Metamuse

By Adam Wiggins, Mark McGranaghanTechnology

Metamuse episodes

January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: There just really doesn’t seem to be an effective
concrete practice for taking like day to day insights and accumulating
them, like rolling them up into a snowball of novel ideas.
00:00:16 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is software
for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This
podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the
small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my
colleague Mark McGranaghan. Adam, and a guest today, Andy Matuschek.
Hello, thanks for joining us today, Andy. I think you’re about as close
as there is to Rockstar and the tools for thought space.
00:00:39 - Speaker 1: That’s a really distressing statement.
00:00:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we’ll, we’ll talk more about why this
space is so small a little later on, but for those that might not know
you that are listening, maybe you can briefly give us your background.
00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Sure, I’ve kind of a meandering background. It
begins in technology. When I was a kid, I was constantly developing
video game engines and kind of these tools for creative people. I, um,
with a couple of roommates, I worked on the, the first native Mac OS 10
graphics app and did that for a bunch of years and then made some open
source software for developing.
I was always really into tools for others.
Went off to Caltech and kind of got introduced to science, serious
science. And uh kind of got my, my very pragmatic engineer perspective
salted uh with all that.
But unlike all of my peers who who went off to get a PhD, I, I went off
to Apple and got a different kind of, it kind of felt like a graduate
program of studying at the, the heels of all of these people with like
jeweler’s loops that they were using to to look at individual pixels of
devices and There, there my work became much less about just programming
and much more about kind of the intersection between technology and
design. I, I got myself involved in in all these projects that it kind
of the through line was that they, they were about what was central to
dynamic media, uh, as opposed to just pictures on screens. So things
like, you know, interactive gestures and like the 3D parallax effect
and, you know, crazy page curls and And all this stuff we’ve talked
before about.
00:02:07 - Speaker 2: Uh, the way that Apple’s environment maybe has
less of that distinction between design and engineering or there were a
lot of people that sat really on the intersection of those two things
and it was part of what allowed them to do and continues to allow them
to do really innovative things on interface and and maybe you’re a
person that sits in that place as well, right?
00:02:26 - Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, yeah, it’s it’s interesting because
like from an org chart perspective, there’s really heavy boundaries
between engineering and design, and like I was on the engineering side
of the house, like I sat with the engineers, but uh for several years,
I, I would like Spend much of my day sitting in the human interface lab,
like next to a designer, and we’re just kind of like tossing prototypes
back and forth all day. And so it became this kind of mind meld thing
where those people could tweak values in the prototypes I built and you
know, I would end up tweaking design elements as I was building
prototypes and it kind of just the titles fell away.
But over time, I kind of, I began to feel that these experiments we were
doing with the dynamic medium, I would love to see them applied to
things which had More, more meaning, more impact in the world. And so I,
I got really interested in, in education research. I started writing
about that. And uh the folks at Khan Academy reached out and asked
whether I’d like to do that kind of work with them.
Um, so I joined Khan Academy and and took along, uh, one of my Apple
colleagues, Mei Li Ku, who is a wonderful designer and, and together we
started this like R&D lab, uh, at Khan Academy where we explored all
kinds of uh novel educational environments from that perspective of like
trying to trying to look at what the dynamic medium alone can do.
Trying to make these active learning environments and I did that for
about 5 years and um I started getting a little disillusioned with
institutional education and um I started getting really interested in
the kind of knowledge work that people like you and me do every day,
where you’re reading information, writing information, creating new
things, pursuing uh novel ideas every day, and I’m wondering how we
could augment some of that.
Uh, so now I have this kind of independent research practice where I’m
pursuing oddball questions like what comes after the book? Can we make
something that does the job of a book but better? Uh, it’s just been
sort of a delightful experience.
00:04:12 - Speaker 2: And I think one of the uh pieces you’ve written
in all your writing is delightful, and I certainly recommend everyone uh
read it, but uh uh read as much of it as they care to. But when I’ll
link to because I think it particularly illustrates maybe the place
where you and our team kind of overlap and thinking is the
transformational tools for thought article, which both describes sort of
your current work around the the learning and the space repetition,
which you can tell us about, uh, but also the kind of the meta elements
of how do we develop these kinds of tools in the first place.
00:04:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that that was a project with uh my wonderful
colleague Michael Nielsen, who’s also been investigating the space
which we might label tools for thought. And people have defined this in
different ways that the term stretches back some decades, but uh I like
to think of it as tools or environments which expand what people can
think and do. And you know, a great example of this is writing. Another
great example is numerals. So there’s a tendency to, to think about,
you know, kind of computer implementations of these things and of course
there are instances which are very interesting. Um, I find it very
powerful to reach back to you know, these, these cultural.
00:05:16 - Speaker 2: Uh, ancestry tools for thought.
Absolutely. Another great example of that is, I think Brett Victor has a
piece about this, which is essentially the chart, is the charting
numbers, you know, on an X Y axis or, you know, line graph or that sort
of thing that we we take for granted nowadays where it’s easy to crank
that out in a spreadsheet or whatever, but that was an invention that
happened not even all that long ago. It’s, you know, a couple 100 years
back or something like that and the existence of this new. Um, tool, or
actually, I think as you argue in that piece, medium, you would even
call it a medium for thought, might even be more accurate, basically
allows you to have new ideas or see the world in a different way. So the
tools shape the kinds of thoughts you’re able to have and the kinds of
works that you’re able to create.
00:05:58 - Speaker 1: That’s right. If all you have is Roman numerals,
Roman numerals, uh, then it’s very difficult to multiply.
Suddenly, if you have Arabic numerals, it becomes quite easy by
comparison. So kind of in the what comes after the book space, one of
the things that my colleague Michael and I had been exploring is just
this observation that most people seem to forget almost everything that
they read, uh, and sometimes that’s, that’s fine.
The thing that really matters in a book is, is the way that it kind of
changes the way that you view the world for many books that really is
the impact that matters. Uh, but for other books, for instance, if
you’re trying to learn about quantum computation or some advanced
technical topic, uh, it really is kind of a problem, uh, that, that you
forget. Uh, most of what you read because these topics build on each
other as the book continues. And so you end up starting reading a book
in English, say, and then halfway through the chapter, uh, you start to
see there’s like a word of Spanish and, and then by the end of the
chapter, there’s like whole sentences of Spanish and then then like the
whole second chapter is in Spanish and say that you don’t know Spanish
as a language, you read this book and you’re like, well, I thought I
was reading an English book. It’s like, no, it’s actually written in
this other language that you have to. Learn, just as you would have to,
you know, learn vocabulary, if you were trying to speak a foreign
language, you need to like learn the vocabulary, both conceptual and
declarative of this domain that you’re seeking to enter. Uh and so, and
so the experiment is kind of been, well, can we make that easier? A
project that that paper describes is this textbook called Quantum
Country, which tries to make it effortless for readers to remember what
they read. Um sounds like kind of a crazy thing, but It takes advantage
of really a fairly well understood idea from cognitive science, about
how it is that that we form memories. It’s reasonably well understood.
There’s sort of a closed set of things that you need to do in order to
form a memory reliably. Uh, it’s just that like logistically, it’s
kind of onerous to do those things, and it requires a lot of
coordination and management. And so most people don’t do it or it’s
kind of difficult to do it. Uh, but it’s pretty easy to have a
computerized system assist these things. And so, basically, as you’re
reading this book, every 10 minutes or so of reading, there’s this
really quick interaction where, you know, say you just read about the
definition of a qubit, after a few minutes of reading, there would be
this little prompt interface where it’s like, hey, so how many
dimensions? Does a qubit have? And you try to remember like, uh, how,
OK, it’s two dimensional. So you think yourself 2 and then you reveal
the answer and it’s like, oh yes, it was 2, and so you say, cool, like
I remembered that. And then we say like, OK, so a qubit is really a two
dimensional what space? Like, how do we think about representing this?
And say you don’t remember that, it’s this linear algebra concept. OK,
it’s a vector space. That’s fine. Like you reveal it back, you didn’t
remember that. See market is like, I like, I didn’t remember that
detail. And um this is already doing something for you because it’s
kind of signaling like, hey, maybe you weren’t quite reading closely
enough or just seeing that answer that you missed, like as you read the
next section, if that topic comes up. Maybe you’re more likely to
remember because you were just uh corrected and you saw that correct
answer. But somewhat more importantly, 10 or 15 minutes later when
you’re looking at this, this next set of prompts, and you, you see kind
of the new things from this section, that prompts about the two
dimensional vector spaces that you failed to remember, that one will
appear there. And so you’ll, you’ll kind of get another chance. And
then once you remember it there, the idea is a few days later, we will
send you an email and you’ll say like, hey, uh, let’s let’s remember
these things about quantum computing that you were working on, let’s
work towards long-term memory, and you’ll you’ll open up that review
session and linked in the email, and you you’ll kind of do this
interaction again, just, just a couple seconds per question. It takes
about 10 minutes to go through the material. And that 5 days later will
kind of reinforce your memory of that material about as well as the 10
minutes later prompts did, not, not exactly, but, but just roughly you
get the idea. And then if you remember things after 5 days, then, you
know, maybe you will next practice them after 2 weeks and after a month,
after 2 months, after 4 months, and so it initially seems like this kind
of onerous thing, like, oh, I’m gonna like be working on these like
memory flashcards for this thing I’m learning, but Because the way
human memory works is that it’s stabilized in this kind of exponential
fashion where you can have successive exposures that are further and
further apart. Uh, it only takes a few exposures before a particular
idea can be remembered durably for many, many months at a time.
00:10:11 - Speaker 2: And this is a space repetition systems you’re
talking about, um, which I had some exposure to through Onki, which is
this little kind of I don’t know, uh, it’s definitely a tool for
thought, but it is, uh, very nichey, I would say more than a little
clunky to use.
You have to be really motivated to do it. And so you can use a tool like
this to increase your retention or understanding of something you’re
reading a science paper, a book. Something you you do want to get a deep
grasp of, but you got to really work hard at it, right? The tools are
very taping it all together yourself in a way that requires pretty big
commitment and investment.
And one of the things I think is really interesting about the work
you’re doing is whether you can take that and build it in a way that’s
fun, relatively low effort by comparison, maybe even you know, sleekly
designed and just more, more enjoyable overall.
00:11:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, one thing that characterizes, I think a lot
of opportunity in this space is that there are many exciting ideas which
have been explored by technologists or by academics, which are promising
at some foundational level.
The underlying mechanic of Aki is fundamentally the same as the
underlying mechanic of quantum country if you look at it from a certain
angle, but there’s this core design piece missing, that’s kind of
keeping that idea from really having the transformative impact it could
have.
By that, I don’t mean the fact that Aki is like hideous. I mean, it is,
and, and it will kind of like turn off basically everybody who looks at
it for that reason. But there are deeper issues to your point, it’s
really hard to write good prompts. Uh, both in the sense that people
start by being bad at it, and so they’ll write prompts that don’t work
very well and that are boring and onerous to review, and they mostly
won’t realize that that’s what’s happening. They’ll just think like
that’s what this is. And then also in the sense that even if you do
know how to write prompts well, it’s quite taxing. It takes a lot of
effort. It’s a context switch from the experience of reading and it’s
valuable insofar as kind of reflecting on material that you’re studying
and synthesizing it, distilling it and turning it into a question
actually does. go quite a long way to enforcing your your understanding
of the material, but maybe you’re only going to do that for like the
most important things in your life. And it’s pretty interesting to
wonder like, OK, maybe you do that for the top 10% of the stuff that you
ever read, but what if it was like really pretty easy and low effort for
you to remember the top 70% of the things that you could read. You could
save that special effort for the stuff that really, really matters. Um,
that’s kind of what quantum Country is pursuing. One of the main things
it’s wondering is, can we make this something. That it basically
everybody who’s reading it and is serious about the topic can take
advantage of and really see the benefit of.
00:12:49 - Speaker 3: I think this thread also reflects one of the
challenges in developing new tools for thought, which is you actually
need a lot of different skill sets. It’s not just a matter of
engineering or computer programming, you need engineering, products,
design, writing, marketing, community, often you need at least all of
those things. And I see a lot of people approach the domain as basically
pure engineers and they they. Tend to kind of bounce off or the products
don’t stick because they’re missing a lot of those aspects.
00:13:15 - Speaker 1: That’s right. And I’ll add one more actually,
that that’s kind of Michael’s in my hobby horse here, which is that
you probably also need some kind of domain expertise.
So many of the, the projects in this domain, even if they do actually
have the design skills and the technical skills involved as well as some
of the other peripheral skills, they’ll be doing things like trying to
make a tool to do math better or something like that, but no one on the
team is a serious mathematician. And so they’ll make something that
seems really cool and it makes for a really good like product
presentation, but no mathematicians really going to use it to do serious
work.
