, they want to see what this looks like because indeed it is a
visual topic beyond the ones we’ve already mentioned. Are there some
good resources you can name that allow someone to flip through and see
the variety of different experiments folks have tried for visual
programming?
00:49:15 - Speaker 1: Definitely, there’s some people who have done a
lot of wonderful labor compiling screenshots of I think every possible
visual programming language or platform that’s ever existed. And what I
want to point to that we’ll put in the show notes is a visual
programming codex that Ivan Rees put together. Which is a GitHub repo
with just a wonderful array of examples. And there’s another one called
Whole Code Catalog. So a nice play on the Whole Earth Catalog that has,
again, a nice sort of categorized collection of different programming
platforms and alternatives and the sort of the different qualities each
of them has all nicely organized in a beautiful website.
00:49:52 - Speaker 2: Well, thanks everyone for listening. If you have
feedback, you can write us on Twitter at museAppHQ or on email, hello at
museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts,
and Maggie, I’m really glad you’re advocating for making programming
more visual, more embodied, more learnable, and I’m especially inspired
by the idea of having a less bifurcated world between the art thinkers
and the math thinkers. I think we need that. That’s a beautiful vision
for me.
00:50:21 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me on. I really
appreciated getting to come on the show, and I’ve mentioned to you I I
adore the podcast, I think I’ve listened to every episode up until now,
so it was really wonderful to get to finally come be a guest.
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: You start with some seeds of an idea. Basically,
it might be some sketches or a picture of a whiteboard you took or a
voice memo, and what you want to end up with is, say, an essay, and
there’s several steps to the creative process. And one of the things
that’s exciting about the new text feature plus blocks is you can see
it as a trellis for that growth.
00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad.
But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the
company and the small team behind it.
I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Mark, I’m
pleased to report that Metause has broken into the top 200 charts on the
technology category in Apple Podcasts. It’s a per country breakdown.
I’ve been using a little thing called PO status that essentially sort
of charts your position over time. Some countries were there pretty
consistently, other places like Germany where I live, we kind of pop in
and out at the whims of the algorithm essentially. That was quite
surprising to me in a lot of ways, cause I just still think of this as,
you know, me and you were having a chat sometimes with guests, just
people we like to hang out with and seeing our logo alongside these what
I consider to be kind of giants of the podcasting world like Cortex and
Accidental tech and so on is kind of a thrill actually.
00:01:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I continued to be really pleasantly
surprised by the reception we get to the podcast. It’s actually just at
a family event about a week ago, and people would come to me and say,
Mark, hey, it’s great to see you. By the way, I love the podcast, like,
whoa, OK, I didn’t know you were listening to that, but that’s cool.
So yeah, it’s been fun.
00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, and I also want to maybe make a little
request. First of all, a huge thanks to all the people who have tweet
recommendations or a lot of folks tell me that they do more kind of in
person. Reminds me a little bit of our episode on social media where we
talked about something going viral slowly kind of through word of mouth,
sort of the ideal thing, and I think there’s a little bit of that here,
which is great.
But actually, if you haven’t had the chance to recommend us, you can
actually help by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. They make it a
little hard to do, but if you go to the new podcast page and go to the
Apple Podcasts, I’ll link that in the show notes. You scroll down to
the bottom, I think you can tap write a review if you’re on your
iPhone. I’m sure Spotify has a similar thing. We only have a few
reviews. In a lot of countries, sometimes none, so even just taking a
moment to drop in a star review in one sentence of what you think you
like hearing these weird guys talk about, if nothing else, will soothe
my vanity.
So our topic today is text. Now that word even is so rich for me and
many of the reasons I got into computing and tools for thought, and so
on. The impetus here is we’re just now releasing into beta for all our
pro members a text blocks feature, so essentially changing our text
cards today, which are kind of these Post-it notes things, pretty basic,
to something that is a little more inspired by the notion Rome craft
world of things. And maybe we’ll describe a little more of that vision
later, but of course I always like to start with the absolute
fundamentals. So Mark, I have to ask you, what is text, and I mean not
the dictionary definition, but what comes to mind for you with that
word.
00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Well I’ll give you a very marked philosophical
answer, which I’m sure we’ll hear echoes of in the rest of this
conversation.
Now, if you think about conveying information, there’s sort of a
necessarily most primitive form, which is a string of 0 and 1’s, you
know, you can’t reduce the dimensionality beyond a line and you can’t
reduce the base beyond two, right, or else you have no information.
And then in the case of human acceptable information, it’s perhaps a
string of human readable characters. So in some sense it’s the most
basic fundamental primitive way to communicate information. So that’s
one of the reasons why I think it comes up so often in Tools for
Thought, but we’ll talk more about that throughout the podcast.
00:03:51 - Speaker 2: For me, the word text, I think, makes me think of
plain text or files that end in .txt and for a very long time, that was
my whole knowledge management system was a folder full of text files.
Maybe at some point I did mark down or something like that, but plain
text is just one of the most fundamental formats on a computer. It’s
how code is usually represented, it’s a very durable and long-term
format, it’s very flexible, you can do Aski art and things like that,
yeah.
But I guess going back even before sort of the digital side of things, I
really think of writing things down in any way at all as the original
tool for thought.
And in fact, it feels like almost all of the things that build upon that
are essentially variations of ways to write things down.
Ways to externalize thoughts from your mind. I think we’ve talked
before about even something as simple as using a stick to draw on the
dirt and I don’t know, cavemen drawing a picture of a horse on the wall
of their cave, and certainly you have this whole history of, I guess
there’s sort of written language, which of course is an extension of or
a mapping of spoken language.
And that leads you into the whole world of alphabets, but actually even
before alphabets, you have logograms, things like hieroglyphs, you know,
you have a picture of a duck, and that means the word duck, for example,
and then you have all these technologies for mediums for writing on,
mediums for writing with, for reproducing those things, clay tablets,
styluses, papyrus, paper, pens and pencils, printing press, whiteboards,
posted notes, etc.
And then language, which we typically represent in modern times with
alphabets which stand for sounds roughly, but are actually very
abstract, you know, they’re pretty far removed from the pictures or
diagrams we once had, and I think that leads us to one of the dualities
I wanted to talk about or I’ve been thinking about a lot in terms of
this muse product direction, which is the duality or the spectrum of
symbolic versus spatial and visual.
00:05:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this could that something really
fundamental, which is formats that are optimal for conveyance and
translation and reproduction and storage, which I would say plain text,
especially for that category versus formats which are optimized for
matching how our minds work and think, which is closer, I would say to
the music model of it’s multimedia, it’s free form, it’s kind of
messy, and so.
Forth.
And so there’s constantly a tension, I think, between having a tool
that better represents and better works with how we tend to think versus
having a tool that, for example, can persist that data over hundreds of
thousands of years, or just a few years in the case of today’s
software.
And I think kind of grappling with that, not to mention just the
complexity of actually building such a multimedia canvas is a lot of
what the tools for Though space is about.
00:06:35 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I would argue that at least the current
tools for thought space, which is maybe a little bit overindexed on
building sort of Rome clones and variations, and I think there’s
probably much wider space to explore.
I’m certain there’s much wider space to explore, but those, of course,
yeah, Rome notion, they’re in the same vein of, yeah, plain text files,
marked down, Emacs org mode.
Very symbolic oriented and of course symbolic representation, yeah,
mathematics, written language, of course, even programming is just an
incredibly powerful way to do things, but this spatial and visual side,
I mean, we talked about this with Anne Lohr back in the episode on
thinking in maps and sort of diagrams and literal maps in some cases, as
being a spatial and visual way to represent things. Or there’s
something like data visualization.
Of course we can’t go in an episode without mentioning Brett Victor,
and I was just rewatching some of the humane representation of thought,
where he talks about the invention of the modern chart or data
visualization. I think it’s in the, maybe the 1700s, 1800s by William
Playfair.
And this idea of creating a chart where you got time on one axis, and
some thing that goes up and down, like money or population or some other
thing on another axis, turned out to be a really powerful way to tap
into our spatial reasoning and a much better way to get overviews and
see patterns in data, but that would be invented just like everything.
So that’s an amazing tool for thought, I think, an example of in that
sort of spatial and visual side that we think is Maybe under explored in
the digital realm or right at this moment in the digital realm.
00:08:16 - Speaker 1: Right? And I also think there’s an element of
time and process here.
So there are some use cases where you want a very visual and spatial end
product. A map is perhaps the canonical example of that, but I think
much more common is a case where the process along some of the Steps
asks for such a format.
So for example, if you’re eventually going to write an essay, the final
artifact is going to be plain text, essentially. But I find at least
it’s quite hard to start ideaating and brainstorming and sketching an
essay, like basically in a text editor, you know, maybe I’m going for a
walk or I want to be giving myself a voice memo or I’m sketching some
ideas in my notebook, or I’m drawing some diagrams, right? And so you
have this process where often I find in the beginning stages of
ideation, brainstorming, sketching, outlining, you can really benefit
from this freeform spatial multimedia model. But then you have the issue
of if that’s step one, but the final step is plain text, how do you
navigate that jump basically? Do you jump tools? Do you have some kind
of conversion step? I think often what people do or often what people
have done in the past is they just kind of punt on it. And they find a
tool that’s like flexible-ish enough to do some of the brainstorming
and like presentable enough to do some final publishing. I think notion
is actually a really effective example of that where it’s really nice
to do the whole process in one tool, even if it’s not ideal for either
end. Or sometimes people, I think they jump tools like they do some
sketching in the notebook and they have an outline for their essay, and
then they go type it up, they basically got to retype up all their
notes. So I think there’s an interesting potential for tools that allow
a more gradual and continuous process where the shape of the content
evolves from a messy sketch to a typed up essay, for example.
00:09:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and there may even be some value to the
transcription process.
So in the coming up with what you’re going to write for a long form
prose piece, let’s say you’re a journalist or you’re just writing a
blog post for your own personal thing, of course, in the end it is going
to be this linear one dimensional starts in the top left for left to
right language readers and ends at the bottom right and flows very
linearly, but when you’re figuring out what to say, maybe you draw on
your whiteboard, you’s catching your notebook, you use index cards that
you can move around on a table.
And maybe you find what you want to say, but then actually sort of
transcribing that fresh into, I don’t know, your writing tool or
whatever works.
Maybe that works OK in a lot of cases.
There are some examples in the digital realm.
I think we’ve spoken about them or linked to them before, but this
company Literature and Latte makes one of the maybe best known kind of
dedicated long form writer’s tool, which is Scrivener, I think it’s
really intended, especially for novelists, fiction novelists. But they
also have another tool called Skel, I believe it is. I’ll link that in
the notes, which is kind of cards on a canvas, Post-it notes, desktop
thing, maybe it’s not as sleek and modern as Muse, but I’ve run into
people who use Skel in the same way you might use Muse, and notably
they’re both from the same company. And they’re intended, but they’re
just for those different stages, precisely like you said.
One is this ideation, you’re figuring out the arcs of your character
and maybe even want notes that aren’t even going to be sort of in line
to the story. There’s backstory about a particular character or a
place. You’re not necessarily going to just have a paragraph where you
say so.
So it was from here, they’re this old and what have you, but as a
writer, having that floating around on the edges as a reminder while
you’re near your other kind of plot elements can be useful. So that’s
another example of the nonlinear free form, and then eventually you
somehow collapse it down to this one dimensional long form prose format.
00:11:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think there’s just a ton of potential
in that type of tool, and I feel like we’re only just beginning to
explore it as an industry. We kind of take for granted that you’re
gonna be starting with like a text buffer and you’re gonna type stuff
in and that’s that. And I think it really impacts our ability to
develop creative ideas, and I do believe that as we develop more tools
that are more aligned with how we’re thinking, they’re more
multimedia, they’re spatial, they’re free form, we will in fact have
better ideas. That’s one of the big bets of news.
00:12:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, thinking about the linear kind of top to
bottom flow of text or symbolic language, I also had me thinking a bit
about terminals, or reppel, sometimes they’re called.
You know, when you think of computers, text is like really foundational,
and then the terminal, at least for Unix folks like us, that’s a place
where we spend a lot of time, it’s a venerable, it’s sort of a way to
have a conversation with the computers the way I think of that a little
bit, a little bit of the gliders, man, computer symbiosis, but I always
find it interesting if you dig into why does the terminal.
Work this particular weird way with a lot of control characters and
whatever and then you get into this TTY thing.
What does TTY stand for? Well, that’s short for teletype and these like
teletype things date back to the 1800s, their stock tickers, that sort
of thing. They were essentially these ways to have again the computer or
some automated device produce a linear stream of symbols.
I think later they were adapted to mainframes, maybe in the 1960s or
something like that. And then even when you go to word processors,
whether it’s like the WordPerfect and whatever in the 1980s or Xerox
PARC and there what you see is what you get word processor, and even
today Google Docs still has this quality. You start in the top left, you
go top to bottom. That’s kind of it. Except, I do think a breakthrough
or, and maybe this is less at the symbol level, but it is at the overall
corpus level, is linked. Let’s see you had wikis first, I think the web
with hypertext, you could argue is clearly the biggest and strongest
example of that.
And a lot of the excitement also around tools for thought right now,
notion first, you know, sort of a modern wiki in many ways, Rome with
its backlinks, lots of others have focused on the linking elements of
things, and so now you do get a graph of your knowledge and so.
The individual documents are still these linear streams of text, but you
can kind of pop around between them and the web, I think, takes it even
further and Notion I think does this reasonably well also, which is
letting you put multimedia elements in images, video, that sort of
thing. Although in the end I think notion is still very much inherits
that sort of top to bottom, typing into a word processor kind of thing,
and the web has more free form, but of course if you really decompose
it, you know, you hit view source in your browser, in the end there’s a
top to bottom linear document made out of characters.
00:14:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s interesting. This is clarifying for
me that there’s a couple of dimensions at play here. There’s the
dimension of what’s the datum type, and by datum I mean like the atom
of information, which could be a text paragraph, it could be an image,
and then there’s a dimension of call it like interactivity or
freeformness, if that’s a word.
00:14:54 - Speaker 2: Unstructuredness maybe.
00:14:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and the examples that you gave are
interesting because when we think of text, we often think of the
straight up plain text buffer and sublime or whatever, but you gave the
example of a wiki. Reppel, I would include social networks like Twitter
in there.
There, the datum is still text, but it’s very rich and interactive in
other ways, right? And I think that that’s compelling because there’s
all these nice properties of text as a datum, but there are a lot of
limitations with plain text as a pure linearization of text datums,
right? And again, this kind of gets into what I think we’re trying to
do with Muse, where we really like text as a datum, and I think it’s
really important, perhaps the foundational one. But you don’t want to
be limited to putting just text just in a line.
00:15:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Twitter’s a great example. I hadn’t
thought of that one, where of course as text first, it’s even famous
for that 140 characters, now 280 originally started with essentially
sending SMS messages before they kind of adapted to the mobile client
world, but I would argue that its value and richness does come not just
from the text, but from the links, from the images, from the video.
And furthermore, that there is this atomic unit that can contain all of
the above in a particular container, which is the tweet, which often is
represented with this card, you can invent that. And actually that’s a
nice note for what we’ll get onto later, which is sort of the block
text concept, and that is an atomic unit, and then of course, news has
its cards, so I think all of those sort of relate a bit.
So in thinking about the importance of text and what we might like to do
for use again, we love text, we believe in it, we just think it’s so
well handled or supported, or that’s where a lot of the interest,
innovation focus has been on computing tools and we saw the iPad and
it’s particularly. The pencil, which as we talked about in the iPad
episode here recently, was kind of the thing that starts to make it
potentially a different type of computing tool that’s unique and so we
wanted to take advantage of those making another kind of text first tool
on the iPads it felt not quite right.
But having done that, having invested heavily in the spatial and visual
side, now we think, OK, we have these text cards, they’re pretty basic.
Text is still really important, what can we do to bring that in? And in
some ways I kind of draw the spectrum or something like that on digital
products as you have the increasing number of I don’t know, tools for
thought or something like that that again I think are very influenced by
the notion and Rome side of things but are again lineage going back to
Emacs org mode and work flowy and all that sort of kind of stuff tend to
be text first. Yeah, you can do some multimedia, but the multimedia is
in line with the text. That’s the focus. It’s on desktop computer,
you’re using a keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, etc. And then you have the
world of, I’ll call them digital whiteboards, which I think people
often do want to categorize news as, that’s kind of what it looks like
at first glance. I don’t think it’s actually quite right or that’s
not at least our long term vision, but you have something like Mirro,
for example, or fig jam, or even like these sketchbooks like good notes,
I think you and I have both used quite a bit. That essentially allow you
to do very free form stuff. It’s spatial. You can drop in images, you
can sketch, maybe you can do so collaboratively, but notably I think all
of those that latter category, you can put text in, but it’s not fun.
It’s basically the same as putting text in photoshop. I mean, imagine
trying to write a blog post in Photoshop with a text tool. It’s
miserable concept.
00:18:27 - Speaker 1: It kind of reminds me of when you need to annotate
PDFs for like legal forms, you gotta go like annotate, insert text, and
it gives you the chunky text box, you know, you can do it, yeah.
00:18:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And I actually had the opportunity
to speak to product people from both Miro and Fig Jam recently, and they
confirmed, yeah, text is not something that’s important to us. We think
it’s useful to drop in the equivalent of a Post-it note or a little
title or something, but it’s just, that’s not what we’re doing.
So I think or hope that the hypothesis we’re exploring here with this
beta is that bringing these two together, richer tech support. And this
visual spatial sketchy environment could be something really powerful
and maybe a more useful thinking tool than either of those apart.
Although I’m very conscious of the, let’s say the opposite side, which
is uncanny valley, right? Sort of like not very good at editing text,
but the text gets in the way of the free form stuff, that would be the
downside of that, and that’s why I want to explore it through this
beta. Now it’s Ben, our colleagues Yuli and Leonard, both of whom have
been on the podcast before, they’re really driving the vision on this,
doing some incredible work, as always, and I know you’ve been more
heads down on the sinking side of things, so I think you got a chance to
try the text blocks beta recently. What was your reaction as someone who
is coming in a little bit cold or a little bit fresh to the idea?
00:19:52 - Speaker 1: In the most recent beta of the text blocks, I
think I got a glimmer of something really special.
It’s this flow where you have a series of blocks of text, sort of like
a to do list or a brainstorming list, and you can move the blocks
around, and the list automatically reforms, and I really like that
because before I used to do this sort of thing with the pencil because
then you can do lasso select and you can move stuff around, but it’s
always so. to use the pencil for everything, or I could do these lists
on a desktop, but then, you know, you’re sitting at your goofy office
chair and stuff, and it just doesn’t feel very creative.
But with this latest beta, I think we’re getting close to feeling like
the text tools plus the blocks, plus how they are manipulated is a
really natural extension of how you’re thinking, where you’re saying,
oh, this idea I should move down or move up, and you can basically do
that in the app. So I’m pretty excited about it.
00:20:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and you hinted there at um one of the core
ideas, which is why we’re calling this text blocks, which is the blocks
concept, I think. I don’t know where it started actually.
My first real encounter with it was notion, although I feel like the
computational notebooks that I used well prior to that, like IPython and
Jupiter had a model like this more for the purpose of kind of almost
calls back to the reppel type environment or this top to bottom
execution flow, but this idea of stacked cells, it was almost like a
spreadsheet that only went in one dimension, worked surprisingly well
and of course the thing that makes it a notebook. is that it’s not just
code, but you can drop usually mark down cells in there and you can move
those around and have the explanations in line. It works out to be a
pretty natural way to work to have this structure of the top to bottom
blocks, and then within that you can have, in the case of freeform pros,
you can basically just type however as you would in a normal text
buffer.
And so then I think notion, as again, my first real encounter with that,
took that idea of essentially each paragraph is a block, and that by
itself, it was just text. There’s some things that are cool about it
for like reordering lines and stuff, but I think it wouldn’t be worth
the hassle because it can be confusing when you switch between character
select mode and block select mode.
There’s still lots of ways that something like notion, roam, or craft
behave in a way that’s quite different from the Google Docs word
processor, them, whatever lineage of text buffer editing, where I think
it starts to excel is when you bring in other things that aren’t text.
So, images, video, links. Tables, convent boards, and I think this is
part of the power of modern digital computing. You can do these
multimedia documents, you can illustrate things, you can drop in
screenshots, etc.
Google Docs, for example, I use this kind of an internal memo thing for
a long time. You can put images in there, but it tries to make it kind
of a giant character. They’re very weird to work with. It’s just it
feels wrong. And having these stacked blocks where most of them are
texts, but they can be other things like images and Video and so on,
somehow that makes the whole thing, even though it’s still a text first
environment, it feels much friendlier and more natural to this
multimedia world we live in now.
00:23:02 - Speaker 1: And I think we’re also getting a line of sight on
this grow a document use case that we’ve been striving for for a long
time.
So this is the idea that you start with some seeds of an idea. Basically
it might be some sketches or a picture of a whiteboard you took or a
voice memo, and what you want to end up with is, say, an essay, and
there’s several steps to the creative process. And one of the things
that’s exciting about the new text feature plus blocks is you can see
it as a trellis for that growth, right, where you start with Line, which
maybe is initially just like one or two word snippets, or maybe it has
some pictures thrown in, or maybe it has some handwritten notes thrown
in. And then as you go through, you’re rearranging, but also sort of
expanding each of these blocks. So your little block that says, you
know, to do insert paragraph about food here, that grows into a full
paragraph on the essay. And likewise, your little picture of a
whiteboard of some diagram gets replaced with a nice diagram that you
create, right? And that way the essay sort of organically grows and
critically it also Happens in one place. So there’s no point where you
need to jump from your notebook to your brainstorming tool to your
authoring tool. You can sort of do it all in one place. And I don’t
expect that you would do the full creative process in Muse. I think you
would probably stop at like the sketch or the outline or the draft
phase, you would move to an authoring tool and a publishing tool for the
final step, but even the idea of growing the whole meat of the essay in
Muse is really exciting to me.
00:24:24 - Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I’ve done this kind of writing
workflow myself, and I’ve heard from lots of folks writing in to
support or just that I talked to casually that they use Muse in this way
for their own writing workflow.
Jeffrey Litt showed something like this for his newsletter, previous
podcast guest.
We have a fiction author that described a similar way of working through
sort of plots and character development and things.
Now I think in the current kind of text cards thing, they’re basically
like Post-it notes.
And what I do like about that, and I do this in the analog world as
well, I know I have a lot to say on the subject, but I just don’t know
the structure. I don’t know the table of contents. I don’t know where
to start. So you can just take a stack of index cards or Post-its and
just write down the first thing that comes into your head, you know, the
seven word version of it, pull the Post-it off the stack, set it aside,
right the next thing comes into your head, and do that until you got 20
of those. Now go arrange them on a wall or something, right? And you
might start to see a pattern emerge or a narrative arc or something like
that. Right.
I have used Muse for that for years now with the kind of post-it cards,
but it’s like you said, you stop pretty early because once I have the
rough ideas roughly in the order I want, and maybe a few scribbled
arrows and highlights and things like that, I go, OK, I’ve made it this
far. I don’t want to do any more substantial writing. I don’t want to
do any really amount of big investment in the words. It’s really more
just the high level concepts, and I want to go over to my writing tool.
Now with the text blocks, potentially, you can do more of the long form
writing. Again, it’s not a full-fledged text editor, never intended to
be, but you can at least get a lot more of the core ideas written down
and then basically use your select tool, just grab everything, hit copy,
pop over to a writing. Tool like Kraft Ulysses or your WordPress blog or
whatever it is, paste it in and then go and do your more substantial
wordsmithing. But at that point you’ve got the flow, the order, the
structure of the piece, maybe some of the major phrases and opening
sentences of each paragraph and that sort of thing. And now you can go
and start really putting the meat on the bone.
00:26:25 - Speaker 1: Now we’ve talked about jumping to a full-fledged
authoring and publishing tool for writing, which I do think you’re
gonna need to do if you have an external audience, you’re gonna want to
create a PDF or something similar.
But I’m saying is that often for internal communications within a
company, you can get by with just using the ideation and brainstorming
tool as the quote unquote publisher. So we see this a lot internally
with both muse and Notion. People create muse boards or notion documents
and use those as the final artifact that they’re gonna share with their
teammates because yeah, they’re a little bit sketchy, but that’s
fine.
We recently had a good planning session where we used a beta of the text
blocks and it was really cool to see that and it’s actually nice cause
it kind of correctly reflects the state of the ideas.
You know, it’s this notion that you don’t want it to seem too rough
nor too polished, because the ideas are sort of in this intermediate
state, which I think the muse boards with some text cards and some
highlighting and some images and stuff that show which is nice.
00:27:23 - Speaker 2: Fidelity, the representation should hopefully
convey the level of polish of the ideas as this uh carefully crafted
plan intended to be conveyed to a wide audience versus a thing that we
sketched together in an hour of a planning session. Right? It’s a
really good point on the publishing side of things. And I think that any
idea that you want to express, again coming back to that, writing
something down as the original tool for thought, externalizing an idea,
and you can start on one end of the spectrum is just you want to express
it for yourself. And that’s the sketchbook, that’s what M is focused
on today. It’s just, let me get this idea out of my head, explore it on
the page, see if there’s legs, develop it.
But I never intend to share it, at least not in this form with anyone
else.
The other extreme is I’m a journalist writing a piece for The New York
Times or I’m a documentary maker and I’m going to put my thing on
Netflix and it’s going to be consumed by potentially millions of
people. And so there’s going to be a very high degree of polish and a
whole long process going from ideation and sketches to drafts and drafts
and revisions to Some maybe post-production process to make it really
polished.
So those are the two ends of the spectrum, then you have a lot in the
middle, and I think internal memo culture accompanies is a very big, I
don’t know if you call it a publishing, it is a type of publishing in a
way.
So for example, at Hiroku, I think we typically use GitHub and just. As
a way to kind of publish memos, email, of course it’s a classic kind of
internal memo. I’ve used Google Docs in the past, as I’ve mentioned,
at Muse we use Notion pretty heavily, but more and more we use Muse just
depending on what the item is.
But Muse makes it hard to publish. We don’t offer a good or easy way to
screenshot or PDF, that sort of thing. Again, that’ll be coming in the
future, since our focus really has been on that individual ideation
point.
But yeah, if you think about, OK, when I write a memo in notion for my
teammates, well, I only have 5 teammates, or there’s only 5 people in
the muse team, which means I have 4 colleagues, so there’s a total of 4
people who are going to consume this, and I want it to be
comprehensible. I want to respect their time. I want them to be
energized by the idea. I want them to just understand what I’m trying
to say, so it’s worth a little while. to make sure I’ve got my
thoughts together and it’s not just a stream of consciousness that no
one can follow, but it’s only for people and people I’m pretty mind
melded with and we have a lot of context, so it can be pretty rough. And
on that same note, we do share muse boards internally even though there
isn’t great mechanisms for that yet, and it works well because again
it’s sketchy and it’s It starts as this individual ideation, but it
doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to cross that threshold to something
that I can give to you or Leonard or all four of you, and you can
understand because you have this context and we’ve already talked about
these ideas before and this is just another iteration on an overall
philosophy of what we’re trying to do with this company and product.
00:30:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, super interesting, and I like that you
mentioned spectrums because one of my favorite intellectual tricks is to
look at spectrums or grids and interrogate each of the points on it or
along it. And now that you’ve talked about spectrums, this kind of
connects back to one of the original impetuses from you, which is to
speak in terms of spectrum. There’s a lot Software for the extremely
populated side of the spectrum. This is like enterprises where you have
Lassian wikis and so on, just because there’s such a big amount of
money there. And there’s a fair amount of software for the individual
side, if for no other reason, that’s kind of the base case and you kind
of got to start there before you add collaboration. But we had this
hypothesis that a lot of the creative magic happens. In small groups,
maybe it’s 3 to 30 people. It’s the whiteboard, it’s the brown bag
lunch, it’s talking over dinner at the summit, and what would it look
like to have a creative tool that really embraces and supports that. And
if you back into the amount of fidelity, it’s probably this
intermediate level that not coincidentally, Muse tends to work with. So I
think there’s another way to look at how text blocks and the other
features around it can support the type of group creative thinking that
we want to see more of.
00:31:29 - Speaker 2: And I’ll make a mental bookmark to do an episode
some time on our vision for collaboration. I know you and Leonard have
been doing some deep sketching on that just recently here and some
exciting ideas shaping up, but I think one of the core constraints that
makes it interesting is that point in the spectrum where you’re talking
about.
I ideation to share with this small group of colleagues and that’s very
different from, I don’t know, a presentation you could argue is
something that is intended either for a larger audience or maybe you’ve
got your keynote deck for your client, you want to press them because
everything is super polished.
You don’t need to impress your colleagues or hopefully you don’t need
to if you have the right kind of team. Instead, what you want to do is
really get those amazing ideas flowing.
As Nicholas Klein would say, get the creative collaboration going, turn
my ideas into our ideas. I think there is a big opportunity with digital
tools to allow that to happen for these small teams, but on a remote
basis. Now, what are the challenges ahead for trying to bring text into
this visual and spatial environment?
00:32:35 - Speaker 1: Well, there are some interesting nitty gritty
design issues with text.
So one that we’ve been grappling with is text is only sort of spatial.
So think about an image, an image definitely has a two dimensional
representation. You can make it bigger or smaller, you can translate it,
it basically works, where text, it’s really linear and you need to
choose some way to wrap it, and by the way, the wrapping might change
depending on your font or even your text engine. So we have a little bit
of an impedance mismatch between the very visual spatial original
conception of muse, where you just to be concrete, you could basically
take a picture of your iPad and that’s how you would expect it to
render in all cases, versus text which people expect to kind of reflow
basically. And so how do you reconcile those two worlds? I’d say
that’s basically an open design question for us. We have some ideas.
Another related issue is that text, especially small bits of text, they
don’t quite map as neatly to the card block idea that we’ve had
throughout Muse, because Again, for something like an image or a PDF or
a video, it feels sufficiently substantial that you want a card that has
a different background, it has borders and so forth, it feels like a
distinct item, whereas if you had a one word item on your to do list,
for it to be a whole card, it’s like a bit much, which is one of the
reasons that I think our current Text implementation feels a little
weird in some cases because you have this like basically huge card for
one word, just it’s kind of missized, but then you have these new
items, I guess we’re calling blocks which are very related to, but
they’re not exactly the same as the cards that we’ve had on boards
previously, for example, perhaps they’re transparent or translucent. So
figuring out how to evolve the mental model and the design interactions
to support that is another tricky design problem.
00:34:29 - Speaker 2: Yeah, those are two very significant and concrete
ones, and I think it does reflect going back to this symbolic versus
spatial.
The nature of a diagram, the fact that the circle is next to the arrow
is very significant information.
That’s important. You can’t put the arrow under the circle and now the
same thing will be conveyed, but one value of this one dimensional
string of characters is that you can display lots of different ways. The
web is very good at this with responsive design. If I open something on
the phone, it reflows everything. So that I can read it comfortably in
that format, but if I open it on a big wide screen monitor, things look
different there. But the text content, if I was to take a screen reader
or just read aloud, a particular piece of text content there should come
out the same, no matter where it wraps the words, no matter if I have
the font size cranked up to make it more legible or something like that.
And so now we have this mismatch.
00:35:23 - Speaker 1: And Adam, you also alluded to another big set of
challenges with text, which is editing. So there’s two pieces to this.
One is, as we introduce these text blocks, you have the issue of text at
the block level versus text at the character level. And with a
traditional text editor, all the manipulations are done at the character
level or they’re basically macros for doing character level
manipulations, you know, you double or triple click or whatever it is to
select the whole paragraph, but that paragraph is two indices
essentially at the character level, right? Whereas we want and use to be
able to support manipulations at the block level to be able to reorder
whole items.
But then sometimes you’re kind of crossing that boundary, like, what if
you want to select one whole block and half of the next block and delete
it? Does that actually do that or is it like both blocks or just
disallow it, you know, that’s the kind of design stuff that we’re
grappling with on the text front. And then there’s the whole like
actual editing in the sense of adding and removing.
Characters, which, as we’ve talked about on the podcast before, is
quite difficult on the iPad because people have different input
modalities, they might have voice, pencil, touch, or keyboard, and even
the keyboard is potentially not as high like throughput as a desktop
keyboard for various reasons. So figuring out how to allow effective
editing that also embraces the different input modalities that you have
with the iPad.
00:36:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, as we talked about in our iPad episode
recently, the multimodal aspect, you’ve got a keyboard, a trackpad, a
pencil, your finger, voice input, potentially, or some combination of
those, probably you don’t have all of them. You have some subset of
those.
On one hand is part of what’s exciting about the platform and opens up
a lot of new possibilities, but it also makes it trickier in some ways
compared to the more known form factor and even posture of the user when
you talk about desktop systems. Right.
Yeah, I’ve used a folio keyboard for a long time, but I recently picked
up the magic keyboard, which is kind of this thing that the tablet
sticks to magnetically and has a little trackpad, and then you can pull
the tablet off when you want to do tablet mode stuff.
It’s really great. I see now why I got good reviews. The price feels
disproportionate to me. It costs significantly more than one of the
smaller test iPads that I have that I use for QA on Muse, so I’m not
sure. that’s really something I’d recommend broadly or even we can
expect users to have, but some kind of hardware keyboard is fairly
commonplace, whether it’s a simple little Bluetooth keyboard or using a
folio keyboard or something more like the magic keyboard, but it does
mean you’re in typing mode versus reading, sketching and rumination
mode.
And maybe that’s OK, but what I found in my own testing of text blocks
is that I tend to go into typing mode and I type a whole bunch of stuff,
I’m moving them all around the board with my finger, but essentially
it’s a bunch of texts, and then I pull the tablet off, grab the pencil,
now I’m highlighting, now I’m Rearranging, and I think that works OK,
but I would love something a little more fluid moving back and forth,
but I think that’s probably out of scope for us.
I think that remains an unsolved research problem to be tackled if the
tablet’s truly going to become a new kind of creative tool.
00:38:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, a super important open research problem.
It’s not gonna be in scope for us for this iteration, but I do think
it’s very important for us to solve it for the iPad if the iPad’s
going to realize its full potential, which we know again alluded to in
our last episode.
I mean, just to give you a couple concrete ideas. I don’t know I’ve
even told you about these before. I mean, so maybe this is your first
time hearing them, but one thing I would like to see is a tool for much
faster and slicker input of voice.
So I always has like this voice thing, but it’s kind of slow and it’s
laggy, and it’s like, OK, you’re entering voice mode and then you’re
exiting, it’s like a whole thing, right? And what I would like is a
tool in our toolbar that’s like the red ink or the eraser, where you
press your finger down on the iPad, you say two words, take it off, and
then you get a text card where your finger was, where you just said, I
think of how good that would be for like building a to do list or doing
some brainstorming.
And another thing I would like to see is, I think the pencil is actually
potentially very good for editing text in the sense of cutting it and
manipulating around. So you can imagine a sort of exacto knife type tool
where you can basically cut the paper, and then you can imagine a finger
tool where you can move the cut pieces around, right? And the pencil is
actually very good and precise for that, maybe even better than the
keyboard.
Again, both those, there’s just very little exploration of such input
modes on the iPad to date, and it’s kind of a shame, but I do believe
we will get there eventually. Maybe it’ll be us, maybe it will be
someone else, but I think we need to see that to realize the full
potential of text on the iPad.
00:39:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve heard you mention those
ideas before, but I do find both of those exciting partially because
there is sort of incomplete or let’s say implementations that exist on
the iPad today that hint how those could be good. So in the case of the
sort of voice quick input, I do use create a new text card, tap the
voice thing, say three words. You wouldn’t want to do anything long
form but for more the Post-it style thing, particularly when you don’t
even care what the capitalization or punctuation is, and I like it quite
a lot. There’s probably a little psychological hump to get over with
talking to your computer, but that’s totally a thing you can adapt to,
I found. Yeah.
