Metamuse

By Adam Wiggins, Mark McGranaghanTechnology

Metamuse episodes

January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The entrepreneurial drive or in this case the
entrepreneurial drive of feeling agitated, there’s like a problem or a
thing that just seems wrong or weird or annoys you and you just can’t
stop thinking about it and you look for solutions, but none of them
really quite seem to fit.
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 today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Well,
we’re entering a new year here, and for me, the holidays is a time to
reflect and think back on what’s learned. And for me, one of the
biggest surprises of 2020 was this podcast. We got started on it. It
was, I don’t know, just an idea that we wanted to try and then to my
surprise, here we are now 21 episodes later with thousands of listeners
and something I really enjoy doing with you every two weeks. Do you have
any reflections, Mark, on this epic podcast journey so far?
00:01:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s been great. I remember when we
recorded our first Uh, demo episode, episode zero, if you will. I was
using my AirPods in this Airbnb in Arizona, I think, and, uh, it was
really fun, and I didn’t, didn’t quite land the first time, but we
felt like there was a good spark there. And sure enough, we followed
through with it, and over the course of the last 20 or so episodes,
we’ve gotten really great reactions from our listeners, and that’s
been the most rewarding piece, I think.
00:01:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, in that same spirit of prototyping
we might use for product work, we sort of prototyped the idea we had to
do a podcast by recording, I don’t know, 20 minutes I think it was,
yeah, in the freezing attic of this Airbnb we were staying in in Sedona,
just recording into the voice memo apps on our phones, and I kind of
just edited together with Ferri, which is this little audio editor for
the iPad, and even I think found some stock music and just shoved it in
there just to get the feel, and then we listened to it and said, OK,
does this.
And the audio quality wasn’t good, it wasn’t long enough, it wasn’t,
you know, we were still finding our groove, but as you said, is there a
spark here? Is there something worth investing in? And we felt like
there was and that kind of caused us to roll forward with figuring out
how to do the real thing.
So I figured that since we’ve been at it for a little while, as well as
the palate cleanser of the new year, I thought it’d be good to do
something we wanted to do for a while, which is a listener questions
episode. So happily we ask for kind of input feedback from folks at the
end of every episode, and we got plenty of those over the last 9 months
we’ve been doing this or whatever, sometimes by private email,
sometimes from former colleagues or friends, very often from folks we
don’t know at all, sometimes. Twitter, etc. And then I recently just
posted a thread on Twitter asking for folks to contribute questions.
Lots of great stuff there. Thanks everyone for sending things in. And,
uh, yeah, I just thought we’d spend this episode walking through a few
of our favorites. We can’t answer all of it, obviously. And certainly
many of these things, I think probably just serve their whole own
episode. So you can give us feedback on the feedback episode and tell us
which of these you’d like to hear us talk about more. Do you want to uh
start us off by reading the first question?
00:03:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so to pull the first listener question out
of the mailbag here, we have a question from Gary Zoo, and we have to
add a blanket caveat here about the pronunciation of names, apologies in
advance. I hope we got that right. So the question is on designing
advanced gestures. Says I am working on designing a new writing tool for
myself that combines some of the stuff I love about Figma into writing.
However, I struggle with designing with the right amount of fidelity. It
feels like mockups are not enough to truly express the idea, but I
don’t want to go into prototyping too early and lock in the design
space. How do you design the interactions from Muse and deal with
tensions while prototyping?
00:03:52 - Speaker 1: And one reason we picked this, so we’ve gotten a
number of variations on these happily we have a solid following of
design-minded people and yeah, the traditional design approach is static
mockups, you know, you basically have these storyboards.
Here’s a screen that you tap this that flows over to here and then even
the prototyping tools, for example, prototyping built into FigGMA, as
well as standalone prototyping tools like I used Balsam.
For many years and this kind of tap through screens or click through
screens is a standard mechanism, but if you’re designing something with
really sophisticated gesture space, for example, or lots of
sophisticated transitions, um, that kind of doesn’t quite fit that
storyboard thing and I feel like that’s a little bit what Gary touches
on here with this mockups are not enough to truly express the idea.
And yeah, my experience with this, we’ve tried a lot of things and we
definitely don’t have an answer, but certainly my experience has been
that you just kind of wing it depending on what the, what the thing is.
So sometimes we do do a lot of stills and just kind of classic flows,
often with kind of textual descriptions that say when you do this, this
should happen, but getting more into, you know, slightly more creative
approaches, for example, Julia, I remember, did a great one quite some
time. Back by sketching out the screens on paper and then recording a
video of herself kind of manipulating the papers and so then things like
sliding and other, you know, you could see the hands and you could see
the gesture and she would kind of like you know puppeteer essentially.
Something that’s a nice way to express the idea and we’ve also toyed
quite a bit with, for example, I’ve used Framer a bit sometimes I just
use HTML. Leonard has been doing stuff with origami Studio to again be
more gesture and motion oriented and things you can even run on the
actual device on the iPad. I don’t think one of those feels like a
silver bullet or a catch all solution.
00:05:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t think there’s a silver bullet here
or a single answer, but I do think it’s really important to make it
real.
Adam, this is one of your rules for creative work that I’ve learned
over the course of many years working with you. And here, you need to
make it real because you can’t really evaluate gestures which are so
physical without something there to actually be touching or at least
seeing.
But at the same time, implementing a full on gesture system that handles
all the edge cases and is integrating into the app is super complex.
So what you want is a way to cheaply evaluate and de-risk gesture
decisions. So a lot of what we’re doing here is ways to kind of isolate
the gesture problem or attack it more cheaply.
So another example to compliment the ones that Adam gave, we have a now
sort of internally famous idea of pink cards on a board, and this is a
demo app, which is basically a blank screen and you have Hot pink cards
that represent muse cards and you can implement new behaviors with
them.
And so the idea is you’re not dealing with any of the other
complexities in muse, you’re just dealing with how do you manipulate
these cards because we know once we have the cards, we can put an image
in them or a text in them or a PDF, but the actual manipulation of the
cards with gestures is quite complicated. And so in that way, you can
fully evaluate how did the gestures work, how does the implementation
go, but you don’t need to deal with all the other complexity and
therefore cost of integrating it into. A full on app.
Another example that we’ve done here recently is prototyping in the
web.
We’ve been doing this for our infinite canvas experiments where for
various reasons, it’s just much quicker to prototype stuff on a web
page. You can just do a single page HTML JavaScript thing and quickly
learn how does it feel as stuff gets dragged around. Now, there, you
don’t have the fidelity of you’re not actually touching something, but
you are seeing, OK, these things are moving, how are the content
indicators changing and stuff like that. And again, you’re really
cheaply and quickly learning.
00:07:29 - Speaker 1: I think another piece of the prototyping is maybe
what you described there is almost the reductionist aspect of let me
just pull out this one piece rather than trying to put it into a full
sophisticated app codebase, and that could even be, yeah, it’s often
the case that something like HTML and JavaScript is a faster way to
prototype compared to kind of mobile development environments, but Yulia
does tons of standalone. prototypes where she just says, OK, we need to
explore a new way that we do the transitions because we were changing
the visual model and therefore I’m just going to make this iPad app
that’s essentially not much more than a hella world of moving these
squares around on the screen, but I can try this one idea in isolation,
get it to where it feels right, and then I can go to the kind of back
porting that into the main app.
So another cluster of questions we have is around zooming UIs and sort
of the navigation within a board, and then there’s the navigation
between boards, which of course you do through pinching to zoom in and
out, for example, hey bang bird, again the pronunciation caveat there
says I’d love to hear your thoughts on zooming you. or Ricardo Medina
asks, thinks this is one of our more interesting design choices and
wants to know why it is disorienting and intimidating potentially to
have the infinite canvas. So we wrote about that a bit in our memo, but
maybe this is a good one to expand on a little bit. So Mark, tell us
about the visual model and why we’ve made the choices that we have
there.
00:08:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the zooming UI question is really
interesting because a lot of people when they first seem, they say, oh,
it’s a zooming UI app. Like that’s the thing that it does, it’s so
distinctive and so prominent.
But that isn’t necessarily a top level goal of Muse. We introduced a
zooming UI because it solves some particular design criteria we had
around how you navigate your content.
So for example, I think it’s really important when you press your
fingers on the screen and you go to do a gesture and you start the
gesture. That it immediately does something and that it’s a continuous
experience from you start the gesture all the way to you finished it.
And assuming UI is a pretty natural way to do that. Like as a contrast,
a lot of apps navigate with like page changes, like you just kind of
teleporting around, and that is quite disorienting because you don’t
know where you came from or where you’re going, and it doesn’t have
the same naturalness that this gradual and incremental transition has,
especially when you’re doing a continuous physical gesture. But there
are potentially other ways to get that, and there are ways that we’ll
consider in the future. You can have a crossfade or a slide in or slide
out, things like that. So it’s not so much that we want a pure ZUI per
se, it’s that it gives these nice properties, especially in the context
of a gesture system.
00:10:06 - Speaker 1: Well, one of the original kind of core ideas or
philosophies we were trying to explore back when we were doing this in a
research context was how to tap into the user’s spatial reasoning.
Because there’s a very powerful part of the human brain we evolved to
navigate spaces in the real world and to the extent that computer
interfaces can tap into that and make things feel place, feel like a
place and access those parts of our brain, the more we can orient and
move around comfortably.
And I think in a lot of ways the computing industry, particularly with
mobile, has gone that direction a little bit. So for example, standard
iPhone apps have first of all usually. Some kind of a light spatial
thing. If you tap an item, it kind of slides to the right, then when you
tap a back button, that slides you back to the left and you have kind of
this sense that the thing exists in a larger 2D space.
I would also argue something like actually the iPhone core interface for
the home screen is a very lightweight zooming UI, particularly with the
swipe up gesture and the zoom kind of transition, you get this feeling
that when you’re looking at an app, you’re sort of zoomed up and then
you swipe up and you toss it away and it flies back to the grid and you
can tap another one to zoom into that, right? So the part of what I
think makes the iPhone and mobile interface is generally much more
accessible and much more natural for most people is precisely because
it’s tapping that spatial reasoning. So we wanted to see if there was
like a power user version of that, essentially, right, exactly.
00:11:32 - Speaker 2: And as for this question of zooming potentially
being disorienting or intimidating, we’ve been talking about this in
the context of when you’re in a single board. And if you can
arbitrarily zoom in and zoom out, and especially if you can also pan in
any direction without any boundary, it’s kind of hard to know where you
are.
So when you start, you know you’re at zoom, you know, 100%, and you’re
in the middle.
But if you do some gestures, like say you zoom into some blank space, it
looks blank, just like it did before. So how zoomed in are you? Well
then, do you need like a zoom level indicator and then you’re into the
whole Chrome thing.
And then if you want to zoom out, do you snap to 100% or is it if
you’re close, you snap, or otherwise, you know, there’s just so many
degrees of freedom that you introduce, which sure gives you flexibility,
but also makes it hard to orient, especially to some kind of standard
landmarks that you would want.
So if we’re thinking about our flexible canvas feature and other
related ideas, we’re trying to strike a balance between, you have the
flexibility to move around and to zoom when you need to see something
closer, but also you don’t feel like you have no grounding in your
content.
And I keep coming back to this idea of drawing on the, the physical
world, and here, like with your desk, you can zoom in, like lean in to
see something with more detail, and you can kind of lean back to get
something with more context, but there’s this natural balance point
that you return to, which is like you’re sitting neutrally in your
chair. And that seems really, I don’t know, obvious or straightforward,
but it’s a really important idea of like you literally know where
you’re sitting, and it’s so easy to lose that in a digital world where
you don’t have all these physical cues.
00:13:01 - Speaker 1: a trade-off between oriented, grounded, and
freedom, openness, spaciousness. It is extremely challenging. We talk
about one aspect of it in our infinite canvas memo that I’ll link in
the show notes, but this is an ongoing challenge for anything we ever do
with the visual model, which is you want freedom, that’s part of the
value of these digital tools. You don’t run out of pages in your
notebook, but that actually comes at the expense of too much freedom and
you’re just lost.
00:13:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah. So speaking of organizing your muse content,
we very often get questions about that. So one recent one, for example,
from Akash was how do you organize your boards by ideas, by articles or
something else. So how do you approach this, Adam?
00:13:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I usually have the answer of however you
want or don’t worry about it, which sort of is unsatisfying.
In practice, when, you know, of course, anything you put in use is
private, we can’t see it, but I have had the opportunity to kind of
watch over someone’s shoulder either virtually in a screen share
session or sometimes in person and see how people organize their stuff.
And there are folks who do a very careful, OK, here’s my work board
over here, and here’s my philanthropic activities over here, and
here’s some stuff I have to do with my kids over here. And they
basically have, you know, subboard kind of like organizing folders on
your file system or something like that.
For myself, I find that I tend to use it in a more messy way, and this
is especially true for me because Muse is really about what’s on deck.
What am I thinking about now? Um, it’s less about the long term kind of
archival of um project material and more about what I’m working on
right now.
And so I tend get a thing where I have a couple of work-related boards
on one side of the screen, maybe kind of in the upper left, and I have
some personal stuff that’s maybe more to the right, including maybe
some journaling, but also some personal admin, life admin stuff, and
then I have like kind of a little archive space down the lower left,
then I might, if there’s one particular project that’s really top of
mind for me in the moment, I might make that a little bigger and put it
towards the middle.
So then I do end up with like a board per Not quite per project, but per
like chunk of thinking about a project, and those kind of migrate to my
archive as they’re not relevant anymore. I’ve moved on to new things.
There doesn’t tend to be like a deep hierarchy where it’s neatly
sorted and taxonomically correct. It’s more just I have a board for
stuff that I’m thinking about, you know, by topic, and I just kind of
put them roughly in clusters and then eventually those move to an
archive and that’s kind of.
00:15:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I have a similar approach where everything
comes into a sort of inbox or desk, and it’s very much a messy working
set. It’s basically whatever I’m thinking about today. And then from
there, any structure is sort of emergent. So if I have a few things on
my desk that are related and I want to keep, I might make a board for
that and put that board on my desk.
But An active project I’m currently working on. And then as I complete
that project or it becomes colder, I might shuffle it down further into
the hierarchy. And that way, the hierarchies that I might need sort of
emerge organically. So I don’t try to pre-plan anything. It’s just
once my current space gets too many items on it, then, OK, I need to
basically rebalance the tree and push some nodes down.
Adam, you also mentioned kind of a mix of personal and work. One
question that we didn’t pull up explicitly, but I’ve gotten a lot is,
you know, how do I make different workspaces or can I have different
users in Muse? We made a pretty explicit design decision in Muse that the
way you separate your top level context shouldn’t use a different
mechanism from how you organize things at a lower level. Like we want to
build these general purpose primitives that you can use to organize at
any level of your workspace. So for example, I have a big top level
board for personal stuff and for work stuff, but those are just regular
muse boards. We don’t have a separate concept of like muse workspaces
or muse users or muse accounts or something like that, um, because we
want you to be able to reuse these primitives and flexibly recombine
them however you want.
00:16:59 - Speaker 1: The next question comes from Chris Corella. He
says, I’d love to hear the projects and use cases people are using use
for.
And this one is for me is a personal, not sure what you call it back
burner project or just a thing I’ve wanted to do for ages, which is
have a gallery that shows sort of the type of person or says a few
things about the work they do, but also shows their boards and we did a
little of that in the newsletter sometimes users would send us
screenshots, by the way, we love screenshots of your boards and of
course they’re personal and often people feel vaguely embarrassed
because they’re messy because thinking is messy. But it’s really
great, you know, when you’re comfortable to share that, giving us a
little peek at how you use it really, you know, pictures worth 1 1000
words, as they say.
But in any case, for a while, I would ask folks for permission sometimes
if we could put that in the Newsletter kind of dropped off on that. Love
to do like a user gallery or something like that because we have really
some pretty interesting people doing some pretty interesting things and
I get a real kick out of that. Obviously we’ve got our, I don’t know,
kind of core audience of tech people probably came out of the ink and
switch days product designers, engineers, computer scientists, product
managers.
But then additionally we have all kinds of interesting things. We have a
few restaurant owners, this was an interesting one to me, but actually
it’s great because you’ve got the bring in the menu as a PDF and you
can kind of mark it up and then you’ve got some photos of the food and
then you got like some screenshots of reviews of your restaurant and
some competitors and there’s a map and there’s, you know, you kind of
mark all that up. Another one I think you uh recently did a user
interview with was a pilot, and these folks often take the, what is it
like an iPad mini or something and strap it to the knee.
00:18:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s an iPad, so they put some Velcro on
their thigh and then put some Velcro on the back of the iPad and stick
it on their thigh for the flight so it doesn’t move around when you hit
turbulence. And apparently iPad is the sort of universal standard for
private pilots because that’s where the best private piloting software
is, I guess. And then from that and from the weather reports and from
the radio during your flight, you’re collecting all this information
and it’s PDFs and images and handwritten notes, and it’s nice to have
a way to bring that all together in one spot.
00:19:02 - Speaker 1: Also seen some attorneys using it for casework.
There’s one fellow that, or I should say one person who periodically
sends in screenshots usually connected to bug reports or whatever, but
turned out as a like a board game designer, so there’s really
interesting card artwork, very visually rich, you might say.
And then we also have a number of authors, but a really interesting case
that I got to meet through our sports channel last week is a really
prolific fiction author who has something like 50 published works and
told a really nice story of using Muse to essentially work out a thorny
point in one of their plots that they were trying to figure out for a
piece.
So it sounds like there’s going to be a book published soon that Muse
at least had a small role in helping with the, of course not the writing
of it, but the thinking of it, which ultimately is our place in the
creative tool chain.
So yeah, I would love to take the time to secure all the permission and
get some screenshots and maybe get some photos and some quotes or
something and just have a nice little gallery on our website, but
haven’t quite gotten to that yet.
00:20:02 - Speaker 2: So our next question is from Edward Lee. He says,
you guys clearly have a mission and you’re building towards that, but
there’s also the reality of making sure you’re delivering a unique
value prop over other products. So, and to paraphrase here, who do you
think of as Muse’s competition, and how do you reason about that?
00:20:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think competition is really important for
understanding how product fits into the marketplace, and certainly when
folks come to me for, I don’t know, just input or advice or whatever on
their products or their startups, one of the first questions I like to
ask is competition because I think that helps clarify things.
For Muse, I would roughly group three categories. One is the, let’s
call them other multimedia canvases, mixed media canvases. That’s Miro
is probably the biggest player there, but Millaote is one I like a lot.
Miro and Millaotte are both kind of web-based real-time collaborative.
They don’t have the iPad component. And then one actually that our
guests on the last episode mentioned using is Skel, which is this kind
of targeted more at authors, but again it’s like a cards on a board
type of thing that works on the desktop app.
The second category I think of is this kind of broad knowledge
workspace, and probably notions that maybe the hot up and comer there.
Evernote actually is one that’s really well established. We hear about
that one quite a bit. And then you have more specialty ones like liquid
text, which is kind of focused on PDF annotation and excerpting, or
actually one I’ve taken also a lot of inspiration one which is called
Devonthink, which is this pretty old school desktop software you collect
up a lot of material and you use it to essentially find connections and
generate new ideas. And in a way I don’t necessarily think we’re
directly, actually feature wise we’re not very directly comparable, but
just in terms of a digital space where people go to kinda collect a
bunch of stuff together and think about it, I think the Enos and notions
of the world are comparable tools. And then the third category is what I
would call the iPad native digital sketchbook. So all the products I’ve
mentioned so far are either web-based, maybe with an app, maybe not, but
they’re really native to the web or maybe they’re native to the
desktop, as opposed to iPad native. And you go iPad native, there are
lots of interesting choices, but the digital sketchbooks would be good
notes, I think it’s a really nice one. Notability is another one. Those
are really pure, I know sketching is quite the right word for it. You
can, for example, Goodotes, I think is a great piece of software. It’s
one I used prior to Muse, I think you did as well, but it’s really,
it’s really about laying down ink on a page. It is a digital
transliteration of a sketchbook. They have a lot of nice inc options.
It’s good for making sketches and exploring things and writing out
stuff. Can add text, but it’s clumsy, you can’t really add links. I
think you can put an image in there, but that’s just not really what
it’s made for. But in terms of being fast, private, and in particular
that tablet posture and stylus use, you know, they’re very inspiring.
So I think Muse tries to take some elements of each of those three, the
mixed media canvas, kind of classic knowledge. Workspace and the iPad
native sketchbook, but it also doesn’t have a lot of those features.
And so for many folks when they come in and they say, well, I’m
thinking of switching from any one of these products I’ve just named to
Muse, but here’s the features that I need. And in some cases we have
made deliberate choices to leave out, for example, really sophisticated
inking options because we just don’t want to be a sketchbook as an
example.
00:23:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think actually a potential 4th
category would be straight up paper notebooks.
00:23:30 - Speaker 1: Ah yeah, of course.
00:23:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we’ve seen in our user research that a
surprising number of people still swear by paper notebooks. They’re
very reliable. They have low latency. They never run out of power.
There’s lots of great attributes of them, and so people keep going back
to them, and in many ways we’re trying to do with Muse is bring iPads up
to the level of the humble paper notebook.
00:23:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, great point. And actually if you further
expand that to be all analog ideation products, sketchbooks, but also
whiteboards, Post-it notes, index cards, if you count all of those, I’m
pretty sure that, you know, if you just pick a random creative
professional and ask them what they use to think through their ideas. is
far more of them. I think that category that you just named, that kind
of analog thing to would dwarf all of the others, right? That’s the
real incumbent that I think we’re looking at is whether digital has
something to offer against these very tried and true and rightfully
beloved products for thinking. Yep. So our next question is from Brian
Zimdler. This is about how we understand user needs. They ask, how did
you conduct the user interview process for Muse?
00:24:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I feel like this has evolved over
time, so maybe we can work backwards. So now we have quite a few users,
many of whom are very active, and so we’re able to engage with them.
Sometimes they just come to us and volunteer, sometimes they have
support requests or feature ideas and engage them on that basis. And we
say, OK, like that’s an interesting idea, you tell me more about your
use case, maybe we can get on the phone and chat. That’s. Avenue that
we have.
And then going back in time before we had products, we would have to be
more proactive about finding these and there we would try to identify
the archetypes, the types of people that we would want to learn from and
reach out to them. And often these people in our network or people who
we had some connection to, so there was some level of trust already, and
we would ask them about their creative process, what tools they use,
things that they were happy about and not, and so on.
00:25:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I really enjoyed the pure ethnographic
research that we did in those days.
It’s tougher when you don’t have a product because it’s kind of
you’re sort of asking someone to tell you about how they work just
because, and you can say I’m associated with this research institute
or, you know, we’re doing the survey, but it’s a little bit less
tangible.
If someone’s using your product or wants to use their product, they’re
trying it out, and particularly as you said, this support becomes in a
way a kind of a lightweight, steady way to get a sense of, you know,
what people need and want.
And you make a great point there as well, which is folks often write in
very reasonably with a kind of transactional question, which is, oh, I
would like feature X, and we almost always answer with something like,
OK, well that’s interesting, and we might say something like, yeah,
lots of people have asked so that we’ll put you on your list. We’ve
got a little database basically where we just kind of tag people with
what they’re interested in, but what we really want to know is why,
like what’s the reasoning? Why are you driving that in the product
manager lingo is use case, which I sometimes.
But it may be for normal people it’s just how are you using this? Why
do you want it? And so I try to dig in on that, like what kind of
projects are you doing and what drives you to need this and why are
there other ways you could do it not suitable and the real good
information is in that.
But to my surprise, sometimes folks are a little bit, not that they’re
withholding but more I think they maybe just assume that we’re most
interested in talking about our product. Which is actually a very
reasonable assumption, but I’m much more interested in you. Like, what
do you do? What is your creative process, what are you trying to
accomplish? How does this tool fit into your life or not, you know, how
do you aspire for it to fit in, but maybe you can’t do that today. That
is much more what I’m interested in.
00:26:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, especially with a product like Muse, because
people are doing so much wild stuff with it. It’s not like, for
example, uh Photoshop, it’s like people are editing images and there’s
some variants on that, right? But with Muse, there’s so many projects
that people are working on in so many different domains, it’s super
interesting to learn about what people are up to.
00:27:14 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, and maybe it helps that maybe all of
us and certainly me are speaking for myself. I just have a real passion
for creative processes generally. One of the reasons I enjoyed working
on Hiroku was because it was very much about the developer creative
process, the software engineer creative process, and we’re getting a
glimpse into a different side of that through working on news.
00:27:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so speaking of creative process, we have a
question here from Tim Lombardo. How do you recognize good ideas to work
on?
00:27:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this was a follow up to episode 12
of our podcast with Andy Matzek. We’re talking about idea development,
and I had spoken about how I use for me there’s a sort of ritual to
starting a new muse board and particularly giving it a name, where I’m
saying there is a problem that I’m facing in work or life or just an
idea I want to develop that I think is interesting enough that I want to
make this blank canvas for it.
And yeah, I think Tim was thinking of this as, is this a meta skill to
develop, which is knowing which ideas to chase, which is really
interesting. I hadn’t thought about it that way before. I certainly
have a strong hunch for what things to go after, which I think of
partially as like an entrepreneurial drive. Maybe it’s something that
is Sort of an effective experience when you’ve been doing maker work
for a long time or for a multi-decade career, you have a good,
particularly if you do proper retrospectives, hopefully you have a good
sense of which ideas panned out and which didn’t, and then you have a
good idea of which ones to invest in.
But I don’t know, I want to think about that one more. Mark, what’s
your answer to that?
00:28:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so one angle for me is getting a lot of
different reference points and potential connections with new ideas that
come in. And so that’s about having a lot of raw material to work with,
raw intellectual material. So a lot of reading, a lot of time discussing
ideas with other people, so that when a new idea comes in, you can kind
of reference it against all these other. I ideas you have in your
corpus, that’s gonna happen with things that don’t even seem directly
related. That’s why I think reading about science and history and the
academic literature and the industrial literature, those are all really
important to do, and it builds up over time.
00:29:22 - Speaker 1: So curiosity is upstream of having good ideas.
00:29:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Another thing is I lean quite a bit
on people who I think have really good radars or radars that are in tune
with mine.
For example, Adam is one of these people who just seems to have a really
good intuition.
Well, thank you. Sometimes he comes to me and says, yeah, you know,
Mark, I have a feeling we should, I don’t know, start a podcast, let’s
try it. Oh, OK. I didn’t exactly thought of that, but I trust you guys,
let’s do it. And there are a few other people who I have a similar
level of trust and respect with. Actually, Twitter has been a pretty
important vehicle for this.
There’s some people that you can find and follow there and Again, it’s
not about credentials or popularity, it’s more about individual people
who have a specific articulated way of thinking, and on the basis of
that you can come to more heavily weigh their input.
00:30:08 - Speaker 1: I’m actually reminded of a talk I saw many years
ago by Paul Bhey, who’s the creator of Gmail, and this of course is in
thinking in terms of product opportunities or what’s a good product to
build, which is obviously a small subset of what counts as good ideas
but happens to be the one I tend to operate in.
And he talks about the entrepreneurial drive or in this case, the
entrepreneurial drive of feeling agitated. There’s like a problem or a
thing that just seems wrong or weird or annoys you and you just can’t
stop thinking about it and you look for solutions, but none of them
really quite seem to fit for him.
I think he was telling the story of being annoyed that All email was
slow and clunky and required you to do a bunch of organizing work that
you didn’t really want to do, and losing track of long threads and just
the nurturing of that agitation over time turned into like a good
understanding of the problem and the drive, the initiative to go and do
something about it.
00:31:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I call this my problem. So at any one time,
I have 01 P problems.
And this is things that I just can’t help thinking about. I’m thinking
about, you know, why are they wrong? What are potential solutions, what
are potential angles for it? It’s in the shower. It’s, you know, when
I’m taking a walk, it’s when I’m talking to people, I can’t help but
bring it up. And that’s something that you basically can’t really
control directly. It’s a function of your environment and what you’re
reading and so on. But when I get that, and especially when it stays the
problem for a long time, I’m really inclined to go work on it because I
have a lot of energy for it.
00:31:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, one that I had a front row seat of was what
eventually became your article on slow software or the article titled
Slow Software, which is a look at why software is slow, why it’s
important for it to be fast, a bunch of the human factors. But yeah, I
remember when you were. that and a lot of it came in the form of just
being constantly irritated and wanting to seek the base of that
irritation, and it would, as you said it, because it’s the one thing
you’re thinking about, it pops out in other places. I remember you
having internal memos, you know, within in and Switch that were about
maybe like a project and it was sort of related, but there would be
several paragraphs that was basically ranting about like it’s got to be
high performance. And it sort of, oh, OK, and like eventually that just
grew and grew and grew and eventually took shape as this excellent essay
that then was widely shared. So this next question is about building
news with MUS. So this, unfortunately I couldn’t find the original
tweet. This was from around the time of our launch back in late August,
early September. There was a real fire hose going on at the time. We
were just getting hundreds of messages through all these different
channels Twitter, hacker news, support. Yeah, the adrenaline was running
high, but I remember I thought it was a really interesting question, and
I said, oh, I should actually do a whole Twitter thread on this. I
should post some screenshots and talk about it. And then I don’t know,
there’s a million things going on, so I just lost track of it and I
couldn’t even find the tweet looking back. So apologize, we can’t to
the author that we can’t give you credit.
Yeah, I think this is a great one or sparked my imagination because the
answer is, yeah, absolutely. I think that is just so obvious. So much of
the work we are doing and in general with product and business work, so
much of it is developing ideas and that precisely is what use is for.
And to me it was a real milestone in the business for me at least, this
piece of software crossed from a research prototype to a product with
legs in the real world was when I started to be able to use it to do
ideation on our business. I remember one of the first real kind of major
boards I had was our first team summit in Dublin there back a year and a
half ago, and you know, we had the different sessions, we’re gonna talk
about the structure of the business. I had one board for some
sightseeing we were going to do there in Ireland, and another one that
was kind of just some of the scheduling stuff and some others that were
sort of like freeform conversations that we were having that collection
of things was really um helped me. Absorb and work through everything we
were talking about there and in fact I think of this as being self
hosting a concept from computer science which is if you’re working on a
piece of software, let’s say you’re working on a programming editor,
there’s a point at which in the very beginning it’s not good enough to
work on its own code base. But at some point, you know, I assume that
the eye and sublime text and VS code and so on, the authors writing that
editor also are editing the future version of the editor in the current
version of the editor. That sort of self-hosting thing is a good sign, a
similar thing for programming languages and. And so on. So in that
sense, the moment for me it was a big moment when news became for me
self-hosting in the sense of the ideas and product roadmap and design
work and so on. At least that I was contributing to the business, I was
doing a lot of that in Muse itself.
00:34:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like as Muse gets more capable, we’re
able to move more and more of our work into it, which is a great sign.
And I also do use Muses a lot for, let’s say designingm. A lot of work
that I’m doing these days is product architecture.
So that’s like, what should the pieces be and how they fit together?
What should they be called, what are the nouns and verbs, what are the
core primitives, how do you power the core engine and stuff like that.
And that’s a very contemplative activity. And so it’s really important
that you have an environment that feels conducive to that.
So I like to take my muse and go on my couch and scribble some stuff and
maybe do some reading, and over a course of a few days, maybe develop an
idea.
This actually leads nicely into questions of roadmap. So, the first one
is from Nicole Carrasano, and it asks, I was wondering if there’s a Mac
version or if you intend to make one.
00:35:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is a bigger rabbit hole than you
might think.
The short answer is yes, for sure, we need to do that for a bunch of
reasons.
The longer answer is more complex because we think it’s long been our
hypothesis for why the iPad and tablets generally are underinvested in
platforms because very often you have transliteration of either phone or
desktop apps to the iPad and a mouse and a keyboard or a trackpad and a
keyboard are just not the same as a touchscreen and a stylus. And so
then it’s basically worse than what it would. on the computer and then
in the meantime you’re not taking advantages of the unique benefits of
touch and we have the same thing bringing it the other way. If you port
an iPad native app to a desktop environment with that keyboard and
mouse, it’s going to be worse. And in fact we’ve prototyped that out
and seen that there’s a lot of ways that the basic metaphor of the
cards on the board will work fine with a mouse, for example, but
there’s lots of other things that really will need some rethinking.
00:36:44 - Speaker 2: Yep, I do think it’s gonna be really important to
get news on the desktop.
We’ve said many times in this podcast that the creative process
naturally encompasses a range of devices.
You have phones for on the go, look up reading and capturing, and you
have tablets, which is our current focus for reading, annotating,
contemplating, sketching, brainstorming, thinking, basically, and then
you have the desk. To which is the power tool for authoring and editing.
And it’s very helpful to have your thinking work next to your authoring
and editing work, and to be able to go back and forth, as well as to do
research sessions on your desktop as input into your thinking. I think
it’s very important that we get onto the desktop, but it’s not going
to be, like Adam was saying, it’s not going to be the same app
transliterated. So there’s quite a bit of design and technical work
that we need to do to get there.
00:37:31 - Speaker 1: That also points to the other big challenge, which
is I think getting a version of Muse running on, for example, a Mac or
any desktop computer that has some changes to the interface that will
make it feel natural with that set up.
I think that’s kind of a moderate amount of work. The bigger thing
there is exactly what you described, which is if you’re moving back and
forth between desk. To for one kind of setting and tablet for another,
well, that implies syncing and good cross device syncing, uh, in
particular that has some of the privacy qualities we’re hoping to be
able to achieve is a very, very big technical challenge. Happily, it’s
one we’re working on right now and we’re optimistic that it is an
achievable end for us. So the next question again is I’m going to do
more of a a paraphrasing of something we hear very, very often, which is
basically just what’s the muse product roadmap, and I think some
additional color on this question or a lot of the motivation is I’ve
really come to realize how important it is for people to know not just
what the product is and what it can do for them today, but also where
it’s going, and that makes a lot of sense in the context. of
subscription software, you’re not really buying it for today, you’re
buying it for the, you know, in this case, if you take an annual
subscription, even if you don’t renew, that’s 12 months’ worth of
improvements that you’re expecting to accumulate, and that gets even
more so if you get into something we’ve talked about in some past
episodes, which is in many ways supporting an early product like this.
It’s almost more like a Kickstarter you’re saying. I want software
like this to exist. I think this team is the right one to do it. I want
to support you financially to make that come true, but then that also
has the additional dimension of you want to know and trust the team, but
you also just want to know where is it going. Maybe the places they want
to go don’t match up with what you think is interesting or inspiring.
So we don’t have any kind of public roadmap, but this certainly makes a
lot of sense to me that people ask about this.
00:39:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe we can describe this as our areas of
interest in areas that we’re being pulled and drawn to both by our
vision for the product as well as quite consistent customer feedback and
questions. There’s a few areas that constantly come up that people want
more in.
00:39:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think really zoomed out. I think of the
kind of three big tiers or sequential areas to work on is starting with
the single user thinking tool.
And that’s the mixeded canvas, use both hands in the stylus, it’s
super fast. It uses all the screen for your content, really fully taking
advantage of the iPad and stylus hardware. And actually this launch that
we did a few months back to me was the feeling like we delivered that.
There’s much, much more to be done there, both improvements on what’s
there and more features, a very long list on that, but I feel like that
pillar is well in place.
Then the phase two, if you want to call it that, is what we’re working
on now, and I expect we’ll take most of this year we’re just now
entering, and that’s the multi-user, multi-device stuff. So that is, I
can access it from all my devices, the new experience in each of those
devices is appropriate to that device, phone, desktop. And so on.
And then of course the multi-user collaboration, sharing, how do I send
stuff to clients, how do I send stuff to colleagues, how do I share in a
way with people who are not using news or people who might be using
Muse, we can get additional benefits from that.
Huge technical and design challenges there, but certainly a very fun
space that we’re starting to get some progress on.
And then the final piece, uh, to me is what I would call the end user
programming or the programmability of it. I see we have a question
further down the list about that one specifically, so maybe we’ll
expand on that there, but that’s just my take. I’m curious how you
think of the overall roadmap.
00:41:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s pretty much how I think about it
too, and maybe you just drill down a little bit into the 1st and 2nd
phases there.
On the first phase, I agree that we have a quite solid foundation with
this tablet native thinking experience. We’ve gotten very good feedback
on that. Now there is some more to do, just to give you a couple
examples. One is, well, we think it’s important to be able to move ink
across boards as well as move it within a board, which you can currently
do, and that’s quite a bit of a technical and design challenge.
Another one that I’m excited about is a non-spatial collection type.
This goes back a little bit to our zooming UI conversation. Right now,
the only way you can collect elements in muse is on a spatial board, and
spatial collections make sense in a lot of cases, but I would say not
all cases. And so I think we want something more like a set type that
automatically manages the position and ordering and sizing and so on of
your elements. So if you just have, say, a stack of papers that you’re
reading, you can do something that’s more like putting a paper on the
stack as opposed to specifically laying it out somewhere on your desk.
And then phase two, yes, it’s a simple matter of making it run on
everyone’s devices everywhere. There’s obviously a lot under that
hood. There’s a big technical challenge in going from all the data
resides canonically on one device to it’s distributed across all
devices. But once you unlock that, you can do a lot with syncing across
one user’s device as well as collaborating across devices. So I’m
quite excited for us to be pursuing that. And then we also talked about
how you need basically 3 different apps, you need one for the phone, one
for the tablet, and one for the desktop. So there’s quite a bit of work
to do there.
00:42:41 - Speaker 1: And certainly on the product or design side, I
think that while there’s a really good precedent for collaborative
tools, including GitHub for code, Figma for design, Google Docs for
writing, There really isn’t a collaborative thinking tool and you know
the sort of obvious thing to reach for is the live whiteboard.
And in fact, in many cases folks find us or imagine that that’s what
we’ll be sort of like standing in front of a white board with your
colleagues talking through a problem and scribbling out visual support
and indeed we may support a use case very similar to that. But I suspect
that there’s a lot of nuance and interesting subcas or related cases
when you talk about asynchronous work and the degree to which you want
to do things in private and then share them with your colleagues for
kind of input or to further discuss versus like starting together with a
blank slate. I think there’s a lot there.
00:43:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the way that people actually work together
creatively or want to work together creatively is very complex.
They want privacy of their information, they want to do a lot of stuff
privately to themselves, and then they have a bunch of different
granular collaborations.
You know, you and I are collaborating on this podcast. We are
collaborating together with the new partners on the business. We also
have all kinds of other stuff going on in our lives and it’s kind of
formed these overlapping groups and correctly representing that and
supporting that in software is a really important goal of mine for this
phase two.
And that brings us to what you described Adam as phase 3 of Muse. Jimmy
Miller has a question here. He says, I’d love to hear you all talk
about end user programming, explorations that bring Muse a bit closer in
that specific direction. What is the place that you see for end user
programming in Tools for Thought and use?
00:44:24 - Speaker 1: So this is a huge passion of mine, career long
passion. I’ve written articles about it reaching.
Back 10 years and more I was one of the foundational inspirations for
Hiroku and just to kind of briefly define and user programming, the idea
there is that most software today is written by professional software
engineers. It’s not something that basically computer code and the
programming tools and everything you need to write software is something
that you really have to be an expert at in order to do, not even just at
a high level but just at all.
And the idea of making that more accessible, such that maybe not every
single person that ever uses a computing device, but many more people
could have access to that, and the comparison on that is often made to
literacy. So once upon a time, reading and writing was something that
was a tiny tiny elite. of scribes and alerted people could do and later
on through the printing press and education and some other means became
something that almost everyone can do.
Not everyone’s a professional author or really strong on English
grammar or whatever, but almost everyone can write a shopping list or
write a letter or an email to their friend. And so there’s a version of
this for programming as well. How do you think about end user
programming as related to Muse?
00:45:46 - Speaker 2: So I suspect for end user programming as we
typically understand it, that is users writing code like stuff, I
suspect you’re going to have the clearest vision for that, and you’ve
thought the most about it. I have a couple different angles on this,
which I’ll share.
One is, I’m quite excited about the idea of the programmability of
data.
So we often think about programming as you have codes manipulating like
in memory variables and stuff like that. I’m really excited about the
Users having programmatic access to their corpus, read and write, and
that being reflected in muse and outside. So you could potentially think
of your end user program as you’re writing these little like bots
basically that are watching and crawling and manipulating your corpus
data and doing automatic things with it. It might be organizing your
daily to do list or something like that, or something more complex,
doing summary statistics over all of your work for the past year. And I
think there’s something very powerful as well as accessible about
accessing the underlying data. And that leads kind of into my next angle
here, which is open ended computing, which is maybe a generalization of
end user programming, and by that I mean users being able to do
combinations of things that the designers of the program didn’t
specifically need to plan for. So with typical mobile apps in
particular, the set of things you can do is basically the set that the
product manager said you should be able to do. And if you want to do
something that the product manager didn’t think of or doesn’t agree
with, well, too bad, delete the app or something, you’re out of luck.
This is in contrast to the world of traditional desktop computing where
you have the standard file formats that any program can access and
manipulate and that the user can directly access via their visible file
system. So to take a simple example, if you’re writing a text note and
you don’t like the color of the text screen, you can just open up a
different editor or you can CP it into a different. There’s so many
things you can do and you have so much agency because the files and the
programs have this interface that’s kind of general and that different
people can access. And that’s something that I think we’ve kind of
quietly lost in the world of mobile apps. You have a little bit of it
with the share sheets that export standard-ish file formats, but it’s
very clumsy and it’s quite limited and oftentimes the programs just
don’t let you export stuff easily. So what I’m curious about is how do
you bring that desktop sensibility of open-ended end user computing back
to the world of mobile apps.
00:48:05 - Speaker 1: I think this point of data being the center of
gravity or the thing that matters to users and customers, I think as
software creators, we tend to think that the code or the running
software is sort of the thing that matters and then data is this kind of
thing that’s added.
Onto that like a database is something you attach to an application or
you write the software and opens and it reads and writes to a file, for
example, but from user perspectives, the data is what they care about.
It’s like I’m using your, I don’t know what piece of software to
write my master thesis, you know, they may like the software or not, but
ultimately they care about their work, they care about the thing
they’re creating. That’s more important to them. And yeah, standard
data file formats that I think once upon a time were much more kind of
universal and easier to use, and those have sort of faded in utility
largely because of the mobile world and finding ways to not necessarily
step back to a previous time to get some of that value of I don’t know
openness is quite the right word for it, but the ability to manipulate
your data in a powerful and free way. I think that’s something missing.
00:49:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe agency is another way to describe it,
yeah, yeah.
00:49:15 - Speaker 2: We also talked about this in our local first paper
which we can link to, but yeah, the world of files gave you all this
control and visibility and portability, but then they basically Fall on
their face when you get into the world of mobile and especially
collaborative apps. And then with mobile and collaborative apps, we kind
of went all the way the other way and said, now your data is totally
opaque and maybe you can’t even get it out, but at least you know, you
can see each other in the Google Doc. We really need a third way, and
that’s something we’re excited to pursue with Muse.
00:49:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is one reason we made it a priority
from the beginning to these Muse bundles that you can export are just
zip archives that you can open and they contain flat files and a little
bit of metadata. That was something, but that’s really just a very
small step in that direction. So I’d love to see us do much more, and I
agree that fits together with the the end user programming is ultimately
about agency and grasping the full power of computing rather than being
kind of at the mercy of the software vendor.
00:50:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah. Another thought I have on end user
programming from looking at it in the wild, if you will, is that what’s
really important is that people really care about the thing that
they’re programming. And then they just need some little window or way
in.
So some examples of this one is Minecraft, where you have these Redstone
contraptions, and it’s basically a very primitive way to program and
it’s pretty gnarly and it’s literally quite bulky and blocky. But
people are really motivated to build all kinds of wild stuff in
Minecraft.
Another example, you know back in the MySpace days people customizing
their pages, and even I would say JavaScript and the web, like, frankly,
JavaScript is a pretty gnarly programming environment. There’s a lot of
things wrong with it, but People so much want to be able to script their
content on the web. They basically found a way to make it work.
And now you have these incredible JavaScript VMs which have wild
performance.
So a lot of the work I think of end user programming is not, how do you
make like some editor that people can think about clearly. It’s more
like having something that they want to program and then giving them a
little bit of a window in. And that’s why I think this idea of the
users’ content and their corpus is so interesting because people care a
lot about their creative work and everything they put into their music
corpus potentially. And so giving them a way to unlock that could be
really powerful.
00:51:17 - Speaker 1: I agree and I think this is one of the challenges
of a lot of the HCI research that looks at end user programming or
programming environments that are more accessible, is they tend to start
with the programming environment. But almost by definition, the people
who are not programming today are people who aren’t interested in
programming for its own sake, right? They’re interested in it because
of what it can do for them. So that means they already have a thing they
care about that they want to automate, they want to extend, and so that
is one of a few reasons, as a very natural reason why anything in user
programming related would come late in the roadmap relative to other
things.
Yeah, one little teaser you could get on what that might look like is
for the capstone project we did an Ink & Switch and I’ll link the end
user programming article we did there, but we had one of our colleagues
did essentially a series of experiments with, as you mentioned earlier,
the bots. Basically you could have cards that had a little script
attached to them that you would write yourself and if you drop the card
onto a board, it would then Sort of do its actions. So we had a couple
of examples that were something like a sorting card you could drop that
on and it would sort of arrange everything in a grid. And there was
another one that I think was a journaling card that would essentially
put like sort of a title with the current date and time that was
intended for a board you’re using kind of as a journal. And those are
simple examples, but they showed the kind of stuff that a person might
like to do with like a personal knowledge tool or thinking tool, and
those were very, very rough and very early, but I think that kind of
gives the direction of that.
And furthermore, that also raises this question of end user programming
can be sort of automating stuff for your own sake, but it can also be
that you make a small plug-in or script or something you want to give to
a friend or a couple of friends. I think a good example of this we’ve
seen recently is Figma plugins, where people write plugins for
themselves, but they may also distribute them a little. More widely,
it’s not really intended to be sort of a full-fledged sophisticated
application. It just extends or changes or customizes this environment
that you’re doing creative work in in some way that makes it suit your
needs and maybe you want to share with a few other people. So I’d
imagine some kind of set up like that for use.
00:53:28 - Speaker 2: Yeah, this makes phase 2 and 3, if you will, very
complimentary. An important learning from our ethnographic studies of
end user programming and the other stuff that we’ve read is that
there’s very little original end user programming. It’s mostly stuff
you learned from a friend and then mutated slightly. So there’s this
kind of one. Original spreadsheet and then it basically propagated
through the world as people made different variants of it and copy
pasted cells and so on. And I think if you have native collaboration and
sharing in use, that could be the vector by which the end user
programming learning gets propagated through the system.
00:54:00 - Speaker 1: Steal a cool bought card off of someone else’s
board by duplicating it into your own.
Exactly. Love it. Well, I can see that this is a topic that is one we
could easily spend a full episode on, so maybe we should wrap it there
and maybe we’ll put that on the schedule for the future.
Right on.
Well, if any of our listeners out there have feedback, either responses
to what we’ve talked about here, or maybe you think some of these
questions could be full episodes in their own right, feel free to reach
out to us.
We’re at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at museapp.com on email. We
always love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes.
Well, Mark, it’s been a real pleasure doing this podcast with you for
the last 21 episodes. Uh, I imagine maybe we could do another 21 more. I
hope so.
00:54:46 - Speaker 2: I’m looking forward to it.
00:54:47 - Speaker 1: All right, see you next time. See you.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Digital tools which were supposed to give us a
creative canvas that was more flexible, that was easier to use, actually
constrained us quite a bit because as you said, I almost had to decide
what’s going to be the final format. What is the output going to look
like before I actually know what the output is going to look like, and I
have to make this decision upstream of working on something.
00:00:26 - 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 today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. My guest
and Laura Le Comf. Hey Adam.
We’re here entering the holidays, and I’m curious to know what you
both are planning to do with your holiday break.
It’s a little different this year around. For me, the winter solstice,
which I think in 2020 is on the December 21st, it can be a different
day. But that’s one of my personal favorites to celebrate both because
it’s not connected to any particular culture, but also because living
now as I do in Northern Europe, where it gets very dark and cold, it’s
a nice thing to celebrate when the days are getting longer. And Laura,
what do you do in the holidays?
00:01:19 - Speaker 1: I usually have a very big dinner. I’m half
French, half Algerian, and I guess in Algerian culture, the biggest the
number of people around the table, the better the dinner. But obviously
this year is going to be a little bit different, so it’s going to be
small, probably just with my parents. The one thing that’s not going to
change is that we’re going to have a mix of like French, European
traditional Christmas food like turkey and stuff like that, and Algerian
food as well, like couscous and meshwe and other little Algerian cakes
and things like this. So yeah, just eating a lot with my family.
00:01:58 - Speaker 2: Well, that description made me hungry. And maybe
you could tell us a little about your background and about Nes Labs.
00:02:05 - Speaker 1: Sure. I started my career working at Google first
in London and then in San Francisco, and my last role there, I was
working on the digital health team, where I was looking after the
marketing and partnerships for products that were helping people being
healthier, more productive, around self-care, fitness, all of. These
kinds of verticals, and I left about 3 years ago. I’ve had a few stints
trying to start different startups that didn’t work out for lots of
different reasons, and I’m currently working on NetS Labs, which is a
website with a blog and a newsletter and a private community that is for
knowledge workers to be more Creative and productive while taking care
of their mental health.
And most of the content on the website is based on what I’ve been
learning in the past two years when I basically decided to go back to
university to study neuroscience in 2018, and I’ve been writing about
everything I was learning and trying to apply it to creativity and
productivity on my blog.
00:03:11 - Speaker 2: I feel like many of my favorite, you know,
YouTubers or podcasters or whatever who are talking about, you know,
it’s called productivity generally, but maybe it’s about building
healthy habits and how to be focused and that sort of thing are people
who are in some kind of higher education and knows something about that
environment or working to get a master thesis or a PhD or whatever that
has you more reflective maybe about sort of the meta element of how do I
do this better.
00:03:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I call it mindful productivity
because both at Google while I was working on startups and as a student,
I actually experienced burnout a few times and I think there’s so much
productivity advice out there that is really about getting stuff done.
There’s very little that is about just asking yourself, should I really
be doing this thing? Am I the right person to do it? Is there someone
else who would actually be better to do this thing? And also just kind
of checking in and asking yourself, how am I doing right now? How’s my
mental health. So this is kind of what I write about as well because I
think these are the basic questions you need to ask yourself if you want
to do good work and find it enjoyable.
00:04:20 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s an interesting general
dynamic here where Adam, you mentioned, when people are at a university,
it seems like there might be more fruitful information about how to do
something. I think there’s a general pattern where, OK, you’re a
beginner, then you’re actively learning to become an expert, then
you’re an expert, and then you’re teaching new beginners.
I think steps 2 and 4 are the most fruitful, because in the case of step
2, you’ve just discovered it yourself and it’s kind of fresh in your
mind. It’s not so systematized, you kind of don’t even know how. You
know all the stuff. And when you’re actively teaching beginners, you
have to kind of relive that process of, OK, what are the steps that you
need to take to go from being a beginner to being an expert.
This is something we’ve mentioned on the podcast before in the context
of teaching hospitals, where often the best medicine and the most
advanced techniques come out of these university teaching hospitals, and
you think, wait, aren’t there’s just a bunch of like, our doctors
here, you know, just learning stuff. Well, in fact, because people are
actively learning and actively teaching, that’s where we often see the
best results.
00:05:10 - Speaker 1: It’s super interesting what you’re saying
because it reminds me of the Dune Kruger effect and if I’m thinking
about this curve that you’re describing, for me, if you consider
yourself an expert in any topic, there’s something static fixed about
it.
I’m an expert. I have authority on this topic, whereas the steps 2 and
4 that you describe are the The moments where you realize the extent of
everything you don’t know, either because you’re still in the learning
phase yourself and you’re like, whoa, I actually know very little about
this topic.
And then when you start teaching, you realize thanks to the questions
you get from students that maybe you’re one of the more knowledgeable
people about the topic, but you’re certainly not an expert if there’s
such a thing as an expert. So I find that really interesting.
00:06:01 - Speaker 2: I think I personally find learning from someone
who has sort of just learned something a lot more effective because
they, as Mark says, have what it’s like to have the beginner mindset.
They still remember that, that’s still in their mind, but they have the
knowledge now. They’ve crossed that threshold of enlightenment,
whatever you want to call that, and so they can maybe help you come
there better than a like a seasoned expert who’s been doing it so long
they don’t even think about it. They take it for granted.
00:06:27 - Speaker 1: That’s definitely an issue with some university
professors who have been teaching a topic for so long that they seem
kind of disconnected from the reality of learning the topic as a
beginner, and I’ve had that several times. I think probably both of
you, everyone has had that kind of brilliant, super smart teacher, very
knowledgeable, who are pretty bad at actual teaching.
00:06:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, being an expert and being able to teach are
two completely different things. You sort of need both of them to convey
a skill or a knowledge area well.
Yeah, I think for myself, the kind of, I don’t know what you want to
call productivity, self awareness, or tuning my mental machine and
processes, I actually drew a lot of that from being in the startup world
and in particular when I had management duties, when I had teams and
particularly bigger teams depending on me because then my whole job and
any The manager’s whole job is to make the team effective and so you
are thinking about both the practical things of, OK, what’s the to do
list, how do we line this up, how do we match up time and budget, those
kinds of things, but there’s also exactly what you just mentioned,
which is the mental health, how are people doing? Where are their
emotions, what are they excited about, what are they dreading? You know,
what are their aspirations, and a good manager is one who also covers
that side of things and tries to make the team not just productive but
also happy and healthy, at least within the structure of, you know, what
makes sense within an organization. And once I’d done that for others
or for sort of a team as an aggregate entity, I found myself a lot more
aware of my own needs, not only again those practical things of time and
to do this, but really that, you know, the emotional. Side and the what
motivates me and why do I feel ground down, why do I feel burned out on
this particular thing wait I thought this project was something I was
supposed to be excited about. Why do I not feel motivated and trying to
maybe prior to going through the managerial kind of path, I would be
more likely to just kind of ignore it and push on through. And now I
feel like, no, no, I want to dig in and understand my own psyche a
little bit so that I, you know, in the end can be more productive, but
also just be happier and have a nicer life.
00:08:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it boils down a lot to getting rid of some
of the shame that we have sometimes when it comes to managing projects
and being productive and work in general.
You mentioned working on something and not feeling motivated anymore,
and I think a lot of the shame we have internalized because of the way
we’ve been educated in traditional school is to Feel bad as a person,
think that it’s you doing something wrong, if your motivation is gone,
if you’re not feeling excited about a project anymore, when really
there’s nothing bad or negative about it. It’s just a piece of
information about how you’re feeling right now that can be very helpful
to almost debug the situation. And try and figure out, should you keep
on working on this, or maybe should you change the way you’re working
on this? Should you get some help from someone else? Should you upskill
because this thing is too hard for you and just posing and asking
yourself these questions instead of burying the problem because you feel
like acknowledging the fact that you’re struggling means that you’re
just not competent.
00:09:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you could even dig a little deeper on that
and ask why we are so fetishizing about productivity and you know, for
myself, I like to make things and I like to get stuff done and I do feel
good about that, but you can take it to an extreme where I think we want
to make everyday productive even if that’s a holiday or a weekend or
something like that. We have some concept of how to spend even time off
productively and I think another.
An important journey for myself in recent years has been learning to
really do nothing or have unproductive days and think those can be
worthwhile too, that productivity is not the only benchmark for
worthwhile use of time.
00:10:30 - Speaker 1: Totally, I was talking about it with a friend
yesterday, and he was telling me, I know I’m very close to burning out
because lately, when I read a book and I’m not taking notes, I feel
like I’m not doing it right. And I told him, yeah, I agree. This is
bad. This is really bad. You need to take a break.
00:10:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And the podcast and he’s working on a
way to make more effective in terms of retaining and that sort of thing.