Maybe it works in an educational perspective, but it’s fundamentally
limited. It’s it’s like a toy in some fundamental fashion. And so to
that list, I would add, you need some kind of deep domain expertise too
for a product like Muse, maybe that is somewhat diffuse. So anybody
working on a product, the domain expertise that’s relevant there might
be like, you know, the visual design of a product or like doing this
kind of conception stages of a product.
00:14:11 - Speaker 2: Well, our domain is thinking. So luckily we have a
domain expert on that, and that’s Mark, right?
00:14:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like a sort of secret that we have,
we had with the lab and now we have with use this understanding of the
creative process and thinking and a lot of it actually comes. From the
study of how this stuff happened historically. And you mentioned
reaching back in history and learning from that something we’ve done a
lot of.
00:14:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s fantastic. I think it’s just really
attractive to build tools.
It is built into my DNA like I grew up that way, and it’s actually a
liability for me.
My tendency when I see an opportunity or I see a problem space, is like,
oh, wow, like I’m going to make a tool to like help with that.
And that’s like a useful tendency, it’s a cool tendency.
But often, I’m not like really solving a burning problem, or I’m
solving an abstract problem that isn’t connected to something that is
like concrete and intrinsically meaningful and that like actually is
about doing the work. So like the analog and muse would be if maybe
I’ve done like one serious creative process that was about like a
concrete thing, and then I. Like, wow, like I’m really interested in
the creative process. Like I’m going to devote, you know, the rest of
my days to working on building tools for the creative process, which I
like, I’m never really using to do any subsequent serious creative
process. Like I’m I’m doing it in order to make the tool because I’m
fascinated by tools. That’s a tendency that I have that I have to
actively combat.
00:15:24 - Speaker 2: The other thing that comes with it, if you come
into building a tool with the domain knowledge.
Is that over time you get focused on building the tool and maybe you
actually know the domain less well.
So there’s there’s quite a parallel for me personally between uh
Hiroku and Muse in that both are some kind of creative process.
Hiokku’s web development, um, which is one kind of one kind of
creativity, one kind of creation, act of creation with Muse’s, it’s
thinking and reading and making decisions.
In both cases, there is a process where a thoughtful professional sits
down and they start in one place and they end with a solution or a
result or or an output.
And studying and understanding that process both it’s fun for me to
introspect for myself, but then the the ethnographic research aspect of
going out talking to in the lab and in the build up to Muse, we talked to
hundreds of creative professionals about their process, which was always
an interesting thing because of course it’s this very private and
intimate thing and also I would say 98% of the time people are vaguely
embarrassed because they feel like it should be better.
It’s like, oh, my notes are really messy, or yeah. Yeah, you know,
don’t look at my office. It’s, you know, things are, I, I should have
some, I don’t know, some they have some idealized version of what it
would what it would look like the reality I think is the creative
process is messy and that was something we we fed into Muse was sort of
embracing that a little bit.
00:16:46 - Speaker 1: I think it’s critical that you all not only
experience that ethnographically but also personally that you have this
deep personal experience of that process. Otherwise I fear it’s too
detached.
The insight from the last year that I’m most excited about is is kind
of this nugget in the middle of the the paper you you referenced, Adam.
I call it like that the parable of the Hindu Arabic numerals. I hope you
don’t mind if if I kind of recap it here because it just seems to
bear.
It’s this observation that if you are the Roman royal accountant and
you’re just struggling through these tables of numbers and you find it
very onerous and it’s kind of taxing and it’s error prone, imagine if
There was like Roman IDEO and you could go to them and say like, hey,
please help me like with my accounting process, please redesign this.
You know, IDEO’s process is pretty amazing in a lot of ways. They’ve
helped make a lot of really powerful products, and they have this
process that is really interesting where they go and they they embed,
they will like sit with the accounting departments and like interview
extensively as you talked about interviewing people about their creative
process and like really try to internalize it, they’ll do all this like
synthesis and diagramming. And they’ll come up with words to describe
what people are doing, and it’s all great, but I think there’s just no
way that Hindu-Arabic numerals would be the result of of that process
if, if what you’re starting with is Roman numerals, because the
transition requires the deep insights of a mathematician and also deep
insights of a designer. So just for instance, place value, this notion
that like if I have a 6 and it appears in the right moment. Spot, then
it’s like a one digit, but if it appears in the second or rightmost
spot, that 6 is still 60 in certain fundamental ways, and you can still
perform the same fundamental operations on it, like with addition and so
on. It still works the same, but it has this alternate interpretation of
being like 60, it’s in the tens place. That is a profound mathematical
insight that depends on deep intuition of like commutivity, the laws of
distributivity. Uh, it’s not something that somebody just like doing
some ethnographic research in the field is going to come up with, yet
simultaneously, it’s also not something that most mathematicians are
going to come up with. And so it’s a great example of how you like, you
really have to have the same, the people on the same team.
00:18:57 - Speaker 2: That is a great example of the domain knowledge,
and I wonder if that connects to something.
I feel like I see the trend of people with design as a skill set. I feel
like are more often drawn to what I would call consumer or sort of end
user things. So they’re more interested in working on social media, you
know, let me get a job at Instagram or Facebook or something like that.
And I wonder if that’s because then they only need to be an expert in
the design domain, and if they’re working on something that’s more um
for an end user that’s not really a specific domain, you don’t need
that knowledge or the things that you need. To understand the problem
space of Instagram is not deep specialized professional knowledge. It’s
just being a person with a smartphone that likes to take photos and post
them on the internet.
00:19:40 - Speaker 1: They can certainly be a lot more successful in
that way.
People are sometimes surprised that Apple doesn’t really engage in
anything that looks like design research, and here I use that word to to
kind of mean that the ethnography that you’re describing user
interviews, the walls full of sticky notes where you’re trying to like
describe user behavior.
And summarizes your quotes. The Apple designers don’t really do that.
But they’re primarily designing products that solve problems in their
lives. Like I use email, like, let me make this email a little nicer,
and so like they can do that.
But I think as soon as you leave that domain, things start getting hard,
like Apple iBooks, there aren’t a lot of like really serious readers on
the design team. I think that’s part of why Apple iBooks is not good.
The various attempts at social music platforms, that’s something that
requires like a set of ideas that have been pursued by various products.
It requires like, you know, kind of a landscape review, understanding
people’s social interactions really deeply, that’s also not part of
the process. The Instagram designers, I think they are doing something
that the Apple designers aren’t, they’re talking to users a lot about
how they feel when they’re interacting socially, and that’s a piece
that has always been missing from Apple’s process, but to your point,
they’re not this like goal of of taking and sharing photos. That’s
something they already like.
00:20:52 - Speaker 2: Well, we’re already pretty far into it here, but
I feel like I should um stick to our format, which is introducing the
topic. Maybe I’ll do that here and Andy, you, you suggested this one,
which is uh environments for idea development, particularly idea of
development over time. I thought it might be interesting to compare what
that phrase brings to mind for each of us.
00:21:12 - Speaker 1: Sure. So one of the hobby horses I’ve been
thinking about recently is, I’ve been reading this literature on
deliberate practice. Eriksson is maybe the prominent individual there
and there’s this, this extensive research on the practices of dancers,
musicians, athletes who have these very formal and intense. Hence
preparation and practice structures that stretch from youth into
eminence. So touring international pianist is still working on these
like fundamental skills and activities. And I think it’s fascinating
that by contrast, knowledge workers really don’t seem to take their
fundamental skills all that seriously insofar as kind of like improving
them in a deliberate daily ongoing way.
00:21:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’d be curious to even just enumerate what
we think are some of the foundational or some of the core skills for a
knowledge worker.
00:21:59 - Speaker 1: I was about to try to do that because I think it
actually connects to this to this phrase. I’m sure that y’all could
add some more, but I think reading effectively is is one of them,
writing, communicating effectively is one of them.
But taking an inkling and developing it over time effectively seems like
another just really important idea of creative work.
And so that that’s what made me suggest the topic that if I speak to
people and ask them like, hey, so you know, this kind of interesting
notion comes out of a conversation, and you think like it might be worth
pursuing, then what? People’s answers are uh. They’re not good, you
know, and like people do come up with things, they managed to develop
ideas in spite of this, but it’s clear that this is very haphazard, and
it doesn’t always feel like haphazard in a good way.
People will say things like, well, you know, maybe I write it down in my
notebook. It’s like, well, and then what? Well, uh, maybe later I’ll
like flip back through and see it, like, no, no you won’t, uh, or, you
know, you can like you can schedule time, you can like put aside time to
like think about that idea, and maybe if it’s like a really important
idea you’ll do that. But you won’t for like, you know, something cool
that comes out of a conversation that seems like it might connect to
something later. There just really doesn’t seem to be an effective
concrete practice for taking like day to day insights and accumulating
them, like rolling them up into a snowball of novel ideas over time,
except insofar as, you know, they kind of happen to accumulate in your
awareness.
00:23:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense and obviously connects very
well to the To the Muse story for me, it’s become because of this
product that I now obviously have been using in the process of our team
developing it.
Because it for me represents the place I go to do my deepest thinking.
There’s almost not quite a ritual, but let’s say when I, when I go to
make a muse board for something that I feel like is something I need to
do a deep dive on, I know I’m really getting into it. That signals it
to myself.
Almost to the point that sometimes I’m, it’s an idea I’m excited to
explore exactly what you described, like the team is having a
conversation, something serendipitously comes up. I think I should
really dig in on that.
I think there’s something there. I put it in my notes to do that. So
that can be like.
A fun, exciting opening a new door, opening a fun Pandora’s box kind of
thing.
But it can actually also be the other way around, which is I know it’s
maybe more of um something important to insult to research or understand
deeply that maybe has is a problem in in my personal life or like a
government paperwork thing or some other something like that.
And I just know, OK, I’m going to really get into it.
This is not shrugging it off. This is not quickly jotting down a couple
of quick notes in my notebook and moving on by creating this board. I’m
kind of mental. Making myself a commitment to follow this rabbit hole as
deep as it goes until I feel like I have my head around the problem or
or I’ve solved it, which is sort of an interesting effect, mental
effect that the product seems to have on me.
00:24:36 - Speaker 1: It’s really interesting. Can I ask the and then
what? Like something comes up in a team meeting and so like you add it
to the muse board. What’s the and then what? How does that idea grow?
00:24:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, importantly, I wouldn’t add it
straight to muse from the meeting. I would put it more into my kind of
like inbox GTD style. Like just stop it’s the same it’s the same list
where I put down, um, you know, we’re out of we’re out of milk, you
know, get more, it’s just like little notes here.
Another way I’ll think of it sometimes uh in team meetings is realizing
we need kind of an internal memo to pull together diverse thoughts on
the topic and like really articulating what the problem is, um, and
really trying to lay it all out so that not just for my own thinking but
so we can all sort of be on the same literal page about.
Something, particularly maybe something that’s a long time ongoing
problem and there’s people that weren’t on the team before and they
don’t have some of the past contexts you want to put it all together.
Yes, so then what for me is deciding I want to devote a chunk of time to
this, you know, maybe it’s 20 minutes, maybe it’s an hour, maybe it’s
more to really dig in, to really just face whatever this is head on and
see where it leads me.
And you know, maybe it’s something like an idea for a new product
feature, for example, which again tends to be more on the fun. Uh, the
fun side of things. And so then, then there’s this whole process
around, you know, let me assemble prior art and get together some ideas
and sketch some things and all this kind of stuff.
The output varies, but sometimes there’s just a clear insight of like,
oh we should do X, it’s a decision basically, and then I will go and
take action on that, but other times it’s realizing, wow, this is a
really much deeper hole than I thought and You know, it needs more
thought or it needs more whatever.
And then maybe I want to, for example, it’s a team activity, maybe I
want to bring it back to the team and say, we thought we could, I
thought I could think about this briefly, have a solution, and then do
it. But actually it’s a lot deeper than that. What do we want to do? So
I think it’s, I think it’s just like understanding or not quite
enlightenment, but getting to this new place of understanding about
whatever the thing is, and then that in turn implies a next action.
00:26:38 - Speaker 1: One of the questions I’ve been exploring in this
space is what to do when it’s not really possible to make a lot of
progress in one session.
So talking with people about their practices, one common approach that I
hear relates to what I just heard you articulate, and that’s that
something kind of reaches a threshold of interestingness or apparent
importance. And at that point, you’re going to like carve out some time
and sit down and really think about the thing.