But yeah, you’re right, it takes enough tapping and special things to
get in there that sort of nullifies the convenience probably. And then
similarly with the pencil scribble, which is a feature in iPad OS that
essentially allows you to do handwritten input, and we do have a pencil
tool for that in Muse that some folks use, but it does have some downsides
and challenges, but one thing it does have is the ability to
essentially, well, scribble out words to delete them, and that feels
great. I really love that.
Now in practice, I don’t use that mode. Enough to kind of really that
be part of my life, but again, you could imagine seizing on some of
those sparks of something that feel good and this fast and precise and
expanding on that either in a research context or in product
development.
Well, I guess that’s how we’re thinking about text overall, so I’m
excited to see how this beta evolves. Now we’re trying something not
completely new but a little new in the sense that this beta is very
rough. It works, but there’s a lot of problems, a lot of quirks, a lot
of bugs, but we really wanted to get it out as early as possible to our
pro members to try it out and give us input not just on does it work,
but how do you see this direction as making sense. Again, coming back to
this. This is bringing together text and a visual spatial environment.
Is that something really powerful, exciting, new, opens new vistas in
your own creative work, or is it a weird uncanny valley where it’s sort
of not good enough at text to use much? And so what we’d love is to get
you to try it out and yeah, give us your thoughts. We did a version of
this once before with what was called the Infinite canvas beta, later
became flex boards, and it was similar in the sense that And the
infinite canvas work was going to be a huge investment in engineering
and design work. I think it ended up taking us something like 3 months
of wall clock time to get it all done. So we really wanted to feel a
strong sense of product validation, or this is valuable to people, you
know, we’re a small team, we have limited resources, we want to make
sure we invest them in places they’re gonna be useful, and that worked
really well because we gave, I think it was just a test flight kind of
beta, but we basically gave this pretty janky prototype. to people, but
got this instant powerful response of this is great. I have to have
this. This is so much better than what’s there today, even in its rough
form, and that gave us both the energy to push forward to the bigger
project, but also gave us useful context, things about disorientation
and getting lost on bigger boards and stuff like that that fed into the
final design.
So we’re hoping to do something similar here and actually if this
pattern works. Sharing data is pretty early to both validate the
direction, but also really get key feedback from people. That’s
something I’d like to make a really regular habit of. So yeah, if
you’re listening to this in, I guess, summer of 2021, when the beta is
still running, yeah, we’d love to have you try it out, try it for your
workflows, and give us basically a thumbs up, thumbs down, is this a
worthwhile direction.
00:43:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I’ll be looking to see if the text
blocks beta passes what I learned as the Wiggins product management
test, which is, you suppose the feature is going to be going away and
how mad would customers be about that? Would they really fight for it,
because it’s easy to say, oh yeah, this is fun, this is nice, but where
the rubber hits the road is, we’re thinking about not really adding
this to the product and the reaction that you want to see is absolutely
not, you know, I’m gonna fight you basically. That’s the level of
excitement we’re hoping for, but we’ll see, you know, that’s why we
do a beta.
00:44:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. I think it’s important or
one of my values product wise is to keep things streamlined, simple,
minimal, just what you need, not sprouting a million features, but of
course you also have to try a bunch of stuff over time to find the right
things, and so having a bit of a willingness to kill your darling. I
think is the screenwriting term for this, which is, you might really
like the idea, probably you can tell from our voices we’re excited
about the direction, but we want to see that it truly adds something
worthwhile to the product rather than just, it’s a nice idea, but in
practice it doesn’t pan out.
Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have
feedback, write us on Twitter at museAppHQ. We’re on email
[email protected]. I mentioned at the beginning, reviews on Apple
Podcasts and elsewhere are much appreciated, and I’m looking forward to
hearing all your feedback on whether text and muse makes sense.
And of course, in general, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the
philosophy of text and digital tools and tools for thought and spatial
and all those other things. So please tweet at us if you have a
reaction. All right, see you next time, Mark.
00:45:09 - Speaker 1: See you, Adam.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: That to me was the magic of the iPad, the direct
manipulation of the iPad with my hands. It just felt so human in a way
that the computers and even the phone never did.
00:00:19 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s
about Muse the company and the small team behind it.
I’m Adam Wiggins, joined today by my two colleagues, Mark McGranaghan.
Hey. And Leonard Sversky. Hi. And I’m very excited to say that we have
just booked our lodging and flights for our first in-person team summit
in a year and a half, is it? The last time was Arizona in early 2020.
So we’ve been doing all our summits, which is a very important way that
we plan our work and just bond as humans get out of the day to day a
little bit. We’ve been doing it all virtually, but that just is not the
same. So we’re gonna be meeting soon in France for a nice get together
and chance to really think some big thoughts. Look forward to seeing you
both and our two other colleagues in person.
00:01:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it should be awesome.
00:01:18 - Speaker 3: I’m kind of proud of us for actually making it
all this way basically, but yeah, it feels like we really need and would
really benefit from seeing each other again.
00:01:27 - Speaker 2: For a team that scaled a lot, we had the benefit
that the four of us already knew each other in many cases very well,
because we’ve been working together for years, we already have those
human connections. It’s easier to translate that to the virtual space.
But I think if you had a team that was adding a lot of people swiftly,
yeah, seems like a challenge to scale the culture, to keep the
creativity and vision, and all the things that just tend to come from
being able to not just see each other as moving squares on your screen,
but as real full three dimensional human beings.
So our topic today is the future of the iPad. So Muse is, at least at the
moment, an iPad only app, so clearly we’ve bet our business on it, and
we see big potential in the iPad as a creative tool, not just a
consumption device, but something you can use to create, do work, be
productive, and of course, for our purposes to think as a rumination
space. But we’ve been at this a few years now, it’s interesting to
look both at the history of how the iPad has evolved even as we’ve been
on it.
Then furthermore, at this moment, iPad OS 15 is in beta. It’s got some
enhancements to the multitasking capabilities, which is sort of a power
user capability, and all that just, I think, had me at least as I was
using the beta, reflecting on how has this platform evolved.
From our perspective as app developers as users that want to see it be a
great creative tool.
So I guess the first question that a lot of folks tend to ask. And I
think it was last year the iPad had its 10 year anniversary, and there
was a lot of articles about what does it mean or where are we at or how
has this platform evolved in this time, and I think the tenor there was
generally negative. I’ll link a few, but Strateteri, for example, has
one called the Tragic iPad, and they basically say it’s a device that
never found its purpose or never found its real role. It’s sort of too
big to be mobile and fit in your pocket the way a phone does, but it’s
not as powerful as a laptop. This thing doesn’t have a clear role in
people’s lives, at least that’s the way that was presented then. How
do you both see the role and who it’s for question with the iPad.
00:03:35 - Speaker 3: I think the fact that it doesn’t have a clearer
role is both the appeal of the iPad for many people that it can be a lot
of things and a lot of different things to everyone, but it’s also,
especially for us, the developers, it’s also the problem, right? That
we don’t really know what Apple has in mind for the iPad, but it wants
the iPad to be who it markets the iPad for. And so it’s hard to really
think about the future of the iPad and be certain what kind of app you
should build for it.
00:04:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, to my mind, the verdict is very mixed here.
So I think the iPad has succeeded as this unique third form factor
that’s somewhat mobile and critically has multi-touch input with a
pencil and for apps that are designed for that hardware, things like
Procreate and of course Muse, I think it’s uniquely good and it’s
really special.
The other thing that I think people envisioned for the iPad was this new
general purpose computing platform that would basically replace a lot of
the things that the Mac desktop has previously done, and I never saw
that and I still don’t see it. I think it’s a future we could get to
if we all really want to, but I don’t see it happening right now. I
know some people kind of use the iPad in that way, but I don’t get that
at all. So we could talk more about that, but that’s what I see as the
split vers on the iPad right now.
00:04:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, speaking as a user, I’ve done for
quite a while the big kind of stationary workstation, big monitor,
mouse, I’ve got my big podcasting mic that’s set up on a boom arm.
I’ve got various recording equipment, I got a ring light. This thing is
not a mobile workstation.
At all, and I like that.
It allows me to have all these multimedia pieces that I need, but it
also allows a more powerful computer with a bigger monitor and bigger
input devices and so forth, as opposed to a clamshell laptop. And then
when I’m traveling or going someplace, even in town for a meeting, I
bring my iPad.
And this is just so much more portable, right? It’s not just the size,
actually, it’s probably about the same in many ways as a standard
MacBook, but in terms of battery life, instant on, I’ve got an LTE SIM
card in there, which means it has always on internet, it’s really just
truly remarkable as a portable device.
Now you do hit the limits of what it can do, and I run into that when
I’m taking a longer trip if I’m traveling for a week, for example, and
then I want to do something heavier, certainly anything to do.
With kind of web development, for example, but even editing a really
long form essay or video editing, you can do all that, but you do run
into limits.
There’s just less software available. The software that’s there is a
little less powerful, but for me that bifurcated thing actually works
really well, and I feel like the laptop is actually a weird mix in a way
because it’s not as portable as the iPad, but it’s not as powerful as
the workstation.
So that works for me. The idea of doing 100% of my work on the iPad
seems untenable.
00:06:27 - Speaker 1: Adam, it’s so interesting that you and I have
arrived at a totally different conclusions than this. I think that
that’s been the case since day one. You were like, Mark, you should
check out the iPad. It just feels magical. It feels like the future.
And my response was basically no, except for the pencil, which is
awesome.
But you seem to really get along with it. I don’t know what to make of
that. And I wonder kind of where the median or average user is.
I do think a lot of people get away with the iPad as a sort of laptop
light, but I also think a lot of people, it just doesn’t work. And I
don’t know, maybe that’s more evidence for the mixed verdict.
00:06:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think for a lot of people, it’s a mix of
use cases and they basically find the ones that work for them and to
discount all the ones that don’t work for them. And that kind of helps
the iPad in that, yeah, it often isn’t great because of the software as
a general purpose computing was that really does everything you needed
to do. And so as long as you’re fine with that and stick to the things
that you know you can get out of it, then it can really fill that
specific hole that you want it from.
00:07:25 - Speaker 2: That’s true. It may be in some ways the market,
especially more on the consumer side, was trained in that direction from
mobile devices generally and the iPhone, which is, I know a lot of
people who, especially a younger generation or in some cases older
people who they just always struggled with computers. Like desktop
computers, the difference between I don’t know, minimizing a window and
closing an application was endlessly confusing, file management, all
this junk that never made that much sense to them. They don’t find it
fun.
And so then along comes a mobile device where they can do 80% of what
you can do in terms of sending emails and That kind of stuff and so they
just try to do everything on the phone because the phone makes it easy,
they understand everything. It’s hard to mess stuff up, you can’t get
viruses, you don’t need to manage your files, and they just essentially
decide to not do the things you need a computer for because it’s just
they would rather be on the phone and then they can make the decision
to.
Cut out some of those use cases, whereas maybe a really uncompromising
user that has really specific needs, either niche software or just wants
a lot of power, a lot of control, something like that is not going to be
satisfied with anything but sort of maximum computing capability, and
the idea of cutting out a few of those things that they can’t do is
just sort of like untenable.
Yeah, that feels like the future point you mentioned there, Mark, is
something that actually has come up a lot in our call user research, but
basically just talking to people that use Muse or want to use Muse,
which is they say something along the lines of the first time you use
the iPad or when I open the iPad, it just feels like the future. It’s
this magic device, it feels like they’re living in the future, and I
certainly feel that as well, but in a way it’s sort of like a future
that’s never quite coming true in the sense that you can do.
A lot with it, but again, at least when it comes to those creative tool
things, they haven’t really made the jump, and it doesn’t feel like
there’s a fast and furious, Adobe porting all their products over and
except far superior versions, or what if you want to use Figma or
sketch, those seem like really natural things that a person who is also
the sort of person that wants to use the iPad as a creative tool would
want, but you really can’t use them at all, and it doesn’t really seem
like that’s gonna happen anytime soon. So yeah, again, it leaves this
conflicted or mixed verdict in some ways.
00:09:42 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m always reminded of that first slide
that Steve Jobs showed when he introduced the first iPad and it kind of
had the iPhone on the left, the Mac on the right, and then the iPad was
introduced as that third device in the middle.
And I think we’re still trying to figure out what exactly the role of
that 3rd device is, even though we know, OK, it’s kind of supposed to
be in between, but does that mean it takes things from the Mac and makes
them simpler? Does it mean it takes what’s good about the iPhone and
makes it better? What’s the actual use case that’s being solved by
that 3rd device? Is it really only consumption based, which is kind of
what a lot of people already use the iPhone for? or is there actually
also a place for another productivity device or professional device that
can do things that the Mac can’t do?
00:10:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this gets at the heart of the matter
because I think once you put these 3 devices on one axis, the iPad’s
already in a lot of trouble because the phone is already so pervasive
and capable, people use it for a ton of stuff.
It’s great for content consumption, and even some creation now, and the
Mac desktop is uniquely powerful, and now, I would say that they’re
very portable, almost as portable as an iPad. So you really don’t have
a lot of space left for the iPad in that model.
That’s where you get these like kind of marginal and incremental use
cases like you have kids who use the iPad inside the desktops, it’s
lighter and cheaper, and you have people who watch Netflix on the iPads
as a bigger screen and like Adam types who take the iPad around so it’s
a little bit lighter and more portable.
Yes, but it’s not fundamentally different in the way that the Mac
desktop and the iPhone were.
Now I think there is a future where the iPad, it’s on its own axis,
which is things like pencil, multi-touch, these things that are uniquely
iPad. I just don’t see Apple really pressing on that front. I see that
more from a few specific apps.
00:11:30 - Speaker 2: What might be good to talk about now our
perspective as app developers in terms of a question that someone asked
me recently that I thought was interesting to think about is what are
the capabilities that you need from the platform to make your app better
or more powerful or more professional.
And there are some things that could be surfaced as maybe APIs that we
as developers can use to make our app behave in a different way, but a
lot of it really does come down to the operating system, and so for me
at least, I’d be curious to hear how you both see this, but for me, I
think the operating system is the weak point.
The hardware is unbelievable, world class. I think it’s just the best
computer we’ve ever made.
00:12:12 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the hardware is absolutely the best
hardware that’s ever existed. It’s not even close, it’s definitely a
software.
00:12:17 - Speaker 2: Right? And then the apps are weak, although I
think a lot of that is Ato economics, and we inherited this whole iPhone
consumer model and it makes it tricky to basically charge a reasonable
prosumer price for your software, so that that’s holding it back as
well a little bit.
But I think the operating system itself is one of the biggest weak
points. And I was really excited when, what was it 2 years ago,
something like that when they forked off iOS into, so now there’s iPad
OS as its own thing with its own version number and its own that sort of
thing. So I was really hoping that maybe that meant I have no idea what
things are like internally at Apple, but there’s a team whose job is To
make this operating system, it can diverge a bit from the phone. They
did that in the beginning with the dock and drag and drop, which were
both things that are only available on the iPad, and then that would
allow it to find that unique identity instead of constantly inheriting
things from the phone, which I think are at this point more of a
liability than an asset. It doesn’t seem like that’s quite happened.
Yeah, and I’m curious, again, from the app developer’s perspective
rather than say the user or just kind of market analysis perspective,
how do we see our experience as an app developer and trying to make
something for sort of professional use on this platform?
00:13:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, let me give a quick list of what I see
as the biggest features, and then I’ll build a little theory around
that. So I would say it’s powerful multitasking, general purpose file
management, payment structures and expectations, the whole payment
situation, and more control over the run time in the form of basically
downloading and running code things like scripting, extensions,
plug-ins, and so forth.
These are kind of the defining features of a desktop operating system.
And I think that’s not coincidental. I think the fundamental tension
here is pro use cases are almost by definition about taking multiple
different pieces and recombining them in novel ways that weren’t
anticipated by the original authors of those pieces, because if
something was simple enough to do in a fully premeditated and
pre-existing package, it kind of almost by definition wouldn’t be a pro
use case, right? That’s kind of a casual thing that’s already been
done before. So you need this ability to recombine pieces in ways that
weren’t anticipated by the platform, but that’s kind of antithetical
to how Apple thinks about the iOS ecosystem of they want everything to
be curated and controlled and to be on the rails, which they have many
good reasons for, but that’s what I see as the fundamental list and
perhaps a theory for why they’re not making a ton of progress on it.
One other thing I would add, I mean, I think you get very far with those
things. I think if you want to realize the full vision of this third
type of computer, you would need a lot of work on input. So an obvious
thing is to have a bigger screen, more like a desktop size screen that
you can put on your desk, multiple pencils, other physical input
devices, and software that really took advantage of the 10 finger
capabilities. Right now, most apps. Basically have one finger at a time.
You have some apps like Muse where you can use multiple fingers, but you
can imagine the muse approach to touch, which is use all 10 fingers
being pervasive throughout the operating system in all apps and perhaps
finding a way to replace the incredible speed and precision of a
keyboard. That’s a hard problem. But I think you would need to tackle
some of that if you want to really realize this third type of pro
platform.
00:15:30 - Speaker 2: Yes, so from that list, it gets the
programmability, the run time element, and that’s both individuals
being able to write their own stuff, scripting or write their own little
mini apps right on the device, that sort of thing, as well as something
like plug-ins that basically are fairly strictly disallowed, and I do
really see the tension there with essentially the security, you know,
the App Store and the iOS and the mobile model Android has a version of
this as well, maybe not as well done, but strict sandboxing, a little
bit of a curation review process, and then just really kind of
controlling what you can do. That is actually a lot of the reason the
platform is good and is able to, yeah, your system isn’t bogged down by
some weird ghost.
Process malware is not a problem, which is partially the
programmability. It’s also partially things like runaway background
processes and stuff like that.
So because the operating system controls all that so strictly, for
example, a lot of that has to do with how the battery life can be better
because the operating system has very, very strict guardrails for
exactly what can run and when.
And so I think a lot of that is good and some of them may need to be
changed or relaxed if there is pro use cases, but even before getting
into that, I really wonder if there isn’t lower hanging fruits in the
form of some of the other stuff on your list, and to me, a huge one
there would be multitasking, and I see that two forms. One is just the
interface, and happy to say that iPad OS 15 does improve on that a bit,
but it’s still could be a lot better. It’s pretty awkward, basically,
to like get two documents or two. Apps side by side and copy paste
between them, and there’s things with focus on the keyboard and all
that sort of stuff that is just not very nice, it’s not very fluid,
it’s not very memorable, it’s not very discoverable, either for,
let’s say a less sophisticated user or for a pro user that’s really
willing to invest, sort of it ends up being maybe a clumsy middle
ground, I’m not sure exactly, but I think that can be improved on from
the app developer perspective, the harder thing is something like, yeah,
for example, this background process thing.
So Muse we run into this a lot when we need to deal with a large data
export or import or something like that. And so maybe if you want to
export your entire Muse corpus, for example, in flat files, if you have
a big one like I do, many, many gigabytes, that can take a few minutes.
And I would just leave it running, except, of course, the device goes to
sleep. If I switch away from the app, the process gets shut down after 5
seconds. Again, the operating system is very strict about how it
controls that, which is part of what makes it good, but it’s also holds
you back from these pro cases and we end up having to come up with all
kinds of weird workarounds in order to do these things that we need to
do.
00:18:13 - Speaker 1: I’m smiling over here cause I’ve long given the
team a hard time about multitasking when Adam first said the iPad is the
future. I’m like, is the future you can run one program at a time. Now,
fortunately they’ve gotten a lot better about it, but yeah, that seems
like an obvious one to get to improve.
One related thing that we talked about in the podcast before, and then
I’ll bring up again is this idea of kind of a technology frontier. So
right now with our current sandboxing technology, you do have these sort
of two choices of the wild west and viruses and out of control processes
and all your battery and an app store where you can’t have plug-ins and
extensions and everything is very controlled.
Now, I think there’s a world where you have better sandboxing
technology that allows you to get more.
Of those benefits at the same time. You know, for example, if you had
much more granular and accurate accounting of what bits we’re using,
what pieces of power, you could finally control that or whatever, right,
while still allowing good actors to do some work in the background and
shutting off all the bad ones, right? Probably actually the easiest
thing there would be on the payments front where all the things that we
need to do with payments are well known. And I think people would be
fine using Apple if like you could give refunds and stuff, right? And
there’s a whole series of things that we could do to make that pretty
good. And that’s the kind of work and research that I would like to see
Apple doing if they’re serious about turning the iPad into a new pro
platform.
00:19:32 - Speaker 2: And what’s your perspective as a designer of the
app? Are there places where you’ve found either huge benefits from the
platform compared to, say, designing for the web or for desktop computer
or weak points in terms of things you can and can’t do?
00:19:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think to me the most interesting part is
actually not even iPadres, like it seems to me that, OK, they’re kind
of trying to make it more like the Mac and they are borrowing features
from the Mac, trying to come up with ways to make them work with touch
and this whole iPad system.
And eventually they’ll probably get there, like they’ll probably year
after year, figure out more things to add and they’ll have more and
more features.
Developers will be able to make more and more powerful apps.
But from a design standpoint, the more interesting question to me is
what should these apps actually look like and what kinds of apps does
Apple want us to build basically? And today, I really feel like it’s
not enough for Apple to improve iPad OS. They kind of need to lead by
example and build their own pro iPad apps and really have a shining
light of an iPad app that shows everything that the iPad can do and
shows the kind of interface that an iPad app should have in the minds of
Apple designers.
00:20:47 - Speaker 2: Right, so one thing Apple could do if they really
wanted to lead the way on the design front would be to take their first
party apps, keynote, numbers, pages and use them to really demonstrate
not just hey, here’s a reasonably good port of a Mac app to the iPad
and it’s usable, but actually really go above and beyond and make it
something where imagine Keynote seems actually like a pretty obvious
example of something that’s fairly visual and tactile. Could you make
it so that the keynote experience which so much better. People really
preferred doing it on the iPad to the Mac or the spreadsheet actually is
another interesting example where not only is that such a venerable and
useful kind of staple productivity tool, but also to me it feels like
pretty natural on the tablet form factor, and I often am poring over
spreadsheets with I don’t know business financial models or something
like that, and it’s nice to sit back in that more ruminating posture in
the reading chair and what have you, but beyond just kind of.
Assuming or very minor changes to a spreadsheet is no fun at all to do
anything with a spreadsheet on a tablet.
I feel like I could picture just maybe more emotionally, I can picture
what it would be like to have a spreadsheet that’s really amazing and
fun to manipulate on a tablet, even if it was not as powerful, but maybe
for like the very most basic common operations that you do that it could
really showcase that form factor’s capabilities, and yeah, no one’s
led the way on that, not Apple.
00:22:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there are a few layers to it,
right? So one reason why I actually want Apple to build more of their
own pro apps for the iPad is that I think that will make them see sort
of the pain points or the gaps in the iOS iPad or interface. So I think
a lot of the difficulties that we have with Pro iPad apps are actually
because of gaps in the iPad OS.
00:22:39 - Speaker 2: So maybe if Apple was putting more effort into its
first party apps less because they want to be successful with those apps
and more as a showcase or an example of what this platform could do,
then in turn they would be exposed to the weak points in the platform,
things that the app developers need like background processes or more
powerful gestures or other things they’ll discover those and then in
turn the platform would get better. But that sort of begs the question
also of What does make a great pro app or what does make a great pro app
on the tablet?
00:23:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and one way is certainly to just look at the
Mac and see what’s working there, try to bring that to the iPad.
And I think sometimes that works and that’s what Apple has been doing.
So for example, I think in one of the recent versions of iPad where
they’ve tried to bring the right click from the Mac to the iPad. And so
since the Mac has a mouse with two buttons, you can have a right click.
The iPad doesn’t really have that. So instead, you have the long press
on the iPad, basically. And then you get the same sort of context menu
that you would get on the Mac, which works. It does sort of add another
layer of more options that you can add like some hidden complexity that
you didn’t have before. It’s basically the same thing as on the Mac,
but it’s just a worse version of it.
00:23:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree there’s a lot of stuff that you can
transliterate over from the Mac, and I’ve argued earlier that they
basically should things like multitasking and a real file system and so
on, but to your point, it’s only gonna get you kind of 80 to 90% there
because a desktop will always have a bigger screen or will have a
keyboard, which is an incredible input device. Again, I think if you
want something really interesting here, you need to take advantage of
the things that are unique about the iPad, which are the pencil and 10
finger input, and I just don’t see a lot of activity there outside of a
few apps right now.
00:24:28 - Speaker 2: Now, since it seems like we’re falling a bit more
on the negative side, let me balance that out with a bit of positivity.
Also, since I’m the iPad feels like future guy, whether or not that
feeling is correct or not.
One example is the pointer stuff they introduced last year. So this is
essentially if you have a trackpad or a Bluetooth mouse connected to
your iPad, you get this little translucent circle that is your mouse
cursor effectively, and it sort of morphs according to what it’s over.
So, for example, if it’s over a button or if it’s over an app, it’ll
turn into a rectangle shape that mirrors what it’s over, and this
Sounds like a pretty minor thing, but once I used it, now going to a
desktop and it’s mouse cursor feels very old fashioned, and it actually
kind of boggles my mind a little bit that something so important and
basic as your cursor, which you’re looking at all day, you need to spot
it on the screen, you use it to do everything, basically hasn’t changed
in, I don’t know, 25 years.
And not to say that things need to change all the time, but generally
that’s a good indicator in the technology world that we’re improving
computers and they change and grow with time.
And just seeing this in some ways kind of minor design tweaks on what
the pointer can be, but it feels better, it looks better, it’s more
functional, it’s more discoverable, and I just go, wow, this is great.
Like, can we take more of these basic sort of. primitives and apply some
new thinking to them and things you couldn’t do before, right, these
smooth morphing animations, even something like a translucent cursor,
was not possible at the time these black and white cursors that Windows
and Mac and Linux use. Translucency was like a high powered graphics
operation. No way it could be a part of your standard mouse cursor.
Today, of course, that’s totally a trivial thing to do.
Now, a counterpoint there might be people are disappointed that they are
not applying this sort of innovation to the Mac and are investing it in
the iPad and in fact, the Mac is the work and productivity platform. Why
not improve something like pointing devices there instead? I find the
contrast really interesting, especially for someone like me who goes
back and forth between a Mac and an iPad in my daily work.
00:26:43 - Speaker 3: It seems to me like one of the most exciting parts
of the whole iPad platform, or at least the iPad system, is that Apple
does have teams like that that like they probably spent years just
designing and developing this cursor system and getting all the details
right and really going back to the start and not trying to just take
what’s on the Mac and kind of apply it to the iPad and make it work
somehow, but really think deeply about what its place on the iPad should
be.
00:27:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I see that as the positive version of
transliteration.
I feel like this happens in personal life.
For example, you move to a new house or a new office, or maybe if
you’re changing your productivity tools, it sort of forces you to take
stock of all the stuff that’s there.
You had weird stuff hiding in your closets or you hadn’t really
rethought how your kitchen was arranged because, you know, you just had
what you had and it worked fine, but when you’re changing it.
Everything, then you stop and you go, wait a minute.
I’ve actually changed my cooking habits. Let me change my kitchen to
match that, and you actually can end up with something much better.
And so I think there is a version of this where we’re translating
things like keyboard shortcuts or right click context menus or mouse
cursors to this new platform, and they think, OK, well while we’re
here, let’s rethink it.
Let’s take the things that are really great about it. And actually even
keyboard shortcuts is a good example of this to me, like this kind of
system-wide default capability affordance on the iPad, which is when you
hold down the command key, you get a nice pop up that shows you all the
currently available keyboard shortcuts in the current context in a
format that’s really standardized. You know, most Mac apps have some
kind of keyboard shortcut help sheet, but it’s hard to find, not
everyone has it, and it’s just always right there, and it’s incredibly
discoverable because if you hold down the command key and you’re like,
hmm, wait, what do I want? And you kind of pause there for a little bit,
then it pops up because you’re sort of being indecisive. I think it’s
like a really nice example of bringing across keyboard shortcuts are
amazing, including modifier key-based shortcuts, but bringing them to
this new platform was a chance to improve and enhance. And so I see that
as a lot of the ways in which there’s big potential in the iPad, and
what we just don’t know is whether that potential will be fulfilled.
00:28:53 - Speaker 3: And notably both of those innovations are about
inputs to the iPad and accessories to the iPad, the, the trackpad and
the keyboard. And to me, that’s really what’s most interesting about
the iPad and when you compare to like the Mac or the iPhone. We say the
Mac has a keyboard and it has some sort of mouse, and you can kind of
guarantee that every Mac has that, and that’s not really going to
change. Windows has some touch stuff, but that’s more added on top like
no app really makes that great of a use of it. And the iPhone just has
touch and they aren’t showing signs of trying to add a pencil or
external BlackBerry like keyboard to it, right? Versus the iPad has
really this flexible system of inputs, by default, it is touch and
that’s sort of the basis, but then every user adds their own input
devices to it. Some add an external keyboard to it, some have a keyboard
case where it’s semi permanently attached, and then you have different
kinds of pencils.
00:29:51 - Speaker 1: Now I’m realizing as you two describe all the
different ways that you use the iPad, it’s kind of alarming because
unlike the phone, And the desktop, where there’s basically one way to
use them and the phone it’s the thumb or the pointer finger, and the
desktop it’s a keyboard and mouse.
It sounds like people are using the iPad in all kinds of different
ways.
I could come up with at least 4.
There’s the muse style, 10 fingers, there’s the you’re holding it
with one hand and using a 1 pointer finger. There’s the Adam Wiggins
style keyboard with the iPad propped up.
And there’s maybe it’s lying on a desk it’s a 4th way, right, with a
pointer or a mouse like device, and it’s a benefit because there’s
always different ways that you can engage with the device, then as an
app designer, you kind of don’t know how they’re approaching the app,
and I guess in use cases we’ve kind of had to say we’re gonna embrace
this one or two styles of using it where, you know, for example, we kind
of assume that you have a pencil, but I don’t know, maybe if the
different input modes proliferate that becomes a sort of bigger problem.
00:30:47 - Speaker 2: Multimodal input is, I think, one of the things
that makes the iPad, or maybe just the tablet form factor generally, the
most exciting to me. I agree it’s a huge design problem as well as just
user research problem. You can’t necessarily support every possible
combination that people have, but I think that that Reflects how
computing is changing for humanity overall. I mean, it wasn’t that long
ago when you wanted to use a computer, you would go into the room where
the computer was, you would turn it on and wait for it to boot up, which
took a couple of minutes, and you sit down and you start your computing
session and you do that for some length of time, 20 minutes, an hour,
whatever it is. When you’re done, you power the whole thing down, you
stand up and you walk away, right? And then mobile brought this thing
where it was so integrated to our daily lives. You pull out your phone,
you look something up really quick on the map, or answer a text message
or something, pocket your phone again, and now comes, I think I read
somewhere, some statistics of people look at their phone 100 to 200
times a day, pretty commonly, and some of that maybe is social media
engagement loops sending you breaking news, notifications. really need
to be looking at your phone and you can talk about all the ways that
that’s interrupting, I don’t know, more human conversations and
whatever, but putting that whole discussion aside, I think that this
thing where computing is woven into our daily lives, where if I just
want to Google something quickly or look up the hours in a restaurant or
pull up a note on something, I can do that quickly and return to what
I’m doing in context. I use that all the time from everything from
looking up something with one hand while I’ve got my baby in the other
hand, you know, when you’re out in the world, all that sort of thing,
and I really like that, and the mobile platforms powered that.
And so I think the iPad and thinking of the iPad in again more of a work
productivity setting, it’s less about just whip it out and do something
quickly in 5 seconds and put it back in your bag, and more than I’m
here in my office, and I’ve got the iPad with the touch capability, but
it’s also got this really nice hardware keyboard. I’ve got the
trackpad, I’ve got the stylus, I’ve got voice input. I use the
dictation. Not hugely, but sometimes I’ve got my AirPods and I can
listen to things. So basically there’s all these different ways I can
interact with it. I’m moving around the room, I may carry it into
another room if I’m in a meeting with someone, and the laptop, I think,
kind of for all its mobility, it inherited that desktop. You sit down
and you’re in one posture, and that’s sort of the position you’re in,
and it’s this integrated to life. And that’s sort of related to or
overlapping with the multimodal input.
For me, it’s just a much more creative, comfortable, fun, I don’t
know, it’s just like, once you’re there, you can’t go back, but then
you have to go back because you can actually do most of the things you
wanna do on this platform.
00:33:36 - Speaker 1: No, totally, that to me was the magic of the iPad.
It wasn’t the cursors for me, Adam, but it was the direct manipulation
of the iPad with my hands. It just felt so human in a way that the
computers and even the phone never did. So yeah, plus one on leaning
into that for the future of the iPad.
00:33:58 - Speaker 3: I think this is another case where the iPad
software lags behind the iPad hard, where you have all these different
input devices. You have touched on the iPad, the pencil, the keyboard,
draws a trackpad things, and you can really mix and match them. You can
use the pencil in one second and switch to the keyboard in another, and
it all works great.
But then on the software side, they still kind of feel like different
modes. When you use the keyboard, you are probably editing a text field
somewhere. When you use the pencil, you’re on some sort of canvas
sketching area.
And as soon as you go outside of that, the pencil only emulates touch,
basically, like it doesn’t add anything to the experience. So that’s
why I would hope that Apple advances iPad OS in a way that you can
really combine these and say, press a key on your keyboard while
touching something or while doing something with a pencil. And that’s
also why I think it’s important that they start building their own pro
iPad apps because in the end, that doesn’t only need to be reflected in
the system software, but also in every app and you just kind of need to
come. To expect how these different devices that you can use with the
iPad really interoperate and not just uh stand for different modes.
00:35:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is an incredibly rich area. I
really hope we see more work in this, and I would emphasize that it’s a
lot of work. Like we have a multi-year research program going through
ink and Switch, and now Muse, like, how do you use more than one finger
at a time, right? Just that alone is a huge deal and doing it in a way
that’s responsive and accurate and so on. And so I could imagine teams
working on this for years to really bring that vision to life.
00:35:34 - Speaker 2: The one thing that often comes up when folks are
talking about the future of the iPad is whether it will or whether it
should merge with Mac OS.
So there’s something that happened a little bit in the Windows world,
for example, the Microsoft Surface hardware, which is one of my favorite
tablet stylus form factor hardware pieces.
But of course it runs Windows with all the baggage that entails, and
they have found ways to merge the touch and the stylus and the mouse
cursor that I think are not entirely successful, but you see where they
sort of brought together those platforms and those paradigms in their
way.
And many have argued that Apple is doing something similar.
They’re on a long, slow progression whereby, for example, adding things
like trackpad support to the iPad or you look at something like the
control center in Mac OS Big Sur and has these very big kind of
touchable chunky things that look like you should touch them with your
finger, but In fact, of course you can’t because the Mac doesn’t have
a touch screen, but at the same time, I think Apple’s been publicly on
record saying no, we’re not planning to merge those together, so I’ll
put the question to both of you, do you expect that as a thing that will
happen? And then separately from that is the thing you would like to
happen or that you think it’s a good idea?
00:36:50 - Speaker 3: So to me, it kind of comes back to the question of
what Apple wants the iPad to be and what really is the core of the
iPad.
And there are sort of a few possibilities there and it kind of worries
me that we still don’t know what it is.
So one possibility is that it’s really about the simplicity of the US
as we talked about that it just has more restrictions and it’s just
something that is a simpler version of what the Mac does. And in that
case, I don’t think it can replace the Mac. Then they are clearly
positioning the iPad as something that is more approachable and less
complex as the Mac, so the Mac has to stay where it is. Although then I
would also argue that Apple could invest into the Mac a lot more and
actually go into the opposite direction with the Mac and make it a lot
more complex and say if you don’t like that, you can always go to the
iPad.