And I was raising this question of, well, sometimes I don’t really care
about the retaining the knowledge. I just enjoy the process of reading
it, even if it’s a nonfiction book, where in theory, its purpose is to
communicate information to me. But sometimes I just want to enjoy it and
I don’t necessarily want to, you know, type everything I learned to do
an on key flashcard. And that leads you into the whole thing about,
well, to what degree do we consume information for fun and sort of
enjoyment versus because we want to achieve something, and I think those
things are often very tangled up for especially for knowledge worker,
creative professional type people where we enjoy reading and learning
and consuming information. And sometimes that has a very specific
purpose, something in our work or our personal life, and other times
it’s just for enjoyment.
00:11:47 - Speaker 1: And especially now that the work and life of
knowledge workers has become more and more public, whether on Twitter or
other websites, there can be sometimes a bit of an unhealthy competition
in terms of how many books have you read this year, how many notes do
you have in your note taking system, how many blog posts have you
published this year, which I think it’s not necessarily good either for
people’s mental health, but even in terms of creativity, as you
mentioned, having these days where you do nothing, you just recharge
your relax are super important as well.
And unfortunately, lots of people struggle with this because they can’t
stay idle. They feel like I need to do something with my time. I’m not
producing, I’m not creating, therefore, I’m wasting my time, which is
very dangerous as the mindset.
00:12:38 - Speaker 2: The word idle reminds me of a book I read some
years back, almost a manifesto called How to Be Idle.
Basically, it’s a whole long book that is both first of all, arguing
the case for why this is a worthwhile way to spend time and then has a
detailed list of ways to do nothing while seeming to do something, so
they have, I don’t know, fishing and taking a walk and smoking, and
they talk about many people, you know, being sick as in getting a cold,
you know, common cold or being hungover as oh no, now my day is wasted
or my couple of days wasted because I just have to stay home in bed and
watch TV.
Or whatever, and the author basically describes a mental mind shift of
actually be glad for this day where you’re under your normal capacity
because you can spend it in a different way.
Maybe you can spend it with people that you care about, or you can spend
it doing something that’s different from your normal thing and that can
be worthwhile.
That was in many ways a tough book for me to read because I think I do
come from that, yeah, productivity is everything, mindset somehow, but I
also think it was quite good for me for that reason.
00:13:45 - Speaker 1: It’s funny that you’re mentioning smoking
because I quit smoking cigarettes. And at first, the first few days, I
was incredibly tired, incredibly tired, and I didn’t know where that
came from. And I realized afterwards that all of my breaks during the
day were smoke breaks.
00:14:04 - Speaker 2: Smoke breaks work well.
00:14:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. I was just going out, having a
little cigarette and doing nothing, just like staring in front of me
doing nothing, not thinking, and then coming back to my laptop and doing
work. And when I cut these out, I was basically working nonstop. So I
had to create the habit of just getting up, stretching, doing something
else, which to this day still doesn’t feel as natural. I still feel
like I’m forcing it, but I know that I need it because if not, at the
end of the day, I’m completely dead.
00:14:35 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is an article you wrote on the
Nest Labs website that I was quite drawn to, called Thinking in Maps.
I’ll link that in the show notes, of course, but maybe you can tell the
listeners what that’s about.
00:14:48 - Speaker 1: I’m so glad you picked this article because it’s
probably my favorite, or at least one of my favorites that I wrote this
year.
And the reason why I wrote it is because every time I was telling people
about connecting ideas, using symbols, crafting maps that are looking at
different ideas, most people were replying to me and telling me, oh
yeah, I know, mind maps. And every time I had to explain that no mind
maps were just a tiny subset. Of the way we can think in maps, and I
decided to do a little bit more research. It started as an article where
I just wanted to review all of the different ways you could think in
maps, but by doing research, I realized that Human beings have started
thinking in maths way earlier than what I realized, thousands of years
ago, and I thought that was fascinating. So the article is basically a
review of the history of thinking in maps from the Lasco caves, that’s
like 14,000 before Christ, something like this years ago, that’s like a
long time ago, up until today. That’s what the article is about.
00:15:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I always love the historical example because
those of us who work in digital tools of some kind, which include all of
us at various points in our career here, or the three of us at various
points in our career, tend to vary, I think box it into exactly how the
devices or the tools that we have today work. So going back and looking
at these older very different cultural contexts, very different, even
writing implements and things like that. But I think the fundamentals of
the human mind, because of the pace of evolution and biology, that’s
gonna be the same. So you change all the other variables, but the mind
is the same, and then that can be very enlightening.
00:16:35 - Speaker 1: This is what’s fascinating about looking at the
historical examples as well, is that even thousands of years after these
maps were created, even if you don’t speak the language that they were
speaking at the time, even if you don’t understand every single symbol
that they’re using, you still instinctively. roughly what’s going on,
and I find that absolutely fascinating compared to text in front of you
in a different language and you don’t read it or speak it, you won’t
understand what it is about, but a map with symbols, it kind of just
defies culture, defies time. Everyone will still roughly understand
what’s going on.
00:17:17 - Speaker 2: And you had some nice examples in there that I was
familiar with like Leonardo da Vinci, obviously is pretty famous for the
visual thinking stuff he does in his notebooks, more recent, someone
like Walt Disney or this fellow Cassor Doris, and I found that quite
right, Roman fellow hadn’t seen that one before. Is there one on this
list that you think is a good example or you personally found
compelling?
00:17:38 - Speaker 1: The most fascinating one for me is the one that is
one of the oldest ones that we’ve seen that’s from the Bible where
someone It is Cassidorris, I think, actually, who took the stories from
the Bible and decided to visually draw the different storylines and
create this map of what’s going on in the Bible by connecting the
different stories. And again, I don’t need to speak the language. I
don’t need to speak Latin or anything. I look at it and I understand
that each bubble is for a con. or a story and that they’re connected
together with lines.
And this concept of having ideas in bubbles and connecting them together
with lines, the fact that I think it was created in like 600 or
something, this, this one, that’s such a long time ago, someone drew
this, and I can look at it in 2020 and feel like, yeah, I know what’s
going on here. It is absolutely fascinating.
00:18:36 - Speaker 2: Mark, what’s your take on thinking and maps?
00:18:39 - Speaker 3: I think it’s very interesting and very important,
and I also appreciate the historical angle. I’ve often argued with
respect to HCI type topics that there’s a lot of embedded knowledge in
very old practices.
These maps that we’re looking at here, these are maps that people
created when it was extraordinarily expensive to create a map and or
that were preserved over thousands of years where it’s extremely hard
to do that, and or where the technique was repeated again and again.
So there’s Something worthwhile are working here, even if we don’t
initially understand, there’s definitely something important to know.
And I also think it’s useful because we often get some blinders working
in digital tools because it’s actually a very limited medium, you know,
the screen is very small, it’s low resolution, and so on. And so you
can often learn or get ideas for new techniques that become applicable
as computers get more advanced if you go back and study these old
examples. So definitely worthwhile.
00:19:27 - Speaker 2: One thing that comes to mind for me is I think the
word map for I think most English speakers leads you to thinking about,
I guess what we call a geographical or a cartographical map, that is to
say what you see when you type maps. Google.com into a browser, but one,
I think it’s interesting. this is actually we think of it as being a
very kind of literal map, I guess, but it’s actually quite abstract.
First of all, you know, it’s sort of a projection, right? Taking the
surface of the globe and the terrain and all that kind of stuff and
flattening it down onto this like two dimensional thing. But secondly,
putting aside, I don’t know, satellite photos or going up in a plane,
we don’t see the world this way, but it seems to be quite natural for
many or even most people to look at this kind of bird’s eye overhead
map. It’s actually a pretty abstraction of how things are laid out and
then be able to use that to navigate a complex place which is really.
Quite interesting to me.
00:20:21 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s funny if you look at old maps, they
tend to basically just be of coastlines and rivers, cause that was
essentially the only way you could get around was on water. It was
extraordinarily difficult to travel any distance over land, so you
basically had to use the water. So the maps are just basically all these
exploded coastlines and rivers, and they don’t look anything like our
normal maps, but you have very high detail on all the ports and harbors,
which is what you actually care about.
00:20:42 - Speaker 1: And if you go back in time, even further, the
oldest maps were not even trying to capture anything real when it comes
to geography.
They were being used as a message to position a particular culture in
the world.
So if you look at one of the oldest maps ever found that it’s in good
condition that was created by the Babylonians. It’s a circle that looks
like a sun, and Babylon is here in the middle. And then everything else
is in the shadows. What’s really interesting here is that we know from
historical evidence that the Babylonians were very, very aware of the.
Existence of other cultures outside of their own. So it was a deliberate
choice to not include them and to position Babylon as the center of the
world. And to your point, Adam, of how all maps are an abstraction. I
think what’s dangerous is when we forget that. And nowadays because
they feel like most geographical maps feel like they’re closer to
reality. They feel more real, they feel more true when really they
aren’t more true or more real than the map that the Babylonians create.
at the time just gives us that impression because, as you were saying,
maybe the coastlines are a little bit more detailed, maybe whatever,
maybe it just looks more real, but it isn’t. All maps are just a
collection of symbols and all maps are taking a subjective position as
to what the world looks like.
00:22:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the map is not the territory issue,
and I think it’s a great point because it’s one that we’re especially
susceptible to these days. We do so much work in symbols and
abstractions, and we write term papers and emails and we feel like
we’re masters of this domain of information and it’s very easy to
forget that that’s not in fact reality.
00:22:41 - Speaker 2: Another historical example that I like a lot that
also connects to a pseudo geographical map is Alexander von Humboldt,
who’s this great, to my mind, great thinker, sort of really changed the
scientific world with his, he essentially invented the concept of nature
or ecology as we would think about it today.
There’s a great book called The Invention of Nature that documents his
life, but he has this famous again map, sort of an elevation profile.
It’s called the Jimborazzo map.
And it’s essentially like a side view cut out of a mountain that shows
the different creatures, the different flora and fauna that live at
different elevations. And again, this is one of these things where
nowadays kind of an elevation map that shows you this kind of
information seems, if not obvious, then not too surprising to the kind
of ways we’re used to visualizing information, but it was pretty
breakthrough at the time. And it was part of what allowed him to first,
I think have the insight and then convey that to others, which was, he
was comparing the flora and fauna at different elevations on some
mountains in South America to some in Europe in the Alps and saw that
even though the creatures are different, there’s essentially what we
would today call ecological niches, which is not an idea that People
just assumed, yeah, you go to a different place, there’s different
animals and different creatures, who knows why, that’s just the way the
world was made versus seeing this concept of again an ecosystem and
ecology and there’s niches within that and different creatures and
different plants that fill different needs within an ecosystem and it
was largely this now pretty famous sort of side view of a mountain that
again helped convey that idea to the world.
00:24:19 - Speaker 1: It’s so interesting. There are two parts to the
work he did. The first one is connecting ideas that were seemingly
unconnected. So by drawing these different maps, he noticed these
different ecosystems. And then the second part you mentioned, which is
also fascinating and has been The use case for maps for a very, very
long is just as a communication device because it’s visual, especially
when a map is really well made and using the right symbols, it can help
people understand a concept much quicker than if you were to write a
really long book, for example.
00:24:55 - Speaker 2: So that kind of geographical or semi geographical
maps. Can you give us some examples of other types of maps?
00:25:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so we can also have maps that are focused on
connecting abstract ideas rather than real world landmarks. So mind
maps, as I mentioned at the beginning, is the one that I think most
people are familiar with because the person Tony Buzan who invented them
is also an incredible marketer and businessman. And so he did a really
great job at promoting his mind maps, but you also have concept maps,
radial maps, it’s all sorts of different maps.
The one thing that I think all of these more abstract maps, which goal
is to connect ideas have in common is again, this idea of using lines or
arrows. To connect different nodes, and the main difference between
these different maps is what kind of arrows and what kind of nodes. So
are the arrows bidirectional or not? Are the nodes overlapping? Can you
include several nodes like Russian dolls in the same one, or are you
just mapping them out on the canvas without any of them overlapping? And
depending on the choices you’re making here, you’ll get different
types of mental maps.
00:26:19 - Speaker 3: Yeah, one really interesting example from your
article was the Disney map about how he imagined the business working
and it’s amazing.
See, he literally mapped this out, you know, back before it was ever
built, and it’s basically exactly right, like how it all end up feeding
back on each other, you know, how the merchandise supports the film,
supports the music, supports the theme parks and so on.
This one’s also kind of near and dear to my heart because it’s this
topic of, you call it an institution, it’s a kind of a complex web of
people and properties that all reinforce each other, like another
example this would be a university, we aspire for Ink & Switch and
it’s surrounding entities to be this, so it’s an interesting example.
00:26:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s the concept of the flywheel, right? If
you manage to have a part of that map that works well, it’s going to
feed into the other nodes and if you do your job well. It should just be
this virtual cycle where it just keeps on working, and I feel really bad
for the creator of this map because it’s not Walt Disney, it’s one of
his executives, but no one knows the name of this person and everyone
thinks that Walt Disney made the map. So just a thought for the
anonymous maker of the Disney map.
00:27:31 - Speaker 2: Thinking of process diagrams or things flowing
from one step to the next in the medical field, you have the Krebs
cycle, sort of like the way that basically these acids and proteins flow
through the body. And I remember my colleague Orion kind of using this
as a metaphor when he was doing distributed systems engineering where
you have messages being passed around the system and interpreted by
different components in the system, and at some point you get really
confused trying to hold out of that in your head and you naturally lean
to drawing kind of a process diagram, which reminds me a bit of this
Disney executive’s map.
00:28:08 - Speaker 1: This is such an important use case, the fact that
there are processes that are way too complex to hold in your mind and to
really understand in their entirety and maps can really help with that.
Just having a canvas where you can lay them out, that allows you to see.
how the system works, but also to identify any gaps, any places where
really there should be an arrow here, but there’s not, or there are too
many arrows going in the right direction and none of them going in the
other one. So that’s definitely a use case that’s very helpful.
00:28:46 - Speaker 2: How do you think about the interaction between
maps or maybe visual thinking more broadly and symbolic representation.
So obviously there’s prose, text, you know, I’ll sit down and journal
out paragraphs of text, but also most of these diagrams have text labels
in them. They do have symbolic representations, even though there’s
these maps or sort of visual thinking layouts. Do they go hand in hand?
Are they for people who have maybe different kinds of minds, maybe some
people do better with symbolic representation, some do better with more
visual?
00:29:20 - Speaker 1: I think you absolutely need symbols for maps, and
it really depends on who your audience is, but the only mistake really
you can make with symbols is using symbols that you’re the only person
to understand. And I see some people doing this, just assuming that the
symbols that they’re using, everyone understands.
One that’s really fun, I told you I did a workshop about visual
thinking. Sketch noting and an example that came up in the conversation
was the floppy disk, how some people were still using this as a symbol
for saving something, and how if you show this to a kid who’s like 15
or 14 years old today, they’ll look at it and they may know because
they’ve seen it on computers, that it means saving, but they have
completely lost the connection with the physical object that was.
The basis for this symbol.
So symbols can be extremely helpful, and I think they’re even necessary
for maps to make them easier to read and to make them more useful.
However, and it’s the case with any powerful tool, it’s really good to
always ask yourself, Should I use this one? Is it the right one? Do I
really need it? Just being a bit mindful of how we use symbols is quite
important when creating maps.
00:30:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, symbols are very information dense and
general purpose, so they think they’re good for labeling the entities
and also for labeling the properties of the connections, and the map
aspect is, what is the relationship among the entities. So I think
they’re very complimentary in that way.
00:30:50 - Speaker 2: Right, so whether you’re talking about a
geographical map and you label, here’s the name of this mountain or
here’s the name of this lake, you’re naming it or you’re saying what
it is, but you’re not showing its relationship similarly with a lot of
these diagrams.
00:31:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, you wouldn’t write the mountain is 100
kilometers north and 20 east of the town. You would just put it there on
the map.
00:31:09 - Speaker 2: Well, that question in particular, I think is of
interest to the Muse team when we’re designing our product because I
think most digital tools, they’re very visual and spatial or they’re
text oriented, right, you know, text editors or writing tools or
processors, whatever, you can kind of put some images in, but it’s very
hard to do, you know, it’s just basically flows top to bottom. You
usually try to pick one or the other, and definitely it was a major
evolution of our product and we added essentially these little text
cards, which is sort of a simple thing. But being able to put in a few
sentences of text and then draw an arrow from that to something else,
which could be something visual or some more text.
And so I think that the mix of them together, different people will use
them for different kinds of scenarios and some people maybe tend more
towards one and more towards the other, but in the end, I do think
mixing them, which I think is a weak point of a lot of technology, but
as a potential strength of just pen and paper, is definitely something
we can get better out on the digital side, I think.
00:32:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say about pen
and paper. It’s really interesting that we have been using this tool
for so long and for the longest time, if you compare the amount of time
we’ve been using digital tools compared to pen and paper, we’ve been
using pen and paper for much longer.
But for a very long time, digital tools which were supposed to make our
life easier, to give us a creative comeback. That was more flexible,
that was easier to use, actually constrained us quite a bit because as
you said, I almost had to decide before creating something, what’s
going to be the final format? What’s going, what is the output going to
look like before I actually know what the output is going to look like?
And I have to make this decision upstream of working on something, which
is quite unnatural. And not really helpful when it comes to creativity.
So I think any solution that gives us back this freedom of deciding as
we go in the creative process, what kind of format we want to use? Do I
want to use symbols? Do I want to use images? Do I want to use text
here? Do I want to doodle? Do I want to do all of these different
things, is something that is much, much needed.
00:33:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is super important, and we’ve
mentioned on the podcast often that the human thought is inherently
multimedia.
That’s the way people want to and do think, and it’s important for
tools to support that. And again, it’s important to understand the
historical context of why tools historically might not have.
So for example, with books, until quite recently, it was extraordinarily
expensive to add pictures to your books. You had to get an engraver to
carve a plate, each one was individually numbered. You know, it’s much
harder to press these out and so. And then eventually it got to the
point where you could add images to books pretty easily, but now we’re
just crossing the same threshold with computers where until relatively
recently it was hard to add images and especially video all in the same
document. We’re just now being able to do more of that. And so we
should be mindful that it’s not an inherent property of reality that
you have a text document and an image document like many of our existing
computing tools in force. It’s a matter of that’s a sort of historical
accident and limitation that we’re now moving beyond, hopefully.
00:34:07 - Speaker 1: And hopefully that’s going to get us closer to
being able to really map our thoughts, the way they do happen.
I really like this expression you just used how the mind is multimedia
because it’s true when you think about something, you kind of follow
these different branches of thought, and sometimes you recall an image,
sometimes you recall someone’s voice when they told you something
during the conversation.
Sometimes you recall a Smell and you connect all of these experiences
and thoughts and memories in a nonlinear way.
And I really hope, and I hope, I know it’s going to happen, but I’m
excited about a future where I can capture all of the diversity of,
let’s call them formats of memories and thoughts that I have in my mind
and capture them onto my digital device so I can work with them. Right
on.
00:35:01 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good transition to talking about
the sort of the technology and tools that do exist that we do think are
interesting on that front.
One that comes to mind for me, I think is the web has always been good
and especially in the last, I don’t know, 5 to 10 years on this kind of
multimedia being able to mix together different formats.
Now, obviously the web is, it’s sort of a publishing format. It’s not
a place for raw sketchy thoughts, but when you talk about these, for
example, von Humboldt and communicating about something through his
diagrams in his published works, I think the web has a lot of potential
and we’re seeing some Movement there, particularly when you combine it
with the data side of things.
So I think a great one in that world in the JavaScript world is this D3
library that has all these really interesting, unique and often quite
attractive kind of data visualizations that you can do and it’s a nice
way to explore expressing some concept.
And there’s other kinds of these often more interactive like parametric
press.
Now all of these require a lot of knowledge, programming specific
technical knowledge, and again, it’s more of a communicate to others at
scale rather than kind of a more personal level thing, but that’s one
area where I think digital technology is not only Starting to catch up
to what we could do with good old pen and paper that actually offers new
affordances and new ways to visualize things and communicate things that
we actually even go beyond what you can do with analog tools. I’d be
curious to hear if either you have particular tools or technologies that
you think are promising in this area.
00:36:36 - Speaker 1: It’s not an individual tool for thinking in maps.
It’s more of a collective one, but I recently, a few months ago
discovered this website called Connected Papers, which you probably
heard about because it’s absolutely amazing. It basically shows you by
just entering the DOI of a specific research paper, it shows you a
visual map of all of the papers that or. Connected to this original one
that you entered, and the strength of the connection is correlated with
how strongly the two research papers are connected.
So instead of every time you’re reading a paper, going through the
references one by one, checking the paper, reading the abstract, being
like, OK, that’s not what I’m looking for, going back and Doing this
very tedious work in one click you can have this constellation of papers
related to this topic that you’re researching. You can navigate them,
you can save them, you can click on each node to see the constellation
related to that specific one. It’s fantastic, and the reason why I’m
so excited about it is that I think it will also help make it more
accessible for non-academically trained researchers to just do research
for Just the sake of their own curiosity.
00:37:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a good one cause that domain is
inherently very networked. The process of science is all about building
up this increasingly rich mesh of citations and papers, basically. It
also brings to the forefront the issue of projection. This meshes like a
zillion dimensions, you can’t actually look at it and forget to pick
some subset of it to show and then project it down to 2D and in fact
your projection is probably gonna change based on which paper you’re
looking at. So the highlights again, the map is not the territory
difference.
00:38:24 - Speaker 2: Mark, do you have a favorite technology or product
for map-based thinking?
00:38:29 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I’m always interested in looking at the
gravity wells that form, and this is the areas that everyone seems to
fall into and converge over time. So one of the more obvious ones is the
idea of pinch to zoom on maps. This is so common actually that people
are now getting accustomed to it at very early ages. So if you put into
YouTube like babies zooming into magazines, you can see these little
kids like trying to pinch into physical paper magazines, and of course
it doesn’t work, but that’s what they’re used to, it’s a very
natural emotion. And we’re seeing that more and more, of course, and
uses one example of that.
Another more tools for thought oriented example would be the emergence
of cards on a canvas as a standard document type. And everyone’s coming
at this from a slightly different angle. So Figma’s coming at it, for
example, from the angle of product design. There’s some of the notepad
type iOS apps that are coming at it more from the example of you start
with a page, you add in and now you can add images. And so on. But
everyone started, I think, kind of converging around this idea of you
can have a canvas and you can put different types of media as well as
perhaps handwriting on it and move things around in a free form way. And
I think in the same way that text files and folders or directories have
become a sort of standard metaphor for computing in the desktop age, I
expect that this becomes a sort of standard content type that more and
more apps support in a more consistent way.
One other example that I’ll mention is I always bring up this theme of
video games are at the forefront, eventually a lot of consumer and
enterprise computing draws from them. And again, the maps on video games
are like super advanced. You have imperfect information, so you tend to
discover the map as the game or whatever. Go on and also you have a sort
of collaborative information sharing where your teammates are also
collecting information and conveying it to you, so you’re trying to
build up this collective picture of where your team is and where the
others are. And you have all these indicators of where other people
might be like off to the edges of your screen, and you have this notion
of quasi mode or HUD where you can Instead of either you’re looking at
the map or you’re looking at the world, you can have them superimposed
on each other, so you might have a translucent map, or to be able to
hold down a key to bring up the map very quickly and then let it go.
These are all advanced ideas that I suspect we’ll eventually see appear
in the world of, for example, these cards on a canvas tools.
00:40:29 - Speaker 2: Earlier mention of pinch to zoom.
Mark also reminded me of the iPhone one and what made that such a
revelation.
I was actually a bit of a skeptic about it, but I think the thing that
really made it work was Google Maps and the pinching.
So the multi-touch screen obviously had all this potential and I think
in retrospect, folks talk about basically being an internet connected
multi-touch screen, but I really think without Google Maps it would not
have had the same impact.
And so there you took a type of map, a type of semi-abstract
representation of the world that most people were familiar with, but you
put it kind of on this ready device and with this gesture that was so
natural somehow, and the two put together to just be this really
incredible, incredible device.
00:41:16 - Speaker 3: One other example I’ll mention that I was
reminded of by the network of papers example is this class of maps that
I would call like relaxation based clustering, and by that I mean you
have many, many nodes and you’re in a multidimensional space and you
need to figure out how to basically group them together. So I’ve seen
this done with Twitter accounts where people pick some valence, it might
be political ideology or geographic location or whatever, and then you
can Cluster the entities so that they tend to be near people who are
similar to them. Of course it’s imperfect cause you’re projecting down
to 2D, but you can get a really quick sense of, OK, who are the
clusters, who’s in them, which clusters are close, which clusters are
far apart. I’ve actually seen this applied to academic papers where you
can look at all the clusters of like the economists on Twitter or
something, and you see that there’s the cluster for the macro people
and a cluster for the micro people, and a cluster for the Austrians or
whatever, you know, you see these cool patterns emerge.
00:42:06 - Speaker 1: It’s so interesting. I’ve seen this done where I
was included in one of these maps, and they didn’t even seed it with
specific portance.
It was just seeded with a starter account. So you had this account in
the middle, and then it would branch out and have all of their followers
and you could see these different groups and For me, it was really
interesting because there was kind of a difference between where I
thought I was in the Twitter sphere and where I actually was. And I
realized that I still had a lot of my past startup life that was showing
in terms of people that were following me and that I was following
back.
And way fewer of the academics or the researchers that I feel like I’m
engaging way more with today, but in terms of social graph, that shift
actually takes way longer than you think. So that was really interesting
for me to see those different bubbles, and I think lots of people who
saw the map were also kind of surprised to see where they were on that
map versus where they thought they were standing.
00:43:14 - Speaker 3: Interesting, yeah.
00:43:15 - Speaker 2: Uh maps to my anecdotal experience of probably a
lot more of my Twitterosphere is an artifact or reflects the history of
Hiroku, Silicon Valley, Y combinator, a phase of my life that’s 10
years in the past now. You know, I built up these really strong social
connections over time and maybe newer things are more nascent,
obviously. And so, yeah, when you actually look at the reality there, it
can be surprising. I’d love to hear about both of your personal
techniques, how maps of any kind appear in your thinking process, and
Laura, maybe you can start us off.
00:43:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I use maps a lot. I have paper maps that I
use whenever there’s a problem I want to try and solve.
It’s just a really good way to close my laptop and get my head down and
just try and think about a specific problem space and I take my, you’re
not going to see it because it’s a podcast, but I take all of my
colored pens. With me and I just draw and try and connect ideas
together.
Sometimes when I’m on my laptop and I want it to be a bit more
organized or something I can use in an easier way later, I use a tool
called Staple where I also map ideas this way. I really like using it.
And another kind of map I’m trying to use more, which I still haven’t
found that useful in terms of connecting ideas together, is my knowledge
graph in Rome. I feel like at this point it’s more I can be to me. I
like. Looking at it and playing with it, but I still haven’t managed to
really produce or create anything new by just looking at this graph or
playing with it. More creative for me is definitely pen and paper and
just playing with cable.
00:45:01 - Speaker 2: Apel actually was one of our influences from you,
so this is by the same folks that do Scrivener, which is a writing tool,
but I guess I don’t know, there’s lots of maybe more general audience
writing tools like Ulysses or Kraft is what I’m using these days that I
really like.
But Scrivener is really for not only authors, but I’d say fiction book
authors. They have lots and lots of tools that are about organizing
chapters and all that kind of thing and so.
I assume you’re not necessarily writing fiction stories, but I know
their ideation tool, which is another one of Mark’s kind of cards on a
canvas kind of style of things, but it is very much about, yeah,
understand, get your characters together, figure out your plot lines, do
that all in a kind of a loose way that resembles a little bit like
moving post-its around that has a lot of the benefits of digital. It’s
an old school tool, but a really good one. Mark, how to maps here or not
in your thinking.
00:45:53 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I have this philosophy of idea generation
that most of your good ideas come from your sleeping mind.
It’s not when you’re actively trying to have a good idea, it’s that
you have this background process that’s running.
And you need to feed the background process. And the way that you do
that is you sort of work over intellectual materials.
So one thing you can do is read, one thing you can do is annotate, but
another important thing is to sort of arrange and organize. So often
what I’ll do when I’m working on a new topic is I’ll bring a bunch of
stuff into Muse, for example, I’ll bring in some links, some images,
some PDFs, maybe some handwritten notes, and that alone is good.
But you can also do the exercise of how do these things relate, what are
the connections, what are the different ways to organize? And you’re
basically just moving stuff around the screen and putting things next to
each other.
And at the end, you basically throw that thing away.
It’s not necessarily to produce a knowledge map per se. It’s more that
when I’ve done that process, OK, that’s another way that I’m building
familiarity and connections, and then back in my sleeping minds tonight,
that’ll be more for my brain to use to come up with new ideas.
00:46:49 - Speaker 1: That’s very similar to the concepts of focused
mode and diffused mode of thinking by Barbara Oakley. I don’t know if
you’re familiar with her work, but that’s exactly what she’s
explaining that there’s the focus mode where we’re trying very
actively in a very specific space to solve.
A problem and then this diffuse mode, which is our brain working in the
background, whenever you have what we call a shower thought, that’s the
diffuse mode of thinking that’s happening where you don’t really feel
like you’re trying to solve the problem, but there’s this eureka
moment, you find a solution without seemingly even trying.
And I absolutely agree with you that it’s so important to balance the
two.
That’s also why sometimes when you’re trying to solve a problem and
you can’t find a solution, it’s good to just step away and go and do
something else or do something that activates the more diffuse mode of
thinking like doodling, organizing, playing visually with different
topics and ideas.
Without having the explicit goal of finding a solution, which sounds
like what you’re doing when you activate your sleeping brain, as you
say, so I really like this.
00:47:58 - Speaker 2: For me, taking a walk is a big one. I want just
enough activity and stimulation to keep me occupied, but not so much
that the brain’s full capacity is taken.
I will say that I think that kind of, yeah, sleep on it or take a walk
or, you know, take a shower kind of thing. I think it’s not just, well,
OK, can I solve all my problems by sort of not working on it.
I think that is a second half to the focus time is when you really load
that stuff into your head and you give the sleeping mind, as Mark would
say, something to work with, but then you balance that with the
non-focused time and that’s potentially the one to punch that can work
really well.
00:48:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you need both. If you’re focusing for very
long and not letting your brain do the job in the background, you’re
not going to find a solution, but if you’re giving your brain the space
to think about nothing, you don’t have any starting material, you’re
not going to get anywhere either. So the focus time is to just try and
do your best. To understand the problem as well as possible, and then
the diffused time is to let your brain assimilate, connect all of this
information and come up with a solution that may not be as obvious as
what you would come up with consciously if you’re trying to think in
too much of a linear way.
00:49:19 - Speaker 2: Two types of maps that make their appearance in my
work. One is timeline, which is maybe similar to a geographic map in
that it is at least on one dimension trying to make an abstraction for
something in the physical world, in this case, the passage of time.
But I find it surprisingly helpful for, there’s obviously like
organizing a project or you’re launching a product and you want to put
together a little road map of the pieces that lead up to that, you’re
taking a trip and you want to make sure everything’s covered.
But I find it’s a really focusing thing for when I start to lay out
what I’m actually gonna do and what the sequencing needs to be, and
what comes before what, and in some cases there are specific calendar
marks that I want to hit. I actually find that really helps me get
clarity about the meaning or the purpose of the project as a whole and
what you realize, for example, you can’t fit everything in, so what
needs to stay and what needs to go, or what things can be done kind of
more in parallel and what things need to be done sequentially. And so
it’s a, again, it’s a very simple kind of abstraction against
something real, but for some reason it just really brings things into
focus for me.
00:50:25 - Speaker 1: It goes back to what we were talking about a
little bit earlier in the conversation, how some processes are too
complex to just hold into your mind and in your case, having all of
that, either on paper or in news on a tablet or wherever you put it is a
way to see those places where you’re trying to cram too much in the
places where you have a little bit more space that you didn’t see. So
it’s a really good way to augment the way you’re visualizing your work
and you think about it in general.
00:50:55 - Speaker 2: The other one I’ll name is uh Affinity Maps, the
idea where I think normally you do this post-it notes or index cards or
something, but you basically kind of You want to make sense of a space.
You can do this in a group, can sometimes be interesting, but you can
also do this as an individual, just kind of write down every thought you
have on a space or a problem or a project, or what have you, and in no
particular order, and then once it’s all down on say on posted notes,
you kind of stick them and just put them near each other. Maybe this
comes back to the same. We use spatial nearness, you might say in the
case of the paper clustering you described, or the geographic map of the
mountains near the lake, or some of these D3 visualizations, nearness or
the Twitter graph, nearness describes a relationship. And so there’s a
similar. with the affinity map here is just a set of ideas that seem to
belong together somehow from those patterns emerge and we can kind of
zoom out a level maybe in turn what seems like a big jumble of things
and actually there’s three big themes here that lets us clarify our
thinking as a group or as an individual.
00:52:00 - Speaker 1: This sounds great.
00:52:01 - Speaker 3: I wanna try it.
Yeah, Adam, it’s interesting that you mentioned these cause these were
two of my go to general purpose tools for engineering management.
The first being make the work cues visible because all production work
is essentially a series of cues. That’s the universal abstraction, and
it’s very important to make work visible if you’re gonna manage it.
And the other is the sort of affinity maps where a very general purpose
exercise you can do is identify all the things, have people put like
pluses and things that are important, and then group them together. You
can basically apply that for anything, you know, what should we build
retrospecting our past work, how are we feeling? It’s very universal,
so good ideas there.
00:52:32 - Speaker 2: Well, before we go, and Laura, I’d be curious to
know if there’s anything that you left out of that article or has since
you’ve written, you feel like you would add on to it?
00:52:41 - Speaker 1: There’s something I touched upon a little bit
towards the end, but I think I want to explore more in the future. All
of the different maps that I talk about at the end of the article are
tools for individual thinking or once you’re done crafting them,
they’re communication tools to communicate whatever ideas you had or
connected together with other people. I think maps can also be amazing
tools for fostering collective intelligence, and that’s definitely
something I want to explore more in the future.
00:53:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s very interesting. It’s those
multiplayer maps as predicted.
00:53:15 - Speaker 2: Augmenting collective intelligence right on brand
for us. Well, if any of our listeners out there would like to tell us
about how you use maps in your thinking or your communication, or you
got other feedback or questions for us, please feel free to reach out at
@museapphq on Twitter or through email. Hello at museapp.com. We always
really love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. And
Laura, thanks for this great article, all the writing you’re doing over
at NES, and I hope you have lovely holidays and the end of your year.
Thanks for having me. All right, see you both later.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What are those favorite books or those favorite
articles or those favorite passages that resonated with you so much and
and took you down a path of thinking that maybe ended up being really
important in your work, in your life.
00:00:22 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use this software
for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. But this
podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and
the small team behind it. My name is Mark and I’m here today with my
colleague Adam. How’s it going, Adam?
00:00:39 - Speaker 1: It’s going pretty good, Mark. Thanks.
00:00:41 - Speaker 2: And today’s topic is having better ideas. And
this is a pretty broad topic. So I’d like to start with what is that?
What what what does that mean to you?
00:00:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the word idea somehow I think is
connected with um Maybe sort of a trivial thing, the um the walking down
the street, something pops into your head, the shower thought, that sort
of thing, you know, if you type idea into Google Image search, you get a
bunch of stock photos of people looking thoughtful with some
representation of a light bulb over their head.
Um, I usually like to use the word ideation when I’m talking about muse
specifically, but also more broadly about this, this topic, and I think
that having Sort of the process by which you not just have the seed of
an idea, which is really more that something popping into your head when
you walk down the street, but how you develop the idea, how you take it
from just a a a a hunch, let’s say, and turned it into something
worthwhile, is actually really important for anyone that does creative
or knowledge work.
00:01:46 - Speaker 2: Now, do you have a sort of process or framework
for developing ideas over the long term?
00:01:52 - Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s a it’s a big topic hard
to even know fully where to start, but I think one of the things for me
that’s key is treating ideation as a first class activity, is something
important to do, something important to invest time in.
Basically thinking about an idea takes a lot of time. Uh, and that the
process of turning those well formed ideas into some kind of output is
really just the, the like the second half of that. So, to make it more
concrete, if you’re um a graphic designer, you probably make uh the
output in a tool like Illustrator, Photoshop, uh, or maybe even like,
you know, if you’re a physical artist, you’re painting a painting
with, uh, with paint and brushes.
Similarly, you’re an author, you might be using Scrivenner, Google
Docs, and so on. But the moment of sitting down in front of the blank
canvas, so to speak, to start, uh, creating the work is really only
happens way deep in the process. And so that first half is what we call
ideation. I feel like, um, maybe movies give us the wrong idea,
specifically around authors because you have this, this image of someone
sitting down in front of often a typewriter, if it’s an older movie,
maybe more currently you have sitting down in front of a word processor,
there’s the blank screen and the blinking cursor, and That’s not the
start of the process. The start of the process is the ideation.
00:03:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And for me it’s not just the
kind of wall clock time you’re spending on ideation. For me, it also
takes a lot of, you know, calendar time. It often takes several days or
weeks or even months to fully develop an idea, and you can’t force it
just by like sitting down and thinking about it harder. You need the the
time, the changes of scenery, the different inputs for that idea to
fully develop. Is that is that the same for you?
00:03:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would go with, um, I would of those on one
hand.
Just expecting it to happen purely as a background process in your
head.
Um, my long time colleague Ryan Henry likes to uses the word stewing
usually. He kind of like likens it to a cooking one of these like, um,
slow cooker processes where you, you leave it to stew over maybe many
days, and that’s where the flavor really comes out.
But on the same time, I don’t think it’s just something that happens
naturally, automatically.
I think you do need to work at it, you do need to invest in it and
choosing for me at least, choosing to say there’s this important
problem that I need to think through. I’m going to carve out time and
space in my life and my calendar and. My emotional bandwidth to sit down
and think hard to concentrate specifically on this problem is also
necessary.
You get that just doesn’t force a conclusion. I think both, both parts,
the focused upfront, uh, sort of the focused concentrated effort and the
background stewing, I think are both necessary to the process.
00:04:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’d agree and to elaborate on that a little
bit, I think of that first phase is a sort of feeding of the mind,
you’re taking in. Uh, raw materials of sorts, you know, different
ideas, different inputs, um, different possibilities, and often you’re
sort of like chewing on them, you’re like, you know, turning them
around in your mind, you’re holding that different combinations in your
head at one time, and that’s kind of all raw material that goes to
your, your sleeping mind. Uh, this, this background process is
constantly working creatively to come up with new ideas and like you
said, you need both of those fodder sometimes is a term I like to I like
to use there.
00:05:16 - Speaker 1: It’s just like feeding in raw material that may
or may not be relevant, may or may not be helpful, uh, but is all part
of the, the, um, kindling that gets the fire going.
00:05:32 - Speaker 2: I, I have some pretty uh unique experiences with
this time aspect because when I was an undergrad I did math and uh you
often had these problem sets, which is a fancy word for homework, but
it’s like very hard homework. It often takes a couple of weeks to do,
for example.
And you get these problem sets and uh they were so hard that you
couldn’t actually do them in one sitting that regardless of how long
that sitting was, you had to actually give it uh several days to like to
ruminate on it, you know, you, you take it in, you chew on the problems,
you’re ingesting this fodder and then over the course of 7 days and
several nights, you might eventually come up with the answer.
So there was this weird dynamic where if you didn’t start, you know,
like problems that do on Friday, for example, if you didn’t start it by
like Tuesday, you’re already hosed, um, and that’s a, that’s an
experience that I, I think about a lot in my creative work now where you
really need to give these things time.
00:06:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, one, kind of Hollywood representation of the
The stewing process or the background process is, uh, this show House
MD, which is about a basically a brilliant jerk of a doctor, and every
show is kind of a, it has a little bit of a Sherlock Holmes vibe, but
basically he’s trying to solve some tough problem, which is diagnosing
some difficult medical case, and they’re always showing him basically
seeming to be screwing around somehow.
Um, he’s off in some weird corner of the hospital, messing with a
vending machine or playing a video game or unrelated to the process of
solving the problem, then you sort of, there’s the light bulb moment of
someone says something that triggers an idea in his head, and then the
pieces all kind of come together and then he’s rushing back to to say
like I’ve got it. I’ve got the solution.
And obviously this is the Hollywood version of things. It’s not quite
how real life works, but I, I like how they consistently show this need
to leave the focus space and go to a new environment or or let your
unconscious mind or your background thread work on the problem.
00:07:30 - Speaker 2: Now, do you have a particular way that you like to
do that? Is it sitting on the hammock? Is it going for a walk? How do
you approach that?
00:07:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I get a lot of mileage out of the dog walks
for sure.
And notably, one of my reasons or something that fed into my decision to
adopt a dog was I was already going for super long walks anyways, uh,
and very often timing wise is that I sit down to do the focused session.
And, you know, we, we can talk about the tools more later, but let’s
just say for the sake of argument, I’m in my office and I’m with a,
with a sketchbook and I’m I’m working through a problem or thinking
about a thing. And then at some point, I feel, you know, I’m a couple
of hours into it.
I feel mentally tired and and. Um, need a break and feel like I’m not
making more progress and then that would be the moment I would go and
just take a walk, say, in the park near my house, sometimes a pretty
long walk, and something about the moving, the physical activity, the
fresh air, the different kind of environments, settings, you know, trees
are nice, all that kind of stuff. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a
park, but I think just a different environment that I’m out and I’m
exposed to new stimulus, and my, my mind is taken from that focus place.
But the fact that I was just focusing on it so deeply means that that
fodder is there and now it’s cooking in the slow cooker in the back of
my mind.
00:08:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’ve been amazed at how effective it is
to just change my physical scenery. Um, often when I change locations, I
start to have different ideas and ways of thinking and uh for a long
time I thought that was kind of coincidence, uh, but then I, I learned
that it was actually this um cause and effect, so I can actually have
better ideas or at least different ideas just by physically going
somewhere else. You can like book a plane ticket to better ideas, it’s
pretty wild.
00:09:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, I think environment is really
powerful and that comes in a lot of different forms. There’s the type
of stimulus you’re getting, um, and maybe only tangentially related,
but the word environment makes me think of, I was just in thinking about
the topic here for today, um, I naturally went to reference the book by
Steven Johnson called Where Good Ideas Come From. And this book is
really more about kind of society level ideas, um, where did, you know,
enlightenment thinking and Royal Society and and sort of innovations,
uh, rather than individual having an idea. But there’s certainly lots
of parallels there, and he, he talks a lot about environments,
particularly urban spaces, cities that a particular city in a particular
time will be sort of a pressure cooker for a particular set of ideas.
Uh, he talks about the web is also having some of the same chaotic, uh,
quality, uh, and, and he makes comparisons in the natural world to coral
reefs as being places that are rich, diverse, sometimes kind of chaotic,
sometimes kind of messy, uh, but that’s where the place where you see a
lot of, say, biological innovation. And I think that also works on an
individual level or just mapping my own experience, it works on an
individual level because ideas don’t come from nowhere. It’s not this
blank slate sitting in an ivory tower pondering the universe and then
suddenly the eureka moment, or at least that’s not it for me. Ideas
come from other inputs, other ideas coming back to that. Fodder thing,
but also the shape of the environment, not only gives you ideas or
exposes you to ideas, but also just puts your brain in different gears
or activates the neurons in a different way, or I’m not exactly sure
what. And for me, nature can be creatively stimulating, but so can an
urban environment, a really interesting bustling urban environment.
00:11:07 - Speaker 2: Yep, and we’ve talked here about um the the
second phase of you have your raw materials and you Use those to come up
with an idea, but you alluded to a really important concept which is,
um, ideas are just combinations of other ideas, which I think is is
really powerful. So I’m curious, how do you build up your, your library
of ideas to combine as you’re thinking.
00:11:28 - Speaker 1: Reading a lot is a big one, but you can also
ingest information in lots of different forms.
Podcasts are quite good that way often. Uh, YouTube is a surprising
trove of video essays and and things like that. I think it’s a little
tricky with the information ingestion. We live in this world now where
we just have these huge fire hoses of information available to us all
the time.
News news sources, whether it’s industry news or current events, every
book that’s ever been written, every, you know, TV show and movie more
or less is available on streaming, the podcasts, torrent of podcasts
that are available.
And there is a version of this that can be maybe almost a little
mindless or a little more, maybe just more entertainment oriented, which
is, which is fine, uh, but I try to make it so that at least a lot of
the time that I spend, let’s say, consuming media is things that I feel
like will feed into the ideas that I might have in the future. Uh, and
so reading uh long form books is certainly one of the, one of the
biggest items there.
Now I know you’re a heavy reader and and certainly a heavy reader of
PDFs. What’s your, uh, what’s your flow on that stuff look like these
days?
00:12:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think if I’m on my game, I’m, I’m
definitely actively reading.
It’s, it’s much easier just to casually read and just kind of read
through stuff, but I think it’s very easy for that to go in one ear and
out the other, so to speak.
Um, so I like to highlight, but I also like to do things like ask
questions, summarize, challenge the arguments, um, pretend I was
explaining this concept to someone else.
Um, those are, are take much more effort. They’re, they’re a lot
harder, um, but I, I find that when I do those, I have a much better
grasp of the material and it’s, uh, it’s, it’s more ready to be
processed in that background mind later.
Well, should we venture into the world of tools here?
00:13:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, all the classics are good and good for
a very good reason.
So that’s a pen and a sketchbook, whether it’s, you know, a fancy
moleskin field notes thing or just whatever GP thing you. Uh, by in your
average stationary store.
Post-it notes are always a really nice one, whether they’re on a
whiteboard, on a wall.
Um, I used to keep, um, big pieces of butcher paper, uh, in my, uh,
office, and I would kind of pin those up on the, on the, on the board
and, uh, put the Post-its there, you know, big fat markers, that kind of
thing.
And, um, pin board, obviously can be, can be good there. And then, uh, I
think the whiteboard is a really great one for more of the group
ideation.
00:13:56 - Speaker 2: And maybe you can also tell the story of the
commonplace book.
00:13:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, commonplace book I think was common somewhat
historically with um intellectual type people, which was basically a
collection of notes about things you’d read and seen.
And so, um, that would include things like an excerpt from an article or
a book, uh, could, could also include a uh little sketch that you did, a
scribble, um, something like that, and, uh, sort of represented not just
your personal notes and writings, although there may be some of that,
but also this collection of input or fodder that maybe was personal to
you.
Like you read a lot of things, but what are the things that really, what
are those favorite books or those favorite articles or those favorite
passages that resonated with you so much and and took you down a path of
thinking that maybe ended up being really important in your work, in
your life. And so a commonplace book is maybe a collection of these over
time.
00:14:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and one of the things that I like about
commonplace books is they are mixed media. So, at least for the media of
that time, which is things like, you know, articles, books, poetry, uh,
transcribed speeches, observations, drawings, those could go all in one
place, your commonplace book. And I think for tools for inspiring
creativity, that’s really important because we don’t think in terms of
different buckets of media types, we don’t have an article brain and a
book brain and a speech brain, right? Those things are all mixed
together in our minds. So I think it’s interesting to have a tool for
supporting creativity that uh combines different media types together.
00:15:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, those, those are the sort of the analog
classics, but in the digital tools space, ideation has never quite found
its footing.
Uh, you do see that people repurpose what I would call authoring tools.
That’s like a word processor, a spreadsheet, a text editor, um, maybe
there’s something like, um, yeah, we did an interview with a, a master
someone was working on their master thesis and they did it all in
illustrator, basically. It was mostly text. They created this big sort
of 2D spatial map of all the research they were doing.
You also see the very narrow focus tools, so that’s something like
maybe a diagramming tool. Like Omnigraphle, or there’s a a pretty solid
mind mapping app for uh the iPad called Mind Node. Uh, and these are,
these are good, but they’re pretty narrow and focused.
And then probably notes and note taking apps end up being Kind of a
place where people do a lot of this, particularly nowadays when you have
such easy access to a note taking app on your phone, whether that’s
Google Keep or Apple Notes, Bear drafts, Evernote, there’s a long list
of them, and it’s very natural to, yeah, you’re sitting on that park
bench and the some ideas are starting to coalesce and you want a place
to write it down, your sketchbook isn’t handy or whatever you you pull
out the notes.
App and Apple Notes, for example, and this is true of others as well,
are mixed. You can do a little scribble there, you can drop in a link,
you can drop in an image. Um, I think in many cases they’re not really
designed for this, but I think to some degree notes apps because
they’re so widely available and because they’re so at your fingers.
Tips end up being probably the top place that people do digital
ideation, even if it’s not a great, uh, not a great fit.
00:17:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that’s true. Although we’ve seen
with our user interviews that even for people who do a lot of authoring
and digital tools, they still lean very heavily on analog um tools for
ideation. So it’s extremely common, for example, for folks who produce
something in Google Docs or Final Cut Pro to just carry around a mollusk
andopic everywhere and that’s their preferred tool for ideation.
00:17:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and and folks will talk about, you know,
they like the tactile aspect of the page, they like that there’s No
distractions. There’s no chance that a notification is going to pop up
and try to engage your dopamine receptors to go see that someone liked
your Instagram posts when you open your sketchbook, right? It’s always
a blank page. It only sits there quietly and lets you draw on it.
00:17:57 - Speaker 2: OK, well, let’s turn from the tools to the
techniques here. Uh, what are some techniques that you like to use for
having better ideas?
00:18:05 - Speaker 1: Ultimately, the Uber technique in some ways is,
first of all, making time to sit down and focus on developing an idea.
And second, that part of the process of focusing is both pulling in the
the raw materials, the fodder, but also writing down, writing down your
half finished thoughts and trying to find some way to make it concrete.
Um, maybe there’s shaping is is a verb that um. Is used in Ryan
Singer’s book Shape Up, uh, or you can talk about like wire framing if
you’re a designer, maybe, um, you know, if you’re a filmmaker, you
talk about storyboarding or you’re just doing these very simple
sketches of, you know, what the framing might look like or where the
story might go.
But ultimately that Writing down and trying to bring out of your mind
and into physical space the idea, even though you’re not ready to do
the authoring, you’re not ready to shoot the film or make the, you
know, make the design in figMA or whatever, you’re still in this mode
of trying to figure out what the idea is, develop the idea, and that at
some point I can only hold so much in my head and to truly develop an
idea I need the. I need the sketchbook or I need the whiteboard, or I
need something so that I can start to make a thing with my hands rather
than doing it all in my mind.
00:19:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I always find this externalized
thinking, this writing down half form thoughts to be uh So powerful, but
it’s also a sort of leap of faith because, you know, by definition you
only have half the idea there, yet you’re going to write it down and
I’m always amazed by how when I get the first half out, it creates
space in my head for the rest of the idea to come back in.
00:19:43 - Speaker 1: Well, or there’s the other side around which
maybe just indicates that I tend towards overconfidence, but I often
feel like there’s this idea in my mind that’s so clear and so
complete. And I feel like it’s ready to go. And then the attempt at
writing it down I see start to see all the holes and flaws and places I
haven’t thought through yet and I go, OK, actually this is not as far
along as I was thinking.
00:20:07 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s let’s look at an example. Is there
an example of a long term process you’ve been through recently?
00:20:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so many that it’s sort of this sort
of technique of ideation to Big choices in my life, things to do with
family, things to do with home, but also clearly to business, career,
work, uh, things that I’m making a lot of them are probably hard to
fully describe because my main, you know, my work is being a founder,
entrepreneur, building companies, products, teams. This happens over the
course of many years. It’s hard to sort of encapsulate that in a short
example.
Um, but maybe writing is actually a really nice one in terms of, I think
the purpose of a written piece is ultimately to share ideas and a good
piece is one that shares good ideas. So in a way it’s almost the purest
form of that.
So for example, all the writing, uh, sort of more academic style writing
that I did for, uh, the ink and Switch research lab. So we wrote about
things including tablet platforms and software performance and. Um, ways
to store data.
So if I was to walk through a little bit the process of what it looks
like there, you know, it does always start with that initial
inspiration, the, again, walking down the street, taking the shower,
sitting in a cafe, and, and, you know, the, the light bulb, the
metaphorical light bulb turns on above the head. And so from there I’m
gonna go to more of the kind of focused ideation of like, let’s sit
down and try to sketch this idea out. Um, and in that case, it really is
going to be starting with that fodder, particularly the prior art. What
other articles have I read? What other books have I read? What other
material have I, what have I come across where people have talked about
or approached this problem, um, and kind of collecting all of that
together and then looking through all of that to try to better
understand, OK, what is it that I think that I have to say that’s
unique that adds to, you know, I don’t want to repeat. An insight
that’s already been made well in some other work. I want to make sure
that I’m bringing something new and so looking through that may give me
a sense of like, OK, well, here’s, here’s the knowledge that’s out in
the world, uh, humanities like knowledge sphere today, and then what’s
the delta, what’s the small diff that I can potentially add on top of
that?
00:22:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have, do you have
any particular Techniques or approaches you use there or just googling
around?
00:22:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of it is things that I’ve saved, so
maybe maybe this comes back to the to the modern commonplace book. Uh,
for me, I use Pocket, which is a sort of read later for um tool for for
the web, and so I’ll use my favorites and basically start.
In there, um, although realistically I am often thinking, oh, you know
what, something, you know what really kind of turned on a light bulb for
me was, uh, was this article. I think so and so shared it in Slack three
years ago. Let me search and someone sent it to me on email and I’m,
I’m trying to dig it up again or I’m trying to remember the email, the
keywords in Google. Um, but I also have my saved spaces like pocket, um,
some of my personal archives that are kept in Dropbox. Um, yeah, I
don’t do the bookmarking thing so much anymore.
So in some cases I’m going from stuff that I’ve already read, consumed
in the past, that Kindle highlights another good one. Goodreads actually
is one I’ll go back and just kind of search and filter. For books I’ve
read, and then that’ll remind me, oh yeah, this book here had a lot of
good ideas. Let me go dig that one up and look through my highlights and
it’ll spark some spark some memory on that.
And that’s stuff I’ve already consumed, but the other side of it is
things I haven’t found yet. And so I’m often surprised how often like
I have what I think is this brilliant original idea. And then I, that
tells me what I should search the web for, uh, in in order to find, um,
someone else that’s thought about or tackled this problem. And in many
cases, I find an amazing article that someone’s written that much
better encapsulates whatever insight I wanted to share, and I think, OK,
great, I could just read this article. I don’t, I don’t need to write
it.
00:24:03 - Speaker 2: I think this is called uh Cowan Soft or Tyler
Cowen. There’s a literature on everything.
00:24:06 - Speaker 1: There is. Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that
restating some ideas in a different form to a different audience in a
different context. In some cases just better. Sometimes there’s, you
know, an academic paper that’s really dry and Um, kind of maybe not
written in the most engaging style and not too many people have seen,
and wrapping those ideas up in a different way and publishing them in a
different medium could in fact, you know, reach a new audience.
00:24:31 - Speaker 2: And going back to the beginning of your example,
you mentioned this idea of hunch or something that you felt like you had
to tell the world.
To me that’s really important. I, I think we tend to really heavily
weight ideas that we can verbalize and articulate, you know, in our
training and like school and in business. It’s all about what you can
put on the test and what you can put in the email, for example. Um, but,
but so many ideas are good before you can actually articulate them. And
so I think it’s really important to tune into your, your hunches and
your intuitions and to start working and developing ideas in that phase
even before they’re fully, you know, written out.
00:25:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the hunch phase for me is almost always
manifests itself as extreme irritation, and I start to get once that
irritation crosses a certain certain threshold, I want to do something
about it, and that doing something about it is basically developing
the.
The idea and in some cases, the output of that, if I indeed follow
through with it, is making a new product, making a new company, writing
an article about something.
But I’ve seen this in others as well, and I’ve actually learned to
tune in to this on Teams, particularly when I’m in some kind of
management role. Uh, which is when I see someone or hear someone, and
this has certainly been the case working with, with you these many years
we’ve been together, which is like when I see you start to become a
little agitated or irritated about something but you can’t express what
it is you’re agitated or irritated about. It’s just, it seems to
circle some. You know, some area or topic, I tend to, when I see someone
in that state, I basically want to encourage them to like pursue that
because that that is the start of a hunch. But I’d be curious to hear,
Mark, what uh what your experience is like.
00:26:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the Genesis is often a hunch. Um, and, and
for me that usually comes from reading or some other content like that,
often from different domains.