That’s cool. And sometimes that is enough. I noticed that for a lot of
the most interesting ideas that I explore, one session doesn’t often
really doesn’t yield all that much. In fact, often it doesn’t
necessarily feel like that session really produced a significant
increment at all. Uh. You’re just kind of like manipulating the terms
of the equation, so to speak, getting a better handle on it. And so one
element that I noticed often really seems to be lacking from people’s
processes, because it’s kind of it’s hard to orchestrate is
marination, where it seems like sometimes what ideas need is just kind
of consistently returning to them over time and asking like what do I
have that’s new to say about this difficult question? OK, I can say a
few sentences about it that seem kind of new, like it’s interesting,
but it’s still not. Something. So I’m going to leave this for 2 weeks
and I’m going to come back and like, what do I have that’s new to say
about this? And maybe if you do that, you know, 6 times, something
starts to emerge. That seems really difficult to orchestrate.
00:27:58 - Speaker 2: It makes me think of a great article called
Solitude and Leadership, which basically is describing how you need to
carve off this.
You basically need to disconnect from the opinions and influence of
others in order to have original thoughts.
One way that the author talks about it is in that first session, like
you described, at the end, everything that you’ve come up with a
written. Down is really in a way just the thoughts of others that
you’re echoing back. And that’s fine. That’s a starting place, but to
truly get to something original or new or potentially breakthrough, you
need to push past that.
Yes, he claims that he can sense when he’s sort of like sort of cross
from the more mundane thinking and into the more excuse visionary for
lack of a better, better word or just original, uh, when the thoughts
start to not just be an echo of what he’s read or seen or heard
someplace else.
And that always requires multiple sessions.
00:28:49 - Speaker 3: I think this also points to the idea that you
can’t always expect to sit down in a series of sessions and then kind
of one step after another, produce an idea all kind of in the forefront
of your mind.
When we think about thinking and ideas and tools for thought, we have
this very conscious perception of it.
It’s like I’m sitting down, I’m going to come up with something
that’s better than Roman numerals. At the end of the session, I’ll
have, you know, Arabic numerals. I think that’s just not how it works.
Usually, sometimes you can get away with that, but often it’s more of
your, like you said, marinating on stuff. That’s becoming this fodder
for your mind and then in the background, you’re having an unconscious
process of ideas, connection forming, inspiration, and then when you
come into a later session, you might be better prepared to have a new
idea. So I think it’s like you said, it’s really important to find
ways for the tool to support that marination, chewing, ruminating, going
over, rearranging without the expectation that you’re going to be
explicitly building up your new idea.
00:29:39 - Speaker 1: It’s really easy for tools to accidentally build
walls for that.
One of my favorite novel reading tools is this. liquid text, totally
fascinating set of interactions for manipulating PDFs, excerpts, things
like that. One very interesting design decision is that by default
documents are kind of a workspace and so you extract excerpts into like
this canvas and you can manipulate them, but documents are kind of
separate from each other in that sense.
So you can have a set of insights about a document, but if you’re going
to have inter-document insights, that’ll depend on your memory.
Now there’s a fix for that, which is that you can create multi-document
workspaces.
You can say like, well, this is like my thinking about the this.
Problem, you can kind of like bring several PDFs into it and kind of
like make your notes and make your excerpts and whatever. And that’s
cool because then you can have insights between them, but it still
requires this intentionality of saying like, cool, I’m gonna like bring
that PDF into this workspace and then like the notes and excerpts and
whatever like they live there. But if you’re working on several
interesting questions and ideas at once, it’s not at all clear that
you’re going to have interactions between those workspaces that are
necessary.
00:30:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, liquid liquid text is great, but I think as
a coming back to the environments for idea development. That creating
room for serendipity without just total chaos is maybe a subtle and
tricky thing.
00:30:53 - Speaker 3: I’ve thought about ways, by the way, to do this
not subtly. One notion I have for an experiment is the idea collider. So
you have something like your, your notes or your wiki pages, and every
morning it just gives you two random pages and it’s like write a third
page, which is the synthesis of these two things. Oh cool. I’d love for
someone to do that experiment. Have you tried it? No, no, it’s kind of
a it’s open. Request for research. So if anyone listening wants to
develop it, let us know. That’s great.
00:31:14 - Speaker 1: It connects to a set of ideas that I’ve been
exploring for the last year or so.
I’ll share it, maybe that’ll generate some more.
I’ve been doing this kind of strange note taking practice that really
came out of trying to solve this problem of like, how, how can I make
marination effective? How can I, how can I make a process where I can
like do something every morning and cause there to be increments on my
understanding. of some ideas or some problems I’m trying to solve.
And so I have something that’s kind of like a personal wiki basically.
The technology is not really important. It’s more about the practice
that’s important and the practice is that I try to write these notes
that are densely linked to each other where each note is about a
particular atomic idea.
Sometimes the note is a question like what are the most important design
considerations when writing prompts for the mnemonic medium like one
country and sometimes for Since the children of that note are
declarative statements like space repetition memory prompts should focus
on one idea, and then that note will kind of accumulate not just in one
session, but over many sessions, all of the things that I have to say
about that.
And sometimes I’ll learn that the title was wrong. It’s like, oh,
actually they shouldn’t always focus on one idea because sometimes
it’s really good for, you know, these memory prompts to like synthesize
multiple ideas and these things kind of evolve over time, a term that
some have used is is gardening.
Uh, I call these like evergreen notes because they’re trying not to be
fleeting notes, like notes from a meeting that you’ll never really
return to, but rather uh notes that you water and which grow over time.
And just to get back to your idea, Mark, one of the practices that I
found most rewarding here is this notion of a writing inbox, where when
something seems interesting or juicy, I have a place for it to go, and I
start my writing most mornings by looking at that writing inbox and and
training. those as a set of provocations or prompts and asking like,
which of these things do I feel like writing about this morning.
In this way, ideas which seem promising, even if there’s already a lot
written about them, I can kind of throw them back in the inbox and then
it’ll like it’ll appear for consideration on upcoming mornings. But I
think that inbox gets even more powerful if you start to introduce
fancier orchestration methodologies into it. So one possible
orchestration methodology is like the one that you just mentioned where
like maybe the inbox this morning. contains these like pairs of notes.
Uh, so it’s going to kind of combinatorically like walk my tree here.
But another thing that seems pretty interesting and that I’ve been
playing with is this idea that I had this interesting idea in a
conversation with someone. I don’t really know what to do with it yet.
It still feels promising, like, I don’t want to lose it, but I also
don’t really have anything more to say about it right now. So I can
like kind of snooze it for a while. It’s like, OK, I can go out of my,
my writing inbox for a while, and it’s familiar from Gmail. And then
It’ll like come back in a while, but in a modification on the snoozing
functionality that I’ve been finding very interesting is the
parameterless snooze. Normally you have to say like come back in a week.
I think that kind of overhead is unhelpful and is often
counterproductive and it’s better to just say like, no, not today. And
to say like, well, if I’ve said that 10 times, then like, probably this
should just go away a long time.
00:33:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, does it like exponentially back off and
reminding you. I think by the way, that snoozing or moving things out of
you is really important. It’s actually a big difference in just having
a big pile of to dos because there’s a limit to how many things you can
have in your head at one time. And often we have new ideas that we want
to bring in, but there’s no space. And the only way to do that is to
actually kick stuff out from your working memory, and something like a
snooze can help with that.
00:34:21 - Speaker 1: Muse is really Interesting in this regard because
the the constraint of the screen as a surface, it encourages users to
keep stuff to the quantity which they can see at a reasonable zoom scale
on a screen at a particular time. I like part of the design?
00:34:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, certainly constraints are potentially
great for creativity. Post-it notes.
One that I reliably come back to both in my own work, but also just as
just this kind of very workhorse tool for thought analog world thing and
part of it is you just can only fit so much you can also use index cards
for this as well, yeah, maybe with an index card and a Sharpie and that
sort of limited amount that can be on each card.
Of course you can have any number of cards.
So yeah, obviously with Muse, you’ve got the, you’ve got the expanding
boards and you’ve got the sort of the 3D nesting, but certainly
there’s I feel a desire to make what’s on the screen at the time kind
of fit together as a collection of things that feed each other and when
I start to have a section. Of the board that starts to feel like a
rabbit trail, then I want to make a subboard that and so it feels like
you’re going deeper down the rabbit hole or something like that.
00:35:30 - Speaker 1: One of the things I wanted to ask you about is
kind of muse relates to this note writing practice I’ve been doing is
the practices of refactoring or revision, polishing, gardening.
Uh, something that’s been very useful in my practice is kind of having
ways to think about writing at different levels of fidelity.
So I’ll kind of have a place where daily notes go that are quite
fleeting and kind of scraps will start there. And when something is
titalable, there’s some, some atomic unit that I can point to and say
like, OK, that’s that’s the thing. Now it can get its own notes and it
can be linked to from places. But almost, it’s almost like the goal
over time is for these things to adhere and Crete into larger elements.
So a a note that’s a single claim is like not that useful. It’s kind
of this ross, but eventually some number of notes that make a claim will
become like a, like a theory or like a noun phrase, a coinage or
something. And that larger note that, you know, contains references to
all these constituents, it feels like an increment that’s meaningful.
And so the pressure in the system to like over time refine, refract. To
create ever higher order abstractions is very helpful in my writing
practice and I’m curious how you think about that.
00:36:38 - Speaker 3: I would say that Muse supports that, but doesn’t
require it. So you can certainly use Muse as a persistent corpus that
you’re accumulating over time and building up to these pristine and
complete notes that are basically publishable.
But you can also use it in complement with other tools. So maybe you’re
doing it in your head, maybe you’re writing stuff out in notion, maybe
you’re using an authoring tool like Final Cut Pro, it’s more flexible
on multi-purpose maybe.
It’s very important. It was a very explicit design decision that boards
and cards in general do not require titles. I think that one of the kind
of original sins of of file systems is in order something to exist, it
has to have a name, but a lot of things just aren’t named yet.
00:37:11 - Speaker 2: That was one of our design goals with Hiroku was
that you’d be able to put an application online without giving it a
name.
00:37:17 - Speaker 1: Oh, that’s great. I didn’t know that.
00:37:19 - Speaker 2: That’s wonderful. The original implementation was
Apps by default were untitled some long.
00:37:25 - Speaker 1: They have cute names.
00:37:26 - Speaker 2: I recall. This was, I think one of the, one of the
really lovely pieces of work my partner there, James Lindenbob did,
which is what we now call haiku names, which I think have been fairly
widely adopted, which is sort of taking an adjective and a noun that
were carefully selected so that they go together and they convey a
certain vibe that kind of connected to our brand or whatever, plus we
eventually had to add some numbers on the end just because there was
enough of them. Um, but the idea is something that looks nice. It
doesn’t look unfinished, it doesn’t look like untitled, but it
doesn’t also require you to figure out, wait, do I want to call this my
wiki or is it the team wiki or is it Team Wiki 2 or is it the, cause
it’s like an idea I wanna pursue an unfinished thing and I don’t quite
know what it’s gonna be yet. I have this hunch that I’m exploring and
then yeah, you get all hung up on the name, um, and yeah, for for sure I
see the file system. Uh, world of things having kind of that same
problem where you use his names are important when we know that we sense
that and so if you have to give it a name to even get started on
whatever it is you’re creating, that can be a bit of a, a bit of a hold
up. Now it’s nice, it might be nice to title something or label it
later. Muse has labels for that reason, obviously rename your Hiroku
app. There’s lots of other examples of that, but being able to just
start with, it doesn’t have a name and eventually actually the act of
naming it is you’re sort of upgrading it from Random tidbit of of
random idea, random tidbit of knowledge may not amount to anything to,
OK, this is a thing now.
00:38:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I really like this word upgrade. It accesses
a design direction or a design space that I’m curious about with this
taxonomy of notes, taxonomy of creative work. Taxonomy is too too rigid
a word. It’s obviously much more fluid than that. Almost the ceremony
of giving something a name, giving some. A coinage, and that that feels
that the object feels more complete when it has a name, almost like it
wants to like it wants to have a name. It’s OK with not having a name,
but it’s in a happier state when it has a name.
00:39:19 - Speaker 3: This is a feeling that resonates very strongly
with me. When I’m doing a project, a huge milestone is when I come up
with a good name. And I don’t know why it is just, it feels so much
more. Real when that happens.
00:39:29 - Speaker 1: In designing tools for thought in general, I think
this is a powerful practice to avoid the tyranny of formality by saying
like, OK, there are 6 types of notes. There’s the fleeting note,
there’s the claim note, like, that’s terrible, screw that.
But you can still have an opinion about process.
People ask me like, what software do you use for your note taking? and
it’s like totally the wrong question.
What matters is kind of the methodology, but having the methodology and
Mind, I can’t readily like communicate it or install it into others'
minds except by having them read like thousands of words of notes.
And one of the things that Tools for Thought can do is to encourage a
particular methodology, not by imposing formal structure, but by
implying certain kinds of structure, by making, for instance, objects on
a canvas feel somehow more complete when they have a title. You’re not
imposing the necessity of a title, but you, you’re suggesting that
one’s work should perhaps culminate in a title.