00:37:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I see it similarly, I would break this into
two questions, which is, does the iPad grow to support pro use cases,
which means things like really powerful multitasking, powerful file
system, run your own code, things like that, as well as all the input
stuff that we talked about. That’s question one.
And question two is, does Apple want to continue to support pro users?
So there’s a world where the iPad continues to not support pro use
cases, and then kind of part B of that is Apple could continue to
support pro users through the Mac, or it could basically sunset the Mac
and say, you know, those folks are cool, but it’s a relatively small
piece of the market. We’ll let Windows and Linux deal with the weird
like audio editors and stuff and other normal people can use iPads and
iPhones.
My bet for the first piece is that I would love to see them turn the
iPad into a Pro Tool, as we’ve talked about, that’s a huge amount of
work, it’s a long path, so it’s kind of hard to predict that they will
do that. It’s kind of hard to imagine them giving up on. The Mac
because those users are such a keystone piece of the ecosystem, among
other things, it’s all software developers. That would seem to be a
mistake to me, but who knows, maybe there’s just so much money in the
iPhone, the iPad that they can get away with it. But I don’t think that
they will do is they won’t get pro users to use a non-pro tool. Just
won’t happen. People use our platform as they have in the past.
To be clear, the future that I want to see for the iPad here is that
they make a 24 to 30 inch version that has all of these powerful
features and that can replace or appear to the Mac desktop. I think they
could do that if they want to. It’s just given how things are going,
it’s hard to predict they will do that at this time.
00:39:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s a really important bridge
basically that Apple could cost.
Right now, yeah, iPad is the super mobile device and everything about
it, including the different inputs you can use with it.
I kind of built towards. OK, you can hold it in your hand, you can have
it at your desk, you can have it on your couch, and you can switch
between those within seconds.
And I think that’s part of the really big difference that right now
iPad is a really mobile first device and I could very well see Apple
deciding, OK, that is what iPad is about and we don’t want to make it a
24 inch or even like a 20 inch, 16 inch device because then you can’t
really hold it in your hand anymore. And that’s really like the line we
draw between the iPad and the Mac.
00:39:50 - Speaker 1: I also think, by the way, if this gets a little
bit beyond the iPad, but I think if Apple chooses not to pursue this
future of a pro tool for the touch surface class of devices that someone
else could do it. So, you know, someone could go buy a 30 inch touch
screen. Those are becoming increasingly available and write the software
and plug it into Windows or something. I guess we’ve kind of seen
Microsoft try that a little bit with their line of what’s that called
the Surface hub, surface, yeah. I think it would be a real shame if that
future wasn’t pursued somehow, so if Apple chooses not to do it,
hopefully we’ll find another way.
00:40:25 - Speaker 3: And certainly I think it would help Apple embrace
sort of the general purpose nature of the operating system, because it
doesn’t make sense on a 24 inch screen to have a single device, and it
doesn’t make sense anymore to use it on the couch. So you want to have
it on a desk and you want to do things on it that you do on your desk,
which are naturally more complex interactions. So in that way, I think
it would be really exciting for Apple to build a larger iPad, even for
the people that don’t want a larger iPad, like they would probably
still benefit from the development that the iPad gets out of it.
00:40:59 - Speaker 1: There’s an incredible endgame here where what was
originally iOS becomes adaptable from the phone to the iPad to a Pro
desktop class tool, and if you were able to figure that out, if you were
able to succeed in that research project, you could have this incredible
fluidity between the devices, maybe even using the devices together, for
example, your iPhone is on your desk as a little sidecar with some extra
controls while you’re working on your main iPad plus.
00:41:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that. Maybe that’s extending the
multimodal input even a little further, as sort of a multi-device world,
which I think we already kind of live in, you know, you’ve got your
Kindle, you’ve got your fitness watch, you’ve got your computer,
there’s other kind of devices that float around in your home or your
office. And I always like this kind of Hollywood thing with uh Tony
Stark on his lab where he’s got his like robot assistant he talks to,
but he usually has multiple screens and this is basically just a
Hollywood thing, but in some ways it also is compelling that the room is
the computer and the screens and the different devices, whether they’re
touch screens or holographic displays or voice interfaces, they’re all
just different affordances into that same computing medium.
And I think in a way, we kind of have a version of that now, in the
sense that we do have lots of devices floating around on our desks and
in our homes and so on, but they don’t coordinate that well with each
other, so yeah, you can imagine that there is a version of iOS that
flows across all of those different size screens and different form
factors, and they work seamlessly together, that could be pretty cool.
00:42:35 - Speaker 1: It’s so rare that when it does happen, it’s such
a shock. I remember the first time I experienced the Wi Fi flow where
you try to log on on one device and it like another device that has the
login, sends it to the other device. Oh my god, that’s so cool, right?
But you can imagine that for everything. Yeah.
00:42:52 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I feel like the fact that Apple is
putting that many resources and making the devices, the Mac, the iPad,
and the iPhone work together really points to me more to the fact that,
yeah, they aren’t trying to replace the Mac with the iPad. Like they
are seeing the iPad as a 3rd device and they want you to use it even
right next to your Mac and like they showed, I think with the iPad OS 15
and the next Mac OS version, you can kind of use your MacBook trackpad
and actually move the cursor over to the iPad and then control your iPad
with it and also use your MacBook keyboard. And it really, at least from
the demo, it really seemed seamless.
And to me, that’s really the exciting part of what Apple is doing,
where if the iPad is a 3rd device that I’m supposed to use next to my
Mac, then they can actually figure out these specific use cases that the
iPad is good for, and they aren’t forced to bring down everything that
the Mac does to the iPad, but they can say, OK, you you have the Mac,
you also have an iPad. And we can figure out exactly what interface
works best for each of those and maybe even more importantly, which use
cases are best for each of those.
00:43:53 - Speaker 2: Now obviously here we’ve spent plenty of time
speculating about what Apple will do, what they should do, what their
opportunities are, and that’s, I think a lot of folks in the industry
because they are such a powerful player, and certainly anyone who is an
app developer, you’re necessarily very much playing their game, and so
what Apple, who never, you know, announces ahead of time their roadmap
or their intentions, where they’re going, becomes a source of maybe
endless speculation.
But I think it’s useful sometimes to stop and just think, OK,
separately from what Apple will or won’t do, what is the computing
future that we want? We got to this a little bit with Rasmus Sanderson
and that episode talking about some of his vision for Playbit, but
notably here at Ink and Switch, Mark, you and I worked together along
with a bunch of other great folks on various research projects, and in a
way, we saw them circling potentially a larger vision.
I think at the time we called it the programmable personal knowledge
manipulator, not that catchy, I suppose, but, you know, you gotta start
somewhere.
And we envisioned something that had a form factor similar to an iPad or
a surface, where you have the tablet and the stylus and the 10 fingers
for touch, but potentially other kinds of input had maybe, you know,
local first storage, so you have a powerful file management like you do
on the desktop, and more suitable for collaboration in this sort of
cloud world, and that furthermore, it’s fully programmable, and then
maybe the base device doesn’t. Do a lot. It doesn’t come with a lot of
apps, it doesn’t have a lot of features, but you could sort of write
your own apps and browse the web and sketch, and that something like
that could be a very fun and powerful new kind of pro platform.
Again, not necessarily trying to replace the desktop, but a way to take
these computing capabilities that we have with modern hardware and
everything that’s been pushed forward by the mobile revolution and
bring that to the creative tools space. And we even put some work into
trying to bring those pieces together into a prototype, but we actually
determined it was just too early, too hard, probably too big for any one
company to do.
So that’s part of where we kind of split out the different pieces, and
one of those was Muse. We said, look, the best way to explore this kind
of multimedia canvas side of things is on an existing platform and that
platform was the iPad. But I still have that shining vision floating in
the back of my head, and I think it both leads me to, I’m doing the
mental diff between where the iPad seems to be going and that vision
that I have for that programmable knowledge manipulator that I want. And
the ways in which the iPad is changing to be more on that trajectory
versus not, makes me happier or less happy with the iPad, but then maybe
separately, like you said earlier, Mark, maybe someone else needs to
build that, and it’s a huge undertaking, but maybe Apple isn’t the
right company. Maybe they’re a consumer company now, not a creative
tools company, and maybe something, another company or another team or a
set of companies or open source project, I don’t even know, that could
really be focused on that audience and that sort of set of use cases
could do something pretty special.
00:47:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting because there
don’t seem to be a lot of people really working on this. This is
problems like the multimodal input problem, including with 10 fingers,
the sandboxing and security problem while maintaining power and
flexibility. There is not a ton of work on this that I know of. And so
the flip side of that is that if you do get a small group together and
work on it for a few years, you can pierce the frontier, you know, you
can make a contribution to the field. So I’d love to see more people
try that.
00:47:28 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it’s kind of where change needs
to come from. I think Apple does have like a ton of really good research
groups that do this kind of research, but it all stays within Apple and
they’re famously secretive. They certainly don’t show it, but a lot of
it also either takes like 10 years to develop. I think a lot of stuff
like even the MacBook Touchar that nobody really likes took like 10
years to develop from like the first research stuff. But like 90% of
what they come up with will never see the light of the world simply
because.
Apple with the iPad and especially because it’s based on the iPhone,
it’s now at a point where it is such a popular and widely used device
that they can’t really change anything fundamental. The only thing they
can do even with the iPad is to add stuff on top of it, which might
improve things somewhat, but they will never really be able to change
the game. And so what I would really hope for is, yeah, we basically
need some sort of newcomer that doesn’t have any legacy to worry about.
And can really just start fresh, but that gets more difficult with every
year basically because there’s so many more things you need to do and
the ecosystem that Apple and Microsoft and Google have just grows bigger
and you can’t really compete with it.
00:48:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it is tough. It’s why I think this idea of
research prototypes was so important out of the lab. You need something
that’s higher fidelity and more information than just like theorizing
about something and drawing some sketches, but to turn it into a
production product that’s integrated with an existing platform is an
enormous amount of work we’ve seen with Ms even to do a tiny slice of
it, as many years, right? But these research prototypes, they’re real
software, they’re working, you can play with them, but they focus on
one or two dimensions. And so that’s perhaps a way to tackle that.
00:49:14 - Speaker 2: Well, before we go, coming back to the iPad, if
you had a wish list item, a genie that could grant one wish for
something that could be added, some major change to the iPad as a
platform, say, 3 years out, what would that be? My answer to that would
be developer tools. There was a great terminal and the ability to write
your own apps directly on the iPad and run your own apps and possibly
even give them to your friends.
And finding some way to resolve that problem of you want that sandbox
security, and you want the app Store curation that protects against the
wild world of difficult malware, but at the same time gives you the
freedom and flexibility to program your own computer, and I think that
that in turn would kind of solve. A lot of the other problems, because
then the developers could start to do more of the innovation and
discover more weird interesting use cases. If they could do that and the
thing that is not constrained by Apple review because it’s just for
yourself and a couple of friends, then I think some very interesting
things might emerge from that that could then solve a lot of the other
problems.
00:50:21 - Speaker 3: For me, I think it would be text selection. It’s
sort of the underlying cause of so many small frustrations that I have
when using the iPad. And basically, whenever you work with text, you
kind of need to select things and move the curse and it naturally
doesn’t really work with touch. And so either Apple needs to figure out
a way to just make it work more precisely with Touch, or maybe even
leverage all the input devices they have and make better use of the
pencil and the keyboard and just let me use those in combination with
touch to accurately select text.
00:50:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, probably that area of things might even be
bad enough that just declaring bankruptcy just completely remove
everything with the current touch base text selection, which is just
doesn’t work well, has never worked well, and instead start over from
scratch, and maybe that’s, you can’t even select text at all with
touch and you need some other input device, or maybe they just have some
wild new idea for how to do that. But yeah, what’s there now is not
good.
00:51:19 - Speaker 1: Well, it’s tough for me to pick just one, but a
very practical item is multitasking, and there’s a very simple test
here, which is the multitasking needs to be good enough for me not to be
so mad that I agitate for us to write our own in-app multitasking in
use. We’re still not there yet, but I believe we can do it and thereby
avoid a bunch of work on our part.
00:51:43 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for
listening.
If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at @museapphq. You can reach
us on email at [email protected], and you can help us by leaving a
review on Apple Podcasts.
And while we’ve had our gripes and concerns about what the iPad is
today, where it might be going, I think clearly the fact that we’ve all
chosen to devote our careers here in the moment to building exclusively
for this platform means we see its potential, that it’s one of the most
interesting. Fast evolving places in computing right now and certainly
for building thinking tools it offers new capabilities that I think are
not available anywhere else. So I hope you both still feel positively
about the potential for the iPad because well, you’re betting your day
job on it.
00:52:32 - Speaker 1: Absolutely we criticized because we care and we
love the platform.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Rather than giving someone this hermetically
sealed box, can we use an analogy like build a beautiful Lego set for
them and hand it to them, where if they like it just as it is, that’s
fine. And if they want to add one Lego right there, it’s not a big
deal. They sort of see the composition of how this thing was made, they
have a little bit of flexibility to tweak it because it’s made out of
parts they understand.
00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about
Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here
with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. I’m joined by Jeffrey
Litt.
00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Hello, hello. It’s good to be here.
00:00:41 - Speaker 2: So Jeffrey, one thing I’m thinking about these
days in raising my young child is growing up in a multilingual
household, since both of her parents are from two different countries
and we’re living in a third country. I know you grew up in a
multilingual household as an adult, what are your reflections on that
experience?
00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so my mom’s Japanese and I grew up sort of
half my childhood in the US, half in Japan, and when I was a kid, my mom
sort of forced me and my brother to learn Japanese when we were in the
US and I was just thinking about how I’m so grateful now that she sort
of overrode our preferences as children, and that now I have some
proficiency in the language and so raising kids is complicated.
00:01:20 - Speaker 2: There is going to be, I can see this already at
this young age, and I think if it gets only more so as children get more
agency naturally with age, which is parents do know better. They’re
just older and wiser and know how the world works and At the same time,
a kid needs to find their own way, and authoritarian upbringing doesn’t
sound particularly like a good way to blossom as a person. So finding
that balance between what’s prescribed by parents, you’ll thank me
when you’re older. In this case, literally so versus let a kid find
their own path. I think that’s an ongoing philosophical moral dilemma.
00:01:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, especially for something as difficult as
learning a language. You know, I do think with whether it’s sports or
music or these skills that take a lot of time to master, I’ve also been
grateful that my parents helped me learn to love Japanese and build some
of that motivation, whether that’s from visits to Japan to hang out
there as a kid. I tend to believe that the goal of education at a young
age isn’t primarily to transfer the skill. It’s to, as they say, light
that fire that eventually keeps learning going, and to this day. I’m
practicing my Japanese trying to keep it up, and so I think that’s an
important balance this track too.
00:02:31 - Speaker 2: What’s that saying? If you want to set sail on a
boat you’re building, you don’t teach someone to build a boat, you
teach them to yearn for the ocean.
00:02:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, I think there’s a lot of that at
play.
00:02:43 - Speaker 2: So Jeffrey, I’ve been wanting to get you on the
podcast for a while here. We got the chance to work together on the
Cambria project at Ik and Switch last year, but I’d love to hear just a
little bit about your background, how you came to be doing this work in
the tools for Though and independent research space.
00:02:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’m currently doing a PhD at MIT in
computer science. I’m in a lab called the Software Design Group, led by
my advisor Daniel Jackson.
And at the highest level, the questions I’m trying to explore are how
do we empower more people to kind of take full advantage of the medium
of computing? I think it’s very ironic that we’ve invented this
infinitely flexible thing called software, and most of the way that we
use it ends up being a small group of people, make some stuff and throw
it over a wall, and everyone else uses it. And I’m just interested in
new approaches to building software that changed that dynamic.
But before coming into this academic side of things, a lot of my
thinking on this area actually came from working in startups and
shipping real software to people.
If you had asked me 5 years ago, are you gonna be doing a PhD, I would
have laughed at you and said, you know, no, I’m not that kind of
academically minded person. But over my time in startups, I got really
interested in these topics and I decided that Rather than go try to
start a company or something, the academic environment offers a certain
amount of freedom from the need to ship real software immediately, the
need to make money immediately, that I thought would be really valuable
for kind of thinking more deeply about what the problem actually is
here, and maybe bigger picture ways to reorient the way that we build
software.
00:04:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. You have both industry
background, as they might say, ship stuff fast, solve real customer
problems, and kind of academic mindset, longer time horizons, more of a
search for basic truths, trying to think bigger and more expansively and
more philosophically, and that’s actually, I think, a place. That I and
Switch kind of excels or part of its reason for existence is to kind of
be in that middle space between those two worlds which I think is not
well occupied and certainly for creative tools generally I feel like
that at least right now is the space where we need the most minds and
the most effort.
00:04:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s part of why I have really enjoyed
following and can switch his work over the years and have gotten to
collaborate a bit with the lab, and I think it fills this really
important middle place between those two worlds.
Too often I think startups are kind of not reflecting on the larger
possibilities of what they could be doing if they had more than, you
know, 3 months ahead to think about.
And on the other side, you have academics who, I think sometimes It’s
not really clear to me how idea transfer really happens from academic
human computer interaction research to the real world sometimes. I
don’t think it’s a smooth process where, you know, startups are
devouring papers that are being written and trying to implement them in
the real world. I think it’s a much messier process. If you look at
even someone like Doug Engelbart, who I think is a hero for a lot of
people in this community, it was really hard for him to get his ideas
out into the world, ultimately succeeded, but through a pretty
circuitous path. So I think it’s really valuable to have institutions
that are thinking about both of those worlds simultaneously, with the
ultimate goal of actually deploying in some form, their ideas, as
opposed to just sort of just handling the ideas half of things.
00:06:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, that’s why I think I really enjoy
following your work so much, is that you do fit in that middle space and
hopefully can be a role model for the rest of us on that.
00:06:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m trying to, it’s tricky. There are a
lot of tensions to navigate as I’m sure that you guys have experienced.
00:06:23 - Speaker 2: And I also thank you for being one of the very
early users of Muse during the beta as well as a customer. I hope you’ll
consider renewing your subscription when that comes up again.
You’ve both tweeted lots of screenshots about how you use it, which is,
I think, really great for other people seeing how you use things and the
every publication even wrote an article. of detailing your work and you
talked about a lot of different tools in your flow, include some
screenshots of use there so very much appreciate your business, but
probably even more than that, the kind of very public moral support
makes a big difference, especially in the early days of a product when
you know you don’t have so many believers just yet.
00:07:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for building such a great tool. I
mean, I bought the big iPad Pro originally when I was starting to dip my
toes into the academic waters and being confronted with a lot of 8.5 by
11 PDFs and decided I wanted a nicer way to read them, but something
felt like it was missing there in terms of synthesizing across them. And
when Muse appeared, I was like, this is it. This is maybe the early
versions weren’t the perfect product yet, but I could tell the vision
was exactly what I needed, and so it’s been a blast using it.
00:07:29 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is bring your own client, which
is something you’ve written about, and of course I’ll link that
article in our show notes here, but maybe you can tee up for the
listeners a little bit what that’s all about.
00:07:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So bring your own client means
having the flexibility to pick what application you want to use when
you’re working with some data, and for there to be some independence,
especially I think between people who are collaborating on the same
project, to pick the software that they want to bring to the table.
So I think like to give a concrete example, right, back in the old days
when we used to email each other files to work on a document, let’s say
I could email you a Word doc.
And then you might open that Word doc in Apple Pages or OpenOffice,
whatever your preferred word processor is, and then you would send that
doc back to me, and I don’t care what application you used on your end,
as long as I get a file back, we can work together, right? And in fact,
if we’re emailing files, I also don’t care what email client you’re
using.
There’s sort of this inherent point of flexibility built in where we
get to make these individual choices about how we want to work.
And broadly, the topic I’ve been thinking a lot about these days is how
I think that we are starting to lose some of that flexibility with the
way that computing is headed.
So I’m very interested in this overall ethos of bringing our own
clients and perhaps even building or customizing our own clients, um, to
gain a little more control over our experience with software.
00:08:56 - Speaker 2: I think email is one of the best examples perhaps
because it’s this really one of the oldest standards in some ways, sort
of the first internet protocol in some ways, and the plethora of
different clients that have existed over time. I don’t know, I used
Pine and later mutt, this kind of terminal-based clients. At university
in the 1990s and going forward to Gmail was this big revelation in terms
of lots of great interface innovations as well as backend innovations,
but it could just work right away. You didn’t need the person on the
other end to be also a Gmail user, they could be with any email client.
00:09:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think email is one of those domains
that really demonstrates how valuable it can be to have this
flexibility.
You know, I think sometimes it can be tempting to say, does this really
matter? What’s the big deal? Can’t we just all agree on the same
software to use? But if you look at something like email, I know a lot
of people, some of them not that technical, who have really strong
opinions about what email client they want to use because they’ve just
found one that works well for them. I’ve had many moments of my
favorite email clients sort of going out of business or being acquired
and hopping from one to the next and searching for that elusive best
client. And I think for anyone who’s sort of an email for like 8 hours
a day at their job. You start to see why having this degree of
flexibility genuinely matters for people, and it’s not just like a
little convenience, it’s actually a big deal.
00:10:23 - Speaker 2: Right, and so you see this not only in the big
example of Gmail that really revolutionized a lot of things about how
email works, but even nowadays we have a plethora of new clients,
superhuman, tempo is another cool up and coming one, or for example on
the Muse team for our inbound support where you can just basically email
hello at museapp.com that goes into a product called Front and so this
is kind of a group inbox email thing that has quite different
characteristics from what an individual might want.
But it’s nice because the person on the other end, they don’t care
what we’re using, they can just send us an email, maybe they include
attachments, maybe they include whatever we reply back within that, so
that gives each party in this back and forth can use what suits them and
what’s gonna suit a team that’s going through a bunch of support
requests is just dramatically different from what might suit an
individual doing their own personal inbox.
00:11:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually personally use Tempo, and I think
it’s a great example of a niche product.
It’s really perfect for what I’m looking for.
They have a really minimalist design. They have this concept of batching
your emails so you don’t get distracted.
And for me, as someone who’s at least trying to not check my email 100
times a day, it’s sort of aligned with what I want.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the perfect product for everyone or
even the majority of people, but I think it’s right for me, and it’s
just great that because we have this shared protocol, I can make that
choice to adopt this niche product that maybe only 1% of email users
will ever use.
Without convincing all this other 99% to join me in using this thing, we
sort of take this for granted with email, but look at Slack. There’s
not really a concept of a third party Slack client, right? And I think
it’s easy to forget how monolithic that experience is.
Every team that uses Slack is stuck with the exact same user interface
with no ability for individuals or even teams to really meaningfully
customize it. And I think that’s a tremendous design challenge to try
to make something that works well for so many different people and so
many different workforces.
00:12:21 - Speaker 2: Maybe there you illustrate the trade off though
Slack because it is an integrated product where they control every part
of it, the client, the API, the data storage, all of it, they can work
on a very integrated and sleek experience.
Twitter went through something similar in their early days. They were
moving in this direction of being a platform. There was this initial
explosion of clients that tried interesting things. Like TweetDeck and
Tweety and so on, and ultimately they decided it was a product decision
within their company.
We don’t want to be a platform. We don’t want to be the next email. We
want to provide an end to end curated experience where when we are going
to add a new feature, whether it’s images and video in line or
something else that we can fully control what that looks like for all
the parties in the equation.
And that’s a trade-off that I think you always have to make, an email
is a good example.
You do get weird stuff that happens when you email between two clients
and they don’t quite agree about how to display the results, and also
it’s very difficult to add new things.
I say that speaking as someone who would really like to embed video into
email newsletters and you just can’t do it. You got to use animated
GIFs which are low quality and slow to download and so on, but it’s
just not a standard that can quickly evolve.
00:13:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is indeed one of the core
tensions in this idea. How do we balance moving fast with a single
decision being made about an ecosystem versus having this more
distributed approach.
One idea that I find interesting though is kind of this idea of partial
compatibility. Can we find sort of middle points between these extremes
of a single rigid standard that hasn’t evolved since the 80s versus a
company that just decides whatever it wants and imposes it on everyone.
I think we can potentially at least try to have app ecosystems where you
might have two applications that share 80% of their functionality, and
there might be parts around the edges that don’t work perfectly
together, but that might be something you can manage as a team,
especially if you’re working with people and you know what tools
they’re using. I’m really interested in finding tools and sort of
platform approaches to mediate this kind of fuzzier partial
interoperability.
00:14:34 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s a really interesting
spectrum here, or maybe even a whole world of different possibilities.
I’m reminded, for example, of this idea of aftermarket support that you
see in consumer durable goods like cameras, for example, and there
through fiat or evolution, you have some standards, some connection
points where people can.
Plug in often literally and you might have the core the proprietary, but
there’s all these extensions and accessories that you can put on it and
because of that, you get an enormous ecosystem of tools and so on that
you can build around the core, like a good example of this would be
tractor attachments, where there’s the 3 point hitch, and you can
basically put whatever you want on a. you know, a plow, a snow blower,
whatever. And that’s really interesting because you enable profitable
commercial entities and there’s only a few of them to build the
extremely complex integrated tractor. And then you have this whole world
of mom and pop metal fabrication shops building random implements for
200 bucks. It’s really interesting balance, and I don’t see that very
often in software.
00:15:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s also interesting in software
to look at domains where you often have a lot of tools that look pretty
similar to each other if you squint.
Take to do list software or like team issue tracker software, for
example. Every time I see a landing page for a new project management
tool, there’s a lot of concepts there that look pretty familiar. You
have things to do, you assign them to people, you have some notion of
projects.
And yet every tool has a little bit of some unique spin on that
problem.
There’s perhaps new ideas that they bring for organizing stuff, and yet
I think it’s reasonable to say that maybe 80% of the core ideas are
shared.
So something we actually worked on on the Cambria project that I worked
on at I can Switch last summer was, let’s say, as one example, you have
one to do list app that’s decided that you can assign something to
multiple people to work together on.
And another app says that a to do is assigned to a single person. And
what if you want those apps to interoperate, you might just say this is
impossible, but you could also say, well, if you assign something to
multiple people, we’ll just show the first one on the other app that
only allows a single assignee, and maybe that’s good enough for your
use case to get by with that sort of partial little bit of bridging
between those ideas. And I think if we can get creative about bridging
between similar but not identical apps more, that opens up a lot more
possibilities for how we can have tools work better together.
00:16:54 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Another thing that I’m reminded of
here is the metadata that you can put at the top of HTML pages. I’m
actually forgetting the name, what’s the right name for this?
00:17:02 - Speaker 1: The meta tags, the meta tags, I guess, yeah.
00:17:04 - Speaker 3: And there’s a whole world of emergent, somewhat
adopted, partially adopted, somewhat conflicting standards for preview
cards and Twitter preview cards and open network preview cards and, but
it kind of works out, right, because there’s this basic platform entry
point, which is the meta tags and then different platforms and users
adopt different subsets of them, but in practice it tends to work pretty
well.
00:17:28 - Speaker 2: I think the web obviously in many ways is a great
example of an open and evolving standard that on one hand has innovated
a lot and continues to over a pretty long period of time but also is not
owned by any one vendor and browsers come and go and so on.
But one principle that’s often used there is this idea of progressive
enhancement. which maybe is kind of what you’re pointing to there,
Mark, which is you can drop in something like if there’s some fancy new
audio thing or some fancy new video thing or some fancy new interaction
capability, you can either first of all just handle the degradation case
of this browser doesn’t support that, so let me do something.
Simpler, but in many cases just putting in, for example, those meta tags
that produce, for example, a certain kind of unfurl card will just be
ignored by older browsers that don’t know what that is. They just kind
of skip over that and if you’re in that situation or You just don’t
see that information and probably something similar happens with, yeah,
you use an older browser to load a page that has, I don’t know, some
fancy new video thing, you just see an empty box or whatever. That’s
not great, but it still works for you, you can still get most of the
content.
00:18:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we have a lot to learn from the web
in terms of how to promote sort of a more flexible notion of what
software can be.
One really cool thing about the web, right, is that people don’t have
to build plug-in APIs into their UIs for you to mess with them.
So if you know a little bit of JavaScript hacking, or even, you know,
how to open the DOM Inspector on a website, you can go in and delete
ads, you can change stuff, you can install browser extensions that
modify stuff and none of that is Using some official API, right? It’s
just that the nature of the platform is that when you build a website,
sort of by default, there’s a lot of hooks built in for people to
reverse engineer how it was made and to pretty intrusively modify any
part of it.
And I think that’s a really interesting goal to aspire to and more
software as opposed to a more traditional plug-in API like in a lot of
platforms, if there’s no API for it, you’re stuck, you can’t
customize that aspect of the software.
Of course there are trade-offs, you know. The reverse engineering
approach is harder, it tends to be less secure, and it’s a lot harder
to maintain over time because things change out from under you.
But on the other hand, I think there’s a certain beauty to being able
to make changes that not only did the original authors of the software
not anticipate and explicitly authorize you to make, but even sometimes
ones that they actively don’t want you to make, right? So ad blocker
being the prime example of that. And so I’m very excited about the
potential for browser extensions as a mechanism for a more customizable
kind of software, especially as the web just seems to keep growing and
growing as where all software is going to end up living.
00:20:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one of my favorite party tricks is opening
the Dev Tools console in someone’s browser and doing something like
just changing a background color or some text on any website you want
Facebook, CNN.com, whitehouse.gov and you know, it can blow people’s
minds, wow, you’re an Uber hacker, but I actually also use that as an
entry point for getting people interested in programming, letting them
see without needing to install any new tools in their computer. Kind of
how the web works a little bit under the hood and that they could do
this too.
00:20:42 - Speaker 1: I love doing that too. If I’m trying to teach
kids about HTML, I’ll always have them vandalize their school website
and the Chrome deaf tools inspector and they just get such a thrill.
I think it’s, you know, If you’re brought up in this world where
software seems to be this immutable object that is just presented to
you, and then someone shows you this little trick you can play, that all
of a sudden makes it yours and something you can mess with, I think
that’s just a really powerful ethos to instill in people. I think Alan
Kay would call it.
Popping open the hood and seeing something sensible inside and just a
little bit of that ability to mess with the internals, I think can go a
long way.
Adults too, you know, I’ve shown like sales people how to fake a mockup
in the browser, and I’ve seen people, adults scream with delight when
they realize they can do this stuff.
I do think there’s also a problem, which is that stepping from a little
bit of dom hacking and depth tools to actually making a real browser
extension, is this enormous leap.
Like, if you think about it, you know, to publish a browser extension or
even to save one for yourself, you go from messing around in depth tools
to, OK, I’m going to learn. All these weird APIs and I’m gonna open up
a code editor now, and I have to learn some JavaScript, and there’s
just this huge chasm, and one of the things I’m interested in is
finding ways to, I guess, bridge that gap, or just make it a smoother
slope from that first hint of malleability to taking further steps down
that path.
I think, for example, spreadsheets do this really well, and this is one
of my favorite things about the way spreadsheets are designed.
There’s a lot of things that make spreadsheets magical for me, but one
of them is that you can take your first step of just typing in some
numbers, right? It’s just a data table, there’s nothing special. And
then you want to add together some numbers, so you learn to use the sum
function, let’s say. And then you just keep taking these little little
steps. There’s not that much learning involved with any one of them.
There’s not that many concepts involved.
And fast forward 2 years and you’re like running a whole business on
like a bunch of V lookups, right? And I’ve met so many people who
don’t consider themselves that technically literate, who are in fact
incredibly capable in this medium, and I think that a lot of it has to
do with the fact that you can sort of accidentally end up becoming an
expert, because no one of those steps was too big.
Even though it is the case that, in fact, if you add up all the little
steps, you did learn a lot. There was work invested, but it’s a much
smoother path to mastery.
00:23:09 - Speaker 2: End user programming is something I think we’re
all passionate about here and we’ve written about it in Switch and
elsewhere, but this particular element of a gradual step by step rather
than having this big jump from user of software to producer of software,
I think is a really key part of it.
We haven’t cracked the code on that yet as an industry, let’s say. One
great discussion of this. Again, coming back to the web, there’s
there’s a YouTube talk I’ll link in the show notes, but essentially
someone talks about how they had first were using, I think it was
LiveJournal, they quickly learned that you can customize the background
color or something by pasting this little magic snippet of CSS and that
leads you to doing more customizations, and then you go from there to
kind of going to full HTML and CSS.
There are some break points there if you’re gonna, you know, move off
to your own home. Hosting or whatever. There’s a similar kind of path
also with HTML that are just files that you FTP to a shared server, or
shared host of some kind and then you’re just writing HTML but you can
actually break out into PHP with these little codes.
So all of these technologies, perhaps not even purposefully, I’m not
even sure they were specifically designed to have that gradual ramp, but
they do spreadsheets, HTML. PHP all have that kind of ramp, and that
ramp is how you can avoid hitting some wall where you have to have some
deep intrinsic motivation. I want to learn to be a software engineer or
manipulate computers in this way. And instead you’re just on the way to
solving your problem. You find some ways to do that by pasting some
magic codes into your thing.
Maybe you get a little curious and you follow where that leads, and
pretty soon you’re an empowered computer user.
00:24:49 - Speaker 1: For me, this comes back to the bring your own
client thing. One of the most frustrating experiences for me in software
is when you’re in some sort of monolithic ecosystem, and you hit a wall
of something you really want to do, but you can’t do, and depending on
how the ecosystem around you is arranged, you might just have no choice.
That’s sort of it. You can file a feedback request with the company
that makes the software, and they will tell you, you know, we have put
it on the backlog. Good luck with that.
00:25:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s on our roadmap. Honestly, I make that
answer myself in a new support requests all the time and it’s genuinely
true, but I’ve never. Worked on a software project that doesn’t have a
roadmap backlog, whatever it is, that is just way longer than what you
could ever hope to do in a lifetime.
00:25:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve been on both sides of that too.
Actually, a lot of how I got into this whole topic to begin with was
from my experience being on the other side of that conversation.
So before starting a PhD and doing research stuff, worked in startups, I
spent a while at an education technology company, where we were building
software for K through 12 schools and When we started, we were a very
small team. I was fortunate enough to join early. We were like 6 people
living in a house together. We only had a few customers, and so we had
the ability to focus a lot of attention on any individual request that
came in.
But as we grew over time, starting to serve thousands of schools across
the country, it just became harder and harder to manage all this
feedback.
And I think the default answer and what you’re supposed to do, given
the way software is currently arranged, is to just get better at saying
no. So, you sort of assume, well, we’re a resource constrained team, we
are the only ones who can change the software. We don’t have the time
to do everything everyone wants, and so we’re just going to do less.
And I think that on the one hand, that can reflect sort of a wise style
of design where you’re not just building a faster horse, you’re like
digging deeper and really building something better than they could have
asked for, but often in my experience, it was not that at all. It was
just that only 5 people wanted something. And I agreed with them, you
know, sure, that makes total sense for you. I can see why you want that.
I wish I could build it for you, but there’s only 5 of you. And so I’m
sorry, and that just really, I think, was a frustrating experience for
me, and I found myself wondering, why does my team, you know, in this
office in Boston have to be making these decisions for these teachers in
like Idaho or whatever.