So you mentioned these articles that we wrote together at ink and
Switch. Uh, one of those was called Slow Software, it’s about software
performance. In that case, I had been reading about, you know, software
architecture, uh, user interface design. I’d also been reading about
the kind of ergonomics and human factors of like, you know, the physical
biology of how humans work with tools. um and I’d also been reading
about the uh the hardware and software that goes into games, uh,
computer games, which is the tends to be like the highest performing.
Uh, consumer facing software that we have and combining all of those
things at once created this hunch in my mind that software performance
was slow, it was unacceptably slow, but there was also a path to making
it fast because in fact, software performance is pretty good in the case
of many games. And then from there I often go into that prior art search
like you described where I read a bunch, I do citation crawling where I
find one article and I read all the references in that article or all
read about all the terms that I didn’t know.
00:27:23 - Speaker 1: That article is a great example because it did
connect a bunch of pretty deep academic research about what you call the
human factors.
So for example, measuring. How much latency a human can be sensitive to
on a screen, you know, what frame rate. Uh, and that’s very dependent
on the action you’re doing and some other things, but there’s some
really great and deep academic research about that.
But you’re also connecting that to, for example, some things from the
gaming industry or some things from the way that you sort of deep, um,
software and hardware engineering things. I don’t necessarily know that
the groups of people that worked on those two different domains were
very likely to share ideas, but actually connected together, they fit
together really well and produced fresh insights by by putting those
together. And in fact that article was quite successful, I think, uh,
largely because of connecting those ideas from different but very
complementary domains.
00:28:15 - Speaker 2: Once we have the, the kind of uh raw material, I
often go to write an outline, that’s when you really start testing, you
know, your idea and the way that that you mentioned where you feel like
you have something, but it’s not until you actually go to write out
that you understand if you, if you have a coherent argument and if it
all connects together.
And then this is often the the point where I apply Wiggin’s law, you
know, when in doubt cut scope. And so we have all these ideas and some,
but some of them end up being kind of dead ends or not really supported
or or indeed not even true. And so you kind of trim down to the The
pieces of the idea, the kernel of the idea that’s that’s really
strong.
00:28:49 - Speaker 1: An outline is the, the, because I can imagine one
way to make it concrete is take a specific section or a specific point
you want to make and write a page or write a couple paragraphs or
something, but the more top down outline table of contents thing is a
better, that’s how you like to do it.
00:29:05 - Speaker 2: Oh, that’s a good that’s a good question. I
actually like to do both the kind of vertical and the horizontal so
that.
The horizontal would be the table of contents, breadth first, sketch out
the ideas and then fill in the details.
I also do like to do vertical slices. uh, so for example, I did this
where we were talking about the latency of, uh, styluses on, on tablets
and I basically did. Uh, the full media for one particular case, like I
actually filmed the stylus on the tablet. I calculate the latency. I
compared that to the literature about what kind of latencies are
acceptable to people and kind of had a a a complete vertical slice as we
would call it of the argument and that um in a different way informs if
the approach is viable.
00:29:50 - Speaker 1: Do you have an idea just off the cuff? How often
you get something to this stage. Let’s say you, you both do the, the
top down outline table of contents thing and sketch out one section,
including maybe, yeah, the, the, the media that goes with it, how often
you get to a stage like that and think, well, this thing isn’t really
very good and just kind of set it down, uh, versus something that does
go on to find its legs and you eventually publish into the world.
00:30:18 - Speaker 2: I feel like maybe. A half or a third make it from
the sketch to a final draft, and then even before that, there’s another
factor of 2 or 3 of ideas or concepts or instigations that I might write
about at some point. So it’s a pretty steep funnel.
00:30:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s my experience too. It’d be
hard to Hard to hard pressed to guess it, but it’s certainly less than
half get to any, you know, I invest a lot in that ideation. In some
cases, even writing partial drafts and outlines and things like that and
just kind of look at it and go, yeah. It seemed good in my head, but I
just don’t think there’s enough here, and maybe I need to research it
more, maybe I need to develop more and maybe the time isn’t quite
right, or maybe it just turns out there really isn’t something here
worth uh worth writing about. Yeah, makes sense.
You also made uh just kind of a. A sidebar, but earlier you made the
point of like, in the case of writing specifically, you go in to make a
point and then you’re using your supporting materials. Hopefully
that’s something you collected as part of the prior art fodder research
phase, and you think, OK, well, you want to make this particular. Point
and so you’re going to support it with this, you know, citation link
out or footnote or whatever it is. And then it’s happened to me with
some frequency that I go to do that and then I actually dig in a little
bit because I realized that the thing I want to use as support doesn’t
actually support my point, and then I dig deeper and I realize the
point’s actually a little bit wrong, um, you know, maybe in a nuanced
way, maybe in a more direct way, and I just misremembered something or
misconnected something and of course the, the part of the benefit of
externalizing a thing in this case and. You know, the written word is to
bring that clarity.
The job of the writer is to be right, so it’s not enough to write a
compelling argument. The argument has to be based on sound facts and the
process of writing forces you to confront that and find the gaps and
flaws in your own thinking.
00:32:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I wish this is actually something
that uh the, the American educational institutions took to heart more.
The the model there is much more like the adversarial argumentative
approach where you kind of pick a side and defend it to the best of your
ability, whereas I’m a much bigger fan of writing as a process to
discover and communicate the truth. So one last topic I want to talk
about here, Adam, is deep work, sense of flow. I think that’s really
important for generating good ideas. How do you think about getting into
a sense of flow and using that for your process?
00:32:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so to decompose a couple or define a couple
of the things there.
The state of flow, which is this idea from psychology that Uh, when you
really sort of get in the zone and you’re able to focus and concentrate
that there’s satisfaction that comes from that, but also you’re able
to perform at your maximum capability, whatever that is, whether it’s
physical for an athlete or mental for, uh, creative, creative
professionals like we’re talking about, uh, and then there’s this
concept of deep work which is uh. This book by Cal Newport that I rather
like. He’s an academic computer science kind of guy, and he is
basically just making the, uh, the observation that you need big blocks
of uninterrupted time to focus on problems if you want to, um, be able
to do really breakthrough things, which is sort of a feels sort of
obvious when you state it that way, but in a world where we’re
increasingly surrounded by distractions all the time, notifications on
our phone and Group chat from our teams and um news cycles and basically
there’s always there’s always distraction around us um everywhere and
the idea of sort of making specific time scheduling time to think, to
work on problems, what I would call the idea, uh, is a really uh
valuable and important thing to do and in fact is a differentiated thing
to do that if you can find ways to. To make that time in your, in your
daily schedule to go and think deeply and work on a problem for say 2 or
3 hours, uh, that that will allow you to be much more effective at your
craft than maybe many of your more distracted peers.
00:34:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and do you have particular practices here
for your own work?
00:34:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Um, one, of course, again, it’s
just kind of scheduling that time or in my case, I have the benefit that
there’s a uh a natural time in my cycle or in my There’s a natural
time in my schedule in the morning, which is after I was done my morning
chores, um, but before, uh, the rest of my team wakes up, since most of
them are based in the United States. And so in that moment I have a few
hours when I’m in a good creative mindset. Um, and I can turn off all
my notifications, close the door to my office, which I do whether or not
there’s anyone, this is my home office, but I actually closed the door
to my home office even if there’s no one else home because that’s
actually a signal to me that I’m here to focus, um, and it’s a small
thing, but this ritual of sort of turning away anything that could be a
distraction and saying, all right, I’ve got this block of time and I’m
gonna do nothing. but focus on and think about the problem that’s in
front of me right now. It’s harder than it sounds to create that focus,
but for me, you build a technique, you build a habit. Do you have uh
habits of this uh for yourself?
00:35:35 - Speaker 2: Well, I feel like it’s better now with the remote
set up because I can create time for myself uh in my home office and
also because we have this this thing where people are in different time
zones, so there are parts of the day that are naturally more quiet.
Um, this also actually reminds me of a, a practice that I or kind of
pattern that I picked up from the academic world. So think about how,
how corporate time works. You basically, you come into the office for,
for your work day, and it’s all like, you know, kind of a busy time.
You don’t have a lot of time to think necessarily, and then you might
have some weekends off and you have some holidays, but you have these
basically two modes. You have the, the busy work times and you have
every, you know, year or so you have a vacation, uh, and you have your
weekends.
Um, the, the, the pattern in academia is much more kind of spread out.
So on any given day, a professor often has, uh, classes, which is kind
of their busy work time, and they have their, their office hours and
their research time and those are kind of three different types of time
that they have within any given day, and then often within their week,
they have different types of days, so there are some days where they
have more classes and some days where they just do research.
Um, and then they have different times of the year. So they have the
within a semester, they have between semesters and they have between
summers or kind of in the summer, uh, and then they have typically a
sabbatical every 6 or 7 years. So you have this kind of spectrum of
breaks, you have the like the 1 hour break, the 2 day. break, you know,
the 2 month break, the year break, and the 6 year break, and I, I find
that having that those kind of different timescales um that are that are
spread out amongst themselves gives you the opportunity to have
different types of ideas. So it’s a practice or a pattern that I’ve
tried to incorporate into my own work where I I don’t just have like a
5 days on, 2 days off schedule. It’s more, it’s more flexible, um, and
I also try to take a longer periods of time off every few months or even
uh even longer periods every few years.
00:37:32 - Speaker 1: One other thing this makes me think of, or I
hadn’t thought about it until now, but um I guess coming back to kind
of connecting ideas here to um philosophies that I think fed into The
best way to get those um uninterrupted blocks of focus time because
it’s not just external distractions, it’s it’s, um, your own mind is
a source of distractions. So even in that completely quiet room with the
phone ringer turned off and you know, the, the schedule blocked out in
your calendar and you’re not gonna be disrupt interrupted, the tendency
to think about anything and everything other than the problem you sat
down to work on. It can sometimes be challenging when you’ve got a
thing that’s just worrying you, going on in your life or your work, you
know, there’s that critical bug that needs to be fixed or in your, uh,
in your personal life, there’s something going on that needs attention.
Um, and two things, two philosophies I’ve really drawn from to help
with that is, one is, uh, David Allen’s getting things done, which is
sort of a classic in the productivity. Nerd space but basically he has a
lot of good ideas there, but one of them is one of the reasons you have
things like calendars and to do lists and these like productivity
systems is to get this stuff out of your head. He talks about his open
loops. So you don’t, as soon as you have a quiet moment to sit down and
think about an important problem, you don’t want to instantly be
thinking, oh, but what about I left the oven on, right? And that’s the
classic classic open loop. Um, you want to feel like, OK, there is stuff
to take care of out there. I do need to do my taxes. There’s this thing
going on in my kid’s school. There is this thing my colleague needs
from me on a pretty urgent schedule, but I’ve already put those things
into other systems where I know they’ll get done at the right time, so
I can remove all that from my mind and give my full emotional and mental
bandwidth to the task that’s in front of me. And that’s the, that’s
the getting things done side. And then the other one actually is
mindfulness meditation, which has a a similar sort of thing on the
emotion side, which is the ability to I guess disconnect a little bit or
have be able to step away from your emotions uh and sort of observe them
at a little bit of a distance and both of those in their own way, the
open loops thing and the kind of mindfulness step back from your
emotions thing, um, can be helpful to me in giving your full, full, full
attention to the problem at hand.
00:40:01 - Speaker 2: Those sound like two good ideas to close on, Adam.
00:40:04 - Speaker 1: Well, I really enjoyed the chat, Mark. I’m sure
we’ll talk about this more because sort of having ideas, developing
ideas, ideation tools and techniques is, um, I think, pretty core to
what we’re working on here at Muse.
00:40:19 - Speaker 2: Indeed, and if any of our listeners out there have
ideas or feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or
hello at musesApp.com by email. Love to hear your comments and ideas for
future episodes.
00:40:35 - Speaker 1: Thanks, Mark, see you next time.
00:40:37 - Speaker 2: See you, Adam, bye.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think that the future is not determined. I think
that it is up to us, and I think that we should always believe
fundamentally in the ability of human intelligence when properly applied
to solve problems.
00:00:17 - 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 today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our
guest Jason Crawford from Routes of Progress.
00:00:35 - Speaker 1: Hello, thanks for having me on.
00:00:37 - Speaker 2: And Jason, when we first met, you were a tech
founder working on Field Book. Tell me about that.
00:00:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. So most of my career has been
in software and technology. I was a software engineer, engineering
manager, and tech startup founder. Most recently, starting in 2013, I
started a company called Field Book. Field Book was a sort of hybrid
spreadsheet database, a lot like Air Table, so very much in the mode of
a tool for thought and I’m very sympathetic to that general space of
tools. I still have a soft place in my heart for it. In fact, Adam, one
of the things That inspired me and helped give my mindset early on in
developing that tool was a book that I think I learned about from you, A
Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi.
00:01:23 - Speaker 2: Um, yeah, so that was a 93. Yeah, you can believe
that.
00:01:27 - Speaker 1: And still very relevant today, frankly, and so I
told all my employees, recommended they read at least the first few
chapters of that book and there’s a significant amount in there about
spreadsheets, which are probably the greatest tool for thought ever
created, so.
00:01:40 - Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I think the world’s most
successful end user programming tool, which is almost everyone knows how
to use a spreadsheet and probably can do at least the very most basic
function like summing a column, and that is a small bit of computer
code.
00:01:52 - Speaker 1: Exactly. So yeah, I built Field Book, worked on it
for about 5 years. Unfortunately, didn’t work out, we ended up shutting
down the product and selling the team. We did a sort of aquahire to
start up Flexport.
00:02:04 - Speaker 2: And to be fair, the end user programming dream is
one that many have chased and few have found there’s a few success
stories, yeah, spreadsheets, you know, which are now decades old, maybe
Flash, maybe Unity more recently, but it remains a really elusive dream
to make a tool that both brings kind of the power of programming to an
audience that is not already professional programmers.
00:02:27 - Speaker 1: It’s true, although at the same time, in the last
couple of years, there’s been the notion of no code and low code has
become, you know, much more prominent, and there have been a couple of
major successes, so I’m happy to see tools like Air Table, tools like
Notion, and, you know, a number of other sort of competitors in that
space all keeping the dream alive and actually creating some pretty
successful products.
00:02:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So going from there to, I don’t
know, an independent scholar or educator or advocacy around progress
studies seems like at least a pretty big leap. I’d love to hear that
story.
00:03:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right.
So what happened was I got interested in the story of human progress
early 2017.
It began as not even a side project, it began as just a reading list,
really. It was what books am I gonna read next. I always like to be
reading a non-fiction book and at a certain point I discovered that it
was kind of a good idea to read books in clusters, sort of pick a theme
and then read a handful of books on one theme, and you can learn a lot
more from that than just reading random books. So I decided to learn
about the history of human progress, and mostly in the beginning at
least was interested in focusing on kind of technological and industrial
progress, really fascinated by just the simple basic fact of economic
living conditions and standards of living throughout history, how much
those have really skyrocketed in the last couple 100 years after, you
know, thousands or tens of thousands of years of very slow progress and
very little improvement overall in living conditions. And I just wanted
to know, like, how did we get here? What were the major breakthroughs,
the inventions and discoveries that created this standard of living? And
ultimately I’m interested in getting to the root causes. When I started
blogging about this, I called it the roots of progress. You know, so
ultimately understanding what are the conditions, what are the root
causes of this explosion of creativity and invention that ultimately has
made everybody’s lives so much better. So it started off as just me
sort of reading books, and then the books were so fascinating that I
decided to start making some notes on them and maybe publishing the
notes on a kind of a little blog that I didn’t even care if really
anybody read except for maybe a handful of my friends. And then a couple
of years went by and I was still doing it and frankly, it just became my
hobby, you know, people would ask me, do you have any hobbies? And I
would think about what do I do on nights and weekends? And then I would
say, well, I don’t know, is economic history a hobby? Can that be a
hobby? Because that was where my time was going. And so then when I
decided that it was time for me to move on from the last tech job and
figure out something new to do, I asked myself, what am I really
obsessed with right now? What’s the one thing that I can’t see myself
not doing in the near future? And it was really doing this research and
writing about the history of technology. In the meantime, a couple of
things that happened. One is that my audience had actually grown
somewhat, some of my posts kind of got popular, one of them hit number
one on Hacker News and So I was starting to actually see that there was
an audience for what I was doing, people liked it. And then the other
thing was that a whole community began to form around this notion of
progress studies, particularly after economist Tyler Cowen and startup
founder Patrick Collison wrote an article together in the Atlantic about
a year and a half ago, calling for more focus on the nature of economic
and industrial progress and indeed calling for a discipline of progress
studies. And so that article sort of galvanized a community around this
notion and it turned out there are a lot of people who are interested in
this concept. And so, you know, between that community and my new
audience and my just personal obsession with the topic. It was a, I
won’t say it was an easy decision to kind of make a hard left turn and
just take my career in a different direction, but there was something
that just felt inevitable and undeniable about it. So here I am, it’s a
little more than a year later, and I’m quite happy with it. It’s still
a topic that continues to fascinate me and I think it’s still very
important for the world.
00:06:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I find it really interesting that my own
journey as kind of tech entrepreneur, like if you go back, I don’t
know, 56 years, maybe you and I had pretty similar jobs in certain ways,
you know, starting a company, building a tool, sort of standard software
as a service inside the Silicon Valley startup, combinator model, and
then we each in our own ways got interested in the meta process of
innovation, and my path was to go off and start this research.
Switch that Mark later joined up with about how we generate big
breakthrough kind of step change, new digital technologies and that in
turn led to me working on Muse because that was a spin out of that
technology.
You went a maybe more scholarly path, but I feel like they come from the
same place, which is working within that box, that Silicon Valley box,
which is very much about change, innovation, new technology, but it’s
sort of narrow in a certain way. It doesn’t take that broader view of
Human history and how do we get here? And for me, a big personal
breakthrough or something like that source of inspiration was going back
and researching all these older industrial research labs like ARPA and
Bell Labs and even back to Thomas Edison, and you were nice enough to
invite me to give a little talk at Torture Progress about that exact
topic. So maybe yeah, there’s a seed of something that started in the
same place, even though we ended up doing very different things in terms
of our day job now.
00:07:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting to see how
much overlap there is between the software, kind of computer and
internet and startup community and the progress community. It seems like
it’s probably not a coincidence, but it’s interesting.
00:08:04 - Speaker 2: And Mark, you’ve been a little bit involved in
the progress studies community. How do you think about this? How do you
even define progress might be one place to start.
00:08:13 - Speaker 3: Well, that’s a big one. You might define progress
as our ability to satisfy human wants and needs and desires.
It’s a big area, right? I guess I came to it similar to Jason through
the lens of economic history and reading about all the progress we had
made over the past several 100 years in particular, but then also how
curiously we seem to be going pretty sideways in the last 50 years.
And it’s notable, I think that both you and Jason described reading
about or having the sense. of there’s some sort of stagnation going on,
because actually, if you look at the literature, it’s very pervasive.
In many areas, it seems like we’re going a little bit sideways in terms
of not making the type of progress we made in the first half of the 20th
century, for example.
And so as I read more and more, you keep seeing this over and over
again, and it drives me to wonder what exactly is going on and how can
we make it better.
And I also have an interest similar to both you and the, you might call
it the meta of why this is all happening the way it is and what might
make it better.
But to my mind, that’s perhaps the main thing. What’s the system of
social technologies, if you will, that allows us to make progress or
prohibits us from doing so.
00:09:16 - Speaker 2: Where do you fall on the stagnation hypothesis,
Jason?
00:09:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, short answer, I have come around to it after
being initially skeptical. It was not my initial or primary motivation
for sort of getting into progress studies or, you know, starting to
study this story of technological progress. I was more motivated by sort
of the opposite, which is how much progress there actually has been in
the last few 100 years compared to the previous several 1000. Right, and
I think we need to keep in mind that is still the bigger story. Even if
progress has slowed today, it’s still significantly faster than it was,
I think in any pre-industrial era, right? Like the big division is still
between the industrial age and pretty much all the time prior to that.
However, after some amount of time reading different arguments,
quantitative and qualitative, looking at it in different ways. I’ve
come around to this idea that progress actually has slowed down in the
last approximately 50 years. I now see that. And part of what actually
really helped me to see it was mapping out on a kind of a timeline,
major invention. In different areas. So I made a sort of two-dimensional
timeline for myself or one dimension was, well, time, and the other
dimension was just sort of breaking out areas of technology into a few
major categories like manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and so forth.
And then I started placing on here kind of like, what were the huge
breakthroughs, you know, in each of these areas at different times. And
just from that, you can kind of exercise, you can really start to see
it. And so the simplest way that I can summarize stagnation right now.
is to just point out that around the end of the 1800s and into the early
1900s, we had, by my count, approximately 4 major technological
industrial revolutions going on at once. One of them was electricity and
everything that I was turning into, motors and everything, light bulbs,
etc. Another was oil and all of its ramifications, including the
internal combustion engine and the vehicles made from that the car and
the airplane. Another was, I’ll just call it chemical engineering, the
science of chemistry really coming into its own and beginning to really
affect industrial processes. An early example would be the Bessemer
steel process, a late example of this that really kind of capped it off
would be the entire plastics industry. And then the fourth one, which
maybe doesn’t always get a listed or counted as kind of a quote unquote
industrial breakthrough, but which I think essentially does fit in that
category, is the germ theory, the germ theory of disease and all of its
ramifications in improving hygiene, improving public health,
pasteurization of food, better food handling practices, especially water
filtration and chlorination that improved that. And so these 4 things,
oil, electricity, chemistry, and the germ theory, 4 major, mostly
scientific and overall industrial innovation breakthroughs that are
completely transforming one or two of those major areas of the economy,
and then each one of them is having ramifications pretty much on like
the entire world and on all areas of the economy, and they’re all
happening at once. Now by the time you get to the end of the 20th
century, the last 50 years or so, you’re basically down to 1. It’s the
computer and internet revolution, right? And that is huge, and I think
we shouldn’t dismiss it or discount it or downplay it, and there’s a
lot of breath wasted on people arguing it across purposes a sort of like
missing each other’s point going back and forth. Where I blame Peter
Thiel for this a little bit. The whole, you know, we wanted flying cars,
we got 140 characters. Well, what’s the matter with 140 characters?
Like, That’s a pretty dismissive way of talking about this amazing
information revolution that created the entire internet and put a
supercomputer in everybody’s pocket and gives you access to all the
world’s information and has connected everybody like never before. I
mean, that is, you know, you don’t want to downplay that. But I think
it’s fair to say that the computer and internet revolution itself is
roughly comparable to any one of those four revolutions that I just
mentioned, oil, electricity, and so forth. I don’t think it can measure
up to all 4 of them going on at once. So if you just in a very crude
way, if you want to count major technological revolutions that are going
on, we went from 4 going on at once now to approximately 1. And by the
way, that 1 has been going on for several decades, it’s kind. starting
to level off. It’s starting to plateau. We’re starting to get to the
point where it’s saturated the world and there’s still a lot more
value to be generated out of computers and the internet, but it’s not
gonna last forever, right? In a couple of decades, certainly we’re
gonna start to see diminishing returns if we’re not already. And I
think there’s some ways in which we are already starting to see it. So
what comes next? Do we have another revolution on the bench or waiting
in the wings to take over, right? Because the only thing worse from
going from 4 technological revolutions to 1 is from going from 1 to 0.
So that’s my current take on stagnation.
00:14:10 - Speaker 2: It does beg the question of what is the right
number of revolutions to have or ideal number perhaps.
There’s one version which is just more progress is better, and just 4
is good, 6 would be even better, 10 would be great, so 25, there’s
another version where we say, OK, we like the world that existed and
that it produced to have 3 or 4 major revolutions going on at the time.
One isn’t bad. Somewhere in there seems about right, but there is such
a thing as maybe too much progress or that’s not the only thing that
matters in the world. There’s other things related to just human
happiness. So how do we decide, I guess what what what we want in terms
of societal progress.
00:14:50 - Speaker 3: Maybe that’s an internal variable in the system
because you can imagine different social technologies that is different
political systems, different ways for organizing society, where you have
more or less ability to metabolize change.
There are some structures that are very brittle, and if you put more
than one, you know, industrial revolution on, it would just crumble and
break. But we’ve also seen that there are systems that can handle 4 at
a time, you know, reasonably well, at least get through to the other
end. So I think there isn’t necessarily hard cap so much as you need
the technology to be able to metabolize other technologies, if you
will.
The other thought is, and this one was really driven home to me by the
book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which paints the picture
that Jason just did about the huge amount of change that we had in our
everyday lives before 1970 and basically the stopping aside from the
information technology revolution after that. That book really focuses
on the everyday lives of people and what it was like to live day to day.
And a point that the author constantly makes is there are a few areas
that are really key, housing, food, transportation, medicine, and these
are kind of the bread and butter of everyday life. And it’s easy, I
think, to forget that as people who work in the information economy. And
so one way to answer the question of how many revolutions should we have
is, well, we obviously have huge gaps in all of those areas. So we need
enough to at least make progress in the big spaces like that.
00:16:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that is a good book that really does drive
home, I think the how much progress there was in that late 1800s to
early 1900s time frame, you know, compared to today.
I deeply disagree with his conclusions about the future, where he sees
basically no more progress ever, as far as I can tell, but I think his
history is excellent.
If you don’t want to read all 700 pages of the book, by the way, I did
summarize it on my blog at roots of Progress.org.
I have a sort of summary and book review. So I break it down, um, I
mean, food, clothing, shelters sort of one way to look at it. I break it
down as kind of manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation,
communication, and medicine. Those are sort of the big 6 that I think
about in terms of areas of the economy.
And you can put almost all, not absolutely everything, but you can put
almost all big breakthroughs and innovation into those categories. And
so I see no reason why we shouldn’t have at least one major revolution,
you know, affecting each of those things at any given time.
You know, if you want to ask, well, how many technological revolutions
do we need at once, right? One thing to look at is the areas that
haven’t changed much and especially the technologies that seemed
promising and areas where people thought there might be a revolution.
But either it was aborted or hasn’t arrived yet or just hasn’t lived
up to its potential.
I mean, if you go back to the 1950s, everybody at the time thought that
the future of energy was absolutely nuclear, you know, they almost just
took it for granted that of course, this is the future, this is where
it’s going, we’re gonna have nuclear powered homes, nuclear cars,
nuclear batteries, nuclear everything. And I’m far, far from an expert
in that technology and what is actually possible, but I think that far
more is possible, at least according to the laws of physics that we
know, than what we’ve achieved or than what most people actually
believe to be possible.
So I strongly suspect that nuclear is a far under exploited technology,
and in a world where everybody is very worried about carbon emissions,
that really looks like an oversight, doesn’t it? Manufacturing is
another interesting one. So another book that I recently finished and
reviewed on my blog is called Where Is My Flying Car by J Stors Hall.
It’s basically just sort of the polar opposite of Robert Gordon’s rise
and Fall of American Growth. It’s in many ways a work of futurism, and
the author spent a lot of his career in nanotechnology, trying to do,
you know, true or, you know, investigating, researching true, like
atomically precise manufacturing, where you have basically nanobots
putting together. Whatever you want, assembling it atom by atom, placing
every atom in the right place, that would be an absolute revolution in
manufacturing, right? That would allow us to not only create things of
enormously higher quality, building 100 kilometer towers out of diamond,
right? But also would, you know, like pretty much every revolution in
manufacturing enormously bring the cost of everything way down, right?
Because you’d be able to do everything faster and with much less human
labor.
You can look at genetic engineering technology and biotechnology, you
know, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. Gosh, it would be really nice
if we had had a broad-spectrum antiviral drug that was as broadly
effective as our broad-spectrum antibiotics. We don’t have any such
thing yet.
I’m really, really glad that somebody was working on Messenger RNA
based vaccine technologies because the first two COVID vaccines that
have come through and seem to have promising results in their phase
through trials are both based on Messenger RNA. That’s a brand new
technology, by the way. I mean, it’s been around in the lab for a
while, but there’s never been a vaccine approved or in widespread use
based on that technology. So this looks like COVID will be the first.
So there’s always more. More progress to be made. And I think that’s a
really important theme of progress studies, something I think you learn
by looking at the history and I think, you know, it was always very easy
to take the current world for granted and just assume that kind of this
is how things are. You know, the people 100, 200 years ago, many of them
were quite happy with the world as it was. They didn’t see the need for
these huge breakthroughs. They didn’t believe they were possible, they
didn’t even necessarily believe that they would be a good thing. Every
single one of them was fought and opposed, not only by special interests
who maybe stood to lose if some new breakthrough came into the world,
but also The original Luddites, right? Yeah, and also just by people who
were generally afraid of the technology and didn’t know, you know, what
to do with it.
00:20:27 - Speaker 2: So, yeah, well, by default, you could say that
humans I think are Fearful of change, and I almost wonder if kind of the
tech founder type is someone that, because I’ve always been drawn to
novelty and I find adapting to change or even taking advantage of it,
sort of making the most of it in some way to be an exciting and fun
challenge and stagnation is sort of bad for me, but I’ve come to
realize that that is very much the exception, not the rule. In general,
change is just threatening, very simple.
00:20:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s right. So I think it’s very
important that we remember that perspective and that we remember that.
Now if there’s one message I really want to drive home to people, it is
that the future can be as amazingly better compared to the present as
the present is compared to the past. Are we in the future and our
descendants can be as fantastically wealthy compared to today as we are
compared to the people of 200 years ago, the vast majority of whom lived
in what we today consider to be extreme poverty. So we should keep that
in mind and always be working for that much, much better future.
00:21:31 - Speaker 2: And that’s part of what’s very powerful about
the advocacy side of progress studies to me is that it’s probably a
very crude summary of cultural attitudes about change, but I think from
what I understand, most cultures through most of history, most of
civilization.
Saw the world is largely static and it was really fairly recent that you
had this, oh, we can actually steadily improve and each generation can
be better than last, but maybe that was the Victorian era concept of
progress, progress with a capital P, which was the sense that things
must get better, that it’s sort of mandated somehow by God or nature or
it’s in our nature that if we just keep doing what we’re doing, things
will continue. get better and then maybe that the pushback to that is,
well, wait a minute, it’s actually not quite like that. Things can and
do get worse, you know, ask the folks in the declining empire like Rome
or many of the others over the millennia, but in general, we can choose
a society and as individuals to say that we actually think progress is
possible and desirable and then do things to try to affect that.
00:22:36 - Speaker 1: That’s right. The most interesting book I’ve
read on this was A Culture of Growth by Joel McKe came out just a few
years ago. It’s one of the first books I read in my study of progress,
and he says much of what you just said that the very idea of progress is
a relatively new one.
It is not at all the default. In fact, a common view in many places and
times in history was sort of the opposite, something he called. ancestor
worship, where we looked back to our ancient ancestors as the most
Aristotle.
Yeah, or even in the Middle Ages, people looked at the, they looked
around and they saw the pyramids and they saw the Colosseum and the
Roman aqueducts and, you know, they just thought, well, wow, these
ancient people who and then especially in the Renaissance and, you know,
when they started rediscovering some of the ancient texts, and they’re
just getting this knowledge.
That had been lost in Europe for 1000 years, you know, like how to mix
volcanic ash into your cement to make a hydraulic cement, right? That
was something the Romans knew and worked with and was kind of
rediscovered 1000 years later after the fall of the empire.
And I think it wasn’t just in the west either. I mean, I think the West
had this special sort of historical thing where there was a kind of
cultural decline for a long time and Than a rebirth, but I think in many
places and times people have sort of looked to ancient ancestors as the
wisest people who ever lived. We will never surpass their knowledge or
achievements.
All we can do is kind of learn what they had to teach us. And so
progress in a certain way requires reversing this notion and actually
believing that we can do better, that we can discover knowledge that
none of our ancestors ever had, that we can create things that work
better than anything they ever made.
And that takes a little bit of hubris and Mir says that that notion of
progress evolved in the West roughly between about Columbus and Newton,
so say the 1500s and 1600s.
The Voyages of Discovery actually had a significant amount to do with
it, because here we are out discovering entire new continents that the
ancients never knew about. Francis Bacon had a lot to do with it, and
he’s a pivotal role in Moyer’s book. Newton really put the cap on it
with his system of the heavens and explaining the motion of the planets
and clearly better than anything that, you know, Ptolemy or anybody ever
came up with.
The summary of that book is basically it’s how the Enlightenment set
the stage for and led to the industrial revolution.
00:24:55 - Speaker 3: This reminds me, one of the interesting things I
see with the study of progress is that it’s very contingent and
embedded. And by that I mean, you generally don’t have one person who
strikes out and decides, I’m going to make some progress today.
Instead, you have a culture, you have a society, it often takes several
100 years. Amen.
00:25:12 - Speaker 2: Speak for yourself. That’s what I think every
morning. Perfect.
00:25:17 - Speaker 3: So you do think that Adam, but that’s because in
part, it’s because you spent so much time in Silicon Valley, which has
become the sort of magnet and amplifier of this attitude that if you
spend enough time there, you can kind of catch as a contagious disease
almost. And I think it’s important to understand these very human
elements of how just the notion of the improving mentality can be
transmitted and encouraged culturally or conversely, it can be lost if
it becomes too diffuse.
00:25:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s almost a societal level growth mindset
where, yeah, again, it’s the thing we can do and we can choose to do,
but it is not automatic. It’s something we have to work out and over
extended periods of time. Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah, and I certainly have plenty of ways that I talk about, and Mark,
you and I talked recently about our decision to leave San Francisco,
each on our own basis some years past, and some of that was for me at
least was somewhat some Silicon Valley monoculture and feeling like I
wanted to break out of that to have sort of new perspectives and new
ways to pursue the things that are important to me.
But at the same Time for some of the critique I have there, it is really
one of the few places in the world I feel where that it is a baseline
cultural thing that we’re here to make changes that we think will
improve and possibly very deep changes. We talk about disruption, which
is sort of an overused word, but it’s this idea that it’s the creative
destruction. You can’t go beyond very incremental improvement without
some tearing down. What’s already there and hopefully that shouldn’t
be in a disrespectful way. And sometimes Silicon Valley startups get
into trouble with that a little bit, which is they get so wrapped up in
there, we’re going to change the world and it’s gonna be better that
they forget about that every change, every transition has impacts, some
negative, and you should be aware of those. But at the same time, yeah,
that perspective of we can make the world better is quite a unique
thing.
00:27:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, now we’re kind of getting into the
discussion of why we progress or don’t. So Jason, I’m curious, you’re
looking back 50 years and you’re seeing we’re not making as much
progress as we did in the previous couple 100 years, even though it’s
more than we did 1000 years ago. Why do you think that is?
00:27:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah. I have 3 main hypotheses right now. My hunch
is that they’re all true and part of the issue. The most fundamental is
cultural and sort of philosophic ideas and attitudes towards progress. I
think in many ways our world is not nearly as favorable to progress and
doesn’t think of it as highly as we used to. We’re much less
appreciative and much more fearful and angry.
And I think when you value something less, you get less of it. You get
less investment, you get less resources going into it. Fewer people want
to devote their careers to it and so forth.
Exactly why that happened and why it happened when it did, I don’t
totally know. But if you go back to again, sort of the late 1800s. The
culture in general, I mean, particularly in the west, and especially in
America, was extremely favorable to progress. It was seen as a very good
thing. It’s coming along and improving everybody’s lives. It was
transforming the world. Humans were proud of themselves as a species and
about our abilities and what we could do, right? That was sort of how it
was seen. It’s this kind of Victorian progress with a capital P, you
know, the march of progress and so forth, right? I mean, you go back and
those things are, I don’t know, almost cliches now, but they were very
real attitudes. People celebrated progress. You go and you look at the
imagery, the posters from the old World’s Fair type exhibitions and the
way that they saw. They really saw progress as this positive force
moving forward. As what you mentioned earlier, yes, I think some of them
even. Got to maybe see it as inevitable and unstoppable, which is wrong,
it’s not inevitable in any way, but people saw it as something, you
know, overall that was making the world better. Sometime seemingly
around the, I’m just gonna say the middle of the 20th century, the tide
seemed to turn, and by the end of the 60s and with the rise of the
counterculture, you definitely see popular attitudes turning against
this. I think you See most of all, but not exclusively in sort of the
rise of the environmentalist movement, there was just much more concern
about technology, fear for unintended consequences, a different set of
values, even that may be put nature and animals, other species, the
planet itself, the quote unquote ecosystem, all of that, even above and
beyond what’s good for individual human beings. And overall, again, I
think just people stopped believing in progress as this fundamentally
good force and some people even started seeing it as a fundamentally bad
thing. And so, again, when you give less honor and prestige and acclaim
and social. Status to invention and science and technology and business
and capitalism, you’re gonna get less of it. You know, you have fewer
people devoting their energies to it and more people devoting their
energies to stopping it. One of the lines from, I mentioned that book,
Where is my flying car? He said something like, today for every person
who’s out there trying to change the world, there’s somebody else who
believes that they’re saving the world by stopping that person. So that
I think is maybe the deepest explanation. So my second major hypothesis
is the growth of bureaucracy and especially government regulation,
although not exclusively government regulation, I think there’s been a
general kind of growth of bureaucratic overhead even within private
institutions. But there’s just so many more rules now, so much more,
you know, that any new thing, both the invention itself and the process
of research and development, there’s just so much more to comply with,
right? And so much more overhead, and it’s just an enormous amount of
friction added to the entire process. I mean, the multi-billion dollar
FDA pipeline now, right? I mean, that’s how much it costs to get a new
drug out there. The cost of getting a new drug out there has been
increasing over time, over the decades. There’s sort of an inverse
Moore’s law. In fact, there was a famous paper by, I believe Jack
Scannell at Al. That coined the term E-room’s law. Eroom is more
spelled backwards because the price of getting a new drug to market on
average was doubling every 9 years. And I think that may have leveled
off or so in the last decade, but still, the prices are enormously high.
It costs multiple billions of dollars on average per new drug approved
by the FDA. And uh you know, there’s a number of different potential
explanations for this, and they mention a number in that paper,
including things like, by the way, every time you add a drug to the
market, all new drugs have to be better than everything that’s ever
previously, right, so the bar just keeps going up, right? But you know,
one of their hypotheses was what they call the cautious regulator
problem or the over cautious regulator, just that the requirements for
new drugs have just been going up and up. To the point where, you know,
the FDA doesn’t even allow people to try drugs experimentally, even
after they’ve been proven safe, right? They have a further standard of
efficacy. And it’s the phase 3 of the clinical trials that costs the
most money, by the way. Like, why is nobody even talking about something
like a universal right to try, not even, you know, putting these drugs
out there just kind of on the open market, but At least allowing people
who discover them and know about them, give them the right to try in
their own bodies, at least after these things are proven safe, you know,
in earlier trials or once we have like a certain amount of data, right?
I mean, these are the kinds of things where I think, I mean, coming back
to sort of cultural foundations, I think we have evolved something of a
safety culture, especially in the United States and in the world in
general. And I often wonder if the safety culture has gone beyond true
safety into basically safety theater, where we just keep adding overhead
and processes and bureaucracy and regulation. Basically, we’ve gotten
to the point where you can justify anything on grounds of safety, and
you can pretty much kill anything on concerns of safety. And there just
doesn’t seem to be any really ability to talk about trade-offs. And so
I fear that what has happened is that we’ve kind of built up the safety
theater, which is extremely low ROI like it adds tons of overhead and
does not actually add an appreciable amount of safety. So I think we
need to get smarter about the ways that we create safety. And this is
not, by the way, to say that safety is not a valuable goal. It
absolutely is. In fact, increased safety is one of the enormous
accomplishments of technological and industrial progress over the last
couple 100 years. Our lives are actually much safer now in many ways,
although there are some arguments that they become less safe in some
significant kind of, you know, tail risk ways. But in many ways, you
know, our exposure to germs and disease, our exposure to air pollution,
just the safety of our machines and our vehicles, all of these things,
we’ve actually gotten a lot safer in many ways. So I’m not against
safety, I’m very much in favor of safety. I just think there’s a
trade-off in how we create it. And then the third major hypothesis, and
maybe the one that is closest to the hearts of Ink & Switch, is the
way we fund, organize and manage research. We have lost certain ways of
doing this, in particular, it’s been a significant decline of corporate
research and corporate R&D labs. At the same time, concurrent with that,
there’s been a kind of centralization and bureaucratization of funding
for science and research, especially in a small number of large and
bureaucratic government agencies, and I think there’s a good case to be
made that we don’t have ways of funding the real kind of. Contrarian
maverick breakthrough ideas anymore. And that also closely related to
this, that we don’t have great ways of funding very uncertain long term
research that can’t prove itself with very predictable or short-term
results, but, you know, is actually the kind of thing that makes
long-term fundamental breakthroughs. And so looking at how we organize
and manage and especially get resources to fund different types of
research and development, I think is an important place that we should
look at for countering stagnation. So those are my three big hypotheses.
1, culture, 2, regulation of bureaucracy, 3, funding organization and
management.
00:35:23 - Speaker 2: There was so much in there, I’m trying to figure
out where to start on the response. You touched on many things, I think
are very interesting safety is versus like anti-fragile FDA approval is
the thing I’ve been involved in in some of my advocacy work, funding
research is obviously a huge one, and they can switch in kind of broader
independent research world, but actually I want, if I can respond to
something at the very beginning there, he talked about the potential
change in attitudes about kind of progress and maybe technology and
maybe capitalism is kind of a piece of that as well.
And you know, I agree with you that if you of some of these mechanisms
that have brought us so many great advancements, I think that is a
problem both for progress and humanity.
But I also wonder if in that time range you were talking about that I
don’t know, 1960s, 1970s counterculture, people thinking about the
environment, a lot happened in there to make people maybe have almost a
reality check against the maybe more uns the word for it, unchecked,
kind of just positivism of science and technology and capitalism and the
modern world’s all good. And we saw that nuclear, which as you said was
this great big hope for the future of clean energy, we had these
horrible meltdowns were so deeply traumatic to the individual countries
where they happen.
Maybe there’s something like discovering the link between cigarettes
and cancer and that for many, many decades, generations really, these
huge corporate interests had been basically pushing this addictive drug
that turned out to be quite deadly.
Obviously the environmental stuff, rainforest deforestation and
shrinking ecosystems and all that sort of thing and. Yeah, that
basically it was sort of reasonable to have a bit of a, wait a minute,
maybe we should think about some of the downsides of some of the
progress, technological progress or growth in capitalism that we
experience.
Now maybe the place where I land on that is having a little bit of a
reality check, maybe was a good thing or is a good thing, you know, you
don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
00:37:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a major and significant factor
actually was the World Wars.
So if you read what people were saying and thinking pre-World War One,
the excitement and enthusiasm for progress, and it wasn’t just
technical and economic progress, it was scientific progress and it was
in many ways moral and social progress that people saw.
And the Enlightenment era was focused on all of those. And so, you know,
people saw the and were hoping for, we’re looking ahead towards the
perfection of morals and of society, just as we would perfect science
and technology. And there was a belief and a hope that the new
prosperity created by industry, the connections created by
communications and transportation. The interlocking of peoples and
economies created by trade, that all of this was leading to a grand new
era of world peace, and perhaps even that war was a thing of the past.
And the world wars completely shattered that illusion. They were, I
believe, the most destructive wars in history, um, certainly they were
enormous, highly destructive wars, and of course they were made more
destructive through technology. You know, in World War One, we had
chemical weapons, we have poison gas, right? We had the automatic guns,
we had towards the end of the war, I think the tank.
00:38:44 - Speaker 2: One really powerful way to get your head around
how shocking that was, the role of technology in essentially killing
people in mass numbers is there’s this excellent history podcast called
Hardcore History, and they had a series, I think it was like a 6 or 8
hour series on World War One, particularly the beginning of it and some
of those first battles, and you know, at the start of that war, I don’t
know, they have like French cavalry. Riding into battle with their blue
jackets and their big puffy hats and their sabers on their side, and
then you look at these battles where they pull out these new weapons
that have been developed over the course of the previous few decades,
and they’re able to just kill in just such efficient and brutal ways
and it was just so shocking that war just took on a whole other meaning
and I Listen to that whole series just as I first moved to Germany,
which is of course a place that has very deep scars, cultural and
otherwise from both of the World Wars and yeah, it was a really powerful
thing and for me, even I tend towards techno optimism. I think I tend
towards that like technology is unbalances for the good, but then
listening to these kind of contemporary descriptions of the destructive
power of the technology of that time. Again, it’s kind of a reality
check.
00:39:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and then World War II, of course, was even
worse. I mean, you know, World War 2 was the wizard’s war. If people
could catch a glimpse of the role of technology in war in World War 1,
it was very obvious by World War 2, right? I mean, we had planes and,
you know, bombing runs and radar and and then to wrap it all up, the
atomic bomb. And I think that when we think about people’s fears about
nuclear technology and nuclear power and energy, I’m sure that a
significant amount of it was the association with nuclear war.
00:40:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m pretty sure in a film if they ever want
to give you the feeling of, I don’t know, technology’s gone too far,
society’s gone awry, I feel like there’s a little montage of this in
the Fifth Element, great little sci-fi movie from some years back where
they showed that mushroom cloud, that is the icon for we went wrong
somewhere and yeah, technology was a mistake, basically. Yeah.
00:40:54 - Speaker 1: So I think the World Wars were very significant in
the psyche of the world overall, especially the West. But at the same
time, I think that events affect people’s views of themselves in the
world, but they don’t determine those views.
There’s always a question of interpretation. And so, for reasons that
I’m not yet clear enough on.
To talk about them, people interpreted the wars in the aftermath in a
particular way and in a way that caused many people to turn against
technology as such, and in the phrase that you used to throw the baby
out with the bathwater and to, you know, rather than saying, Well, we
have put a lot of effort into creating these technologies that have made
us very powerful, and we haven’t put enough effort into creating
defensive technologies or creating safety technologies or Instead of
just saying, well, our attention and effort has been misplaced, let’s
refocus our efforts so that we make sure that progress serves mankind
and not destroys it. I think a number of people turned to a particular
kind of counter-enlightenment sort of romantic notion that had really
been around for a long time. Had always been around in some form, a kind
of a back to nature, you know, very Roussoy and sort of down to
technology, back to nature, and let’s just live simpler, quiet lives
rather than trying to sort of move forward and make everything better
all the time the noble savage. Yeah, exactly.
00:42:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s an interesting angle in terms of the
World Wars causing perceptions to be negative on progress. The people
being negative on progress is interesting, because I think it’s kind of
both a cause and an effect. It’s a cause for the reason that you just
described, but I think something also went wrong around. The 70s in
terms of how well the system was working for a lot of people.
And so to some extent you had people more or less rationally saying,
this isn’t going well for me, I don’t want to sign up for even more of
it. And this connects to a broader theme I have around our social
technology. And I keep using that phrase, to me, that means the systems,
the governments, the organizations, the norms, the patterns of behavior
that we have that determine how we operate day to day.
It feels like that technology is becoming a worse and worse fit for
purpose in the sense that a, it’s sort of Decaying, it’s becoming
bloated and it’s losing the plot, but also the world is changing a lot,
especially with information technology, and our social technologies
largely haven’t caught up.
So this is why I keep coming back to this space as being a really
important frontier.
We need better ways to organize and motivate our work as a better fit
for our modern world. And I’m pretty optimistic that if we’re able to
make progress in that domain, it will in turn facilitate progress in
other areas like people feeling that the system is working better for
them and also areas like funding more impactful research.
00:43:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s definitely true. I think that they’re
reinforcing cycles in this, as with many things, I think in society,
where the more you value progress and honor it, the more of it you get,
and then the more people can see that it’s valuable.
Conversely, the more that you are fearful of progress and try to block
it, the more you get technological stagnation, which then leads to
people saying, well, what has technology done for us lately? You know, I
don’t really see how technology is making my life better, so maybe
it’s not even a thing to bother with or invest in.
It takes some cultural leadership with vision to break out of cycles
like that. It takes somebody who can see beyond the recent past and see
a different type of future other than what we’ve had to take things in
either a positive or a negative direction.
00:44:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there’s an opportunity both for
people to innovate within the system and to help create new systems.
So as an example of the former, I would probably give Elon Musk, you
know, he’s basically operating with the parameters of existing
governments and organizations and Our model for capitalism, he’s like,
I’m going to Mars. It’s kind of a mess to get there because of all
this weird bureaucracy, but I’m doing it anyways, you know, good for
him.
And I think we also need stuff like Routes of Progress and ink and
switch where it’s like, OK, let’s try to change the game a little bit
here and rearrange the pieces. And I hope we can encourage people to
operate on both fronts.
00:44:58 - Speaker 1: Absolutely.
00:44:59 - Speaker 2: Role models is another thing I think I would like
to see more of and Jason, you referenced the celebrating achievements
and yeah, the tickertape parades for Lindenberg when he crossed the
Atlantic, celebrations of scientists that contributed to vaccines and
things like that. And I don’t know if it’s an effect of kind of our TV
oriented culture or something else, but when you look at the role models
that people are likely to just the famous people, people are likely to
name or people that kids are likely to say, I want to be like this
person when I grow up.
You know, they play sports, they’re actors, they’re maybe YouTubers
nowadays that we aspire to be maybe political leaders and to some
degree, there is, yeah, the kind of tech world, folks, the Bill Gates
and Steve Jobs and so on.
But maybe we don’t have enough celebration of, and again it becomes a
cycle, either a virtuous or non-virtuous cycle that if you celebrate the
people who do these great achievements, and then people look at that and
think, I want to be like that, I want to do what they do, and then you
get more of those people.
00:45:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I do think that is part of the
cycle, and yeah, in one sense, one of the biggest things that Elon Musk
has contributed to the world is just people look up to him as a role
model of like, wow, here’s somebody who’s defining really ambitious
technological visions for the future and then going after them full
throttle. And I think there’s a lot of people who will come in his wake
and be inspired by that, him and others like him who are doing things
like that.
00:46:26 - Speaker 3: I think that this idea of role models is super
important because so much of human behavior and action is basically
imitation, and so much of what we do is influenced by who we just
basically happen to be around.
And so it sounds kind of weird, but you can make really different stuff
happen just by putting different people together. And this is why one of
the frontiers of social technology that I’m so bullish on is different
types of organizations and replacements largely for what was previously
the university.
Which are basically an elaborate mechanism for getting a bunch of weird
people in the same hall, and there’s all kinds of apparatuses happening
around that, but that’s the core engine of it.
And I’m excited to see people exploring new models that try to get that
same core dynamic, but that leverage the internet so that the routes of
progress community would be one of those, for example.
I think there’s just so much more to do there, and I’m pretty
optimistic that we’ll figure out some cool stuff. So a lot of work to
do here. Jason, is there anything in particular that you’re looking
forward to working on next or that you are looking for help on going
forward?
00:47:20 - Speaker 1: Let’s see, so a couple of projects that are big
for me right now. So one is over the summer, I created a high school
program in the history of technology. We ran it initially as a summer
program and it’s now being incorporated into the history curriculum. Of
a high school, private high school called the Academy of Thought and
Industry, and I’m continuing to do some curriculum development for them
and really excited about how that’s gonna turn out.
I think high school is a great time to begin learning about the detailed
history of technology and how it’s improved everybody’s lives.
The other somewhat longer term project is that I am working on a book.
So I’m gonna take the writing that I’ve been doing at the Roots of
Progress and the kinds of stories that I tell there about the
development of technology and how it changed the world and I’m gonna be
putting it.
Together into something a little more long form and comprehensive, so
that is kind of my main focus right now.
Can’t say at this point how far out it is. I’ve still got a lot of
research to do, but that’s the biggest driving thing, you know, for me
right now and the thing I’m most excited about.
00:48:26 - Speaker 2: I’m really excited about that one too, not least
of which because I think a book makes a field or a movement more
tangible in some way, but also because you were nice enough to give me a
peek at the list of chapters and yeah, I’m even with all of the reading
I’ve done of your material, I think having together in this long form
format will be, well, something I’m really looking forward to.
Well, it may be a fun place to end.
I think an interest that Jason and I both share is jet travel and
particularly supersonic jets, which had an interesting story here. I
think just recently this company Boom has been out doing kind of big
product rollouts to announce their basically prototype of their
supersonic jet, but I got really interested in this when I read the
biography of one of the main, what you call it product managers, maybe
the lead of the team that worked on the 747. The 747 is basically the
plane that defined the modern airplane.
When you see planes designed before that, they look kind of old timey,
and the 747 and that have come after it share kind of the same rough
body shape and the same style of interior and that sort of thing.
So it really ushered in this new era of air travel, but one of the
things that’s powerful to me about reading this book, both because I’m
a. person and I like hearing the inside story about how the stuff
evolved, but you realize it was just a guy, very smart guy, and he had
some really good predictions about the future and what these
technologies might enable for travel, but you saw, again coming back to
that theme of progress is a thing we can decide to do and work towards
as individuals.
He had a vision for more wide travel. He saw the technology could make
it possible. He got Himself in the position to work on that project and
made it happen and basically ushered in this modern era of travel,
which, putting aside the last year of relative lockdown has been an
absolute golden age where essentially most people have the ability to
get on a plane in a major city and go to almost any other city in the
world for a relatively affordable price, which is a really amazing
breakthrough when you think of it.
But we also thought at that same time that the 747 was being developed
or the industry feeling was supersonic was the future. And so at the
same time they were sort of designing and developing the 747 and some of
the related technologies, there was also the development of what would
eventually become probably the Concorde is the best known of the
supersonic technologies, but that actually turned out to be a dead end
or had this eventual abandon. where essentially a combination of the air
pollution from the sonic boom, the fuel cost, and a few other factors
meant that even though we have this technology that would allow you to
fly, say from Paris to New York in just a few hours compared to the
usual 6 to 8 hours it takes us across the Atlantic, eventually we shut
all that down. And now there’s a new company that’s working on it
saying basically some things have changed, some technologies have
changed. We can do something different, but I find that story or that
evolution to be an interesting example of progress as first of all,
something that individuals drive and decide to do. Obviously in groups
and through mechanisms like capitalism and government funding and all
sorts of other, all those social technologies that Mark talked about,
but ultimately it is just people deciding this thing they want to do.
But also this path of you. About the revolutions that we have, we had a
revolution in air travel, but then we also thought there would be a
similar or a next step change in travel based on supersonic, and that
actually didn’t turn out to work out, or at least we stepped away from
it. And maybe we’re coming back to it now, maybe we will be able to
make it across the United States or across the Atlantic in just a few
hours, but that remains to be seen. But it was exciting to me to see
that banner picked up again.
00:52:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the speed of passenger
aircraft over time is one of the clearest graphs you can look at that
just sort of shows the stagnation of the last 50 years, right? It was
going up and up and up, and then it actually went up to supersonic, and
then it went down. We actually regressed, right? Forget about
stagnation.
00:52:37 - Speaker 3: This is actual regress, especially if you count
the time in airport security lines, which is increased significantly.
00:52:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, which ties back to the safety
emphasis topic.
00:52:45 - Speaker 1: And the regress in passenger airplanes is not
unlike and in fact came around the same time as the regress in space
travel, right? We used to be able to go to the moon, and then it right
at a certain point, we didn’t even have the Saturn 5 rocket anymore,
and our space capacity had actually regressed. And in fact, there’s an
argument to be made that you can chalk both of them up to very similar
causes.
Both supersonic passenger travel and the space race were pursued
primarily as government projects for government glory, I mean, for lack
of a better word, they were put out there for national prestige and to
show off technological capability. And they weren’t set up to be
economically sustainable, right? And that was a real problem with
Concord, wasn’t making enough money.
So I think part of the lesson of these things is that big showy
government projects can temporarily push the frontier forward, maybe
much faster or farther and earlier than it otherwise would have. And
maybe that has some good effects, but they can also set areas up for
regress and stagnation for decades. The way to make something actually
long term sustainable is to give it a sustainable economic model, which
means a profit model. And so I’m excited that both supersonic and space
travel are coming back as private efforts from for-profit companies that
are setting up sustainable economic models to actually make them
profitable, make them pay for themselves in the long term. That’s how
they will stick around and how they’ll grow.
00:54:18 - Speaker 2: So Jason, given everything we’ve talked about, do
you find yourself at this moment optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere
in between about progress?