00:40:24 - Speaker 2: My creative process is always heavily oriented
around finding patterns, which is why it’s important for me to have a
lot of I guess raw material and input.
Uh, you can call it data, but it might be something like user interviews
or it might be something like looking at some other products in the
space that I want to compete with or improve upon or something like
that.
Um, it might be a series of bug reports, and I’m trying to get to the
root of what this is in some kind of complex system in order to do that.
I want to, you know, it’s been very difficult to track down, but if I
could somehow kind of look at all of it together and extract out what’s
the, what’s the pattern here? That’s, that’s the place where insights
come from me. I, I glean that’s not necessarily the case for everyone,
but for me it is this process and if I can somehow get everything
together, I can get all the relevant stuff in one place, that’s half
the battle.
00:41:12 - Speaker 3: Uh, one last idea and tools for thought before we
transition into the meta, and the, the mummonic medium can be thought of
as a way to optimally position you to remember things.
There’s this point where if you’re at as a learner, you’re, you’re
best position to recall vocabulary phrases. It’s like just as you’re
about to forget, basically, you get prompted again and as that happens
more and more, those times become longer and with a system like space
repetition, you get this software-based support to help you remember
things.
I’m curious if you think that technique can be applied to Skills. Uh,
this is an idea that I’m really intrigued by because yes there’s a lot
of interesting things that are like facts and figures, but there’s also
a lot of things that are our skills and abilities, and I wonder if we
could apply the same technique to learning how to play chess or how to
use a video editing program or something like that.
00:41:57 - Speaker 1: I do think that’s possible. I’ve spent a few
years experimenting with it now, and so is my colleague Michael, and it
begins with this observation that it’s possible to use spaced
repetition memory systems for more than just recall. So the the typical
way to use them is like, OK, what’s this term? What’s this definition?
And that’s cool. I mean, that’s useful. But you can also use them for,
for instance, applying an idea. And in fact, in quantum country in the
final chapter, we have these questions that look a little bit more like
lightweight exercises from a textbook or something like that, that share
the property of the recall prompts that you can kind of, you can do them
in your head, they’re quite rapid. They’re semi fungible, they’re
lightweight, but they’re things like what would the output of this
circuit be? And these are different from the recall prompts and that
they’re not the same. Every time you see them. So you’re actively not
trying to remember the answer, but you’re trying to like go through the
work of producing the answer.
You can also write conceptual prompts, concepts distinguish themselves
from declarative knowledge by focusing on how things relate to each
other and kind of systems and structures.
You can ask questions like for instance, when I was studying the history
of philosophy, contrast positivism and existentialism.
Now we’re making a connection, but in terms of developing a skill, like
maybe you want to like learn to think in a Danological fashion or
something. So you can also write a prompt that says, take a decision
that you made this morning and it could be as simple as like deciding
not to exercise when you normally would have and justify it or condemn
it from a dentological perspective. And so this is like a task.
So zooming out, I think space repetition becomes most powerful when we
think about the items, not as flashcards, but as micro tasks and what
the system is doing is batching. The transaction costs, which would
normally be associated with orchestrating all of these tiny micro tasks
that you could use to practice a skill or develop a worldview or
self-author in some way, and putting them together so you can say like
I’m going to do 10 minutes of like my self betterment session very
broadly construed, and that’s going to involve remembering certain
chess moves and also practicing this line of force motion in chess and
also reflecting on logical positivism in a certain way. Uh, and so on
and so forth.
00:44:06 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s really interesting, and I’m, I’m
wondering if you can extend it even further. So I think one element of
space repetition is it’s kind of helping you with the mechanics of, OK,
you commit to spending 10 minutes a day on this problem and we’re going
to use the software system to make that really productive.
You’re gonna see a lot of cards, for example.
But I think another element is basically identifying what you need to
get better at. In the case of memory, it’s pretty straightforward.
It’s like the, the question. that you answered incorrectly last time or
something like that, are the ones that you need to see now.
But in the case of chess, for example, it might be that your endgame is
weak, or you don’t know how to handle attacking knights or something,
and that is potentially much harder to identify programmatically.
But it seems like it’s also within reach. And so I’m curious about
systems that both um help you mechanically, but also in kind of the same
system, identify your weaknesses and where you can improve.
00:44:48 - Speaker 1: There’s a lengthy history. of people trying to
solve that particular problem, going back, I think now almost 5
decades.
For me, the most promising kind of subfield or sub approach is called
intelligent tutoring systems.
There are a few systems in the wild that have been commercially
successful.
The most notable is called Alex ALEKS. It’s an algebra tutor which has
some fairly clever mechanics for identifying your weak points and then
focusing practice time on on those.
I would say that none of these systems has been wildly successful and
the field as a whole has not been wildly successful.
I don’t fully understand why.
I’d like to spend some time studying that because it seems like a
somewhat obvious progression once you kind of get into the space
repetition space of trying to schedule stuff more efficiently, choose
construct cards more effectively, perhaps dynamically. I have read some
papers about people in the fields theories about why it hasn’t worked
very well. They center on things like the non-regularity of topics. So
an intelligent tutoring system on algebra will often share very little
in common in its implementation with an intelligent tutoring system on
geometry. They can share, you know, some kind of fundamental like
modeling, the learner primitive type stuff, but the representation of
the ontology is first off very difficult to construct and second off
very. difficult to like systematize and encode in a consistent way
across fields. My like personal hunch, and again, I haven’t read deeply
into this, but my hunch is that part of why these systems have not been
more effective in my practice is that they’re universally incredibly
dreary. They, they have this intense feeling of being in a skinner box,
like you’re a rat in a wheel, you are being fed. These like morsels of
problem, and you like swallow, and then, OK, true, like, here’s another
morsel, like, do this one next, and I think it may be possible to like,
to recuperate the underlying conceptual ideas without the the
interaction framework that they all employ.
00:46:39 - Speaker 3: Yeah, very interesting. I check out that
literature.
00:46:40 - Speaker 2: So if we come to the meta side Of how tools for
thought get developed.
We all have some familiarity with the human-computer interaction
academic field and dabbled in that in various ways, even if none of us
are career academics.
Then Andy, you ran a corporate R&D lab, which is sort of a one
commercial approach to tackling innovation.
We, uh Mark and I were part of An independent research lab, which was an
experiment in that, uh, and then all of us in various ways have been
part of either classic Silicon Valley startups or bigger innovative
companies like Apple.
And despite all of these, I feel like we still don’t have the level of
attention, funding, and just people who are passionate about.
Yeah, computers and more broadly information tools that can help us be
smarter, more thoughtful, make better decisions, be self-actualized, all
of that bicycle for the mind stuff. I’m still trying to figure it out
why that is. What’s the, what’s the gap there?
00:47:41 - Speaker 1: This is an ongoing mystery and a topic for
discovery and discussion because in my mind, the wind condition for my
work is not creating a particular tool for thought that that’s really
powerful, but causing this to be a field. I view it as not a field right
now. It’s kind of like this proto fields like some people doing stuff.
We don’t have the Maxwell’s equations. We don’t have a powerful
practice, but it kind of wants to be a field. I would really like it to
be a field.
00:48:04 - Speaker 2: And in order to get there, no one graduates from
design school and says I’m going to go into Tools for Though.
00:48:08 - Speaker 1: Well, I mean, some people have that intention, but
they mostly don’t, and they mostly can’t.
00:48:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, can’t is a really good point. I we got a
lot of emails that can switch with people saying, hey, I’m about to
graduate from this design school or I’m working in a startup over here.
How can I get into To this field, I kind of said, well, what field? I
didn’t have, I didn’t have anything like an answer for them.
00:48:27 - Speaker 1: I don’t think there is a good answer.
Almost everybody who’s been successful, it’s difficult actually to say
that anybody’s been terribly successful recently in this space, but
anybody who’s had even moderate success has something weird going on.
They’re like independently wealthy or they have some cash cow that
they’re like milking in order to let them do this essentially
economically unproductive activity, or they have like a whole bunch of
connections that they’re using.
I have been helped in my thinking on this recently by reading uh Nadia
Eggbal’s new book Making in Public, which analyzes the economics of
open source production, and there are some connections between the the
challenges of trying to provision tools for thought, work and also the
challenges of trying to provision work on. Open source. They both seem
from an outside view to be kind of economically unproductive
activities.
Nadia’s insight that really helped me and that seems to have some
analogs and tools for thought is that it makes sense to separate the way
that we think about the economic model of consumption of open source
from the economic model of production of open source. So when one
consumes open source software, that is a non-excludable resource, so the
code is just, you know, it’s available online, you can’t readily
charge tolls for it. Uh, it’s also non-rival risk. So you downloading
the code doesn’t really like make it more costly for me downloading the
code. There’s very near zero marginal costs.
The analog and tools for thought is once I like publish that paper. On
the great idea I had in Muse. This is a non-excludable resource out
there, and it’s also mostly non-rivals, you know, the 100th person
consuming that paper and consuming those ideas. It doesn’t really cost
any different from the 100th person.
But the production looks pretty different. It’s a it’s a small country
of people. It’s perhaps excludable, and there are some rivals elements
in open source, for instance, Nadia characterizes it as being about
attention. The scarce resource for the open source maintainer is their
attention, they’re being bombarded by these like requests and like
well-meaning people trying to contribute code and so on and so forth and
it’s very draining and this actually makes the resource rival risk
because the 1,000th contributor to the repository doesn’t cost 0
additionally relative to the 100th contributor. And so one way to think
about this that she suggests for open source that I think applies a bit
for tools for thought and relates sort of the strategy that I’m
pursuing now is we should think about funding production. Than funding
consumption.
Normally with media goods, we think about funding consumption. Like you
go to the store and you buy the shrink wrapped package of software, and
see like you’re buying a good, you’re buying an artifact. And when we
think about commercializing or monetizing software, likewise, we think
about the good or the artifact, or perhaps the services associated with
it in the modern world, like I’m going to sell support services if I’m
red hat or something, modern models might sell cloud services, but a
different way to think about all this is to think about kind of verb
instead of noun, funding the process of production rather than funding
the The output of the production. This is more common in the arts,
somewhat more familiar in the arts. Like if there’s a musician you
really like, your contribution to buying their albums or whatever, like
it’s probably not earning them very much money, but increasingly it’s
a popular thing to like be part of their their fan club or sponsor them
or something like this. And when you do that, when you sponsor the
musician, it’s not really that you’re like buying a particular song or
like buying an output, whatever. It’s more like, I like what you’re
doing and I I I want you to keep doing it. I recognize that you need
resources to keep doing what you’re doing. And I want you to have those
resources. So like here I am funding your process.
And that’s roughly a model that I’m exploring for tools for Though
presently, wherein I’m soliciting funders to cover the production of
what are typically public goods. So I’m going to sit here and like do
this work and think about space repetition systems and the most
prominent, the most useful long term results of that is going to be an
essay, or even if it’s instantiated in software, and even if that
software is proprietary, it’s going to be a set of ideas, interface
ideas, which are instantly stealable. And so those are public goods, and
it’s probably a lost cause to try to monetize either the essay or the
like interface ideas in the software, yeah, file a patent on it, but
like that’s not gonna work. And so instead, maybe we can think about
supporting this stuff in terms of uh recently I’ve been phrasing it as
like funding a grant, like an ongoing grant akin to the way that you
would for an academic research lab, which also produces public goods.
00:52:33 - Speaker 2: And it it sounds to me like you’re describing
somewhat of a patronage model and you talked about this on a past
podcast. in what’s happened with indie games, Steam Early Access and
Kickstarter being the two channels there, um, and that that’s maybe a
good example in a lot of ways, even though games are so different.
It’s the upfront production is where the cost is. You do have to do it
upfront. There’s several years of development by these, by, you know,
whatever size team there is. And when people invest in that, yeah,
they’re getting some things like access to a community and ability to
influence the game and ability to play an early buggy one that probably
isn’t very fun. And maybe that feels good for the person or it’s fun,
but ultimately it’s more about wanting to support something they want
to see exist in the world.
And I see a similar thing happening with the boom and subscription
newsletters. We’ll see, you know, whether that’s a bubble that will
pop or something sustainable. I I hope closer to the latter, but I think
it’s a similar thing, which is that people think this is someone and
and probably that personal connection is part of it. When you get a
subscription to I don’t know what the New York Times, there’s a maybe
a similar thing there you’re saying, I want to fund good journalism.
There’s something more powerful, I think about that individual creator,
whether it’s the musician, whether it’s the indie game creator, uh,
whether it’s the newsletter author where you you feel like you sort of
know them as a person and what their work is and you’re really funding
them because you believe in them and their worldview resonates and
you’re sort of saying, I want, I want more of this in the world.
00:54:00 - Speaker 1: This leads I think, to a significant challenge.
It’s comparatively difficult or it seems comparatively difficult to
fund teams with this model.