One of the bright spots against that sort of philosophy though was
coming back to spreadsheets. I remember this feedback call we had with a
customer where We wanted to ask them, how did you like our data reports
that we’re showing you, cause we were essentially building data
dashboards for schools, and they told us, oh yeah, we don’t use your
data reports at all. We use spreadsheets. Let me show you. And so they
had exported the CSV and made their own thing. And on the one hand, it
was sort of annoying for us having spent so much of our time trying to
build this beautiful product experience for them. But on the other hand,
it was so cool to see how they had built this really weird and ugly, but
extremely functional spreadsheet that did exactly what they wanted for
their school, and aggregated the data in a completely different way that
had to do with how the teams worked within their school. And I thought
what was neat about that was that spreadsheets were this flexible tool
kit that they could use to build their own thing, even something as tiny
as changing a single word of copy that might have been bothering them
and causing friction in their whatever political environment in their
school. There’s so many tiny things that I think people would change if
they could, but it’s just that the way software is built requires
everything to funnel through the original team building thing, which is
who’s never gonna have the time. And so, I wish we could reorganize
software to support more of that style of customization.
00:28:20 - Speaker 2: So we’ve already touched on some of your work
here, Jeffrey. I’ll link your articles on bringing your own client as
well as one about browser extensions being underrated, but then maybe
you can also talk about some of the projects you’ve done that have to
do with how you see solving this problem more broadly.
00:28:39 - Speaker 1: So on the topic of interoperability, one idea that
I’m excited about is thinking about better ways to synchronize across
existing cloud applications. So I think there’s a way in which, you
know, if you’re using one app and I’m using a different app, and if we
can establish a bridge between them, where let’s say I’m editing a doc
in Google Docs and you’re using Dropbox Paper or your preferred editor,
and imagine every single keystroke data is being transmitted live
between them. That starts to create this more flexible feeling where the
data is not locked in any individual app, and it more kind of lives
between the apps. And so one new project that I’m sort of embarking on
now is trying to create tools that mediate that kind of synchronization
across tools.
Some of the hardest part comes back to that partial compatibility issue
we talked about earlier, where if there’s changes I’m making that are
going to mess up your experience or that aren’t going to propagate to
the app you’re using. How can we help users understand the relationship
between these apps and feel comfortable with the overall user experience
of stitching them together? And I think this gets at some of the
toughest challenges in these sort of more flexible software ecosystems
is that if we’re all using the same thing, it’s really easy for me to
know what you see and what your experience looks like, and the more we
diverge. I think it’s really important that I’m at least able to
preserve a mental model of maybe there’s some data I’m putting in that
you’re not able to see for some reason, and if I’m not aware of that,
that’s gonna cause problems, right? And so, a lot of my thinking these
days is about building these sorts of sync tools to mediate that gap.
00:30:05 - Speaker 2: I can think of a few examples of that,
particularly in the enterprise world, for example, kind of Salesforce to
SQL database stuff where your sales team wants to use their CRM because
that’s got all these tools and things that suit them, and they’re
typing stuff into a web dashboard and getting reminders about who they
need to follow up on.
But then your data team or your programmers, you know, they’re not
going to go cook around in the Salesforce interface. They need to pull
stuff into a proper database like a postres database and so syncing
seamlessly between those is valuable.
Do you have other concrete examples you mentioned the project management
tool case. What are some other ones that you see as kind of like key use
cases?
00:30:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s funny, sales data is one I’ve heard a
lot about too from people and it’s sort of a more mundane use case.
I’m not sure I would classify it in sort of the creative tool space,
but I think it points to how this need just pops up a lot inside of
companies.
00:30:57 - Speaker 2: I’ll go ahead and count sales as creative work. I
actually have this discussion of fair fair bit, which is sort of I like
to use the term creative professional when I talk about sort of the
target audience for muse, but also maybe just the kind of person I’m
interested in serving generally. And a lot of people do respond to that
with, oh, well, I’m an attorney or I’m an accountant, is that really
creative work? And I think it is, I think there is creativity that goes
into, for example, financial modeling, and absolutely there can be
creativity that goes into sales. It’s not traditional artist type
stuff, so I would go ahead and count that.
00:31:30 - Speaker 1: That’s totally fair, and in fact, I think it
points to why tools matter in any profession. Like, there’s a reason
that people want to synchronize HubSpot with MailChimp. There’s
something going on there about what individual tools are good at in the
entire life cycle of how you want to run your process, and the need for
sync emerges from the reality that no one tool can do everything
perfectly. And so I think that’s totally valid.
00:31:53 - Speaker 2: I’m reminded of the phrase toolmaker humility,
which came up in our podcast withalant from Kraft where he really tries
to keep that in his heart as he designs the product of knowing you’re
not only, not the only tool that people are using. but you’re probably
a large collection of both process and over time your toolkit is
changing and that sort of thing, and I just feel it’s so easy for
toolmakers to want to make the everything tool.
Don’t worry, we’ll just do everything and you can put everything in
here and we’ll be all in one place and then it can all work together
seamlessly and that has never been how the world has worked.
It is never going to be how the world works. If you can design your tool
to play as well as possible and be aware of that reality, I think
everyone’s better off.
00:32:38 - Speaker 1: I think it’s tricky though, because you need not
only the willingness of the tool makers to play with other tools, but
you need a platform that supports that interoperability in the right
way.
So I think Kraft is the perfect specific example of this. I think
they’ve done the best possible thing you could expect a writing tool to
do today, which is that I think as Balant mentioned on this podcast,
they let you save your documents either to their cloud, which gives you
real-time collaboration, you can comment and things like that, or you
can save it to a file, which gives you more control.
It is sort of locally stored with you.
You have the ability to save it wherever you want.
Other people can potentially open those files in different applications,
I think, is the ultimate goal of that teams, but it’s an either or. So
if you want to collaborate in real time and have that flexibility to
open those files in other applications, there’s no technological
solution to that today that exists. There’s no platform that team can
build on to support that, and to me that’s the key missing piece.
There’s this ecosystem missing there, that means that even in this
dream world where Google decides they want their party editors to exist
for Google Docs or something, supporting that technically is very
challenging, and so I think we need better platform support for that
kind of thing, in addition to thinking about business incentives for
people to even want to do in the first place.
00:33:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a great example to bring up. I agree
there’s a huge technical challenge here. It’s one that I and many
people around me and the Ink & Switch research lab have been working
on for some years now.
Yeah, so you would need to have that in place, something like files for
the real-time collaborative internet. What is that abstraction. And then
on top of that you do have this whole issue of business and incentives
and dynamics and path dependence because let’s say conservatively that
creating this technology takes 10 engineer years. a million dollars,
who’s going to put that up and then how do you actually turn that into
a public platform that’s optimized for the benefit of all the
individual users and not the creator? It’s a tough problem.
One of the things that I liked about this project that you mentioned,
where you’re synchronizing data between cloud services, is that it does
grapple with the reality of, here’s our initial condition of there are
a bunch of proprietary. cloud services that do have important data and
it’d be ideal if they had a perfect JSO API, but that’s not the
reality that we live in. So we need to find a way to help our users get
data back and forth between them. I feel like a lot of the conversations
in this space, that is a space of open systems are of the form, we
should X where X is design and build and use a perfect open system.
That’s not gonna happen. In fact, it’s unreasonable for you to ask
other people dedicate their moral lives to your pet projects, right? So
you need to find a way to grapple with these dynamics and get out there
in reality.
00:35:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a tension I think a lot about
between sort of an incremental approach versus a first principles
approach.
I think you could frame it. For example, the solid project, which is led
by Tim Berners-Lee and is pretty prominent in this space, is one attempt
where their idea is, you know, we’re gonna essentially fundamentally
rearchitect how web apps are built. We’re going to give users these
little, they call them pods, where the users control their own data, and
then web applications can connect to your pod to access and edit your
data, but the applications themselves don’t store the data.
And I think that’s a lovely vision. I would love to see something like
that succeed, but as you’re saying, Mark, I think the biggest challenge
is, how are we possibly going to get from the world we have today to
that future? Are we really going to rebuild the web stack from scratch?
And is the experience going to be better enough for both developers and
users to incentivize such a massive shift? I tend to think that no
amount of, you know, legislation or regulation, let’s say, is going to
successfully push us to a solution if it’s not better for both
developers and users. And so I think we need to think about making it
incredibly easy and awesome for both of those groups in order to get
from where we are today to that beautiful future.
00:36:34 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to be clear, I do believe it’s possible
to get to a future that looks very different from the present, a
radically different future, but necessarily you are going to get there
in incremental steps, which might be incremental steps from the status
quo or incremental steps from zilch, basically where you’re building up
a new system in the context of the current ecosystem. I think both of
those are viable. I agree. I think what we need here is entrepreneurs in
the broadest sense, not just of commercial ventures, but of ideas and
nonprofits and politics and all these things to really work towards the
future that they want to see.
00:37:04 - Speaker 1: I think another really important thing on the
entrepreneurship theme there is being realistic about use cases. I think
my favorite startup style thinkers are the people who can really focus
on what is this technology actually useful for, and how can we focus in
on that one killer app.
And I’m not sure that we’ve necessarily found that killer app yet in
this space.
For me, I think collaborative writing might be the one personally, but I
worry that you can make all the tech demos you want. But a lot of things
take off in a particular niche. And I’m interested in finding where’s
the place where people desperately are needing this real-time
interoperability to the point that they would actually abandon their
familiar tools.
00:37:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like this actually afflicts quite a
few projects in the space where, again, they’re thinking in terms of
generalities and they don’t have a specific use case in mind. I
actually called this the mark rule for product management, which is you
need to have a single named human being like an email who specifically
wants your projects. And that sounds like a low bar, but in a lot of
cases, you ask people that and they’re like, oh, it’s salespeople.
Well, do you have a specific one in mind that I can email? Well, not
always, right? So it’s a good baseline.
00:38:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think often, especially with this kind of
customizable software, it’s tempting to get into wouldn’t it be cool
if conversations that where it might be nice, but there’s no real
pain.
One use case that I think is really compelling to me is I read a paper
recently by some researchers at Northwestern University on accessibility
issues and collaborative writing. And they talk about how people with
sight impairments have a really hard time using Google Docs with their
teammates, because there are certain accessibility issues around how
that platform works. And what they often end up doing is they’ll either
convince their team to adopt a different workflow, or they’ll just give
up and copy paste text out into a Word doc or something, edit it there,
and then paste it back. And it’s very, very cumbersome. It’s not just
a little inconvenience, it really limits their ability to be a true
member of their team. And they have to make this incredibly
uncomfortable choice where they talk about the social anxiety around
trying to convince all of their coworkers to use a different tool, or
just internalizing that friction and deciding to try to live with it.
And I think that if you imagine a world of greater interoperability,
could we have a text editor that is much more optimized for this
specific group of people who have very different needs and still allow
them to collaborate with their peers more effectively? The more that
people’s needs differ, especially people with disabilities, I think
often have fairly different kinds of needs and a lot of other people. I
think that those are use cases I’m thinking a lot about in terms of
where we really need better interoperability.
00:39:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s a great motivating factor. It’s easy
to think of the what ifs in terms of cool conveniences and emojis and so
on, but let’s not forget about that as well.
00:39:51 - Speaker 1: I also think as an antidote to cool conveniences,
there’s sort of an interesting paradoxical way that software
customization actually promotes very boring stability.
So I think one of the special things about, let’s say, programmers and
their text editors, which is a place where we have some of this
file-based interoperability, is that if you talk to programmers, often
they’ve invested like a decade plus in using a particular editor,
right? And they’ve carried it with them from job to job, they’ve
really made it their own.
And they have successfully been able to avoid switching tools because of
interoperability.
It’s not this kind of tinkering, trying a bunch of new things mindset.
It’s exactly the opposite of just getting to invest deeply in one tool
and to keep using it. I think that’s an underrated benefit of
interoperability is just. Yeah, being able to make that deep investment.
00:40:42 - Speaker 2: The revealed preferences of software engineers is
that yeah, very standardized file formats, usually plain text, wide
variety of source editors, wide variety of different kinds of plug-ins
and liters and things like that.
I guess you do have to agree on your version control system that needs
to be at least somewhat standardized on your team.
Terminal, even things like database clients, you know, SQL is pretty
standardized, so software engineers seem to prefer software that changes
less.
And has more interoperability and it does have the problem of, as we
mentioned previously with email or Twitter as a platform versus a
product.
Yes, it is hard. Someone says, you know, programming editors or source
code would be really great if you could drop in an image. I could put in
a little diagram of my Architecture or something like that in a comment
that would make perfect sense. I think that would be a big improvement,
but that would be very hard to do because the plain text format we’ve
all been using a very long time and all the tools are built around that,
but essentially software engineers prefer that versus something sort of
newer and shinier and with more features.
00:41:50 - Speaker 3: Yeah, in fact, it’s the ecosystem that is
extraordinarily susceptible to customization and extension because all
the participants are able and in fact inclined to do that.
So kind of competitively, it’s very hard to win without leveraging
that.
I think a good example of that is the editor wars which to my mind are
now kind of coming to a close and BS code is one to a large extent I
think because of the incredible platformization they have with
extensions and language servers and so forth, and typically there’s
going to be a bunch of editors. I use a different one. But they’ve been
able to really pull ahead while accelerating the whole ecosystem for
developers because they lean so heavily into the open platform angle.
00:42:28 - Speaker 1: I also think though that the diversity of text
editors can teach us something about how to reconcile this partial
compatibility thing we were talking about, because if you think about
it, yes, the base format of the code being shared between people can be
really stripped down into this text format, but some editors like VS
code, do a lot with that format.
They’ll run fancy analysis on top of it and do syntax highlighting and
all these like autocomplete things, which are not inherently part of the
data exchange format. They’re just Bells and whistles that each
individual editor gets to add on top to that experience. But I’m not
forced to opt into that. I can use a stripped down, I could use
Microsoft notepad to edit code if I wanted to, right? There’s nothing
stopping me from doing that.
00:43:08 - Speaker 2: Ed is the standard text editor.
00:43:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah. In fact, I think when I was like 12 years
old, that’s probably when I started using to write code because I
didn’t know any better. And I think That’s an interesting, for me
lesson to reflect on is can we get more places where there’s this
shared core and then more functionality built up as optional app
specific extensions.
00:43:27 - Speaker 2: And then we touched briefly on, I guess, financial
incentives, and we look at the interoperability problem writ large.
Certainly it comes from the world of files, kind of classic desktop
files, and yeah, there was problems with sort of format openness like
Word docs.
Files, for example, but ultimately files did seem to have a lot of that
agency and interoperability, and it’s really both mobile and cloud that
I think brought us these more closed up hermetically sealed systems,
both for their own reasons.
I think mobile is more around kind of safety and security and
comprehensibility to end users, particularly very non-technical users.
But on the maybe cloud web app side, particularly B2B software, now you
get into this thing where data is considered to be where the value is.
James Chen used this terminology data swamp. That that’s kind of like
the aggregating a bunch of data together and that’s where the value is
and you even see that in what people expect to pay for software.
We run up against that with Muse, we talked to Balant from Kraft about
that as well, which is people are in the mindset of, oh, if you’re
going to host my data for me, then you need to run a server or whatever,
then I can justify paying a subscription.
But if I’m just buying the software, they feel like software isn’t
valuable on its own, and of course that’s really restrictive for making
truly great software and furthermore, it creates all these incentives
around of course you want to lock up the data, of course, something like
a two-way sync. Like you described, that’s hurting my business’s
value.
So trying to find a way to create financial incentives and paying for
the software and the value that provides you versus the data, the data
swamp, that’s a tough one.
00:45:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s tough.
One angle that I like circling back to a previous podcast on games is,
so to kind of recap the dynamic there is that there are some ecosystems
that are so high powered because of their open platformized, scriptable,
customizable, whatever nature that no amount of proprietary excellence
can compete.
And I don’t think we’ve quite found or charted that path in the world
of creative tools. You think about, I don’t know, Photoshop. Could an
open Photoshop be so much better such that it displaces Adobe Photoshop?
I mean, maybe, right? I don’t yet see the path for that, but perhaps in
the world of multi devices or multi users or other use cases, there is.
So I think that’s one promising angle. There are other angles, but that
to me seems perhaps the most interesting.
00:46:01 - Speaker 2: That’s an interesting one to think of the way
that for example the web and its open standards and interoperability
displaced and was clearly a huge improvement on the more closed up
formats like Flash or maybe Java Servlets that came before. Clearly the
web was just so much superior and it In addition to being open,
hackable, you can pop open your DOM Inspector and do stuff to any web
page. So what would be an equivalent of that that would make Photoshop
or even something a beloved current piece of software like Sketch or
FIMA? What would make those things feel like a Java servelet by
comparison?
00:46:38 - Speaker 1: I think there’s a really tricky balance here to
strike because it is very valuable to have someone think through an
entire unified product experience and make it all fit together in a
coherent way.
I know this is something you’ve thought about a lot with when I use
Muse, it feels like someone has taken care to design this whole
environment and I don’t have to do much work to sort of put together a
bunch of pieces. And 90% of people most of the time, don’t want to like
assemble their own software from scratch, right? There’s a reason we
pay designers. is to think through these problems for us. And I think
that’s totally a good thing, and designers bring a lot of value in that
way.
But at the same time, I think that we can think about rather than giving
someone this hermetically sealed box, can we use an analogy like build a
beautiful Lego set for them and hand it to them, where if they like it
just as it is, that’s fine. And if they want to add one Lego right
there, it’s not a big deal. They sort of see the composition of how
this thing was made. They have a little bit of flexibility to tweak it
because it’s made out of parts they understand. I think that’s a
design ethos that sometimes I feel like we’re in danger of moving away
from. There’s this great story in one of my favorite books about end
user programming, which is called Changing Minds by Andy Dessa, who’s
sort of an education and computing researcher, and he talks about this
nightmare he had where he’s riding a bike, and he looks down at the
gears, and they are labeled not with numbers, but with words, like this
is gravel mode, this is like uphill mode. And he has no idea how to use
the thing, you know, if I’m going downhill on gravel, do I use gravel
mode or downhill mode? And he talks about how like, because we’re used
to riding bikes with number gears, this sounds sort of ridiculous, but
you can imagine the product manager that had that conversation where
they said, these numbers make no sense to people. People don’t want to
like, see 1234, they want to understand the function. We need to give
them an easier way to understand what this tool is for. But what you’re
robbing them of is a structural sense of what’s going on underneath to
provide that functionality. So that the moment you go off the expected
use cases for the thing, you have nothing to lean on. You have no
coherent understanding of the system, and so everything just falls
apart. And what he contends is that people can actually learn sometimes
more than I think we give them credit for. Like, it’s not actually that
hard to learn a bike. Everyone learns how to ride a. Like, even though
it takes some practice and you have to feel out the gears to understand
how they work. Once you’ve put in that little bit of effort, you have
this sort of generalizable understanding of the system that can go a
long way and is much more generically applicable. And so I think it’d
be nice to see a little bit more of that style reflected in how we build
software for people.
00:49:09 - Speaker 2: Well said, yeah, I think the design ethos often is
kind of polarized towards the edges, which are either making pure
consumer stuff. It just has to be as simple as possible, no choices, no
customization, just can’t have no chance of going off the rails. And
getting confused or we have the full on I’m going to build my own PC
from parts and put together my own Linux distribution and assemble my
raspberry Pi and you put together all my special VS code plugins and
there’s kind of nothing in between sometimes.
00:49:43 - Speaker 3: This reminds me of an important point about these
platforms and ecosystems. If you look at the successful spaces, whether
it’s software or protocols or hardware, it generally is not, you have
some platform and then a bunch of individual users completely
customizing their setup.
What tends to happen is you have the platform, you have a small number
of secondary market providers, if you will, who provide modules.
Sanctions, implements, what have you, and a much bigger group that
tries, by the way, but a lot of that stuff just kind of gets filtered
out, doesn’t bubble up the top.
But if you create an opportunity for people to have a business or some
other sense of fulfillment from providing these things to the community,
you only need a few of them. To really enhance the ecosystem. And yes,
you’re gonna have some users who want to build their whole tractor from
scratch or who want to go in and fiddle with the HTML and CSS that’s
fine, but often the real main potatoes of these ecosystems is the
secondary market of service module extension providers. And the somewhat
sad consequence of that as someone who’s really into end user
programming is that often it’s not the end user programming experience
that matters the most. If you look at how hard it often is to build a
module or extension or an add-on, often it’s frankly a huge pain, but
people who are doing that as a small business, as a major hobby,
they’re willing to get over that and then they can provide the service
for all the other users in the ecosystem. So it often ends up being
important is distribution, obviously platform access, and some ability
to monetize or get the equivalent personal fulfillment.
00:51:20 - Speaker 1: I’m not sure I totally agree that it’s sad for
end user programming. I think you’re totally right that there’s this
collaborative dynamic, but for me, that’s sort of just one part of the
picture to keep in mind when we’re designing tools for this. So like,
for example, and I think there’s a similar dynamic in spreadsheet
usage, where there’s been some great studies by Bonnie Nardi, who’s
kind of like a hero in the end user programming community of how
spreadsheets are used in offices and What it turns out being is that
there’s like someone in the office who’s like the spreadsheet person,
right? And when you have a really complicated formula, right, you go to
them and they help you and they figure it out, and then you go back to
your desk and keep working on it. But the key thing there is that there
is a large part of that ecosystem that is available to you, even as a
novice, and you don’t have to like, again, ask someone to ship you a
hermetically sealed thing. Maybe you can sort of read the formula they
wrote and start to learn a bit. And so I think Having fuzzier boundaries
of expertise and enabling more collaboration is a thing to strive for.
One project I’ve worked on that sort of embodies this goal a bit is
this project called Wildcard, which is a tool kit for people to build
their own browser extensions without programming. And the rough idea
there is, like you were saying, Mark, it’s pretty hard to build a
browser extension. Some browser extensions are extremely complicated.
And when I install them, I have no idea how they work inside. If I want
to tweak the extension, or maybe compose two extensions in a new way,
that’s typically really hard to do. And the thesis of the Wildcard
Project is that, yes, some extensions need to be really complicated like
you said, but also there are some extensions that I think don’t need to
be that complicated.
I remember using for a while an extension that added a checkbox next to
every transaction on a bank statement, so you could just remember
whether you’d already written it down somewhere else. And this had like
thousands of installs on the Chrome extension store, you know, that’s
not a sophisticated thing. But again, it’s really hard to even build
something that simple as a non-programmer. So the goal of Wildcard is,
can we take that subset of extensions, which is not that complicated and
make it accessible to normal people to build. And actually, as you can
tell, you know, I’m sort of a spreadsheets fan. And so the paradigm we
went with was, what if you could edit a website in a spreadsheet is the
vision.
You know, you open up a little pane, you see some data in a table that
sort of represents what’s in the page, like on a news site, it might be
a list of articles with their names and authors and whatever. And then,
As you mess with the spreadsheet, whether that’s sorting and filtering
or adding new columns with little formulas in them, all of that flows
back into the page and modifies it. And the goal there is that if
you’ve used a spreadsheet, you can maybe learn your way around this
environment, you don’t need to like open a code editor, you’re just
right there in the website and you can build and share these
customizations with other people.
Now, again, it might be the case that 90% of users of this thing
eventually will just install pre-made things that others made, but if
they’re not written in JavaScript, if they’re in this sort of more
user friendly paradigm, maybe more people will end up popping the hood
there and making little tweaks of their own. So I think it’s this
delicate balance there.
00:54:15 - Speaker 2: Well, before we go, one question I think that can
come up sometimes is this question of designing software for other
people, and maybe you can imagine that product designers who their whole
role in fact is doing that and software as this abstract hard to
understand thing you actually need another person with that expertise to
design it for you. But you could actually swing back the other way as
well and say, how can anyone else know your needs? And in fact, this is
why some of the startup advice is solve your own problem, build
something for yourself because you know it in an intimate way that no
one else can. Where do you stand on this? How can others design
software?
00:54:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this may be a slightly extreme way to put
it, but I think I’m pretty pessimistic that it’s possible to design
truly great software for someone besides yourself. Especially if the
person you’re designing for is operating in a complex environment,
like, for example, I had experience designing for teachers, and I’ve
never been a teacher in a classroom before.
And I felt like no matter how many user interviews I did, there was
nothing that could possibly replace a decade of teaching experience in
sort of the depth of understanding there. And I’m sure, you know, I
could have done better user interviews or whatever, but that’s sort of,
I think, an initial hypothesis.
Then the question is, what do we take from that? Well, in some ways,
that sounds really disappointing because You might say what that means
is that you’re gonna end up with a bunch of 22 year olds in San
Francisco building food delivery apps, because those are the people
making the software, right? But I think there’s kind of a fun way to
flip it, which is to say, well, maybe that just means we need more
people to be able to build software. And you might say, well, I don’t
know if, let’s say teachers can build software or if they’re
interested in that. But I think that if we had more democratized tools,
you could imagine that whatever it is, 10% of teachers who have an
interest in this stuff, who have Some sensibilities around design. If we
had more tools to help them build their own tools and maybe build tools
for other teachers, I think you could imagine a world where we have much
more sort of insightful software that draws on the experience of being
the user, in a larger variety of domains, that’s not just programmers
scratching their own itch.
00:56:21 - Speaker 2: That almost brings a moral argument to end user
programming that it’s not just this is something that we as technology
people think would be cool or fun or exciting, but in fact is something
needed to bring this really important medium, this 21st century medium
of software to the wider world, and that’s all the For professions that
could need it, young people, old people, people in different places and
different cultures, the only way that everyone will really get the
software and the computer experiences they deserve is to make
programming more accessible, not to every single person in the world,
but to enough that we can represent all of those different people in the
software world.
00:57:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think an important thing there is
keeping an open mind about how our culture could change.
You know, people throw around the idea of computational literacy, a fair
amount in the tools for thought community, and I think one of the
lessons to learn from literacy is that it took a while to get to the
point where everyone could read and write, and maybe before mass
literacy, it would have sounded reasonable to say, why does this farmer
even need that? They don’t care about reading and writing, it’s not
important to them, but we ended up creating a new society where that was
part of How people operated, and I think that you could make a similar
argument for building software, where, you know, just because people
genuinely don’t think they need to do this today, or don’t care about
it or don’t want to, that’s not a reflection of the way society will
always be. I think we can, in an optimistic sense, imagine sort of a
feedback loop where if we change our tools, eventually society will
catch up.
00:57:55 - Speaker 2: I think that’s the perfect note to wrap it up.
Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter
at @museapphq or via email, hello at museapp.com. You can help us out
by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Jeffrey, thanks so much for
carrying the torch and inspiring us all on end user programming and data
interoperability.
00:58:16 - Speaker 1: Thanks so much. This is a lot of fun.
0 min
January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Something I really admire about Tokyo is that they
are able to, while it’s a very desirable place to live, the housing
costs in Tokyo are actually not that high, and people are pretty liberal
about tearing things down and building new things, and it seems almost
like a cultural love of newness, and people are always excited to like
rebuild and create a new thing in the place where an old thing stood.
00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about
Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins.
I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest
Devon Zugal, hey. And Devin, not too long ago, I would have said, of
GitHub, but I believe as of a few months ago, you are now a free agent.
How’s life treating you?
00:00:54 - Speaker 1: It’s been great. I left GitHub about 2 months
ago, and I also moved to Miami around the same time from San Francisco,
and so I’ve been spending my time exploring the city, writing a number
of blog posts about it, talking to people in the government and like
housing developers and that sort of thing, just because that’s what I
do in my free time is learn about cities. So it’s been really fun to
explore my new home.
00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, typically when people think of Miami, the
first thing they think of is speaking with members from government
agencies to better understand how the infrastructure of the city works.
So it makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. And can you tell us what your
background is, how you came to GitHub, what came before that, and what
might come after?
00:01:39 - Speaker 1: For sure. My background is computer science, which
is probably not a big surprise.
I studied that in school and then I worked as a software engineer at a
number of San Francisco startups.
And then most recently, I was a product manager at GitHub for the last
2.5+ years. I was leading the communities department where we built
tools for open source. Communities.
And so it ties in a lot with my interests and love of cities and
economics, because they’re both about sort of what can you do to create
an ecosystem and a platform where people thrive, but without defining it
all in advance? How do you create those building blocks so people can
live their lives, find opportunities, build really interesting things
that you never would have dreamed of and help give them that platform so
that they can put those plans together themselves.
00:02:28 - Speaker 2: It’s pretty easy to see the parallels between
communities of different types, which includes open source, and then
cities as well, which is you can’t really do a top down thing.
I’m sure we’ll get into that a bit here, but unlike, for example, me,
my experience in designing products or building software products is
often that you sit down, you figure out what you want to make, and you
make that thing, and it may or may not work out the way you want it in
practice and you need to iterate on it and you need to get. Back, but
it’s a very highly controlled experience, whereas something like a
community can only be grown. It’s incredibly organic and I think at
best you can kind of guide and obviously guidance matters a lot because
that’s why we get some communities that thrive and others that don’t,
but it’s just nowhere near as prescriptive as what at least I’m used
to in product design.
00:03:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I moved over to product management from
software because I really enjoy what I call social technology.
I think that that’s really a sweet spot for me where it’s thinking
about the system in terms of how can you shape and encourage behavior
that’s healthy, but also without mandating it, like, sort of more of a
carrot than a stick perhaps, I’m not sure if even that’s like the
right metaphor, but I think that cities are a really interesting lens to
look at certain types of software because things like social networks,
which I would consider GitHub a social network on some level, and
certainly Twitter’s Facebook’s Instagrams of the world, they really
are communities of people where you as the designer or the software
engineer or whoever’s building it.
Don’t really control what ends up actually on the screen completely, so
you have to think about what are the affordances that you provide? What
does the design language say about what you’re supposed to do here?
Kind of like how restaurants will have a sense of the space. So if you
walk into a really quiet classy restaurant with like piano playing in
the background.
Everything about the space is telling you like, don’t start yelling and
like dancing and screaming and whatever. Like this is a place where
you’re gonna have like a nice steak, you’re gonna sit down, you’re
gonna listen to classical music, but then if you walk into, you know, a
Miami club, it’s a very different vibe and it says like, you’re here
to kind of go wild and have fun.
So I think that cities do the same of like, how does this Encourage you
to live your life and different cities do that very differently. And I
would love for more software teams who are building places for people to
congregate online to think about it in those terms because I think it’s
been a little bit lacking in the past, and I think it can lead to
problems for both the creators and the people who are trying to
experience the space.
00:05:12 - Speaker 2: I think that pretty naturally points to our topic
today, which is Order without Design, which in fact is a book about
urban economics and urban planning, and you didn’t write the book, but
you do have a podcast by the very same name in which you interview the
author of the book. Certainly this is not necessarily about the book
itself, although I think there’s lots to discuss there, but also about
this larger question of exactly what you said, how do cities become the
way that they are? Each city has its own different character, and some
of that evolved organically, but some of it was active choices made by
people governing and living in those cities, and this is a topic that
Mark and I talked about more in the, let’s call it the user perspective
in a Previous episode, I’ll link in the show notes where we talked
about our respective decisions to depart San Francisco and why he landed
in Seattle and I landed in Berlin, and when you’re in the position of
working on an all remote team or a distributed team, and you can
basically choose to live anywhere where you have the ability to think in
terms of not just I’m going to the city because my employer, my school
is there, but you’re thinking, what are the qualities of the city that
I like, what would make it a good Place to live that would be creatively
inspiring for me at least, that was the experience that got me
interested in urban design as a topic, which is seeing the unique
character of Berlin and what it was that spoke to me, spoke to my soul
about that and then thinking, OK, well, how did it get to be that way?
What were the series of decisions and who are the people, and I know how
digital products come to be, but how does the city come to be? So maybe
you can illuminate that for us a little bit.
00:06:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is one of my favorite books, and I
read it several years ago when it first came out, and instantly just had
to become friends with the author.
His name is Alan Berto. And he and his wife Marie Agnes, they’re in, I
believe their 80s now, and they’ve spent their life living in a bunch
of different cities around the world, creating their master plans.
They worked for the World Bank for sanitation systems, transportation
systems.
They’ve been in places really far flung, such like all over the world,
really. They’ve lived in Bangkok, they lived in Sana’a. Yemen,
they’ve lived in New York City. I’m missing another dozen or so places
that they’ve lived.
Some of these cities I hadn’t even heard of, to be honest. And so
they’ve seen cities from a lot of different dimensions.
They’ve experienced lots of different types of people who have
different goals for their cities, and they’ve done their best to shape
their work to fit those goals of the residents of those different
places.
They’ve been in Port au Prince, Haiti, where they have a lot of really
interesting stories. And what you’re talking about here about remote
work and how the way we think about cities differently now that more and
more people are working remotely, really an interesting lens to think
about this book, because one of Alan Berto’s main points is that
historically, cities have been labor markets. That’s what brings them
together. It’s what sort of is the sinew that holds it all together.
And what he means by cities are labor markets is that people come to
cities to find opportunities to make their life better. And certainly
they come for a lot of other reasons too, but finding work and finding a
way to pay for their life and to better their life is one of the biggest
ones.
00:08:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, at least the way I understood that argument
of his was being a labor market is the root of everything else. If you
don’t have that, the rest of it won’t come. The population density now
leads into culture and, you know, art museums and Interesting cultural
scenes emerging, but all of those are secondary effects. You have to
start with the labor market.
00:08:45 - Speaker 1: Right. And I think he would point to places that
are, let’s say, retirement towns and that sort of thing is somewhat
exceptions to the rule, but those will never become massive cities.
Those will never become engines for economic growth, for helping
people’s lives get a lot better, pulling people out of. poverty.
They serve a role, but they’re not really what he’s talking about.
But I think it’s really interesting because we’re now going into a new
era where more and more work can be done remotely. The labor market is
in the cloud.
So if cities no longer have to be the labor market, what does that look
like? How do we now think about the places that we live? How does that
change the decisions that we make? And so that change hasn’t completely
happened.
The vast majority of people still work in person, but there’s been a
real inflection point, I’d say in the last 10 years and certainly with
COVID that has made people really start to think about this new
paradigm.
00:09:38 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and there’s sort of two dimensions of
effects here. There’s the people are free to potentially move to
different cities, so one can move from San Francisco to Seattle or
Berlin or Miami, or you can move to not a city and participate in a sort
of distributed labor market, and so there’s competition along both
those axes essentially.
00:09:57 - Speaker 1: Totally, for a really long time choosing to live
in a rural place dramatically reduced your opportunities, and some might
argue that that’s still true.
I personally think that face to face has a lot of really important
things that you just can’t get via Zoom, but at the same time, there’s
a whole new frontier opening up here, and people from all different
countries can now. in labor markets that used to be centered in the
United States primarily in the case of tech.
For example, my boyfriend is from Argentina and he moved to the United
States several years ago, but many of his friends and family were not
able to get visas or weren’t interested in moving. They wanted to stay
with their families. And so they’re now able to participate in Things
that are happening in the United States and and vice versa in a way that
they just couldn’t 10 years ago. So, in a really weird way, there’s
people who are sitting in Buenos Aires but behind a microphone, who I
feel are a closer part of my community than some people who are my
neighbors, and that’s just a very different world and will really
change the way that cities develop, I think, in the future.
00:11:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. And perhaps the most exciting
piece for me as you mentioned this idea of social technologies, I think
we’re gonna see some of the benefits and consequences of cities move
out to the cloud, if you will, things like aggregation effects, quote
unquote population density, self sorting. These are all things that you
really needed to have a city in a physical space until very recently to
get, but now people can, you know, whatever, join the right Discord or
something, it’ll be very interesting to see that all play out.
00:11:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m tentatively excited about it. I have
some concerns.
For example, I was talking to a friend who’s a venture capitalist a few
days ago, and he was telling me about how in 2020, during COVID, roughly
the same number of dollars went to venture capital investments in that
year as the previous year, but it went to half as many companies.