00:54:27 - Speaker 1: Well, I think it’s important to distinguish
between two types of optimism, and I’ve used the terms descriptive
optimism and prescriptive optimism. So descriptively, you can predict
what you think is going to happen, or, you know, whether we’re on the
right track, whether we’re on a path for good or bad outcomes. And I’m
somewhat ambivalent, frankly, at that.
I think part of me wants to be optimistic or is optimistic. I think
there’s a lot of good things going forward, you know, the vaccine
efforts against COVID are just like a great example of what we can do
when the best of our science and technology comes forward to. a major
problem. For people who don’t know the history of vaccine development,
developing a vaccine in like a year or less than a year is amazing and
basically unprecedented. Generally, vaccine development is something
that takes decades, and so this really shows how far some of our
technologies have come and what we can do. To use a cliche when we put
our minds to it and put our efforts into it and our resources. But you
know, there’s a lot of things to make one pessimistic as well. I mean,
the US government’s response to COVID has been mostly incompetent. I
think there is a lot of buildup of bureaucratic craft, a lot of our
social technologies, to use Mark’s term, are not in such a great state.
And so I think we’ve got a lot of work to do and in some ways, you
know, have slid backwards. But I think it’s important to distinguish
that kind of prescriptive like descriptive rather, are we on the right
track from the prescriptive optimism or pessimism of what should we do
about it? And prescriptively, I am always and ever an optimist. I think
no matter how bad things are looking. The only thing we can do is to
step up, bring our best efforts to the game, and, you know, even if
we’re on a bad path to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. I think
that the future is not determined. I think that it is up to us, and I
think that we should always believe fundamentally in the ability of
human intelligence when properly applied to solve problems and to make
the world better. So, descriptively, I’m sometimes an optimist and
sometimes a pessimist, and it’s very case dependent. But what I’m not
and will never be is defeatist, and I think there’s a lot of defeatism
out there, you know, the notion that combining perhaps a descriptive
pessimism with a prescriptive pessimism that essentially tells people to
give up, or to scale back our ambitions or maybe even to deliberately
regress to a safer or, you know, more comfortable world. So
prescriptively, I’m always an optimist. Forward, you know, let’s
confront the problems, no matter the odds, and let’s do our best to
make the future better.
00:57:01 - Speaker 2: Can’t think of a better place to end than there.
Yeah, right on. If any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel
free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or via email, hello at
museapp.com. We always love to hear your comments and ideas for future
episodes. Jason, thanks for inspiring those of us who are working on
building the future, and I’m looking forward to reading the book.
00:57:24 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, thank you for building the future and
thanks for having us was a great conversation.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: To us, it’s very important that we design this
all holistically. There’s a lot of research, for example, on
cryptography schemes that assume key management or on collaboration
product designs that assume the server can just read all the data. And
in order for this to work with Muse, we need all of the product design,
the collaboration technology, the key management, the cryptography, the
mental model for how people think about documents that all need to line
up.
00:00:31 - 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, Adam, and Mark, I
like to listen to podcasts in the morning, but I understand that you
have a slightly more unusual and in-depth source of audio.
00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this morning I was actually listening to the
real-time oral arguments in the US Supreme Court on their very important
ACA slash Obamacare case.
This is obviously a very big case for the US and for many of us
personally, and so I was keen to listen in and see what the judges were
thinking.
And this is notable because I think until recently you couldn’t
actually listen to these broadcasts in real time. There wasn’t the
C-SPAN equivalent for the US Supreme Court until I think COVID hit and
they started doing everything via audio, audio, you know, Zoom or
equivalent. And I think at one point actually, they didn’t release the
audio to the public until quite a long time after the arguments had
concluded. I think they did it every term or something, which is 6
months or something, and then more recently they changed it to be every
week, and then now they release it in real time.
And of course, that’s interesting as an interested citizen, but also it
kind of connects to our topic today of privacy, because one of the ideas
that we’ll talk about is how visible or non-visible your work is while
it’s in process.
00:01:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, privacy is a huge topic and something on our
minds right now because we’re making some product decisions for the
sharing and collaboration features that will be forthcoming from use.
So in the process of working through this as a team, where do we make
trade-offs on things that necessarily results in a kind of a zooming
out, you can’t help but to look at the larger context, which is OK,
there’s what do we want to do for our product, what matters for our
customers, what’s technically feasible, what do we value as a team.
Then you zoom out a little bit from there to OK, what’s going on in the
technology industry.
Obviously this is a very, very big topic for the tech industry right
now, and then you can zoom out even from there and talk about the
society-wide impacts and you know, what does privacy even mean? What can
we expect, what’s important or not important in terms of our lives as
citizens, but also just as technology changes, we may need to adapt to
what we can reasonably expect in terms of privacy.
Yeah, as you know, I always like to start at the beginning with the
definition or something of that nature. So what does the word privacy
bring to mind for you, Mark?
00:02:58 - Speaker 1: Hm. Well, I don’t have a super nice prepackaged
definition, but what’s coming to mind is a sense of agency over who
does and doesn’t have access to your work. And you might exercise that
agency by saying only I can read my personal journal, for example, and
so that’s private to me. Or it could also mean that we are working on a
project together and so I want you and me, Adam, to be able to see some
work product, but no one else. Or it could be that you want to share it
very broadly, and that’s your choice as well. So some sense of
controlling who does and doesn’t access your work.
00:03:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when I went looking for kind of what is
actually the definition here versus my own vague sense of what counts or
doesn’t count as privacy, which probably, by the way, has changed over
the years, but the canonical one that’s often linked back to is a piece
in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 called The Right to Privacy.
And they point out that some of these American values of right to life,
right to pursue happiness, right to secure property originally maybe
meant something more practical, you know, property was your cattle, for
example, but now you fast forward here now over 100 years ago, they’re
writing and they say, well, wait a minute, we’ve.
Started to recognize more of a spiritual nature of man’s feelings, his
intellect, and so maybe these rights that we talk about broaden a little
bit and the term property may include intangible things like your notes,
like your thoughts, for example. They actually just use the phrase at
one point, the right to be let alone, you know, maybe in modern
phrasing, we would say the right to be left alone, but the idea of Maybe
why you don’t want everybody in the world to have your phone number is
you don’t necessarily want the equivalent of spam calls coming in. You
want to give that to people that you have this trusted relationship with
that you believe they’re gonna call you because there’s someone you
wish to speak to, you have an existing relationship, something like
that. So that lens for privacy I found thought provoking.
00:04:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a very interesting definition
because it gets at a problem that I’ve seen with a lot of the privacy
discussion, which is It’s very tempting to try to imagine or infer or
argue for some very natural and fundamental right to privacy.
Obviously, if you like privacy, you’ll tend to do that, and I often see
this in the form of privacy is a human right or privacy is a natural
right. And I certainly think you can make arguments to that effect, but
it kind of dodges, to my mind, the real fundamental question here of
what are the trade-offs, what are the benefits, what are the costs, and
what work are we willing to do as a society to bring about those
benefits if we want them? Because unlike something like perhaps the
right to life, you know, you can get that just by not ending other
people’s lives, right? Whereas privacy is is much more complex than you
need to build cryptography, you need different business models, right?
It’s much harder to grapple with.
00:05:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, another way to think about, at least for
these intangibles for information privacy, which is chiefly what we’re
concerned with in our business and in the technology industry generally,
it’s really communication is often the thing, you know, Muse as it stands
today keeps all your information on the device there and putting aside
some threat vectors like someone stealing your device, for the most
part, that means there isn’t so much to worry about.
It’s once you go to share it with another person or share it digitally
over the internet, that’s where. Things get trickier and I liked your
courtroom example because another one I had kind of sketched down was
the social contract or the common legal protection that’s given to what
they usually call client confidentiality or patient confidentiality, so
attorneys or doctors or therapists.
The idea is that You are going to have a private communication with them
and you can expect both kind of from just a manners perspective but also
in some cases legal protections for what you say there. and that gets a
little bit to what’s relevant to our business, which is in one of those
communications speaking to your therapist, for example, but also
sketching in your notebook.
If I need to think about, OK, everyone in the world can see this either
now or in the future. Maybe that is going to consume some part of my
brain figuring out how comfortable I feel with that, whether I want to
alter what I’m saying or writing a little bit, and there’s something
freeing where I say I’m in this communication with one other person or
with my notebook only, so essentially myself or my future self, and I
can reasonably expect that no one else is going to hear this. or be
privy to it, and that frees me in a lot of ways to be creative or to
really open myself up. And it seems to be a common human experience that
it’s easier to truly open yourself up when you know exactly who’s on
the receiving end of that.
00:07:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. If I think about the benefits of
privacy, to me, that’s one of the three big legs is this idea that when
you have control over who has access to your thoughts, your work, and
your data, especially when that’s quite limited, it encourages and
allows creativity.
And that might be creativity in terms of your personal journal, right?
You’re much more inclined to write something to share it with yourself,
if you will, if you know no one else is gonna see it.
But it could also mean You’re doing some private brainstorming, and
that would be very different if it was just you and me versus if we were
in a stadium with 50,000 people watching, right? And it’s just that’s
kind of how humans are.
I think that’s a big piece.
And also, it connects to what I consider to be the second big leg of
privacy benefits, which is it allows you to manage communications.
So it might be the case that you eventually want someone to know
something, but while you’re working on it and you’re preparing the
communication. You don’t want them to be processing all of the raw
stuff. It’s something that I encountered a lot as an engineering
manager, you know, if you’re working on an organizational change or
something, right, you don’t want people to be reading all of the raw
discussions and debates about how it’s going to happen. You want a
clear and coherence and well executed communication plan. That’s again,
you need privacy for that.
And just to mention what it is in my mind, the third leg, and we can
perhaps talk about it later, but it does have protection from
governments and other large concentrated powers. And for me, that’s
especially important with electronic data and communications.
To my mind, this stuff is so sharp because it’s so easy for it to get
replicated, for it to get distributed, for it to be intercepted, for it
to be eavesdropped.
In a way, that’s just not the case with something. Like paper, you
know, with paper, it’s actually quite hard to make a billion copies of
paper. It’s also very easy to reason about where the paper is going
because it’s in this physical world that we have a lot of familiarity
with.
We don’t have the same intuitions or ability to reason about electronic
data in terms of how long it could be persisted, how many people can see
it, and all the ways that it can be processed. So I think overall, it
makes this problem of concentrated data in the hands of large powers
very sharp.
00:09:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think in the analog world where
you’re just thinking about who might be overhearing me in my office, or
as I walk down the street having a private conversation with a friend.
That you can kind of scope and time and impact, but when I put my
photos, my notes, my whatever it is into electronic databases that can
be replicated potentially forever, I think of something like
LiveJournal, which was this journaling slash blogging site 20 years back
that was very popular. A lot of people, especially young people, poured
their very private thoughts and things about their lives into under the
reasonable expectation that was only going to go to the few friends
they’ve scoped to.
And then in the meantime, it’s been sold several times to several
different choirs. All that stuff is in there, what someone wrote 20
years ago in a database that’s now in the hands of someone very
different from who originally it was in the hands of and and I think
it’s just we don’t quite yet have the capacity. to actually reason
about.
00:10:33 - Speaker 1: Totally, and just to expand on this a little bit,
this points to two other ways that electronic data privacy or
non-privacy can be very sharp.
One is this time element where the data can persist and indeed
accumulate and move around for a very long time. So we might say, oh,
you know, with our current privacy practices, nothing that disastrous
has happened. Well, we actually don’t know because the half-life of
this data is probably 50 or 100 years. So we’ll know in, I don’t know,
200 years if this is actually a bad idea, but we can’t really say that
it wasn’t until all the data has fully dissolved into the ocean or
something. The other huge thing here is how humans are or aren’t part
of the process.
So again, with electronic data for collecting it, for storing it, you
just need to convince basically a few people, it’s a good idea. So if
the NSA wants to read everyone’s emails, they convince a few people at
Google and Yahoo, and that’s basically it. And then they get billions
and billions of emails. Whereas if you wanted to eavesdrop on someone in
the physical world, you got to pay someone, they got to go out, you
know, to the rooftop and That’s expensive.
And if you have a ton of them, you have to actually convince all these
people to do this every day and maybe actually have trouble convincing
thousands and thousands of people to do this. So there’s this kind of
like human rate limiter friction that you get if you want to do wide
scale data collection in the physical world, but you don’t have it in a
digital world. This is another reason why I think the digital stuff is
so sharp and potentially dangerous.
00:11:53 - Speaker 2: Feels like there’s a parallel there to spam,
postal mail versus spam email, which is people sending you unsolicited
advertisements in postal mail has always been a thing, it’s still a
thing.
But it’s limited by sort of physics and the cost of actually getting
that brochure or whatever into your mailbox, and digital is just so
cheap and so fast and so easy to do in this kind of anonymous,
unaccountable way that then it goes from being uh maybe an
advertisements in your postal mailbox or a minor annoyance to being
something that potentially Overwhelms the systems of the internet and
makes, you know, at one point threaten to make email a completely
unusable service, and I think basically every kind of communication
technology that comes online and gets substantial traction has to deal
with that same kind of spam and abuse problem for that same reason.
It’s just so cheap to do that and try to grab people’s attention
through these automated and unaccountable means.
00:12:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, spam is also notable because there was a
very powerful technological problem, basically people sending out
zillions of emails for essentially free. There’s also a very powerful
technical solution, probability-based spam filtering. And so there was
this battle for a long time. I think we could say that eventually the
spam filtering won because they have access to all the leverage you get
with electronic data that the attackers have. But yeah, that wasn’t a
preordained conclusion, and I don’t necessarily think we should count
on that being the case with privacy.
00:13:19 - Speaker 2: And looking at the things going on in the
technology industry there, we have something like GDPR is a pretty big
deal in Europe, that’s been in force for a few years and then they’ve,
I think, are looking at doing more to strengthen it, sort of trying to
give people more control over their personal data, more insights over
what’s being captured and when it’s deleted and that sort of thing.
Another notable trend in recent time is products, privacy focused
products that have, if not broken into the mainstream necessarily have
been pretty successful. There’s something like the Brave web browser
that has built in ad blocking and essentially makes a privacy oriented
pitch over using something like Chrome. And they just posted recently,
they had 20 million users, which is a pretty good number.
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that in many ways you could say is worse
than Google in terms of results, but it’s privacy protecting and so
that one selling point seems to be enough for quite a lot of people to
use it. And there’s a long list of others of these protonmail for
email, fathom, which we use for analytics on our website.
There’s this whole class of messaging apps like Signal and Telegram
that have really got a lot of traction. And it’s interesting to me,
almost all of these that I just named, they’re basically worse in every
way than whatever they’re competing with.
Not always, I like Fathom better than the Google Analytics, and I think
Brave is nicely made mostly because it’s just kind of a fork of Chrome.
But in many cases they are about the same or worse, you know, using
Telegram to communicate with someone versus WhatsApp or SMS for example,
it’s basically the same kind of experience, but that one benefit of
some kind of privacy protection or some kind of assurance that privacy
is something that people who create the product care about is enough to
get a lot of people to use it.
I’m curious how you think about that. Are you motivated to use products
that are privacy protecting versus trading that off against other
things? Do you think that those kinds of products will always
essentially just be a niche for the few people that care enough about
it, or do you think there’s a future where that kind of focus would be
something more mainstream?
00:15:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s not an easy question, Adam.
Yeah, so I’d say first that I definitely use some of these privacy
focused products. Two examples that I would give, one is Safari, which I
use because it’s faster and I think it has better privacy capabilities
than Chrome. Another is D. Go, which for a long time I’ve used almost
exclusively instead of Google. I find that it works great and has a much
better privacy story. So for me, on the margin, I’m definitely inclined
to look at the privacy angle and especially if things are comparable or
if for some reason I care a lot about the privacy of that data, I will
make the move.
And I’m glad to see that we have these offerings and people can make
choices like that.
To my mind, the bigger deal though is the overall dynamics of the
industry and what a lot of users end up choosing. And yes, it’s great
if we have options for particularly privacy conscious or privacy
sensitive people. And again, I’m very thankful for that.
But if you think about this third reason that I mentioned a while ago,
data concentration in large powerful entities, that’s really determined
by what most people do, right? So for that reason, I’m very interested
in the overall dynamics of the industry and our governments and how
those things interact.
And there I would say that it’s perhaps a more discouraging situation.
I think there’s things we can do and there’s still passed out of this,
but I think it’d be very easy to imagine a world where governments just
have access to all our data, which by the way, you did a good survey
there of some of the current privacy focused products, but a huge deal
is access to TLS. And it’s something we take for granted that you can
go to HTTPS website, which basically our websites are now, and at least
that data won’t be accessible to people online unless there’s some
exceptional circumstances. And we take that for granted, but in my
opinion, that was not a given. At one point, it’s my understanding that
this public key cryptography was not a generally accessible technology.
It was somewhat controlled by the government. And with Netscape and
commerce moving to the internet, again, I’m not sure exactly how the
story played out, but they eventually convinced the government to allow
us to use that to export it outside the country, and so on. But I could
absolutely imagine a world where that was not the case. Like if you can
imagine, for example, that 9/11 happened before that stuff got out
widely in web browsers, the government might have just said, you know
what, we can’t have people communicating securely at all. This is now
banned. And then that would have been a very path dependent thing where
we might have stayed in that situation.
00:17:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m old enough that I lived through that
process. I was in the computer world and in the industry for some of
that.
The clipper chip was actually a US government initiative at the time to
create cryptography that had a built in backdoor for government agencies
to open. And there was also things like, yeah, up until the 90s, um get
in trouble here recounting this all from memory 20 years on, someone’s
going to fact check me, hopefully you will, but at least the way I
remember it was in the early 90s, it was the case that cryptography
technologies were very rare, so I think it was up to 40 bit keys were
allowed, but of course that’s low enough that you can reasonably, I
think even back then, you can brute force crack them, so it wouldn’t
really be that viable for something like online commerce.
And then I think um the, I don’t know what you want to call it,
technology, cryptography, folks, enthusiasts, slash experts uh on the
then sort of growing networked world were really, you know, arguing for
why this technology could be really enabling and there’s good reason
for governments in the US government in particular.
To be cautious and treated as a weapon because, you know, in many ways
you can point to the Allies winning World War II, that was basically
done through science and one piece of that was maybe the atom bomb and
the Manhattan Project, but less dramatically was the cryptography story,
right? The Alan Turing and the Enigma machine. And the fact that one
side could read the messages, another side couldn’t, and it was that
asymmetric key cryptography, that was the technology that essentially
allowed the Allied communications to stay stay secret. So thinking of
that as effectively having won that war, the greatest, certainly most
destructive conflict in human history, and then being really cautious
about who has access to that seemed quite reasonable even, I don’t
know, 40, 50 years on from said war. And yet, the things that
potentially enabled were so great.
And of course now we live in that time where as you said, SSL and that
little lock icon that you see in your web browser makes it possible to
have this huge, I mean, what would the world be like without online
commerce in a pandemic age, right? Just to name one thing. So, I’m glad
we won that, or let’s say the people on the side of more access to
encryption and privacy protecting technologies won that fight, but as
you said, it definitely wasn’t guaranteed.
Now, coming to Muse specifically, historically, we’ve had everything,
in fact, we even say this when you first fire up the app or first log
in, which is we basically say everything stored on your device locally,
it’s private. That’s important to quite a lot of people, sometimes for
very practical reasons. There are, for example, an attorney that has
case notes in there, but in many cases just coming back to that sense of
privacy allows you to be freer and if you feel like you can write stuff
down and not feel like the NSA is looking over your shoulder, um, and
that’s just a better state to be in creatively. But now we’re starting
to move into much requested features that allow us to not be essentially
in the iPad silo. So right now we already have a browser extension and
an iPhone app. There’s a very simple capture into the iPad, but
eventually we would like to imagine that you spans all your devices,
that’s wherever you need it to be. So that’s the multi-device side of
things, then it gets even more interesting with the multi-user side. Of
course, we know that all these collaborative tools like Google Docs and
GitHub and Notion and FigMA have really supercharged our work in the
modern world and certainly for remote teams like ours. Now Muse has a
different use case, which is more about developing ideas than making
these end work products. So what role exactly the collaboration and
sharing side will play for us is not fully known yet, we’ll explore
that as we build this stuff out. But here we are confronting this thing
where we on the team value privacy. We know that many of our users and
customers value that a lot. It makes you feel freer, but then we also
know that being able to access your stuff from all your devices and
share things with colleagues and friends is immensely powerful. So
you’ve been leading the charge a little bit on thinking about the
particularly the technology sides of that trade-off. Where are we at
right now?
00:21:55 - Speaker 1: Well, let me start with the way this is done in
almost all apps today, note taking productivity style apps.
There is a central server that’s run by the tool provider and that
stores all of the users’ data in a way that’s accessible to that
company.
So you might have a table that’s like documents and has the data for
all documents for all users in it, and then. When you fire up your app
on a device, it talks to the server and says, Give me the latest data on
this document, and then it renders it on that device. And then if you
share a document to another user, that just becomes metadata in the
database that says for this document row, this user ID can access it. So
when that user’s device requests a document, they can have
authorization to get that data.
00:22:41 - Speaker 2: Right, so when I make a new blank document in
notion or Google Docs, type in 3 characters, those 3 characters go into
a record in a database somewhere in Google’s servers, and that the
cloud, as I believe they call it, is precisely what makes it so easy to
share because if I want to send this to someone else. That I need to
take it off my device and put it on theirs. It’s already in Google
servers. Google essentially has ownership of that. I’m just accessing
it through this client or front end and so giving one other person or
some number of other people access through their client or front end is
a relatively straightforward operation, right?
00:23:14 - Speaker 1: And notably with these modern cloud-based tools
like Google Docs and Notion, you typically don’t even have the data
locally.
So if you type in this document, save, exit, and later you’re off the
internet and you want to open up your document, well too bad the data is
not there. So that’s the standard approach, and we remain open to doing
that for use. It has a lot of benefits in terms of relative ease of
implementation, of course, providing all of the features that you want,
as well as things like backups in the case that the user loses all their
devices or something.
But we’re also very interested in exploring a second way where you get
the benefits that we’ve associated with cloud-based collaboration,
being able to access your data from any device, being able to add
collaborators and collaborate in real time, all of those things without
the tool provider in this case Muse being able to read your data.
So the way I pitch this is like signal meets Google Docs. You have the
security model of signal where data is and then encrypted and you’re
talking to your collaborators and only you and they can read that data,
but you have the rich documents, multimedia collaboration, multi-device
synchronization that you would associate with Google Docs, and that’s
quite a hard technology and product problem, but we are looking into it.
00:24:26 - Speaker 2: You and I were both co-authors on a paper called
Local First Software.
And this was much more research outward thinking technology of sort of
removing the cloud from the equation completely. Which is not what you
were just describing there, but it does have some of these same elements
of trying to make it so that it’s less about what’s out on these
servers and more about what’s on the individual users’ devices. I
think we touched on encryption briefly, but I think, I mean, as we
described in that paper, we don’t necessarily think that building a
truly 100% local first application is really in reach for certainly for
a small team like ours today. So it’s really parts of that we do think
are achievable and other parts maybe are still a little bit more, we’re
waiting for the technology to get good enough.
00:25:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I might say that I still think local
first, at least as I understand it is possible for us.
The thing that is less valuable and interesting is pure peer to peer. So
there are some apps or technologies where if you and I are
collaborating, we’re sending packets back and forth directly to each
other, and there’s no server interposed, which has obvious potential
security benefits, but it also gives you a certain resiliency.
Against DDOS and other issues with a central server.
And for me, having servers on the internet is not necessarily that big
of a deal. And in many cases, there’s just no way around it.
For example, you need to talk to a central server to get apps onto your
iPad because Apple requires it. And for me, the bigger deals are that
central server being able to read all your data and you not being able
to read and write your data if you’re not connected to the central
server.
So the world that I imagine is one where you potentially have a server
or even servers, but the servers are more like symmetric nodes, you
know, they behave more like any other node like your phone or your
tablet, and it’s not so much of a special superpowered case.
00:26:19 - Speaker 2: And then on the encryption side, you, you
reference signal and I think one of the places they’ve been very
influential is, I wanna say they started as this open whisper systems
sort of security consultancy or something like that, and they not only
made this secure messaging app, but they wrote a lot of articles and
sort of publicized their approach, and that was something that’s then
been picked up by others, including WhatsApp and Telegram and I think
the hard part in this is usually the key management, right? So this is
asymmetric key cryptography basically relies on the person having this
block of data someplace and no one else having that data, but that’s
tricky because that person has to keep track of it. Maybe it’s a bit
like a physical key. You lose a physical key to your house, you
potentially go to a locksmith and they can crack it open for you the way
that these digital keys work, if you lose it, that’s it, you just
can’t get access to that data again.
00:27:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so there’s a couple of things going on with
an app like signal. You might break it up into key management and
cryptography. So on the cryptography side, this is like, OK, assume
magically for a second that everyone has keys and we know who has which
keys, then you need an algorithm for using those keys to encrypt the
data. And there’s been a lot of work on that in industry and in
academia. It has been, I think, quite focused on the messaging use
case.
And one of the things that we’re excited to do with Muse if we do
pursue this end to end encryption path is making it more general case.
Like, let’s encrypt data structures and documents and not make
something that’s very specific to messaging.
Also, in the case of Signal, I do think they make some specific
trade-offs that are more appropriate for the grade of security, if you
will, they’re looking for like signal needs to be resistant to powerful
nation state actors. And in order to do that, you need to make some
specific trade-offs that maybe wouldn’t be appropriate for a
productivity tool.
But anyways, yes, that’s what happens on the crypto side, but then the
key management side.
That’s a whole big challenge, and many people will tell you that key
management is actually the harder of those two issues, and there are
different ways to do this.
There’s the fully distributed web of trust type model where you build
up a model of who has which keys based on a series of ideally. In-person
interactions. So, you know, you and I might meet in real life, we would
exchange keys, and we might also exchange information about other people
that we have, and we would sign that information and then over time, you
kind of accrete up this web of process where the name comes from.
That’s kind of the most distributed, but least practical model.
The most practical, but least secure model is just, you ask the server
who has what keys, and that’s very convenient. You get all the benefits
of a centralized server telling you exactly the right answer. The
downside is the server can just lie and say, this is Adam’s key, when
in fact, it’s just a server’s key and it’s read all atoms data.
And the thing that I’m most intrigued by and that we’re exploring a
little bit with views is more of a middle ground where you get some of
the benefits from the centralized registry, but you also get some of the
benefits from direct or decentralized verification, especially where you
need it. So one example of this in Signal, I think they have this set up
where you can look up people by phone number and the signal will
essentially send your data to their devices, but you can also, when
you’re next to someone, you can verify each other’s QR codes and then
that lets you know that you, you in fact verified. This person, I think
it gives you a stronger level of security. So I think there’s more
things we can do along that vein.
Another example from the Zoom white paper, you know, Zoom is working on
and then encryption. They said for a long time they have it, they don’t
really have it as we understand and then encryption, because they’ve
had this key management problem where everything was encrypted, like TLS
is encrypted, but they control and administer all the keys, so they
could just impersonate people if they want to. But they’re trying to
move to a proper model where you can, in fact, verify people if you
desire to. And one of the things that they’ll try is, on your Zoom
video, you’ll have a little code. And when you’re on the call, you can
say to the person on the other side, you know, the security code is ABC
123, and that’s very hard to impersonate in real time, obviously. So if
you’re correctly verifying the code on each side, you know, OK, this is
not being tampered with. And there are other techniques that they’re
exploring too. But this basic idea of you kind of mix the benefits of a
central registry for keys with more distributed ad hoc verification
where you need it.
00:30:14 - Speaker 2: I think we’ll be looking for the sweet spot there
between trying to give some reasonable privacy protections, but not
having a very difficult or very technical.
And demanding, for example, key management system. That’s probably
exactly what Zoom’s grappling with right now.
I think of the canonical example of inaccessible as something like PGP
and I’ve used the GNU PG for a number of years. I’m pretty good with
it. I’m handy at the command line and even so, it’s just very easy to
mess it up, get the wrong key, delete the key.
Encrypt the wrong thing, it’s just very, very unforgiving even for a
technical user and so way, way out of reach for kind of more casual
use.
And SSL is a great example, as you mentioned, HTBS websites is a great
example where we did manage to find a way that was a middle ground of
real solid encryption that really does make a difference in terms of the
things that enables, but it’s very accessible. It does not require some
kind of deep technical cryptography, key management thing in order to
get the benefits of it.
00:31:24 - Speaker 1: The last thing I might say on key management and
crypto and user interface trade-offs and stuff is that to us it’s very
important that we design this all holistically.
There’s a lot of research, for example, on cryptography schemes that
assume key management or on collaboration product designs that assume
the server can just read all the data and In order for this to work with
Muse, we need all of the product design, the collaboration technology, the
key management, the cryptography, the mental model of how people think
about documents that all need to line up. And I think that’s why this
has proved quite challenging for us. It’s not something that I think
very many people have grappled with, but I’m optimistic that if we can
get all those things to line up in the right way, it’ll be a very
powerful combination.
00:32:06 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m potentially excited for that, finding a
new set of trade-offs. I feel like most tech industry products are
essentially binary. You have either Totally local old school program
saves on your hard drive, great, you know, no one else has it, but you
just don’t have any of those sharing and collaboration features or you
have the fully in the cloud thing, which is just so incredibly useful,
and yet you just know, OK, I’m just giving up every single keystroke I
type into this. I know that Google engineers and Google machine learning
algorithms and the NSA and anyone in the future that may acquire this
data for essentially an infinite amount of time. I’m just giving up and
saying they have full access. It’s the trust us model, vendor model,
and I’m excited that we can potentially find a different set of
trade-offs, a different sweet spot, a different place to be that isn’t
one of those two extremes.
Exactly, yeah. And normally when the topic of privacy comes up in the
context of the tech industry generally, one of the key things is people
are talking about my data, and I think we’ve almost been entirely
talking about what I would call content and so maybe content privacy. I
make a document, I write a note, I record a video, that’s my content
and I want to know that I am the only person, me and people I have
chosen to share are the only people that have access to that.
But the other category and maybe even a more common one to be in these
discussions is more call it analytics or you can call it telemetry data,
and it’s a really interesting question when you do frame it as data
ownership, if there’s something like a motion sensor, for example, a
smart home kind of motion sensor that is logging entry and exit to a
location. If I put that in my home and I’m logging that into a computer
I control, it feels pretty clear to me that that data about the comings
and goings in my home is mine. But if it’s in another building, say a
public building, and I walk in and my arrival is recorded, and of
course, you know, cameras, they’re your faces, you know, in the data,
is that mine? Well, probably not, but then I kind of, that is part of
the discussion. It’s like, well, wait a minute, you’re kind of
recording me or tracking me. I feel like that belongs to me somehow or
you’re invading my privacy and it’s, but then you’re, you’re in that
other person’s building, you know, the building is a public place or
not something that belongs to you, so it’s a funny thing to discuss in
a way.
00:34:25 - Speaker 1: Yeah, OK, so to unpack that, I think there’s
actually 3 different things going on there.
One is the classic analytics data, and the example that I might give for
that is, say you have a web app and it’s indicating how often this user
uses certain features, like, do you use the export feature? Do you use
the print a PDF feature, things like that. That’s what I would think of
as analytics.
Then there’s the PII, the personally identifying information. This is
information that ties some abstract user to you as a real person. So
typically emails, as IN names, plus addresses, phone numbers, these are
things that take an abstract account, you know, user ID, whatever, and
tie them to Adam Wiggins. And then there’s this third issue of data in
public places. I think that’s another huge challenge and to my mind,
those are 3 different quite hard issues.
00:35:11 - Speaker 2: And notably the, you know, I mentioned GDPR in
passing before cookie warnings are this huge thing in Europe where
basically almost any site you go to pops up this morning and it’s kind
of regulatory things gone wrong where they were trying, I think quite
reasonably to say like if a site is going to track you in some way that
they should seek your consent.
But now, essentially, most websites just do a kind of blanket consent
seeking because most websites set some kind of cookie, but the detail of
it actually is that it only matters exactly as you said, if it’s
personally identifying some way, if it’s it’s sort of tracking you
around.
So there are a lot of cookies that you might set that are more kind of
anonymous or more kind of general telemetry, but are not about me
specifically.
And so for example, the Muse website does have analytics, you can see
that if you do view source, but it does not have a cookie warning and
that’s because the type of analytics that we use is essentially
anonymous. It doesn’t track you around, it doesn’t connect to what
you’re doing somewhere else, it just counts essentially.
Gets to our site, which is very useful to have. It’s nice to know,
especially with refers or whatever, it’s, you know, if there’s
suddenly 1000 new users pop in, wow, where these folks come from? Oh, I
see we got linked on some high profile site. We can see that in our
analytics. It’s very useful to have for our business.
00:36:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and GDPR by the way, is I think a good
example of the importance of systems thinking. I think the failure of
that legislation, and I, I mean, that perhaps sounds blunt, but I think
that’s the correct assessment was due to not thinking about it as a
systems problem where you have to deal with the realities of what are
people actually going to do, what our business actually gonna do, what
are the capabilities or non-capabilities of the government, things like
that.
I do think that the differentiation between analytics and PII is
important and good.
To my mind, those are just very different beasts as well as being
different versus content. This is something that we’ve kind of caught
up in discussions with users and, you know, sometimes a privacy
fundamentalist who says, you know, everyone has a right to privacy, no
data should be ever transmitted over the network without my explicit
permission. You know, maybe, but the reality is, it’s hugely valuable
information that for most people has relatively low cost in terms of
their privacy cost, if you will. So it’s not surprising that people end
up sort of making that exchange. It’s much easier to, and therefore
cheaper to offer software if you have access to this analytics data,
whereas it’s a relatively low cost to individuals in terms of their
privacy. I do think the PII and content stuff is much more tricky, and
PII is also slippery because you can collect the data that’s like,
quote unquote anonymous, but it’s actually very easy to deanonymize if
you collect enough of their screen size OS version, browser version,
yeah, the browser.
00:37:55 - Speaker 2: Fingerprinting stuff which is for a little while I
was following kind of the Tor browser world of things, which is another
one of these.
Well, that’s even a step further on the privacy focused products, I
think.
It’s very interesting stuff that that team is doing trying to make
truly anonymous web browsing. And one of the things they have had to
face up against is the browser fingerprinting, which is exactly what you
said, which is sort of knowing the exact resolution of the screen and
you know what version of the operating system they’re on, you tie that
together with some other data, some time stamps and things, you can work
backwards from there to pinpoint someone, at least that it’s the same
person repeatedly surprisingly well.
00:38:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I also think that the PII information can be
separated from contact information and used to something interesting
here.
We do require an email to use the app because we need to be able to
communicate with you for various reasons.
But there’s no requirement that the email is like your only email or
your canonical. email that it matches any other emails. So a lot of
people just put in their default personal email, but a lot of people
will create an email that’s specific to muse, kind of like a muse
specific inbox, or they’ll just use like a burner email that has no
connection, no identifiable connection to their real identity. And
again, this is an example of where you can tease these things apart. You
can separate out PII from ability to contact someone from analytics
information from content information.
00:39:16 - Speaker 2: And speaking to use on the kind of analytics side
of things, I mentioned our website, but the product itself, the iPad
does report back analytics on usage, and that is for improving the
product.
Huge one, for example, is crash reports. So when iPad OS 14 came out a
little while back. We embarrassed to say had a very rocky patch for a
couple of weeks of crashchiness, and that was partially changes in the
OS, partially with problems on our side. We eventually sorted it all
out, I’m happy to say, but if we didn’t have reliable crash reports to
be able to see, first of all, that there is a problem, and secondly, to
try to hone in on what that problem is, and then once we’ve fixed it,
you know, we roll out a new release, has the rate of this particular
kind of crash gone down. That has a big impact for our ability to not be
blind or trying to improve the product.
But it also includes things like just features. So a little while back,
Leonard was redesigning the action bar, which is what comes on the
screen when you tap a blank space and you get the little couple of
buttons down at the bottom, and we were really pondering whether the
undo redo were worth including because they took up a lot of space and
most people use the gesture or you can use the keyboard shortcut in the
case where you have the keyboard. And so we thought, well, is it really
worth the screen real estate this takes up and we could actually go ask
this question of what percentage of people. are using the buttons or
what percentage of the time versus using a gesture or keyboard shortcut,
and I forget where it came out. I think it was like 15% or something
like that, 10 or 15% of undos were from the action bar button, and I may
say, you know, that’s just enough. I think it’s worth keeping. We’ll
make them a little smaller maybe to represent that so we can make
product choices.
And of course there is ways to, I don’t go ask people, of course
there’s, you know, you should be doing that and occasionally we get to
observe people using the product and so on. But the ability to go and
get real data about those kinds of questions, they really help us to
improve the product and so it can become a better product faster.
00:41:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. And again, this seems to me like an
imminently reasonable and good trade-off for both sides involved. If we
had to develop use without access to this information, it would be much,
much harder, and it would be worse product.
You know, maybe it would cost twice as much or maybe be half as good.
But is that worth this very marginal amount of privacy and In terms of
analytics information, I don’t think so.
Now, I’ve discussed a lot of this in terms of favoring a sense of
trade-offs and opt in decisions over fundamentalism in any direction. I
do think a huge issue with privacy again in the electronic realm is
it’s very hard to understand what’s going on. You know, Muse, I like
to think we try to be a good actor, we try to do reasonable things and
nothing nefarious, but it’s basically very easy to do really bad stuff
in terms of privacy, especially on non-web platforms. And to my mind,
that’s actually a big technology gap. You know, how do we empower users
to actually make these trade-offs instead of just having to throw up
their hands. And there have been some movement on this. I think Apple is
coming out with some additional required information from developers
soon about what information you collect and how you use it and so on,
and that’s certainly a step, but I suspect there’s much, much more to
do here.
00:42:30 - Speaker 2: In general, I think I and most people would point
to Apple as one of the best actors in terms of moving the ball forward
on.
What users can expect privacy wise, and I think this stems out from iOS
from the beginning was a very securely designed operating system, much
more than the classic desktop and server operating systems that that
came before, and they’ve continued to do that.
I think of something like the on-screen notifier when an app accesses
your clipboard, when they rolled that out a little while back, then
suddenly you saw all these slightly shady things that many apps were
doing, including, I think. TikTok pulling from the clipboard on every
single keystroke, for example, and you need that, you need a clipboard
that can move between apps and apps that are going to do interesting
things need to access the clipboard, but finding ways to try to surface
that so that people who are not acting in good faith, not using the
operating systems capabilities for the benefit of the users, but for
their own benefit, or at the very least just being deceitful perhaps
about what the user expectations are versus what they’re actually
doing. So certainly got to give props to Apple on that. They’re not
perfect, but they’re definitely one of the best players, I think in our
industry, certainly at that scale.
00:43:40 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean, lots of good things going on
there and it helps when you have control over the platform because you
can manage access to things like the camera roll and the microphone and
so on.
I guess my point here is that I think there’s just a huge gap
remaining, especially as you look at the meat of the data and the
network connections.
You know, apps, they can basically talk to anywhere on the internet they
want, and they can do whatever they want with data that you input into
the app. So a good example of this is perhaps you have an app for
composing a message. The app can, and in fact, many of them do, just
send every keystroke. Type, regardless of whether you hit send or when
you hit send. So, you might not realize it, but when you’re drafting a
message, whoever is running this app has a copy of that draft forever,
even if you layer decide, oh, that’s actually not a good idea to send
that to backspace. A, that’s really questionable, but also it’s really
tough to manage against. Like, what would the interface be that prevents
apps from doing that, or even alerts users that it’s happening? It’s
hard.
00:44:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I have a tendency to type messages in
progress if they’re anything more significant than just a, you know, a
few words for a quick reply into my local text editor.
Very programmer type thing to do, but first of all, I like the better
editing capabilities, but it’s also the sense of knowing that it’s not
a cloud connected thing, that it’s truly, you know, when I hit that
close button, maybe it prompts me of whether I want to save but you
compare to the cloud where anything you ever put into it is just always
saved instantly, which by and large is a huge win for users, like
unsaved documents or things you forgot to save and then your computer
crashes and.
And whatever, that has been a massive source of user frustration for a
very long time and this modern era of mobile apps and cloud that don’t
really have a concept of needing to save things and just everything you
type in has ever saved is mostly a big user experience when, but for me
personally, yeah, when I’m composing a message, I like to know that
it’s in this ephemeral place and that if I decide, ah, this isn’t
quite right or whatever, I just delete it and I know it never went
anywhere.
00:45:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, fair, that makes a lot of sense.
Oh and by the way, on mobile, another huge way that the mobile platforms
achieve security is just banning huge categories of stuff, especially
arbitrary code execution, plug-ins, extensions, and these are
capabilities on the one hand, are incredibly powerful.
You could argue that they’re basically required for getting a lot of
the power user workflows that you see on desktops, but they would be
super gnarly to sandbox and To be clear, I’m not saying that that’s a
wrong decision or that Apple or anyone else hasn’t done enough or that
they’re making bad calls here. It’s more to point out that I think
it’s an incredibly important research problem. Is there a way to get
the benefits of third party plug-ins and security at the same time?
Right now it’s very much one or the other. In the same way that is it
possible to get collaboration and and then encryption at the same time,
you know, it’s an open research question to see if you can figure out
how to do that.
00:46:25 - Speaker 2: A little earlier you mentioned the term privacy
fundamentalism.
And I like this concept of trying to just better understand how much
does privacy matter to people, how much does it really matter? And for
us, you know, from a business perspective, we can sit here and in fact
we do talk about big philosophical things that we believe in regarding
privacy and what the technology industry should do and the things our
society are going to be grappling with having to do with this, but
we’re a small business, we need to do things that, you know.
Makes sense practically for us in places we invest effort, time, energy,
money, or places, you know, that is zero sum. We could be building out
other features and if we’re looking into and then encryption to make a
signal style thing for creative professionals to share their little
notebooks, you know, that comes at the expense of other things.
How important is it really to our potential customers? And one of the
pieces of prior I was just kind of looking at when we’re thinking about
this episode was essentially a survey of people’s attitudes about
privacy.
And in this case, I think it was like an internet of things kind of
category, so I think this is in the context of smart home or something
like that. But I like that they broke things out into three categories
in terms of people’s attitudes.
There was the privacy fundamentalists, which you described, which were
people who would trade off almost anything for the privacy aspect of
things. And then you had another category which was also a small group,
but still a significant one which they called privacy and Concerned,
they just said, who cares? Nothing I do is that interesting. Google has
all my data anyways, what difference does it make? I don’t care.
But then the biggest category by far is what they call the privacy
pragmatist. That’s certainly the category I put myself in, which is
this is something I care about. I think it is important. It has impacted
my life in direct ways in the past, and I do see it as a big and
important topic for our industry, for our society going forward, but
I’m not willing to trade off everything for it. There’s a bunch of
other things that I care about in terms of the utility of products that
I’m using. And so finding that balance, I think, at least when I put it
in this frame, I’m going to make a wager that I think a lot of users,
both current and future are privacy pragmatists.
00:48:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s right, and I agree on
privacy fundamentalism, I think that can actually mean two things. I
think it can mean that one as an individual has very high standards for
privacy, and I think that’s totally fine for an individual to say, and
I think for some people, it’s absolutely the right decision.
For example, if you are acting as an informant, if you’re doing
something that the government doesn’t like, so on and so forth, right?
That’s the correct trade-off to make. The thing that I am not as
sympathetic towards is the sense of privacy fundamentalism that sort of
the entire system should be subject to it.
And this is where I come back to this idea of privacy as a fundamental
human right. That sounds very appealing. But on the flip side, it’s
saying that no, you should not have the ability to choose to be a
privacy pragmatist. You shouldn’t be able to use software that takes a
different set of trade-offs with respect to privacy. And that’s
something that I’m not very sympathetic to.
And I would furthermore say that I also think it’s valid that you want
to live in a society where many or all people choose to be privacy.
Fundamentalists or choose to have very strong standards for privacy, but
I think we need to recognize that’s an enormous amount of work. It will
cost many, many millions of dollars to develop and operate that
software, and it will require perhaps trade-offs in terms of our day to
day experience with the software. And if you kind of ignore that cost,
you’re fooling yourself and it’s being intellectually dishonest,
you’re gonna end up not achieving that. One other possible angle on
privacy fundamentalism is again going back to governments, there’s a
possibility that a loss of privacy is a one way, very destructive
ratchet, and that for that reason, you want to be very careful. This is
the sense that once a government has access to data, they might be
extremely reluctant to forego that grip. And over time, they’re going
to tend to get access to more and more through various means. And if you
see the endgame as being bad, which some people do and some people
don’t, but if you see that endgame as being bad, then you’ll want to
resist by basically any means possible, the progression of that ratchet.
00:50:37 - Speaker 2: Well, talking about governments makes me want to
recount my personal journey into thinking about privacy in a broad way.
I think for a lot of Americans, it was the case that the Edward Snowden
incident, which revealed how much kind of digital surveillance the US
government was doing on its citizens was a bit of a wake up call.
Now, for me, I think I’d always had the vague sense that, you know,
this is something important and I know digital technology is going to
change the game, but I don’t think I’d given a deep thought and by
just a coincidence of life, this all was sort of unfolding right as I
was moving to Germany.
And I watched the startup I was working for at the time in Berlin, they
just organized a little outing basically to see this documentary
Citizenfour in the theater, which was a very interesting experience
where they followed Edward Snowden around the camera, and this was You
know, before the news had broken, essentially, and so you see all that
unfold, and you see the crazy lengths he goes to, you know, the tails
Lennox distribution and putting a blanket over his head, uh, is actually
a very reasonable security precaution when he’s typing in his password,
that sort of thing, a very interesting film.
But that in turn led to me having kind of a lot of conversations with my
colleagues there, many of whom grew up in Germany, and for them it was
very much in the recent past, the East German Stasi, which was kind of a
secret police that had, I think, at least as far as we know, is the most
extensive government monitoring of its citizens to date.
Some crazy thing like 1/3 of the entire East German population was a
Stasian farmer. And when these records were revealed when the Berlin
Wall came down in 1989, and these records were revealed to the
population and people realized how much had been tracked and largely
using at the time the new technologies of things like small microphones
and wiretaps and, you know, recording things, tape and stuff like that,
just the extent of it just shocked people. They had no idea that such a
thing could be possible.
Actually another great film worth checking out a fiction, but I think
captures this well. It’s called The Life of Others, German film that
sort of depicts a fictional Stasi officer and what they’re doing and
they’re monitoring.
But yes, I spoke to these folks who, this stuff is in their living
memory. They grew up when this was happening, right? This is only now 31
years ago at the time, 24 years ago. And they said, you know, we know
what it looks like. Maybe I had almost a little bit of an innocence, you
might say, insofar as being this American where I guess I basically just
feel like most of the time, you know, government can be bureaucratic, it
can sometimes be incompetent, but ultimately, most of the people that
work in government and the systems that are in place are basically there
to serve the citizenry. And yeah, there’s a lot of trade-offs about law
enforcement getting access to wiretaps and stuff like that, but
ultimately they want to do that to catch the bad guys, keep us safe, all
that kind of stuff. And speaking to the German folks where they said,
you know, no, we’ve seen what it looks like to have a society where
government so heavily monitors its citizens in the name of protecting
that society, right? Everyone that worked. You know, in this state
surveillance apparatus believed they were doing something really good.
They were keeping their home safe. And I’m not saying I necessarily
converted to seeing the world that way. I do see it as a series of
trade-offs, and yet that was a powerful experience for me, and I think
has influenced strongly how I see this topic as it unfolds in the
technology world.
00:54:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, and I think it shows how
dangerous it might be to just assume or hope that everything will go
well if we concentrate an enormous amount of data in a very legible way
in one or a few powerful entities.
00:54:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Silicon Valley is maybe already grappled
with this a little bit, which is you have a bunch of young optimistic
people building powerful new communications and other kinds of digital
technology, and they tend to think about the positive case, you know, I
think people who get into tech tend to be optimists, they tend to think
of technology as a force for good, and they’re not thinking about the
ways that it can cause harm. It’s a, you know, technology is neutral
and can be used as a weapon, can be used for harm, can Decay the things
that a society holds dear, and I don’t think that’s a reason to fear
it or to kind of have a knee jerk reaction, but I do think there is a
clear-eyed sense of, OK, as we open up brand new ways to do all kinds of
things with our information life thanks to these digital technologies,
what’s that going to mean and not to say that we can fully know or
fully predict what the impact of this stuff is, but I think being
mindful and having some caution as we go. That certainly goes for you
and I who work on new products where we’re trying to bring new
capabilities into people’s lives. What are the risks, what are the
downsides and certainly the privacy product issues that we’re grappling
with right now are very much in that category for me, for sure. Well, if
any of our listeners out there have feedback, for example, we’d love to
hear how you think about privacy and digital tools, go ahead and reach
out to us at @museapphq on Twitter, or you can email us at
[email protected]. We always like to hear your comments and ideas for
future episodes. And Mark, I certainly hope you’ll keep us in the loop
about how you’re thinking about these trade-offs on the technology
side, on the product side, and on the philosophical side as we continue
to explore what we can do with the collaboration and multi-device
capabilities of Muse.
00:56:11 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, I’m really looking forward to this
work.
00:56:14 - Speaker 2: All right, have a good one.
00:56:15 - Speaker 1: You too, Adam.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think at some point I would love to go back to
just work on, I don’t know, album artwork, or just lock myself away in
a cabin and just draw typography. But for now, I feel like there’s some
stories I want to tell. And for some of those stories to really
resonate, they need to be put into people’s hands and experience. And
so until I’ve told those stories, I feel like there’s unfinished
business.
00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for
thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about use the product, it’s about
mus the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins.
I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our
guest, Jason Yuan. Hello. And Jason, you are a prolific creator of all
sorts. The one that struck me as very interesting from your background
is that you got your start in stage design, which you described as a bit
of a two-way interface. I’d love to hear about that.
00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think what’s interesting about stage
design and theater design in general is that It’s so inherently
multidisciplinary. So even if you say I’m designing on a show, you
might mean costume design, stage design, set design, sound design, and
all of those have to be choreographed perfectly. They have to work
together.
And then, obviously, the stage needs to be used by the actors. It needs
to be functional. People need to be able to enter and exit. It needs to
be safe. So that’s one aspect of like, I guess the people that it needs
to work for and then obviously you have the audience who rely on. The
culmination of how the stage design works in conjunction with all the
other elements to bring them into a world and to tell the story. And so
it’s fairly high pressure because so many people rely on it and because
theater is sort of in the moment, if something doesn’t work or God
forbid if something unsafe happens, like that’s on you, partially, so.
Design has always sort of felt very high stakes, even in interaction
design now where you could always ship a bug fix or you might be able to
delay the launch or incrementally improve things over time in theater
unless you’re a very prolific show, you don’t really get that luxury.
00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can imagine the live performance element
creates a sense of, well, I suppose drama would be the word for it, but
for the people who are creating it as well, you have this showtime
moment and everything’s got to come together and work right, and if it
doesn’t, the problems are all up there for everyone in the audience to
see very dramatically.
00:02:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, something that frustrates a lot of
people that I’ve worked with in tech, sort of, I’ve always carried the
show must go on mentality. That sometimes, you know, applies, but then
if you’re working on indie projects where like there’s no real
deadline, people are like, why, why though? It’s ready when it’s
ready. And I’m like, no, like the show must go on. So that’s been
interesting trying to find elements I want to keep from my past now that
I’m practicing something that’s fairly different.
00:03:01 - Speaker 2: At some point you made the transition to the
digital technology world and lots of interesting work in your portfolio
there, including Mercury OS we’ll talk maybe a bit on a little bit,
which was how I first discovered your work. You’ve also been working on
MakeSpace. What else is on the recent portfolio.
00:03:21 - Speaker 1: You know, after Mercury came out, there was so
much feedback from people who wanted to see it become real in some way.
I worked on several smaller spin-off projects that were inspired by the
initial vision, like, I don’t think it was ever designed to be a thing
that I saw ship as this. It’s a very point of view.
Mercury was designed from a very specific point of view through the lens
of someone who is frustrated that my own mind as someone who lives with
ADHD and PTSD and just, I find a lot of things particularly stressful in
computers like file systems and how I have to constantly open and close
apps and switch context uses. It was a very specific point of view there
about like operating systems, but, you know, trying to think about a way
to make some of the ideas actually happen.
Has taken up a lot of my past year, I think. And in some ways makespace
is kind of an offshoot of that in the sense that I think the spirit of
reimagining something that I felt like could have a lot more potential
exists in Maspace.
And, you know, when Asa and I first started working on it, the code name
was untitled OS. So I think from Makespace came this fascination. Of
like exploring platforms, but then also exploring smaller, more
contained experiences that attempt to deliver sort of flow state to
people. I think I’ll be sharing some of them soon, is what I’ll say.
There’s two particularly I’m excited about. The first one is sort of
looking at screenshots as a metaphor, sort of inspired by. I saw this
guy tweet once like screenshots and then you save and then obviously
Omar’s work on screen notate.
00:05:15 - Speaker 2: Universal solvent is usually the way we put that
now.
00:05:18 - Speaker 1: A screenshot sort of experience is something I’ve
been working on with a collaborator called Tyler Egert, and he’s
currently at this startup called Reple. And then a separate project is
sort of like a take on a to do list that sort of imagines to do lists in
the context of your social media feed. But that’s a much longer
conversation, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of that soon.
00:05:40 - Speaker 2: We’ll be excited to see those. Well, yeah, I’ll
link the projects we’re mentioning here other than the ones that
aren’t out yet, of course, in the show notes. So yeah, Mercury OS,
which is kind of a rethink everything in the sort of the operating
system interface, and then MakeSpace, I can see the thread there, I can
see how that’s related. Makespace is an app for lack of better word for
kind of spatial video chat experience if I’m understanding that
correct. But you can see how that’s an offshoot or a different way to
cut the kind of the operating system space, but maybe a little bit more
focused specifically around the video meeting domain. Does that sound
about right?
00:06:18 - Speaker 1: Yes, and I think the original prototype that Asa
hacked together was just spatial browsing. I think video was the second
thing we added.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, so it kind of started as a vision for a spatial
browser.
And when we brought Wei Wei into the project, she had all these amazing
ideas about like bidirectional linking and then we had ideas about like
how to use web apps, like how this might enable people to disassemble
and reassemble web apps.
And like use them as modules and how you could essentially author your
own ideal interface environments.
And then sort of the faces going into that experience is sort of like
COVID was raging here.
It was having a grand old time and we just felt like, why not coexist
next to, we think about breaking boundaries between app silos. What
about the silo between what I do on my computer and people.
So yeah, that’s a little bit about how that project came together.
00:07:14 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good way to tee up the topic that
we’re kind of theming around today, which is rethinking the OS, and I
wrote an article recently kind of talking about some core interactions
and I listed off some of these what I would call concept projects. You
tell me if you think it’s fair to group these together, but I put
Mercury Desktop Neo is one that our colleague. Leonard, the Muse
designer did while he was in university. There’s another one called
artifacts, which is very interesting, goes very deep, and all of these
have maybe the quality of sort of really rethinking from the ground up.
It’s not just how do we remake one part of this, but if we really had a
blank slate, how would we, how, how would we want. to be knowing what we
know now in terms of new software, new paradigms with, yeah, whether
it’s social media or video capabilities or really large screens or
touch screens.
A lot has changed since the core interactions that make up certainly the
desktop operating systems, even mobile in a way is now well established
compared to all that’s come up.
00:08:19 - Speaker 1: I remember I seen Desktop Neo and then this other
project artifacts and around the time that I was writing the story
around Mercury, and I remember thinking like, oh fuck, am I allowed to
swear?
00:08:32 - Speaker 2: Oh, it just means that when I edit the XML for the
episode, I have to flip the explicit switch from yes to no. Although it
is very good that the podcast RSS feed format lets you flag specific
episodes. I had to first do this for Josh Miller from the browser
company. He was an enthusiastic swearer, and I felt like editing that
out would be taking away some of the. The character. So please proceed.
00:08:55 - Speaker 1: You, you can feel free to add a bleep somewhere. I
think that’s always fun and dramatic and it feels like you’re in a
sitcom.
Anyway, so, yeah, I remember seeing Desktop Neo and artifacts, and I was
like, fuck. People are gonna be like, you ripped them off, because the
things that I recognized was this desire to extend the desktop
horizontally.