Like a lot of the advantage does seem to be from this personal
connection, you know, if you like go to my Patreon page, it’s it’s
like it’s personal in a lot of ways. Like I’m writing like, here’s
what I’m thinking about. Here’s what I’m anxious about. And you’re
also perhaps there because of my presence in other places like you heard
me on a podcast or you, you saw me on Twitter or whatever.
If now this is like the team for the something game, it’s more diffuse.
And then there’s also simply A matter of funding amounts.
So it seems at this point pretty likely that Patreon is going to be able
to raise an amount of money that can basically support me, which is
exciting and kind of surprising to me, but very nice.
Assuming that persists, I can continue producing public goods of this
kind, but it seems unlikely that it could support a team.
I really don’t see that happening. So I, I don’t quite know what that
model is. And one of the things I’ve been thinking about is that if the
main useful long term output of this kind of tools for thought research
is not The specific software that is created, like we don’t use Ivan
Sutherland’s sketchpad anymore, but rather the insights, then maybe
it’s actually OK for some or all of software components of these
elements to actually be proprietary.
If you’re my patron, maybe what that means is that you’re funding my
work, you’re funding my research. So that’s going to include essays,
which are, you know, freely available and perhaps software which is used
to produce the insights, those core insights that are captured in those
essays. And if you’re a patron like that software is also freely
available to you.
But otherwise, The software is perhaps proprietary and perhaps generates
revenue, which can then support a team.
One of the other problems I have here is, is that I can’t do all the
engineering work myself and also do great research. I kind of need long
term, I need staff.
00:55:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I do think the patronage model is really
promising a few comments there.
One is I tend to agree that it’s harder to find large teams with the
model. I do suspect that small teams are actually possible.
Another thought is, I think some of the most interesting work in this
area leans a lot into community.
So again, to draw a somewhat simple example from the gaming world, often
if you support these gaming creators at different levels, you get access
to like correspondingly elite Discord channels, which seems like it’s a
small thing, but it’s actually a huge human needs, like be a part of
community and and to believe in something that is important to you and
to participate with your peers. So there’s actually a lot of um kind of
community goods that one can provide as an independent creator or as a
small team.
Another interesting example there is Pladium Magazine, which is doing
really interesting work on political economy. And they have different
tiers for supporters and as you become a more substantial supporter, you
can participate in things like salons or even interact directly with the
team.
Another idea to address the funding a team problem is, I think people
don’t like to put money into big mushy pots.
Yeah. Like you think about donating to some huge institution, you like,
what’s it going to go to? Is it like going to go to some, I don’t
know, like random building or like cutting the lawn? I don’t know,
it’s not very exciting. Whereas with an individual creator, like I’m
funding, you know, this work on the neonic medium, that’s awesome. And
I wonder if you can get a little bit of both by having an institution,
but also supporting more targeted funding. So it’s almost like you’re
having a two-side marketplace for funding as an institution where these
are the 5 projects that we want to potentially do research on and you
can back individual projects, and once it’s reached a critical
threshold, we’ll go ahead and do it. So if it feels like you have more
agency over what your money is supporting.
One other example there is you mentioned the work potentially being
proprietary. This is actually well precedented with keyboards of all
things, folks, you got to look up this, this. Crazy world of custom
keyboards.
00:57:27 - Speaker 2: Oh, it’s so you’re talking about the mechanical
keyboard.
00:57:29 - Speaker 3: Yeah, they’re usually mechanical and they do
things like, you know, someone says, I’m going to make a keyboard.
It’s going to cost you, I don’t know, $500. And if I get 200 orders
for them, that’s enough money for me to do a production run in China.
So I’ll do it. I mean, people pay 50 $500 for a keyboard, maybe
they’ll pay $50 for, you know, a better note taking app or something,
right? I think it’s it’s very possible.
00:57:45 - Speaker 1: And and do those people also have patronage or or
is is now just the product they’re selling?
00:57:50 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s kind of both. So you’re. Yes,
you’re covering the production costs, but also there’s this huge
creative and entrepreneurial element where you have to ask to pull
together the keyboard, like find the right key caps and get the right
producer in China and arrange it all right. And so you’re also paying
for that. It’s kind of an entrepreneurial activity in a way.
00:58:04 - Speaker 1: And do they like open source the like CAD files
and stuff? Is there like a public goods component at all in that world?
00:58:10 - Speaker 3: Um, that’s a good question. I’m not sure.
00:58:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ll link both the mechanical keyboard and
subreddit, which is just fun to scroll through for the great photos.
Uh, but also kind of relative to the what people are willing to spend
side of it.
There’s an article by Kevin Lainoff, if, if I’m not mistaken, that is
basically an exercise in what could you price this out and, and they
actually end up with a price that’s over 1000 or something like that.
And again, it relates to people who are really, really into a very
specific hobby. They like the fact that it’s this one time run. It
feels very authentic. It’s just someone in their community, you know,
it’s it’s not a ongoing commercial entity. It’s just a person in the
community that has an idea for a unique thing to make that they want to
share with everyone else. To your point, they’re willing to put down a
lot of money to do that. And yeah, I think there’s a, it’s a very
different kind of calculation when you think I’m supporting something I
believe in. With the community I want to be a part of is a different,
very different kind of transaction than I’m purchasing a product, I’m
going to, you know, shop on whatever comparison sites, to get the lowest
price I can. I’ll never ever meet or even have any idea who was. Behind
making this product in the first place is very transactional,
mechanical, just give me the cheapest, simplest thing that will solve my
problems so I can move on with my life.
00:59:28 - Speaker 1: Another related problem seems to be the arrivals
to working on this kind of work have gotten more appealing.
And this is kind of a different angle on your point about Instagram.
When you look at PARC, it’s not so much that people there got paid a
huge amount, actually, that the total budget for the projects that
produce personal computing was not that large, but relative to the
rivals, uh, relative to the universities that essentially would have
been the employers for that staff, PARC was offering more than anybody.
And so they were able to assemble basically all the really great
computer scientists that existed uh in that period. It’s a bit of
Overstatement, but they got a huge portion of them. Whereas now this
work is competing with, you know, fairly lucrative jobs in the tech
industry and in more than one way. So like, yes, it’s true if you’re
young and you, you know, go work for Instagram, you’ll maybe make a
quarter million dollars a year or more, but also in this kind of
uncapped upside way. So if you are the kind of person who’s
entrepreneurial and agenttic enough to pursue this kind of original
technological work, you could probably be working on a startup and you
could be getting uncapped upside. Whereas it seems fairly difficult to
uh pursue a course of action that could yield uncapped upside in the
tools for thought space nominally speaking. Uh, because of the kind of
public goods elements, like the, the hardest thing that you do will be
to come up with the elements that is novel, unique, and immediately
stealable. And like, yes, you can start a startup around the, you know,
the, the kind of the software around that, but uh you feel like you’ve
shot yourself in the foot a little bit.
01:00:56 - Speaker 3: I certainly think there’s a lot of truth to that.
I just want to jump back to the absolute amounts and comment that I
think that the amount of money you need to find really interesting
projects in this space is in the scheme of things very.
Small. It’s gonna be a fair amount to any individual person or any
normal individual person, but just the absolute amount in terms of what
we spend on random funded startups or what our various levels of
government spend is just quite small. That, that makes me optimistic
that there’s a way to make this work.
Um, on the opportunity cost thing, I think that cuts both ways. Like,
yes, it’s the case that people can go to the Googles and the Facebooks
and earn a lot of money, but we’ve also seen with the lab that people
really value doing this rewarding, interesting, unique work and it’s
accessible to a broader set of people.
So like, is remote because we have a broader hiring funnel and so on. I
also think there’s a time and a dynamic element here where you don’t
need to spend your whole career doing research.
Actually, one of the ideas behind the lab, use the spin out and kind of
the whole group there is that we expect people to rotate over time. So
it’s not just you’re not just a career researcher or a queer
entrepreneur, you actually get a lot of dynamism from going back and
forth. You get different benefits in each world and then actually going
all the way back to our conversation about full-time toolmakers versus
practitioners. you help solve that problem. You spend maybe 4 or 8 years
in one domain and then you switch over and you get that hybridization.
01:02:10 - Speaker 2: I’ll fill in that I think the funding it through
commercial products. We said the paying for the for the result rather
than the process.
01:02:19 - Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, yeah, kind of paying for the output of
the artifact rather than paying for the production of it. Yeah.
01:02:24 - Speaker 2: Obviously we’re pursuing the paying for the
artifact path with umm that we’re we’re selling this product
commercially if you want, kind of, but like it’s subsequent.
01:02:31 - Speaker 1: To the paying for the production element of I and
Switch.
01:02:36 - Speaker 2: That’s right, yeah. Um, well, I almost wonder if
there’s a progression there a little bit, which is ink and Switch was
very much just a small amount of money, grant money that was people that
want, you know, some people that wanted to see this thing, see a certain
kind of research done in the world and very much public goods, we
published everything as we open sourced as much as we could. That was
the whole point of that.
And then the spin out commercial entity now we’re in a state where
probably we’re close. to that kind of patronage Kickstarter level,
which is, you know, I think a lot of the people that purchase the
product, now they’re thinking it’s less about does the exact feature
set that exists today, you know, how does is that exactly what I want or
is that that, you know, worth the price and more that they’re thinking,
I believe this team over the next period of time that my subscription
covers is going to make great things and it’s going to make this
product even better into something that fits into my workflow into my
life, enhances things for me, enhances things for others.
And you can imagine fast forwarding a few years when the product is much
more complete, uh, that at that point maybe it does come more
transactional.
No one cares about funding the the team or the long term thing, it’s
just more about now it’s a good product, it’s very full featured and
has been developed over a long period. Time and so they’re going to
spend money that the price they pay is, is much more of a transaction to
just get this thing that does solve an immediate problem for them and
they’re not worried about the future or the team behind it or the
community element. So you can see that as sort of a three stage
progression. Uh, at least I hope or imagine that could happen here and I
could also imagine it happening with, with other things including
something like the pneumonic medium or other uh research work that I’ve
seen in process, but the making that transition step to step to step
that I think is another place where Mark and I talked about that in our
HCI episode that that I think is another weak point in the the field if
we can if we can call it that.
01:04:25 - Speaker 1: Totally. I think that. Progression is, is likely
to happen in my work. And one of the things that seems to create the
weak points and is likely to create them in my work is that it’s not
always the same people who want to be working on these, these different
things. That’s both a weakness and the strength. Maybe I don’t feel
like doing the production maintenance of a commercial piece of software
like that that’s just not what gives me joy to today.
01:04:55 - Speaker 2: But there’s like a lot of people who really like
just like churning through task lists, and they love like the feeling of
like, check, check, check, check, and Those people will be like really
well suited to be on the engineering team for, you know, long term I’ll
note you even reveal your proclivities by saying turning through
taskless, because some someone that has more of the mindset of wanting
to keep a real existing thing running and serving people’s needs, they
would say, I don’t want to just think big floaty thoughts about
something that could exist in the future. I want to deliver real value
today by building production software and shipping it to customers,
right?
01:05:17 - Speaker 1: For sure. And and so if you’re someone who values
the big floaty thoughts, and you want this, this big floaty thought that
you’ve kind of tethered to earth to actually live long term, you got to
find somebody who enjoys the other stuff to come and pick it up and take
control. That seems like a weak point in the process. Reminds me of tech
transfer in universities, tech transfer.
01:05:36 - Speaker 2: I don’t know if I know that concept.
01:05:38 - Speaker 1: It’s how many of the top tier research
universities actually get most of their funding these days. Uh, my alma
mater, the plurality of its funding comes from this.
I think it’s true of Stanford too, but essentially, uh, the model is
that professors are paid for mostly by public grants, and IH NSF, things
like that in the sciences anyway, and they produce mostly public goods.
They publish papers and so on, but also sometimes they They file patents
on those things when they are patentable things or they do spin off
startups or their advisors to startups or something like that and the
university gets a cut.
Uh, and so a great deal of Stanford’s wealth, for instance, comes from
the patents which underlies gene tech for recombinant DNA and uh Google
as well.
01:06:18 - Speaker 2: Another piece of the funding spectrum. Is
corporate R&D labs, which Xerox Park famously was Bell Labs and the one
I often use as as inspiration. Now that was quite unusual in that it was
a corporate R&D lab for the largest monopoly business, I think that is
certainly ever been in information technology. But Andy, you had your,
your at least brief run at doing uh on the corporate R&D side. How do
you think that fits into this?
01:06:43 - Speaker 1: It’s really challenging. I spent a lot of time
studying the players in this space and mostly came away with a pretty
bleak perspective.
My own work at Khan Academy was kind of weird because Khan Academy is a
nonprofit. So that the motivations are somewhat different there.