And his interpretation of this was that the business that VCs are in is
to find people that they trust and that they think will take that money
and do something amazing with it. And his theory here was that because
they couldn’t meet people face to face, they couldn’t build that trust
with new people on the network, and so all of the money was going to
people who are already in network and already trusted. And he was a
little sad about this because he was thinking like there’s all these
people who would probably be amazing entrepreneurs, but because they
didn’t have that access that they would have had an in-person world,
they didn’t have that. So I’m not sure if that’s completely the right
interpretation, to be honest, I think there’s a lot of ways to look at
that data, but it did give me pause and think like, oh, that’s like not
great if that is the right interpretation.
00:12:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it’s still very early. You
know, the world doesn’t owe it to us.
There’s no particular reason this couldn’t become very messy and weird
for the next 10 or 50 years as it all shakes out.
We talk often on this podcast about how it takes some time to metabolize
these big society level changes.
I’d say that our technology and our social technology is still very
early, like the communication bandwidth over Zoom as nice as it is
versus what we had 5 years ago, it’s very poor compared to being in
person and likewise our social technologies are mostly transliterations
of stuff from our previous physical world.
So I think we solve a lot in front of us to see how it all shakes out.
00:13:09 - Speaker 1: But I’m optimistic. I’m definitely optimistic,
but it’s not a done deal for sure.
00:13:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah. So how would you answer the question that I
sort of posed earlier or the question I posed myself, I suppose, on
discovering a city that I liked really well and wanted to settle in just
because I liked it rather than because an employer was there, which is
how do cities become the way that they are and in particular who are the
people that make that happen.
00:13:34 - Speaker 1: There’s a lot of components that go into that.
I think of cities as an ecosystem, and so a lot of different pieces have
to be in place for them to be the way they are, but like geography makes
actually a really big difference in the way that people interact, and
that’s not human made usually. But it has a huge difference. Like, for
example, I live in Miami Beach, which is separated from mainland Miami,
it’s on an island, and so I’m much more likely to spend time with
people who are like on the island with me than I am to like drive into
mainland just because there’s a body of water between us. And so that
really shapes the way life and culture work in Miami and similar
geographical features make a big difference in other cities as well.
00:14:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one I noted in my own city exploration is
San Francisco and Amsterdam, two places I’d spent time, were both on
these kind of fairly smallish peninsulas, and so they’re necessarily
constrained on 3, I guess an island is 4 sides, but here you’re
constrained on three sides. And so, there’s sort of a limit to how much
they can grow or things get denser, they get more expensive, and by
comparison to other places, Berlin is one example, but probably most
places don’t have as much constraint and as the city grows, they can
spread outward and in that way kind of create more relief for just more
space for more people to be there.
00:14:53 - Speaker 1: Totally, and other factors can have a similar
effect, so London and Paris are interesting to contrast to each other,
where both of them are in England, they’re not on the peninsulas or
islands.
Well, I guess Britain is a very large island, but Paris is much denser
than London, and a big part of that is because Paris was basically
conquered and like overrun again and again, so they built these like
city walls to protect it.
And they wanted to keep as much of the buildings inside of those walls
as possible, and the denser it is, the easier it is to defend.
Whereas London being in Great Britain, which is separated by the
channel, they just didn’t have those problems. They were much harder,
much easier to defend, much harder to attack.
And so London is much more sprawling than is Paris, and that’s sort of
a I don’t know if it was a conscious decision by any person, but just
the factors that they had to deal with resulted in a very different city
form. So I guess those are two answers, geography and like sort of
exogenous factors that just kind of force you into this shape for
survival.
I think another pieces, decisions that are made early on in a city’s
history, there’s an immense path dependence in cities because it’s
painful to tear things down, unlike in software where it’s like not.
That costly and this kind of infinite space, you can always write more
software for the most part.
00:16:16 - Speaker 2: Developers get excited when they see a huge number
of red dashes in their pot, right?
00:16:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, they love it because it simplifies things.
Whereas in cities, you know, someone like Creative destruction, yeah,
00:16:27 - Speaker 1: they put up a bunch of bricks and like they paid
money for them to go up and it’s a more zero-sum game in cities than it
is in software because anytime you build something, that means someone
else can’t build something there until they tear your thing down.
And so it leads to very different dynamics and you get much more
constrained.
Like a concrete example of that is here in Miami Beach, there’s a lot
of beautiful art deco buildings. Miami Beach is really famous for this.
And so there are rules protecting the art deco because it’s a national
treasure and, you know, I really love them. But what that means is that
you can’t build something else there, and this is a beautiful place to
live. It would be awesome if more people could live here, but because
the art deco is there, we can’t do that. And it forces you to make
different types of trade-offs. Do you value this architectural heritage,
or do you value having many more people be able to live in a place and
every community is going to make different choices there.
00:17:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think an important thread through
everything you just described is that ultimately it’s individuals
making personal choices in this sort of organic chaotic mess that
ultimately bubbles up to the emergent order, if you will, that you see
in cities. And I think it’s so easy, especially as software people to
think about, you know, that the city does this or we should do that, but
really it’s just a bunch of individual human beings ultimately have to
make the decisions and take the actions.
00:17:47 - Speaker 2: Well, and this, the, I don’t know, subtitle or
the part that goes after the colon in the order without design book
title is how markets shape cities, and of course markets are very much,
yeah, decentralized, you know, individual actors pursuing their own
means, but then that forms into a larger, something that is uh greater
than the sum of its parts.
Also, if I’m not mistaken, one of the interesting things about the
author’s experience is he had actually worked for a centrally planned
economies, including, I believe, some Soviet work in the 1980s before
the USSR ended, and then also for the Chinese government.
And so he had the chance to even compare a situation where there is no
kind of classic market forces like rent to figure out, you know,
efficient land use. Instead, there is urban planners that do just sit
there and say we should put houses over here and restaurants over here.
00:18:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and he also worked in China during the
period where they were liberalizing economically and moving from a
completely communist planned centrally planned government to trying to
make things a little bit more free market from the economic side.
And one of the things that he pointed out was that like, there are a lot
of very strict rules that the Chinese government adhered to. So, for
example, there was a rule imposed by the government said, Every single
room in every building has to have at least one hour of sunlight
throughout the whole year.
Now, that sounds like a good idea, like, I wanna have sunlight in my
house, sunlight is a nice thing, and even one hour almost seems kind of
low.
But the issue is that China is a really large country and goes very,
very far north, where there’s actually just not that much sunlight at
all during much of the year. And so there’s some cities in northern
China that were forced to build the buildings extremely far apart, so
that the angle of the sun would like properly hit the inside of the
buildings for like the minimum number of hours a day.
And what this meant was that cities in the north are much less densely
populated and much more spread out than the ones in the south, and it
correlates almost perfectly with this angle to the sun.
And what it means is like, this has a lot of other implications for the
cost of infrastructure and all these trickle down effects that, like,
weren’t really conceived of before, you know, when they put this rule
in place, they weren’t trying to say infrastructure in the north has to
be extraordinarily expensive. They’re just trying to get everyone to
have sunlight. And so he came in and sort of noted some of the rules and
said like, this is actually hindering development in these places
because this is a limit that is not gonna work out.
00:20:20 - Speaker 2: So in more market-based economies that probably
most people nowadays are more likely to live in or be familiar with,
what is the role of an urban planner? What do they actually do?
00:20:31 - Speaker 1: Well, I think Alan would say that historically
urban planners in non centrally planned economies still think of
themselves as central planners, even if they don’t explicitly say so.
They still think that if they put a rule in place, it will be followed,
and it’ll work out the way they’re imagining, as opposed to thinking
of it as a dynamic system that will react to the rules and sort of mold
itself in a way that has a lot of unintended consequences.
So, I guess there are a lot of urban planners still that think of
themselves as architects who can like shape a city in exactly The form
they want something like a Disneyland, but I think Alan would say, and I
would strongly agree that urban planners should think of themselves more
as like protocol creators in the way that a software engineer might
design a protocol, but not say everything on top. So TCP IP is a
brilliant design because it’s not that opinionated. It’s only
opinionated about the things that need to happen to help people
coordinate. So, a city that I think has done this really well is New
York City. And I believe it was 1811, the city put together a master
plan that laid out the grid that we all know today of, you know, streets
and avenues, and you can actually see which parts of the city were
created before that plan was in place in the southern tip of Manhattan.
They’re all this warren of streets that is, I think, beautiful, but
also quite messy and like hard to get around. But then everything north
of that is a grid, very, very precise, and something that the New York
City plan did really well, I think, is make it very clear from the
get-go what was public land and what was private land. So instead of
saying we’re gonna control everything, or instead of saying we’re
gonna let everyone just like be anarchists and do whatever they want.
They said we needed to find rights of way because people need to be able
to get around. We need to keep space for like sewage and other
sanitation systems that we all need. Like no one wants poop in the
streets, and we’re going to define spaces for public parks. That’s why
Central Park is so big. They just carved it out before anyone actually
started developing there. And then they left everything else to the
market to decide. And I think this works really well because it enabled
the key methods of coordination that people needed, while also leaving
space for people to be creative and to make their own idea of what the
city should be.
00:22:55 - Speaker 2: In New York, I think many would feel is the city,
a cultural powerhouse, a place people love to visit, and many people
love to live. Maybe it’s also incredibly dense and incredibly expensive
and dirty, and all those negative things you associate with the
collection of people, that is cities, but nevertheless, truly the
prototype city in some ways.
00:23:16 - Speaker 1: And it’s been an engine to pull people out of
poverty for hundreds of years. Like immigrants have landed in New York
and poor Americans have ended up in New York. Black people ended up in
New York after the Reconstruction, and they found this place where they
had more opportunities and they were able to like build themselves up
and like it has a lot of flaws, but it’s something that enabled both
the coordination while also remain keeping space for people to make
their own lives what they wanted it to be. And I think it’s just been
one of like The greatest engines of progress in America, and I know that
sounds really melodramatic, but I stand by it.
00:23:53 - Speaker 2: Absolutely.
00:23:54 - Speaker 3: No, for sure, all the more significant than that
we’ve conducted this sort of quiet experiment on rolling back market
dynamics in American cities over the past, I call it 60 or 70 years, you
know, like you said, it used to be that you basically do whatever you
want. If you had private property. Now the model is like in San
Francisco, which we’re both familiar with, that you basically can’t do
anything to a first approximation. Everything is set forever, don’t
change it. And I think we’re only now starting to see the consequences
of that experiment and to evaluate how well it did or didn’t work.
00:24:25 - Speaker 1: Totally, and it’s a very complicated issue. So,
one of the reasons I left San Francisco was this growing feeling that
you’re just like not allowed to do things there anymore.
And for me, what that meant concretely was like, I was very active in
housing policy because I wanted San Francisco to build more housing, so
more people could move there and have access to the awesome
opportunities that the tech industry has offered, and other industries
as well, but tech being the primary one. And after several years of it,
I just kind of got a little down about it and didn’t feel like we’re
making much progress because San Francisco has very strict zoning laws.
It has a very granular local control where neighbors can stop projects
in their tracks that are near them or really anywhere in the city, but
it has a really complex history because the place that it comes from.
It’s actually a place I agree with, and then I think it’s just gone
too far.
So the place that that’s come from is in the 50s and 60s, American
cities all over the country built many highways and the way they built
these highways was they primarily tore down African American
communities, other communities of color as well, but primarily African
American communities. And they just did it without really asking. They
would just bulldoze an entire neighborhood.
00:25:37 - Speaker 2: this eminent domain or?
00:25:39 - Speaker 1: It was through a variety of different methods.
Some of it was eminent domain, yeah, and there were a number of
different ways that they could do this and like each city had a slightly
different approach.
The effect was that like these highways would just cut through these
communities and destroy them. So, there were these things called the
highway revolts that started happening in the 60s, where people were
saying, hey, you’re destroying my life. That’s not OK, you can’t do
that. And one of the ways that San Francisco reacted was putting rules
in place to make it easier for locals to defend their neighborhoods and
to have a voice in the process, which I think is a very good goal to
have.
But where that has ended up is that today, one of the specific tools
that was put in place is something called discretionary review.
And discretionary review basically says that if you have an issue with a
project as a resident of the city, you can like file a complaint and
stop it, or at least force it to pause and like have a hearing about the
project and In theory, that was supposed to be used by, you know, people
who were getting their houses bulldozed so that a highway could go
through or whatever, or, you know, someone’s putting up like a really
loud factory next to you or something like that.
But practically the way it’s used today is that like, really wealthy
people who live in Pack Heights, Pacific Heights, which is a
neighborhood in San Francisco, will like complain about how their
neighbor who’s building a two-story house, is putting a shadow in their
vegetable garden. And, you know, like, you don’t want a shadow in your
vegetable garden, I get it, but my personal opinion is that making it
possible for a family to move in next to you is like way more important
than if your squash gets sunlight.
So it’s this tool that ended up going so far as to give people local
control that like completely blocked the system. And as a result, San
Francisco has added far more jobs than it has housing for the last like
10 years straight. And the housing prices just have completely shot up.
Anyway, I shouldn’t rant about that way too much, but the point is that
it’s a really complex issue where it’s always a balance between local
control and also maximizing sort of for the greater good, and for the
greater good is like a really complicated concept to define.
00:27:47 - Speaker 2: Or as you mentioned earlier with the art deco
buildings where there’s heritage to protect, you want to protect the
character of a place that makes it unique and special and not just tear
it all down and replace it with highways and strip malls, which maybe
sometimes pure economic forces would take you in this homogenizing
direction, which I think is also part of the argument against
gentrification which There is a big, big talk back here in Berlin these
days. A lot of demonstrations and things. There was a 5 year rent cap
law that had been passed and then was struck down by the German Supreme
Court. It’s a real huge point of debate between the people who are here
already and want things to basically stay the way they are.
They want to preserve the character of the city, which I agree is very
special, but then Life has changed and the city should grow, just like
all things, grow and change to be healthy. In addition to just the
simple fact that we’re adding more humans to the planet, and if we’re
gonna have more humans, then we also need more houses for those humans
to be in, and just because you were there first doesn’t necessarily
give you a special privileges for housing as opposed to the needs of
others.
00:28:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the rent controls issues is a really
interesting one, because I understand where it comes from, which is we
don’t want people to get displaced when the place around them becomes
more expensive, but at the same time, when you have rent control, I
think it’s akin to aristocracy in the sense of saying like, you got
here first, this is like your land, you have some special privilege over
it. And newcomers who may also want to make their life better and may
also want to have access to what that beautiful city has to offer, now
don’t have access, and like sympathetic to the goal of locals, locals
being in a position where they can stay in their home, and I think that
is a problem to solve, but rent controls are a very blunt instrument
that don’t actually quite do the thing that people say that it should
do.
Rent control is a tricky situation because it encourages things like
landlords neglecting to actually take care of the building. I think
there’s other ways to achieve the same results that are also not
perfect, but result in fewer issues.
One final thought on that is like, rent control also increases the price
for other people who weren’t lucky enough to be in a rent controlled
building. So, Berlin, for instance, has a lot of immigrants who are
coming in, who I think they should have a home and should be welcomed,
but because they weren’t in a building at the time of rent control,
they’re now forced to the outskirts of the city, or they’re forced to
pay a lot more for the remaining buildings that are not rent controlled
because it’s rent controlled effectively removing supply from the
market. It just sort of puts everything in stasis and people don’t want
to move from places even if they need to upgrade and I’m sympathetic to
the goal, but we have to look at like the outcome of what actually
happens when you put something in place, not just say what you wish it
did.
00:30:42 - Speaker 2: Some of that sounds like sort of understanding
market dynamics or economics, and that reminds me of another thrust of
order without design, which is, he’s basically talking about urban
economists, which is essentially the academic study of cities. And then
urban planners, which in fact was what his job is, which is people whose
work for governments in some form to figure out things like zoning laws
in an attempt to shepherd the city in whatever direction.
The government would like it to go, and he talks about that at least at
the time this book was written, they didn’t have good communication
with each other. So planners might be not that aware of economics and
kind of market dynamics generally, but then also the very specific
dynamics of the role of markets in cities and of course vice versa as
well. The academics are a little disconnected from the reality of the
decisions that the planners need to make every day.
00:31:39 - Speaker 1: Totally, and some of those realities are political
realities, like what we’re just talking about with rent control, people
do not feel good when they see what they consider gentrification
happening, or when they feel like they’re being priced out of the
neighborhood that they’ve lived for their whole life, and so they get
angry and they want something to be done. And the problem is that doing
something doesn’t always make the problem better. Doing something
sometimes actually makes the problem worse if you don’t understand the
causal model of what’s gonna go on. And so there’s been a lot of
actions that people take that I think actually worsen the situation to
their own goals because they don’t appreciate the level of dynamicism
that’s happening. So like a similar example, it’s not about cities,
but is sort of a similar dynamic economic system is like taxes. Since
moving to Florida, I’ve met a lot of people who have moved to Florida
from New York to California because New York and California have been
hiking up taxes for companies and for themselves individually. And I
will not make any judgment about whether I agree or disagree with that,
but just to make the point that like, when you increase taxes, people
will find ways to not pay them often, not always, but it is a reality
that you have to deal with, and you can’t just like moralize it. And
say, oh well, they’re bad people for not paying the taxes that the
society around them agreed upon. You have to actually deal with the
problem. And so I think a lot of governments will raise taxes and then
be shocked that like, they get a lot less revenue than they expect
because people just move away. And so, cities often have similar issues.
Like, for instance, there’s something called a privately owned public
open space in San Francisco, and I believe New York and a number of
other cities have this too. And the concept is, you’re a big developer,
you’re building like an office building or a bunch of condos or
apartments or something, and the privately owned public open spaces is
POOS is the acronym. It’s a rule that says like if you build a
development of a certain size, you have to build at least this much
public space for people to enjoy in the building.
Sounds like a really nice idea, and some of them actually are really
nice. Like, there’s this really beautiful cafe in the LinkedIn building
in San Francisco that is a popo, but there’s a lot of other popos that
are sort of hidden because the developer sees the letter of the law and
they say, ah, but they didn’t say like where it needs to be. And so
sometimes they’ll put these popos on like the rooftop of the building
and put like no signage. Whatsoever for people to find it. And so it’s
effectively just a private space for the building. And, you know, it’s
a nice amenity. Maybe the people who live in that building like it,
whatever, but it’s not solving the problem that the government wanted
to solve when they put that rule in place. And so something that
complexifies this is that politicians and bureaucrats usually get points
for starting something, but not for the actual. And so they say we did
something to create more public space in San Francisco, people clap and
like re-elect them.
But then 5 years down the line, you realize like, oh, there is no extra
public space really. These are really hard to get to and people have to
put together like special maps. There’s all these like lists online
that you can find, and there are all these like secret little nooks,
which is, you know, fun in its own right, but really not what the city
was going for.
00:34:53 - Speaker 2: I think accountability loops is one of the biggest
things missing in public policy debate or politics, and I don’t
necessarily think anyone’s quite to blame there. It’s a systematic
thing, but it’s something where when a project like that is set up, we
don’t even define what success is necessarily. We say we’re going to
do a project to change our spaces somehow, more public space, more
greenery, different transit options, but what will success be and how we
measure that 5 years down the road and if it’s not working, we’ll
pivot or transition or sunset the program, but that’s rarely the way
the government works.
00:35:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, and I think it’s
doable. A lot of organizations do this all the time, and I’m sure that
some government organizations do as well, but It doesn’t usually loop
back to the voters, and I still don’t have a clear model of why that
is, but I think it’s a really important problem to solve because in the
situation that we’re in now, Without that accountability loop,
politicians who even want to do the right thing will have a hard time
doing it because they’ll spend all their time doing the right thing and
not like doing the flashy things, and then they won’t get re-elected.
And so they’ll only have their what, 2 or 4 year stints or whatever it
is before they’re booted out, and you can only have so much impact in
that time. So, building those loops is really important, and I think
I’ve seen some cities like Singapore, for example, have like dashboards
with certain statistics, which I think are An interesting start, but
it’s definitely not normal, like a normal practice and not something
that more people are aware of.
And like, no person wants to create a system where they now have to be
accountable cause now it only increases the chance that they won’t
succeed at the goal. So something that has to be imposed. And actually,
before that, even, it’s even hard to even agree what the goals should
be, right? So like, in the instance of historical preservation, we are
talking about different cities have made very different trade-offs, uh,
but individuals within those cities all disagree really strongly. So
like Paris, for example, has Effectively decided to be kind of like a
living museum. There’s rules like you’re not allowed to build
buildings that go above a particular line relative to sea level, so that
you can have a good view of, can’t remember which church, but like a
particular church on a hill that’s just gorgeous.
00:37:12 - Speaker 3: Is that Notre Dame or am I imagining that?
00:37:14 - Speaker 1: No, I don’t think it’s Notre Dame. I think it’s
the one on the hill with a really beautiful view of like, uh, has like
this like, I can picture in my head, but it’s not coming to me.
But it’s gorgeous and you’re supposed to have a view of it from
roughly everywhere in the city, and that’s a choice to make, you know,
but the result is that Paris is extremely expensive, especially for
Parisians, and a lot of people end up having to move to the outskirts,
or similarly like, it’s tough to have a large headquarters for a
business in Paris because there just aren’t that many big buildings.
So they’ve created this whole new business district called La Defense,
which is like way off. In the outskirts and like nowhere near the core
of the city, which has big skyscrapers. And like there’s a tradeoff
that Paris chose to make. And I think it has hurt their economy, but it
has like preserved this gem of a city that I’m super happy exists and
I’m like really glad that I can go and look at these beautiful views
and beautiful architecture. So every city needs to make those choices
itself and there will always be people who are benefiting and hurting
from it, and it makes it really hard.
00:38:26 - Speaker 2: One example of kind of preserving what’s there,
living museum, like you said, versus investing in the future, which
sometimes means taking risks, was the building the Eiffel Tower.
Uh, I read a great, uh, biography of Gustav Eiffel, who’s a pretty
inspiring fellow, but did quite a lot of work, um, but if the Statue of
Liberty and the, um, or the internals of the Statue of Liberty and the
Eiffel Tower being two of us.
More famous pieces, uh, but when, you know, when they put up plans to,
to build that for I think it was the World’s Fair, the outrage in the
city was, was huge and even immediately after it was built, the feeling
was, it’s this eyesore, it dominates the the the skyline, it’s this
super modern thing that doesn’t fit with our, um, you know, quaint, uh,
quaint architectural vibe, um, and it took a long time before it became
what it is.
Now, which is this total icon that not only stands for Paris but in fact
for France, and you couldn’t couldn’t even imagine it without that.
But that was a bold move that a lot of people were um were against. And
so in order to in order to build that next Eiffel Tower, whatever
that’s going to be, you need to be willing to take risks, but then that
comes at a cost.
00:39:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s such a good example.
And I mean, I think I should probably express my bias here is I like
building things and I like taking risks and like seeing other people
take risks, and so I like to live in a place that allows that.
That’s one of the reasons I moved to Miami from San Francisco is it it
feels like it’s more welcome here and like, you know, Paris seems like
an even more extreme version of San Francisco. But I also respect the
idea of a community coming and making that decision to make the opposite
choice, but it becomes really challenging to decide like, what does it
mean for the community to make the decision, because it’s hard enough
to even know what one individual wants, I think, let alone to capture
the views of everyone. The most common form of voting, for instance, is
like, first past the post or whoever gets the majority rule vote, and
that works, it’s like better than a lot of things, but it has a number
of really important flaws. Like, for example, what if the majority of
people kind of like the Eiffel Tower, but a minority hates it, and I
think it’s the worst thing ever. So there’s a majority that weekly
would like it, but also they don’t care that much if you don’t have
it. And they voted in, but then there’s a minority who’s like totally
harmed by it. To me, like, if you had that distribution of preferences,
I would actually prefer not to build it because like it’s harming
people extremely in a way that no one is actually benefiting from that
much. But you know, that’s the values question and like designing these
systems is the values thing. And I think every single voting system has
like some very valid criticism that you could have. So it’s not clear
even how communities should make these choices, which brings us back to
markets, which I think is like something I really like about having
every city make decisions differently and having a little more
decentralization. Where, you know, a central government, like a
particular country isn’t making all the rules, because then every city
can come to its own decision about how to make decisions, and you can
end up like, leaving places and making choices for yourself if you
disagree with that particular place. And so it By allowing diversity,
it’s gonna create more situations that you personally disagree with,
but it also create more situations that you really love and you can go
live there. And so diversity is really crucial, I think, to solving this
problem, and then the other pieces, people have to be able to actually
move, and that’s really hard, you know, in a world with a lot of
borders, there’s actually quite limited choices for most people in the
world.
00:42:04 - Speaker 2: I’m a huge fan of Let 1000 flowers bloom, and
then individual choice to kind of have a bottom up emergence of what’s
working or what is into a natural sorting.
You’re absolutely right.
The world that we live in that’s built on nation states which sort of
assume you’re born in a place and you probably live your entire life
without going more than about 100 kilometers from that place and you
have kids there and you die there. That’s what I think a lot of the
sort of national systems and immigration and customs. Systems that we
have now are kind of assuming, but I think that has not been the case
for a while, and that’s going to become even more so with a lot of mass
migration in the near future and certainly for those of us privileged
enough to be in the tech world where we have disposable income and
choice of where we want to work, perhaps because we’re on remote teams.
It is really the case just as I decided to go to another country, not
because I wanted to go to another country so specifically, but because
the city I wanted happened to be located in that other country. I ran up
against very much still do run up against all the challenges, the
significant challenges of being an immigrant, and quite a lot of it is
related to this assumption that people don’t move.
00:43:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think growing up in a country like the
United States, you have a lot of options cause it’s a really big
country, so you can move a lot of places, but honestly, even that is
very limiting to grow up without a lot of money, it’s hard to move to
San Francisco because it’s an expensive place and like, sure you might
be able to get a job with a high salary once you’re there, but it’s
gonna take time, and you don’t know, you haven’t been there, maybe you
can’t get a job, who knows, so a lot of people are stopped by that as
well. But in a smaller country, like again, Argentina is one that I know
really well, there’s one really big city, it’s Buenos Aires, and a
third of the country lives in that city. There’s a lot of other cool
places to be too, but Buenos Aires is the place you want to go if you
want to have like a really ambitious career. And, you know, if you
don’t Like Buenos Aires, tough luck. Like it’s tough, you know, it’s
a beautiful city. A lot of people do love it, but if you want something
else from your life, you want to be a Hollywood movie star, you now have
to get a visa. You have to like uproot your entire life and move to a
whole another country on a different continent. And so I think it’s
something that we’re going to have to find new models for it because
what’s happening now locks a lot of people out of opportunities, and I
think it’s honestly a moral issue. There’s people who live in places
with very little opportunity, and they themselves have a lot of
potential, but they’re stuck somewhere that has poorer systems of
coordination, and they just can’t get out. And so we’re going to need
to find new models for that, but I don’t have solutions. I’m just
criticizing at this point.
00:44:42 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the mobility question is really tough. To
what extent do governments have a heightened obligation to their current
citizens versus future ones who might yet be born there or might move
there? That’s a really tough question. I don’t know. I don’t think
there’s an easy answer. But looking within an existing polity, I think
our discussion of voting and markets was really circling around the crux
of the issue.
The reason I think cities are so hard and potentially so much more
valuable. is you have this mix of public and private impact.
So by public and private I mean a private good with something that you
kind of you yourself purely consume and the effect only touches you,
like if you consume a pencil or something, you know, by consume I mean
like you write with it. That basically only affects you. It doesn’t
really affect your neighbor. It’s a totally private good and a totally
public good, an example might be national defense. It’s like everyone
in the country gets it or no one gets it. That’s not exactly true, but
that’s a good that’s basically purely for the benefit of the group as
a whole.
The thing about cities is you get this really messy mix. So to go back
to your example, Devin, of building a two-story building in a previously
one story lot. There’s a huge chunk of private benefit you get space
for the family and there’s all kinds of other secondary public impacts
like there’s shadow and there’s noise, and there’s traffic, and then
you’re consuming some of this precious lumber off the market, it’s all
this kind of stuff going on.
And I think the issue we have with cities is we only have a few
relatively primitive technologies for distributed decision making and
coordination.
We We have first past the post voting, we have corresponding
representatives with that model, and we have called laissez-faire
economics, and the pure economic model works really well for private
goods, and the pure voting model can work well in cases where we have a
single public good that everyone cares equally about, but we don’t
really have the social technology to address this mess in the middle.
And that’s why I feel like we end up with so much issues with cities,
and then the flip side of that is that I think there’s enormous
potential on the upside if we have a coordination technology that
reflects that underlying reality better, we could get into a much better
spot with cities. I’m so optimistic that we’ll figure something like
that out.
00:46:49 - Speaker 1: I think that’s really well put, and that actually
clarifies a lot for me, honestly. That space in the middle is really
challenging, and I think right now we have these massive
oversimplifications where we just pretend like they’re private goods,
or we just pretend like they’re public goods, and they’re really not,
they’re a mix. And so I think one of the reasons why we haven’t had
more innovation in those sorts of coordination mechanisms for things in
the middle is that there’s a limited amount of land and it’s really
hard to Just start fresh. Like there’s kind of no frontier anymore on
earth at least. And also in combination to that for the land that does
exist, the people in power would have to agree that we should try a new
system which would probably lessen their power. And so they I want to
give it up.
And like, you know, if I was in power, maybe I wouldn’t want to give it
up either. I don’t know. Like, I think I have some pretty good ideas,
so of course I should have the power, right? Like I think that a lot of
people have that view. So it doesn’t make them bad people or selfish
necessarily, but just, why would I give up control that I have? Some
concepts that I’ve been really excited about that are a bit out there,
but I think are really important for us to take seriously. the idea of
building new cities, and 3 projects in particular have come to mind. One
is seasteading, if you’ve heard of that, which is the concept of like
building floating cities in the oceans, effectively creating new land.
Where there wasn’t any before. A second one is charter cities, which is
the idea of carving out land in a place that already exists, and
creating sort of a special economic zone, much like how Shenzhen in
China was a new experimental city. That ended up dramatically changing
the way that all of China works ultimately because so some background,
Shenzhen is this part of China where several decades ago, they carved
out this place and they said, we’re going to like kind of experiment
with capitalism here. We’re gonna like see if it works. And it works,
like really well, according to the metrics that the Chinese government
cared about. And so they started adopting those across the rest of China
as well. So charter cities are kind of like taking that idea and scaling
it to more places. And the third one is, a lot of people are really
interested in the idea of going to space and going to Mars, and I don’t
actually know a ton about that. That seems really hard, but I think that
comes from this place of people saying, you know, there’s no blank
slate anymore, and it’s really hard to change these kinds of things and
systems that already exist. So, where are the places that we can create
new land or create space to run these experiments? I think all of these
are really far fetched, like, I’m not sure if any of these experiments
will work. I mean, I mean charter cities have the most potential given
that they worked in the past with places like Shenzhen or Dubai in some
senses was a special economic zone, but I think the experimentation is
where you get these new ideas and you develop confidence that they might
work.
00:49:40 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I have some optimism that we’ll see
experimentation in those types of new cities.
I’m also very bullish on experimentation with land like places in the
non-physical world. So one example that I can kind of run through is
spectrum.
So electromagnetic spectrum, you need a slice of it to be able to
communicate over the airwaves, basically things like radio and Wi Fi, go
over this, and it’s kind of like land and that’s sliced up and it’s
sold or licensed currently by the relevant regulatory authority.
And that has a lot of the same challenges that we see with regular land,
whereas if for example you have naive pure private property, you could,
for example, say someone buys the slice of Spectrum for Wi Fi 100 years
ago, and then someone else develops Wi Fi, well, the person who owns
that Wi Fi slice just got massively rich by no. Work of their own,
right? That’s really wealth that doesn’t in any way belong to them.
And in fact, they could now not be a particularly good owner of it, but
perhaps for financial or tax reasons, they don’t want to sell it, so on
and so forth.
So there’s all kinds of proposals for managing the allocation and
taxation of land like things that we could try on something like
Spectrum first. It could be that you have rolling auction or that you do
a self-assessed value and get taxed based on that. There’s all kinds of
experiments that I think are more palatable there and perhaps once we
see their value, where value means like basically you’re unlocking a
bunch of economic surplus and distributing it out to the citizens in
some way, then there’ll be more eagerness to backport that into the
physical cities where it’s higher risk.
00:51:12 - Speaker 1: Totally. Everything you said is very exciting to
me.
I think there have been some experiments run on things like land, like
you’re talking about, and for the audience, I think the way I would
characterize things that are like land are things that you cannot make
yourself, like you technically can fill and like create islands and
stuff, like, basically you can’t really make that much land.
Or things that when you use them, you exclude other people from using
them or you ruin their experience.
So for example, if you use a plot of land, someone cannot build on it
until you let them.
And so that combination of those two factors of like, you didn’t. Make
it. So anytime the value of it goes up, you’re not responsible for that
value, but you’re actually going to capture it yourself. But then also
you’re monopolizing it so that the rest of your community cannot use
it. Those are things that are like land. So anything that’s like a
natural resource basically falls in this category as opposed to
something like an idea, which is not like land, an idea that is like
infinitely copyable.
00:52:12 - Speaker 3: I think land has this property furthermore, where
the pure raw land itself gets almost all of its value from the actions
of other people.
So a given acre of land in the United States, the value of that is
almost entirely dependent on where it is. Therefore, the value comes
from basically the people around it and all the activity that’s
happening. So the reason that totally private ownership of land feels
kind of weird from economic sense is basically all the value is made by
other people, yet all the benefit is accruing to one individual.
Now it’s not the case for like improved structures on the land, right,
which should be treated differently. This reminds me of Georgisms, which
was the kind of policy prescription to match this worldview about land.
Devin just finally, maybe you’re familiar with this.
00:52:51 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I’m a big Henry George nerd. Go on
though, I’m very excited about this, go ahead.
00:52:56 - Speaker 3: This was basically his belief about land was that
the benefits to the pure raw land were developed by the citizens of a
given polity and therefore those benefits were sort of owed to them. So
what he advocated was basically you tax the raw value of the land. And
use that to fund the government, and you don’t have income taxes or
corporate taxes or whatever.
00:53:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, like concretely, what that can look like is,
my parents bought a house in Los Altos, about 35, 40 years ago, which is
a town in San Francisco Bay Area, which is now a very expensive place to
live.
They bought it before, I mean, it was already kind of expensive, but now
it’s like really, really expensive, one of the most like expensive
places in the country.
And while I love my parents and they’re very hardworking people who
certainly contributed to the community, the vast majority of the
increase in that piece of land that they bought decades ago is because a
lot of awesome things happened around them, and people want to buy that
land from them so that they can have access to those awesome things that
other people created.
Now, my parents also remodeled the house, which also increased its
value, so that’s something they did.
They put a little garden, it’s very nice. They themselves were
contributing to the community through the work that they did, the
volunteering that they did, you know, they volunteered in my schools,
but the reason that property is so darn expensive is because it’s where
it is.
And if my parents had done all of that same. and all of that same
community activity in like the middle of rural Missouri or something
like that, their house would not have gained value much at all. And so
that’s a situation where they’ve benefited from the system and, you
know, indirectly I’ve benefited too, but it’s actually not really just
like that value should actually go back to the community in the form of
taxes, in my opinion.
00:54:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to bring it back to our discussion about
markets, the intuition here shouldn’t be that like, we should
confiscate all the land or something, right? It’s more that we want to
bring the dynamism and the distributed information processing and the
efficiency, the experimentation that you get from markets and
entrepreneurship to things that are more shaped like public goods or
things that impact many people, because we have those incredible
benefits in the pure private market. It’s, and it’s created an
enormous amount of wealth and good in the world, right? We’ve had
trouble with the more public domains, which by the way, now constitute
most of our economy, you know, healthcare, education, so forth. We’ve
had trouble with the dynamism and the efficiency in those spaces.