To have the component of like your windows should be able to flow
horizontally and off this arbitrary bounding box.
And I think like Mercury is definitely not the first project to sort of
envision that.
And I really think that all of these speculative projects point towards
that future of people wanting, for lack of a better word, more space,
and also, I think it’s something that I would be curious to see.
Happening in some way. I mean, one could argue that with iOS 14 widgets,
I know that it seems like quite an incremental or even catch up, so to
speak, but if you look into the future and you imagine like widgets and
also app clips, and now things can live in your home screen that are
more than just icons, and then your home screen having the ability to
obviously swipe between pages, some interesting connections there that I
would be curious to see where that leads.
00:10:11 - Speaker 2: Hm. Mark, what’s your take on rethinking the OS,
these concept projects, and then more to the point maybe where they
point, which is, do we need or is there value in a fairly dramatic
rethink of the fundamental interactions versus, you know, what we have
is tried and true.
00:10:30 - Speaker 3: Well, I think it’s certainly always worth trying.
There’s so much upside if you get it right, if you land on something
interesting. So I’m glad to see all the experiments, and I do think
that the fundamentals underpinning all of our work are changing, so
we’re getting bigger screens, we’re getting touch screens, we’re
getting new. Graphics pipelines that are much more GPUs and
parallellyzed, and I think a huge one is we’re getting very different
economic models around the operating systems and the platforms and all
of those have, and I think will continue to drive changes. So iOS was
about touch and the new economic model mostly. And things like these new
desktop explorations, I would say are more powerful, bigger screens and
touch moving into the desktop platform and things like that, as well as
having enough processing power and media that things become much more
rich, interactive, visual in a way that they weren’t really even 10
years ago. So, I think it’s worth pursuing.
00:11:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s one of the things I think a lot
about with what do computing for productive uses look like in the
relatively near future is we now have this huge screens, the multimedia
stuff, you know, video is just absolutely everywhere, for example, but
we also have the diversity of input. This is one thing I like a lot
about the. iPad stylus, touch with the fingers, trackpad, keyboard, you
can throw voice in the mix there, and then if you go to, OK, everyone’s
waiting for that drafting table sized or maybe just IMAX sized iPad that
seems likely to come in the not too distant future or something like it.
And then you can imagine something that feels a lot more like a
room-sized thing where maybe you have multiple screens, which is already
the case that we all kind of have our phones sitting there in the
desktop and maybe you’ve also got the tablet. You got the voice
interfaces, you’ve got the different kinds of inputs, and you put all
that together and I don’t know what it adds up to necessarily, but it
does seem to imply some fundamentally different relationship with your
computing devices, even just how you relate to them in physical space,
your posture as you use them.
00:12:28 - Speaker 3: And speaking of the human element here, we’ve
done a kind of systems analysis of why might you different operating
systems to emerge. There’s also the human side, which is when you put
these new OS’s in front of people, you get a very positive reaction.
They say things like, yes, this is how I want to feel as a user of my
computer. It’s a very visceral reaction. And so I think there is a,
there’s a gap between how computers currently work and how people want
to feel when they’re using their tools. And that I think is still a big
space to explore.
00:12:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think when I started with Mercury, it
started as a purely like surface level ergonomics project.
It was so funny. It started as a design system of like, let’s make
things look better. And then I’m like, wait, no, like that’s not
actually why I don’t like my computer.
Things look OK, generally, and I’m like, OK, well, maybe let’s make
things move better. And then I’m like, hm I don’t know that the
choreography is necessarily a problem that much. And then there was a
phase where I realized that the ways that we are conditioned to think
about interaction design. When I first started learning about it, it was
like you use sketch, and then you, which is basically illustrator, and
you have art boards, and then you link art boards together and then you
basically make a choose your own adventure presentation thing. And
that’s interaction design. And I realized like the real ergonomics part
that I felt like was missing was the in between. Each moment of
transition should feel like a moment of power, should feel like you can
sort of change your mind or keep going, but the way that we’ve been
conditioned to design sort of digital products don’t really. I don’t
really feel like it affords that way of thinking about how interfaces
work, unless you use something like origami or court composer or code.
And so it was at that moment that I’m like, maybe this ergonomic
problem goes a little deeper, and that’s when I started to think on
more of like a system level. I think before that, I didn’t feel like I
had permission to, you know? During my internship at Apple, it was
actually a friend of mine, Marissa. We were just having a conversation
about Siri one night and she just started asking like, do you think this
is really like what voice interfaces should be like? Do you think there
should be all these different modes? Do you think that having a little
brick in your phone that holds all the power is the right way for
computers to sort of expand into and. I had just never thought about
things like that before. I was just trying to make screens that moved,
that looked and felt ergonomic. I wasn’t thinking about the actual base
layer, why? And so after that, it sort of felt like suddenly a whole new
world of just asking questions and digging myself into a rabbit hole was
just possible. And the process behind thinking of Mercury was very
similar. It was basically that, but in a design process. And I think
what you’re saying about people being drawn to These very tactile
experiences, I think, in the process of researching for Mercury, I read
a lot of like white paper style things. And I was just incredibly bored
or not stimulated by them because I’m like, yeah, you kind of have
these drawings that look like memes of diagrams that look like they go
in a patent. I care about this because I happen to like designing
computers, but you put it in front of anyone else, and they’re like,
why should I care? And so it became apparent that If I wanted to create
a vision that people cared about, that I would have to focus a lot on
the craftsmanship, the visual design, and also the storytelling
delivery.
00:15:45 - Speaker 3: It’s funny you mentioned that Adam and I were
just talking about this this morning. You basically can’t explainm to
people with text. It just doesn’t work as an empirical matter. What
really works is video and animation. And I think this is resonant with
what you were saying, where you need the right medium to convey your
emotional message.
00:16:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I learned about the concept of a tool for
thought after moving to the bay. It’s one of those things where I just
like kind of don’t get it, where kind of everything is a tool for
thought. Um, but I kind of understand why there is this specific
community that’s very obsessed over thinking about thinking tools,
essentially. And I think giving something a phrase gives it power sort
of reference points. And so I think absolutely like, I think when I
first found news, I can’t remember the copywriting, but I can remember
seeing the gesture on the iPad and seeing things zoom in and out and
seeing writing being just all over it and just thinking like, yeah,
that’s how it should work. And I think it’s successful in that it
makes things seem very obvious in hindsight, and I think that’s sort of
a quality that I really aspire to achieve when I design.
News is interesting because you can tell a lot of OS or platform level
thinking goes into it and it’s an app. And same with sort of makespace
where even though internally we think about it as like a social
collaborative operating system, it’s an app. And then my instinct is
that there’s going to be a lot more in the coming years slash months,
and I would be curious to see like, you know how Android has like
launchers, that, but for my desktop experience.
Though I’m unclear how that might happen. But something very compelling
someone said to me was like, Google search is basically an OS now. And
when I think about operating systems, it’s less like Unix and like how
you actually what this is, and engineers are probably going to send me
death threats, but like I really don’t care. Why should I care about
that? As a person who likes computers and likes to play with computers,
I just want to worry about how it feels and looks, and that’s really
how customers were users. I don’t like that word either, but customers
would think about it or people. So double edged sword, probably.
00:17:51 - Speaker 3: I think this is also kind of inevitable because
operating systems are, by definition very general and complex. It’s
about being able to host other programs, and it’s the nature of complex
things that they inevitably arise from simple things. I forget the
person this is named after, but that’s a lie if we can put it in the
show notes.
So that’s why we see most of the platforms evolve from something
simpler, either from an app, so I would put the Web browser in this
category, it started as an app on, you know, Windows and Mac and so on,
but now it’s basically a whole other platform.
Or you see basically a small kernel of fixed apps evolve into a
platform. This is the iOS story. There wasn’t an app store, remember,
it was just, there was the calculator and the male app and Safari, and
that was, you know, kind of it. If you want something else too bad. But
eventually they generalized it into a real platform, a real OS that can
run user supplied apps.
00:18:36 - Speaker 2: If you want that back even further, I usually
think the iPod is the start of the iOS story. So it really was a
completely dedicated device for playing music and had a very, very
simple, but in fact innovative interface, the little wheel was
recognizable. It was fit for the purpose of on the go, music listening.
Very simple screen, but all designed to really solve that problem
extremely well in a way that maybe MP3 players at the time didn’t. And
then yeah, that evolved upwards into more and more complex platforms to
the point that today I think it’s one of the world’s most
sophisticated places to build applications.
00:19:12 - Speaker 3: And this to me is a really interesting and
important research question in. Operating systems, what’s the path that
you take in the path dependent sense to get to the place you want to be?
Like you need to have a vision, you need some provocations for, OK, I
think we want this style of operating system, but it’s very much a
social, economic path dependent question on how you actually get there.
It’s extraordinarily expensive to develop an operating system these
days. So you can’t just suppose the final step.
00:19:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and now it also has to live up to
everyone’s expectations of not only what it can do, but the ecosystem
that it brings. And I think, you know, I have zero idea how any of this
will happen, slash if it’s ever going to happen, but I would love to
live in a world one day where instead of having like 500 note taking
apps, I can just piece together and buy a la carte elements of different
experiences that I like. Obviously there’s an entire conversation
around like how capitalism works and what’s profitable and blah blah
blah, but, you know, one can dream.
Mainly I’m just tired of I’m tired of opening all my Adobe apps, and
they’re basically like a canvas that you draw things on and then
different ways to make things adhere to or not adhere to the grid and
treating things as faster versus vector blah blah blah.
Like to me, uh, it just seems like mentally I just envisioned it as a
canvas that I can bring in different tools as needed and that should be
how my workflow is, which one day like, it would be amazing if something
like Makespace would turn into that sort of platform. Given its
inherently spatial nature.
00:20:50 - Speaker 3: The Canvas thing is interesting. We’ve seen that
emerge as a key content type, I would argue over the past few years. By
Canvas, I mean it’s free form, it’s mixed media, uh, you have some
flexibility, so Figma, Makerspace, makespace, Muse, a lot of these apps
have developed this and they’re all kind of circling around a similar
idea. It’s like this thing where you can put whatever you want, however
you want. And that hasn’t quite been baked into an operating system
proper yet, although it’s funny, it kind of harkens back to the old
school classic desktops, which we almost forget about, but that’s like
the OG canvas.
00:21:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Something that we’ve talked about a lot
internally is how used to our people to this canvas metaphor when they
don’t spend their days clicking around in FigMA or using Adobe Suite.
00:21:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s sort of the opposite of the
particularly the phone innovation of you have one app at a time, it’s
full screen, and that’s all you can do. And actually that’s an
improvement for certain cases on the desktop complex windows that
overlap with buttons on them, and you can minimize things and they have
these menus and there’s focus and there’s all this confusing stuff to
keep track of, but at the same time.
Time for a more powerful environment where you do have multiple
documents open, you need to move things around between them. You have
different kinds of media, different kinds of things that you need to
look alongside each other, move stuff between things, copy paste, and so
on, the mobile one app at a time is the wrong metaphor. And so yeah, in
a way, these tools where the primary document is a canvas that you can
put things on in a very free form way that does. and back to the GUI
operating system, uh, metaphor that came out of Xerox PARC, but there
you had something where you have one document, which is sort of your
desktop, maybe you have 4 if you have virtual workspaces, and then the
windows that you arrange, they’re very kind of temporary, right?
They’re just what’s in memory, there’s no persistence, there’s no
sense of a board and certainly I can’t share it. I guess there’s
screen share, but.
So in a way, there is something to that metaphor.
I think what you find when you reinvent or rethink something is that the
best qualities of a previous or of an older idea come through, but you
also leave behind a lot of the things that maybe you don’t want or you
can improve upon it in a dramatic way, but you can only do that, I think
by having a little bit of a break.
It would be hard to imagine, for example, Linux, Windows and Mac.
Evolving into Figma or evolving into makespace or uses. I don’t think
that could happen. They have too much baggage in history.
00:23:25 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the primary change that I’ve
experienced in my year in the valley is, you know, last year I was all
like, it’s not too late to we start delete everything, you know,
everything sucks. We need to start from scratch, just everyone to stop,
like, no more software.
Um, whereas now I’m a lot less. I mean, I still live for speculative
proposals or provocations. I love when people ask questions and when
people rebel a little bit, but I think working on the sort of future
stuff like it’s Tends to be a very lonely process, and you don’t get
that satisfaction of like opening night when like audiences actually get
to experience the work and walk away with a little bit of their lives
may be changed. Sound like such a theater kid right now, but I swear
that part has not died.
Silicon Valley can’t kill me. Um, but I think I’m learning more as a
creator to hold both truths at once, to have a series of clear North
stars that I think. would really help people that I’m curious about
exploring and also finding practical concrete ways to head there. So
I’m not just like randomly in a lab somewhere, which is like that’s
fine too, but I don’t think I’m there yet.
00:24:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that duality is really important.
You got to dream big, but also be willing to find ways to bring that
into practice.
I feel like you have the one extreme, which is, you might call it ivory
tower head in the clouds, dreamer thing, and it’s much easier to think
the big thoughts and the inspiring ideas because you’re free of the
baggage of, I don’t know, reality or the status quo or what have you.
But I think it’s ultimately unsatisfying and I think I’ve seen people
who are Maybe tend towards that dreamer side, be even frustrated or even
become bitter because they think I have all these great ideas. I figured
it all out, but those ideas, if they don’t see them come to fruition
somehow, it ultimately feels sort of unsatisfying.
But the flip side of that, of course, which is people who are really in
the day to day and the practical and being very pragmatic and
incremental, which I think certainly the tech world has a very strong
iterative, you know, just make your MVP and build on that. thing which I
think is very good for getting going and discovering a problem and so
on, but sometimes you do that that means you’re losing the ability to
think big thoughts, dream big dreams, go further, move past what’s here
today.
And so there’s some, I feel there is some way to resolve that duality,
although in a way, I think as an industry and certainly for me as an
individual, I’m still trying to figure out exactly how you get the best
of both worlds and hopefully the worst of neither.
00:26:04 - Speaker 1: I kind of just do things through the lens of
culture to get anything to actually take off or have impact.
Essentially, you need to change culture in a certain way or to have an
idea influence culture. And I think there’s a place for it, you know,
speculative or utopian dystopian ideas, and certainly, you know, those
ideas are exciting and can excite a lot of people as like sort of
aspirational pressure. Which is a term I stole from Asa, where you make
something and then if enough people care about it, then that creates
momentum towards that one day. And then the sort of more incremental
thing is a slower way to more immediately start bending culture. I
don’t think everyone should care about computers as deeply as like,
maybe I do, or obviously you guys do, cause people have their own stuff
going on, divorces, and I think that’s it. I think that’s the only
thing that happens to people.
But Um, so like, like we don’t have time. Like, don’t make me fucking
worry about that. But at the same time, because computers are basically
worlds that we live in now, people should feel empowered to think about
it or question it if they want to. It’s sort of like, I guess politics
in a way. It affects you whether you like it or not. And I think more
people feel empowered to have an opinion on politics versus on like the
operating system. And I think I would love to help make that
conversation more accessible in some way.
00:27:24 - Speaker 3: You might not be interested in operating systems,
but operating systems are interested in you.
00:27:30 - Speaker 1: The old saying, oh my goodness, is that it really,
that’s that’s the same.
00:27:34 - Speaker 3: Well, it’s a classic thing with politics, right,
00:27:37 - Speaker 2: um, yeah, right, you can ignore that I don’t want
to think about that, but in the end it does affect your life and that’s
why it’s important for us all to be concerned citizens.
Now happily, part of the magic of capitalism or just the world we live
in generally is that there’s specialization. And so it’s OK that
there’s people like 3 of us who for some unknown reason seem to be.
obsessed with computers and we’re devoting our careers to trying to
make them better as we, um, as we see, take that word to mean, whereas
there’s others who are obsessed with other things and they can work on
those things and hopefully we can all together make a better world for
all of us.
But that said, I think it is a really great point. I’m often struck
when I speak to friends who are not from the tech world, and I can talk
about. I don’t know, a design decision that Facebook is making, for
example, and for them, it’s more like just a force of nature. There’s
no the concept that there’s people behind it who are actively making a
decision to do one thing versus another thing versus that it’s far
away, yeah, unchangeable thing, doesn’t even enter their minds. And I
understand why technology is hard to understand if you’re not in the
field. Even if you’re in the field, frankly, it’s pretty hard to
understand to keep up with everything, but as you said, empowered to
have an opinion at the very least seems worthwhile.
00:28:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember as I was trying to think about
Mercury or operating systems, I think certain people I worked with were
mentors would be like, why is it something you care about? Like, are you
gonna ship this thing? Like, are you gonna go propose it to like Craig
Federation? Like, why? Like it’s not gonna ship. What’s the point? And
I disagree still, I think. If we just stop caring about anything that we
can’t change, you might as well just stop caring, period.
Certainly these days it’s quite easy to just associate your life away.
I mean I’ve I’ve certainly been doing a lot of that. I think something
that was very interesting to me when I first arrived here, I think one
of the first things.
I did was my friend took me to Dynamicland. but my friend informed me of
who Brett Victor was slash I, I knew who Warrior Dream was, but not who
Brett Victor was, you know, and then about Dynamic land and that it
existed.
So I went and like the first thing that I thought was like, oh my God,
people should be using this to make theater. This is interactive
theater. Like, why isn’t this in my black box? Where are the artists,
you know? And that’s something that from what I understand, maybe
community outreach is not necessarily like a focus of theirs in this
present moment, but I think if you’re serious about getting people
excited and therefore affecting change on a cultural level, I think it
starts with getting culture makers excited and. It takes me longer to do
write-ups than to design things because it’s so important to me that
people who had no idea of why they should care about an operating system
can read the story I wrote and then walk away feeling like, yeah, I care
now too.
And I received lots of emails from people who are also had certain
neurodiverse tendencies or just like friends in theater who I didn’t
think I had permission. Like, I, I didn’t know that. Like, now I’m a
lot more angry at my devices, and I’m like, you’re welcome. And I love
that. I want to be remembered for making lots of people really angry. In
a good way.
00:30:56 - Speaker 2: Well, yeah, people in my life often point out how
I seem to be more dissatisfied with the digital technologies that we
interact with every day than anyone else they know, and that sort of
maybe seems like a strange, a surprising juxtaposition when I work in
the field and claim to enjoy computers and the internet and software and
all those sorts of things, but my patience for things that, you know,
are trying to hijack my attention. Or faces that are too slow, or things
that just treat me in ways that I think are not the way that these
devices which are designed to serve us and help us and make us better,
often do sadly these days, but it’s connected part of my passion for it
is precisely because I think we can do better. Yeah.
So when you talk about Brett Victor, his work is just the pinnacle of
inspiring, but as far as I know, he is not doing things to really Bring
his work to practical. He’s not trying to produce spin out startups or
take one of his code bases and make it open source so someone can build
on it. He’s trying to show what might be possible to get us to aspire
to something higher to to get us excited. And I know many people who
point directly to his work as something that got them maybe specifically
interested in design or specifically interested in productivity tools
design or specifically interested in. And user programming or some other
aspect of this kind of computing for thinking and productivity and
creativity.
And so you could say that that, you know, you could do it just that way
and Jason, I see your work is seeing a lot of that. You do these pieces
where it’s not just the design you’ve made, of course, but it’s also
like you said, the write up where your intention is to help people
understand why. And get excited and follow the story and you probably
would be OK to stop there. Now you don’t have much say over maybe you
lack the satisfaction of getting to deliver something all the way
through to a customer and see it put a smile on their face. But one way
to do it is kind of say, well, I’ve done my part, which is to inspire
and step away, assuming that you can make that into a livelihood and let
others kind of productionize, you might say. But it sounds like you
don’t find that satisfying enough, or you want to take it past just
that inspiration stage.
00:33:13 - Speaker 1: Um, I think if I lived in my ideal world, I would
never worry about shipping anything ever.
I kind of view that sort of more as art though, versus design in a way.
Like it feels more like a personal provocation expression, like a need
to do something driven internally and design is a lot more.
I interpret it as a service, and you could argue that doing aspirational
conceptual work is kind of a service, but I think of it more as art
versus design.
And so I think if I was able to, and if I had that pedigree and
following and just sweet, sweet cash.
Live in capitalism, can’t pretend to live out of it, you know,
whatever. I would do it.
To be honest, I don’t know how long I will spend in the tech industry
because I think at some point, I would love to go back to just work on,
I don’t know, album artwork, or just lock myself away in a cabin and
just draw typography.
But for now, I feel like there’s some stories I want to tell, and for
some of those stories to really resonate, they need to be put into
people’s hands and experience. And so until I’ve told those stories, I
feel like there’s unfinished business just for me personally.
00:34:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to me, part of the motivation for
bringing things into the real world is to understand if you got it
right, because here’s the deal with reality.
It’s so complex, you can’t actually understand it.
These design heuristics are about coming up with a better guess and then
incrementally perhaps arriving at the solution and really the only way
to know is to try it.
So that’s one of the reasons why I like the balance we struck with ink
and switch and Muse. You have this combination of academic thinking, far
out planning and vision. But then you also force that to confront
reality and see what comes up, and often it’s surprising, and it’s a
little bit of a bummer when your visions are contradicted by the cold
hard truth, but that’s important data if you ultimately want to move
the needle in the real world.
00:34:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love exploring all the interesting
gestures that you guys have in use, and there’s a certain point where
I’m like, if I wanted to take this out of a layer, do I just hold on to
it and then move and it turns out you actually just do that, which I
loved. I love when things just naturally feel like. Connected to my
intent in some weird magical way.
Just ergonomically, I love it.
And I think on the note of like designing productivity software, I think
something that I wish I had done with Mercury or just in general, is
thinking about all the ways that new paradigms are fun and playful.
Like, I’m sure notion and Air Table are exciting advances towards tool
for thought or whatever. But like, I don’t really associate
spreadsheets and databases with fun. It’s like intriguing, but it’s
not fun. And the thing you mentioned with iPod click wheel was it’s
just fun. It was inherently fun. There’s no like real reason why that
is more efficient than buttons or like a deep pad, but it was fun and
because it was fun, people cared about it and it was also great for
fidgeting, which I love. I think. Part of the reasons why I get so
distracted in social media nowadays is my computer. I can’t really
fidget. I can like move my mouse around and or I can like sort of just
like fidge on my screen just by like moving things up now. But the
interface itself is not really designed to let you fidget. Anyways, so
iPod was so fun, and I want to see more tools for fun. Or tools for
thoughts that happen to be playful and fun and really unapologetic about
it. Like I could care less about bi-directional linking, like I have no
fucking clue what that even means if it’s not fun and visually
palatable.
00:36:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is a huge deal. And to my mind,
the real poster child for this is emojis, and emojis, they seem goofy
and insignificant, but they’re actually a huge deal. They’re a huge
deal for Slack and to me, they’re a huge deal in notion. I was having
trouble. It’s like, isn’t this kind of just like Google Docs, but you
know, better and it’s like, well, yeah, but I can pick the emoji for
each of my docs, oh, you know, and it just it gives you much more energy
and it also allows you to communicate. more effectively, I would argue
so. Yes, I think that’s a big thread.
00:37:15 - Speaker 2: The fun, the playfulness, the maybe joy, I think
is one of the biggest things to come out of the mobile touchscreen iOS
world.
And of course, consumer applications sort of were the first to get that,
but I absolutely think yeah, even the term productivity tools I use that
just because, well, it’s the kind of the industry name.
But I think when you look at, I’ve used the example before of Slack,
and why I think Slack was successful is they make talking to your
teammates fun. And it wasn’t really that much fun with hip chat and
Campfire and IRC somewhat the Slack somehow tipped over between, I
don’t know, animated gifts and unfurl cards and emojis and a couple of
other things and just maybe the sleekness of the overall experience,
good mobile app and stuff like that. They just made it the thing you
wanted to do. And I think there is a version of that for almost any,
yeah, what’s a spreadsheet for the TikTok generation, right?
00:38:11 - Speaker 1: So a cursed phrase. Oh my God, no. Oh my goodness.
00:38:17 - Speaker 2: But sort of embracing that, hopefully not the bad,
you know, I think there’s a lot of downsides to the kind of engagement
oriented social media stuff that is dominating a lot of, let’s say
mainstream design thinking, but there is a version of that which does
come down to the fun, the playfulness, the emotiveness, the just general
joy you get when you think I want to use this. to do the thing you’re
going to do more of it.
And that’s, that was absolutely our thinking with Muse. We’re a little
more understated. We’re less of the emojis everywhere and animated
gifts everywhere thing, but we do try to make it fun and interesting and
fast and a little bit playful to interact with your ideas.
And so I think thinking of our overall mission to help people. Be more
thoughtful when I talk to people about sort of deep thinking who maybe
they know, maybe, for example, there’s an important decision in their
life, they should really think through deeply, but it’s really hard.
Deep thinking is hard. But if you had a tool that made it fun and you
thought, well, this was a chance to use that thing, and I know it’s fun
to use that thing, so therefore, you’re likely to do the activity, then
maybe just a few more for more folks will want to do that.
00:39:25 - Speaker 1: I feel like play and fidgeting are just my tools
for thought. I can’t think if I’m strapped to a chair somewhere. And
some of my most exciting sort of revelations just always come from doing
improv, which I deeply miss. But it seems like the world is kind of just
on improv right now, in a way that’s really hard to say yes to. Anyway.
00:39:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, a little more specific nerdy tangent
is like part of the reason why I think spring dampening works so well is
because when you give something physics, Spring dampening here you’re
talking about when you have a transition of some kind that instead of
being a linear movement, it sort of speeds up at the beginning and then
slows down as the transition is coming to a close, yeah.
00:40:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, except I don’t even like to think of it as
a transition.
I kind of think of it as just reaction, um, because like if something is
like If, if something is responsive to physics, you like bounce
something a certain way, then theoretically you could also bounce it
from the other way and you can start to play with it.
And it doesn’t actually have to serve a concrete purpose. It’s just by
nature of being responsive to physics, it makes it more playful because
it kind of grounds it in the real world somehow. Whereas like, the
reason why I don’t think of this transition is sort of Because it’s
not like a set timing that you’re like, this transition will last for 1
2nd, it means if it’s the middle of doing something and you want it to
stop, you Very difficult to describe. But that’s the more nerdy take on
it is that because when you think about motion, not animation, but
motion design and how things respond and react to your touch, they
enforce, they create the physical world of your application. And when
there is that sense of physics, there is a sense of play because then
people can start experimenting with like plotting things together or
breaking them apart or things like that. And to me, that’s fun.
Although I feel like I hesitate to promote this.
00:41:26 - Speaker 3: It’s like very trendy right now, so you’re just
like throwing it everywhere and I feel like not everything has to bounce
be bouncy, but anyway, well, I think you’ve come to a very interesting
distinction here because transition and animation, it almost implies
that there is this point where as a user, you’ve indicated what wants
to happen, the machine will now take over and for the next 200
milliseconds will direct the activities and until then you can’t do
anything else.
And at the end, OK, the transition is complete. Now you can go resume
clicking on things, whereas physics is more like every millisecond,
you’re doing something and the machine is responding to what you’re
doing and you’re never giving up control. And to me, the animation for
the point of showing something isn’t as interesting as making it
responsive to what you’re always doing, right,
00:41:58 - Speaker 3: the physics.
00:41:59 - Speaker 1: My pet peeve is when. Everyone designs motion for
interfaces on the aftereffects and just have these like really specific
3 point motion curves and I’m like, literally no one’s gonna like that
after the first round. They think, oh, this is fun and smooth. And the
second time they’re gonna swipe something and it’s gonna have this
perfectly choreographed transition and you’re like, oh, I don’t feel
like that’s because I did something. I feel like I just triggered a 1
or 0. And that’s actually like, I think like for touch, like bounce and
spring dampening works because your fingers are soft, so there is the
inherent element of the input device has bounced. Whereas like, I
don’t, for example, for mouse cursor interactions, since it’s very
much like your mouse is either down or it’s not, it might be less
appropriate.
Yeah. But on the most surface level, it’s fun and that was my first
impression, you know, I wasn’t like, oh, this responds to my input and
therefore, it’s a prosthetic to like, no, this is super fun swipe to
unlock. So therefore, I shall sell out my soul to tech forever.
00:42:56 - Speaker 2: Maybe what you said there ties together a couple
of themes we’ve touched on here, which is the mouse versus touch and
how the system should respond in terms of like how things feel within
the physics of the virtual world you’re interacting with.
I think there is this tendency, Mark usually calls it transliteration,
which is if you take an application or a type of application that’s
sort of for the desktop and you put it on to say a tablet or. vice
versa, to basically bring across some of those same basic interactions.
But in fact, the mouse or the trackpad is a much more precise tool than
the finger. And there’s pros and cons to that. Sometimes the precision
is actually really annoying. It’s too precise, it’s too fussy, and
then other times it’s what you want, but in any case, the system
responding to that.
And so I think, for example, one of the places that the Windows. The
surface platform falls down a little bit is that it essentially treats
those as the same thing. When you touch the screen, it’s essentially
just kind of moving your mouse cursor there and clicking. And you know,
that’s a very sort of obvious thing. They’re both ways to point, so
why not do the same thing? And to be fair, they were pretty early, so
they were still just exploring this, but a more thoughtful or a more
considered way to go about it is to think of each of these input devices
and as we have more and more of them and the diversity of them, as we
talked about before, and making each one serve its different purpose,
and that also means that the physics of the system should react and feel
different. And obviously, it will take us a long time to build all that
out potentially, but I think it’s really worth doing to make the kind
of creative environment, at least that I want to have.
00:44:31 - Speaker 1: When I think about things like head tracking or
eye tracking or even voice recognition, those are the moments that I’m
curious to look at.
You know, not necessarily like, hey Alexa do blah blah blah blah blah,
and it’s like very clear start and end, and you have a single thing you
want to do, but more like as you’re in the process of doing something,
maybe there are small ways that your body naturally responds to
something that informs some part of the UI or how, I don’t know.
That starts a whole other conversation about muscle memory, modular
interfaces, pros and cons, but it is a specific curiosity of mine,
especially as I think we start moving away from.
We’ve been accumulating more and more devices and now I think we’re
naturally headed to a world where your points of contact and essentially
the, the power of the computer is more distributed.
It could be all over your home, it could be everywhere you go because of
headphones that you’re wearing or certain headsets. And I think when
that world arrives, I’m interested in seeing the ways that interfaces
change to sort of see if interfaces kind of move towards the direction
of like multimodal input, if at all.
00:45:39 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s exciting. This is another
example of where the fundamentals are changing because until basically
very recently, voice recognition wasn’t viable, wasn’t fast enough, it
wasn’t cheap enough, it wasn’t accurate enough, and it’s just now, I
think, crossing the threshold and probably similarly with eye tracking,
but I know for a while they’ve had specialized hardware that you can
use at labs but it was expensive and uncomfortable. That’s also, I
think they can do it with commodity cameras now. So interesting times
for sure.
00:46:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and something that I hope to see more in new
tools for thought or productivity tools is just, as I mentioned, more
embrace of just fun, physics, and also things just being more sexy in
general. I think making something desirable is Oh God, I was reading
this tweet the other day of some like thought leader going like, if you
have to pick between like what you’re wearing in the morning, that
you’re not doing real work, I’m like, shut the fuck up. Like,
literally take your Patagonia vest and I don’t know, jump off the go
but that’s too harsh. Just like, no, like, that’s so important to
people like that. That’s what makes people human. Like we just
naturally or instinctively, we just find certain things desirable, and
that’s OK. And that should absolutely be a part of the consideration
and focus for when we design new sort of environments and interactions
that we hope people will care about.
And right now, Adam, I think you mentioned that it’s very hip and
trendy to work on things like, you know, perhaps Instagram. Although
probably not anymore, but like maybe TikTok, spreadsheets less. And I
think part of it is just the inherent fun factor. And the other part of
it is like, you don’t really associate culture with spreadsheets, but
you absolutely associate culture with social media.
And so I really think that if you can create software with the intention
of creating a cultural movement or a cultural shift, that will really
perhaps help you in some way. I say you as like a disembodied you, not
like you, um.
It’s like if I were, I don’t know, a meme generator, I would just have
that diagram of Steve Jobs with the liberal arts and technology
crossroads in his background, but yeah.
00:47:45 - Speaker 2: Now I love that tools are about the communities
and the culture that come along with them.
We don’t use them in a vacuum. We don’t get excited to use them, and
we don’t continue to use them and we don’t certainly in a
collaborative work environment which we almost all find ourselves in,
yeah, sharing.
You could argue that for For example, a collaboration tool like GitHub
or one like Figma, those bring along with them certain culture. And
that’s part of why you, let’s say get into the tool and part of what
keeps you there and part of what shapes your work and part of what makes
it fun, and part of what inspires you or upsets you, maybe depending.
But the point is, it’s not this dry, sterile, just kind of solving a
problem and moving on. Uh there is culture with it.
00:48:30 - Speaker 1: I love that. And there’s that continued discourse
between culture and impact and what you’re making. And something I hope
to see more is like, you know, as we create these new environments to
live in and live with. That we become more aware of certain implications
or results of use and misuse, and that we take responsibility for those
results.
That if our tool for, I don’t know, if I were to create a collaborative
tool for thought and it was used to orchestrate DDOS attacks on women
and minorities, I would personally take a long hard look on like the
things that enable that, the culture that I have created around my tool
and recognize that like.
I’m a human, I’m a creator. It is OK to bring your own perspective
into things because you’ve made it, and that’s just something that is
on my mind a lot these days, and there really is no way to ensure that
your tool is not being misused to harm people, I don’t think.
00:49:27 - Speaker 2: Design ethics has become much more of a topic or
perhaps technology ethics very broadly and more here you see this in
social media news and news tools and things like that that are more
about spreading ideas on a wide scale, but one could imagine that coming
to more sort of productivity tools style space and then maybe you want
to think ahead and think, OK, so the folks that were working on social
media 15 years ago didn’t really picture the ways that their work could
be used for harm.
And of course, you can never stop something. There’s always the
potential to use something for harm, but there are ways to design it
that maybe encourage more positive uses and strongly discourage more
negative uses.
And I think there’s a tendency for tech world people who skew young,
who skew optimistic to just think of the positive cases and not think of
the negative cases and therefore not hedge against potential risk and
think about the responsibility of the power that they’re wielding.
00:50:27 - Speaker 1: Something I hear a lot is like you’re so
negative, but I think at the root of everything, I think I’m very
optimistic about what people can be as a species, as cultures, and what
technology could help with. I’m very optimistic about technology and
people in general, but because of that optimism, sometimes it is
expressed as anger or negativity, but I really admire those who kind of
just believe.
Uh, fuck, I’m just gonna head into some, I’m gonna not say sappy shit
on your on your podcast. I’m gonna save it for my memoir or my stand or
my Netflix special.
My Netflix special is coming out in about 15 years. It will be called My
Career, and that is the joke. Um, I, I predict massive success from over
two audience members, but um. Yeah, oops, nice.
00:51:22 - Speaker 2: I actually just watched uh David Attenborough’s
uh sort of career memoir. So yeah, all, all you got to do is have um 60
years of really impressive career like that guy, and then you two can
have an inspiring Netflix special.
00:51:38 - Speaker 1: 60 years is a long time. Um, I don’t know. It,
I’m curious for you both is thinking about computers and tools for
thought and operating systems and essentially world building. When was
the first time in your life that you noticed that instinct or curiosity?
00:51:59 - Speaker 3: For me, computer programming in particular came
relatively late. I didn’t really get into it until college, which is
late for a lot of people that are, for example, currently in the
industry, but I’d always had an interest in building things more
generally, you know, model planes and rockets and Other things like
that. So I think I just more struck on the right medium eventually
versus a general interest.
00:52:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, for me, I certainly was fascinated by
computers from my first encounter, but I think it probably connects to
exactly what you said, which is the world building. So the interest in
computers and the interest in games kind of came together and I pretty
quickly got on from playing games to making my own games, and making
games is fundamentally an act of world building and the really appeal to
the systematic part of my mind. And I think it definitely influenced a
lot of my views on the world, which includes calling back to right where
we started, which is that the world around us is mostly constructed, the
society we live in, the governments, even the physical structures,
they’re constructed by humans and we can choose to make them different.
very hard to change those things, but they’re not, well, I would say
not set in stone, but some things actually are set in stone.
But actually, even those are changeable. You just need a good
jackhammer, right? And thinking of it as both this combination of, if
you think systematically about the emergent effects of the world you’re
building, whether that’s a game or something in the real world,
something economic or social.
And then similarly, as we have these increasing virtual worlds, even
beyond games, but productivity tools. And collaboration spaces and
online forums for a meeting to converse with our fellow citizens about
the society we all live in. These are all things that we construct and
we have the ability to think systematically about how the design choices
that go into them, the outputs in the form of the world that we live in,
and the way that that causes people to be prosperous and happy or not.
And so to me, yeah, right from the start, I think that shaped how I see
everything about the world.
00:54:06 - Speaker 1: When was that start for you?
00:54:10 - Speaker 2: I think maybe about 8 years old.
00:54:12 - Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah. Oh my goodness.
To paraphrase one of my friends and collaborators on Makespace Maily,
she often speaks of her different disciplines. I mean, she’s an
interaction designer and also a DJ and also she’s interested in the
culinary arts, and she just thinks about like those different practices
as kind of canvases of art, and then You connect the canvases through
your life to eventually create a path of your own.
That’s purely paraphrasing and probably fucked it up. My fascination
also began with video games. Tomb Raider was the first movie I ever saw,
very interesting choice for a 5 year old. But after that, I was just
obsessed with this idea that you could inhabit someone’s life and body
and adventure, and inhabit a space that might feel safer in some ways.
Obviously a very utopian view on computation. And then I started graphic
designing and PowerPoint. I don’t think I used a real design tool until
college.
00:55:12 - Speaker 3: It’s the power of general purpose tools.
00:55:15 - Speaker 2: Well, it’s to your earlier point that everything
is a tool for thought and so in this case, everything can be a way to
design, right? I do designs and text files with AskiR where needed, so.
00:55:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah. What’s exciting about talking to folks like
you is it reminds me of, and it opens my eyes to all the things that
I’m so deeply curious about exploring and learning about. And it’s
really inspiring in the sense that It feels like if you’re digging for
diamonds and the more you dig, there’s more interesting shiny things
and you just want to keep going until you end up burying yourself and
then you end up living in Oakland forever alone. But that’s a different
fanfiction.
00:55:56 - Speaker 2: That metaphor did not end the way I was expecting
it to.
00:55:59 - Speaker 1: I don’t know. I feel like if you dig a tunnel
deep enough, it’s eventually going to end up in Oakland. I feel like, I
don’t know why everyone’s like, I’m in Oakland. Like how did you get
there? But yeah, something I’m curious to hear your thoughts on. It’s
sort of, as I’ve been more acquainted with the culture of human
computer interaction, including important cultural figures and
milestones and perhaps dreams that once were.
I’ve moved through several stages of like, let’s say grief. Of like
denial and then sort of acceptance or Hm, that’s poorly phrase. As
I’ve I’ve accumulated more knowledge into this specific cultural dome.
I hear from a lot of people that their North Star is they want to
achieve Engelbart’s vision of computation, or they want to, you know,
make Brett Victor proud or something, something Ted Nelson, Alan Kay,
something something Xanadu, you know. And I’m curious to hear if that
sounds familiar and in what ways do you relate or not relate to those
modes of thought.
00:57:04 - Speaker 2: Oh, incredibly familiar. Mark, I’m curious to
hear what your journey was on this, but there was a kind of Let’s call
a research rabbit hole or just path to go down of discovering the works
of these visionary folks that you just described and seeing the big
ideas that they had and so long ago that it’s just really eye opening
when you compare to on one hand that we’ve achieved so much and
technology has come such a long way, particularly when you look at say
just the raw horsepower, computational power of computers, but then you
look and you feel like maybe we haven’t quite achieved. As much as it
seems like we should in terms of what computers actually do for us, and
all of those folks that you mentioned and others in that world are
absolutely a source of inspiration and ideas in work that I’ve been
doing in the last, I don’t know, now 5 or 6 years of my career.
At the same time, I do think you can over, not sure what the word is,
fetishize that, which is this kind of romanticized past or You know,
first of all, that these folks as visionaries, they didn’t fully manage
to make their ideas come true, and I think that is a gap and that is one
reason why I’m so interested in the topic we talked about earlier,
which is not just how to have the big inspiring ideas, but how to bring
them to reality.
And then the second part of it I think is that there is a version of the
kind of the Aristotle problem, right, which is you don’t move on with
new ideas because you’re so busy kind of treating the ancients as
having the ultimate wisdom and you just need to unlock, you’re
searching for the philosopher’s stone, and you know you can find it in
the books, the coded books written by the ancients, and if you just look
long enough rather than thinking, well, These folks were really
impressive and amazing humans that did amazing work, but at the same
time, I can do that kind of work too. And maybe there’s new ideas and
fresh directions for us to explore.
It’s not about somehow achieving some ideal that was set forth
previously, but more that we can fold those ideas in, and also learn
from what worked and didn’t work with them and then make new ideas for
an inspiring future.
00:59:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a lot of similar thoughts. For me,
certainly the desiderata that were laid out by these visionaries
resonate a lot. Things like computers should help us have better ideas,
it should feel amazing to use them, bicycle for the mind.
Yeah, so at that level, it makes perfect sense.
But when I was researching this body of work, it actually made me fairly
concerned because it’s so old, it means that something went quite wrong
or failed. It’s kind of like how every year we find older and older
cities and older and older human. Bones, it’s like we realize that more
cities and civilizations have risen and fallen than we previously
realized. So it’s actually just this aing set of cautionary tales. And
so that’s why I focus so much in my thinking and research on the
system’s problem of what’s the path, what are all the factors, and
again, really grounding in reality, because there’s something about
this problem that we don’t seem to get yet because we all say, bicycle
for the mind, let’s do it. But 50 years later, we’re not quite there
yet. So what’s the, what’s the thing that we’re missing? It’s
something that I’m always looking out for.
01:00:14 - Speaker 1: I don’t think we’ll ever be there. I think there
is always moving target.
And so my real benchmark now is sort of like when I set out to do
something, it’s like, how do I want something to feel? And then maybe
some work from like Xerox Park or whatever is an interesting poke at
that and it’s an interesting thing to build on the shoulders of.
But then ultimately, when I come back to the things that I’ve made, I
kind of just simplify it into like, does this evoke the feeling or
emotion that I wanted it to. And I find that it’s much less stressful
making that way compared to constantly trying to see if you can live up
to some impossible standard. Even as an industry, I think it is a
highway to burn out and cynicism. Like, I’m what, one year out of
school and I’m already like, maybe I’ll go into fashion, like that
seems like a more ethical industry and it’s like, and the narrator is
like, it was not, um, but. Um, but, you know, from talking to a lot of
folks here, like something that struck me was like, people didn’t
really seem to believe that I was creating based on like, how something
feels emotionally, or that that was a viable North star. But I look back
on some of the things I was trying to explore, and I just wanted things
to feel more fluid. And it led me to learning about all sorts of really
cool inventors and inventions and That sort of set me off the beaten
path a little bit, and I began to think like, oh my God, like motherball
demos like Englebar, like blah blah blah blah blah, bicycle, tricycle, I
don’t know, circus elephant for the mind, um, and, and I was just so
frustrated. I’m like, it feels like, I don’t know, Dumbo with its ears
clipped, but then one of my mentors just was like, you just simplify it.
Like, why did you start doing this in the first place? Was it because of
Englebar and I’m like, who? No, but. it wasn’t. I just wanted to make
something that felt fluid and felt playful and fun and mentally I tried
to guide myself back to just It’s the sort of the acting actor’s creed
of like, a lot of people think acting is about pretending to be someone
else, to pretend that someone else’s life is yours. But I think acting
is about honesty. It’s about finding the things that resonate between
someone else’s life and yours, the things that make you human,
emotions, mistakes, trauma, hopes and dreams and. As best you can
inhabit the things that are honest, and that’s how you can really reach
sort of the hearts of people. And so I feel like when I came to the bay,
a lot of people pointed me at certain directions that Progressively make
things feel less and less honest to me. I’m just now a year later,
finding my footing again of thinking like, maybe I don’t need to carry
on someone’s torch or try to impress someone who couldn’t give less of
a rat’s ass about me. Maybe I’ll be happier and more creative if I was
just more honest. If I was just honest about the things I didn’t and
didn’t care about. And I hope we create more spaces for people to be
honest with themselves and the world around them.
01:03:20 - Speaker 2: I think that is a lovely noteend on.
01:03:21 - Speaker 1: Thank you. Oh, exit my soapbox. Wait, no, the term
is get off my soapbox. I don’t really see how you would fit inside.
01:03:31 - Speaker 2: Maybe in the COVID times, you have a soapbox that
has a self-contained plexiglass room.
01:03:37 - Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. That’s my ideal habitat. If I
become extremely rich, I will move to a forest somewhere and live in a
glass house within walking distance to Boba and CVS. And occasionally I
will go on Twitter just to remind myself of. The fact that I can still
feel angry. But also hopeful.
01:03:59 - Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, if any of our listeners out there
have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello
at museApp.com by email. I really like to hear your comments and ideas
for future episodes, and great that you’re out inspiring us all, Jason,
to think bigger about things that we can improve and change about the
world, and thanks for coming on to chat with us today.
01:04:22 - Speaker 1: Thank you for letting me ramble for so long. I
feel kind of emotional. So yeah, thanks.
01:04:30 - Speaker 2: Well, when it’s such an interesting ramble, it’s
easy to do. All right, see you both around.
01:04:34 - Speaker 3: Goodbye. See you, Adam.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The purpose of design is really to marry the kind
of far out there crazy ideas with what can be practically achieved and
serve some practical function.
00:00:16 - 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’s Adam Wiggins.
I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam and Andy
from Andy Works.
00:00:33 - Speaker 1: Hi guys, thanks for having me.
00:00:34 - Speaker 2: It’s great to have you on. I understand that uh
you’re a woodworker. I was just looking at your clock project.
00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, when I moved to Seattle, I finally had
the space after moving from New York to open up a small woodworking shop
here.
00:00:48 - Speaker 2: And how would you compare doing things with your
hands where once you make a cut, you cannot take it back to the digital
virtual space that is your day job, let’s say.
00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it definitely requires a greater degree of
thoughtfulness, I’d say, and the material is certainly a lot more
expensive when you screw it up. But it’s been, you know, woodworking, I
think has just been a great kind of like new creative field to get lost
in and feel like a newbie again as someone who’s been in the design
field now for 16 years or so. It’s great to just kind of get back to
something and feel lost.
00:01:24 - Speaker 2: And maybe you can tell us just a little bit about
your background.
00:01:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I came into design really through filmmaking
first, and that was really sort of the first creative expression that I
had sort of growing up in a, you know, small fishing village in Alaska
and then found my way into design here in Seattle at the University of
Washington, studied graphic design, and then started finding my way into
this interaction field kind of combining filmmaking and storytelling
with design and communication.
This was definitely at the early years of product design, wasn’t
wasn’t even called UX or product design at the time. And came through
some different agencies, worked with Nike for a bit, worked at the big
corporation Microsoft for a while on a project called Microsoft Courier,
doing some ink and touch.
00:02:13 - Speaker 2: Courier, absolutely. That’s a, perhaps not a
commercial success, but a um say a source of inspiration for future
notebook computers, right?
00:02:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, we like to say it’s the new duo now,
it just took 10 years or so to finally get out there.
00:02:29 - Speaker 2: Unfortunately, in this business, being early is
the same as being wrong. Exactly. That’s a quote I often reference.
00:02:37 - Speaker 1: We used to joke at Microsoft that back in the
Balmer era that they were either 5 years too early or 5 years too late
with all their products. So in this case, maybe it was both. So 10 years
off.
But I did that for a while and that’s really what got me interested in
tool making in the digital world and so left Microsoft and then ended up
starting a company called 53 with some people from Microsoft. And that
was really about taking that idea of building creative tools forward.
And at the time, creativity wasn’t really a market that anyone was
really looking at. The iPad had just come out and we started to see a
lot of interesting opportunities with this mobile touch space on a
larger screen and came up with a product called Paper and Paper was like
a digital sketchbook and is still out there and doing well.
00:03:29 - Speaker 2: I suspect a lot of our audience knows paper and I
certainly think of it as being one of the first apps that maybe really
demonstrated the potential of the iPad, and especially back in those
days, you know, there wasn’t an official stylus yet, and it was a much
more nascent piece of. And yet if you saw an app like this and you
thought, OK, now I can kind of picture what this might be for, how it
could be more than just a big phone, not just a weaker computer. Right?
00:03:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s great because that was our
intention. I think people forget when the iPad first came out, it was
primarily marketed as a consumption device, you know, as Steve Jobs
leaning back on a couch on the stage there. Reading books and watching
movies.
And, you know, we just always felt like that’s one view, but really
technology for us really amplifies what makes us human, and a lot of
that is creativity.
So we just saw a lot of potential there. So we built paper, we built a
stylus called Pencil before the Apple pencil, and really tried to kind
of build out this ecosystem of creative tools. So we did that for a
while and then ended up joining up with We Transfer and I worked there
for a couple years heading up one of their products called Paste, and
recently jumped away from that to start up this thing called Andy works.
00:04:54 - Speaker 2: And maybe that brings us to how we in fact got in
touch, which is I came across here, let’s call it your uh initiating
blog post.
I don’t know, it’s the first article on your site in any case, uh,
called No More boring Apps, and in fact, that’s our topic today, and
maybe I can just scroll back in our, we have a slack inspiration channel
here, and I posted the link when I first saw it a couple of months back
or last month I guess.
And I have a couple of quotes I pulled out here.
One was, if you’re small, it’s to your advantage to be weird, you can
build apps that the big tech companies never could.
And secondly, when I use your app, I don’t want to see your company’s
KPI that’s a key performance indicator. I want to see your point of
view. And so those ideas being weird, particularly being weird and
small, and not necessarily surfacing the business’ needs, which I feel
so much of technology today is something where they’re asking me for
something because it helps their business, not because it helps.
Me and the point of view, the perspective on the world, which could of
course be wrong, but at least it can be unique and fit with your app and
fit with your team’s vibe and dynamic, that sort of stuff is what I’m
in this business for and hopefully is what we’re doing on the Muse team.
I’ll link the article in the show notes, of course, but Andy, maybe you
want to briefly summarize why you wrote that article or what you think
the thesis is.
00:06:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll try and summarize it as kind of
succinctly as I can, but That statement, no more boring apps really was
something of a rip off of the artist John Baldassari, who was a painter
back in the 70s, who famously, you know, at the age of 39, well into his
midcareer, done hundreds of paintings of landscapes, took all of his
paintings, lit them ablaze. And took the cremations and made cookies out
of them and it was a whole performance piece, but one thing that he did
is he proclaimed, I will not make any more boring art and recorded a
video of him writing that thousands of times over and over again. So I
just loved that story, that sort of like epic moment of kind of
renouncing your past and then going on to something else.
And he went on to become one of the seminal conceptual artists of the
20th century. And sort of hesitate to put myself at that same sort of
epic moment, but a few things kind of started coming together for me and
one of those was simply kind of looking around at the industry.
Again, I’ve been in this industry for a bit now and talking with
friends, you know, I just wasn’t finding that much inspiration from the
product industry itself. And the more I started to look at other design
disciplines, you know, fashion, architecture, industrial design,
furniture design, you see so many inspiring things there and when you
talk to people from those fields, they have their heroes, they have like
these amazing pieces that are coming out, people that are really pushing
the boundaries of what can be done in that field, even though many of
those fields are many decades if not hundreds of years older. Than
product design. And at first kind of thought it was just me, you know, I
was like, maybe I’m just reaching that age and I’m getting a little
jaded, but the more I started asking others, the more I started to hear
the same response, you know, people struggling to find interesting work
in this field.
00:08:28 - Speaker 2: And I’ll add on to that point by it was actually
just a couple episodes ago on this podcast that Mark and I were talking
with Josh Miller from the browser company and we got onto this topic of
architecture and buildings and how architecture we find inspiring both
because it’s sort of an active. Creation that’s like art, but at the
same time has these practical and functional elements, but notably there
we all got excited about this. We knew the names of specific architects
whose work we find inspiring. That’s exactly an illustration of your
point. I think that we look for inspiration outside our field, not
within it.
00:09:03 - Speaker 1: Exactly. And I think, you know, some of it is
because it’s a younger field, like some of those titans are probably
still yet to be really christened.
But I think all the ingredients are there for great things to happen.
You think about our field compared to these other fields, there’s so
many people in product design today and building products, it’s an
incredibly vast field. It’s one of the largest creative disciplines
there is today, and there are many more product designers than there are
furniture designers, for example, but you know, furniture designer
doesn’t struggle to find inspiration within their own field. That was
part of it, you know, part of it was just feeling that sort of
frustration and some people have asked, does that mean I can’t have any
boring apps, you know, does that mean, what about my bank app or
something a lot more sort of cut and dry? Does everything have to be
breakthrough and different? And that’s not really what it’s about. It
was meant more as a kind of manifesto for Andy works itself. So what
I’m trying to do with Andy Works is really push on this idea of design
driven products, a truly sort of design differentiated software
business. Because there really aren’t that many of those, I think when
you actually strip it back.
00:10:25 - Speaker 2: Certainly a word that people use plenty in this
world shaped by the Apple juggernaut, and that word went from being not
really a part of the computer industry that I was part of 20 years back,
let’s say, to being something that I feel like every company does talk
about use that word in some way, but it sounds like you feel like
they’re not getting quite right or at least it doesn’t push the button
for you.
00:10:48 - Speaker 1: I mean, I think for sure design plays a role, but
I think there’s a big difference between design, driving a business in
something like fashion. I mean, fashion, it’s clothes. It just needs to
be as functional as software. Like it still has a purpose and a
function, and yet there’s an expressive element to it that’s very
important. And there are fashion studios that wouldn’t exist. It’s
entirely about the design, right? And same with architecture, there’s
architectural studios that are entirely about the design, and it’s
really the design that sells the product. And something that I’ve come
to appreciate, I think more so over the last 5 years or so is, and this
is not a knock on business, but how much business drives everything at a
company. And it can be for kind of good or bad.
And I think a lot of this is gonna sound either really obvious or maybe
unintuitive, uh, depending on who you are, but business really drives
everything in a company and it drives the goals and the objectives of
what you’re trying to achieve as a company.
And design serves that goal, just like anything else, just like legal
development, everything else, all the other operations at a company. And
that’s not always aligned with people or users. And so if that goal, it
can be really be based on anything. And it can be based on some like
core revenue metrics that you want to hit, but everyone sort of has a
different pathway there to get to those goals.
And it’s not always coming directly through design.
A lot of products that we use today that we think are well designed,
they may be well designed, but I contend that a lot of them aren’t
actually design driven. Examples of things like, I mean, I love the
design of something like Airbnb, great design, great design team, but I
think the truth is that like, I don’t know if it’s truly a design
choice that you’re making when you go there. I think it’s actually a
number of other factors like price, maybe some other aspects of
convenience. There was a time where Airbnb design was not so good, and
they did pretty well, and they found a great foothold. It’s not to pick
on Airbnbs.
00:13:16 - Speaker 2: Is that partially a function of the business
you’re in or who your customers are, you know, maybe in the Airbnb
case, you just want access to the inventory that they have to offer.
Exactly as you can imagine something else where you mentioned the bank
example before, and I do think there is, yeah, we can come to the best
practices versus the more original. Approach, but I do choose banks
based on whether they have a good user experience in the way that I
interact with the services they’re providing me because lots of banks
can hold my money, but being well designed is in fact a differentiator
and a big one for me, a deciding one.
00:13:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think there are these key kind of
companies like that that really, for me, it comes back to how much of it
is what you’re doing and how much of it is how you’re doing it.
And I think design really comes into that latter portion. It’s really
about how you do it. So where everything else is equal and you’re
offering sort of the same thing as someone else, design really comes in
and helps differentiate it.
You know, paper is a good example of this. Paper was not the first
drawing out on the iPad. There were literally, you know, 40 or 50
others. That we looked very closely at and just felt like they weren’t
capturing the right sort of spirit of creativity and weren’t executing
on it very well. And we took all those insights and thought, well,
let’s formulate it into something else, something that focuses really
on some of the key things that we knew were really important to the
creative process.