But even just looking at the for-profit space, it’s difficult for me to
get excited about corporate research labs as an institutional model,
speaking to some of the people involved in setting up and tearing down
Microsoft research, that really was not terribly successful for the
company and indeed was like successful in these other ways of creating a
sink that could keep talent from Going and starting startups in Seattle,
for instance, is like actually a useful and positive effect that made it
worth funding for, you know, Bell Labs had it was this kind of this
chaff to dodge antitrust litigation seems to be the prominent reason it
got so much funding. It did actually generate a ton of value for the
parent company.
And Park, you know, I mean, there’s this fumbling the future phrase
that goes around. The fun thing is that Park actually was profitable for
Xerox, just barely because of laser printers, not because of personal
computers.
Yeah, Apple’s corporate research uh was really not successful. Um,
I’ve been having difficulty learning as as much as I would like to
about Dolby. Uh, which does actually seem to be pretty successful. But
another fairly successful example is Pixar. And one thing that I think
really distinguishes Pixar’s corporate research is that there’s
cutting edge graphics research that goes on there, but it it is very
much in service of these creative films. They are huge money generators.
01:08:08 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe that creates the connection and is
always one of the challenges is the disconnect between the uh the mad
scientists off thinking the big thoughts and the real world problems
that those can be applied to and Yeah, having the the graphics
researchers need to turn around and produce an algorithm or even work
code for the new movie that’s coming out on a particular deadline and
there’s a lot of money at stake for maybe that creates some realness or
or as a way to, as you said, tether the the thought balloon to the earth
a little bit.
01:08:38 - Speaker 1: One of the challenges that seems to exist for all
these labs that Pixar manages to avoid the mechanism you just described
and also existed at Khan Academy, which is a nonprofit so it had, you
know.
Interestingly different funding issues is just this, um this challenge
of tech transition.
So even the lab comes up with an idea, we came up with the laser
printer, we came up with a personal computer, we have the Alto, we have
the star, you know, whatever. And like, we want to get it out in the
world and have it be a major corporate strategic priority. This is often
the point where things fall over because if if the research really is
cutting edge, often it will mean at the highest level shifting the
company’s strategic objectives to really Capitalize on that technology.
It’s difficult to find organizations that have done that consistently.
Pixar makes use of their research, but I think in general, capitalizing
on really great like water rendering technology or whatever doesn’t
require shifting the highest level corporate strategy.
01:09:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, Ben Reinhardt has done some really
interesting research on this topic in the context of DARPA. I highly
recommend checking out his work and one of the insights from the world
of DARPA and military.
Or dual use technology transfer is that it’s extremely dependent on
thick social networks that are formed largely because of DARPA’s work,
and this I think points to another gap or opportunity, which is the kind
of institutional and community side, where if you have a place for
people to congregate and to gather and to form social connections, it
can really fertilize the creative work of the industry.
And we saw this a little bit with ink and Switch, you know, we had a
very modest community effort.
It was Slack channel. We had some articles published, we would tweet
some things, but even just that got all kinds of amazing people to come
out of the woodwork and say, you know, I’m working on this too, or this
idea or what do you think about this or how can I contribute? And I can
only imagine if someone invested a lot more in something like that,
you’d see correspondingly more results.
01:10:17 - Speaker 1: I’d love to make that happen. It was briefly a
kind of a high goal for the year until I realized that I couldn’t
really achieve the other things that seemed important if I pursued that.
So one thing I observed is that these kind of community efforts do seem
to be like the result of times of plenty. DARPA, uh, especially in its
heady days with just like excessive funding, is able to devote resources
to this in a way that seems difficult.
01:10:39 - Speaker 3: But I think DARPA is also an interesting example
of how, again, the absolute amount needed is not that big. Like the
number of people at the very core of DARPA is quite small.
01:10:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe I’m just thinking too small here.
01:10:49 - Speaker 2: The time of plenty point, I think seems right,
which is what we’re talking about is investing in the future.
Our particular niche and interest is this, this tools for thought. Um,
but in general, being willing to invest in the longer term, 5 years out,
10 years out, and more.
There’s a few things that drive that.
There’s military is just a huge one because that’s just always an
existential question for a nation. It’s also things like and of course,
the space race with a lot of the stuff that led to the internet and a
lot of those technologies was at its core connected to a sort of a
military dominance or perception of that uh between the world
superpowers at the time.
Or you have something like Bell Labs, which, as you said, you know, this
antitrust thing, this, this huge monopoly with so much money to spend
and so sort of in their interest and and government funding generally,
the larger pool to draw from potentially and a willingness for longer
time horizons.
And corporate R&D labs are always tough because they’re always when
times get a little tough and there’s always the up and down, you’re
going to look a little shorter term, of course, the first thing to go is
the dreamers that are that are looking further out. And that’s fair
enough. I don’t, I don’t think that’s a very pragmatic and reasonable
choice, but then that that comes back to well, is that a is that a way
to fund our future and at least the evidence seems to be despite some a
few cases, a few exceptional cases like PARC, uh, that that’s not
really very. sustainable or repeatable.
01:12:14 - Speaker 1: It’s interesting to look at HHMI’s funding
practices versus the NIH’s funding practices of targeting specific
researchers and trying to give them consistent funding over longer
periods of time. What I feel differently about spending a lot of time
right now on like community organizing, if I had something like an
endowment. Um, I probably would, and it’s weird because like I’m not,
I’m not really bleeding. I am in the red, but it’s, it’s not so much
that I don’t want to do it because it feels like ultra ultra urgent to
resolve that. It’s more that there’s a feeling of not being on steady
ground. Yeah.
01:12:49 - Speaker 3: I think the future is still, I’ve written here,
we’ve talked a lot about structural issues like funding and things like
that, but a huge element is just the individual will and passion to see
something change in the space. And I think Andy is a great example of
that. There’s all kinds of currents that make that kind of work very
challenging, but he’s succeeded because of his will and talent and
persistence. I would invite more people to just try to take that on.
01:13:14 - Speaker 1: It’s very kind. Thank you, Mark.
01:13:15 - Speaker 2: B like Andy, I like that. 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. We always like
to hear your reactions to anything we’ve talked about and we’d like to
hear your ideas for future episodes. Andy, thanks so much for joining us
today and talking about these areas of mutual interest. Thanks y’all.
01:13:37 - Speaker 1: This was a really fun conversation. Thanks, Andy.
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Because oftentimes when we launch startups, we are
very keen to tell the world why we’re so different and so unique, but
we often forget to tell them why we’re equally good as what what’s
already there.
00:00:17 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is software
for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving.
This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company
and the small team behind it.
I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and our
investor Lisa Ankle. Hey, this is quite an impressive use of internet
technology, I think, because Lisa, you’re in Singapore. I believe it’s
9 p.m. for you. Mark, you’re in Seattle. It’s 6. a.m. for you, and
I’m here in Berlin at 3 p.m. So this is truly a globe spanning call,
but it works. Seems to be. So Lisa, welcome to the to the podcast, and
can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. So I’m Swedish person living
here in uh in Singapore, have been here for a couple of years, have a
background in working for startups, often as an early employee, and for
the past 2.5 years I’ve been part of building out a VC firm. Called
Antlers. So we actually run startup generator programs where we help
individuals find their co-founders and then launch startups and then we
invest in the best teams. On the side, privately, I also do a couple of
angel investments, um, a few here and there, select ones, and then my
background is in, in marketing and product primarily on the growth side.
00:01:29 - Speaker 2: One of the things that caught my attention about
Antler, in addition to its, I guess from my point of view, uh, exotic
location. Uh, is that it’s taking some of the, I guess, accelerator
model pioneered by by combinator and others, and sort of bringing that
to, uh, to this new place. But also I think it has just very nice
branding marketing presentation. And I feel like that may even be more
important for a for an accelerator who’s constantly recruiting
companies, you’re a two sided marketplace in a way, right? You’re
connecting companies with investors, right? And so being Uh, being
something that presents itself in a way that’s interesting, attractive,
appealing to both of those parties, uh, seems quite important.
00:02:09 - Speaker 1: It definitely is, and I think it’s, it’s hard
because we want to convince entrepreneurs like yourselves that it’s
better to to launch a company together with us than to do it, to do it
alone and to to kind of convince entrepreneurs, it’s a very hard, I
think, persona. To, to crack. So we try to work with kind of repeat
entrepreneurs and very experienced founders. Yeah, and then also
establish ourselves as a trustworthy investor. So it’s definitely those
kind of two sides that you mentioned.
00:02:34 - Speaker 2: Great. Well, I think that the topic we want to do
today is authentic marketing, and you sort of suggested this based on uh
the couple episodes ago we talked with Max Schoening from GitHub. And I
think we were talking more about product things, but that naturally
drifted into this, uh, into this field. And um he talked a bit about the
being close to product and even what it means to, you know, what is the
marketing playbook in 2020. Uh, and in many ways, he felt like authentic
marketing is one that that doesn’t have much of a playbook or you’re
doing things that are new and special to you or speaking with your voice
in a way that makes sense for The audience for your your product. But of
course at the same time, while just saying there’s no playbook,
obviously marketing is a skill. It is a whole career field. And in fact,
I was reminded of a podcast I heard recently with Patrick McKenzie where
he basically described his whole career as being built around taking
concepts from the marketing world and bringing repackaging them for
engineers who typically don’t appreciate the depth of that skill and
then repackaging that in a way. That it’s comprehensible and makes
sense to them.
00:03:40 - Speaker 1: I think the episode you had with Max was super
interesting, especially around the product principles and kind of having
them, having them in place, and it reminded me quite a bit of what you
also talked about the company values and the importance of, of choosing
what not to do because it’s so easy to say with this, this, this and
that, and by choosing everything you don’t have any decision making in
the company and I think that’s kind of ties into very much around the
marketing and Positioning as well because you want to be for everyone
and you want to be this wide, you know, very broad and wide thing and
you don’t want to exclude anyone, but by doing so, you also don’t
help, you know, the customers or the potential users to to navigate or
or to understand you better. So I think that was a very good kind of
similarity.
00:04:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if you’re everything for everyone, then
you’re someone understand what you are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:04:29 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe that naturally leads to a conversation
you and I have been having here as we are gearing up towards our product
launch and thinking about how we want to explain news to a wider
audience. We have our kind of our core group of people who’ve been
following our story, maybe even back to the research lab days, and if
they, I don’t know, read our 5000 word research article and listen to
Mark and I talk on the podcast for 10 hours, they can understand the
product, but we’re trying to find a way to package that a little bit
more tightly so that more people can get access to that message. And and
one of the things that has come up there in our conversations or as
you’ve been, have been advising us is what category are we in? And this
is honestly a real struggle because it’s important to put yourself in a
category that’s an easy way for someone to understand what you are. Are
you a car? Are you a kitchen knife? Are you a word processor? Are you a
photo editing program? And of course, you can be new and different and
better, but starting with, here’s what it is, you know, Google Docs
maybe was quite different. In some ways than what came before, but
ultimately, you could have described it as well. It’s Microsoft Word,
but on the web. Um, but we’ve really struggled with this at Muse. What’s
your take on the the sort of the category question and how it fits into
the larger positioning topic?
00:05:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you’re not alone in feeling this way. It
was the same when we started Antler. It’s been the same with multiple
startups I worked with. It’s really hard to kind of choose because
oftentimes you actually do something new. That’s why you’re a startup
and you don’t want to be like someone else. It’s already out there,
but I think the risk of not choosing is so high, so you kind of have to
choose, even if you choose something that you’re not super happy with.
I tried to compare it with like, if you walk around in a grocery store,
you want to know what shelf you’re gonna go to, if you want to find the
nuts or the dried fruits or going to the candy shelf or going to the
fruit stand, and by positioning yourself next to the fresh fruits or
next to the candy, it tells a lot about your brand and if you are kind
of a healthy snack or if you are not a healthy snack, like the peanuts,
the salted peanuts will be. Next to the chips and candy, right? But then
if you have a whatever nature bar, they will be next to the fruits. So
it does tell a story.
I think it’s important to take, to have the discussion and to take it,
and you may not land in something that feels completely right because
it’s new, so you will feel a bit uncomfortable. But if you don’t
choose, then others will choose for you. And that’s the big risk. Then
you will have journalists, users and customers, and they will start
calling you things and they will all start calling you different things,
and that’s horrible for SEO and it’s really bad. Uh, because no one
will remember you.
So even if you choose something that’s not awesome, at least you have
something and you can be consistent.
00:07:00 - Speaker 3: This reflects my experience talking with friends
and family about Muse.
Initially, I would try to describe the app from first principles in
terms of all the novel things that we’re doing and the the unique
interaction model and man, people had a really tough time understanding
what it was.
But once I started describing it in terms of things they were familiar
with, note taking apps, personal. Information management, those are the
two main ones. I really stuck better and then you could give them the
deltas, you know, it’s that, but here are the deltas and the deaths.