So if we can find some way to bring those dynamics of the market to
these more public spaces that could be really valuable. So thinking
about the land thing, if you’ve ever been a homeowner, you know. So the
incredible amount of pride and attention and care you place in your own
private residence, right? Like you pay a lot of attention to it, you’re
willing to invest in it. If we had a mechanism whereby you could get
that same sort of care and attention to detail on public goods that were
impacting others, perhaps because you got paid out a dividend or
something, think of how powerful that could be, you know, how exactly
you do it, that’s the social technology question, but I’m optimistic
that there’s a way to make that happen.
00:55:53 - Speaker 1: Two ideas I’ve played around with, which might be
terrible, I’ve, you know, no one’s ever tried them that I know of. So
one, the simpler one is, what if people in San Francisco had shares in
the city of San Francisco, like, equity, basically.
And the reason I asked that question is like, right now, if you’re a
homeowner in San Francisco and someone builds like a big condo building
next to you or an office or something, you just lose out. Like, it’s
just bad. It is actually just kind of bad for you for the most part. You
know, don’t have as nice of a view, your vegetable garden has shade,
like you have more rowdy neighbors or whatever. But if you had equity in
the city, like maybe equity in the property taxes or something like
that, your incentives would be more aligned with what’s good for the
community at large, and what will generate more opportunities for all
sorts of people, and not just yourself. And so I’ve always thought that
that would be like a really interesting thing for a city to experiment
with. And something like UBI universal basic income, might serve
something like that, though the way that people have talked about
universal basic income in the past doesn’t tie those two concepts
together very well, so I don’t think people would emotionally get that
connection. So I’m not sure if that actually solves the problem.
00:57:00 - Speaker 3: Adam, stop me for we aren’t too far off track
here, but I think it was a tragic mistake to call what we currently call
universal basic income, that instead of something like a citizen’s
dividend, it’s not like you’re entitled to a living by other people’s
work. It’s that the work that we all do to build this enormous amount
of cultural wealth in a given polity, uh, you know, that’s wealth that
we’re building for each other and so it’s plausible that you get some
dividend of that out to you on a per capita basis. I think that would
make a lot more sense like this idea of having shares in San Francisco
basically, or perhaps you have shares in the properties closest to you
on an exponentially decaying basis. So the ones right next to you, you
own a big chunk of, and the ones on the other side of the city you own
almost none of, you know, you can imagine all kinds of wild stuff, but I
think there’s something there.
00:57:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s an interesting change
on it. And I think like to put some flavor and like the idea of what are
people contributing to society, cause like, you know, some people don’t
do any volunteering, some people, you know, there’s some people who
don’t work at all or whatever, and you’re like, well, maybe they’re
not contributing, but like just by existing, maybe you’re walking
around the street and now a woman who’s walking home late at I feel
safer because you’re there. Like that’s the kind of thing where being
around other people actually has value just purely by itself. And sure,
everyone contributes slightly different amounts, but right now, that’s
not really recognized at all. Everyone gets like sort of zero in return
directly, and I think it would be interesting to like experiment with
that. I think it would have to be workshopped heavily, so cities, please
don’t take this as described, Please play with it. But I think as a
concept, there’s something there.
Another idea is like, you could put more markets into the zoning code,
so instead of saying things like, you cannot build buildings higher than
this, instead you could have like, have you heard of air rights? Yeah,
yeah, yeah, so you could have something more like air rights, which is
basically creating property rights for the air above buildings in
different cities you can like swap them.
00:58:54 - Speaker 2: When you mentioned charter cities earlier, I was
thinking of Astral Codex 10 recently did a kind of review or overview of
a charter city, and apparently the way they’re doing it is what they
call voxels, which I’m familiar with from my video game days, which are
essentially 3D pixels. So there’s 1 m by 1 m by 1 m square voxels and
property rights are not just sort of the 2D space that’s on the ground,
but actually goes up into the air.
00:59:18 - Speaker 1: Exactly, that’s exactly the concept. Like right
now we have a very two dimensional property rights system where people
like.
Land and then some chunk of air above it, but like, basically it’s 2D,
but that’s actually a very massive simplification, especially in a
place like Manhattan or Hong Kong, where buildings are extremely tall.
And so if you could swap those in a more fluid market, then I think you
would end up with people internalizing more of the externalities that
they impose on people when they have a choice.
So in that example of the Pacific Heights residents vegetable garden.
They would say, you know what, it’s worth $100,000 to me for my
vegetable garden, not to be overshadowed, and I will pay you that money
so that you don’t do it.
And now, the person who’s not able to build really high will be
compensated for it, or vice versa, you know, maybe the person trying to
build the buildings is like, you know, it’s worth $100,000 to you, but
it’s worth a million dollars to me. So I’m going to do it and now I’m
going to compensate you for the cost that it has imposed on you.
Poor squash. Yeah, yeah, the poor squash, but it’s like very expensive
squash. And so I think the key idea that this is all trying to get at is
like, how can you make it so that when people affect each other, when
they have impacts on each other, that That person is compensated for it,
and so that people actually bear the costs of like that they’re
imposing on other people.
And if they’re willing to pay it, that’s great, but if they’re not
willing to pay it then they shouldn’t do that action. So anyway, those
are still very rough ideas, but I think this is why I want to see more
cities pop up and exist in the world like Prospera, the charter city,
because we’ll be able to run these. Experiments and see if they work
and they might be totally crackpot ideas, but they also could be great
ideas. Like democracy seemed like a terrible idea that didn’t make any
sense for a long time, but then some countries started experimenting
with it and it works pretty darn well. And so more places were able to
adopt it. And that was only possible because there was a lot of frontier
and we don’t have that much frontier anymore, so we have to make our
own.
01:01:20 - Speaker 2: So maybe before we go, I’d love to hear from each
of you a city that you think really does a good job at being itself
perhaps, but in particular, that manages to have a unique character and
a high quality of life, and be an attractive place for some certain kind
of person or some certain industry through good governance, through
whether it’s urban planning, whether it’s general policy making, is
there something that stands out to you as a bit of a role model that
others could look to.
01:01:50 - Speaker 1: The first one that comes to mind for me is Tokyo.
It’s, I believe, the biggest city in the world by population, like 37
million people, something.
Totally wild, and it’s a source of roughly all of Japan’s economic
growth.
In fact, like, Japan is a very slow growth country and the population of
Japan overall is declining, but there’s still more people moving to
Tokyo, which is just an astonishing fact.
Something I really admire about Tokyo is that they are able to, while
it’s a very desirable place to live, the housing costs in Tokyo are
actually not that high. And it’s not entirely clear to me why this is
true.
There’s a number of things that I think contribute to it. One is that
people are pretty liberal about tearing things down and building new
things, and it seems almost like a cultural love of newness, and people
are always excited to like rebuild and create a new thing in the place
where an old thing stood.
And so I think they’re able to adjust as things change over time more
rapidly than cities that are more afraid to tear things down. I think it
is sort of cheating in the sense that like Japan overall is seeing
depressed population growth. It is declining, so that does make things
cheaper.
But as I mentioned at the top, like Tokyo is growing as a city, the
number of people are coming in should balance that out.
So, I think Tokyo is one of the few massive cities in the world that has
maintained a relatively low cost of living, and I think that there’s a
lot of lessons to be learned there and how they’ve done it, while also
being an engine for economic growth.
01:03:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, Tokyo is a great choice, and there’s lots
of interesting land use law there. We can add some stuff in the show
notes, but I think the short version is it’s one of the few big cities
where it’s legal to build housing, therefore it’s relatively
affordable.
01:03:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.
01:03:38 - Speaker 2: I just visited there once, a number of years ago,
but yeah, I absolutely was impressed by how clean and organized the city
was for being the world’s biggest metropolis, and just it’s a small
note, but it’s a huge one to me, and feels like something every city
should adopt. They don’t have on street parking. So, while there are
cars, each individual street you walk down feels very kind of cozy and
human scale in a way that I don’t associate with basically any other
city or I associate with more of a village vibe, and I think this is
just pretty brilliant.
Transit policy and how people get around cities and why it’s so
important that they be able to move conveniently and safely is something
we didn’t get into at all, and there’s a huge interest of mine, but
that’s one small example of a policy choice that just radically changes
the feel of a place.
01:04:25 - Speaker 1: And part of why that’s so important is because by
not having on street parking, they’re forcing people to internalize
externalities that they impose on other people, whereas most American
cities have on street parking and it’s free, which is basically sounds
fine, right? Like, so many cities have this, but the result is that
people don’t have to pay any of the costs of their car taking up space
in a city.
And so, like in San Francisco, the square footage of renting out a
parking space on the street, it’s like, I don’t know, 50 cents an hour
or something.
It is cheaper than the rent of an actual apartment. And so there have
been like people joking, like, maybe I should just like camp on a
parking space all the time and like live there because it’ll be cheaper
than renting an apartment.
And and it’s effectively this like public space that we’ve given up to
people and said like, you can have this and do whatever you want with it
without realizing that you’re implicitly making a trade off.
And so yeah, I really love that Japan and Tokyo does that.
01:05:18 - Speaker 3: The parking topic is its whole own interesting
thing. I very highly recommend the book, the high costs of free parking.
It’s an economic and mathematical analysis of what happens when you
give away or subsidized parking, and the short version that’s every
free spot in a major city is like lighting tens of thousands of dollars
on fire. You can read the book for the details.
01:05:38 - Speaker 1: It’s a great book, it’s really good.
01:05:40 - Speaker 2: So I think for me my choice will be Dubai, which
we mentioned briefly earlier, and in fact, I’ve never been there, but
I’ve read a couple of pretty good books about it, including History of
Future Cities, which covers a few very interesting cities such as Saint
Petersburg and some others, and then another one, that’s sort of a
longer history of the ruling class there and how Dubai came to be. And
on one hand, it’s an amazing example of human achievement and what you
can do if you decide you want to, and well you have a lot of resources
to throw at it. On the other hand, there’s a lot there that’s
extremely terrible, so it is this study in contrasts, but I guess I
don’t necessarily take it as that it reflects a place I want to live or
is how we should build cities, but rather you get this sense that It is
possible we can decide as kind of societies that we want to build a city
in a particular way, and we want it to be a particular way. And coming
back to that kind of let 1000 flowers bloom, we need to experiment more.
To me, it’s sort of inspiring in its study in contrasts, and for me
it’s sort of opened my eyes to what could we do if we were willing to
think a little bit more outside the box about our cities.
01:06:52 - Speaker 3: And the ones I’ll pick are not perfect by any
means, but I think they’re very interesting and important, and those
are the major cities in Texas, like Austin and Houston.
Texan cities, perhaps more than any other in the western world, embrace
the idea of let people do things and see what happens. So if you’ve
ever visited one of these cities in Texas, it’s highly chaotic.
You know, there’s incredible amounts of cars and freeways everywhere.
There’s like houses next to commercial and next to light industrial,
it’s kind of anything goes, and they’re constantly building stuff and
tearing stuff down. But the result is that you get this incredible
dynamism and indeed people are voting with their feet to move to Texas.
So I think it’s at least a very interesting experiment and I’ll be
curious to see how it plays out over the next couple of decades.
01:07:34 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for
listening. If you have feedback, write to us on Twitter at museAppHQ or
via email. hello at museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review
on Apple Podcasts, and Devin, whenever you get around to starting your
charter city and implementing all of your unique ideas, please let me
know. I can’t promise I’ll move there, but at least I want to visit.
01:07:57 - Speaker 1: I’ll definitely keep you posted. Thanks so much
for having me.
0 min
January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Pricing is uniquely susceptible to getting
gridlocked. Everyone has opinions about pricing, as they can and should.
It tends to be an emotional topic. There usually is not a team or a
person whose full time job it is to do pricing, unlike product design or
product engineering, and it often takes more effort than you think or
realize.
00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s
about Muse, the company, and the small team behind it. I’m Adam
Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, and my
colleague Leonard Zaburski. Hi. And Leonard, you are a longtime member
of the Muse team, you are the design powerhouse behind all the lovely
things that people I think are familiar with, but it’s your first time
on the podcast here, so maybe you could just quickly tell us about your
background, what was your journey that brought you to Muse.
00:01:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I started about 2 years ago with MS and I
actually came from studying interface design in Potsdam near Berlin here
and just had done some freelancing, basically found out that wasn’t
really for me and was looking for something else. So I saw that I can
switch design memo you posted about news. And yeah, we kind of started
working together and sort of just worked on going from a prototype into
a real product.
00:01:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if I’m not mistaken, maybe Mark originally
found you through two works you published. One is Desktop Neo, which is
sort of a rethinking of desktop operating systems for kind of more
modern productivity, which obviously is quite on point for us. Then you
have another done one called the Cloudfall, which I think is a bit more
about consumer data, how apps could potentially in a hypothetical world
kind of give users more control over their data and privacy while also
giving you a lot of the benefits of the aggregation. I’ll link to both
of those in the show notes.
00:02:01 - Speaker 1: The other side of the origin story is whenever
I’m working on a hard problem, I like to search for the prior art on it
to see what other people have done and to learn from that. And so back
in the early days of Muse, when we were thinking about the core design
problems, I went into DuckDuckGo and typed like direct manipulation
touch interface, and one of the very best things I saw was the work
Mener had done like, oh man, we got to email this guy and see if we can
get him to come work with us and one thing led to another.
00:02:27 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I think it was actually really good
timing. You had just read the Ink & Switch piece on the Muse Studio
for ideas at that point, still very much a research prototype, we were
still thinking about even whether to try to commercialize it, so it was
maybe hot on your mind, so the timing was very good.
00:02:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I was actually really surprised after I
published both of those essays, like how much feedback you can get and
how well it actually works to basically publish something where you’re
working on exactly the thing you’re interested in, which maybe, you
know, isn’t something that a lot of people are interested in, but sort
of the more niche it is, the more feedback you get from the people that
also care about the same sort of stuff. And so it actually works out
really well to find sort of the people you want to work with.
00:03:11 - Speaker 2: Exactly right. Find your tribe by that weird thing
that only you and 20 other people in the world care about, and if you
publish that and put it on the internet, you can all kind of find each
other.
So our topic today is pricing, and this is a big one for a lot of
reasons. So Muse just launched new pricing, we kind of call it pricing V2
internally, and just really briefly, you know, I’ll link the new
pricing page and we’re gonna write a memo on it, that sort of thing,
but basically we’re going from having one price, which was $100 a
year, to two tiers of membership, a pro plan that remains $100 but then
kind of a starter plan that’s $40 and then you can also pay for those
on a monthly basis, so you can potentially get started for $4 a month.
And we’ll talk a little bit more about our journey there, but I think
for me one of the most important framings on this is that pricing is
incredibly important. It’s really important to your business. The
stakes are very high, right, the right price and you can make a
successful business, the wrong price either too low or too high, and you
can basically fail. And furthermore, in my experience on this, because
I’ve been involved in a number of teams setting prices for products,
there’s no real playbook. I feel like almost any other type of product
development, business work, particularly in the startup space.
Marketing, sales, engineering, design, there are playbooks and best
practices and lots of material that you can find. There’s a few books
and things on how to price your sass product or how to price your hourly
rates as a consultant, but I found them pretty unsatisfying and it feels
like a really just kind of.
And frontier and no one really knows how to do it, but it’s critically
important to your business and it’s really important to your customers,
obviously.
So I think that makes it a pretty rich topic and why I’m also really
pleased we did manage to get the second iteration of pricing out because
I’ve been on many teams that have done it and it’s hard, it’s hard
because the stakes are high.
00:05:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and the context for Muse is that we were in a
relatively unexplored part of the pricing IDMAs.
So if we go back to pricing V1, this is back in the early days of MUS,
we had this aspiration to create a professional grade software product
for.
The iPad and in order to do that, it would require a lot of development
work and therefore we need to fund the business reasonably and so if you
kind of do the math on this stuff, we realize that you realistically
need a professional price for the business to work out and for us to be
able to produce and maintain the software where professional prices
caught on the order of $100 a year or $10 a month.
00:05:45 - Speaker 2: And I did some search on the priority there, it’s
remarkably consistent, whether you look at something like Microsoft
Office back when it was sold in a box, you know, it was $300 and you’d
kind of need to buy a major new version about every 3 years, whether you
go forward to today with SAS subscriptions, Photoshop, that sort of
thing. Some things are higher, some things are lower, but that’s quite
commonly, no matter how they package, it ends up being around that
amount, again, for professional software, which is typically on the
desktop or on the web.
00:06:14 - Speaker 1: Right, and that’s where the first big challenge
came for us. There’s very well established precedent for pricing
professional and especially enterprise products in the SAS model.
This is where your company uses ocean or whatever, and every seat in
this app cost, I don’t know what notion is, but they’re almost all
$10 + or minus $5 a month. I would bet notion is too. And the software
is distributed in the usual fast model.
Now, for product reasons, we really want this to be an iPad native app
and a pricing challenge there is that of course you need to sell that
through the app store then and pricing the app store for professional
product. has historically been almost nonexistent.
There are almost no products sold to the app store with a professional
price. It’s much more dominated by consumer pricing, which might be
free, it might be ad-based, or it might be consumption based, like a
free to play game or a dating app or something. So a big question for
us, a big risk for the business was can we actually deliver a
professionally priced product for the iPad through the App Store. So we
decided very early on to confront that question because it was a big
risk and basically to try and see if it worked. And so that led us to
pricing V1 which briefly was, there was one option, it was a one year
membership for $99 or $99.99.
00:07:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and for the record, I’m not a big fan of
the 99 cent trailing thingies. I know why psychologically that. Yeah,
$399 seems like less than $4 but that’s not a choice because we sell
through the app store, that’s imposed upon us by their system, so we
end up with $99.99 dollars, but I tend to, you know, just refer to it
as $100 when I am speaking informally.
00:07:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. So we had this one membership
option for one year for $100 and we wanted to see to what extent that
would land with the market.
00:08:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I remember when we first turned on sort
of the paid product, which was very, I don’t know, nerve-wracking,
exciting, but also nerve wracking, both because one we knew we were
taking kind of a bold position to charge sort of a desktop product price
for an iPad app.
Of course I believe the iPad can and should have great software. It’s
an incredible piece of hardware and it seems a shame to me that there
aren’t more really good professional tools for it. And so that’s part
of our kind of whole hypothesis with this business. But yeah, we went to
turn on the pricing, which was a little more than a year ago because we
just had our first renewals come up and, you know, it really was this
kind of bold experiment. We didn’t even have a monthly option, for
example, and that was partially for simplicity, but it was partially to
really see, OK, like if we really do this litmus test, does someone
believe either the software today or more plausibly kind of the concept
of what they think it could do for them is something they would pay this
price for. And I remember turning it on and I thought that was very
plausible that we would just get 0 people making a purchase, and pretty
quickly we got our first few. I think our first few were kind of friends
and family or investors or something like that just showing their
support, which I appreciate and, you know, making sure our payment flow
works and everything, but it wasn’t long after we turned it on that we
got our first purchase from someone we didn’t even know who they were,
they had never contacted support, you know, they just made a purchase
and I ended up, you know, writing to some of those early people and
basically kind of Not too pointedly, but kind of saying like, why did
you buy this? Just to see if what they conceived, you know, what they
thought they were buying or what was in their mind matched what we
thought we were offering, but that was very promising. So even though
early on, we’re basically still in the beta phase and we had a few
users anyways, or pretty small number of active users. The fact that
some of them wanted to purchase, and they wanted to purchase at this
kind of unforgiving price, that didn’t even have the monthly option or
whatever, that was a validation, that, yeah, we can do something in this
range.
00:10:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I remember sort of prepping the team on
what we should expect and look for, which was we’re really trying to
get a non-zero number of non-affiliated customers to buy.
So it’s like excluding friends and family and investors, people who
show up and believe in the software enough to pay in $100 and I say
some small number because regardless of what price you charge, like if
we charged 99 cents. A lot of people would say it’s too expensive.
You’re always going to have a bunch of people saying that.
What you really need when you’re early on is, is there some non-zero
evidence this has traction and then as you go on, you need to worry more
about conversion rates and so on and so forth, and we’re starting to do
more of that, but it was really, can we get some initial believers and I
think we did.
00:10:39 - Speaker 2: And as a product person or just speaking to kind
of the product management discipline generally, will you pay or actual
proof that they will pay is one of the main ways you kind of seek
validation for your product market fit hypothesis, because just liking
something or being enthusiastic about it or thinking it’s cool or even
using it, these are all good, but enthusiasm alone. There is an
indicator, but it’s not enough. There’s something really, the rubber
meets the road, or it really puts a point on it to say, OK, yeah, you
like this, but enough to part with your hard earned cash for it, and
that’s really an important moment in those early days, it’s less
about, can you make enough money and just will people pay at all,
because that’s an indicator that you’ve created something of value.
00:11:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that was also a huge motivation
for the whole team to go from people saying, OK, this is nice, and you
know, we did use the tests and people liked it, but it’s a different
level of people actually start paying for the app, you know, then
you’re actually working on a product and not on a research prototyping
thing anymore.
00:11:46 - Speaker 2: Oh, I agree, yeah, I totally felt like a moment of
growing up, maturing, things getting real, and also on the support side
right now when someone writes in and we have like a little kind of
plugin in our system where we can see if they’re a paying customer or
not, and if they are, you know, of course we tend to give them priority
support, particularly if they have a problem, and it wasn’t right away,
but I remember the first day we had essentially an angry customer where
something wasn’t working the way they wanted and Yeah, they were upset
because they had parted with money for this and again, it’s just a very
different dynamic when you’re in this business transaction. They might
like your podcast or your cool vibe or your nice design article or
whatever, but at the end, now they’re using your product to solve a
real problem they have. In their personal life or their professional
life or whatever, and if it’s not doing what they expected or what they
want it to do, they might get upset and then you have an obligation to
them and it’s just very different from, check out my cool research
prototype or even my MVP that I’m letting you use for free.
So yeah, once we got that initial data of people would pay and they
would pay this professional price, that was a good learning, but then
from there, having been active for a year now and especially after we
launched, there was kind of the steady trickle of beta users converting,
but the launch was where, you know, the graph kind of started to change
shape.
In a really nice way and we started to see, OK, there really is a
business here, but in the meantime, you know, we knew this was just our
first stab at pricing. We knew it was never going to be the end state
and so we over the course of this year, and particularly post launch
when the numbers became, you can start to see patterns when the numbers
are bigger. I think we learned quite a few things and that’s what kind
of motivated our let’s do a pricing V2 roll in the things we’ve
learned because I think price is just like product you have to iterate
on it to improve it. It’s hard to do for those previous mentioned
reasons, the stakes. High, it’s emotional. People hate price changes if
you have to do that, but I also think it’s critically important because
the price being comfortable or accessible, having to be a fit for what
people want is crucial, and you just won’t get there without iteration
and experimentation.
00:13:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so we did notice some patterns with this V1
pricing.
There were, first of all, a friend of people who were happy to pay it,
so that was good, stayed 0.0, and there were not surprisingly, a lot of
people who were unwilling to pay the $100 a year price.
Now we expected most of that, of course. So you gotta drill in a little
bit.
In particular, there’s a lot of comments that essentially implied that
they would never pay anything for this type of software, which is fine,
you know, it’s your life and your money, but that’s not something that
we were gonna be able to help them with. In the near term.
But there were some more interesting cases. One group of cases is people
who valued the software a lot, but have less ability to pay for various
reasons. So students actually were a big group of this. A lot of
students use and like Muse, but they’re in a different situation for most
of the professionals who might otherwise use Muse.
Another one was people who were in different countries and for reasons
of the local economy or the currency, the price as it was translated
originally by Apple might not have been suitable. And then I think there
were also some people who were not happy about or unwilling to do a
subscription, which we should talk more about.
Then there were people who I think are open to the idea of using a
product like Muse, but they were looking for a few more features.
I think the most common things there would be sync slash collaboration
and just some more core features around richer data types and so on. So
I think that roughly summarizes what we learned with the one.
00:15:07 - Speaker 2: And that point around folks for whom the price
wasn’t accessible, students, maybe folks globally, that leads into, I
think to me, one of the underlying principles here is we’re making the
software because we want as many people as possible to use what we’re
creating, right? We fancy ourselves artists or artisans or something
like that. We’re making this to help people and I feel incredibly good
and happy when I see people using what we’ve created to do interesting
work.
But at the same time, we also have to make a sustainable business.
I like this, I think I’ve heard people say that, you know, money and
cash flow for a business is kind of like oxygen for a person. You don’t
live to breathe, but you definitely need oxygen if you want to keep
living. That’s not the purpose of life, but it is a necessary sort of
mechanism. So for us, we’re sort of looking for that happy balance
where as many people as possible can use this software and get value
from it, but also make a sustainable business, and that’ll lead into,
yeah, some of these other topics we might talk about, but how we could,
and what we hope the V2 pricing has done is to try to make it accessible
to more people, not everyone, for sure, and I’m sure there will be a V3
and V4 down the road, but to me that was both one of the biggest things
we learned and one of the big goals with the next iteration.
00:16:24 - Speaker 3: So when we actually ended up with pricing is a set
of changes and maybe the most obvious one of those is the introduction
of a cheaper plan, what we are calling the starter membership. So before
we are yet, this single membership, $99 it gets you the full thing.
And now, the startup membership is less than half of that, and it has
the same set of features, but it basically puts a limit on the number of
cards you can have and the size boards can have.
And then the other thing we are doing is adding monthly pricing to those
membership options.
So before, you would have to pay the yearly price upfront. And it turns
out that a lot of people actually just want to pay monthly, and so we
just support that.
00:17:08 - Speaker 2: And I will say that I think part of my motivation
in having only the yearly before was you were a little bit sort of
supporting our Kickstarter.
Or sort of helping fund development for something that you believed
could be good and then now because we have a more mature product that
you think it’s pretty well proven to solve a set of problems for a
certain kind of person that you might want to subscribe for a couple of
months and then that proves its value to you and you want to get the
discount on the yearly plan, or maybe you just, you only have a need for
a project for a couple of months and you just want to pay for the time
when you’re getting value and not when you’re not.
And that fits better with, we’re less in this mode of aspirational, and
onto we have a real product, it works really well, lots of people use
it, lots of people get value from it, and I wanna open that up more.
00:17:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this concept of gradually
getting people more and more involved in use is really key to our new
pricing, yeah.
Before we kind of had this free trial option and we specifically said M
as a free trial. And now we are kind of reframing that as, as the base
version of MUS and specifically saying, OK, it’s not a trial anymore.
You can actually use this for months, basically, or even for years. And
we have seen a lot of our users do that. And then, you know, many months
after using the free version, they discover, OK, uses actually works for
them now and they become a member. And maybe, you know, they become like
a startup member at first and then a year later they can become a pro
member. And that is sort of, I think what we really need to support with
news and the prising.
00:18:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, before we asked you to make this pretty big
leap of faith commitment, now we have a way to ease into things, and as
it proves its value, you can use it more and pay for what you need, or
if it’s not proving its value, you hopefully haven’t lost too much.
Notably the new base, what we’re not calling the free tier, that’s no
different than the trial we had before. It’s still unlimited time, 100
cards, but I think when we first did that, I don’t know if we thought
that maybe it was more limited, or maybe we knew it was pretty generous,
but we kind of wanted to frame it as a trial to really say, you know,
this is software you need to pay for, and I think we’ve gotten that
message across and so now we’re softening a little. We’ve basically
been framing them all along, but this is just kind of explaining it in a
way that makes that a little more clear.
Depending on who you talk to, software subscriptions are seen as either
the absolute savior of the software industry and just a great deal for
both businesses that get to support their ongoing development and
customers who can pay for just what they need when they need it and not
have a big upfront cost for software that they may or may not. Use long
term, or there’s many people who have a deep dislike that it feels like
renting your software, you’re going to get tricked into paying when you
don’t really need it, that you’re going to get locked out of your data
somehow, that it’s just a really uncomfortable or unpleasant way to
fund software development.
And then we have an additional wrinkle here with doing all this in the
iOS App Store world, which inherits so much of the iPhone consumer ads
supported data monetization world of things where the big apps on a
phone are Facebook and TikTok, not productivity tools that you pay for,
and so the iPad ends up sort of inheriting that, so. That’s a huge
topic there, but I guess before we get into philosophy there, it’s
worth talking about what we actually did on this pricing B2, which is
what I like to call alumni mode. I don’t know that we actually call it
that in the software at all. I’m not sure that phrasing appears
anywhere.
00:20:39 - Speaker 1: I think that’s actually interesting because they
basically didn’t need to think about it for the first year.
00:20:44 - Speaker 2: It’s true.
00:20:45 - Speaker 1: There’s actually been a whole series of these
things.
00:20:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s many elements of the subscription
model to talk about, but when it comes to that being locked out of your
data and feeling like you’re being held hostage, and it’s a very
reasonable thing to feel because so much of modern business models in
general have to do with sort of data. Control data swamps, but
particularly for something like productivity tools where you want to
access your work, you know, you want to be able to go and pull up the
source documents for a master thesis you worked on 3 years ago or 5
years ago, regardless of whether you’ve been paying for the software
all that time.
So the way we wanted to address that specific thing, because it is
really the case, we’re not trying to monetize your data and ownership
and control and access to your data, we’re trying to monetize great
software, a great tool that feels good and provides you really a
supercharging your thinking experience, and you’re paying for that
value while you’re getting it, and when you don’t need it anymore, you
don’t pay and your data is not something you need to worry about.
So kind of our solution to that was What I’m usually calling alumni
mode, which is basically that once you cancel or don’t let your
subscription renew, then all your data is still there, you can still
access it, you can navigate, you can search, you can move stuff around,
you can even still scribble with the pencil, but you just can’t add new
stuff. And so I hope we’ll see how it plays out, but I hope this is
something where someone could, if they wanted, subscribe, become a
member to Muse for a few months or a year, or however long they need it.
And then if they’re not getting value from it currently, they let that
expire, and then they can still access all their data, they don’t need
to worry about it being locked up, and if at a later time they want to
resubscribe because they have a new project, they can do that. And
we’ll see how that works out in practice, but at least my hope is that
will help address that getting locked out of your data, that that’s the
purpose of the subscription fear, I think very reasonable fear that
people have.
00:22:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this brings us to the philosophy of
subscription pricing for software. It’s a huge topic. One thing I’d
say is that I do believe most software is fundamentally subscription,
whether you want to be or not or whether you call it that or not,
that’s what’s really going on under the hood.
Now there are different periods that are possible. Adam, you mentioned
it used to be that you might buy Word and use it for 3 or 4 years, and
then you would buy the next version. So effectively you have a
subscription period of 3 years, or you can have more like the modern
situation where you have month-based pricing. So I think there are
actually a few things that are happening when people are concerned about
subscription pricing.
One is call it the annualized total cost of ownership and however it’s
charged, they don’t want to pay, say $100 a year for a software tool.
And again, that’s fine. I think a lot of cases it’s not viable and
that software is not going to get made and so it is what it is.
I think there’s another piece of it, which is a sense of agency and
control. And in the case of buying boxed software or buying something
like a car, you have much more agency over when the period ends and what
you do with the thing as it’s approaching the end of the period. Like
you can choose to ride out the car and keep using it, running to the
ground, or you can sell it. And, you know, Ford can’t come and like
yank the car out from under you because they changed their mind about
cars, right? So it’s a sense. Of you have more agency over your stuff,
and I think that’s a large part of what people are objecting to with
traditional subscriptions. First, the price and paying monthly per se.
So insofar as that is the case, I think this model where you have a
credit card charge monthly, but you have essentially indefinite control
over your own data through a alumni mode and B exporting to very
standard flat files that have been around for decades, perhaps that
threads the needle.
00:24:20 - Speaker 2: And maybe another point related to software
subscriptions is acknowledging how much it is the case that software is
a living thing that needs care and feeding, and even if you’re not
improving it, which hopefully our team’s hard at work trying to improve
our app, make it even far better in a 12 month period than it was at the
start, but even if you take that out, there’s just an ongoing
maintenance thing, right? And I have old side projects and whatever that
I don’t know, a game that I put in the app store and you know at some
point we didn’t have time to maintain it and it just fell out because
you got to keep up to date with the APIs and you got to like make it
match the modern world and you could complain, OK, is this just some
kind of treadmill of Microsoft or Apple or whoever the platform provider
is that’s making you do the latest API because they want to get you on
their latest operating system version and there’s probably some of
that, but honestly, I think it’s just the internet.
And software and technology is this really dynamic place and every year
we have huge leaps forward in everything like screens getting more vivid
to internet connections getting faster. You can do more, software gets
better, computers get better and get more capable, and that’s great,
but it means that all of this is.
Kind of a living ecosystem and everything is connected together, and
there’s lots of older programs that I love, but they aren’t maintained
and as a result, they stop, even if they don’t completely stop working,
they just stop being relevant to the modern world, right? And that’s a
shame. You need that maintenance if you want the software to sort of
stay relevant.
00:25:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, that’s sort of the underlying
reason for why most software is fundamentally a subscription, and I mean
you can look at it the other way. What would it even mean to buy a one
time software product of Muse’s nature in the iOS store? I think
realistically. Buying a license for like 1 to 3 years depending on the
whims of Apple and so forth, right? There’s no reasonable expectation
that that software could work forever. And if you were thinking, you
know, the software works forever and you get indefinite upgrades, that
seems unreasonable to me. So I think the subscription makes more sense.
00:26:18 - Speaker 2: I think there are a number of, particularly indie
apps in the app store.
I think of things as one of the better examples of a really well made
and kind of professionally priced.
I think it’s like a one time purchase, camera, $50.70 dollars for the
iPad and you then it’s $30 for the phone, and I forget what it is for
the desktop, but they do major new versions.
And those major new versions are paid upgrades and they do those major
new versions every few years.
So that’s more like the kind of Microsoft Office in the box model and
there you feel maybe a little bit more like you paid one time, you’re
not going to be surprised by a recurring charge coming on your credit
card, which I understand that is very unpleasant feeling.
And then also you feel like you have indefinite access to this, but of
course, what’s gonna happen is the developer’s gonna move on to the
new version, the old version’s gonna become less relevant.
I don’t know what they do for long term maintenance, but in the end,
yeah, I just feel like software is a living thing, and if you’re
continuing to get value from it, paying for that value is sort of best
for everyone.
00:27:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and a bit of an aside here, but I do think
there is a place for software that is designed very specifically to be
packaged and distributed, and this is software for use in what I would
describe as austere or even adversarial environments where you don’t
want your ability to use the software to be jeopardized by, you know,
for example, the payment processor doesn’t like what you’re doing
anymore. So if you’re working on an encrypted messaging app, for
example, you might want to distribute that in a way, engineer and
distribute in a way that has a real chance of working for several years
after you do that. But that’s like a huge effort and compromise and
you’re not going to be able to achieve the level of productivity and
quality that you can with modern living software, but for certain
specialized use cases, I do think that makes sense.
00:27:56 - Speaker 2: You know, the software in the Mars rover or in the
Mars rover is the first thing that came to mind on that, something that
needs to keep operating at a distance, some new version of whatever
Linux or iOS or whatever coming out can’t break it. It should be a very
kind of static, it should be in a kind of stasis and self-contained.
That makes sense there, and there are other examples of that, but most
of us were using these devices that are connected to the internet, that
are in collaboration with other humans, and protocols are evolving, and
file formats are evolving, and there’s new capabilities all the time,
and necessarily the software is kind of a living thing.
00:28:32 - Speaker 1: This is even more out there, but I could imagine
someone undertaking the project to design a whole ecosystem for software
that was designed in this way.
There’s been this sort of change recently towards more static linking
of programs where if your program has software dependencies, you
basically bundle all those things up into your program and distribute
that instead of looking for those dependencies at. Run time on whatever
machine you’re running on.
So you could imagine a system that kind of took that to the next level
is where you bundle in maybe the OS, maybe actually hardware, so you
design the whole thing from the bottom up to be runable for a very long
time. But that’s the whole undertaking and importantly, it’s not the
software ecosystem that most of us are operating in.