So it took those sets of values applied to something that already exists
and I, I mean if you looked at paper just from a bullet point
standpoint.
It would have looked very boring, you know, if you just had a feature
list. It would have looked like nothing. I think it’s that really that
approach that you take that really makes it driven by design.
And I think there’s just so much happening today where people are
trying to find new problems to solve. And I think that’s great, but for
me, I’m at a place where I don’t feel like I need more or I don’t
feel like I have a ton of new problems to solve. I kind of want better,
you know, when I look at my phone, it’s full of hundreds of garbage
apps, to be honest, stuff that I just kind of downloaded in the moment.
And I’m just finding this desire to have like that well crafted thing
just like as we are in our homes, you know, I think you look around and
the things that you choose to put in your office or on your desk or in
your kitchen, you want those things to be considered to reflect your
values. There’s nothing revolutionary about a new tea kettle, but maybe
you want something that just like really reflects your values and your
aesthetics and maybe even be a little bit inspiring.
00:16:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. So my perspective on your post was
that there’s potentially a lot of degrees of freedom that you have when
you’re designing a business and a product, but it feels like design is
often the last variable, so you end up fixing things because of the
economics, because of your or structure, because of your product goals,
or because of just, um, assumptions or constraints that you impose on
yourself.
And then after you’ve done all of that, you don’t have a lot of room,
basically.
On the design, so everything ends up looking the same, right? And when I
think of when I hear no more bad apps, it’s like break out of those
constraints, let design be a more free variable, give yourself more
degrees of freedom, so you can make different choices and not take on so
many of these assumptions and premises and see what comes out of that.
Yeah. And I think that speaks both to, by the way, the product in terms
of where you end up with the design, but also speaks to you as a
designer, right? It’s not super fun to be the last free variable where
you’re very constrained. You want to be actually to have more agency
over how the thing works in the broadest sense.
00:17:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think we’ve kind of seen this sort of
central premise of like user centered design. We’ve seen its flaws now,
we’ve seen where it can fall short.
00:17:17 - Speaker 2: So here you’re talking about user centered as in
more driven by kind of user research, as opposed to, I don’t know, a
designer’s internal sense of what’s interesting, special and good.
00:17:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in a sense, I mean, again, it’s one of
those things that can sound very obvious, but as people like we’re
we’re terrible at knowing. What it is that we really need, right? You
know, you can kind of ask us what we want, but we’re pretty bad at
knowing what we really need. So that’s kind of a direct hit on the idea
of user centered design.
Now, there’s a lot of good with user centered design, but I think with
anything, you know, once it becomes a dogma, it can go too far and we
can start to see its flaws.
You mentioned architecture earlier. I’m a fan of America’s greatest
architect really, Frank Lloyd Wright, and His household name back in the
first half of the 20th century. I think he was on the cover of Time
Magazine like twice. Like everybody knew him. He was like a superstar
back in the day and really shaped American architecture in the first
half of the 20th century and even beyond that really. But, you know, his
last work was the Guggenheim in New York and It’s a weird building.
It’s not quite in line with much of what else he’s done. But when it
first came out, it was super controversial. You know, now we think of it
as this great pillar of architecture. It was very controversial at the
time. People were complaining about how it was very disrespectful of the
art. I don’t know if you know it, it’s a building that’s basically a
giant spiral. So you walk along the outside on a slope. So you’re
walking around this large atrium on the exterior around the slope,
spiraling upward, and then you walk back down, spiraling down. And it’s
kind of antagonistic to users in a way. It’s not very conducive to
appreciating the art, but it’s become like one of the best places to
build installations because it has become its own kind of unique place
that has created its own sort of unique artwork. So artists will
sometimes create paintings that follow the curvature of the floor and
have this slight bend to it. And I think about that sometimes because I
think, again, that wasn’t listening necessarily to what an art museum
should be. It was creating this new vision and then having other people
jump in and react to it. And that’s something that I think again is
kind of missing like user centered design can be this great kind of
iterative approach. It can get you kind of to this local maxima. But if
you really want to step into new territory and see some new vista, you
know, sometimes that takes some crazy leap of faith by like individual
minds, right?
00:20:16 - Speaker 3: To look at another art form, Keith Raboy makes
this point with movies. You don’t make a movie by surveying 100 people
and then taking the average of what everyone said and then filming that,
right? If someone has a vision for a movie that should exist and they
pull together all the pieces to make that happen. They find the actors,
they find the photographer, and so on, and then you test it, and you
see, OK, people do where they don’t take that up, but you have to work
backwards from a vision.
00:20:41 - Speaker 2: Which once again seeking inspiration from other
fields, and actually that strikes square on one of my favorite books in
this kind of maker biography category is called Making Movies. I can’t
remember the author’s name, but it’s a pretty successful Hollywood
director who basically wrote a, here’s how I make movies, he just kind
of like walks through the whole process giving specific examples from
his work. And the director is this sort of the visionary CEO type of the
thing, he, she or they are doing some kind of artistic expression, but
they also have all this practical management stuff of just getting the
right people there and the technical stuff with the camera and Dealing
with weather and dealing with municipalities and zoning and permits and
you gotta sort of pull all that together while at the same time keeping
the line of sight of the vision that you’re here to make a piece of art
and make something that moves people and you do that by having a unique
idea and sticking with it through all those practicalities.
00:21:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love, as I mentioned, my first creative
outlet was filmmaking, and I loved those as So I tend to use filmmaking
as references quite a bit. And one thing that I love that a lot of great
directors, Tarantino, Scorsese, the advice that they’ll give to up and
coming directors is really to make the movie that you wanna watch, you
know, find something that you want to see, that you want to exist, and
make that. And if you’re lucky, there’s probably other people like you
out there that are really gonna connect with it.
But that’s really the only way to make a great story, is to really, you
know, feel something personal about it.
And I don’t really say it in that piece, maybe I hint at it, but Part
of my hope is that the product design and products in general can
actually be this vector for interesting culture to emerge. Again, our
products are used by billions of people every day, and there’s so much
time and so much attention put into these products that I think it’s
just this great medium that we haven’t really fully explored in terms
of creative expression.
00:22:55 - Speaker 2: Can you think of some examples of digital products
as vectors for culture?
00:23:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I can, believe it or not. But it doesn’t
come from the product world, it comes from gaming.
00:23:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Mark and I reference games and both
technology inspiration and design and otherwise more often than you
might think for a productivity tool.
00:23:19 - Speaker 1: I think gaming is amazing, and I hadn’t sadly
really been following it that closely. You know, you’d think someone in
UX design and filmmaking, like the intersection of that is gaming.
But I hadn’t really been following it.
So this last year I’ve really jumped in and kind of immersed myself in
gaming, and it’s just fascinating.
I mean, yeah, if you’re talking about ways to really connect with
individuals at a brand or an emotional scale in the digital world, I
think it’s gaming and so, yeah, I mean, a lot of work from Play Dead
Studio like inside. Limbo.
Yeah, I love Limbo. There’s a Swedish game designer, Oscar Stolberg. I
don’t know if you guys have heard of him. He did a game called Bad
North, uh maybe a couple years ago, but he just came out with a game,
you know, it’s, it’s hard to even call it a game, it’s almost a
creative toy. But it’s called Townscaper.
00:24:20 - Speaker 3: Oh, that guy, yeah, I just know him as the
townscraper guy, yeah.
00:24:24 - Speaker 1: It is fascinating. I mean, the execution on it and
the thought put into something, again, like to explain to people like
you literally just click.
Like a sort of empty grid and you create these little like cubes of a
town and so you build a town. That’s kind of all you do. So it’s
almost like digital Legos in a way where you’re like building
structures, but just the thought and attention that goes into how these
things are built and how they connect and how one connects with
another.
He has lighting, he has just amazing sense of polish and execution. On
something that’s really just so simple. So those are the things that I
tend to look at more and more these days.
00:25:08 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s interesting when I was thinking about
inspiring digital creators, the first big category that I came to was
these maverick game designers, and often it’s just one person who
somehow builds the whole game end to end.
A few examples that came to mind for me was Jonathan Blow with Braid,
Notch and Minecraft, Jordan, I think that’s Bechner on Prince of
Persia, and oftentimes they did not only the idea and the story, but the
programming, the graphics, they composed the music, sometimes they
record it.
It’s an amazing breath, but going back to this idea of degrees of
freedom, that gives me the ability to have this vision and to build it
up using all of those different angles and aspects to the way that they
want it to exist.
So you get these very unified, polished, inspiring experiences from it.
And they’re able to do things that are really out there, because when
you have this new idea for how a game should work, you really need to
change all those other aspects at the same time.
And it’s hard to convince a bunch of other people to do that. So by
having everything under your own control, you can often make that
happen.
00:26:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and wouldn’t it be great to have some of
that seep more into our everyday lives? That’s kind of my dream, I
guess. And what we’re trying to pursue with Andy works is like, can you
take some of that playfulness, that fun. That challenge it at times and
bring that into everyday experiences, maybe.
00:26:26 - Speaker 2: Now games and film both are probably more on the,
there’s obviously many practical aspects to implementing them, but the
output really is art and it’s more pure form.
It’s designed to give you an experience or show you a perspective on
the world that doesn’t really serve a practical purpose, whereas the
clothing and architecture examples we used earlier, those maybe are
closer to something like digital tools, productivity tools in the sense
that, On one hand, they can be inspiring. They can express an artistic
vision and in the best cases they do, but they also need to do practical
things. They need to stay on your body and keep you warm. They need to
house humans or in the case of productivity tools, they need to solve a
specific problem that a person has and is willing to pay for.
How do either of you think about that trade-off between the express
something original or inspiring or playful or soulful versus solve a
problem such that someone wants to pay you for the product?
00:27:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m not sure there needs to be a trade-off.
actually, as I was thinking about other examples of inspiring creators,
I came up with this category of like the vertical integrators, this
would be again Raboy with and team with Open Door, Ryan Johnson at Cul
de sac, obviously Elon Musk and everything that he’s doing. These are
people who like, in the case of cul de sac, for example, it’s like, I
want a more walkable neighborhood. So do that. I’m just going to go to,
I think it’s Arizona, buy a bunch of land and like build an entire
neighborhood from scratch. OK, that’s a lot of real stuff to achieve a
real end. And likewise, of course, with, you know, Elon sending stuff to
Mars and so on. So I think you can get both of those and actually I
think when you undertake a more ambitious and inspiring mission, you can
often attract more talent, resources, and so on to your venture.
00:28:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll even go a step further. I honestly
think that is kind of the purpose of design, is really to marry that the
kind of far out there crazy ideas with what can be practically achieved
and serve some practical function.
And I think without those two ends, it sort of gets lost or the design
falls a bit flat or loses touch if it goes too far and the kind of
playful.
I mean, I’d be tempted to just build a game myself, but something in
me, I think growing up in Alaska, feels like everything I do has to have
some practical purpose to it.
And so I like this idea of trying to bring those two together and again
like I think we see it in so many other aspects of our lives, you know,
the furniture that we buy to the items that we use every day.
We use them, they serve a practical purpose, but we don’t just buy any
chair, you know, we buy a chair that speaks to us, fits within our
surroundings, maybe reflects something that we think is interesting.
And so it’s always kind of this combination of the two, and again,
yeah, you see it in fashion, you see it in architecture. We just
haven’t really seen that much in the digital product space.
00:29:19 - Speaker 2: I like your connecting items in our daily life,
physical items in our daily life to some of these digital products.
And for me, this is why I like using the word tools. For me, my bike is
a tool for me to get around the city.
And my kitchen knife is a tool to help me do a better job at making
healthy food, and the furniture, for example, a chair is a tool for me
to sit on either to do productive work at a desk or relaxing chair to
sit and read or feel cozy. These are all tools that serve a purpose, but
also can make me feel inspired or make me have certain kinds of positive
feelings and digital tools are no different. The apps on my phone, the
software on my computer, the services I use for email and calendar and
all these other relatively prosaic things, but in the same way that
sitting and cutting and writing are all prosaic everyday things, so too
are these digital things. I mean they can’t be inspired and that they
can’t, as you say, marry together the practical function that they
fulfill with something extra, something special.
00:30:21 - Speaker 1: Especially because we’re spending more and more
of our lives in the digital world now, and we expect to spend much more
of it over time. I mean, especially now, of course, with the quarantine,
but we’re spending so much of our time here. And that was another
thing. I just started to see where this was going. It’s like, oh man.
This world needs to look a little better and be a little bit more
inspiring if this is, you know, where we’re gonna be spending the
majority of our time down the road, you know, where we meet people,
where we connect with people, where we get our work done. And I’m
really drawn to these everyday things.
00:30:59 - Speaker 2: So when we think about everyday physical items in
our life, one that comes to mind for me is this clock project that I saw
you document on Twitter. How does that fit into what we’re talking
about here?
00:31:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so that really came about through one this
interest in furniture making and just really like, again, getting really
deep and lost in like a brand new field.
As soon as you get that new talent and that new ability, I feel like you
start to see everything around you as something that can be rebuilt or
redesigned or or recreated.
And one thing that I had my eye on for a long time was a clock. And the
reason for that is that my kids, I have two young kids ages 3 and 5, and
they would constantly ask me, as young kids do, is it time for bed yet?
Is it bedtime yet? Is it time for lunch? Is it time for dinner? They
didn’t know how to read an analog clock, and at first my thought was,
well, let’s just teach them how to read a clock, but then the design
brain kind of kicks in and you’re like, well, maybe the problem isn’t
the kids, but it’s the clock, not the user’s fault.
00:32:10 - Speaker 1: Exactly. So you start digging into it and you
start to realize how many of the conventions that have really been set.
You know, how arbitrary many of them really are like the sort of twice
around 12 hour dial clock that we think of as the analog clock, was more
of a mechanical limitation at the time, and it’s just kind of hung
around for a few 100 years.
So I started to think about what a clock could be.
It turns out like an analog clock is really hard to read actually. It
sounds simple cause we’ve learned it and we looked at it all the time.
But if you’re a young kid, or if you’re, you know, it’s even used as
mental aptitude test for people that may have like early onset dementia.
And so it’s actually quite a complex abstract test.
You know, you have to think of which hand is what, you know, there are
multiple hands, they represent different increments of time, and you
have to know which direction they’re moving. You have to know that like
the large hand pointing at a 3, multiply by 5, that means it’s 15,
that’s a fraction of 60.
There’s a bit going on, and that’s just too much for a 3 year old to
really grasp. But it’s silly like they understand time, in a sense,
they understand that things take time and that something isn’t now or
it’s later. They understand the concepts.
00:33:33 - Speaker 2: They just can’t the cyclical aspect of the day as
well that there is a dinner time every day that is at the same time and
it’s the day that changes, uh, even though there’s a, there’s a,
there’s a new day, but maybe the only thing they understand is that
there is a schedule.
00:33:45 - Speaker 1: But I started looking at that and just going down
a rabbit hole of like questioning every assumption and actually ended up
coming back to the first clocks, which were sundials. And that was the
first goal was to fix the model rather than spinning twice. We see the
sun move around the earth, or that’s how we perceive it, once a day.
So, OK, let’s have a 24 hour clock rather than 12. And then I got rid
of the hands that was clearly like just too much information.
And the truth is, if you’re a kid is at 1253 or 1255, like that level
of precision doesn’t really matter typically. So I replaced it with
just a single hand that moves around a 24 hour clock, and then I painted
half of it dark and half of it light.
So the dark half was nighttime, the light half was daytime. And then
probably the best move was just, I did this right at the end. I just
slapped a sticker next to bedtime on the clock. So just a little red
dot. So the hand is like a nice bright red and this red dot. So all they
have to know is like, has that hand hit that dot yet or not? That’s
when they know it’s bedtime.
And kind of, you know, whenever you make something, you don’t know if
it’s gonna work. This like surprisingly worked really well. Like, they
immediately got it, didn’t have to really be taught it. And now they
can read it and they can tell me the time, they could tell me if it’s
bedtime or not. And so it’s really kind of changed their abilities and
really like opened up their own sense of agency.
But probably the most interesting thing is I found that for me, it was
also a little bit easier. I didn’t quite realize just how those micro
moments of kind of looking at an analog clock to kind of compute the
time. How much that was really in the way.
It’s kind of like uh uh it’s hard to explain, but it’s almost like
screen refresh rates, you know, once you jump to 120 from 60, suddenly
like, you notice it, you feel it, and it’s hard to go back. It’s that
same kind of like mental exercise that suddenly it feels easier. And the
other thing is that I noticed that of all the things I built, I mean,
paper’s been downloaded 50 million times and I use it every week, but I
don’t use it as much as this clock. This clock I use 20 times a day at
least, and it’s just like making those small moments better and easier
and more delightful. And that really got me on this path and what we’re
trying to do with Andy works around taking that idea of like, no more
boring apps and the everyday, and you make these everyday moments. Marry
them with great design and build something that’s truly like design
differentiated. So all these little digital moments that touch our lives
throughout the day, you know, I wake up, I check the weather, I set a
timer, these things like this, can you elevate those to something
interesting, inspiring, maybe even simpler.
00:37:01 - Speaker 3: I think it’s such an interesting example because
it shows. How often bad design or boring design is really directly
downstream from the wrong assumptions or constraints. So yes, if you
assume your clock needs to go around once every 12 hours, it needs to
have second accuracy, it needs to have two hands, it needs to have 12 at
the top, it can’t have any other markings. Like you basically back
yourself into the boring old clock, but when you break free of those
constraints, when you allow yourself to analyze the problem from first
principles, there’s a lot more you can do. That’s a power and I see a
lot with things that end up being boring apps.
00:37:33 - Speaker 1: Well you guys are doing this too. I feel like
testing some of the assumptions around navigation, input, creativity.
00:37:40 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. And not only assumptions on the
design, the solution that is, but also on assumptions on the sort of
problem or the inputs. So for example, a big one for us is we broke the
assumption that you need to be flexible to people having a stylus or
not. Basically, Muse requires the Apple pencil to. substantially and a
lot of apps, they just would never accept or even consider that being a
possibility. We realized, hey, actually, basically, everyone has a
stylus, the people who don’t, they’re happy to buy one, so let’s just
roll with it. And that gives us a lot more degrees of freedom to use
that as an input modality in a more powerful way.
00:38:12 - Speaker 2: Thinking about established conventions like 24
hours on a clock or do the hands go around twice and thinking about Muse
and where we’ve tried to sort of challenge the status quo because we
think things can be improved, such as requiring a pencil versus places
where we just go with what people know and expect. I feel like with apps
and software, you have the platform conventions and in many cases even
rules, right? Apple and their human interface guidelines and the the app
store rules and the review process and there’s a different but similar
set of conventions for say web software, desktop software and so forth
and.
I think part of the hard part of the journey we’ve been on building
this particular product and I expect it’s the same for anyone that
wants to do something a little bit original, is trying to decide where
to take your weird thing and just really take that all the way and just
double down. on the fact that you’re breaking on what’s expected or
even breaking the rules of the platform and in other places, you just
want to be as simple and standard and boring and exactly what’s
expected on the platform as possible because that’s not where you’re
really innovating.
How do you navigate the trade-off between those two things?
00:39:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you can’t really play either extreme,
obviously, and you see that happen sometimes, especially with younger
product makers or designers trying to reinvent everything in their
experience or their app, and you can very quickly go down a path of just
everything’s too new. Everything’s like, look at me. I mean, you’re
really calling attention to something when you are rethinking it. And so
just like with, you know, a great piece of graphic design, you kind of
know how to control someone’s attention. You can’t make the whole
thing loud. You have to know where to put white space and where to draw
attention. And that’s really the trick is kind of finding what’s
unique about you. That’s usually where you want to put the innovation.
I don’t know if you guys have heard this before, but sometimes we in
the past talked about things like an innovation budget, you know, you
have a certain amount of innovation that you can plug into your app that
people are willing to kind of learn because there’s something new and
unique and interesting behind it or that is unlocked by it. And so you
have to really, I think, know what’s unique, you know, like what is it
that you’re bringing that’s unique, and that’s where you focus on
what becomes, you know, unique and interesting and rethinking common
conventions. But honestly, like most of an app, oftentimes or any sort
of product is convention, and that’s important because you need the
important stuff, the truly innovative stuff to pop out, to jump out at
you. And you can’t have it all jump out. So there are places where you
kind of need it to recede a bit, and the best way to do that is to
follow some convention. There’s nothing wrong with conventions, like
they’re there for a good reason. But they become the sort of like
receding sort of principle.
00:41:12 - Speaker 3: This actually reminds me of another great blog
post called funnily enough, Choose Boring Technology, which seems
contradictory to your blog post title, but it’s actually making a
similar point to what you just said, which is, I think he called them
innovation tokens, if I remember correctly, this idea you have like 3 to
spend in your entire business and so choose wisely what you invest your
novelty in.
00:41:32 - Speaker 2: Maybe that one is on the implementation side. And
Andy’s talking about sort of the user side, users only have so much
willingness to kind of struggle through figuring out something new, so
you want to spend that call attention to the things that really matter
and everything else kind of follows conventions and on the
implementation side, such as technology. It’s just your team is going
to need to push hard and invest more and spend more time to get the
weird stuff right, to get it good or get it interesting versus following
conventions. It’s kind of almost mindless. You just do what is known to
be the best practice and that’s it, you can move on.
00:42:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think one of the challenges or
shortcomings that I see today is that there are a lot of products that
are almost all convention and you sort of struggle to find it, at least
again from a design standpoint.
I see a lot of companies innovating on business models or distribution
or various services, but in terms of design, execution or a user
experience, there are very few that I think that are really kind of
pushing the innovation button there, but there are things like design
systems are great, but again, that’s like a tool you’re establishing a
convention, and if your entire design.
It’s just kind of hinged upon pulling components from existing design
systems. Then, you know, your index experience is gonna look pretty
conventional.
00:42:56 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and ultimately, well, I think it’s
important to have a sense of how you’re going to navigate this tradeoff
of convention versus originality, I think you ultimately need to go back
to first principles and just make a great design. I think some people
sometimes get lost in how they’re relating to the convention or
whatever. You gotta ask yourself, is it good? I sometimes joke with our
designer Leonard, like, Leonard, you can design this however you want as
long as it’s good. And I’m only half joking when I say that.
00:43:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, to go a little further, I, I, you have to
realize, like, why do these conventions exist? I mean, the truth is a
lot of conventions exist. A lot of the guidelines for these things
exist. Like think of who is building an app like Google has to build
these guidelines for everyone. Like somebody that knows nothing about
design. They’re kind of building a base layer and also one size fits
all, right?
00:43:40 - Speaker 2: So it’s not just the skill level of people
implementing, but just all very different kinds of apps or in some cases
weighted towards just where their existing customers or revenue bases,
right? That’s part of what we run into with Muse, which is so much of
the iOS platform and design conventions are based around phone used with
one finger or small screen. And so those conventions are basically good
there for consumer apps on the phone, but they become quite restricting
and even very counterproductive on the iPad for a professional tool.
00:44:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah. So in many cases, the conventions are just
that, they’re conventional, like they’re not going to get you to
something interesting because they’re not really designed that way.
These guidelines are put in place to provide some very base common
denominator experience for everyone. Like you’re not gonna be able to
kind of push above the noise and achieve something truly great by
following those alone.
00:44:38 - Speaker 2: I’m also reminded of a lesson that my high school
English teacher taught me, which is I was complaining that we were
taught all these rules of good writing and even grammatical rules, and
then we would read these classics who were held up as these amazing
works, and I would point out all the ways that these authors broke the
rules. I said, why are we learning these rules if these great works
break them? And her answer was, well, you have to know the rules first
because then you can break them in interesting ways.
00:45:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. Thumbs up. I’m curious for you
guys, what you think your most controversial belief is. Hm.
00:45:14 - Speaker 3: It was very interesting.
00:45:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, and part of the premise of MS is
that I believe that computers can help us think, not just author, but
think our thoughts. And actually maybe with some of the tools for
thought stuff that’s breaking into the zeitgeist a little bit this
year, that’s slightly less controversial, but the counterpoint to that
is everything about the way that they’re created now, particularly when
you get to the realm of web and mobile platforms, which is essentially
where all the action is, let’s say, is designed really specifically to
keep you from thinking. There’s literally a bible of user experience
design titled Don’t Make me Think. And my view is, no, please, make me
think and actually help me think.
00:46:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s related to my belief as well, which
is, well, I guess I have 2.
Maybe I’ll throw 2 out there.
But they sort of formed some of the the backbone of Andy works and what
we’re doing.
So the first is that a product can challenge its user. So at times maybe
even be antagonistic or seem to be antagonistic towards the user, but
again it’s something that you see in other aspects and so many other
experiences that we experience in the physical world in other areas, you
know, again, films, if it doesn’t challenge you, it’s not interesting,
right? And so, I really think that design can challenge, it doesn’t
have to be invisible. It can kind of be right up there in your face.
And we just have yet to see it. That’s one. The other one is around
pushing back against the idea of scale in software, and it really kind
of cuts against, I think, what is just natural in the software world,
or, you know, software just naturally wants to be high volume, low
margin, but thinking about, you know, is there a way to flip that around
where it’s, you’re talking about very low volume, high margin value
though, and Ship something and create products that are only for a few
people, but really deliver a ton of value to them in the consumer space,
not just in the like specialized professional space, but in a consumer
space. I don’t even know if that’s possible, but I’m really
interested in it. And like we’ve been trying some things with Andy
works to do some of that, but it’s really cutting against the grain of
software. Everything about software wants to be completely open and
available to everyone, you know, we’ve been exploring ideas around like
making limited edition versions of software. That’s something that is
just like, you wouldn’t have to think twice about that in the physical
world. It would just come naturally. But like in the software world, you
have to do extra work to limit it, you know, you have to like track
quantities and things like that. But I’m really interested in that sort
of sense of exclusivity and personalization and having this like high
impact on fewer people.
00:48:16 - Speaker 3: Nice. I like that a lot.
And that also resonates with what I was thinking about from my
controversial opinion, and it connects back to this idea of design is
related to everything else in the business.
It’s related to your work structure, it’s related to your business
model, it’s related to the economics, it’s related to your users and
your protocols.
So I think the flip side of that is that if you really want to do
something innovative with design, you have to grapple with those other
aspects.
I actually saw, there was a tweet from Patrick Colson yesterday about
people who are doing interesting work on desktop designs. And to me,
that’s, you actually can’t tackle that without tackling the whole
problem of funding that work and getting it distributed.
So I think the most interesting design problems are really these system
problems of how do you organize people over time to come to this future
that you want.
And I’m excited that people are now starting to try that a little bit,
like in your case with software, I’d like to see a lot more of that
experimentation.
So before we close out here, I want to bring it back to where we
started, which is working with your hands and woodworking.
So Andy, I have a sort of pet theory about woodworking in particular,
and I’m curious if it resonates with you as a woodworker. And I
developed this theory because a lot of my programmer friends and
acquaintances have wandered into the field of woodworking. So I think
there’s some particular attraction for people who work in technology.
And here’s my theory. So, There’s the kind of obvious piece of it’s a
new and different creative endeavor. In the same way that I, you know,
play the piano, and that’s a creative thing, woodworking is also a
creative thing. But I think there’s more factors at work. One is, it’s
a very physical undertaking where you use your whole body and also the
work product is something you can, for example, sit in or lie in. And so
that is something that I think a lot of people who work in technology
are missing because it is very digital, unsubstantiated work products.
But the thing that I think is most important with woodworking is you
have a lot of agency. As a woodworker, you can go all the way from the
tree to the end product yourself. You have control over the exact wood
use, you can choose your tools, you can choose what you build. You’re
so much creative freedom and agency as an individual woodworker, whereas
with Modern programmers, it’s like, OK, you basically got to use iOS
and you got to use Swift, and if you don’t like that, too bad, you
know, find another job. And I think people are increasingly grinding up
against that as developers and when they see woodworking, they see all
those ideal qualities as a creative person. So I’m just curious if that
resonates with you.
00:50:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, that does. And like you said, I
think it’s a common feeling. I think even outside of woodworking, you
know, you see a lot of people baking their own bread during the
pandemic, right? I mean, to the point where it’s almost becoming a
joke. But look, if you’re gonna go out and make something, I’m not
gonna make fun of you. I think there is something about, yeah, going
back to some very fundamental materials and being able to shape it into
something again that you can use and you can use every day. And that was
definitely part of it for me.
Another part for me personally was I’ve always been interested in 3D
and getting deeper into 3D. But you know, like, uh, when I left we
transfers at the start of the year, I’d just been kind of burned out on
digital things and just needed to like step away. But a great way to get
into 3D is not actually through the 3D software. 3D software is like
some of the most complicated software in the world. I mean, uh, the
modeling, the rigging, animation, texture, I mean, like building a game
is pretty sophisticated stuff, and it can really be a beast to try and
get into. So the way that I kind of wanted to break into it wasn’t
actually through the software, it was through like playing around with
3D form and thinking about three dimensional form. I mean, again, I come
more from a graphic background. So for me, it was a great way to just
start thinking and playing in 3D, getting back to basics. I feel like I
learned a lot actually about product design now that comes from
woodworking that I’m sort of bringing back into product.
But yeah, wordwork is great. I mean, it’s amazingly deep. It can seem
so simple, but I mean you could spend a long, long time just trying to
figure out the right finish for your desk or your bench or whatever it
is, because there’s so much history there, so there’s so much depth,
so much history. To dig into and you can never really reach the bottom
of it. I feel like you talk with super experienced woodworkers and
they’ll all still say like, uh, I don’t really know what I’m doing,
you know, like, there’s someone who’s a better expert out there than
me. And so I really love that, the sorts of combinations of things, the
depth of it, like you’re saying, the kind of like elemental nature of
it to take something very primitive and transform it into something that
you can use every day. And then again, personally for me, it was partly
just like Getting my hands into something 3 dimensional. Hm.
00:53:09 - Speaker 3: Very interesting.
00:53:11 - Speaker 1: Do you guys do woodworking?
00:53:13 - Speaker 3: I had dabbled in it a little bit. I actually took
some courses here in the Seattle area, and then when I was younger, I
did a lot of model working, which is like, you know, balsa wood type
stuff, and I had a lot of those properties of you have agency over what
you’re building and what you end up with is something very physical and
potentially interesting, if not, you know, useful in the classical
sense.
00:53:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think the reason a lot of us, like
a lot of people from our generation got into this sort of like digital
product world. It was partly because of how open it was. Back when I got
into this 20 years ago, there were no tools to design this stuff. There
wasn’t a software application to design software, you know, you had to
use photo editing software or like, you had to hack Flash, you know,
which was meant for animation to build something with scripting. And so
we kind of got into this, I think, because of its ambiguity and its
openness and now over time as it.
That open field is like slowly started to pave pathways. And then lay
down the asphalt. Now things are very set in many ways. And so, yeah,
moving something to a discipline like woodworking or metalsmithing. I
know some folks jumping into that. That’s just kind of going back to
this idea of like, well, now anything’s possible again, kind of going
back to something that’s very elemental that you can really shape in
any way that you want.
I personally think that there’s still room in the digital world. Oh
yeah, totally. And we just haven’t, maybe to your point, haven’t set
up the businesses and the sort of fundamentals right to make it possible
yet. I’ll stop there, cause I’ll probably keep going.
00:55:00 - Speaker 2: I think that’s a great note to end on because it
leaves me feeling inspired. Great. Well, if any of our listeners out
there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter
or use email with hello at museapp.com. We’d love to hear your comments
and ideas for future episodes. And Andy, this was really inspiring
discussion. Thanks for coming on and thanks for pushing us all to not be
boring. Thanks for having me, guys. All right, see you both later. Bye.
00:55:26 - Speaker 3: See you, Adam.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I really thrive off of urban energy, but I also
I’m at a point where I want a little more green, a little more quiet, a
little more space, and can I get those two things together. 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, and I’m here with my
colleague Mark McGranaghan. Mark, what’s the air quality like in
Seattle right now?
00:00:33 - Speaker 2: It’s much improved. We got hit really bad by that
smoke, but we got some proper Seattle rains, and now it’s really clean
out here.
00:00:40 - Speaker 1: I love the uh smell of the air after a good rain,
and I can only imagine how different it must be in the wake of the
wildfire smoke. Our colleague Julia found it a little funny because
actually in the demo video that’s on our website that you recorded,
there’s some content related to Seattle and there’s actually a whole
board about natural disaster risk and wildfires explicitly called out
there, and I think it’s pretty low, mostly in the Pacific Northwest, I
assume because it’s raining or whatever, but apparently not in that
calculation is what happens if wildfires hundreds of miles away happen
and then the smoke drifts.
00:01:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. The immediate area here is safe
cause it’s very wet, so it’s hard to catch fire, but we definitely can
get smoke as we were reminded the past few weeks.
00:01:23 - Speaker 1: So our topic today is leaving San Francisco, and
we both have a personal story on this.
You moved to Seattle a few years back, leaving the Bay Area, and I moved
to Berlin 7 years ago now, after 7 years in San Francisco.
And there’s a little in the zeitgeist in the discussion here, the
pandemic has led a lot more companies to remote work, and in turn has
made people who work for those companies have more sort of flexibility
where they can work from wildfires are probably a piece of that as well,
but in general, I feel like I’ve seen in my Social networks and
colleagues, people considering leaving the Bay Area or in some cases
they’ve done so. There’s a great article by Kevin Lana who speaks
about that, that I’ll link in the show notes. And we’ve also got tech
companies like Stripe and Zapier being willing to essentially pay you to
move someplace cheaper, which is sort of interesting. But the topic here
isn’t to debate the merits of the Bay Area, but I thought it would be
really interesting to reflect on not just our personal stories, but how
you make a decision like this. Because it feels like an unprecedented
social shift in some ways, which is most people, and me included, most
of my early life, I went to where I needed to go for school, you know,
university, where can I get a good education that will have me, and then
later on to pursue employment. And I didn’t make any kind of calculus
of where do I want to live. I made the calculus of where can I get the
best job for myself, and then that naturally dictated where I was going
to live. And it’s something I feel like I’m seeing a lot of lately. I
had a bunch of conversations with folks where people are going through
the same process that I went through some years back when I embraced
remote work, maybe you did as well, which is to realize that you have
the opportunity, the privilege to just pick where you want to live and
have that be based on some criteria that’s not coupled to your
employment. But also realizing maybe the weight of that responsibility
or it’s not the right way to put it, maybe that it’s a great
opportunity, but how do you decide if you can do more or less anywhere
in the world or within some time zone band, what criteria do you use?
Where do you even start? So that’s why I thought it would be an
interesting topic for us today. So Mark, I know you moved to the Bay
Area, kind of at the start of your professional career. That’s when we
got the chance to work together and I think for you it was like me, an
incredible opportunity to build your early career and then just a couple
of years back, you moved to Seattle. I’d love to hear a little bit of
that story.
00:03:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so I moved to San Francisco originally. It
was 10 or 11 years ago, I think. And at the time, I knew I wanted to be
in startups and San Francisco was basically the place that you went for
that.
Another possible option would have been New York City, but it was
definitely second place as compared to San Francisco, and actually at
the time, San Francisco was much cheaper than New York. Jokes kind of on
me there eventually, but that was a factor at the time.
And yeah, I was there for maybe 7 or 8 years or something like that. And
an incredible experience, you know, learned a lot, met a lot of
interesting people, including obviously you, but a couple years ago, I
was ready for something different and moved up to Seattle after a bit of
a process thinking about that.
00:04:29 - Speaker 1: Yes, so I had a similar story. I moved to the Bay
Area in 2007 because our company got into Y Combinator, and yeah,
accessing the networks there, certainly the venture capital, but also
just the wider world of tech was absolutely fantastic for our business
and for my career.
But then when I set down my work with that venture 6 years later, I
found myself a little more flexibility. I realized that some of the day
to day life there wasn’t quite what I wanted, and that led me to
starting to think about where to go next and went through kind of a
pretty detailed process by which I made the somewhat surprising decision
to not only relocate from San Francisco, but actually move to another
country, but that I think worked out really well for me.
So you mentioned going through a process and I had one of my own as well
and I guess this is what I’ve been talking to folks about recently is
when you have this capability to choose a place, how do you actually do
that? It struck me how that’s similar in a lot of ways to the two-step
creative process we’ve talked about in the context of Muse before and
we can get on to that a little bit, but I’d be curious just to know
even setting aside process criteria, what makes one place or another
better for the stage of life that you’re in or what it is that you
seek.
00:05:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I had an interesting angle on this. So the
original impetus for looking to leave San Francisco was mostly the usual
reasons, which I don’t think we need to go into too much here, you
know, it’s extremely expensive, it’s overregulated, and so on.
But a more subtle thing that I think is really important is what was
happening to my cohort.
So I’m in my early 30s now, and what was happening was all of my
friends and peers who are mostly a similar age, were hitting that
period. Where they want to start a family, they want to have a bit more
space, maybe they have other hobbies, just kind of entering that phase
of adulthood, and they were all really hitting a wall in San Francisco.
A few people were able to make it work, having one or a few kids, for
example, but most people, when they hit that point in their life, they
just couldn’t make it work in San Francisco anymore. So they had to
leave. Some of them went to the East Bay or the North Bay, but a lot of
them just completely left. They went to Texas or To Portland, for
example, or to Seattle, where it was possible for them to pursue that
phase of their life. So a lot of my peers were basically leaving all
around me, which is a problem from a personal perspective, of course.
But also, I was starting to sense that the magic of Silicon Valley and
of San Francisco was starting to break down. And here’s what I mean.
The reason San Francisco has been so special for tech is that you have
people who have been there for 5, 10. 15 years who are helping to bring
up the next generation, right? You get that mentorship, that experience,
that network. And what was happening was the amount of time that people
tended to stay in San Francisco, I felt like it was getting less and
less to the point where it was starting to knock on that threshold of
being there long enough to kind of fully contribute to that cycle.
People were jumping out after they’ve been there for 5678 years. And as
that amount was coming down, I was feeling like there was a bit of a
collapse in the San Francisco magic. And on the flip side of that, I had
this intuition that the future is on the internet, right? It’s not
going to be limited to one city. We’ve been developing these social
technologies for people collaborating and forming communities across
physical locations, and it was very nascent at the time, but I figured
it’s only gonna get bigger. And so what I want to bet on is that it’s
not being tied to one physical place, it’s having a network that
actually spans more of an area. So when I was looking for a place, it
wasn’t as much finding everyone being in that one city. Like it’s not
that everyone who I want to collaborate with and be with is in Seattle.
But for me, that’s a very good home base, and it kind of personally is
a very good fit for me, and I can talk about that if you’re curious,
but also it’s a great jumping off point. It’s in the right time zone
for collaborating with a lot of people in San Francisco and also the
East Coast has an amazing international airport, in my opinion, like
basically one of the best you can get. So it’s a good place to start a
business. It’s of course, where we’ve HQ use. So that’s kind of how I
was thinking about moving from San Francisco to Seattle.
00:08:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when I was thinking about or you know,
enumerate a little bit, maybe my criteria for or what I discovered was
my criteria for a place I like to live, but I was thinking more in terms
of greenery and transportation and architecture. But here you’re
talking about networks, which obviously is much as people I think like a
lot of the history and architecture and nature in San Francisco and
rightly so, the networks is obviously the real reason or is the big
reason, the overshadowing reason for someone that’s in technology. I
note that the places that we both chose. I wanted actually to be, if
anything, in less a completely saturated place where I love being around
these people that are in the same field as me and being connected to
that, and that was very powerful at first, but then at some point I
started to feel saturation where I can never get away from it. Totally.
I was, you know, going to a coffee shop, every single conversation you
overhear is about someone’s funding around, driving down the, what’s
the main freeway there, every single billboard is a recruiting thing for
some tech company and I’m not saying that’s good or bad, it’s just
for me, what’s right is I want a mix. I want to be around some people
who are in the same field and share this passion with me about computers
and technology and the internet, but I also want to be around a
diversity of people, young people, people, kids, people that do other
kinds of work, artistic people, people in different professions. So
trying to find a mix of those in Berlin was a good one. I feel like in
2014, there were some really fun up and coming. Companies and even now
has a small but vibrant startup scene so I can be around people to do
that stuff. There’s some great co-working spaces and companies I can
connect with and all that sort of thing, but it’s not everything, it’s
not everywhere. And I feel like Seattle has something similar. There’s
obviously the legacy of both Microsoft nearby and then Amazon in the
city and other smaller companies. So there’s plenty of tech around.
It’s just not the defining characteristic of the city.
00:10:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. That was definitely a factor for
me. And to be clear, there was a whole series of kind of personal
factors on why I chose Seattle as this home base instead of, for
example, Austin, Texas. And yeah, one of them was getting this better
balance between being plugged into the community but not being
overwhelmed by it. I actually like Seattle in that respect because Well,
first of all, I think people underestimate how big of a tech hub Seattle
is. You know, two of the three biggest tech companies in America are
based in Seattle, not the Bay Area, for example. Also, it is really the
hub of like cloud back end services, even maybe enterprise, it’s very
strong in those areas, games, whereas San Francisco is more. Startup and
consumer focused, I would say. And the Seattle flavor is more of my
expertise. So that was a good fit. And yeah, I did want to be in a place
where I still had 1 ft in the world so I could go down to downtown
Seattle and talk to people about tech stuff and you know, even have that
option career-wise in the future, but not be so overwhelmed with it as
you are in San Francisco.
Also, I would say, I was betting that Seattle was just going to keep
riding that curve up while San Francisco struggled. You know, it’s
really hard for people to build an office in San Francisco and expand it
somewhat notoriously. The Bay Area recently had this proposal to like,
basically ban commuting for most of your Employees for large employers,
it’s really wild. I’ll link it in the show notes. But on the flip
side, the offices in Seattle are just growing big time. I was really
impressed with how quickly Stripe, for example, was able to stand up a
really solid and thriving office here in Seattle. And so I just figured
there’s going to be more tech in the future here.
00:11:51 - Speaker 1: And you’re quite good at or quite connected to,
let’s say local governance and being aware of and evaluating how well a
city or state government is making an environment for infrastructure
projects and certainly businesses, which is something I quite like and
respect.
Because I think there’s a tendency to focus on national politics and
election horse races, and those things are important, but many times,
especially for something like your business, it’s actually the local
level stuff that probably matters a lot more. It’s like a little less
dramatic and a little more long term important in some ways. So I’d be
curious to hear, I know you’ve looked in quite a bit in Seattle, maybe
done some of that in San Francisco around things like ease of starting a
business, tax rates, that sort of thing. And again, this comes back to
this making a decision about where you’re going to live, if you’re
someone who’s an entrepreneur or an investor or a mix of those or a
freelancer, which is that it may actually be not just, hey, I like. This
place because the schools are good or I like the public transit, or I
like the sports team, but actually may have impact for your work life if
you’re more of a solopreneur, freelancer, entrepreneur type person. So
it is both a professional and a personal decision.
00:13:06 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that local and state politics are a
really big deal. Maybe this is an American thing, but at least here in
the US it’s really important. I think people underestimate that. I
certainly fell into that bucket when I first moved to San Francisco. I
didn’t really understand any of the California or San Francisco stuff
when I got there. So for example, somewhat to my embarrassment, I was
not aware of the rent control laws in San Francisco, which is a huge
deal. And I kind of lucked out and ended up being fine, but I think
understanding those dynamics is really important.
You know, it’s funny, this was actually one of the things that really
pushed me over the edge on San Francisco. I was getting more interested
and involved in local governance, especially around land use and housing
and transportation and taxation. And the more I understood what was
going on there, the more alarmed and dismayed I felt about.
Situation. And it also seemed like it was quite structural, like it’s
not something that was just a little bit more organizing and a little
bit more democracy, you know, you can push through and fix this thing.
It’s very deeply structural in California and San Francisco. And I just
didn’t see it getting fixed anytime soon.
Whereas on the flip side, I was looking into the governance of other
cities and states around the US. I think Seattle actually does
relatively well and Washington State compared. to the other big coastal
piers. So if you look at, for example, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, New
York, Boston, Washington, DC, Chicago, I would put in that bucket.
They’re all to varying degrees troubled, but I think Seattle and
Washington is probably the best run of all of those cities. And so that
was nice for me. And also there’s good structural reasons why Seattle
and Washington are going to be, I think in much better position than
those others.
00:14:39 - Speaker 1: And I wonder what effect this greater freedom and
flexibility for so many knowledge workers will have in the longer term
on city governments, and I’ve come to think a bit of government
generally, but especially local government as maybe there’s just my
bias because I’m a product guy.
A city is a product of sorts. It’s a very all around you, all
encompassing product, but nevertheless, it offers a series of things
and.
Requires a series of things as a citizen, and I wonder how much people,
I guess it’s already the case that cities competed for or do compete
for employers.
For example, you saw this when Amazon was considering their second
headquarters and they essentially put out like an RFC to cities around
the United States and said, you know, make us a good offer, and I think
that boils down to some pitch that mostly in the end is tax breaks or
something, but if individuals again these People who have a little more
agency now in their own careers and they’re deciding, I wonder how that
will change if governments, city governments are thinking in terms of
how to attract these sorts of people and provide them a good product,
essentially a lovely city to live and work in. I don’t know how that
will change things, but for me, that helps the mindset you’re
describing, which is not thinking of as well, the government’s just
given, it’s a natural monopoly.
I don’t know, either complaining it doesn’t work well or Satisfied or
whatever it is, but treating it as an unmovable force versus, well,
actually I can choose. I can go here, I can go there, different cities
are governed in different ways and some of those produced places that I
find more amenable to living a good life, to running a business, and so
I want to go give my business, so to speak, or give my citizenship or my
residence to a place that is doing a good job at making a good home for
its residents.
00:16:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s going to be very interesting
to watch this reshuffle play out over the next few decades. I do think
it’s going to be challenging for some cities who see their tax bases
realize they’re less captive perhaps than they were in the past. And I
think for a lot of it’s going to be a huge boon because people have the
flexibility to move there and take advantage of the quality of life and
other benefits. So I think it’ll be interesting for sure.
00:16:44 - Speaker 1: Well, maybe now we can talk about the process
element here.
You mentioned that and I have one of my own.
This is the Muse tie in to me, which is, I think of one of the key
purposes or one of the reasons this product exists or why I’m motivated
to be pushing it forward is that I think of making decisions as a thing
we could all use help with, making thoughtful decisions.
I often think of the Muse mission as being to help individuals and maybe
someday even the society as a whole to be more thoughtful.
We live in this age of hot takes and the next outrage wave and sometimes
it seems like we just lack space for contemplation and of course one
version of that is, you know, build a log cabin and disconnect, but I
don’t think that’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater kind of
thing and this is a place where I think There’s potential for it to
help and something like deciding where you’re going to live and work,
if you have that flexibility is a great example of this really deep
important decision that involves both facts and research, but also just
a lot of thinking and a lot of reflection on what’s important to you or
what factors are in your life.
So I’m curious when you were in the position of considering moving and
considering options, what did that process look like for you?
00:17:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there were a few angles. A big one for me is
just spending a lot of time in the actual cities. So for several years
before I ended up moving, I actually had a habit of spending time
visiting different cities, often long weekends or working remotely from
a week for different cities in the US and around the world. And I’ve
always found that you get very different energies, just being in
different cities, being on the street. I always feel very different
depending on where I am.
And the only way you can know is to go there and do the actual. So I Did
some more of that with cities that I was thinking about more seriously,
including Seattle.
Come here during different times of the season, which by the way, is
something people always warn you about in Seattle. You know, you visit
in the summer, people like, oh, this is amazing. Why isn’t everyone
move here and like, wait, you gotta, you got to experience the winter
before you make any rash decisions. So I was sure to do that. And also,
you know, see different neighborhoods, see the city at different times
of day, early in the morning, at night, things like that. So that was a
big bucket.
Another bucket was, frankly, it’s a fair amount of reading. Again, to
me, the governance situation is quite important. So I did a lot of
reading about the politics and the land use situation and transportation
and taxes and business law and all that stuff in some different
municipalities, and also researching some basic stuff like the weather,
for example, and seeing how that’s going to line up with how I feel
about where I want to live.
So, it’s kind of a mix of the more analytical, explicit, studying the
situation and the more emotional, just dive in and see how it feels and
then ultimately get to intuit a decision from there.
00:19:19 - Speaker 1: How many places did you seriously consider,
particularly when you talk about the reading and research side. It’s
one thing to go visit a friend for a weekend and just be like, oh, the
city’s nice. Maybe I wouldn’t mind living here, but it’s a whole
other thing to think, you know, I’m going to really consider this as a
serious place to live and what would my life look like and let me do
some deep research on it.
00:19:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so honestly, there weren’t a ton of
candidates because I did want to live in a global city with an
international airport and a reasonable population.
And even if you include other westernized countries in addition to the
US, there’s not a ton of cities that fit that bill. Actually, another
thing that was pretty much a hard criteria for me was walkability. So
especially in the US that limits you to a pretty small. Set of cities.
So in my kind of first round of consideration, I did have maybe a large
handful of cities in the US in the bucket, including Seattle, New York,
Chicago, and then a few others internationally, Berlin and Tokyo were
two big ones for me.
But actually it pretty quickly got narrowed down to Seattle and Berlin,
and I ended up spending a fair amount of time in both those cities and
thinking about it pretty hard. How about you, Adam? Did you just dial in
on Berlin right away, or is that more of a winding process?
00:20:28 - Speaker 1: Definitely more of a winding process, yeah,
similar to you both more focused research, but also, yeah, the visits. I
often would use, I don’t know if maybe this was on the tail end of my
experience. I was still getting invited to speak at professional
conferences or yeah, just would have a friend to visit or something like
that.
And if I had an opportunity like that in a city that I was interested
in, I would be more likely to go and do it and then I would purposely
plan extra days to just, yeah, go feel the vibe of the city, go to a
coffee shop, try to not go hit the top tourist attractions on
TripAdvisor because that’s not what your life’s gonna be like when you
live there, but see this is a place where knowing someone that lives
there versus landing in the natural tourist districts is helpful, but
just try to absorb that urban character. And this is something I love
about cities. I’m very much a city boy and I love that they each have
this personality that seems stronger and bigger. than even in the
national character. People say Berlin’s not Germany, for example, which
is absolutely true, but it’s the same thing. Yeah, San Francisco, New
York, Los Angeles, these places all have a very different character, not
only than the United States generally, but even in their immediate
surrounding state. And I love that and trying to go and get to know
whatever that character is, is a fun part of travel.
00:21:43 - Speaker 2: It’s funny that you mentioned going to coffee
shops. People often ask me, Mark, what do you do when you go to these
cities? And I’m like, uh, I uh go to the coffee shop and uh walk around
the neighborhood and I don’t know, maybe go grocery shopping. It always
feels weird to them, I think that you would go halfway around the world
and do this very mundane stuff, but the grocery store. But for me,
that’s like that’s the vibe. That’s what you’re looking at and
that’s what’s in some ways, that’s just daily life. So it’s the most
interesting thing.
00:22:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, coffee shops, libraries, another one I like
to do. And then I’ll also just look for big public parks or if there’s
a dock or a waterfront or some space like. That it kind of open public
spaces where people naturally walk or cycle or walk the dogs or just
hang out with their friends. A really good way to get a feel for what
the people who live there are like, right, because that’s a lot of the
energy. When we talk about the energy, often what we’re picking up on
is that vibe from the people. What are the kinds of people that are here
and how do they behave when they’re out in public.
00:22:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, speaking of vibe, one interesting thing for
me about Seattle is I had this sort of 2 by 2 quadrant that corresponds
to the geography of the US.
So in California, I think of it as being informal and kind of cowboy,
and in the Northwest, I think of it as being informal but professional.
And in the Northeast, I think of being Being formal and professional. So
in the Northeast, you have like the bankers in suits, and in Northwest,
you have the really elite systems programmers, but they wear like
t-shirts. And in California, you have sort of people wearing flip flops,
right? And for me, actually, that upper left quadrant, the Washington
State Quadrant was a good vibe for me.
But it’s kind of hard to figure that out until you spend some time in
the place.
00:23:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so for me, I did some visits again both in
the states but also internationally. Another thing I did quite a bit of
was just talking to people, to people that I knew had either lived in
one place or another for a long period of time and would have thoughts
on it, as well as just asking them, even just asking well traveled
people where they thought I would be interested in. I at one point I
ended up I think with the 4th ranked list of five places and Berlin made
it to the top there based on often the conversation I would have is
saying something along the lines of not just what did you like, but what
do you think I would like.
That question often had people answering Berlin, which they turned out.
You write about. So yeah, there was very much that kind of open ended
process and yeah, the cities did include some places in the states like
Boston and Austin, Texas, but also I was really interested in this
living abroad experience.
And so yeah, Berlin, Amsterdam, Cape Town, Tokyo were all under
consideration.
One of the things I like to do, and these days I didn’t have Muse, of
course, so I would use just kind of my paper sketchbook and Dropbox, I
think it’s kind of my collection point, but I would take a few notes or
my Google Maps, I would kind of star places that I thought were
interesting and then photos was really big for me. I would just snap
photos and of course you can snap photos when you’re traveling and
those are memories of the.
But for me, it’s a very evocative way to remember that vibe of the
city. What was it that I liked or didn’t like about this place and
putting all those together and then I have a pretty distinct memory
actually of scribbling in a sketchbook one morning when I was actually
visiting Denver, which is another place I was thinking about just
because I’ve had some friends move there and having this feeling of
looking at all this together, kind of looking through the photos and
some notes and Writing in my sketchbook and kind of an emerging for me
that, you know, I really think I want to try one of these European
cities.
And that was basically a surprising result for me. I would not have
thought that before, but I feel like that is the benefit that can emerge
from a more not systematic process exactly, but it’s not based on going
to one place after another, and then at one point you feel good enough,
you think I’ll do this. Kind of being able to zoom out a little bit and
look at all of it together if that makes sense and having these
reminders which include your notes and your photos and so forth. And you
know, when I describe it that way, of course, that experience and others
like it are exactly what I wanted Muse for. I wanted a digital tool that
was built around that exact process versus this weird hodgepodge. So I
wonder what it would be like considering a new place to live with Muse in
my toolkit.
00:25:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, interesting. Now, when you came to this
realization about the European cities, were you able to back out the
reason for that? Like the factors that unconsciously had come to that
decision for you?
00:26:00 - Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, there was a lot of the collect
all the raw data, which is largely making visits, but also, as you said,
some reading and also talking to people.
But then having this sense of, OK, I like these three cities but not
these two. And there was also some sense of coming back to my home in
San Francisco and Seeing the ways that San Francisco wasn’t meeting my
needs.
You mentioned walkability, that’s a big one for me. I walk to think, to
get fresh air, to just move around and exercise, and at least where I
was living at the time, just was not a very walkable place, not a lot of
green, not very pedestrian friendly.
I don’t want to slam on San Francisco. It’s just that I had the
comparison of being in some of these other places, particularly these
European cities, which tend to be amazing for walkability and they have
cycle paths and public transit is good and lots of trees and Berlin in
particular, you know, San Francisco is very constrained by being on this
little peninsula and so there’s kind of a not quite a space limitation,
but things are tight and I know that ties together with the governance
and all these sort of things and that low amount of space, I think
contributes to this.
Everything’s packed in and it’s always a little too small and there’s
never quite enough space to walk by something in Berlin by comparison is
this big giant flat Northern European city where there’s essentially
all this space. Sidewalks are very wide and it feels much more open and
comfort.
And maybe what I’m describing, a lot of people go to the suburbs for
that, especially once they have kids for that exact reason, they want
more space, but I wanted the density and the vibes of the city. I just
wanted to see if I could do that while being a little more comfortable
when I took a walk.
And so visiting a number of cities, which included again, some in the
states but also particularly stood out in Europe, trying to look at that
and say, OK, what’s the pattern here and even looking at photos of them
side by side and just reflecting on my experiences and realizing that,
yeah, the walkability, the greenery, and it’s not just parks, it’s not
just that I want to go to a park, but it’s the amount of green and
plants and things that are on each street, it’s the history and
architecture.