It’s Microsoft Word, but it’s on the web. People get excited about on
the web and likewise, we have a series of deltas for use that was quite
effective. Although I had never thought about the people start to pick
names for you angle, which uh now that you mentioned it seems quite
important.
00:07:36 - Speaker 2: And sometimes that’s good. You want to wait and
see how people describe you and then maybe adopt that because in many
cases, the target audience or The people who want what you’re offering
are actually better able to find the right words.
00:07:50 - Speaker 1: The problem with doing that is that your very
smart customers are not, they don’t have a big following, maybe some
do, but some of them may not have a big following online and the people
who do are the tech journalists, and they might not have time to think
this through, and they take a concept they already know and they will
just splash it onto the article and then there you are.
00:08:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when it comes to journalists and even
reviewers that go relatively deep, you know, in the end, they need to
crank through a lot of articles or reviews or whatever it is they’re
doing in a relatively short period of time. They don’t have weeks and
months to get deeply familiar with your product and your philosophies
and your all the ideas you’re trying to to share. So of course,
they’re going to look for the, the shorthand.
So if you don’t, if you don’t give them that shorthand, then yeah, you
risk a lot of just fragmented. Sort of description. Yeah, for me, this
was the very point. Once we got into this discussion, I started working
through this, uh, it, it really called back to me to my Hiroku
experience. And so here when we were working on this platform for web
deployment in the late, uh, sort of like 2008ish period, and we ran into
the same problem because there was this clear, I guess you call it
category which was hosting, but in many ways it had all these.
Associations really led people in the wrong direction, particularly the
historic kind of shared hosting FDP and PHP kind of stuff. Um, and cloud
didn’t exist yet and cloud infrastructure didn’t exist.
And eventually we did go along with an industry term which was platform
as a service. In some ways I was never that great. I don’t think
customers are like, I don’t know, industry analysts would use that, but
customers didn’t really use it. They didn’t, they didn’t really think
of it that way. Um, and, and we struggled with it for a long, long time,
basically, as long as I was there, and many years later, I don’t know,
10 years after we started the company is when the industry settled on
some terms. One was containerization, that’s for the Dockers and
Cougarneti stuff, you know, at Hiroku we made up this weird word dino.
Because there was, there was nothing that that behaved in this way. And
so we needed a new word for it. And eventually the industry came up with
a word which was container.
And later on, there’s another cat there was a category or a name for
this type of platform, which is serverless. Now that’s a well known
space. And we even had like a no servers or forget about servers, that
was part of our message, but it just, it wasn’t a category. We were
just doing this weird thing that no one could understand and then yes,
exactly that problem.
Customers, journalists, colleagues, investors, whatever else they want
to stick you into this, into a category that isn’t a good fit. And then
yeah, I don’t know it was this, it was this constant struggle. In the
end it worked out for us, I guess, because we’re doing something that I
think was different and special and, and, and ultimately people. Enough
people got it, uh, to make the business successful, but still, it was a
constant source of pain for me personally, not only to just, I don’t
know, write a good homepage or something, but also even what I usually
call just the cocktail party experience, which is just what Mark, you
just said, Mark, which is chatting with someone that you haven’t caught
up with in a long time, whether or not they’re tech industry people are
not around the dinner table at a family event, and they say, what are
you doing? And you want to like sum it up in a couple of sentences and
Just could never do it and just people were left scratching their head
and they thought that I was being withholding or I didn’t want to tell
them and that wasn’t it. It was like, well, no, you know, I need to sit
you down and give you a 20 minute lecture on the history of web
development so you can understand this product. And yeah, no, that was
always pretty unsatisfying.
00:11:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think we had the fear of ending up in
the wrong.
That really drove my initiatives when we, when we launched and started
answer.
I did not want it to be in the bucket of incubators because in Singapore
alone there are 53 different incubators, most of them, I mean, of
course, some of them are great, but many of them belong to corporates
and I mean, I’m gonna sound like a bitch, but nothing good has ever
come out of them.
And we didn’t want to be in that bucket because we wanted to build
great companies and then we also didn’t want to be an accelerator
because that’s a bit different because then you take in an existing
team with an existing product and you help them accelerate their
growth.
We brought founders together, you know, in the first place and helped
them navigate what product to build in the first place and then invest.
So therefore we, we kind of landed after a lot of pain in the term
startup generator that we were generating startups and we’ve been
sticking to it for 2.5 years and now.
We talk about ourselves more as a VC firm because we’re also now doing
a little bit later stage investments as well that we are expanding. So
now we have VC firms, and now I’m just a VC kind of boring, but that’s
life.
And I think, I think that was necessary for us to kind of stand out when
we were launching that to tell the story that we were different from
from these incubators you would know or the accelerators you would know.
00:12:24 - Speaker 2: That’s a and and maybe a good illustration of
someone’s gonna, you know, pick words for you. I think I described you
as an accelerator there just 5 minutes ago or something, something like
that. So. It’s the, it’s the easy thing to reach for. I I know that. I
know that term. I, I have a space for it in my mind, and that’s that
positioning concept kind of calling back to the 1980 seminal seminal
book just titled Positioning is it’s all about that space in a
person’s mind and we all have busy lives and we have a lot of
information coming to us all the time and you just you you always reach
for that quick shorthand. Yeah.
00:12:59 - Speaker 3: So, I’m curious if you’re going to position a
product or service and you want to be in a space like to stand out in
that space. Um, we go back to the Google Docs example of you’re in the
word processor space, but it has this unique aspect. Are there
particular techniques for doing that so that you stand out effectively?
00:13:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so there is actually a framework that I
often use. It’s called the points of parity and points of difference
because oftentimes when we launch startups, we are very keen to tell the
world why we’re so different and so unique, but we often forget to tell
them why we’re equally good as what what’s already there. So let’s
say I’m starting a neobank. I might want to share that actually the
transactions are safe or your money. safe with me, sending some basic
comfort to the end user that I’m not this crazy startup, we have, you
know, whatever it might be encryption or it’s super safe or stable or
something like that. FDIC insurance. Yeah, all those things that comfort
the end user to like, OK, this is something I can trust. This is, this
is, it might be new, but at least I can actually trust it. So that would
be the points of parity. How am I as good as the others in this.
Category. And then once you have a couple of points of parity, you would
add on your points of difference. So, OK, this is stable, it’s safe,
it’s secure. However, we’re also pink and purple and glitter. So
we’re all these like startup sparkly difference, but you can still rely
on us just as you can with your old bank. So that is called the points
of parody and the points of difference, and I think it’s very useful,
especially for very early startups who are just Starting up who have no
trust and people are a little bit skeptical in the beginning.
00:14:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that certainly makes sense. I think in a
way, entrepreneurs are people who maybe thrive on or have the
personality to be different, stand out, be the purple cow, carve their
own path, the rebels, what have you. And so then naturally, when it
comes to talking about what you’re doing, or pitching it or trying to
explain it, you get really going to focus on here’s what’s different.
But here’s what’s the same is actually something that, you know, even
now as we’re talking about it, I think we could probably do a lot more
of that with Muse.
00:15:03 - Speaker 1: Because that’s why you’re building something
new. Like that’s like that because that’s why you’re here and and so
it should be that way, but I think for the regular user or potential
customer, they need to be, you know, feel comfortable in starting using.
Aha, it’s the same thing as, but with these new additions.
00:15:19 - Speaker 2: It just gives you a mental reference point, maybe
the bank example uh company that I really love their product is N26,
which is this Berlin-based bank.
I think they’re starting to spread global now, but you know, it’s just
a sort of a bank account you put money in and they give you a Mastercard
or whatever that you can spend money with.
But the thing that makes them different is they have a really nice user
experience and a great mobile app and it’s 100% virtual. I really love
the product. I also think the marketing is really good, but they do
start with that place of, it’s a bank account, you can put money into
it, and here’s a Mastercard so you can spend money.
00:15:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, another example is on telco here in
Singapore called Circles.life. They are very clear. We use them and they
are very clear like, yes, you will have kind of reception like all over
the country.
We have good, yeah, you have good data if fast, whatever, but then in
addition, we have no stores, so you don’t need to stand in line and
hand in your documents.
We have someone ship the SIM card to your home. And then you just show
the ID as you accept the SIM card and we do everything in an app, which
is different from standing, taking this like, you know, standing in line
and waiting to get a SIM card, which is how you do it otherwise in
Singapore.
00:16:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when it comes to the invented category or
give a new name to something, you mentioned the startup generator,
there’s the platforms of service, serverless thing.
And I was just looking back at my notes for the positioning book and
they, because it’s an older book, they talk about examples like say
Xerox. which invented effectively what we now call a copier, but for a
while, Xerox and copier were synonymous, and that’s the, that’s the
reward to inventing a new category is your, your brand name actually
becomes the generic name Kleenex, I think is often listed in that. They
also mention Polaroid, for example, sort of instant instant photography,
that if you can invent a new category and give it a name and maybe your
your company name becomes the name of that category and you own. That
category in a very impressive way. Um, but it’s very hard to do that. I
think it takes a lot of time. I think it takes a lot of just money,
basically to get the to get the reach, um, and that’s probably
something that’s more suited to a company with big venture backing or a
big corporate parent. Uh, to be able to push it over the long term.
And we explored that a little bit with Muse, our, our very first web
page had the your thinking canvas was kind of the description of it, but
also we were trying to, I guess not quite invented category. I don’t
think I would have thought of it that way then, but that that’s how I
wanted to describe it. And pretty naturally that fits to other kinds of
thinking canvases, which include digital products like Millanote and
Figma and Miro, but also include real world products, which is I think a
whiteboard is thinking canvas, a sketchbook is a thinking canvas, a
chalkboard is a thinking canvas, post it, stuck to your wall as a
thinking canvas. Um, so that was kind of, kind of the idea we wanted to
go with that. But yeah, I think the conclusion I came to is that just a
small team like ours just can’t. we can’t define a whole new, new
category in that way. Uh, now, what we’ll do instead is still sort of
TBD we’re still working through, I guess. So another topic in the space
of authentic marketing is personal aspirations versus solving problems,
and I think Mark, you had some thoughts on this.
00:18:22 - Speaker 3: I feel like every few months you see one of these
Twitter threads where someone is arguing one of three positions.
The first is that you should describe your product in terms of problems
to be solved. You tell your customer you have problems X, Y, and Z, this
tool will help you solve them.
Sometimes you see people advocating for uh the aspirational model, which
is the type of person you want to be. I go, I go back to the classic
iPod ads, where you’re just kind of this dancing, energetic, brilliant
silhouette, you know, you want to be like that, so you get an iPod.
Um, or perhaps the more utilitarian approach where you just say what the
product does, and that’s it. Pro X, Y, and Z, you figure out what it’s
for and if it’s, if it’s right for you. And I feel like there’s
always a tension between those three approaches in marketing.
00:18:59 - Speaker 2: I feel like it’s especially relevant to the
prosumer class of of product, which, which we are in because it’s
something you buy for yourself, but it’s expensive enough that it’s,
you want to buy it because it helps you be better in your work life.
Most likely, it helps you be more successful at how you earn your
living, and so yeah, the the iPod is consumer so that quite naturally
fits with, I think the kind of aspirational, who do you want to be or
what, what kind of lifestyle do you want to live, which certainly I
don’t know, even things like bottled water and so on are sold in that
way, like the advertisements show the product very little and instead
they show smiling happy people uh living lovely lives.
And you think if I buy this product, they’ll be like that, and then
maybe the utilitarian one you described that probably works pretty well
for certain kinds of B2BA or just enterprise software where there’s
just a person working in a business that has a very specific problem to
solve. They have budget to solve it and if you can articulate their
problem clearly and convince them that your product is trustable and a
solution to their problem, then OK, great, there’s the fit. But when
maybe when you get to the prosumer stuff, particularly in this current
time, um, I’m thinking of this article signaling as a service like that
in the show notes here, but I think there they talk about, for example,
things like superhuman, and so the idea that it has this kind of elite
thing to it because it’s invitation only and because of the price point
and then you get the little, you know, you put the little tagline in
your signature or similarly, I think a similar thing has happened with
uh hey, hey.com email, brilliantly marketed, of course, those uh the
base camp guys. They are always great at that, but I think there’s an
element of this where you can’t use a custom domain and actually
getting your hey.com domain name, and the people that even just tweet
their I guess their their hey.com email, they tweet that out and it’s a
way of saying, hey, I’m cool, I’m, yeah, it’s a kind of, it’s a kind
of signaling. um, and there’s nothing. Let’s say there’s anything
wrong with that exactly, but in theory, they are for helping you be more
productive, creative, better at your work, more informed citizen, that
sort of thing, rather than a handbag that, you know, is going to impress
others. Uh, so yeah, there’s, there’s an interesting tension there.