00:29:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think what Apple has been trying to do
by pushing subscriptions in the app store is exactly to enable
developers to continue developing the app and being profitable without
having to constantly create a new version of the app and basically
confusing all the previous users.
That works out great when the company actually wants to do that.
I do think there’s a problem by basically Apple forcing all apps into
this subscription model if they want to be profitable because, you know,
it’s not really that viable for us to have a one time purchase in the
app store that is priced above, say, $3 or something.
And you can’t really invent your own payment model or anything in the
app store, you kind of have to choose what Apple has to offer. And so I
think a lot of apps end up.
Basically using subscriptions without really giving the user of the
benefits that should come with it.
And then, of course, the user kind of easily gets frustrated and feels
like, OK, subscriptions are kind of a scam. And then for us, it becomes
really difficult to kind of differentiate from that and, you know, try
to frame our pricing in a way that still makes sense for users.
00:30:20 - Speaker 2: The App Store side of it is a whole set of
challenges. On one hand, it comes with very turnkey ways to take payment
and currency conversions and product packages and promo codes and
essentially there’s a lot of software in a box stuff that you get, I
don’t say for free but just built in, but it’s also very
constraining.
I have the sense that it’s optimized for indie developers, you know,
like a single person making an app that kind of fits into a particular.
Box and the more you need to or wish to do something a little outside
that box. So for me, for example, there’s a lot of frustration and
things I would like us to be able to do to give a really great
experience to people to help start change that perception of
subscription software, especially on iOS as being not desirable. For
example, I’d love to do a 30 day money back guarantee. You can try it.
There’s a button right in the app if you decide. Yep, this isn’t for
me after all. You can basically go in there and just click the button
and get an instant refund. And to me that’s different from free trials.
We don’t even have a free trial on the new subscription because I feel
like I’m making the decision or pushing a button to make a purchase for
the future and then inevitably I’m going to get surprised and it’s
going to charge me when I wasn’t expecting it and it’s, I think it’s
just kind of a bad experience where I think an instant refund in some
period could be a better experience, but we just can’t do that. That’s
not part of the App Store mechanics. So pros and cons on that, but I
think part of the challenge again is that it’s working within this
whole payment system, an app ecosystem that evolved out of the iPhone,
consumer apps had supported data monetization on the back end, or in
some cases, you know, here’s 399 1 time purchase for a fun little
casual game, that kind of thing. You need something very different in
terms of payment infrastructure and in terms of just how you have a
relationship with your customers, things like being able to do refunds
or partial refunds or whatever. That is something that makes a lot of
sense for business software, for productivity tools, and doesn’t yet
exist in this ecosystem.
Another element of the App Store is for a lot of folks, particularly if
they come through a search or something like that, maybe they never even
saw them use website, their first exposure to what is this product, what
does it do, and Importantly, what is the cost is the App Store, but
actually the way that it’s set up now, it’s not that obvious whether
sort of what the pricing model is, because the App Store was originally
built around or designed around these kind of one time immediate
purchases where to even download the app, you had to like press this
button that had a price on it. Now it was pretty clear and subscriptions
were kind of added in after and you can surface them a little bit with
these kind of featuring. Things, but it’s just not that clear what the
pricing model is really someone should read our pricing page kind of in
tandem with evaluating whether they want to download and try the app,
but if they come through the app store, they don’t see that and they
don’t really have a sense of what is this cost, what is the model, what
can I expect on that. I think that also creates a lot of friction or
confusion or just mismatched expectations, because as Mark says,
there’s people for whom they’re not interested in or able to buy a
professional tool on their iPad, but if they download it, spend a little
time trying it, and then find that the business model, payment model
doesn’t match what makes sense for them, they might feel kind of
frustrated at the time they invested there. But putting aside App Store
listing challenges, Leonard, you worked a fair bit on how we communicate
the free plan in this new B2 pricing. How would you describe where we
landed on that?
00:33:53 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s especially difficult for use
because it’s such a different app from most others, and people really
need to try it out to even know what it is about and you like get a
sense of whether it might be useful for them.
So we really need people to, first of all, try and use and not think too
much about the pricing basically upfront because they don’t even know
yet what kind of value they might get out of it.
And so that’s why we kind of try to really change the communication
from, OK, you can use Muse as a free trial and then you kind of have to
pay up to the base version of Muse is free and you can use it however
long you want. And then when you’re ready, you can become a member if
you want to. And so the danger there for us, I think, is that it kind of
devalues the product a bit because it is now like a free product and
people can use it for free. And before we were kind of trying to build
this image of news as a premium product and we You know, we are a
professional tool that you pay for and you get the corresponding value
out of it. And it’s a very sort of elegant, simple transaction that you
make and in that way, I think we all really like that idea of, yeah, use
as a paid product and that’s it. But yeah, I think it’s a really good
experiment, at least for us to see how far we can push this free plan of
use without sort of sacrificing the paid plans.
00:35:17 - Speaker 2: That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought about that
before, but Fremium, that’s what you call sort of the business model
where you can use something for a limited time for free, but then
there’s some kind of gate you cross where you need to upgrade to
paying, and this makes me think a bit about, of course, another product
I’ve had quite a bit of experience working on pricing for, which is
Hiroku. And in both cases, I think you know Haroki was kind of a
category breaker or as an invention of a new category. It sort of
predated a lot of the server list and other stuff that exists today. And
so yeah, you really have to try it to get it. You can’t just say it’s
a better X because it is something kind of truly novel and it’s not for
everyone, but if you try it, you can find out if it is for you and then
once you know if it is for you. Then that can lead to, you know,
thinking about whether it’s something you wish to pay for, and Muse is
very much the same thing, you know, if you come in thinking, oh, it’s a
sketching app, or an artistic painting app, that’s wrong, and you’ll
find that out pretty quickly in trying it, or if you come in thinking
that it’s more of a text-oriented note taking app.
The point is you have to try it and you’ll know if it resonates for
you, but at the same time, people don’t want to invest the time to try
something if they Feel like they’re going to be surprised by the price,
right? You probably have this experience even window shopping, which is
you walk by a store or display or something, you’re like, Oh, I really
like that jacket, and then the shopkeepers, hey, you want to try it on,
but if you glance at the price tag and see that it’s way out of your
price range, you probably don’t even want to put it on because you just
don’t even want to tempt yourself with it, which is I think a very
reasonable kind of place to come from. So I think we have this challenge
in general of we want to get people in, we want to have them try it to
find out if it resonates, we want to give them as much time as they
want, it’s not time limited, you know, it may take a while for it to
really click, maybe you need to try it on one occasion, you know, really
get it, come back a little later, you try it again, maybe you have a new
project that it makes more sense for to make kind of taking the pressure
off, you can try it as much as you need to until it clicks. And then
once it clicks, then you can think about, OK, I wanna make this part of
my life, part of my work, and I wanna be a paying customer, so I get the
benefits of that. Now, what can I do to make that happen?
00:37:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think on a very practical level, then
the challenge for us is when do we actually tell people how much it
costs and when do we confront them with the price that we need to pay to
actually use it fully.
And so we discussed this actually quite a bit whether we maybe want to
put the price basically on the first screen and tell people so that they
aren’t surprised.
But I think what we settled on is to, to only tell people, OK, news does
cost something, basically, but you can try it out first and then as soon
As they kind of went through our first onboarding steps, which is maybe
like 5 or 10 minutes of trying the app and kind of getting a sense of
what it is and what it might do for you. Then we kind of start pushing
them towards opening our sort of pricing dialogue and actually seeing
the different options and seeing what new actually costs.
00:38:16 - Speaker 2: It’s a really subtle balance to try to be upfront
and set expectations and let people know what to expect, but also not
being really pushy about, here’s the price, or you gotta buy this or
whatever. We wanna make it clear, but we also wanna give you time in a
low pressure environment to just figure out that more important question
first of is this for me? Cause it really isn’t for everyone. It is a
niche app, it’s a specialty app, it really resonates with certain
people, but not with others. And you should find that out first, but you
also don’t want to be surprised by the price tag.
00:38:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think this idea of users being in the
right mindset and having the correct frame of reference is super
important, because ultimately, especially for a prosumer project, this
is gonna be a very emotional decision. There’s going to be verbalized
rationalizations of your underlying emotional decision, but really it’s
a, how do I feel about buying this thing ultimately? And that’s very
much colored by the mindset you have as you’re going.
Through and using the product.
So I think it’s good that we try to establish this is a premium product
early on and then when you go to make the actual emotional buying
decision some months later, that’s been the context that you’ve been
marinating in. You know, going back to the Hiroku example, I think this
is an area where we struggled with because a lot of people came to use
Hiokku and used it for a very long time because it was a place to do
free stuff. And then when your business started to take off and you
needed to spend $20 a month on dinos. People were having all kinds of
weird and highly disproportionate emotional reactions to that because
they were in this frame of reference of this is a place for free stuff,
even when from a rational perspective would have made total sense to
spend a little bit of money to support their business.
00:39:53 - Speaker 2: And one of my big learnings from the Hiroku
experience was, first of all, having that smooth ramp, and I’m not even
sure, certainly by the time I left that we had nailed that. You could
even argue today it’s a little rocky, but something where, yeah, if
you’re getting a huge amount of value for something totally for free
for some number of years, you get almost an entitlement, and I don’t
mean that in an accusatory way, you just get used to, oh, this is what I
have for.
Free. And so then when you need to pay, it feels jarring or
discontinuous, feels almost like a trick or something, whereas if
you’ve been asked to pay earlier, then that’s a more natural, oh yeah,
of course this is a product I need to pay for. And of course having
those smooth steps and matching the value you’re getting to what
you’re paying and that’s an Incredibly difficult thing to do. I don’t
think there’s any ideal way to do it. I like a couple of books in the
show notes on pricing that I basically think are not great, but at least
they’re the best things out there about how to price your business, and
one of them talks quite a bit about pricing consulting, how to pick an
hourly rate if you’re a freelancer, and what it comes down to is hourly
rate. Matches very poorly to the value a client is getting, right? You
might spend 2 hours and do some amazing work for them that is worth
$10,000 and then later you might grind away at a project for 50 hours
and end up delivering something that’s not useful to them. But in the
end it’s hard to really charge for value with sort of freelance work,
so you kind of have to go with hourly and how do you try to match that
up and you do the best you can, but I think one of the places that for
me, I have some battle scars from the Hiroku pricing experience was this
situation where certain people were getting tons of stuff for free, just
an insane amount of value. Other people were getting basically charged
too much for what they were doing and it was just very lumpy. And some
people were in the right place. Many, many people had this mismatch one
way or the other, and over the long term, that’s a bad thing.
00:41:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this issue of values is especially
challenging for a prosumer product like Muse.
If you look at an enterprise product, which again is almost all sass,
there’s much more obvious places to differentiate for enterprises,
because when you become a capital E enterprises, you have a set of
requirements that are quite unique. You want things like role based
access control and advanced permissions and audit logs and whatever the
weird compliance things are that you need, right? And these are things
that match almost 1 to 1 with large enterprises that have large budgets
and have complex use cases for the software. And so almost all
enterprise staff ends up looking something like that, you have kind of
an enterprise tier that has all those things. Whereas in the prosumer
world, the whole point is that you’re giving a very advanced tool to
anyone and everyone who wants to use it as individuals, so it’s much
harder to find places to differentiate on value. The best hypothesis we
have so far is basically the extent to which you’re investing and using
the tool as measured currently by the number of cards in your corpus.
00:42:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this is in contrast to
differentiating based on the features and basically limiting features to
people that pay more or that didn’t pay at all.
Which makes sense at first, but really gets difficult if you don’t have
specific features that are like a 1 to 1 match to a specific group of
people, because then it’s really hard to, first of all, try out the
full app for users.
Like you only have a limited set of features available. If you maybe
need that specific feature that isn’t available, the app is basically
useless to you and it’s really hard to sort of be convinced that it’s
not, but that it’s worth the full price. And then it also just makes
the design and development work really difficult. You can’t really
design a cohesive interface if only part of the people can access all of
it and the other half can only access a few features and maybe you want
to shuffle around things between plans.
00:43:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, and especially in this world of
living software that we’ve just described in the context of
subscriptions, you have potentially this wild feature matrix where you
have different combinations in there, plus the additional dimension of
every version is its own beast. It’s just a complete mess to deal with,
so I’m glad we haven’t gone down that path yet.
00:43:58 - Speaker 2: It was part of my experience at Hiroku and some
other previous companies as well, which is feature-based pricing seems
obvious. It seems like the way to differentiate between your different
tiers, but it basically doesn’t work for all the reasons you just
said.
And so doing something that’s more a proxy for use. Dropbox, it’s
gigabytes of storage, maybe for something like a web hosts, it’s
something to do with sort of scale and requests.
Even there is really a challenge because a lot of times we might have a
very valuable internal enterprise app that has a very low volume and
pays very little, but you can never find a perfect fit. And yeah, with
Muse we settled on this cards, which is a unit that hopefully the user
understands.
Notion has a similar idea with their blocks.
Nowadays, I think they fully sort of fund their personal product through
their enterprise product, but at least a year or two back, they had, I
think, 1000 blocks limited for sort of the free plan, and then you could
pay to upgrade to their roughly $100 a year, kind of more professional
product, and yeah, basically the idea.
The idea that fewer features with the one exception of those very
specific differentiators for say enterprise and that makes the whole
thing more cohesive and everyone can use everything and then you’re
just a proxy for usage.
And I hope at least yeah, kind of our new base, our free tier with 100
cards we’ve found that’s kind of like one project, give or take, or
maybe a few small projects and so if you really want, you can kind of
use Muse for one project. When you’re done with that project, you archive
it out by exporting a bundle to your Dropbox or iCloud or whatever, and
then you have space for a new one, and you can, and lots of folks have
used, used for a year and a half for as long as we’ve been running the
product completely for free. And sometimes some of those people, they do
tip over and become a member, maybe because their financial circumstance
changed, or they just finally felt like they were getting enough value
or they had a big enough project or something like that to justify that,
and I think that’s great, that’s the way I’d like it to be.
00:45:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I do think it’s an interesting challenge
then how you communicate the different limits to people, since it’s not
always immediately obvious, people will know that they need a certain
feature or not, but they don’t necessarily know how much they are going
to use the product or what a certain, what what a certain value means.
And I think you can also use that to your advantage in some way. If you
look at Apple, they differentiate a lot based on storage and people kind
of know how much storage they use right now, but then Apple also
explains, OK, you can actually get like 10,000 songs on this many
gigabytes.
00:46:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn’t that part of the classic, iPod
marketing was, yeah, 1000 songs in your pocket, or something like that.
00:46:37 - Speaker 3: Right, yeah, and then they kind of upsell you on
higher storage versions, right? And then you can do, OK, maybe I
actually want 2000 songs in my pocket and maybe a year from now, I’ll
have more songs. So that’s a way to kind of make people pay more.
00:46:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Apple does well with the what I call price
discrimination.
I guess hardware, computing hardware has always been natural, bigger
screen, more computing power, more storage, but it’s funny because of
course if you look at Apple products, Apple computers or iPads or
whatever as just like raw compute, and in fact folks do this who come
from it, from the, I don’t know, build my own PC from OEM parts, gaming
rig world, and they look at the Apple prices and they say this is
ridiculous when you’re just looking.
At the gigahertz and the RAM and the storage, but that’s not really
what you’re buying when you buy an Apple product.
You’re buying this integrated top to bottom thing with the operating
system and the built-in apps and everything’s been thought through
carefully, you know, but there’s no line item on your receipt for
design, which is a huge part of what you’re paying for.
So they differentiate around these kind of computing primitives, even
though in many ways that’s not really what people are paying for when
they buy an Apple product.
00:47:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this goes back to my idea about how
buying is often emotional, at least for individual users.
One of my favorite techniques here is the licensing for Sublime, which
is the text editor that I use, and I believe the only difference between
a license and an unlicensed version is that if it’s unlicensed, it just
says in capital letters unlicensed at the top of your screen all the
time.
Maybe it asks you every once in a while if you want to buy a license.
And that really reflects onto you as a user and potential buyer of
software. And even though the functionality is totally there, you just
don’t want to be that person who’s looking at capital U unlicensed all
the time, at least it worked for me. Another example of this is the
Windows, like you can download a fully functional window image and run
it, but there’s a little watermark in your screen, it’s like, please
register.
00:48:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I like that model, it’s sort of a little
bit like the old shareware, nagware model they sometimes call it, but
very low key, and it’s just like, look, you’re a professional, you’re
using this tool to like do things, pay for your software, please.
00:48:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it’s kind of a subtle
difference between nagwear and reflecting the image that you’re
presenting to the software provider of a casual versus a professional
user say.
00:48:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when you talk about also Microsoft Windows,
you know, now I think most Microsoft products and Adobe have all gone to
kind of subscription cloud stuff or whatever, but I think in the old
days, the freemium model was piracy. That was kind of this open secret
in the industry was that the way that you use Photoshop as a student was
not that you could afford $500.
For it in a box, but that you would pirate a copy and then obviously
once you graduated school or you know were on to a real project or
working with a real client or something, OK, now I gotta kind of grow up
and get myself a proper copy, and I think that the industry benefited
from that for a long time and now Fremium is a more, let’s call it
above board version of that same model.
00:49:33 - Speaker 1: OK, so we’ve been having a lot of price theoretic
discussions here. Maybe we can turn to what it actually took for us to
ship a V2 pricing change in a production product.
00:49:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a lot harder than it sounds, and I
think it comes back to kind of where we started, which is this is
emotional for customers and it’s emotional for the team, like we really
want to get the right price, that feels good for everyone, that feels
fair, but it’s gonna allow us to have a sustainable business that will
still be here 5, 10 years down the road, and In these theoretical
discussions, and this is something I have a lot of battle scars on from
my Haruki days, which is you come up with a pricing scheme and
everyone’s got an opinion on it, which is good, but then you can always
kind of find a flaw in it or you find a way that it doesn’t make sense
or it looks wrong or it feels weird or there’s some edge case, and
it’s very, very easy to go around in circles debating theoretically,
and this is a place where I think it’s so important to get out and
experiment and try stuff.
And that can come in the form of, for example, I first experimented with
the $100 a year price in one of the early newsletters, I think it was
maybe the 3rd or 4th newsletter we put out. We weren’t ready to charge
anything, but I just said, hey, you know, we’re thinking about
professional price and we’re thinking about this. Level, give me your
reaction, give me your honest reaction, and got a lot of responses to
that, including some that were upset and didn’t like it, and someone
that said, yeah, I love that, and a lot of others that were sort of more
of a, hm, yeah, I’d pay that, you know, if you can deliver on these
promises. So that’s one way to experiment with something, right, as you
put up a landing page or you some way publish it to the world and just
see how folks respond.
But in this case, we actually took it a step further and did essentially
some split testing. So we’ve talked about that on the show here before
with kind of onboarding and AB testing, but this is the idea that you
take a subset of typically your new users and you show them one thing
and you have a control group that sees something else and then you can
kind of compare that data over time. And I think that is a way to Not
just judge the efficacy of does this get us more customers, how do
people react, but also it’s a way to kind of bring to an end these
circling discussions where everyone’s super emotional, we can’t price
it this way, we can’t price it this way, what about this, what about
this, and you just say, well, look, I’m not sure if I agree with this
idea of a starter plan, for example, but let’s try it. Let’s do a
split test, let’s see who buys it. Let’s see, are they happy about
buying it? How do they respond? What do they expect? Does this make
sense? And then when you have a whole different kind of discussion, when
it’s around real responses and real results from people making a
purchase, or even just considering making a purchase of some price point
you’ve come up with.
00:52:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think doing those experiments really
helped us get a shared goal as a team basically and get behind. OK,
let’s work on pricing without having this big discussion and let’s set
a goal to ship something and be confident in it.
00:52:35 - Speaker 2: So that’s another good point is that it’s very
easy to in trying to make price or set of prices that will fit all the
different cases, all the different circumstances your customers might be
in, it’s very easy for those options to proliferate. So you’ve got
yearly billing and monthly billing, and maybe there’s also a 6 month
billing, and then you’ve got these 4 plans and then there’s a student
discount that can apply and pretty soon you have this huge matrix of
options.
And it’s confusing for everyone, certainly it’s confusing for the
company, but I know lots of products I go to look at and I just look at
their pricing. I’m like, tell me what it costs, I can’t tell there’s
too many knobs and levers here, and that comes from a natural place,
which is trying to let someone customize, you know, match their needs
and their means to what you have to offer, but it very easily can get
complex. So.
Having something that is simple and comprehensible that gives you the
right number of options. And so for us, for example, you could say,
well, add the starter plan or add the monthly billing, add the whatever,
throw it in there. What’s the harm if no one buys it? But to me the
harm of having a thing hanging around that no one really wants is
you’re just cluttering up your pricing and making it all more
confusing. And so another reason to actually test this stuff is do
people buy it? Do they want it? And if they don’t, then, you know, why
have it, and you can just kind of quietly shut down the experiment, and
no one needs to be faced with that clutter in the future.
00:53:58 - Speaker 1: I’ve also become a big fan of this idea of just
get out and do it with pricing. I think pricing is uniquely susceptible
to getting gridlocked, because as we said, everyone has opinions about
pricing, as they can and should.
It tends to be an emotional topic. There usually is not a team or a
person whose full time job it is to do pricing, unlike product design or
product engineering, and it often takes more effort than you think or
realize.
We had some of this before we undertook this proper.
Project we were thinking, oh, you know, maybe we should change the
pricing like this or like this, and we realized that, well, one does not
simply change the price.
It’s actually a big deal. You got to change the product, change the
marketing, there’s analytics, there’s testing, there’s support. It’s
like it’s a whole thing.
So I think there’s a lot to be said for blocking off some time as a
team across multiple functions to go in there and do something with the
pricing, even if you aren’t sure yet exactly how it’s going to land.
I’m really glad that we did that in this case.
00:54:52 - Speaker 2: And on the customer side, it can be emotional as
well, just because, yeah, you don’t want something yanked out from
under you or price changes are always a little shocking or confusing or
shake your trust in the company and In this case, we kind of, I don’t
wanna say we made it easier, but we did a strictly additive thing,
right? We added new plans and options, we added a few more perks to our
existing plan, but you could imagine a future where, yeah, something
else needs to change.
Maybe we realized yearly billing actually isn’t that useful after all
and everyone should be on monthly.
I’m not sure, but I think one of the key things there is a great
Understanding how emotional this can be for everyone involved and how
you really don’t want to, unlike the product itself, which, you know,
you should be careful with changes, but if you reorder a menu item, I
don’t know, people can get upset about any product change you come up
with, you’d be surprised, but if you reorder a menu item, the stakes
just feel lower there, even if someone comes back and says, I don’t
like this, I don’t like this change.
With the price, I think there’s a lot of tricks you can use, including
grandfathering people in as much as possible, so new people can’t buy
some plan you’ve decided to sunset, but existing people can stay on it
as long as they want.
I see this all the time in Sass products. I think maybe my website on
NetI is this, like when I go in and look at it, it’s like, yo, you’re
on the something something plan parentheses legacy, and it’s like, who
knows, it was whatever plan they had.
Out of the time I signed up and that’s it.
Actually, maybe they have new prices now that I would like better. I
don’t really know, but the important thing is I don’t want to have to
think about it. They bill my credit card, my website stays up, and I’m
happy for the moment, so I don’t want to have to reevaluate it.
So you need the ability to make changes, but you also want to treat your
existing customers with great care and trying to like keep things really
stable for them and not have them be surprised in any direction.
And trying to pad things over as much as you can with, yeah, someone, we
do really need to sunset a plan or something like that for logistical or
even legal reasons, you know, here’s a promo code for a little extra
time or just try to smooth it over with support basically as much as you
can.
But I think trying to make it so that you can both make changes, try
stuff, iterate, experiment, but also not have people who have committed
their money to feel like they’re suddenly on a shifting foundation or
things that’s gonna change out from under them. That’s the tricky
thing is to get both of those at once.
00:57:10 - Speaker 3: And for a lot of companies, I think that’s really
scary to basically work on pricing because it has all these ripple
effects to other areas and you need to be careful not to upset anyone
basically.
But in a way, I think we were actually kind of lucky because a lot of
our users were already upset. Well, not our users, but our potential
users.
So let’s say, like, they were unsatisfied with the pricing and they
were letting us know. So we kind of knew, OK, we probably have to at
least make some adjustments here.
And so that kind of serves as motivation for running these experiments
and instead of getting the team behind the project.
And I hope we can keep up that spirit even if people are happier with
our pricing now, and just keep experimenting and learn from that
experience.
00:57:49 - Speaker 2: And we talked on this podcast before about being
an independent team and trying to be as much as possible funding with
customer revenue, and focus on long term sustainability, small giants,
all that kind of good stuff versus kind of venture rounds of investment
and kicking the can down the road on how you make a viable business.
But I think one piece of that, you know, we talked about Steam early
access and some of these other ways, including Kickstarter and Patreon,
where you can support teams and products that you want to see exist in
the world.
Typically smaller teams and they’re working on something that you like
and you want to support it in a more. way and I certainly think a year
ago or a year and change ago when we turned on our pricing, it was more
this aspirational thing. Now I think it can be more transactional, but
in terms of communicating that kind of media value versus supporting the
team, I don’t know, what do you guys think we kind of fall on that
right now.
00:58:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it has been really important for us
in the past since, yeah, we are a small early stage independent company.
We can’t really compete based on pure features and what you pay for
them.
So if you compare us to most other apps on paper, you kind of get less
value out of it. So instead, I think what companies like us would need
to do is find this really small group of people for which the small set
of features basically is a perfect fit.
And then those people will be ready to pay for that because they want
that product to exist because it’s such a good fit for them. And there
it’s not about comparing it to other apps based on features, but really
just believing in the vision of the product and the long term potential
and wanting to support that. And yeah, just voting with you what it
really.
00:59:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I might expand this framing slightly
from just supporting something that you want to see in the world to
potentially a bundle of psychic goods one gets in buying a software
product in the same way that you get features and usage and
capabilities, potentially, you get some emotional goods.
Basically, I think this is an interesting frontier of software pricing.
There’s one aspect of this, which is supporting something you want to
see in the world. Another potential aspect is becoming part of a
community. A third potential piece would be some sort of unique or
special interaction with the team, for example, previewing and providing
feedback early on on features. I’ve talked a lot in the podcast, but I
do think something around community and interaction as part of software
and here it’s pricing does have an interesting future. We’ll see it’s
early days.
01:00:14 - Speaker 2: The thing that comes to mind for me as you were
describing those qualities is buying vegetables or food at a farmer’s
market, where potentially it’s probably less convenient than the
supermarkets, and you could say, OK, you get a higher quality or a
fresher food item, you know, vegetables, fruits, whatever you’re
getting there.
But I think a lot of it is, certainly you’re supporting, you wanna see
more independent farmers or more healthy eating, you want to have that
interaction with the farmer or the people who are there vending their
goods.
Maybe you want to have the experience of just being at the market and
being around other people who value the same thing as you, healthy
eating and ecological sustainability and that sort of thing, so you get,
as you said, a bundle of psychic goods, even though the transaction is
around that bundle of radishes, or whatever you’re buying from the
booth.
01:01:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it’s especially interesting for
tools like use where the transaction is not just that they buy the
product and they get something, but they actually buy the product to
become invested in this tool and become invested in this work that they
are doing.
So they don’t need to commit just the money, but they also need to
actually commit time and spend time learning the tool and getting into
the habit of using the tool and then they’ll get something out of it.
And so there’s actually beneficial to have like a paid product because
then you’re already making the money investment and it’s kind of
becomes easier to also invest your time and start using the product
since you have already made a commitment to it.
01:01:43 - Speaker 2: That gives me a memory of an earlier podcast we
did with Lisa Ankle, where we talked about Muse’s running shoes for
your mind. Many times when folks want to get more active, maybe they
want to start running or something like that, they buy the equipment,
right? They buy the shoes or the running outfit or the gym outfit or
something like that. And of course that can be in a big upfront
investment. It’s easy to drop a couple 100 bucks, especially throw in
some nice sport earbuds or something like that, but part of what
they’re actually getting from that is they are signaling to themselves,
OK, I’m really committed to this. I don’t want to have wasted this. I
spent on those sporting goods, and I really want to put them to use to
try to become a more fit, healthy, active person.
Maybe there’s an equivalent for a lot of tools for thought, I think, or
potentially other kinds of software products, but certainly M where you
say, I want to be more thoughtful, I want to be more reflective, I want
to spend more time doing deep reads of academic papers, for example, or
I want to do more active reading where I’m taking excerpts as I’m
going. Or I just want to expand my visual thinking repertoire. Making
that purchase is a way to decide to do that and to commit to that. And
of course, the money is just the beginning, because in many ways,
building the practice of it, learning a new weird tool, maybe you’re
not even that steady of an iPad user, and learning to externalize your
thoughts in this way and think through problems in this multimedia
environment. That’s a skill and a habit to be developed potentially
over a longer period of time.
Before we go, I thought it would be fun to mention that since it has
been a little over a year since we first turned on payments, we’ve been
in the process of sending out our first renewal emails. And of course,
the first few dozen folks who signed up, I just sort of emailed them
personally, and many times they’re folks we’ve had a lot of great
support interactions with, and they’ve given us great feedback over the
year or more and basically wrote them to say, hey, I hope you’ll renew,
but even if you don’t, we’re super appreciative of what you’ve done
here and we just love to hear your reflections when you’re on, and we
got some really, really glowing feedback. I think some of the nicest
things. that I’ve heard folks say about the product and our team came
from not folks that were kind of on the front side where they were, I
don’t know, dazzled by the newness of it, the the shiny new toy, but
they really become a part of their lives and their thinking process, and
that was a really fulfilling experience.
We ended up putting a couple of those folks quotes into the purchase
dialogue. So that was absolutely wonderful.
Those are the moments when I feel that this is why Doing what we’re
doing is to help people and to have an impact on people’s lives and on
their work. And if they feel that way, even after parting not only with
the $100 for the first year, but in fact, the $100 to renew for
another year, that says to me that we’ve done something that, again,
for a very small number of people or a very niche group of people that
have a particular need, but for them, what we’re offering is something
pretty special and I feel really proud of that and very thankful to the
folks that believed in us early on to help us get here. So we’ll wrap
it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write to
us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ by email, hello at museapp.com. can help us
out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and let me just give a huge
thank you to all of our existing members who have taken the time to part
with a little bit of their hard earned cash for our still very early
days product. It’s why we keep doing it and it’s going to make this
the sustainable business that can be around for the long run. So huge,
huge thank you.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I do think there’s a distinction between velocity
and virality that’s important to make, right? Like a good book can go
viral, a podcast can go viral, it just will go viral slowly, be a slow
spread, and I think that’s actually kind of a goal is to have
potentially like a low velocity, a high virality.
00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad.
This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the
company, and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my
colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest, Tobias Rose
Stockwell. Hey there.
And Tobias, Mark and I just recently did an episode on video games and
how Mark’s thesis that video games are where technologies kind of
emerge first and later they make their way to productivity and
enterprise software and that sort of thing, and I feel like our meeting,
which was in an online game, a text-based. They called them back then in
the 90s was a good example of this.
We knew each other virtually before we ever met in person for, I don’t
know, a year or more.
And nowadays we take for granted that you meet people and even have
great friendships, I think in, you know, your Slack channels or online
conferences or colleagues you’ve only ever met through video calls, but
I feel like that was quite unique for the time.
00:01:22 - Speaker 1: Truly, truly, I remember your characters on the
mud, you had to. An amazing automation system in place for your
characters, you just, yeah, you crushed that game.
00:01:32 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I totally forgot the mud world
because it was all tech space, almost kind of had a Unix style in that
sense, you would type commands and you would see these descriptions of
what was happening with the action was very scriptable because you could
make what were called triggers where you would essentially say, OK, if
when you see the word you When you see someone’s name react in this
way, when you see this happening, you could cause it to trigger another
command.
People would do in some cases very sophisticated scripting.
I used a thing called Tintin. I think I was pretty simple with it, so
I’m glad to hear it seems so impressive, but I think that did probably
influence a lot of my thinking on kind of end user programming, personal
scripting world of things.
00:02:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was super impressive. Like this guy knows
what he’s doing on here.
00:02:15 - Speaker 2: And Tobias, maybe you can tell us a bit about your
background, what you’ve been doing kind of in the post mud time and
then leading you up to what you’re working on now, which connects to
our topic today.
00:02:25 - Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me, guys. I
really love what it is you’re working on and I always appreciate your
Analytical and pragmatic perspectives on the world, understanding things
in a more precise way. You know, we’ve known each other for quite a
long time. I feel kind of honored that you have known me through several
phases of my life, different chapters of my professional endeavor which
have brought me here.
But when I was really quite young, I went and lived and worked in
Cambodia for ages of about 23 onwards for about 6.5 years. I lived and
worked on the ground in Cambodia. Crazy wild story for how I got there,
but essentially met a monk when I was traveling through Asia, who was
looking for help in rebuilding this irrigation system. It had been
destroyed during the Civil War there, got sucked into this project that
I thought would take maybe 1 year, I ended up staying there for 6+
years, rebuilding this big reservoir that affected farmers and helped
them rebuild after this very, very problematic time.
And just was very, very interested in what I could do to most, help
people figure out how to improve their own lives, and ended up
rebuilding this irrigation system, getting interested in scale,
interested in the motivations behind helping people help others more
effectively. Which ended up, once I finished the project in Cambodia, I
ended up coming back to Silicon Valley, where I grew up and started
working on various projects to help people connect more effectively to
humanitarian causes, and this was between 2009 and 2012, and it brought
me to the world of online advocacy and really this is the earliest days
of social media at scale, and I was part of this cohort of designers and
technologists and Developers and documentarians that were really doing
their best to try to motivate people to capture altruistic action from
the largest possible audience, right? There was this promise around
these tools that was very kind of intoxicating at the time, this kind of
inherent goodness that could come from connecting humanity. And there
was this thesis, this broader thesis, I think that was implicit at that
moment, which is, you know, if you can connect the world, like we can
solve the problems of the world, right? If you can just make people
feel, if you can make people feel the poor people in India, the people
that are struggling in Southeast Asia, if you can really just connect
people to the feeling effectively, then you’re gonna come much closer
to solving those problems, and that optimism was very real at that time.
And it bled not just into the advocacy world, but I think it was very
much a part of Silicon Valley at that time too. So I worked on a bunch
of campaigns that were really trying to capture virality and maximize
human attention and get people involved with causes, get people to feel,
and that was its own very special era. I worked on a few campaigns that
reached millions of people, it was very exciting time, and the tools
enabled that in this very special way, and I was part of this cohort,
you know, I’ve known. People similar to you have known many of the same
people that were early at these companies that believed that these tools
were fundamentally good for the world and, you know, in many ways they
are, but I think that, you know, as we’re saying, there are questions
about some of their byproducts. So fast forward a few years, I was
working in New York doing design and management consulting, basically
helping the executive teams of very large media organization that kind
of storied in traditional journalistic institution that you would know
if I named it, that was their executive team as the bottom was falling
out of their business and they were trying to figure out how to Make
money in this new media environment, and I was watching them as an
institution begin to make decisions that reminded me fundamentally of
types of attention capture tools that we had used. And the years
previously, and they were making decisions that were very much based on
trying to utilize this new media environment that many of my friends had
built in such a way that I think we would recognize today as
problematic, but at that moment in time we didn’t. They were really
starting to change the editorial tenor of the stories that they were
making, of the tools they were using to capture attention, and it was
changing the editorial bent of stories of content and pushing it towards
the extreme. And this was in 2014, 2015, you know, just the years
leading up to, I think our great awakening to some of the problems
associated with the stuff that came in 2016, but they were really
fundamentally changing the tenor and the content of stories to capture
more attention using these tools and these strategies.