Yeah, of course, it’s things like, is there a good coffee there and
bohemian vibe and some other stuff like that. So I saw some patterns,
and there’s some things that are specific to places like, for example,
Berlin has this music culture.
I was a music creator earlier in my life, and being around that feels
good to me even though I’m not involved in sort of music stuff anymore.
So that’s kind of unique to Berlin, but then I also saw these patterns
across and again it’s something I think would be hard to get if you
didn’t look at them in relatively short succession and then from there
I could back out.
Now I feel like I could actually make a pretty good list of abstract
criteria. Here’s the things that I would want out of a city or a place
to live, and that’s visible to me now because of that sort of data
gathering and reflection process.
00:28:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so looking at the examples gives you the
criteria instead of always insisting on going the other direction of
starting with the criteria and applying them to the examples.
00:28:52 - Speaker 1: Exactly. I feel like I use this a lot in my work.
A good example here is user research. So I really like the exercise of,
OK, we’re going to start to work on a new area of the business or a new
area of the product. Let’s go and collect everything everyone’s ever
said to us in support tickets and Twitter and whatever. Let’s also go
look through our user interview notes, but maybe do some new user
interviews and get everything that’s related to one particular thing.
I don’t know what, you know, reading long PDFs or something like that,
get a bunch of quotes all together in one place that that pulling out
the specifics of that and seeing it all together, that’s where the
patterns emerge from. That’s sort of like key technique in my general
toolkit.
00:29:32 - Speaker 2: So you did end up eventually deciding on Berlin
and Germany, which is a big change from the states. Was that a hurdle
for you to get over?
00:29:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, a huge one. There’s been some incredible
benefits to, first of all, just the experience of living abroad and
experiencing a culture and a nation that’s different from my own, as
well as specifically the ways that Berlin really fits my vibe and makes
my day to day life a happy one, but it comes with huge costs.
For sure going any new place, you have to learn new stuff, you have to
adapt to the culture and even figure out, I don’t know, I remember when
I moved to Los Angeles many, many years ago. I spent several years just
struggling with trying to understand the freeway system and the
intensity of the traffic, just trying to get around the city was just
this really difficult thing. And eventually I figured it out. I figured
out the rhythms and I mastered it and I was comfortable. Then I moved to
San Francisco and it was a whole new story because things are very
different there in terms of how you get around the city.
So there’s always some element of that. But going to a new country
where there’s just different cultures, business happening in another
language is always a challenge, but then German for whatever reason.
Ends up being a particularly challenging one for a lot of native English
speakers. Yeah, it comes as being an immigrant is a, it’s like a tax on
your life and everything you do, certainly trying to start a business,
but even something as simple as opening a bank account. I was turned
down by several banks because they don’t really like doing business
with the Americans because the US tax authority, the IRS requires
certain reporting from foreign banks that it’s just sort of not worth
their while to take on American customers. So the list is pretty long
and it’s ongoing, even though I’m pretty settled and adapted now,
having been here 7 years, basically not a week goes by that there isn’t
something that would be much, much easier to get done in my home
country. And I’m aware of that and that’s time and energy and money
that takes away from things I could be doing otherwise. The fact that
that cost is worth it to me tells you how much, I don’t know, what’s
the word for it. I’m just living a happy life, and it feeds my creative
soul, and I’ve found a sense of home and a sense of a nest that maybe I
hadn’t had in other places I lived. So, in the end it’s worth it, but
it comes with a big, big cost. So, certainly moving within your own
country is a much safer bet if you’re not prepared to bear that cost.
00:31:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I ended up on the other side of that
equation. In terms of the city life of Berlin and the vitality of the
city, it’s probably my favorite city in the world.
Just being in the physical environment, it’s so energizing.
There’s so many interesting people. There’s all kinds of different
families, amazing businesses and art and history. It’s just an
incredible place to be, but I couldn’t get over moving. From the US to
Germany, it didn’t make sense for me. I was trying to reflect back like
you were saying, like kind of trying to pull out why that was. And I
think for me, I really value understanding where I’m living, and not
just the language, but the history, the political environment, the legal
environment. That’s all a big deal to me. And I had spent, you know,
several decades learning that stuff, and I really valued that security
here in the US. I was feeling actually, in retrospect, really bullish on
the US. I know that’s not a popular sentiment now, perhaps, but I was
surprised to see that, you know, I came in with this very global
flexibility, could live wherever I want, maybe I’ll move to New
Zealand, who knows. But in the end, it was like, actually, I’m willing
to bet on the US and that’s where I want to spend the next years of my
life.
00:32:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll second that the United States remains
one of the best places in the world to live. It’s certainly a great
place to work and start a business, and I feel incredibly lucky that
that’s where I was born. And in fact, one of the reasons I was
motivated to go have the experience of living abroad is I met so many
people living first in Los Angeles and later San Francisco who are
immigrants that came from other places, sometimes very far away. I had
so much respect for what they went through to transplant their whole
lives, to come pursue the opportunities and the lifestyle that’s
afforded to Americans and Californians. But because I happen to be lucky
enough to be born in California and be a Californian, I could certainly
Just sit back and enjoy the fruits of that serendipitous occurrence, but
I felt like I wanted to have the experience of living in another place.
And it certainly has given me new appreciation. Being an immigrant just
gives you a whole new perspective on nations and cultures because
you’re outside of As programmers like to say there’s 1 and there’s N,
so most people only have ever really seen the inside of one nation and
one culture. Once you’ve seen two, now you can see the, call them pros
and cons, but even more than that, you just see the variations, you see
the ways that human nature is pretty constant across all these cultural
differences, but you also see things that are maybe more accidents of
history or fallout of particular geography or history that a culture
evolved in.
So yeah, it’s a really mind expanding experience, but certainly I am
and continue to be thankful that I was lucky to be born in a time and
place that is really, frankly, a great place to be.
So another interesting factor of this decoupling of where people live
from their sort of work and school life is that when it comes time to
incorporate a business, now you have also a similar decision. So for
example, in our case, we had 3 founding partners and they were all
essentially located in different places and so basically you just got to
pick where one of them is located and that’s where your business is
going to be. In our case, that made sense to be Seattle, but you can
even take it a step further. Other than that, for example, it’s been
for a pretty long time. I think most San Francisco tech companies are
incorporated in Delaware. I don’t have exact numbers there, but I’d be
willing to wager it’s in the 80 to 90% range.
00:35:13 - Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it might even be higher. And to be clear,
we are a Delaware corporation, you know, we’re incorporated there, and
our HQ is in Seattle. It was kind of funny because you basically have to
pick an HQ and, you know, we don’t have an office and I guess we’ll
pick Seattle because it needs to be somewhere and Mark lives there and
that’s where the lawyers are sure.
00:35:32 - Speaker 1: We did the same thing for I and Switch, which was
again, distributed founding team. We just arbitrarily picked Miami
because that’s where my colleague Ryan lived, so, yeah.
Some are taking it even a step further.
You’ve got services like Stripe Atlas or Firstpace is a company I just
recently invested in, where they actually take this a step further and
say, OK, you can be anywhere in the world, most anywhere in the world,
and in corporated company in the United States, and it’s really more of
a shopping for a jurisdiction, a legal jurisdiction, a legal home for
your legal entity, which again takes that uh Whole another step that
fits into this globalization story, but all of these mechanisms I feel
like were created for, yeah, I live in any town USA and I want to open a
restaurant on Main Street, so of course, what do I do? I incorporated
the local jurisdiction because that’s just what makes sense. And now in
this global internet connected world, the both people and the companies
kind of can choose their home based on, I don’t know, more expansive
criteria. But what do you think about the whole, yeah, stripe Atlas kind
of phenomenon?
00:36:42 - Speaker 2: Well, I think first of all, anything that makes it
easier to start a business and gives the opportunity to more people is
awesome.
I think entrepreneurship is such a powerful force in our society, and I
think a lot of people are limited by just the practical things of it
costs money and time and expertise to know how to start a business,
especially before these two things existed, and they’ve made it much
easier.
So that’s huge.
I’m also pretty bullish on this idea of having more flexibility in
jurisdictions. I do think there’s a lot of benefits to that. There’s
the long running example of being able to incorporate in Delaware, and
just gives a lot of practical benefits for people to have familiarity
and confidence in their jurisdiction and There’s some sense of
competition, dynamism among the different jurisdictions to be a good
home for businesses. So I think that’s quite good. I do think they’re
going to be some big challenges. I think one is going to be the tax
situation. I think honestly, that’s going to be a fiasco. I mean, it
already is internationally. So the deal there is companies take
advantage of being able to move jurisdictions for tax purposes, so they
might flow a lot of profits through, I’m not an expert in this, but
like, you know, Ireland or something, and it’s basically totally
artificial.
00:37:46 - Speaker 1: As I say, wasn’t there a big court case with
Apple over that a lot of their profits flow through Ireland and so the
way they were paying taxes, maybe to the at least American authorities
felt like they were not doing their fair share.
00:37:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s kind of one of many examples of
what’s going on here where historically you had businesses where the
business, the physical plant, the employers, the customers,
transactions, they were all in the same place. Like if you have a mom
and pop shop that they’re all in the same place, for example. And so
it’s kind of obvious what to do.
But if you have a business where you’re incorporated in one place, your
headquarters in another place, your employees are in different place,
your customers are in different place, the transactions. Nominally
somewhere else, the servers are somewhere else, your lawyers are
somewhere else, who gets that tax money? And it’s not an obvious
question. And there’s a lot of wrangling over that right now. And by
the way, it might actually get even worse this coming year because
everyone’s going to have to do their taxes with everyone working from
home. And you know, is your income in where you used to work, or is it
in where you spent 7 months or yeah, it’s going to be a mess. But I’m
confident eventually we’ll be able to figure this out.
00:38:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s one of these problems that
society needs to tackle and find a way that’s fair and comprehensible
and navigable to everyone. I think of something like the Amazon sales
tax issue, which I think took many years to sort out, but essentially
collecting sales tax once. commerce largely moves online. You buy and
sell stuff in the cloud and then where does sales tax get charged?
00:39:11 - Speaker 2: I’m smiling here on the podcast because while the
sales tax situation is better, it’s still not fully figured out as we
recently realized with news, we’re getting there.
00:39:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. And then when you have small
businesses that should be focused on survival, they’re trying to, you
know, in our case, try an innovative new product and see if people will
pay for it, and we have a small team and we don’t want to be caught up
in tax law jurisdiction stuff that’s just going to drain energy and
time and everything else away from just making a good product and
pleasing our customers.
But at the same time, yeah, it’s often not clear. I have a personal
story on that, which was funny. I living this immigrant lifestyle is I
often mystify my working with tax advisors or attorneys or other things
like that. For example, a state planning, you know, I pay into both the
American Social Security system but also the German pension system, and
there’s all sorts of weird ways that those interact.
Many cases, there’s international treaties that govern that kind of
stuff, you know, is a driver’s license from this place accepted over
here, or can you Diverted or if so, how? So yeah, things get thorny and
then my partner, my life partner is from yet another country and then
we’re living in this, so you’ve got two people from different
countries who are living together in a third country and they want to do
things like I don’t know, a joint bank account or purchase a home
together or something like that. Yeah, things get confusing fast, even
hiring experts, attorneys and advisors and other things, they’re often
just mystified or You know, who’s going to be an expert in either 2 or
certainly all three of these jurisdictions and sometimes it’s just not
even clear. One good example for that is because I do so much work for
companies where I earn equity rather than cash or some mix of cash and
equity, which is of course really, really standard in the startup world,
but I have earned equity from companies over the course of many, many
years, have a portfolio on that that I’ve built up over. Time and of
course it takes a long time to pay out. Most of it’s never worth
anything, but some of it eventually is worth something. And I recently
had a company I did work for back in 2010 went to IPO, so I made some
good money from that and that was nice, but I’ll tell you what, trying
to figure out the tax situation as it relates to Germany is quite
interesting because there you go, OK, well, I worked for a company, you
know, almost 10 years ago at the time, almost 10 years ago, in a
country. The company was in the United States. I was in the United
States. I had never even been to Germany at that point. I had no work
visa or anything. That’s when I did the work and I earned the equity
then and of course it wasn’t worth very much then, basically,
effectively worth 0. And then here I am, but now I’m here in Germany, I
have a work permit and I I should be paying taxes on my earnings. The
work was actually done previously and honestly, no one really knows.
It’s just a legal gray area and you end up in this position where you
have to try to figure out, obviously I want to pay what’s fair to all
of these nations who are involved in it, the United States that was
hosting me and the company and at the time as well as to my new adopted
home, but it’s in many cases people don’t know what’s fair and then
you’re trying to figure that out as you go along.
00:42:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the tax stuff is quite a rabbit hole for
sure.
00:42:15 - Speaker 1: Well, maybe we can end on, if you were to give
advice or give you at least your thoughts on how someone could or should
approach thinking about where they want to live, if they have that
flexibility in 2020 in this new Zoom centric world that we live in, what
tips would you offer them?
00:42:33 - Speaker 2: Hm. I think I’d go back to a sort of personal
motto of mine, which is to be honest with yourself, and this means
really understanding what motivates you and drives you. So whatever your
process is, try to dial into what is in fact really important to you and
where you live. And I think it’s being open to the possibility that
that is not obvious, that’s maybe a little bit alarming to you, that
it’s not what your friends expected or think should be the case, but
really being true to what you actually want and need, and then going
forward from there. What about you, Adam?
00:43:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that.
I’ll add on to it that I think when I’ve been in the position of
offering this perspective to someone, I’ve compared it to dating, which
is you can have some idea in your mind of who your ideal partner is just
like you can have an idea of what your ideal home is, but in many cases
you don’t know until you see it because you don’t really know what the
variables are, what the options are, and sometimes a place or a person
just has some special combination of. Elements, some chemistry with you
that never would have predicted just from the on paper analysis. So I
think that’s for being a little open, maybe trying to cut free of what
is expected from you by your culture, your friends, your family, and
being open to seeing what place you vibe with and then doing that
reflection and trying to understand for me, a lot of the reflection. was
realizing, you know, I thought maybe I was in a place in my life where I
want to be a little bit out of the hustle and bustle of the city, the
big bad city with all its crime and dirt and intensity. That’s a young
person’s game. But I actually found when I looked at the different
options, now, I really thrive off of urban energy, but I also at a point
where I want a little more green, a little more quiet, a little more
space, and can I get those two things together. In fact, you can.
There’s a huge amount of diversity in cities in the world, and if
you’re open to absorbing and seeing what your experiences are in terms
of this place feels good to me. I feel at home or I feel comfortable
here and the self reflection on understanding what that means for you in
terms of understanding what you value, but maybe also stage of life.
Maybe you have an image of yourself in the mind that I’m a young
dynamic person and I want to be in. Some young dynamic oriented place
like Manhattan, but maybe in fact, that’s not really what you want.
Maybe you wanted it when you were younger and you don’t want it now or
the other way around. So I think being very open but also
self-reflective is the key.
00:44:56 - Speaker 2: Right on.
00:44:57 - Speaker 1: If any of our listeners out there have feedback,
maybe a little about your own journey in thinking about where you want
to live and work, then reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or by email,
hello at museapp.com. We always love to hear your comments and ideas for
future episodes. And Mark, thanks for holding down Muse World Headquarters
there in Seattle for us. You bet. Thanks, Adam. See you next time.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I cannot overemphasize the first run experience,
that’s when you have the most energy and the most enthusiasm and
momentum coming from the user.
00:00:14 - 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,
and I’m here today with my colleague Julia Rogats.
00:00:28 - Speaker 3: Hi, Adam, nice to be back.
00:00:30 - Speaker 2: And a guest, Jane Portman of User List.
00:00:33 - Speaker 1: Hi, Adam. Hi Julia.
00:00:34 - Speaker 2: And Jane, maybe you can tell us a little bit about
your background and what you’re working on at user list.
00:00:39 - Speaker 1: Well, thanks for having me today. My pleasure to
share a little story. User list is a tool for sending activation on
boarding, life cycle, email and other kinds of messages to Sassy. Users,
so we work specifically with SASS founders and provide great tools for
them to run their SAS companies. And uh user onboarding that we have as
a topic today is so hard for us because that’s like the primary
application for our tools. So we’re sort of on a mission to try and
help founders establish their better onboarding practices.
00:01:13 - Speaker 2: And just because I always like to unpack
abbreviation, SAS stands for software as a service, so this typically
would be web applications, often ones that are sold to businesses rather
than either consumer applications or mobile apps or iOS apps such as Ms.
Yes, that’s correct. What was your journey? What brought you to be
passionate about this area or be working on this particular company?
00:01:38 - Speaker 1: So if we go back in time a little bit, this is my
2nd SAS product and I’m running this one together with my amazing
technical co-founder, Benedict Die. He’s a real engineering wizard,
like I would never pursue this conflict of a product without him.
When I was doing my first product, which was a little productivity app
that didn’t go anywhere because it was not as crucial to the business,
it didn’t like have a major mission, it didn’t have a good audience,
and also while I was running it, there was no great tool that I could
use for life cycle messaging, for user onboarding, etc. except for
Intercom. Which back then wasn’t even pretty, to be honest, so it was
super expensive, not very attractive, and it was not targeting small
founders like myself.
So a couple years later, It was pretty obvious what to build because I
was very sure that Sa founders need help in that area and I recruited
two more people, Benedict and we had a marketing co-founder, Claire
Suentrop. She later on decided to stay as an advisor.
She works on a popular marketing project, Forget the Funnel and Elevate
these days. So that’s the story of fuselist and before that, I’m a
UIUX consultant by trade. For the last 8 years, I’ve been working
online with international clients and running my personal brand, UI
Breakfast, and I also do UI Breakfast podcast, which is a nice design
show. So that’s been out for a while as well.
00:03:08 - Speaker 2: And notably, we’ll have a crossover episode
there. Mark, Mark’s going on with you at some point.
00:03:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m so excited to have him soon. So that
show is sort of catering to my design interest and user list is
something that we’re all passionate about is helping fellow founders
pursuing that like bootstrapper dreams, slow and steady, kind of not
funded, but self-funded growth.
00:03:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, having the pain yourself, that is
having previously done a business and see where this is needed, that’s
certainly one of the best ways to drive you to create a great product, I
think.
And you already kind of teed up our topic here, which is on boarding.
You actually suggested this one, but it ended up being serendipitously
apropos because Yuli was actually deep in the project at the time.
We’ve, we’ve since released it, but deep in the project of redoing our
onboarding, which we’ve done several times and is a challenge for
various reasons we’ll get into later on. But before we do that, let’s
start with the fundamentals. Can you tell us what is on boarding and why
does it matter?
00:04:11 - Speaker 1: Well, firsthand congrats on your recent launch.
That’s a big one.
Also very exciting. Well, going back to user onboarding, that’s the
process that software people use to receiving value from their product.
And this can mean different things in people’s heads because we often
associate this with like tool tips or guided tours, so very like
specific interventions, but it should. be perceived as a more abstract
thing, sort of a larger situation in life that the person is in and how
you can help them using different kinds of tools, interventions and no
little things to achieve value using your product and your product plays
a little role there because they usually don’t strive to be good users
of your product, but they’re striving for achieving something else
which is much, much bigger and important for them.
00:05:00 - Speaker 2: You wrote this piece that we referenced a little
bit titled Inspire, not Instruct that focuses more on the helping people
understand what I usually talk about the aha moment or the understanding
how something can fit into their life or help them in some way or solve
their problem rather than the nuts and bolts minutia of how exactly do I
use this.
00:05:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s kind of meta because user list is a
tool for user on boarding, but it’s also quite a big challenge for us
to onboard our own users.
Once one of our users uh wrote back and said that they loved what they
saw inside the app on the first run experience, and basically what we
have is a single welcome video that does have not a single instructions
inside it.
And our goal is to sort of set up the tone and then we just rely on
their own skills to continue with the journey, because different
software applications have different levels of complexity and ours is
definitely not on the easier side of the spectrum. It has a lot of
elements for the user to become successful, they have to complete the
integration, they have to actually write the emails. Of course we do
have like templates and everything else we can, but. You can take the
horse to water, but you can’t make them drink if they’re not inspired,
so we really strive for this inspiration component more than trying to
like instruct them, um, towards performing certain steps.
00:06:23 - Speaker 2: And I suspect there’s particular challenges when
you get into B2B, as they call it business to business stuff, as well as
very technical products.
We ran into that with Hiroku and it’d be interesting to compare that to
the maybe the mobile app world a little bit later on, but you know I was
curious to get your take on onboarding here.
And again, this has some nice historical touch points for us.
And that we met at a company called Clue, a reproductive health tracker,
and while we were both there, you were leading a project to build the
out of box experience or the UI, it’s kind of the cute acronym there,
which you said maybe UB and onboarding aren’t quite the same thing, but
in any case, I’d love to hear how you think about this now being a
veteran of having built multiple first run experiences for apps.
00:07:08 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. The way that I understand the UBI
or the out of box experience is basically The way that the user sets up
a piece of software, in many cases, this is, you know, if you’re
installing something first, this would be part of the UBI. If we
remember like for Windows users, I think this is still a thing where you
have to double click on a thing and then you get the dialogue, where do
you want to install the tool. So this would all be part of an Ubi.
Obviously, in the app world, you just download an app from the app store
and then you open it, and then what happens in those first couple of
minutes, I would say, is the out of box experience. And so in the
example of clue, there was actually different guided steps to make you
see the app with some initial data, so it would ask you how old you
were. If you remember when your last period was, if you know roughly how
long your period is, and based on the data that you input there, you
will then end up at basically the app’s main screen that already has a
little bit of data filled in. So this was both a way to kind of get to
know the user and get information from them that are relevant for the
app to work correctly and also avoid then bringing them to an empty
start screen, basically, because if you have an app that’s
fundamentally about data input, The first thing that you see being an
empty screen is kind of uninspiring, of course. And so to compare this
with the new experience, I think what we’re trying to do with the
onboarding here is to both inspire them to realize what the product is
about and how it could fit into their lives, but then obviously also
teach them how the app works and Muse, as we all know, is kind of a, a pro
tool that does things quite differently from other apps. So some of the
gestures are fairly hard to discover on their own, which is I think why
it is important to teach the user a little bit on how to use the app
without overwhelming them with too many things all at once. But at the
same time also show them a little bit of content, motivate them to get
some of their own content in. And so based on all of these incentives,
we we’ve tried to put together a little on boarding, which I think we
will get into this later. That hopefully brings all of these components
together.
00:09:23 - Speaker 1: I’m super curious to hear what you decided on
that because you have so many hidden things in news and um that really
requires some instructions. So what is the form and shape that you
decided to go with?
00:09:36 - Speaker 3: Well, we’ve historically been through a couple
different steps here. I think the very first version when we were still
in beta was basically just an empty board with 2 or 3 cards on them, and
one of them, I think was a pretty long text describing what news is
about. And obviously that was neither teaching the user anything nor
being particularly inspiring because the last thing that people want to
do. When they first opened an app is read a huge block of text. So that
was discarded fairly soon.
00:10:03 - Speaker 2: In our defense, I’ll jump in and say that the
earliest onboarding was actually that we didn’t let anyone try the app
unless one of us was sitting right there to help them.
Onboarding was what you might call white glove or high touch, which
often goes with, yeah, high-end kind of enterprise sales type products,
but also I don’t know, maybe someone like superhuman has kind of
popularized this a little bit, at least in the tech world’s
imagination.
But yeah, we would just sit there either in person in some cases or over
video chat and either first give them a demo, try to show them what they
can do with it once they get better at it, but then once they’re in it,
kind of direct them around a little bit and then, you know, that
obviously wasn’t very scalable, but it was a good place to start where
we combined the usability test with a user interview with an onboarding
was kind of all one thing that was just done completely outside the
software.
00:10:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s right.
So I think the thing that we did after this was to focus more on the
inspiring part, so to really show people what you could do with Muse,
what a muse board looks like when it’s filled with rich types of
content. So we actually had a fairly extensive bundle of like pre-made
onboarding content. I think it was one main board and then maybe 5 other
different boards and different topics inside there.
With some, you know, hand drawings or sketches on there, different types
of links, PDFs, basically every content type that’s supported in use
was in there, but there was no instruction at all on how to use the
app.
So people were kind of left to just explore on their own, which I think
worked well in some regards, but I think one thing we also learned there
is to just throw a bunch of random content at the user. Without any
context on why this is important or why they would care about it seemed
a little bit weird to users as well.
Like they come in wanting to do a certain thing and if they then find a
board that outlines, you know, notes on a book that someone wants to
write that maybe doesn’t align at all with what they’re interested
in.
And so where we went from there, I think it was to try a little bit more
of a learning the muse interactions based on a stack of cards that was
in your inbox, like right when you launched the app, that was basically
just a blank board and I think something like 12 or 15 cards that are
arranged in a little stack in your inbox.
This is where your content lands when you bring anything into Muse. And
that definitely had a little bit of a threshold for users in terms of
figuring out what to do with that stack of cards. I think for some
people, and even if I remember correctly during one of the app reviews,
this was actually reported as a bug, like there’s a bunch of cards or
like a bunch of little things hanging off the side of the screen, and we
don’t know what to do with it.
00:12:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, in the ideal world it was sort of. And they
would tempt the user to grab it and drag it out and it’s a way to kind
of draw you into that interaction without explicitly saying it. And I
think that did work in a lot of cases. I ran some usability tests where
I saw people be kind of puzzled what’s going on with these things on
the side, and when they pull it out, they have kind of an aha moment and
a sense of delight at having kind of figured something out, but just as
often as not, it was uh what’s going on here, this app looks broken.
00:13:21 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I, I definitely think the
moment of like when you do figure out what to do with it and then you
realize, OK, you can drag these things around. There are a couple, just,
you know, I, I think it was like a gardening project, so we had like a
set of cards that had some inspiring images, and then a little bit of
text explaining what Muse is and what you can do with it. It also
pointed you to a little panel that you can open from the main menu that
we call it, I think just a learn panel.
That had some of the main interactions of the app explained just with
some icons, and it seems like most people figured out how to use that
and then notably a while later we actually introduced our handbook, I
think there was an entire podcast episode on this, but we really went
through lengths of recording videos of basically every interaction and
everything that you can do inside the app. And put it on a website. So
linking to this also from the main app helps. So if people really get
stuck or they’re curious to learn more or to figure out how everything
works, they can go and look at the handbook.
Basically, the new onboarding that we designed based on the pain points
that we saw with the random stack of cards in the inbox is a bit of a
combination of everything we did before, combined with like a
quest-based system. So our main incentive here was to motivate users to
figure out the app while Using the app without necessarily forcing them
to do something in a certain order, or I think we all know these types
of onboarding tutorials where you first open an app and they, they
really don’t let you do anything but click on the thing where the error
points and you feel a little bit like a child that is taken through like
an obstacle course and There’s basically no freedom to just explore on
your own.
00:15:08 - Speaker 2: Jane, I think your article talks about this,
right, like the tool tips and the guided tours and basically says that
stuff doesn’t work.
00:15:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and also there is this famous person in the
industry of user and boarding, Samuel Heli, and he wrote a book that
I’ve read like ages ago, that was kind of laid the foundations for my
own thinking and we recently had a conversation with Samuel and yes, he
confirms like up to date. This does not really produce great results
because everybody wants to have an autonomous experience. They want to
explore things on their own at their own pace, while tool tips like
enforce working within the UI at some predefined scenario, and this is
just not a great practice.
00:15:50 - Speaker 2: Just as an aside, it must be fun to to read a book
that had a big impact on your career and what you’re working on and
then get to interview the author later on.
00:15:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and we’ve been friends with Samuel for many
years as well, so we have this kind of multifaceted relationship, uh,
him influencing my thinking because he’s the UX consultant who only
does onboarding for the last decade or so. It’s interesting how life
has unfolded that these days we’re also establishing ourselves as an
authority and user on boarding because we have a tool for it. And like,
I don’t want to personally compete with Samuel’s thinking by any
means, and neither do I want to reproduce his ideas, but it’s so
amazing to be thinking in the same direction, sort of.
00:16:33 - Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, well, give me the link to that book,
as well as the episode after and I’ll put it in the show notes for the.
00:16:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, he’s been super famous for these onboarding
tear downs, and he has plenty of mobile experiences as well. So we just
do web apps and he does all those consumer apps that have interesting
first run experiences for end users.
00:16:55 - Speaker 2: Now Yuli, I think you’re about to start talking
about how we landed on the onboarding we have now, maybe called the
quest style. I’ll use this opportunity to tell a little anecdote from
my own history, which is that many years ago I worked on this kind of a
side project, some online multiplayer games.
It kind of early days of the internet in the 90s and ended up doing an
onboarding. I wouldn’t have called it that then. I didn’t know that
term, but that first run experience to help someone learn the game.
And the one I was inspired by was, or there was another game similar
kind of one of these kind of D&D style online multiplayer games. And in
this particular game, you had a magic sword that you started out with
when you began the game. And I thought it was very clever because the
sword would just talk to you and tell you what it thought you should do.
So it would say, OK, maybe you should go over here now, maybe you should
try talking to this person. Maybe you should pick up this object and we
kind of take you through a bit of a, of a sort of a step by step
tutorial. But the great thing was it was just saying that you could do
whatever you wanted and you could just ignore it. And in fact, if you
got annoyed and tired of it talking, you could just drop the sword and
walk off. and basically just throw it away. So it was a really nice way
to both give that guidance for someone that wants it, but then not. Take
away in any way the user’s sense of agency or freedom.
00:18:13 - Speaker 3: Nice. I think that reminds me a little bit of the
little animated paperclip character in early versions of Microsoft Word.
I don’t know if they still do this, but I have a very strong memories
of like my young teenage years having this little paper clip set off to
the side and telling me things that in most cases, I didn’t really want
to know. But sometimes also just helpful tool tips, but I think you also
could, if you get an out, you could just remove it completely from your
view, I think.
00:18:40 - Speaker 2: Well, notably there, I believe this fellow’s name
is Clippy and has become a punching bag for sort of dumbing down
professional products in the software industry. So while on one hand, I
think maybe had some good intentions in many ways represents for a lot
of people what’s actually wrong with tutorials and software on
boarding.
00:19:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree.
00:19:03 - Speaker 1: It could also take forms of different animals in
addition to the paper clip. I recall.
00:19:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the amount of work they put into making that
thing be really distracting was quite outstanding, I have to say.
00:19:19 - Speaker 1: We’ve just talked about how important it is to
keep the user autonomous in their journey, but on the other hand, as a
UIUX person, I cannot overemphasize that the first run experience,
that’s when you have the most energy and the most enthusiasm and
momentum coming from the user, so. Those like first few steps that you
make really mandatory, yes, sure, you have to make them shorter so that
they can then autonomously explore the app. But on the other hand, you
shouldn’t really neglect that energy that’s coming with it, and if
those steps are pretty fine that you might still want to take advantage
of that momentum that the user has that very moment. So it’s not always
that you just leave them hanging. Sometimes you really have to enforce
something.
00:20:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think we struck a fairly good balance
with the new onboarding and new. So what happens now when you open the
app for the first time and you made it past authenticating yourself, you
get onto basically a root board that has a couple cards on it.
One is another empty board, one is a text card, and then there’s
another little text card on the side that just gives you a very brief
intro about what news is and why you should care about it. And then the
other text card is basically already a mini tutorial or suggestion. It
just says take this card and zoom into the empty board next to it and
then drop the card there. And notably, this is one of our, I would say,
most complex or surprising interactions. We often get people to write in
feedback that they can’t figure out how to move a card between a board
and Based on this, it actually seemed like a lot of users really
couldn’t figure this out, so we decided to make this sort of key
interaction to be the first thing that we’re trying to teach users.
In a way, also because we think that it gives users a good idea about
how new is different from other tools. It immediately teaches you this,
you know, you can use both hands. It’s not all just use your finger to
do something. You can use one hand to pick up a card and then you can
use the other hand to do something else. So teaching people how we’re
doing things a little bit differently from other apps was quite key to
us here.
And then once you completed this first task, basically, We guide you to
open a little panel that then has a list of other interactions that you
can do in Muse, and they’re laid out as a sort of checklist, but
you’re also free to just close that panel and explore on your own. And
the next time you come back, you can come back to it and open it again.
So it’s not like it forces you to do these things and do them in a
particular In order, but it does sort of give you a rough set of what
basic interactions are possible in the app, and it entices you to
explore them a little bit. And if you get stuck on any of them, you can
actually, and this is where we’re making use of the handbook and all
those video content that we created to really teach you in a visual way
how the app works. If you get stuck anywhere, you can tap a little
button for each of the tasks, and it actually drops some cards into your
inbox. When you drag them out, you’ll see that they’re like a little
instructional card that explains how a certain thing works. And then
also a card that plays the video. So a video of demonstrating,
basically, you see two hands on an iPad actually doing the thing. So
this way, we’re really trying to explain to people the things that are
possible in the app. And then also motivating them to add a little bit
of content of their own and to basically start exploring how the app
feels when they use it for a real project.
00:22:50 - Speaker 2: I’ll say that the use of the two-handed card
carrier that put a card into a board as the very first thing was a
really great insight by you in terms of it’s this thing that not a lot
of people figure out how to do because it is different. They expect
that, oh, maybe I should be able to drag a card with one finger and kind
of drop it on a board and it’ll go inside there, but that’s Muse has a.
Different model and using both hands to do this complex gesture is not
what they expect.
But we also see that when we show that to people in many cases just
through our support channels they write in and ask how to do this and we
explain it somehow or send a video or something and then they have this,
oh, that’s amazing. I love this. It feels interesting. It turns on a
light bulb a little bit.
So maybe to Jane’s earlier point of they have this energy right at that
moment to try to kind of challenge themselves a little bit or try
something a little different. And it’s something that’s hard to figure
out on your own, but if we guide them to doing it, and then maybe you
have a not only a little light bulb about here’s how I do this specific
thing, but a light bulb of, like you said, this app works differently. I
can use both my hands. I should be prepared for a slightly different
experience.
00:23:56 - Speaker 1: Um, buckle in. For a different experience. I’m
curious, you have such amazing videos with this over the desk camera and
the hands using the iPad and everything. How did you produce those? Are
there any secrets because like you can’t really do that on your own, to
have some magnificent video editor hand or any other secrets?
00:24:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s our colleague Mark. So he set up a
little home recording studio, which is not too fancy.
I think it’s sort of a boom arm that holds everything’s recorded with
an iPhone camera, which of course are amazing these days. They do, you
know, 4K 60 frames per second. And then the lighting turns out to be a
really key thing so getting some lights on all sides so the shadows
aren’t too heavy.
We talked about this a little bit in another podcast episode that I can
link back to, but basically kind of came down to a combination of these
a few pieces of equipment using the iPhone. Camera and then what for me
was a surprise, which is filming a screen seems weird to me, but
actually it works really well because the high quality of cameras these
days combined with the brightness and pixel density of the iPad screen
means basically looks great.
00:25:08 - Speaker 1: So it’s an actual screen recording, that’s quite
amazing. I thought it’s a combination of some magic editing. As they
do.
00:25:16 - Speaker 2: Right. I’ve seen, um, I read a post somewhere
someone doing this for I think an iPhone demo video where they
essentially did like a green screen or a chroma key on the phone screen,
and then they record the hands doing the motions and then they record a
screen recording and composite them, and that would be nuts for us to
do. I mean, even aside from that we’re a small team and just don’t
have the resources for that kind of thing.
It’s also that we have these really complex interactions and trying to
replicate them twice once for screen recording and once for like
recording the hands would be tricky, but yeah, weirdly enough, just
filming an iPad screen works fine and actually I’m pretty sure that’s
what Apple does for a lot of their videos too, so I guess it works.
00:25:51 - Speaker 1: Do you have any other tips for the video content
during onboarding, like from my experience, keeping those short is very
useful, but also a big challenge because the shorter you want to be that
the harder it is to record a good one. Because I’m the one on the team
who does all of this stuff and it’s amazing how much infrastructure
there is in a software application that does not relate to software
that’s got to be done, like the docs, the videos and everything.
00:26:17 - Speaker 2: That is a really great point.
00:26:18 - Speaker 1: So what are your tips for the videos?
00:26:20 - Speaker 2: Well, we, you know, maybe we did it easy because
we’re in some ways, it’s a very simple format, right, just hands and
an iPad on. and these things are often 5 seconds long or something. What
do you do in your videos and actually maybe that’s a lead in. I was
going to ask you more about this whole other world of B2B apps and the
fact that I think onboarding is not just what’s in the software, but
it’s also email exchanges, maybe there’s a sales component or demos,
obviously videos, which could be on your YouTube channel or whatever.
I’d love to hear the larger picture of what that whole experience is
for your customers.
00:26:54 - Speaker 1: I think experience for our customers is one thing,
is what we offer, but there is this whole spectrum of different
interventions that you can apply to try and affect people’s behavior to
some success or maybe to no success. It really depends.
We only cover as a tool, we only offer email as the most classic and
powerful way of getting in touch with the people, and we also offer. In
app notifications, which are like a little chat bubbles, but without the
chat that appear in the corner of the app that you can use to supply
some helpful information.
But there is also such a wide range of tools, and I don’t mean tools
like autopilot or chameleon or a dozen other tools that offer guide
through tours and things like that, but you can also offer demo calls
such as white glove on boarding, as you mentioned before. You can invite
people to. book with you at certain stages of the app, you can, you can
make fun of a little bit.
00:28:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, super cheesy, but it actually does work, you
know, it’s a little more scalable than a one on one thing, but you get
on a video call and you can kind of walk through. Some script, but then
you can also answer people’s questions, that sort of thing can work
really well for the right kind of product.
00:28:16 - Speaker 1: You can do office hours, you can do an online
community where people try and even help each other, but I would never
recommend that at a small scale because it takes so much energy to
support that.
But if you have that, there’s this people out there who seem to be, you
know, revived by communications with others like we’re not among those,
so.
Having multiple customer conversations in a forum that would like drain
our productivity to zero and we’ll never get things done, so maybe
later when we have like a community manager or someone, and also the
docs, videos, everything that’s in this materials ecosystem that you
can produce and help the people.
There’s this delicate play of the formats and different calls to
actions that are all around the place in the emails and inside the app.
For example, in Muse, if you have a handbook, how do you help people
open it? How do you leverage this uh different experience, you have the
app and you have the browser, how do you not lose attraction? It can be
really, really different for multiple products. So you put together this
delicate play, and then it’s usually traditional to have email as sort
of the main thread. where you pile up those interventions and offer
different kinds of help along the cycle. And, uh, there might be
opinions.
For example, there’s this wonderful email expert called Val Geisler,
and she’s amazing. She has wonderful email on boarding tear downs, but
she says that whatever you undertake that makes you send less email is
not great.
Well, we might be missing out on that, but we do think that less stuff
is actually better. And the best email is that the one that’s not sent,
so we highly encourage our customers to use behavior data to actually
filter out some of the communications that are already irrelevant, like
if the future is used, there is no need to promote it anymore. In the
ideal world, the user will just like figure out themselves and not have
to do anything. So yeah, it’s so interesting, it’s so specific to a
particular product.
00:30:21 - Speaker 2: The email one is, I think, worth drilling in on a
little bit there.
I mean, you mentioned it as being kind of the standard or the center
point for the back and forth. I think that’s really true in B2B
enterprise stuff, which is where I spent a lot of.
My career, it is unusual, perhaps even non-existent for consumer
applications. In fact, we’re in an age now where I know younger people
that just don’t have email, right? That’s just not part of their
world.
And in any case, the way that for example, the App Store and so forth is
set up really doesn’t encourage that sort of thing.
We discovered that same you discovered pretty early on that this was a
really important Channel for our target audience because our target
audience tends to be kind of thoughtful reader types. They like reading
and writing long form things and so we made the perhaps controversial
choice to ask for an email right off the bat. We don’t ask for a name
or anything else like that, but we want to be able to have that direct
communication channel and if you send feedback from the app, that comes
from your email address so we can reply to it. And we don’t use it for
a lot. We don’t do any kind of like drip campaigns and stuff like that.
I know that sort of thing is very standard when you sign up for Notion,
you get a series of emails saying, here’s some information for, you
know, your next step in using the app or whatever. But yeah, it seems to
me like email, at least certainly for us, and definitely the more B2B
world is a key piece. How do you think about or or how do you approach
this whole world of, I don’t know, drip campaigns and follow-ups and
that sort of stuff.
00:31:46 - Speaker 1: Your app is really at that price point when
you’ve got to have a more serious relationship with the people about
their billing, about their content, and you really have to use email, at
least a little bit to make sure that this relationship and that this
content is intact if they lose like their device or something like that,
isn’t that true?
00:32:08 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Even aside from the practicalities of
the reset, I think.
Being kind of a spectrum where on one far extreme you have consumer
products which are big scale, you download from the app store. There’s
not really much of a relationship.
It wouldn’t be practical for an application maker that has millions or
tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users to have personal
relationships with their users. They just can’t do that and the users
probably don’t want that either.
And then on the other extreme, you might have the classic, you know,
multimillion dollar top of the market enterprise sales where it’s, you
know, you have a personal relationship with your salesperson, you go out
for steak dinners, they come to your, you know, your wedding or
whatever, that like really, really deep long term.
And then of course there’s a bunch of stuff in the middle. I think for
Muse we kind of discovered that we ended up maybe kind of in the middle,
little closer to the lightweight side, but having that email so we can
build a personal connection when you send a message with a question, you
get an answer from some me or you there or someone else on the team. You
build up that relationship over time and it builds trust in the product
and maybe makes you more inclined to part with money or believe in the
product both now and in the future.
00:33:18 - Speaker 1: That reminds me of a phrase that I really like and
there’s high touch, there is low touch, and there is tech touch. Which
means that you can imitate the high touch relationship, but it’s scale,
because you have like thousands of downloads and you can’t really
honestly offer your hand to everyone, but you can offer your help using
automated means and then some of the people will use it to generate
genuine relationships.
00:33:44 - Speaker 2: I’m a little bit, and again, I’m curious to hear
what you think about sort of the drip campaign method. I’m a little
skeptical of some of that myself when I get those follow-up emails from
a product I just signed up for.
I don’t really tend to read them that much, but maybe a version of the
tech touch or at scale thing is something like our email newsletter,
which now goes out to thousands of people, and I write this in my voice.
It comes from my email address, and when you reply, that reply comes to
me, and depending on the the issue, we get more or less responses, but I
respond to every single one of them.
And I really enjoy making that connection with our audience and with our
users. We’ll see how that scales over time already with this recent
launch, we found ourselves pretty buried under the communication, but
that’s important to us is to feel connected to the folks that we’re
helping or trying to help our product.
00:34:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, as makers of the tool that does that, we’re
under no false impression that this is a magic bullet to nudge people
with email, but it’s still the most reliable channel, so you can use
this to make super personable. And then maybe that will result in some
real life communication and that’s as much as you can do. If you don’t
have any other channels, you can’t really call them well, unless you
ask for a phone number, which also is an option, but that’s as much as
you can do as a founder to get in touch with them.
00:35:04 - Speaker 2: Julie, I know you’ve done a lot of kind of
usability tests and in particular kind of there’s the ad hoc form of
usability test with, you know, grab a person that’s nearby, a romantic
partner, a roommate, a family member, as well as maybe the slightly more
structured, try to reach out to people you know are in your target
audience, but you don’t know personally. How do you think about that as
fitting in with and and particularly for this recent Muse on boarding?
And we’re a little bit restricted in the in-person usability test these
days, but what’s your approach there?
00:35:35 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the sort of ad hocability tests
where you actually watch a person use the app for the first time. are
super helpful and super insightful because I think you often tend to
have the user stumble over certain things and then eventually they’ll
figure it out, which is probably fine, but to actually identify those
initial hurdles, it’s quite hard to do that just by looking at maybe,
you know, aggregate analytics data or something like this.
So actually physically watching someone use your app, get really stuck
or frustrated with something, then figure something out, having the aha
moment. is always super insightful and it’s also always a little bit
painful because of course, you know, if this is a piece of software that
you look at every day because you’re developing it, you develop a
certain blindness to certain things. So seeing someone get confused by
something that you just take for granted is, yeah, is obviously always a
little bit surprising. But it is super important to do these tests and
to take your learnings from there.
So we did this a little bit with the current onboarding and definitely
restructured a few things that some of the wording wasn’t quite
understandable to people, but where we were maybe using some internal
words that for us is super clear what they. but the user who sees the
app for the first time is not quite clear on that terminology. So this
is always a good sort of feedback check if people actually understand
the way you communicate. And then on the bigger scale, I think what
we’re trying with this new on boarding as well is to actually try to
measure. The success of how well users are onboarded, and I think that
the task list that we came up with basically lends itself really well to
this. So whenever the user completes a task in the list, we send like an
event to our servers and based on that can calculate a sort of
onboarding score that each user has. So how many of the basic
interactions have they performed at least once. And then based on this,
you could imagine doing some IB tests, maybe you reshuffle things, you
slightly change the wording on a couple of items, and then you can
compare the score of that version versus the other version and see if,
you know, those small tweaks really make a difference in the long run.
00:37:49 - Speaker 1: Were there any surprising discoveries that you’ve
learned using these AB tests?
00:37:54 - Speaker 3: I think one of them is still the basic interaction
of picking up a card and then dropping it into a board after you zoomed
into it is still not clicking with quite everyone, even though we feel
like we’re explaining it the best that we can.
And maybe that means that it’s still just too weird and people just
aren’t used to doing these things, or maybe it means that we have to
think about explaining it better again.
Or maybe it also means that the interaction just should be changed and
maybe we should come up with a different way of doing this.
So definitely by looking at the data we have now, there’s quite a few
things that we want to try to tweak and potentially do differently. So
it’s quite helpful to have that information.
00:38:32 - Speaker 2: Also noted on the split test front, I think we,
you, I should say ran the initially ran the previous onboarding, which
was this deck of cards garden thing kind of alongside the new on
boarding and so then we could just compare how far looked at those
aggregate analytics to just see in general the people that in this group
got this far and the people in this group got this far, and I think
that’s a, we don’t have a necessarily a lot of split test work on.
Our team, we’ve done a little on the website here and there just to try
some small ideas, but this is a practice that I know a lot of Silicon
Valley firms speaking to a product manager from Pinterest some time back
that said they had a really good practice that they never rolled
anything out without kind of a 90/10 split test, that even the new thing
would be up alongside the old thing for a week, and they could look at
some of their core metrics and just sort of, first of all, make sure
nothing regressed, but also have a pretty specific idea of well. is
we’re rolling out this new thing. It’s not just that we like it
better, or it looks better or it feels better to us intuitively, but
that we can actually show the way that it affects our core business and
it’s probably not quite the way that Muse would go about things, but that
approach of trying to be a little bit rigorous in, OK, we want to help
people be more successful. Does this help people be more successful and
that that’s not just based on our intuition or even these anecdotal
reports, but it can be based on data to some extent.
00:39:58 - Speaker 1: You just touched upon a pretty important topic
that how do you transform like one-off efforts on improving your
onboarding into some organizational practices that help you be
consistent at improving that. And two things that are super easy to do
is one assigning a. On boarding champion in your company who will take
care of this thing in your app, and they would vote for it in the
internal meetings and things like that. Another one is regularly, maybe
once a month or once every quarter, going through the entire boarding
experience of your app, including the payment. The sign up and
everything and everything changes so fast, you just gonna have
absolutely fresh mind every time and you’re gonna have some surprising
discoveries.
00:40:46 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. I think you feel like you
designed a good onboarding experience and now you can go off, develop
new features for your app, but you have to continuously keep in mind as
you’re adding new features or as you’re changing things that that
might affect how the user goes through the. the first time, like maybe
you need to promote those new features, you need to make it part of the
onboarding. I think for us now is the case that every time we add a new
interaction or a new feature into the app, we basically have to record a
new video for the handbook, which made it extra important to make the
lighting situation and the videos cropping and everything easily
reproducible because we don’t want then the new video to look
completely different from the old one.
But yeah, I definitely agree to what you’re saying, to always keep this
in mind and to regularly revisit it and see if it needs to be adapted to
how your app evolved since.
00:41:33 - Speaker 1: I once interviewed Max Zillemann of Ulysses, and I
know you’ve mentioned Ulysses a bit on the show, and they have so much
of this infrastructure in different languages that introducing new
features and producing materials to support that in like dozens of
languages. It’s an enormous part of what they do as a company, like you
can’t overlook that by any means.
00:41:55 - Speaker 2: And once you start to localize, you make the cost
of every change higher, and you’re adding on to your earlier point, I
think, which is that the onboarding tends to get less tension just
because it’s naturally in front of not only your team members, but also
your longtime users.
Because of course, they go through it at the beginning and not so even
if you’re in good touch with, you know, we tend to have the best
relationships and the most ongoing communication with our customers,
those are sort of by definition, people have already not only
successfully onboarded but found value for the app in their lives enough
that they’re going to pay for it.
And so as a result, the onboarding experience is something that we just
personally see less of, and you can go back to run through it. And and
realize ways that it’s come out of date or there’s rough edges or
something’s changed in a new version of the operating system that makes
something funny about, you know, the screen where you type in your
access code or what have you.
So creating some kind of organizational practice to make sure that stuff
gets attention because that is your first impression and that is the
place that’s the sort of the moment you can convert someone into a
Someone that’s gonna use and love the product, or they kind of shrug
their shoulders and say, huh, I don’t see what the big deal is and
never come back.
00:43:10 - Speaker 1: And it’s so much economically viable to invest in
that because sales and marketing costs are enormous compared to the cost
of these little interventions that you can add to like dramatically
increase the activation rate and just make better use of your marketing
money. It’s scale with every single user, virtually any improvement is
a great improvement.
00:43:33 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, I think that’s one thing we
were kind of trying to achieve with this new onboarding is that we have
lots of users coming into the app and of course, naturally people will
always turn for one reason or the other, like maybe they just realized
the product isn’t for them.
But we really wanted to eliminate the risk of using someone just because
they can’t figure out how the product works.
So once you kind of went through the app a little bit, you tried out a
few things and you then realized, yeah, I don’t really know what to do
with this. That just maybe means that the product is not a good fit for
you. But if you actually do have the motivation and that there is a way
that it fits into your life, but you can’t figure out the most basic
things, and we saw this by users emailing into support by like, how do I
delete something or how do I erase something. And so really putting some
focus on teaching them the basics so that they then based on that can
decide whether or not this product is a good product for them was quite
important to us.
00:44:27 - Speaker 2: Looking forward to the future a little bit, we’re
seeing lots changing, including, for example, the importance of video
content, but Jane, with your eye on and your specialization on the
onboarding space, what do you see as potentially being improvements
through technology or practices to onboarding for the future?
00:44:47 - Speaker 1: Well, we’ve been pretty mature in terms of the
tool set that people can use, but it’s great that organizations in
general are starting to realize the importance of user onboarding and
just investing resources in that more and more, and even smaller
founders can now afford certain tools that were previously just for
enterprise companies.
And that’s an amazing trend because previously it felt like this
ecosystem of marketing and growth hacking and everything, it was really
mature, but what happened after I sign up was a little bit kind of vague
and not touched upon.
And these days we can observe a wonderful trend of this product led
trend word, product led growth and things like that, which essentially
means just looking at what’s inside your product and what’s better for
the user. So that’s definitely a wonderful trend.
00:45:35 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a great point. The cultural awareness,
whether that’s within a particular company or in the whole industry,
you know, we saw that happen in this huge way with design, for example,
it’s not that design didn’t exist before, but it came to be something
that probably originally pioneered by Apple, but now it’s in the
zeitgeist where people say, OK, we should be thinking about design as a
first class thing and I think onboarding is not something that has that
same. Awareness as this is a critical piece of any product that you’ve
ever build. It’s a huge opportunity both for your product and for your
marketing, and it deserves its own attention and name and people to
think about it like you said earlier, like the assigning an owner on
your team, so that aside from any technological improvements, the
culture shift seems likely to only produce better onboarding experiences
in the future.
00:46:26 - Speaker 1: And I think that 2020 has already taught us a lot
is thinking about sensitive moments about how that intervention that
you’re applying can be relevant to the user at this particular moment,
uh, because a lot of things have been going on and your drip campaign is
definitely not at the top of their priority list, like reading through
that. And it feels like there is no hack of just sending more email. Now
you have to be really thoughtful and considerate and maybe send less but
be more personal and sensitive to all these things and we’ve had a lot
of big lessons this year about that.
00:47:03 - Speaker 2: Excellent. Well, yeah, thoughtful, considerate and
personal, those head on 3 of our values here on the Muse team and I think
that.
And I think that furthermore, you’re right, in 2020 specifically just
because of the state of the world and society and so forth, those things
are perhaps especially important, but I think they’re important all the
time and if we can get more in the habit of our products and our
companies and the way that we engage with customers and potential
customers as being a little more personal, a little more tuned in, I
think that’s a win across the board.
Absolutely. Well, with that, I’ll just say that if any of our listeners
out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on
Twitter or hello at museApp.com by email. We’d love to hear your
comments and of course ideas for future episodes.
Jane, thanks for coming on, for pioneering slash advocating for better
onboarding through your work at user list and where can folks find you
online?
00:48:00 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely user list.com as our primary
internet touch point, and we are at the moment working on a
comprehensive on boarding guide, which puts together all the resources
and what we want our customers and our audience to know for the right
mindset about user onboarding and that’s gonna be up very shortly,
should be live by the time this is out, and it’s available at
userless.com/user onboarding.
00:48:27 - Speaker 2: You heard it here first, folks, breaking news.
Alright, thank you both for taking the time today.
00:48:33 - Speaker 1: Great pleasure.
00:48:34 - Speaker 3: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us, pleasure.
00:48:36 - Speaker 2: And we’ll see you around. Bye.
0 min
January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: So we think a lot about how do you give agency
back to people, but we think about if this is your web browser, this is
your operating system, this is your home on the internet, how do you
feel agency over Hello and welcome to Meta Muse.
00:00:16 - Speaker 2: Muse is a tool for thought on the iPad. This
isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the
small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, and I’m here today with
my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and a guest, Josh Miller.
Hello. Thanks for being with us here today, Josh. You’re an
accomplished entrepreneur and also have a background in both the startup
world with Branch, which I think later became part of Facebook, but also
you’ve done a stint in government with the White House, if I’m not
mistaken, and nowadays you’re working Obama White House just want to
clarify that.
00:00:51 - Speaker 2: Fair enough. And now you’re working on the
browser company, which is super interesting. Why don’t you tell us what
you’re doing there?
00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Sher, thank you so much for having me. Honestly, I
feel like I’m at Whole Foods right now doing my grocery shopping
routine, listening to this podcast. So, uh, really awesome to hear that
intro live and grateful to be talking to you both.
My name is Josh, uh, working on the browser company.
As the name might imply, we’re oddly fascinated by web browsers. We
feel like we spend a ton of time in web browsers in 2020, too much time,
maybe, and as we were looking at the kind of arc of web browser
technology, it felt like the interface of the web browser and the jobs
it did for you. It was fairly stagnant and honestly was just curious
about why and what else it may look like. So there’s a group of about
10 of us, uh, in a room together, well, I guess a metaphorical room
together experimenting pretty widely about what a web browser reimagined
for 2020 might look like. So figuring it out as we go along and really
happy to be here. So thank you for having me.
00:01:54 - Speaker 2: We’ve had a lot of informal chats through Twitter
and other kind of conversations, but where maybe I really felt like I
got my head around what you were doing was when your colleague Nate
Parrott came and did a little workshop for the ink and Switch crew to
show us the experiments you’re working on, and that was very.
Interesting partially, you know, just to see inside the machine and what
you’re doing, but also because it seems to me like you’re really
taking what I would call a research approach. I think you are a startup
or a venture funded startup. Is that the correct characterization?
00:02:23 - Speaker 1: Yes, that’s a correct characterization. I agree
with that statement.
00:02:28 - Speaker 2: But even so, it seems like this approach you’re
taking these very throwaway experiments while you figure out what your
initial product is going to be as opposed to the maybe the more classic
mode that I’m used to, which is you start with an idea that you love,
you build that until it’s clear that it’s totally unviable and then
you pivot to something else when you’re forced to.
That’s a different approach.