00:07:16 - Speaker 2: This is what maybe nowadays we talk about is the
classic clickbait titles and yeah, emotional activation that’s designed
to in a very short time just get you riled up or activate some more
primal part of your brain, and maybe that ties to your nonprofit work as
well, which is also about emotional activation. But here you have this
media environment where they have a very brief time to capture. Your
attention and they’re just basically motivated to optimize for these
headlines that push these buttons and activate you emotionally, even if
that’s not sort of good journalism or really a healthy information
ecosystem.
00:07:50 - Speaker 1: Definitely, yeah, and it’s not just headlines.
The headlines are the most visible things.
The stuff that tends to be a little bit more pernicious is the editorial
decisions that are made around stories to cover like what to cover,
right? Journalism is this kind of important function. I see it as having
three different fundamental pieces to it.
One is the basic verification of facts, right? It’s like, did something
happen? Did the event happen, did it not happen, right? The next layer
up is selective facts, like which facts are actually important for us to
pay attention to in the world, right? And the top one is really like why
does this matter? It’s editorialization, like why is this important for
us to pay attention to? And what I felt like I was watching in real time
was that the selective interpretation of facts that the sourcing pool
that editors and journalists were using to start trying to kind of find
nuggets of stories, they started to trend towards the outrageous, they
were finding the stuff that would make people the most mad, right? You
might see this in a headline and a story in which the headline will be,
people are angry about X, right? You said, well, people are angry about
X, wow, this is important, I should read why they. angry about X and
then you look at what they’re actually sourcing for the quote unquote
people that are angry about X, and it will be a Twitter user, maybe two,
that have, you know, some 20 followers that a journalist was able to
kind of go in and find they kind of spun a story out of almost nothing
online and wrote a whole article about it, which is terrible if you’re
you’re trying to get a proportional understanding of what people are
actually angry about out there. And that’s just one strategy of many
that are now available to every journalistic institution or
traditionally journalistic institution.
00:09:36 - Speaker 2: For me, the first article of yours that I read
that I think got a good bit of traction was titled This Is How Your Fear
and Outrage are being sold for profit. Where you kind of broke a lot of
this down, and I think nowadays as part of the mainstream discussion,
especially with something like, for example, this Netflix documentary,
the Social dilemma, yeah, I think we have more cultural awareness of
this now, but at the time, for me it was a real eye opener, even being
someone that was in technology that you were kind of breaking down the
mechanisms, just sort of shining a light on exactly how You’re being
emotionally activated or even emotionally manipulated and why that’s
good for these media companies in this new era, and then you went from
there on to a series of other articles including the dark psychology of
social networks, which I think was a cover story in The Atlantic with
Jonathan Hay, is that right? Getting to write with a high profile
author, which is a whole other probably interesting topic to discuss.
Your latest article, which is how to stop misinformation before it gets
shared, collaboration with Renee Dresta Unwired, which talks a bit about
this kind of friction and so to me these paint and you’ve written other
stuff, but if you read the three of these, and of course we’ll link
them in the show notes, they show a building up of what feels to me like
a thesis or a sense of trying to understand or grapple with the societal
effects of this new information technology that defines our world now.
00:10:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like that’s right.
So the second piece you mentioned, the piece with Jonathan Haidt at NYU,
he’s a professor of moral psychology, and we did a almost a forensic
unpacking of what happened between the years of 2009 and 2012 in terms
of the feature sets that were implemented at these various companies,
invented then copied, then propagated across our traditional social
media kind of ecosystem.
And what that did, what these specific features did, and it’s a few
features that we very much understand today as being kind of core to our
information exchange, but having a simple one click share to send a
piece of information out to your entire network. Likes, right, like
fundamental likes and visible metrics associated with that content. And
then the ability to algorithmically sort of feed. There’s kind of three
pieces of the puzzle have dramatically changed the types of information
that we are now seeing on a regular basis. And like each one of these
features in themselves are great. I appreciate both the ability to reach
a massive audience. I appreciate the signal that comes from knowing
whether or not people are liking a thing. And I appreciate the ability
to curate the crazy massive stream of information that’s not coming my
way, but each one of them has kind of conditional failure modes that I
think we need to understand and reckon with because Having access to
what’s essentially kind of the brain stem of humanity now, right? If
anyone can put something out there and anyone can make something go
viral, there are tendencies within the system now towards what Daniel
Conman would call System one, right? System one thinking being this
emotional, reactive, impulsive, kind of instantaneous, fast thinking.
Right, which is one of these partitions in our brains, and the other
being System 2, which is this more reflective, deliberative, slower
processing and thinking, that the entirety of the architecture of the
internet in its current form, it’s built for maximum speed and
morality, it’s orienting towards system one. And that I think can be
seen in so many institutions and so many changes and so much of the
zeitgeist of our exchange now is in this kind of emotional space.
00:13:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that’s a great tee up not only
for our topic today, which is the promise and peril of social media, but
also what the muse tie-in is because a lot of what we talk about on this
podcast is product design, but it tends to be more tools for thought,
productivity, kind of more private things versus these public sphere,
you know, political and social discussions.
But I think there is, when you talk about that System 1, System 2 brain,
a big part of what we want to see Muse do or part of what our mission
with our product and the company is, is to help us all activate our
system two brains more reliably.
Then when we realize there’s something important we need to think about
whether it’s in life, work, social issues, what have you. that there’s
a way to kind of remove yourself from that energy and those outrage
circles or even just the heightened emotional, more primal state and go
to a more thoughtful, reflective, slower thinking because we believe at
least as complex as the world is today, you sort of need that in order
to really make good decisions.
00:14:30 - Speaker 3: Yeah, in addition to the System one versus System
2 access, I think there’s an axis of de novo ideas versus remixed
ideas, and I think basically all good ideas are social, they’re
remixed, they’re transmitted from other people and developed that way.
And obviously, social media is an incredibly powerful technology
potentially for facilitating that. And so we use the product right now,
it’s quite single player and it’s focused on developing content. You
bring in content and you build from there, but I think if you look at
the broader process of thinking and developing good ideas and coming to
useful conclusions, the social ecosystem is so important.
00:15:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I have my own, I think there’s a lot of
creative people do.
Twitter is certainly my social media of choice.
I’ve heard it described as sort of the social network for ideas, and if
you’re a person that’s, you know, looking to seed ideas in your work
in your life, I think Twitter is the right place for that, but it has
these two sides, which is it can be a source of incredible ideas.
Inspiration, connections with new people. Certainly that’s where my
professional network is. I’ve met many amazing people, including a lot
of the guests for this podcast, but have just had the seeds of good
ideas so often. I mean, there’s a reason why we want to add a lot of
media cards to use, but one of the first ones we did was a Twitter card
precisely because bringing in a thought provoking tweet. As a foundation
for some deeper thinking is a very natural thing. But the flip side of
this is what you’re talking about these loops for journalistic outlets
and individuals as well, seeking that the sweet, sweet dopamine hit from
those likes, right, and you discover that those controversial or outrage
generating things or things that just do those emotional System one
activations get you. More of that positive feedback and so then you’re
sort of inclined to do that and it just creates a setting where you have
these kind of information pathologies and negative loops and yeah, it
sort of is very counter to the thoughtful, having good ideas, focusing
on your work. So there’s this duality, there’s these two sides of it
that I feel are equally strong.
00:16:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s really important. As you spoke about
how the general zeitgeist has kind of absorbed some of these memes about
the internet being a place that prioritizes outrage and the people tend
to kind of understand.
The problems associated with this now, there’s, you know, a lot of
great content out there and a lot of talking heads that speak about the
ills of technology.
I do think that the hyperbole around it is actually kind of a big
problem. I think that if you’re too hand wavy about what the problems
are, then it actually doesn’t help us solve them. It doesn’t help us
build better tools, doesn’t help us fix the tools we have. I think it
actually just is pretty detrimental to the conversation as a whole.
00:17:21 - Speaker 2: Right, so there’s this progression where I don’t
know in the Mid late 2000s, it was the sense that this up and coming new
information world was unmitigated good, kind of a sort of exuberance
that in hindsight seems naive.
Then sometime around the time you’re writing these first articles,
2016, 2017, 2018, there’s a few folks like yourself that are kind of
raising the flags and society struggling to figure out, wait, what
happened here, things are changing, maybe in a way we don’t like, it
seems related to this new technology, you know, what’s going on.
And then you come to today, and again I do feel there is a more
mainstream sense that OK, social media is this powerful technology,
certainly these internet giants in general wield a lot of power.
It does seem sometimes boiled down to uh Mark Zuckerberg is the devil,
if we can get in from the front of Congress and slap enough regulations
on him, then everything will be OK.
It feels like a vast overciplication that feels like this is a to borrow
one of Mark’s way of talking about things that Society needs to
metabolize the change, and that’s going to take some time, and we need
to thrash around and try some weird stuff, and maybe some of the
solutions are governmental, some of them are technology product
solutions, like some of these ones you’ve proposed in your various
articles here, and some of them are personal, right, how we choose to
cultivate our information diets and make good choices that will allow us
to get the most out of this brave new world of information without being
maybe sucked down its worst rabbit holes.
00:18:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I don’t know if either of you had a chance
to catch the tech hearings that happened a couple of weeks ago.
00:18:54 - Speaker 3: I feel like there’s one of these every month, so
I feel like, yeah, totally.
00:18:59 - Speaker 2: I’ve seen some of them, at least for
understanding what happened there, I rely on people making dunk tweet
jokes.
00:19:06 - Speaker 2: You’re part of the problematic, and then I
extract what happened based on that, yes, yes I am.
00:19:09 - Speaker 1: What was very clear to me, and I took notes of how
many different members of the house had their own personal grievance
about technology.
I’d made a distinct list of 18 different areas that were very much not
related, other than the fact that they involved Facebook, just this
whole kind of panopoly of different grievances that they had and what
came to mind for me is this. This is not just technology’s fault,
right? Like we’re just inhabiting technology more and so we’re
bringing all of our problems with us, right? We’re now just living in
these digital spaces more and more and more, so we’re bringing a huge
portion of these problems with us.
Now that doesn’t reduce the importance of focusing on the tools and the
specifics of the tools, but I think it is important to remember that
humans are complex and our problems are complex naturally. If we add a
whole new layer of kind of virtual existence onto that, we’re going to
end up with a bunch of new problems and also all of the old ones
manifesting in a different way. So I think it’s just important to
recognize that a lot of these issues are things that we’re bringing
into the fore with us.
00:20:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, part of the concern would be technology is
an amplifier for some of our natural sort of bad traits. We’ve made the
comparison before to food, for example, where we came to this
realization that a lot of fast food is actually quite unhealthy and
feeding into a lot of health problems in the modern world, but that’s
because it was sort of optimized to push our sweet and savory and salty
buttons because these are Tendencies we crave these things in our
natural environment, but we’ve found a way to kind of like supercharge
what you get in a way that has these negative effects.
And I feel social media has a lot of that. For example, follower counts,
I think is what I hear folks talk about, which is like we have this
natural status seeking behavior and getting a certain number of
followers shows that you’re, I don’t know, important, you have
prestige, people care about you or something like that. And so then that
turns into weird status games maybe of trying to game the system or just
treating people differently based on their follower accounts or whatever
and you know one question there is should we hide that because that
basically just brings out some bad qualities in us.
On the other hand, will people find other ways to seek that same because
again it’s not the technology that’s something that’s inside us as
humans is to kind of be status seeking.
00:21:31 - Speaker 3: And just to elaborate here and to further
motivate, I think there are a couple other dynamics that are making it
even more important.
So there’s this baseline dynamic of there’s like a very high powered
social technology and people have always talked to each other and
written stuff down, but now just like a lot more of that with much sharp
edges. OK, that’s kind of what we’ve talked about so far.
There’s an additional dynamic that I would call the revolt of the
public na. This is the, I think his name is Martin Gary thesis, he wrote
an amazing book about how basically people able to talk to each other
outside the confines of traditional hierarchical structures is highly
threatening to those structures, and this would be like traditional
journalism, bureaucracies, higher education. And those institutions
correctly perceived this huge existential risk, so there’s some kind of
fighting for their own lives happening there.
And then another angle is a lot of the most contentious stuff has to
deal with politics, and the reality is that politics, especially federal
politics, play a much bigger role in people’s lives. Now than it has in
the past, you know, government spending is what, 40% of the economy plus
all the indirect impacts like people are correctly interested in what’s
happening there. So these three things stacking on top of each other and
creating huge stakes. So it’s not surprising to my mind that people
have strong feelings about this stuff.
00:22:42 - Speaker 1: There’s a great article, a Paul Graham article
from, it was 2007, 2008, the golden age of Paul Graham essays,
00:22:50 - Speaker 1: so to speak, yes. About how to have better
arguments online. One of the anecdotes that he has in there is that
people are now just accessing more information.
There are more opportunities to collide online. There are more opinions
that we’re being exposed to, and because of that, people are going to
be arguing more, right? There’s this kind of natural trend towards
increased opportunities to disagree in a public forum. And there are
certain things that happen in a public forum when we’re disagreeing and
the kind of ergonomics of that space or the design of that space online
will push people towards a particular kind of disagreement or a
particular kind of agreement potentially depending on how that space is
designed.
One of the things that we speak to in our Atlantic piece is this kind of
idea of what’s called moral grandstanding.
If you imagine us having this conversation right now, this is a great
example. We’re having this conversation, this is over Zoom. I can
actually like see your faces, we’re having interaction, right? There’s
not an abstraction layer, you’re responding to me, I’m responding to
you, I can see your eyes. If I say something mean to you, if I
disagreement with you. There’s a desire that I have to reduce any kind
of empathetic stress or sadness I might cause you. I’m not going to
call you a name because I’m actually getting some kind of empathetic
response from you in this physical stimulus that’s coming back to me,
this visual stimulus is coming back to me. In the digital world that’s
hidden from view, right? So you’re abstracted out into this profile
pic, if you even have a profile pic, you’re just a kind of abstract
creature out there. Make sure you’re even a creature in my mind, right?
You might just be a thought in my mind that I’m angry about. But not
only that, there is this additional layer in most of our social spaces
online in which, I mean you can imagine us having this conversation live
with An audience of people around us, right? And like an audience of
people around us live that were rating us and there was a number
attached to our faces that was going up or down depending on the quality
of our arguments and what was actually happening in real time.
00:24:56 - Speaker 2: I already feel anxious with that description.
00:24:59 - Speaker 1: It would fundamentally. Change the content of our
conversation in a drastic way, and it would not push us towards
conclusions between us or attempting to find truth. It would actually
push us towards the approval of the people watching us and that is what
a large portion of our social media platforms are designed around right
now.
00:25:19 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, this kind of gets into the personal
information, hygiene and personal information, gardening.
00:25:26 - Speaker 2: Yes, so Tobias, in your articles you often are
speaking essentially to the platform creators, you’re saying, OK,
Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, here are features you could build or
maybe users could demand those features, but essentially change the tool
in order to have better social dynamics, and absolutely I think the tool
evolution, we’re seeing that happening already, you describe a lot of
that in this kind of friction concept in your most recent Wired article,
and I’m sure that’s going to be ongoing for a while.
But for me there’s also this question of to what degree I’m not
working on a social media tool, so therefore, what actions can I take in
my life and I’m curious how you see the balance between what we need to
do here is kind of demand changes from these tool creators versus we can
make choices in our own life and for me, part of the value in your
article. has been, I have a more critical eye or have more
self-awareness about my own how I engage with social media and how those
things trigger my primal emotions and with that awareness, I can then
make maybe better choices about making sure I get what I want out of
these tools and avoid the negative spirals.
00:26:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a really important
balance, I think, to be made for, you know, with the designers of the
space versus the things that we can do as individuals, and I, I do think
there’s a lot of things that we can do as individuals, fortunately. It
depends on the particular type of problem that you’re facing online,
but in general, if we’re looking at it in the context of like the
System One, System 2 dynamics. Usually, if I am triggered by something I
see online, a good kind of mental model for me is to try to force myself
in those moments where I feel the desire to basically like rage tweet
back at someone or share a thing that I am incensed about, right? And
that’s one of the big ones is just kind of propagating highly emotional
content. And you know, not all emotional content is bad, right? Emotions
have a purpose in our lives, right? I think it’s like important to
recognize that they spur us to action and bring us passion.
00:27:22 - Speaker 2: I’m doing what I’m doing in my life because I’m
passionate and have strong emotions about those things.
00:27:30 - Speaker 1: Exactly, exactly. So emotions have reasons and
they’re kind of, you know, internal heuristics for us to determine what
is important on a day to day basis.
It’s like they’re helpful directors for what we should focus on, and
you know, biologically and socially they have kind of foundational
adaptive purposes in our lives.
The problem is that in, you know, talking my application in these
digital spaces, we’re actually taking some of these emotions which are
kind of meant to pass through our bodies and just like and be noted and
then direct us towards a specific action. We’re encapsulating those in
little time capsules, right, we’re textualizing them. And then we’re
sending them out on their way into a network to go on and kind of
trigger other people and have a life of their own as they’re ping
ponging around our networks and causing other people to be emotionally
activated, and they kind of live in a semi-permanent state, even though
initially an emotion is just kind of meant to pass through our system.
00:28:20 - Speaker 2: I hadn’t even thought about the sort of
responsibility to others by passing on emotional content. I tend to
think in terms of again how can tools be improved, but then how can I
make changes to my own information tooling and sort of managing those
processes in my life.
Mark and I talked about this quite a bit in our previous podcast on what
I call the information age. There, I think we were focused more on just
the raw quantity of information that we’re attuned.
Through most of human history, we lived in time where information was
scarce and so we seek to get as much news, like even the word news
implies, yeah, like what’s what’s the latest? I want to be in the
know, I wanna be connected, it’s important to know what’s going on,
and now we live in a time of it’s such incredible information abundance
that actually the problem is curating and calling all that out, but
Mark, I’m curious, you know, expanding on what we talked about there, I
feel like you have a pretty good Set of approaches for cultivating your
own information ecosystem, putting it together with some of what we’re
talking about here, what are like techniques that work for you or you
recommend for others.
00:29:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s a lot here. One quick thing on the
like emotional front with weird things coming at you on Twitter and
stuff, I adopted a simple practice of whenever something gives me bad
vibes on Twitter, I just block, or, you know, turn off we tweets or mute
or whatever is appropriate the situation. So I found like, you know,
life’s too short for bad vibes coming through of your own choosing,
right? You have total control of what you see on Twitter, just choose to
close that stuff off.
00:29:49 - Speaker 2: I feel like the immediate devil’s advocate on
that is there are bad things in the world and it’s not helpful to not
be exposed to problems.
00:29:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s not like things that you disagree with
or things that are bad that are happening, it’s things like bad faith
and People being obnoxious and stuff like that. And it’s the default
that you continue to see people that you’ve previously followed, and
for a long time I just had this out for whatever reason, I wasn’t
inclined to change that. I just kind of accrete followees over time, but
then I took more responsibility for my timeline and things are much
better now.
And that in general is a big theme for me with personal information
management.
Like no one’s gonna save you. In particular, the algorithms are
definitely not going to save you.
If you just go to facebook.com and click on whatever’s at the top,
you’re gonna have a bad time. Likewise, if you just go to like
washingtonpost.com and read everything there, you’re not gonna be very
well informed. So you need to take a lot of responsibility. For your own
information ecosystem, and that’s why I like things like Twitter,
podcasts, email newsletter, niche Discords and Reddits. These are places
where you opt into individual small creators, curators, communities who
you believe have good insights and relevance to you. By the way, I just
realized, Tobias, when you were talking about the three like
pathological features of social media, that podcasts are kind of
uniquely resistant to them, so podcasts can’t be retweeted. They
haven’t really been subjected to algorithmic feeding.
00:31:12 - Speaker 2: Spotify is working on it, I think, but yeah, so
far.
00:31:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, but mostly they’ve been quite resistant. I
think that’s an important dynamic.
00:31:19 - Speaker 2: We see that on the side of being podcast creators
or what have you, which is, it’s actually hard to market or spread a
podcast and happily and quick aside, I’m very thankful for everyone
who’s tweeted out links or referred us to their friends, but yeah,
it’s just a podcast can’t go viral, that’s all there is to it. It can
grow pretty slowly and steadily and organically over time. And it’s a
downside in some ways, but actually really a benefit in the sense and
probably why I’m drawn to podcasts often as a place to get more called
System two inputs into my life.
00:31:52 - Speaker 1: Definitely. I do think there’s a distinction
between velocity and virality that’s important to make, right? So like
a good book can go viral, a podcast can go viral, it just will go viral
slowly. spread and I think that’s actually kind of a goal is to have
potentially like a low velocity, a high virality thing in which people
are like, oh, you should listen to this, you know, like a word of mouth
recommendation goes a long way, especially for something like podcasts.
Mark, what you’re talking about, you know, your personal curation
systems, I find that to be so critically important these days. I like to
think about algorithms as kind of like a dog. It’s something that is
like an intelligence that has a very simple understanding of what it’s
trying to do for you, right? And it’s using limited inputs to determine
what it is it’s trying to serve you on a regular basis, so the same way
you might train a dog. I aggressively, for instance, train my YouTube
algorithm. It’s constantly serving me up things on a regular basis and
probably once a week I have to go through and say, I don’t like this, I
don’t like this, I don’t like this. And as a result, I get, and I use
this kind of personal heuristic, which is like, how do I feel after
watching this video? How do I feel after going through my feed here and
checking in with yourself, taking a moment to recognize, I think
there’s. The regret test, very basic test. Like if you regret your
experience on this tool, then you need to change the tool or get off the
tool, right? Unfortunately, that is something that we can do. So I have
aggressively called and trained my YouTube feed and now most of the
time, you know, again, with this kind of weekly training regimen, it
becomes a beautiful source of inspirational educational content that I
really get a tremendous amount of value from.
00:33:35 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think on this personal curation stuff,
you need to be really willing to go against the grain, because the
grains in the wood here are leading down to places that are bad and in
many cases just misinformed or wrong, especially with like the kind of
complex topics of the day, for various systemic reasons, the stuff that
you get in the prestige outlets isn’t very good.
And so you really got to go around and crawl and find the weird Twitter
accounts. I’ve joked that on many complex topics like the recent
pandemic, a lot of the very best information on the internet came from
cartoon Avy pseudonymous Twitter accounts. I mean that 100% seriously.
So you need to be willing to embrace that kind of weirdness in your own
personal information curation if you’re gonna want to have good
outcomes, I think.
00:34:22 - Speaker 1: So what you’re speaking to there is really
interesting because you’re absolutely right, there’s been both like a
decline in trust of journalism at large, right, that’s a big, big
problem kind of we’re facing right now is that we don’t feel like we
can trust historical institutions that we used to rely upon for this
basic validation of perspective and worldview that, you know, we used to
have kind of the forced to feed, essentially, right, we had a forced
algorithm, which was major news and media, that was our content.
00:34:47 - Speaker 2: There’s 3 channels. They all kind of say the same
thing. You can pick one based on whether you like the color of the
presenter’s tie, but they’re basically giving you the same
information, like forced consensus essentially about what is factual and
what is not, yeah.
00:34:56 - Speaker 1: And so as the internet has kind of detonated and
exploded this traditional media hierarchy, it’s also along with it,
detonated this trust network that we had, right, of trust and specific
authorities, and for a lot of people, that’s laid bare and especially
during the coronavirus, is this kind of proxy network of what I call
reality anchors, right, we used to have kind of media anchors, which We
looked for, we had the Walter Cronkites and the Dan Rathers who we
looked to for specific points of reality, how this happened, this
didn’t happen. Now everyone kind of has their own proxy network of
reality anchors, right? It might be the follower on Instagram, there’s
the anti-vaxxer, it might be the IDW intellectual dark web thought
leader, you know, it could be any broader group of humans, but there’s
a really tremendously on display because In a way that they weren’t
previously I think that’s laid bare a lot of the problems of our
epistemic environment now because we no longer have a specific kind of
source of consensus that we can look at collectively. We instead have
this decentralized individuated network of reality anchors that we point
to.
00:36:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and it’s super messy, which I think circles
back to a lot of your work because a lot of these so-called reality
anchors, they’re not based in reality, and we’re asking every
individual to come up with their own notion of reality and inevitably,
most of them are wrong and all of them are at least different. And so
what do you do with that? It’s an extraordinary mess, not an easy
answer.
00:36:24 - Speaker 2: Right, yeah, I find myself conflicted about, on
one hand, the centralized force consensus, as you called it, I think
that left a lot of important viewpoints out in the dark and Living in a
world where I do have access to much greater diversity of opinion and
ideas and perspectives, I think I once heard the, it was Megan McCurle
that described the internet as a quote freak liberation front. And I
like that because I’m interested in lots of weird things and weird
things were sort of hard to find when you did live in a world of
broadcast media, there’s only a few channels, there’s only a few
newspapers and what have you, and I’m basically much happier in a world
where I do have access to much nichier things, but then yes, we lose
that shared consensus, shared understanding of reality.
And I would not have thought this previously, but I think in past years
I’ve seen where in a way there is something to be said for whole
society basically agreeing about the basic facts of reality, even if
some of those facts are actually wrong, but if we agree together we can
at least make decisions together, whereas if we have a totally different
view of reality, we are paralyzed. And an action maybe is worse in some
ways than taking action on a false understanding that that then perhaps
in the future you can correct as you realize, I don’t know, for
example, that the concept of the food pyramid is ridiculous.
00:37:48 - Speaker 1: Totally, you know, if you look at history and if
you go back.
Far enough, you can see there’s a correlation between our ability to
organize in the larger and larger groups with our ability to kind of
understand each other and share common cause, cooperate better, share
good information together collectively, that kind of thing.
Um, good information, qualified good share information together at all,
right, share ideas and myths together and we kind of emerged from this
fog of, we think about misinformation being a new problem, but we kind
of emerged from this fog of misinformation that was actually really just
kind of endemic in society, right? Like we used to believe crazy, crazy
things, you just have to scratch the surface. of history, you don’t
have to go back that far to see that there was just this kind of
constant barrage of falsehoods or half truths that would pretty much
become accepted truths, right, commonly accepted truths for a long
period of time. You probably remember a handful of these from your
childhood, maybe even, right, which like a Ouija board might summon the
devil or a story about aliens or something, but we had this like really
strong. Consensus forced consensus mechanism in place to kind of keep
everyone on the same page, but I think the natural state of human
exchange is much more oriented towards misinformation than it is towards
fidelity and truth, and I think that’s important that what we’ve done
with the internet is just kind of backspaced to a previous era in which
misinformation was emergent and common, right?
00:39:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that brings to mind to me what they call the
yellow journalism era. We talked about clickbait headline titles, but in
fact there was a version of that for when they were selling sort of one
off newspapers by the newspaper person, probably a young man standing on
a corner just yelling the headline, and there were these patently.
Ridiculous headlines about you know we’ve gone to war, other things
have happened because they just wanted to sell papers basically and I
think eventually journalism settled on a better model that was more kind
of oriented around longer term useful truths rather than one off
attention grabbing headlines. But yeah, to say that that’s new to this
era would be quite incorrect.
00:39:56 - Speaker 1: I’ve been especially fascinated with that
particular era of when we basically began to use advertising to
propagate journalism, right? So the era of, it was actually the era
before yellow journalism. There’s this whole century in the 1800s in
which we kind of figured out that you could sell ads with newspapers.
And in that process, you could also make a lot of money by making
sensational claims.
The New York Sun was the first paper to do this in the early 1800s, and
they began their whole business in this whole kind of enterprise of
ad-based journalism by literally making up fake stories and propagating
fake stories on the corner with the guys hacking it and getting people
riled up about stuff. There’s a story about animals escaping the zoo
and marauding and killing people that they put in the stories, extremely
irresponsible journalism. That like caused a mob to go out and try to
find these animals and put them down because they read it in the paper
and they thought it was real, which is literally just a falsehood, just
an entirely made up story that they wrote to sell papers. And the years
after that, there was a story about bat people on the moon that there
was astronomical observations of bat people living on the moon, life on
other planet, that was a sensation, sold a lot of papers and you know,
kind of caused this crazy confusion about life on other planets that was
a hugely popular hit.
00:41:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it also makes me think of George Orwell and
the War of the Worlds broadcast and just yeah, the power of media,
particularly when it’s new, I think maybe we build some, I don’t know
if it’s resistance or just awareness, ability to separate and say like,
well, because I hear something on the radio, doesn’t mean it’s true or
because I see it on the TV doesn’t mean it’s true, and maybe we’re
still in. era for a lot of these internet technologies where, well,
certainly I hope people realize that when you see something on the
internet, it may not be true, but maybe we haven’t yet developed these
antibodies or coping techniques for you see an outrageous tweet and you
immediately reach for the retweet or the reply button and we haven’t
quite developed the better practices for managing that.
00:41:56 - Speaker 1: I think the word is antibodies. I think that’s a
great way of thinking about it like a cultural antibody against the
thing.
The way that changed in that era in the mid 1800s, it was through this
process of professionalization that was actually also market driven. It
wasn’t like the government got together and was like, we’re going to
tell you what is true, what is not true, but it was this process of
consumers learning that they couldn’t really trust specific papers and
they could trust other papers, right? So in the New York. Newspaper
scene that was the sun and these other papers became kind of like trash
papers, you know, you fool me once, I’ll believe you, you fool me
twice. I’m definitely not going to buy you again, right? And one of the
papers that tacked up the brainstem as opposed to down the brainstem was
the New York Times, and they actually started to build a reputation
around actually reporting. facts and being consistent about that and
being trustworthy.
If you think about it as a little bit like an iterated prisoner’s
dilemma for us and accurate information, right, in a world in which
there’s nothing but crazy outrageous headlines, month over month,
you’re going to learn to try to focus on the things that are verifiable
and reputations come to matter. They actually are built over time.
00:43:09 - Speaker 2: It does seem like the value of news is in it being
true.
It gives you information about how to navigate your world, you know, in
the previous, more pre-civilization time news that there’s a dangerous
bear prowling around outside the village is really useful for keeping
yourself safe if it’s true, but if you’re spending much of time
avoiding bears that aren’t there. You’re just draining energy on
something that’s not valuable.
Now I will argue that a lot of our news and information consumption is
fundamentally entertainment nowadays. I think the degree to which
political news is essentially a kind of entertainment kind of following
your favorite sports team kind of thing, and I think that’s fine, but
at least it seems like in theory, bad information. or incorrect
information doesn’t help you navigate the world and has a maladaptive
effect and pretty quickly you’re going to see, OK, I made decisions in
my life based on this incorrect information, therefore my life went less
well than it could otherwise and then eventually you’re going to want
to turn that around and get true information.
00:44:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s an important point.
00:44:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s very much the case. Like, I
don’t think we’re going back to the world of mainstream journalism as
the purveyor of verified facts. Even entities like the New York Times
are already on the train of entertainment and aligned analysis, let’s
call it, and they’re moving even harder to that model now as they catch
up with substack.
And so the question then becomes, where are we actually gonna get these
true facts, which are the sort of public good, and once the fact is out
there, you can’t charge for it. So who’s actually going to provide it,
and it’s a very tough question and right now the honest answer is that
it’s almost no one, so you kind of have to do it for yourself.
And we’re starting to see now people can fill this hole a little bit by
becoming named individuals who have a secured. attached to them
personally, and that way you can bootstrap up into something that you
can trust in the way that you can’t trust a large institution because
it can launder and transform reputations, right? So it’s pretty gnarly
out there right now. And I think it’s important just to be honest about
that and to expect that you’re going to have to navigate that. And
furthermore, that the whatever new equilibrium we reach isn’t going to
look like the old world. So be ready for that too.
00:45:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. The tools that
we have now.
And this might be a good moment to segue into my most recent article
just quickly about friction, just like there are ways that we can
potentially reorient the system to at least trend towards accurate
information versus falsehoods, right? If you look at the trends of
misinformation right now, it occupies the same reach as a traditional
media broadcast, right? Some viral mistruths can go just as far and as
fast.
To a wide audience as traditional media broadcasts where they can reach
millions of people, you know, Pandemic was a great example of that, 12
million people that saw it.
So potentially there’s a concept of friction, which is basically
throttling misinformation as it spreads through a network and kind of
reducing just the inherent capacity for virality across the board,
right? So WhatsApp did this, they reduced the net number of possible
shares. They reduced the number of groups that you could actually share
a specific message to, right, and they just throttled that down. I
forgot what the final number was, but they basically just, I think it
was, they throttled down to 5 groups from infinite groups essentially,
so you could before just copy and paste a message into as many different
WhatsApp groups as you wanted to be before. You wanted to get, to get
your message into and they just throttled that down and that
fundamentally improved the speed at which misinformation could
potentially travel, can still travel, but it just travels more slowly
and is less impactful. And so I think that shifting things towards a
slightly slower propagation system can actually dramatically improve the
types of misinformation we’re responding to on a regular basis.
00:46:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think as we’ve discussed, we’ve
already seen some evidence for that in the different types of
discussions you get in the different mediums. So again, the ones that I
find most compelling these days are podcasts and email newsletters and
small Twitter accounts that you can’t quote to a podcast, and that’s
in many respects that feature or not a bug. I’m more optimistic about
those types of structural approaches than content-based approaches,
cause the content-based approaches is so fraught, and you’re back to
the oracle problem of what’s actually true versus not, and I’m sure
people are gonna try that and continue to try it, but yeah, I do think
the structural approach is more promising.
00:47:27 - Speaker 1: Definitely, and there’s The problem of censorship
and kind of the rights of saying what you could say, you know, Reneeres,
my co-author on the most recent piece, she has this other article and
this letter saying, which is the freedom of reach is not the same thing
as freedom of speech, right, which I think is a really important
distinction when we’re talking about this stuff, because, yes, like you
do have the ability and the right to say whatever you want, but virality
is not a right. OK, yeah, you don’t have the right to reach hundreds of
millions of people with whatever you want.
00:47:57 - Speaker 2: Well, looking forward to the future, Tobias. What
do you see the solutions potentially being? Is it individual information
curation? Is it these companies that run these products, making these
feature changes? Is it government regulation and involvement, or is it
something else? Where does a happier future for our relationship with
social media, with information spreading, with virality, how do we get
there?
00:48:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I really think it’s a mix of both, it’s
both thoughtful design changes on the platform side to help us make
better decisions and better defaults, to have better defaults about the
types of information we’re regularly exposed to.
And then I think as we’re speaking, this kind of cultural antibodies
piece of it, it’s like, it’s really important for us as individuals to
be aware of the information ecosystem that we’re living within.
And to approach stuff with good faith skepticism, if that makes sense,
and to really try to make decisions about what we’re sharing
consciously and to try to push ourselves, I think, to a more reflective
state.
As opposed to this more impulsive state, and I think that’s a big piece
of it, you know, a quick anecdote about when I’m triggered by something
online, I will invariably, if I feel the desire to reach for the retweet
button or the rage tweet, I will take 4 deep breaths before I do
anything. And in that moment, just that small act of taking. 4 deep
breaths will usually allow for my emotional reaction to dissipate in
such a way that it feels like a much more healthy thing I’m about to
say or act I’m about to make online.
I think that just for deep breaths would go a long way in improving the
type of internet we inhabit if everyone can do something like that.
00:49:37 - Speaker 2: Couldn’t agree more. Well, let’s wrap it there.
Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write to us on
Twitter at @museapphq or via email, hello at museapp.com. You can help us
out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. And Tobias, loving all the
work you’re doing on this, and if I’m not mistaken, you’ve got a book
coming down the pipe here somewhere.
00:49:59 - Speaker 1: Am I correct? That’s right, yes, book is due out
next year. It’s about outrage on the internet, how to navigate this new
strange digital world, and how to make our digital tools better stewards
of our humanity.
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