So when Nate demoed to the switch crew and it was really interesting to
see those experiments, but he said something. In particular, that gave
me an idea for a topic here, which is, he said, OK, we’re not
innovating on the browser engine. Things like JavaScript run times and
how the HTML is rendered and all that sort of thing. There’s been
incredible technology developed on that in recent years. You’re
innovating on the interface, all the stuff that goes around that core
engine. Can you expand on that for us a little bit?
00:03:17 - Speaker 1: Sure, of course. First, worth noting. I am one of
many people on the team, so I appreciate being the representative, but
you know, everything I say, I’m trying my best to speak for everyone
else doing the real work back in the office.
In terms of innovating on the interface, I think the thing I want to
touch on first was your comment about the R&D and experimental approach,
because in some ways, that’s the core of our product philosophy.
Whether or not it’s correct or not for us or others. I think with our
first company, Branch, we’re 20 years old. Didn’t know what we were
doing. We still don’t quite know what we’re doing, but we know a
little bit more. And in our first company much more focused on let’s
whiteboard everything, and then let’s mock up three directions, and
let’s narrow it down to the best answer, and that will be the best
answer and let’s go build that. And I think from our experience and
maybe just our dispositions as creative folks, very much believe in that
no one has any idea of what they’re doing. And in many ways, some of
the most interesting innovations may sound like a dramatic word, but the
most interesting progressions of interfaces and software products we’ve
loved and we’ve built have sort of been accidental or if not
accidental, we never intended them to be that big of a deal or that part
of the product or that part of an idea to be that interesting. So from a
philosophical perspective, our view on product iteration is bias towards
experiments, quick experiments, hacking. Experiments, be intentional
about what you’re trying and why, but be open-minded and succumbed to
the fact that you don’t really have any idea what’s going to be
meaningful and what’s not. So I think that’s generally our
orientation, which I should note, we think is great for our specific
prompt and our specific team. I don’t think is the only way to do
things. And so for I just want to represent that as one viewpoint and
one lens which we take to the product problem.
00:05:02 - Speaker 2: I was just gonna support your sort of we don’t
know what we’re doing and that’s fundamental to innovation. I like the
Einstein quote, which is, if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t
call it research. So I think of it as a discovery process that doing
something new that no one has done before fundamentally means no one can
know what they’re doing and you kind of have to embrace that a little
bit, have this beginner’s mind, this humility, and just realize that
it’s, it’s more of a treasure hunt than a Engineering project.
00:05:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I have one story on that note from a mentor
of mine when I was 20 maybe. I really looked up to Evan Williams.
He was the co-creator of Blogger, you know, really the publishing
platform that in many ways popularized what we know is the concept of
blogging.
Then he went on to co-create Twitter. Obviously we know the impact that
Twitter had on publishing in the world, and then went on to work on
Medium, and I idolized him in a way when I was 19 or 20 because what
passion for a single problem and what from afar looks like he had it all
figured out. It was just over the arc of time, he was gonna come up with
all the good ideas and just came out of him effortlessly and when we
were 19 or 20, I had the lucky fortune of Getting a meeting with him and
convinced him to kind of mentor us and invest in our first company
branch and invited us to come work out of his office in San Francisco
after he left Twitter and was sort of in R&D mode. And we viewed this as
this aha moment. We were working on this new publishing platform. It was
gonna be a different thing, and we had the Godfather, the genius, the
expert that was just gonna tell us how to make it the next big thing,
cause here’s the person that knew everything about publishing. And in
our first meeting together after we moved to San Francisco, I laid out
this 6 month plan with a bunch of questions for him of is it the right
plan. And he stopped me, he said, Josh, I hope I didn’t get your hopes
up. I have no idea what the right answer to these questions are. And
actually, quite frankly, let me give you some advice. I’d be aware of
anyone in Silicon Valley that purports to have the answers to questions
like these, we’re all just making it up as we go along. We’re all just
trying our best. So, let’s keep talking about this. I’m really
excited. But I don’t have the answers and no one does. It’s obviously
one worldview, but it was a very humbling, informative experience to
hear the co-creator of blogger Twitter and Medium say, I’m just trying
my best to making it up as I go along. And I’ve continued to subscribe
to that worldview and philosophy as I’ve had a little more experience
building software. It’s not the only one, but it’s definitely the one
that I believe in.
00:07:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can see why that would be really powerful,
and there is clearly a skill, a talent, a whole world of capabilities
for effectively searching for something new or a better way of doing
things, improved technology and improved design, what we’re kind of
broadly calling innovation here. So it can be tricky when I do describe
this kind of process to others or you hear someone really successful
like Kevin. Williams talk like in the story you just told that it seems
like, well, we’re just making it up as we’re going along. It doesn’t
mean that there isn’t a skill there and a structured way to go about
this and discipline that’s needed and that there’s, you know, certain
teams that can be really great at doing that and others that struggle
more, but it’s a different mindset than this visionary top down. I just
woke up one morning with the future in my mind and now I’ll spend the
next 10 years building it according to that plan. It’s a very different
mindset.
00:08:25 - Speaker 1: I think that’s totally right, and I think I
describe it as a spectrum, and either end of the spectrum, in my
opinion, is too far, and so one end of the spectrum, as you described,
top down, we know the answer, we just have to build it. Other side is,
we’re just aloof floating through the world, hoping to stumble across
the next thing. I think every team that I’ve known that is extremely
effective at interface innovation and Development has their own part of
the spectrum, but I think in my experience, I’m curious to hear from
you, Mark and Adam, is our teams that are very principled in what they
are building for and why they’re building it and opinionated at that
highest level motivating factor. So as an example of the browser
company, I’ll share two hypotheses that end up becoming thematic
buckets for experiment. One is our view is that if you look at the
browser in 2020, it’s actually more like an operating system, not in
the technical sense of the word operating system, but it’s no longer
one of many applications on your computer that you go to momentarily to
surf the World Wide Web and track down information. You’re doing all of
your work in the browser, all of your apps, all of your documents. And
so that’s a hypothesis and a principle, which suggests a certain type
of opinionated experimentation and exploration, even if the exact
implementation is something that we believe we don’t know and we’re
gonna have to find out. I think another one is we think a lot about
digital spaces as being analogous to physical spaces, and you think
about a living room or a bedroom or an office, and those rooms are
supposed to make you feel a certain way, and they may look different,
even if they, from a utility or features perspective, all have chairs,
you sit in them, you can exist in them. Generally speaking, they make
you feel a certain way. That’s not as low level as we have a feature
idea that we know is gonna work, but it’s not so vague that we could
just build anything and count it as progress. How do you think about
this Muse? I’m curious what your principles are. So I mean, first off,
it’s worth stating, I know you invited me on this podcast. I’m on this
podcast right now cause I am obsessed. With everything that you’re
building at Muse, and ink and Switch as well. And I’m inspired by the way
you do product development and interface innovation. It sounds like
directionally, we’re pretty aligned in the way that we build things,
but how do you think about somehow narrowing down the scope of what you
experiment on while also leaving open the possibility that you actually
have no idea what’s gonna work?
00:10:54 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, first of all, thanks, Josh. I do think
what you’ve described reflects the attitude that we have at Muse and
ink and Switch.
This kind of goes back to the previous episode where we talked about
principled products where I do think you can’t expect to get there with
pure brownian motion, you know, just randomly bouncing around. You need
some sort of principle, vision, direction, valence, something that kind
of tends to pull you and the team together in a unified way in some
direction. I think that can take different forms. It could be
principles, it could be this kind of postulates, it could be hypotheses,
it can be an end goal that’s important to everyone. You just need
something that’s kind of pulling people together. Another comment I
would make is this idea of balance between theory and practice is also
reflected in the literature on technological development in general. If
you look at how things have improved in our material world, this is a
point that’s made on the Roots of Progress blog by Jason. I’m sorry, I
forget his last name, but Jason Crawford. Jason Crawford, there you go.
Thanks, Adam. He makes this point that if you look at an empirical
matter, innovations that have happened, they tend to be from groups that
have been kind of bouncing between the realm of theory and practice, and
both of those inform each other. And so I think that is reflected in how
we work on software at Mu and Inc and Switch where we have some theories
that are developing over time, and we have some experiments, some tests,
some engineering, you know, field work, and Those kind of go back and
forth, and you can’t expect to get very far just on one of those two
legs.
00:12:14 - Speaker 1: One thing I’m curious about that we’ve thought a
lot about, and I’m not sure we have the right answer, is I’ve seen
some teams where the principal or guiding light is a hypothesis about
what’s possible with software, or what’s possible from a product.
Some people call it jobs to be done. I think other teams articulated in
terms of a target demographic. Uh, elementary school teacher, a back end
developer in Silicon Valley.
I’m curious as you think about Muse, what I find so inspiring about the
product is the tool for thought aspect that can be melded to my own
instantiation of tools for thought and what I want to think about. I can
imagine that direction is also difficult at times to know who you’re
building for. How do you think about that balance between what and why,
who, and I’m, there are other vectors I’m not covering. How do you
think about that?
00:13:07 - Speaker 3: So there are some direct answers I can get to
that. Maybe I’ll actually give Adam the chance to kind of articulate
the specific things that we think about there. But I would also point
out that I don’t think we can actually always expect to be able to
articulate what’s drawing us in a particular direction. This is a kind
of Hayekian idea where you Yeah, the hunch thing is a big part of it.
00:13:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, just because something can’t be written out
in words or articulate doesn’t mean it’s not there in people’s
implicit knowledge. And so that points to another. The thing we very
often use to draw us in directions, which is the energy that an
individual person has for some idea. And that often just ends up being a
quite good predictor of promising areas.
00:13:43 - Speaker 1: I’m so happy to hear that because I wasn’t sure
if I was going to share that part of our process, because it’s true to
us, but I don’t know how quote unquote good it is, is we are so
motivated by the energy and emotion of the team, maybe to a fault, but I
think, you know, I previously worked at Facebook and I think that a lot
of large organizations, they’ve codified their approach to product
development.
This often may look like a design document that has a goal, problem
statements, set of assumptions, input data, and you almost have to
justify what you work on in a relatively formulaic way, which I think is
extremely effective.
Again, I think there are many ways to build products.
We find ourselves a lot, oftentimes all of us are the plurality of us
coalescing around a single idea or direction. And oftentimes, as you
point out, it’s hard to justify it empirically, and it’s just
something feels right, or we’re energized by it.
In the early days of the browser company, we’ve definitely been driven
a lot by that.
It’s felt great so far, but it’s definitely a different posture that
I’m sure has pros and cons, but I’m excited to hear that Muse works
that way as well, because we found it to be really fun and fulfilling.
00:14:48 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to be clear, you often have this raw
data that’s influencing these opinions. So we have some use cases that
we have in mind. We have some archetypal people that we’re working for,
we have some technology theories, and those end up influencing the
directions that we’re personally excited about pursuing. It’s just
that you can’t always expect to be able to formulaically in close form,
describe, given these inputs, here’s the function that determines where
you should go next. Totally.
00:15:13 - Speaker 2: Mark and I might have talked about this before,
but I think of the active entrepreneurship and product creation, which
to me the building the company that builds the thing and building the
thing is one unified whole, but there to me it’s about half and half or
for me to be satisfied with the result. I think it has to be this
balance of practical business needs to have customers and solve a
problem they have in a way that’s useful and fits into their life for.
Price that they find fair and that you have a reasonable distribution
channel and all those business fundamentals, you have to have that, but
then it’s also an act of expression, artistic expression. There’s
something inside me that I want to express, something meaningful that I
have to say, or me and my colleagues, part of the reason we’ve banded
together is we think we have a thing to say together, we share some
values or some sense, this hunch, this drive to make something that
doesn’t exist in the. and I think that part of it, it really is like an
art project, like painting a painting or writing a book or or something
like that.
You just have a thing you want to express, but part of the fun,
intellectual challenge, satisfaction, but also hard part is actually
balancing those two things together.
And so it does mean on one hand, for example, following that energy that
you’re both describing that feeling of like this seems right, there’s
something here, let’s pursue this. That that building what’s in your
heart is the way that my colleague Ryan sometimes put it. I think you
have to do that, but you can’t do that at the expense of building a
business that has those fundamentals, or you can, but you know, that
works until the VC money is gone and then you won’t get more of it. So
I think it’s that balance between the two that’s what makes this act
such an interesting act of creation.
00:16:53 - Speaker 1: I think the discipline that balances this very
well at their best are architects.
So for example, we’re working on collaborating with the architect David
Adjay. He designed the Museum of African American History in Washington
DC and if you look at the building, it is very much an artistic
expression.
There’s a story behind it. You feel Adjay’s personality in the
building, you feel his heritage and the heritage of. People he’s
commemorating in the building.
And you better believe in Washington DC at a publicly funded museum,
there are some budget constraints, and there are some ADA rules to
comply with, and there are bathrooms to build, and so I don’t yet know,
and I don’t know if I’ll ever know how they do it, but I think
architecture, not only for the analogies between digital spaces and
physical spaces, but I also think for the mixture of practical
realities.
Jobs to be done, combined with artistic expression and emotion and
personality.
I’ve always admired how the greatest architects seem to tread those
very, very well.
00:17:55 - Speaker 2: I see a lot of parallel there as well. I’ve read
a number of architecture books less because I want to ever design or
build a building and more that I see these really strong parallels and
on one hand, yeah, you’re trying to express something beautiful that is
art or can be, but at the same time, your building has to stand up. It
can’t go down when the earthquake hits. People need to move through it.
People have physical dimensions that need to be accommodated. Air needs
to flow through, light needs to come in. Right?
00:18:19 - Speaker 1: You need HVAC. HVAC’s not pretty.
00:18:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. That brings to mind.
I’m looking at some images here of the museum you mentioned of course
I’ll link that in the show notes. It also brings to mind. I saw this
fellow, Danish fellow Jark Ingalls, I think.
The name speaks some years ago and the Netflix show Abstract had
featured him in an episode, and he’s a really good example of almost
avant-garde, very kind of forward thinking to the point of being quite
weird sometimes with his designs, but also really Sort of challenging
the status quo and again, same thing listening to him talk about each
building and sort of what he was trying to express through that and how
that fit into the time and the cultural moments and whatever else felt
very close to some of my motivations when I start companies and build
software.
00:19:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and also to connect this architecture topic
a bit to interfaces, it reminds me of the book A Pattern Language by
Christopher Alexander. So this is a book that basically catalogs
patterns and architecture from the very small to the very large that
Alexander had observed as being successful over decades and hundreds of
years of people interacting with buildings. So the very small scale it
might be that people really like to have shelving at waist heights.
That’s kind of where you conveniently put stuff. At the very large
scale, it’s like your city should have greenery accessible to people
within, I don’t know 10 minute drive or something.
And the patterns in the book are very interesting, but also the way that
he arrived at these understandings, which are basically about interfaces
between people and buildings, is observing, it’s kind of this like
archaeology of what has actually worked over the many years that people
have interacted with buildings.
And I think it’s interesting that with software, we’re now getting
enough data where we can do that, and instead of having to invent things
from first principles, we can say whenever people use software. They
really want to like cut out stuff and like put it somewhere temporarily
and hold it. And that’s something that it’s really important that
software does. And you don’t need to invent that idea from first
principles. You can just observe that people want to do that all the
time. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in there that can draw on
this kind of pattern language type thinking.
00:20:15 - Speaker 1: I think that’s a great connection and making the
connection back to interfaces again, a thing we and I have struggled
with is When do you reinvent the wheel? When is it worth questioning the
interface, given that there are these patterns in the physical and
digital world that over some number of years, decades, we have proved
work extremely well and evoke a certain type of feeling or action. When
do you question them and when do you accept them? So in our first
company Branch, you know, being 20 reinvent all the things. You have a
follow button, we have a watch button. You have vertical comments, our
comments branch to the side. And it felt like, because it can be so
exciting and tempting to question and reimagine interfaces because they
are spaces and touch points that we encounter so much in our day to day
life. There is an excitement to the novel, and there’s an excitement to
the new.
But as I learned, and you’ve probably learned, I think the more
advanced or accomplished product designers are the ones that know what
to focus on, and they know what are the highest points of leverage in
the interface, or what are the parts of the interface that are. broken
and deserve reinventing.
And so one thing common conversation we have at the browser company is,
should we be reinventing the wheel here? Is this the right place to
focus on pushing the boundaries? Again, I cannot purport that we have a
good answer to those questions yet, or that we’re experts on this
topic. But I do think it’s a temptation and a talent to know when do
you rely on Christopher Alexander’s-esque observations about patterns
that are wonderfully human, and when do you question whether or not
we’re doing things the right way.
00:21:58 - Speaker 2: To even ask the question, when do we reinvent and
when do we go with the known pattern is the right place to be.
I think there’s a natural tendency certainly goes with youth. I was
there as well at age 20 which is you just want to blow up the status quo
because that’s like in your spirit at the time. That’s what young
people want to do.
And definitely entrepreneurs, I think, are by their nature, people that
like change, novelty, new things, shake it up, try something new, blow
it all up, and then you have others who Maybe you’re more stasis
oriented, like to conserve, protect, go with what’s working, tradition,
that sort of thing.
And I think the art is to learn to step back from either of those
tendencies wherever you may naturally fall and instead try to analyze
where is there opportunity, where is there something that society can
really benefit or individuals could benefit from a reinvention and a
rethinking versus we have a known pattern that works and, you know,
stick with that.
00:22:55 - Speaker 1: On that note, earlier in my career personally, I
think I fancied myself more of an artist. I’m giving myself a little
hard time and being a little self-deprecating, but I think I viewed
things like revenue strategy and business model and market structure as
being things that corrupted the creative process and the innovation on
interfaces process.
And I spent two years working at an investment fund. Observing the sort
of startup technology landscape from a venture capital perspective. And
one of the things that struck me is that some of my favorite products
from uh innovation on interface’s perspective actually fundamentally
took advantage of business model innovation and misplaced incentives in
generating the product experiences that I, from an emotional
perspective, fell in love with and changed my experience.
We’re actually driven from looking at where companies Incumbents were
making money saying, wait, that seems a little flawed or perverse, and
extrapolating from there. And so I think even that’s interesting to
say, even if you care about feelings and emotion and the way buildings
hit the street, sometimes to know where to focus can come from something
that could be as boring to some as, well, how’s the incumbent making
its money? What incentives does that cause? One example from Facebook,
Snapchat, one of its core innovations, was opening to the camera. And,
you know, it’s hard to imagine that. That was a huge deal. Talk about
interface innovation. It broke every rule in the playbook of social
networks.
00:24:27 - Speaker 2: I was actually going to cite that exact one, which
is in the Snap S one, they actually articulate this pretty well, which
is they consider the camera in the phone to be the most important
interface, and they lead with that on absolutely everything from their
little snap codes to the fact that the apps open straight into that. And
it’s more obvious now we live in a world where smartphone cameras
really are this cruel. crucial input device alongside touch screens and
keyboards and whatever else, but probably at the time you’re talking
about, that was quite a shocking idea.
00:24:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I don’t purport to suggest that Evan
Spiegel was motivated to put the camera first from a business
perspective, but if you have an incumbent like Facebook who monetizes
through showing ad units in a news feed right when you open the screen,
structurally, they are not incentivized and it will be difficult for
them to compete on that vector.
We think about this at the browser company. As you mentioned earlier in
the podcast, Chrome and the Chromium team specifically is responsible
for insane technological progress on the browser front, and we’re
building on the backs of that and grateful for that.
From a business perspective, Chrome is useful to Google because it’s
lead generation for search ads. The more you use their web browser, the
more you use the internet, the more you’re gonna do searches on Google.
The more searches you do on Google, the more ads they can show you. And
if you talk to their the Chrome team members, they’ll even explain the
genesis of the Chrome team was not that they wanted to go into the
browser market. They just thought Internet Explorer was so shitty with
all of its IE toolbars, that it was making the internet experience poor.
And if the internet experience was poor, you’re gonna do far less
Google searches. And so that’s interesting and at the time that was
novel. Flash forward to today, Google and Chrome are not incentivized to
make a more feature rich. Powerful web browser that stretches the
definition of what a web browser is, not because they’re not capable,
not because they’re not creative, but their incentive structure from a
business model perspective is one in which they just want you to type
little searches in that URL bar as much as possible. So if you open 40
tabs, that’s 40 potential Google searches, and so it’s not that clean
as anyone that’s listening to this podcast that has worked at a large
organization like Google. I’m dramatizing a bit, but again coming back
to interface innovation. And where do you know where to focus? I agree
that often that comes from energy, often that comes from principle and
product hypotheses, and oftentimes it might come from looking at the
market structure you’re competing and say, where is everyone else weak,
where are they incentivized, and what sort of perverse side effects does
that lead to?
00:27:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is actually a big part of the ink and
switch and muse origin story where we had observed the economics of the
industry were very heavily rotated towards a social slash advertising
and be enterprise sass, and those were the most obvious things to make.
economical and so the lion’s share of work in the industry was being
put behind those to the exclusion to our mind of classic creative
computing for individuals. And so we saw an opportunity product wise
that was like you said, kind of created by the economic dynamics.
00:27:34 - Speaker 2: I think it’d be interesting to return to the item
you brought up earlier there, Josh, about the kind of operating system,
the web or the web browser is kind of a set of operating system
primitives that sort of exists separately from the host computing
operating system.
I strongly agree with your characterization there that the web is kind
of its own OS and in fact OS. It has a really specific meaning in terms
of kernels and. Vice drivers and things like that, but I think of it
more as the operating environment or the way in which the mental models
and the set of primitives that you interact with.
So on classic desktop computers, that’s things like copy paste, files,
mouse cursor, maybe on Mac OS you have the menu bar at the top or on
Windows, you have the start menu in the lower left, and then the web and
the web browser has its own set of those core primitives that includes
URL. includes something like the back and forward button, maybe
something like tabs was a major interface innovation that came from the
sort of Mozilla Firefox early days, and I see a similar thing for Muse
as well, which is for Muse I see something similar, which is I in many
ways envision Muse as kind of being a reinvention of the file browser,
something like the Mac OSinder or even. stretching back to the DAS days,
something like Norton Commander, the files, I think are this cornerstone
primitive in how we interact with computers, particularly how
professionals interact with computers, but in many ways they’ve kind of
aged to the point and become very static in a way that they haven’t
really made this jump to, for example, the mobile world very well. And a
lot of the way we think about Muse, or at least I do, is as taking this
set. Of things that typically are part of the operating system,
essentially how you manage your digital stuff which is expressed as
files on a file system, but bring that into a mobile touch, you know,
more visual interface. What can we bring forward that works really well
about files and then what are things that maybe we want to leave behind
and embrace more modern elements that have been brought to us from, for
example, the touch environment. So I’d love to hear what you see as
being the areas your team is either currently working on or just most
excited to innovate on in terms of the browser as a set of operating
system primitives.
00:29:51 - Speaker 1: Sure. So we think about the answer to that
question really is a series of observations, and really the observations
that guided us wanting to start this company. Some of those observations
include, if we looked at our Mac OS docs and we looked at the quote
unquote local applications we use the most, obviously they were all
internet-based, but they were also all built on Electron, which meant
they were secretly just Chrome, which means we were running 7 versions
of Chrome on our computer instead of just a single browser. So that was
interesting.
00:30:20 - Speaker 2: And just for listeners that might not know it,
Electron is kind of a container that lets you run a web application as
if it was something native to Mac OS or Windows.
00:30:31 - Speaker 1: And it’s an incredible technology in the sense
that as a budding group of developers, you get a ship a cross-platform
application that feels native to the operating system without writing
native code. And so grateful for Electron, we’ve prototyped an
Electron. It’s a great technology.
But as you’re pointing out, we actually ran this early experiment where
we launched the Notion app. We use Notion. I love Notion. The company
runs on Notion, so this isn’t a criticism, but we launched the Notion
Electron app, the local quote unquote Mac app, and then we built a
prototype of our browser which was just the pure internet. There was
zero browser Chrome, and we loaded Notion in that, and you put it side
by side, and it’s almost indistinguishable which one is the Mac app and
which one is the local app. That doesn’t suggest what we’re building,
that doesn’t suggest how to make a better browser, but it just struck
us as an observation as, huh, hmm, that doesn’t seem like it makes a
ton of sense.
Another one is, if you think about Mac OS, you talk about the file
system. A large reason operating systems exist is to help us manage our
files, and that files mean more and more things, but all of our stuff.
I observed again. Just for me, I feel like I live in a post upload
world. My files are all permalinks, random strings of characters that I
enter in my web browser. I have Figma URLs, I’ve notion URLs, and so on
and so forth. And so even from a file and folder perspective, I’m
looking at my desktop right now. I got nothing but a conglomeration of
screenshots that I wish would go away and I didn’t intend to be there.
All of my files are in the browser. And so on and so forth. So I think,
you know, I was a sociology major in college. I’m inspired to work on
technology and software and interfaces, not because of the technology,
but because of the people. And so I think as we just observed how people
are already using their desktop computers and how they’re already using
web browsers, it just invoked a series of questions and observations
that, again, we’re trying to answer, we don’t have answers to yet. We
may never answers to, but just struck us as almost cultural shifts in
how we use technology that may just maybe may warrant a new browser
interface that could look more like an operating system. But at the end
of the day, my wife, my mom, my niece, I don’t think they care at all
about the word operating system. And so we also think a lot about what
are the metaphors or what’s the right way to talk about the scope of
our work that is not just geared towards people on this podcast.
00:32:58 - Speaker 2: Could you give us a hint of some of the stuff
you’re working on? I noted here on your recent tweet of comparing kind
of a browser to a figma canvas. Obviously things of spatial zooming
interfaces are of particular interest to me. I think again your
colleague Nate there tweeted some short videos that he used at that. You
want to speak to that or give us another example of what sort of things
your team is doing to try to push the boundaries or to try to improve
what a browser experiences for a power.
00:33:27 - Speaker 1: Sure, I think first and foremost, I’ll plug Nate
Parrott, a designer on our team who, one of the things he does, which I
love, is we share, I don’t want to call them failed experiments, but
past experiments that we learned a lot from, but weren’t quite right.
00:33:42 - Speaker 2: The primary output was learning. Yes, exactly.
00:33:45 - Speaker 1: That’s what we talk about those. Exactly.
So if you’re curious, I think better than my terrible radio voice, I
check out Nate’s Twitter account and he shared a series of these, and
we’ll continue to share more.
I think that just building off of the canvas prototype that you
reference, what Adam’s talking about is we prototyped a view of a web
browser, which is, imagine all of your web pages or tabs, lay down, if
you spread out a big white sheet of paper on the table or desk in front
of you, and each 8.5 and 11 piece of paper that you plop down on it was
a web page, what if that was your interface for navigating and
interacting with the internet and your web browser? Because it was
tweeted, it did not quite work, but I think, you know, one of the themes
that that touches upon is an observation we made about the way we use
web browsers is when the concept of a web browser was originally
popularized 25 years ago. The internet was a document network. It
primarily revolved around retrieving and finding and reading
information.
00:34:45 - Speaker 2: Sure, well, I mean, it was invented by a physicist
working at CERN that wanted a way to share his research with other
researchers, right?
00:34:52 - Speaker 1: And it was wonderful.
And however, in 2020, I’m doing everything in my personal life in the
web browser. I’m doing everything in my professional life in the web
browser.
In my professional life, for example, that can mean focusing on a
specific task and writing a long document and not wanting to be
interrupted. It could be going on a rabbit hole late at night.
Probably some of the topics we’re talking about today. I’m gonna go
Google them later, and 8 hours later, I’m gonna end up in some random
Wikipedia link.
And given the breadth of parts of our Life we turned to the web browser
for. And given even within those parts, the different modes or moments
that we rely on the browser, it just seems silly that every incumbent
browser was a one size fits all. The window never changes, the tab bar
never changes. It’s all the same all the time, completely consistent
and unchanging. Which could be correct, you know, the counterargument to
this perspective is that there’s some solace or comfort in the fact
that you know what it’s gonna look like.
Our view is, if you take the analogy to the real world, sometimes you
want to read in your bedroom, sometimes you want to read in the living
room, sometimes you wanna host a party in the dining room, depending on
what You’re doing and what part of your life and the time of day and
how you’re feeling, you might want different spaces.
And so what would that look like in the web browser if there was no
Chrome whatsoever? What if there was nothing? It was just a pure web
page.
What if you had 28 web pages tossed onto a table and you could move them
around and see them spatially? What if there was a view to, you know,
manipulate 13 at a time and take bulk actions and move things around and
export them and I’m kind of making this up as I go along. I’m not
suggesting that our final product or current product has all these
things, but that’s an example of starting at the top level principle,
how we end up going down, down, down to prototype that might be, what
would FIMA look like if it was a web browser, for example.
But what about a use? I think you are tackling an equally broad and
large surface area. So how are you? in recent days prioritizing what you
work on.
00:36:51 - Speaker 2: It’s hard. My experience has always been if
you’re working in a company you’re on a product that has a lot of
possibility, it’s very fertile territory, and the biggest problem you
have is in fact being pulled so many directions because there’s so many
great things you could make, or as I think there’s a quote somewhere
that’s great startups die of indigestion, not starvation. We definitely
feel that in MS, there’s so many directions we want to go from new
kinds of content type, video and tweets and lots of other things we have
on our list, but there’s a whole other track that has to do with kind
of collaboration and sharing, whole other track that maybe has to do
with kind of programmability, whole other track that has to do with much
more powerful kind of spatial manipulation and non-spatial manipulation,
and it’s all really good and all potentially really valuable and You
know, that’s even combined with the small things that users are asking
for, at least once you, you know, are to the stage that we’ve been at
for a little while now, if you have a pretty solid user base and
they’re using it for real things in their daily life and there’s a
steady stream of bug reports and small feature requests and things like
that. So it’s tough to find the right thing and keep your focus, but
you really do, especially with a small team, you know, we’re 5 people
and don’t really plan to expand beyond that foreseeable future. It’s
so critical.
To come together, consider all the options, but then pick a thing and
say, we’re gonna do this for a little while because we think this is a
really compelling space. We like to kind of time box that. We’re gonna
spend 2 months going really deep on one theme, see how far we can get on
that, and then step back and, and see what we’ve learned.
00:38:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s worth noting for us at least, as
much as it’s fun to talk about these heady directions and observations,
and it’s earnest and genuine.
At the same time, if my team was here, they would point out that some of
our favorite features and honestly favorite themes of directions have
come from very quote unquote uninspiring simple couple hour feature
development that actually turned out to feel a lot better than we
thought.
I’ll give you one tangible example. We multitask a lot in our browser,
as I’m sure everyone on this podcast does, and we prototype the ability
to click a tab and drag it and drop it on another tab and automatically
create a split screen mode that you can move the dividing bar left and
right and kind of adjust the view of the split screen. Drag and drop for
split screen, not inspiring, no one’s gonna come work for us because of
that. And it was fucking fantastic, and one of our most used features,
cause guess what? What do people do today or some people do? They open a
second window, they resize both windows and do this dance where you pull
that corner up and that corner up and so it may not be part of a
connection to architecture or anything that gets us really excited, but
turns out it’s damn useful and the fact that it was that useful, even
if it was that small, suggested a kind of direction to keep exploring.
So I think it, it would be honest, most honest to also mention that it
doesn’t always come top down from themes. Actually, I found more
successfully it comes from tiny little features and extrapolating, like,
why did that feel as good as it did? What does it suggest and you go
that way?
00:39:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think the bottom up extraction of
the pattern and that there is a bigger theme there that points to an
underlying need that maybe you could double down on.
It’s not, hey, we just made a small random thing and it happened to
work, maybe sometimes that’s it, but probably someone on the team
followed a hunch or did something according to what they saw from user
behavior. It worked out way better than expected, and then you can stop
and reflect on why.
Why did this work so well? Why is a side by side of two tabs? Why is
that? Key to how people use the web and what can we learn from that and
maybe there is a bigger theme we can work up to from there.
00:40:30 - Speaker 3: It’s funny that you mentioned fluid multitasking.
This is something that we’ve studied a lot in ink and Switch and Muse
because our user research has shown that’s very important for the
creative process.
It is an overwhelmingly common thing that you do. You have a few
documents open, you want to read them and put them at the same time.
But notably, it’s still an unsolved problem on iOS.
You basically can’t really do good multitasking on the platform, even
on the big i. Ads. You can sort of get these sort of split screens, but
they’re not fluid and they’re really hard to bring in, and they kind
of go away when you’re changing them and they come back. That’s also
interesting because it, uh, it’s, it’s very much dictated by the
platform. So on the web, or web-based platforms, it’s quite
straightforward to add a horizontal split and to fluidly move it. It’s
kind of built into the engine, whereas an iOS, as it is kind of a
platform thing, and if you want to do it in a way that would incorporate
multiple apps you need, basically the platform’s help. So it’s a
different beasts.
00:41:16 - Speaker 1: Operating systems rearing in their head.
Yeah. One thing I’d love to get your guys’ advice on, uh, since I have
you here, is we had an experience recently where we prototyped direction
that we were super excited about, didn’t work, clearly didn’t work.
There’s some things about it that we liked, but all in all, considered
it uh let’s move on.
Couple months later came back and had this inkling that maybe some
things had changed in our product that might suggest this feature would
work again.
Tried it again, and I think specifically took it to a much higher
fidelity than we had previously, and all of a sudden, I think it’s the
coolest thing we’ve built so far, not to tease too much, but the larger
question is, as a team that experiments widely and quickly and
iteratively and is not afraid to take the research process, which means
tossing stuff out.
Any tips for how do you know when it didn’t work because it’s not
gonna work, and it didn’t work because you didn’t take it far enough
to master the fine details that as we know from our favorite software
products truly matter.
It’s just this experience, which was an accident, and again, I don’t
think we did well. Makes me wonder what else we’ve missed just because
we didn’t take the extra week to do that extra design polish or
animation or rev on a slightly different iteration that we were so
close, but we gave up because we took the wrong conclusion. I know these
are very broad questions and so, you know, maybe there’s a specific
example that comes to mind, but I think that’s the risk of being a team
that doesn’t take to high fidelity and to user ready production code
with every iteration is that some really great ideas need that in order
to work.
00:42:56 - Speaker 2: Also a really tough one. I think it is largely an
act of judgment or even taste, probably something you develop with
experience over time, but yeah, I’ve been in that exact position many,
many times and Yeah, maybe people point to that. I can think of high
profile examples on that.
This is more the product level than the prototyping level, but maybe
it’s a larger scale version of the same thing. Why is it that Slack was
this breakout success when we already had hip chat and campfire, and
most people would just say Slack was just nicer, it was just better
executed. They just took it a bit further and Really put that extra
polish on it. And you could point to some features or whatever, but it
just had this higher degree of craftspersonship, maybe more love put
into it, more attention to the user experience. It turned out group chat
is this incredibly useful and central thing for many and most teams.
Yeah, Slack just kind of broke through that boundary.
Another one for me that’s like that is back when I was first living in
San Francisco and realized pretty quickly that a car, private car
ownership was not the way to get around, but public transit was weak and
whatever else, and I eventually realized taxis are a pretty good way to
go when you need to get across town, but it was really hard to call one
and I thought, why doesn’t someone have an app to do this? Why can’t I
just press a button and summon a car to my house and I can use the GPS
on my phone to know where I am. And then I was delighted when I came
across someone actually in the Ruby community who was building this
exact thing.
I think it was called Taxi Magic, and they hooked into the dispatch
system and they would summon a taxi for you. And they even had a little
map that tracked where it was. And I used it for a good while because I
really wanted this product to exist, and I really believed in it and
they did pretty well, but ultimately it was just kind of not a great
experience and the taxi would get lost and it would take a long time or
the address wouldn’t be right. And so I tried to stick with it. Then
Uber comes along and they just nailed the experience completely,
partially because they weren’t using the dispatch system. And that was
for me and clearly lots of other people, this revelatory moment of like,
wow, it turns out calling a ride from your phone is really, really
great, but they didn’t execute far enough or they didn’t take it far
enough to find that out.
00:45:03 - Speaker 1: One example for me that I’ve been thinking about
recently is I had this moment with superhuman. I’m not sure what
listeners think about superhuman, but I have found it to be a better
email experience for me, putting aside the cost.
I work in email in an unfortunate amount, so I probably am more attuned
to the little details and bells and whistles, but I was just floored by
how fast I felt, how productive I felt using it, and my colleague turned
to me and enumerated how every feature I was describing has been in
Gmail for like a decade or something.
And somehow superhuman tied it together in a way, I don’t know if this
was marketing, if this was design polish, if it was interaction design,
if it was, I mean, who knows, but I think it’s another great example
I’ve been thinking about of it’s not just about building the correct
features, it’s tying them together in a way and with a level of polish
that I don’t know, has that special quality to it.
And so it’s one thing to think about a production email client that
you’re charging $30 a month for, but how do you know which need that
extra level of polish in order to kind of break through and which things
like there’s some features we’ve built where it’s, this is just so
damn broken that it could be ugly, and People would flock to it.
And I think those are some of our most favorite beloved products were
ones where you see V1, you’re like, that was the first version of Acme
Co. but it turned out itself such an acute need that we didn’t need
that last mile. But I think superhuman relative to Gmail is an example
of where, like, wow, Gmail had it. I guess they’re doing fine. We
shouldn’t feel too bad for Gmail, but at least at a personal level was
a snooze is not new, it turns out.
00:46:45 - Speaker 2: Another piece of your anecdote about building
something, not working, setting it down and coming back later, and then
finding it does work. That’s something I’ve experienced a lot in my
career.
00:46:57 - Speaker 3: Adam, isn’t this one of your Hiroku rules?
00:46:59 - Speaker 2: Uh, could be. I have to look it up. Yeah,
certainly we talked there about throwing things away and that sort of
thing, but timings, timings. That’s what it is.
00:47:09 - Speaker 1: Speaking of timing matters, yeah, I’ve been
really curious at a personal level, and I think this applies to you,
Mark.
How the both of you ended up trying to innovate on interfaces when
previously working on a company like Hiroku or I believe Mark, you were
at Stripe previously among other jobs.
Not that those products did not have great interfaces, but I assume the
podcast about why Hiroku worked or Stripe worked would probably be a
different number of topics than the ones we’re discussing today. So I
find it really fascinating and interesting that both of you have
gravitated towards Muse and the interface challenges you’re working on.
Curious to hear what, if anything changed, if I’m thinking about it the
wrong way, if, you know, how did you two get here from where you were
before?
00:47:52 - Speaker 3: Well, there is more in common than you might
think. So those are all basically tools, and there’s a lot of
generalized tool thinking that goes into all three of those companies, I
think, as well as obviously, you know, building software companies.
But yeah, then in terms of timing for me, I mean, a lot of it was, I had
fully experienced the world of enterprise, and there’s a lot of great
stuff there. And obviously it was how I started my career.
To be really honest, I just wasn’t thrilled about looking at Gmail and
Google Docs for the rest of my professional career. I just couldn’t see
myself being really excited. About it.
And at the same time, Adam and team were working on ink and Switch,
where they had kind of the other piece of that puzzle. They saw this
opportunity for developing software that’s about enabling people’s
creative potential. And that really resonated with where I was at the
time. And then of course, I loved working with Adam before at Hooku and
I definitely want to do it again.
00:48:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like there is a pretty strong
connection to, yeah, work you did at Stripe around say APIs as well as
at Hiroku. Speaking for myself, I certainly have gotten from a lot of
folks that it feels like a non sequitur to go from cloud developer tools
to call a productivity iPad app.
And there is obviously some big jumps to make there. There was a lot of
education I had to give myself. In order to learn about building apps on
a mobile platform by comparison to the web stack that I spent a lot of
my life on.
But to me, there is a really a through line and a connection, which is
it is about tools and enable people’s creativity and productivity, and
that just gives me a thrill. And I would say at Hiroku, a huge part of
that was the interface. We had to build a lot of infrastructure. Make
the interface that we wanted, but I knew that I wanted this idea of
servers and configuration files as being the main way that I get my
software in front of my users and needing to go fucks with those every
single time I want to ship a change to them didn’t feel like the right
interface anymore. So I think of Haruku as primarily a whole other
interface, and that of course also led us down this path of command line
tool. And this kind of term developer experience, which I don’t know if
we invented that, but I think we had a lot to do with popularizing it,
which is the idea of, OK, just because you’re building an API or a
command line, those things are very technical tools and very technical
interfaces, but you can still bring the user experience design ethos
that I think at the time, now we’re talking 15 years. Back was kind of
on the rise with maybe more consumer products, but then you can take
that same thing and say, well, developers are people too. They like nice
experiences. They like tools that are easy to understand and use that
serve their needs well, and they like different kinds of experiences,
text-based experiences and keyboard-based experiences, and they’re
comfortable learning technical things that maybe a lot of more
non-engineer users would not be comfortable learning, but You can bring
those same principles to bear there. So I think of Haruku very much as
an innovating on interfaces and the tools for Creative people company,
and then Inkot Switch was a research lab that worked on those things as
well, and now Muse is, it happens to be on this other platform and have
this other kind of business model, maybe even a different kind of target
user, but fundamentally there is that through line that ties it all
together.
00:51:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and back to timing. I didn’t understand
this when I first started working with Adam and team at the lab, but it
was definitely a big influence in deciding to go off and do Muse.
Muse is really riding a particular technology curve.
So if you look at what has happened and especially consumer and gaming,
which drives a lot of the individual level of technology that we see
today, you could basically plot the size, density, refresh rate, and
responsiveness of touch screens over time. And if you Kind of draw those
dots out a few years, you see something like, we should have a kind of
small desk size touch screen that exists, and it’s quite good. And in
that world, what is the software that powers it? And it definitely
wasn’t a big phone. It wasn’t a desktop transliterated onto that
thing. And I wasn’t convinced it was the iPad is currently existed then
several years ago. I felt like you needed something quite different, and
we saw a particular timing opportunity with Muse to go and try to build
that.
00:51:59 - Speaker 1: I think there’s also something interesting about,
I love the way you talk about both of your stories is actually there
being a through line, and they’re not so different as portrayed. And I
also think there’s something interesting about the merging of worlds
and perspectives.
It’s one thing we’ve thought a lot about because if you had told me I
was going to work on a desktop web browser in 2020, 5 years ago, I would
have laughed at you.
And actually, quite frankly, the origin story was the browser company
was supposed to be a web browser for work specifically and an
enterpriseas tool, and I actually gave the idea to my now co-founder and
former co-founder Hirsch, and I said, I think it’s really boring, but I
think it’s a great idea. You should go work on it. I’ll fund you. And
that was the original intention.
And then as I started collaborating with him from that original
relationship, I realized that the web browser was one of the only pieces
of software that is in the middle of the Venn diagram of tools and apps
that my mom uses, my little niece uses, I use. The web browser is.
Almost the most consumer tool out there. And I hadn’t really thought
about it that way before. And, you know, we’ve hired people from
Instagram and Snapchat and take a very consumer lens.
So I think what you would say, our desktop web browser, we probably rely
on more for work and getting things done than fun time on a Sunday these
days. So anyways, I just think there’s something interesting in both of
your stories and how you arrived at Muse and what you did before, as well
as kind of how we think about the browser company, which maybe some of
the more interesting interfaces we’ll find out, arrived from
multidisciplinary teams that bring the intersection of different
experiences that others may see as not compatible or different, but
actually there’s an interesting through line, as you said, Mark, that
ties them together in some way.
00:53:42 - Speaker 2: Josh, do you feel like there’s a theme or a
narrative arc in your career, you know, going from social media space to
government to now reinventing the browser?
00:53:54 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely the sociology major in me.
I was a pretty poor student, so I wouldn’t say I’m a good sociology
major, but I’m a people person.
I literally was sitting back 90 seconds ago thinking, man, the internet
is so fucking cool that I met you guys through the internet, reached out
cold.
We’re now having a podcast, having a topic about something that I would
love to geek out more, but I don’t feel like I have an outlet to do
it.
And so what drew me to technology is like this podcast is happening
right now and how cool is that? And I think I am driven by people and
what we do and what we do together, and That’s what drew me to, you
know, I also did urban studies and urban planning in college. I just
like the meeting places of people and the ways in which we come
together, and I think the internet’s one example of that. Public policy
and our government’s one example of that, and the civic Commons, a web
browser is one of those things, and so I think that’s the through line
for me personally.
I mean, I’ll tell you a quick story about the way I even got into
technology. I was interning for my senator. I did random internships.
Definitely never thought about technology. And then a professor from
Harvard came to guest lecturer named Robert Putnam, and he wrote a book
called Bowling Alone. And Bowling Alone is about social capital, and the
decline of social capital and these kind of meeting points in the real
world where you bump into your neighbors and fellow citizens, and what
that is doing for society. And I was just floored by it. And I went up
to him after and I said, Hey, Professor Put. I’m Josh. What should I do
with my life? And he sort of said, I don’t know you and I have no idea,
but if you liked my book in this lecture, there’s this entrepreneur in
New York who started a company after he read my book and he was inspired
too, so you could go work for him. And that company was Meetup and that
entrepreneur was Scott Heiferman, and I went to intern at Meet Up, and
the first day at Meetupp, I went to an all hands, and Scott got up on
stage and gave this impassioned lecture about the internet was bringing
us together and we were turning away from banks with Kickstarter and it
was bringing us together and we were turning away from universities and
it was a little idealistic, and I’m not sure it played out exactly
right, but it was damn inspiring. And I, he took me to an event called
the New York Tech Meetup, which, man, 8 years ago was a bunch of people
in their 20s, mostly getting on stage and being like, I built this for
fun, check it out. And there was no anything other than that enthusiasm,
and so I think for me personally, it’s even the way I arrived the
technology was through meeting spaces like meet up and meetups and yeah,
for me the through line is people and what we do together and I think
This podcast is a great example of that of how we got here.
00:56:40 - Speaker 2: I actually like that so much. I almost feel like
that should be our closer, but I wanted to ask what other major topics
we should make sure we don’t uh leave off.
00:56:49 - Speaker 3: One thing I wanted to be sure we touched on was
the topic of scripting and extensions. So we’ve long been interested in
the ink and Switch lab with this topic of end user programming, people
customizing their own computing, things like that. And there’s also
this great history in the browser of web extensions, Greasemonkey,
people fiddling with everything, and that seems like it could be up your
alley, Josh. I’m curious if that’s something you and the team have
thought about.
00:57:13 - Speaker 1: This topic gets me so excited, unreasonably
excited, so I’ll try and keep it short. I had this formative moment
where, again, I’m a sociology major and so I’m not the most technical
person in the world, but I remember one of the first times I used the
inspector in Chrome, and I realized I could delete that damn annoying
Twitter sidebar with all the trending like I can delete it. I can edit
the internet like I can make it, I can make that go away. That’s a
thing I can do.
And it was this moment where if you’re an engineer, you know that, but
as a plebeian over here, I have been taught since day one, more or less
that I live within the spaces that people create for me, and I’m
beholden to their buttons and to their flows. And so at a personal
emotional level, that was like wow.
Now obviously there are a lot of things that web apps like Twitter and
Facebook do to make that very hard, but I think the concept of
Greasemonkey and user programming, whatever you want to call it,
fascinating. I think I would take it up one level though.
And I think we think about in terms of agency, which if you go back to
the metaphor analogy to physical spaces, and you think of the web
browser in 2020 is almost our digital home because of the time we spend
in it, we all live in the same home that basically looks the same.
At best, we live in prefab houses where you can pick like one of 5
variations and you get one of 3 countertops.
That doesn’t feel very human. That doesn’t feel like it acknowledges
the unique personalities and spirit and needs of every individual in the
world. And so we think a lot about how do you give agency back to
people.
Scripting is one way to do it. It can also be somewhat exclusionary. I
think there are tons of avenues you can go down to give people agency.
But we think about if this is your web browser, this is your operating
system, this is your home on the internet. How do you feel agency over
it in the same way you feel agency over, I like the little lamps that
I’m looking at behind you, Mark, like you got a spirit and style and
agency over that room, you should have that over your computing tools as
well.
00:59:11 - Speaker 3: We’ve thought about this scripting and
extensibility question quite a bit in the lab, and honestly, we found it
pretty gnarly because there are several things you probably want in a
system.
You want the system to give the user agency, as you said, but you also
want it to be pretty fast so that you can have high performing, high
quality software. You want it to be secure so that the users aren’t
getting their data or systems compromised, and you also probably want
some amount of consistency across the platform so people can develop for
it in some coherent way.
And there’s a bunch of existing systems, but they tend to compromise on
one factor or another. So for example, Unix is scriptable with C, but
it’s a total, you know, wild west on the security front. And the web is
scriptable with JavaScript to some extent, but that has performance
challenges. iOS takes away the agency leg, but gives you all the other
things. And so we haven’t found a good way to get all these at the same
time. So I’m wondering if that’s a problem you’ve grappled with in
the context of giving users agency in the browser.
01:00:07 - Speaker 1: You have to grapple with it. I’m not sure we have
a great answer yet, but I would say one of the ways we think about the
browser in general is trying to come from somewhat humble perspective of
we’re not the end all be all.
Our goal is to not build the only and the best browser for everyone. And
if anything, our theory is that actually what’s missing from the
browser landscape is that all the browsers look the same, and they all
do the same things, and there’s very little variation.
But the internet is such a diverse place in terms of the people and
needs and all of the above, that we need more diversity in our browser
tools and capabilities. And so I guess what I would say is in this
theme, I think what exists is tools that are more restrictive today, and
they’re for a good reason often, right? So I don’t think there’s
nefarious at tent. I think it’s often the name of the things you’re
talking about, especially in Chrome, keeping you secure, speed, exactly
what you said. To us, I think what’s missing is further down the agency
side. Now they’re trade-offs, as you say, security, performance, etc.
However, I think one of our philosophies is, if you are transparent and
you’re communicative, trust people to make the best decisions for
themselves, right? So if we tell you, hey, be careful in this regard, or
just so you know, this is gonna happen, giving people the option, I
mean, that’s what agency is. The whole theory of agency is that you
should have control over which set of trade-offs you care about.
Now, I don’t think this can apply across an entire. Your browser
product. I think you definitely want performance, you definitely want
security. You definitely want consistency and interface. And so I think
even if you believe in agency and you believe what’s missing from our
software tools, especially in the browser space, is giving more agency
at the risk of security at moments or privacy moments. I think they’re
natural limits, but I think it’s all about being forthright and
transparent about the trade-offs and giving people the option to decide
which tools they use and when. Again, I know it’s very broad, but I
think again going back to the like, I want to delete the Twitter
sidebar, is that gonna break every few weeks with certain Twitter
release cycles? Yeah, why don’t you let me know that, and maybe I can
fix it if it’s so valuable for me, versus what I think most people say
is, man, we can’t perfect it. It can’t be a delightful, perfect
experience and thus we’re not gonna build it. Who are you to decide
what I need and what I want? Now, I think that’s where the chrome
extension landscape comes in and serves this need another way. But I
think what’s missing right now is tools that push the agency side more.
And I think one example of this, it’s only slightly further, and it’s
not what you’re talking about, is notion. And I think it’s still far
in the spectrum of lockdown control, not a ton of agency. Anything’s a
page. Put pages within pages. Put whatever you want in a page. It’s
like, it feels so freeing in a way that, as you know, notions actually
not that free, but almost felt revelatory to use where it’s like. Yeah,
you know what? Fuck this layout. You know, I wanna put a database in
there. Like, let me put a database in there. Like that’s really cool.
And I don’t care if everyone wants to use it. And I’m sure Air
Table’s a better equivalent of that specific block, but maybe people
don’t want the best database ever. They just want a database on this
page. Let them do it. So, I don’t know. The risks, and I would love to
hear your skepticism about that or pushback or things that you would
encourage us to think about as we kind of go down that route or explore
that route further.
01:03:29 - Speaker 2: I certainly think that the tradeoff element and
let users decide, even letting users decide what trade-offs they want to
make is a trade-off, and I think this is something that is part of the
discussion, particularly in the tech world now, because you do have
folks maybe that have been in computers a longer time, someone like me
that grew up with them, we’re used to this great deal of agency because
the whole thing had this very DIY sense to it, and computing tools have
gone so much more mainstream. And now the things that make them more
accessible is taking some of those choices away from people. So when you
get the lockdown phone, whether it’s iOS or even Android has very
aggressive sandboxing and sort of the mobile operating systems are very,
very limiting on that agency side by comparison to classic desktop
computers, and that’s really a feature because the average person
that’s using a smartphone for the first time or even just in their
daily life, that doesn’t have the Time and desire to invest in learning
all the things about the trade-offs they will get if they can, you know,
run arbitrary scripts, for example, it’s actually better for them, or
at least the market seems to indicate that it is better for them to be
able to get this lockdown device that doesn’t allow them choices. Then
there are people who do computing things for a living or want to invest
that time or they have needs because they’re power users and they need
powerful tools and they need to customize those. for their needs, for
their work or for whatever needs they have, and then they’re annoyed
and frustrated at the feeling of being dumbed down for the sake of
security and walled garden stuff and even something like performance. So
I think that’s, yeah, the trade-off can be in the choice for a trade
off as well.
01:05:09 - Speaker 1: One idea that we briefly considered and I’ve
since tossed, but I’d love to get both of your feedback on because it
relates to this is. What would it have looked like if we built a browser
that was more of a platform that let anyone make their own browser, and
not anyone make their own browser in terms of my mom, but a lot of the
work we’re doing, we have an infrastructure engineering team.
My first startup did not have an infrastructure engineering team.
There’s a lot of work we’re doing to allow ourselves internally to
innovate on the browser and on the interface level. What should tabs
look like? Should there be tabs? Where should they go? What color should
it be? And we’re gonna make a series of opinionated decisions. Some of
those opinionated decisions may involve giving users agency over the
decision and the output, but it’s still an opinion. What would it look
like to almost offer a browser as an infrastructure platform or service
where you can make a new browser, you can make a Slack browser, and
we’ve abstracted all the complexity, so you gotta make your ideal
browser, make a brows.
Those are for architects, go for it. Who cares if 10,000 people use it?
It makes you happy and that’s enough for you to make a small business.
I’m obviously sharing this level of detail because we decided it’s not
in the spirit of what we want to do. But I’m curious, do you think that
that’s a good idea? Should we be an API driven company and we’re
striped for web browsers and let the web browsers flourish and the
browser for everyone and all the colors and all the shapes, or is that a
step too far in terms of agency?
01:06:31 - Speaker 3: No, I mean that kind of circles back to my
original question, right? So there are two ways you can think about how
you get more stuff on all these axes.
One is you can make different trade-offs. So you can choose 7 on
performance, but only 2 on security or vice versa, depending on what you
want. And it’s good to have different people choosing different things.
But there’s also a sort of production possibilities frontier to borrow
a term from economics where, given the technology that we Have broadly
defined.
There’s only so far extreme that you can go in all different directions
at one time.
That’s kind of what I was alluding to is if you really want to go high
on performance, you have to compromise something else right now, for
example. But you can develop new technologies.
So, for example, rust gives you basically all the expressivity of C and
all the performance of C, but it’s much more secure. And that Required
a big technological investment because before you had to make some
trade-off there if you want to get see like performance with safety and
to use, you know, for example, a higher level programming language that
was much slower.
So what I think we need in addition to all these experiments with
picking different points in the space is something that actually expands
the space.
So you’ve described it as one way, as a platform for writing a new web
browser, but you could also say in the same way that, you know, a web
browser is. of analogous to an OS, you can write an OS that gives you an
expanded frontier or a new programming language or a new runtime. You
know, they’re all kind of variants in the same theme of technology that
gives you a, a bigger expanse of space to choose from. And I think
that’s a really important research project. I’d love for us to do
something like that in a lab or to help someone do it independently.
I think it’s a really important problem.
01:07:57 - Speaker 1: In and Switch browser collaboration. You heard it
here first. Muse browser coming 2022.
01:08:04 - Speaker 2: Well, if any of our listeners out there have
feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello
at museapp.com via email. We always like to hear your comments and your
ideas for future episodes. Thanks for coming on to talk browsers with
us. Josh seems an area of mutual interest. I suspect we could fill at
least another episode on interfaces and operating systems and browsers
and more importantly, the people, which is frankly why we’re doing it
all.
01:08:31 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me and just like I
met you as a stranger on the internet, you’re to meet all of your
listeners at some point too, so thanks for having me.
01:08:39 - Speaker 2: All right, see you guys later.
01:08:41 - Speaker 3: See you, Adam.
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