00:21:05 - Speaker 3: So maybe there’s, there’s two variants of the
aspirational side. There’s this, uh, more outwards facing uh status
signaling type aspiration, which OK, has its place, I guess. To me, the
more interesting variant is when you’re aspiring to something for
yourself. So let me tell you a little story, Adam, you recall that we
went to the Trinity Library in Dublin. Yeah, it’s this incredible. Like
if you Google like amazing libraries, the first image that shows up,
right? I don’t know that’s literally true, but you know what I mean.
00:21:31 - Speaker 2: I’ve seen it as a slide in a lot of
presentations. Um, there’s actually I think a photo of me, you and you,
Lea, because that was sort of our first real team summit. Uh, right
there in that library. But yeah, now I recognize it all over the place.
It’s very distinctive, this long hallway with the kind of the dark wood
and what have you.
00:21:48 - Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, anyways, I remember very vividly when
I was in that hall, I felt like, man, I should be writing a book, you
know, isn’t that isn’t that what one should be doing with one’s life?
And I feel like you get a smaller but still um visual sense of that when
you’re holding a really nice leather notebook, you’re like, man, I
should be, I feel like I should be taking notes or like doing a creative
project, right? And I think that’s something that prosumer digital
tools can tap into. It’s a sense that A tool just by virtue of its
quality can make you aspire to do more creative work.
00:22:13 - Speaker 1: And I think a place we often fall into, especially
if you have like software products, is that instead of talking about how
this thing will help you, a lot of website actually describes different
features, feature A, feature B, feature C, so or it will describe what
goes into the product.
So I had another comparison that I learned many years ago where she’s
like, OK, if you describe a car, you can even describe it like, OK. It
is this kind of metal thing. It has an engine for wheels, or you can
describe it as this, this thing will take you from place A to place B,
and there’s a huge difference there, and I think a lot of startups
often because you’re so focused on your features and what you’re
building, a lot of times we talk about, you know, feature A, B, and C,
instead of talking about what these features, what, what kind of magic
they will create for you and how they can be helpful for you.
So I think there is kind of a 3 steps there. I think we can land in the
middle because I agree like signaling and that is at the end that
that’s also something and, and I think it’s, it’s a difference like
you said between signaling and just inspiring, inspiring you to create
something. But yeah, there is definitely a trap in describing features
in a rather uh non-sexy way that doesn’t really make you feel anything.
Right.
00:23:25 - Speaker 3: And we keep coming back to this theme on this
podcast of Creativity being uh an incredibly emotional act. It’s very
human, right? If you deny that, if you don’t recognize that in your
product, your marketing, um, I think you’re leaving a lot on the table.
00:23:37 - Speaker 2: That reminds me of another influential book I read
many years ago called The Substance of Style by Virginia Pastorrell. I
reread it recently and it’s a little dated just because she spends a
lot of time referencing the original iMac and I think the PT Cruiser and
other current products. Of the early 2000s, whenever it was, the core
idea is still just as valid today, which is that there’s a tendency to
want to separate out the substance of something that is the the meat,
the function, what it does from the surface. We even say beauty is skin
deep. She makes the argument that especially when it comes to products
or tools that we use in our life, these things, it actually matters
because The the surface, the aesthetic will make you feel a particular
way. And these products and tools are designed to be used by humans and
our feelings matter a lot for motivation, for creativity, for being
successful and whatever the thing is that we’re trying to do. And
argues, you know, I think at the time that was when Apple’s was kind of
ascendant with this new kind of design forward approach, and she spent a
lot of time on that and saying why she thought that was really
meaningful in the world. was going to set a trend and was quite right
about that because you can sit there and say, OK, well, sure, the Apple
product and the comparable products do basically the same thing. You can
send an email just as easily from a Mac as you can from a say a Windows
machine, but it just feels so much nicer. It feels so much more
inspiring. It feels so much more creative to do that kind of task from
the Macintosh, at least for many people. Absolutely. And so tapping into
that is, I think, really important, something we go for with Muse, which
is we feel like, OK, sitting down to think deeply about a problem, look
up all the prior art, reference the source materials, pour through it
all, recombine it in a way that helps you find your own understanding
and meaning. That is really hard work and people often don’t want to do
it even when it seems like it would be valuable. They think, well, let
me just take the shortcut, let me just make a snap decision. Uh, but if
we make it really fun and enjoyable and feels really nice to go in and
use over something, well, hopefully you’ll want to do it more. I’d
love to hear if you have examples of tools or products you use that have
this aspirational quality or this inspirational quality in terms of
helping you be more productive, creative, make you want to do the thing
that it is designed to help you with more.
00:25:58 - Speaker 1: I think there’s so many different categories of
this. One is a great pair of running shoes, uh, will help me run more or
like I order now during the kind of lockdown we had in Singapore. I
ordered lots of workout clothes and I started working out as much as
I’ve ever done. Like I, I that’s, I just did it a lot and I think a
lot of it is because I felt great wearing my workout clothes and I often
wore them every day all the time anyway, because that’s the most
convenient and comfortable clothes. But I think that is a great example
of how things can just random things can actually.
Inspire you to do things and and and run further and and run more often,
even if that is a bit of an obstacle as well.
And another example is, so Andreas and I, my partner, we have been
moving around a lot and when we left San Francisco in 2014, we, we sold
everything and we hated stuff that you had at home. We were like, we’re
never going to buy stuff to our home, right? Because we’re gonna live
in two suitcases and that’s it. And we did that for a couple of years,
but then now we’re slowly building up a home again and we were like,
we’re not gonna buy something just because it looks good, like who
would do that? We don’t want to have stuff that don’t have a meaning
or don’t feel a purpose in our home. So we have a lot of functional
things. But then we kind of started like, oh, but maybe we buy this
whatever nice little, uh, I can make my cold brew and it’s actually
this Japanese cold brew thing, and it’s actually really nice. And it
doesn’t really have much purpose in my life, but I’m, I’m happy and I
get good coffee and now we’re just slowly filling up our lives with
lots and lots of nice stuff that makes us happy. So we kind of go. 180
on that one.
00:27:26 - Speaker 2: Very much with you on that. I’m uh I don’t like
stuff. I don’t like clutter. I’ve moved a lot. I moved multiple times
in one, you know, most recently across continents, but other times in my
life, for example, going from Los Angeles to San Francisco where my
Living quarters were going to be a tiny fraction of the size and I
basically had to get rid of everything.
And yeah, every time I’m thinking, why do I have all this stuff? Why do
we need this? It takes up space. It’s um and that’s uh I think this is
the moment we have to do the obligatory Marie Kondo reference here,
right, things that spark joy, it kind of sounds like that’s the
direction you’re going with the, with the coffee.
Maker there and I feel that as well, even though I don’t, I don’t like
stuff that I don’t use or doesn’t really serve a serve a great purpose
for me, but the things that I rely on every day, whether it’s something
like, yeah, the right tools in the kitchen that I use to make healthy
food, obviously my software products, or, or even something like say my
bike.
I got into cycling as a primary means of transit once I moved to the
city where it’s such a nice place to ride, and it took me a while to
find a bike that I really liked. But once I did, it’s just, yeah, it’s
this, it’s this um virtuous cycle of I want to write it because I like
it. And then when I write it, that it helps me be sort of better at
cycling and, and then the other, the two kind of reinforce each other.
And um, yeah, that’s uh that’s always a great feeling for objects in
your particularly physical objects, at least software can be kind of
mostly out of the way. It’s just a square on your home screen or some
bits on your hard drive, the physical. Objects, I feel very sensitive to
that kind of clutter.
00:29:01 - Speaker 1: But we had, I mean, as Zoom did it just works,
right? And I think that’s their tagline, it just works better and we
had an interaction with the new school our kids are going to and of
course, as a school, kind of, of course, but they were having Microsoft
Teams and I was gonna download Microsoft Teams and I was like, I told
Andreas before they called, no worries. I would download it. I, I mean,
you know, I’m kind of ahead of time. I, I prepared myself, and then the
call starts and they were like another 8 steps and, and Andreas, he was
like freaking out, he’s like, oh, we need to change school. What are we
doing here? And there was just such pain. It was just so painful and
why, right? And, and that’s just a good, I guess software example.
00:29:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, obviously being tech industry people
were probably much more sensitive to good software and good tools, but I
think it would be hilarious if you submitted a resignation or, you know,
we’re moving our kids to a different school because I’m sorry, you use
Microsoft Teams. I think all we’re a slash family.
Yeah, exactly. So another place where you’ve been helping us out here,
Lisa and I thought it’d be interesting to talk here, especially because
it’s timely is launches. So I think when, when I first, uh, or when,
when I first brought up this topic with you, I basically led with, well,
here’s some things we’re thinking about doing for a launch, but I
think I started with even should we do a launch, the launches even make
sense in this time period? And uh yeah, I’d love to love to hear your
take on all that.
00:30:21 - Speaker 1: I think there’s so many, it’s it’s a super
interesting question, and there are so many opinions about this because
when you build a product, of course, you want to kind of slowly make
Tends to like slowly on board users and then iterate and and don’t have
this kind of big boom launch and and when you do those kind of things
that often go wrong.
So I think there are lots of reasons to not have this big launch, but I
think what you guys are doing, you’ve been having a beta for a while,
you have now, you know, started adding more users and being more out
there. So I think it makes perfect sense to actually use the launch as
an opportunity to announce it to the world, especially if you look at
The news media and journalists, they need of a why is this news? What’s
the news and why is this relevant and why now? And if you have, if you
say, well, now is, now is the time when we announce this, this is, you
know, this is our launch and announcement that is making it timely and
relevant for journalists to actually write about it because it is news
and that you are revealing a new product to the world, even though it
has been seen by a few handful of people.
Well, you may think that you have already told everyone about this and
you, you’re so tired of telling the story. It’s just so few people,
right, that have heard it and the rest are still waiting and I have no
idea what this is and we’ll read it for the first time when you
actually do your launch.
00:31:34 - Speaker 2: That was a lesson I learned from a little bit, I
got a little bit of exposure to this fellow Mark Benioff of Salesforce
when I was part of that organization for a little while, of course.
Absolutely brilliant marketer in some ways maybe has a lot of the
qualities that I shy away from personally being a more product and
engineering minded person that I care about, you know, this kind of
authenticity and down to earth and sort of no, no bull approach to
explaining things and, and talking about things at the same time, just
incredible skills there.
And one of the things that he really embraced was you launch things over
and over again. Because a launch is just when someone new is learning
about it, some new audience is learning about it. There’s a lot of the
world is very big. The internet is very big, and it’s when you’re,
you’re going beyond your existing audience to a new, to a new audience.
And I think that’s, that’s how we’re thinking about this upcoming
launch.
00:32:26 - Speaker 1: No, and people also forget. If you hear about it
once, people might think, oh, that sounds interesting, and then it’s
gone.
But then if you repeat the message, and that’s why traditional
advertising will hate. Because you tend to you repeat the message and
that’s when it actually sticks there.
So when you go to the grocery store, you pick that is, you know, washing
detergents instead of the other. And so I think like repeating yourself,
it feels really annoying, but it actually it works and it can be helpful
for people because they heard about it somewhere or they read about it
and then wait wait, what was that again? And then they can’t remember.
And then when they get reminded, oh, yeah, that’s right, then they
might start doing their own research about it.
00:33:02 - Speaker 2: I like the old Paul Graham quote, people don’t
notice when you’re there, they notice when you’re still there.
00:33:08 - Speaker 3: It’s a good one. I also think that for an early
stage company, there’s something to the successive levels of publicness
that you’re releasing into. So first you tell some friends, you’re
starting a company, and then you have an alpha product and you have a
beta product, and then you release it, and different people want to kind
of jump on the train at different points. And so you announce each stop.
We’ve had people who said, you know, you sounds awesome, but I don’t
have time for like weird beta stuff. Just let me know when it’s ready.
And so when we launch, they’ll know, OK, it’s ready for that.
00:33:33 - Speaker 1: I learned this when I was, uh, my first job was as
a theater producer, which is super fun.
But I was 18 and like part of the producer’s job is to do PR and and
get people to buy the tickets for the show. And I remember we had, I did
lots of PR announcements. I don’t know, but I just had that every month
we had some kind of news like, you know, these are the actors or this is
what we’re gonna do.
And now we’ve done, we’re done with the clothes, come look at them,
whatever. We just made up a lot of news. And what happened was first the
local press started writing about it, and then after a while, after my
5th or 6th announcement, whatever, the TV called me and they said, well,
they’ve been writing about you so much. You must be on to something.
Can we come out and do a like a interview with You guys, and I was like,
sure, you’re welcome. So then by just getting that niche local media
first, and they wrote about it again and again and again, the bigger
sharks read, you know, they eat the small fish, right? They read the
smaller sharks to try to stay up on what’s going on and what’s
happening. So while I didn’t really target the TV channel, they kept
seeing those that the news in the local media and that’s why and how we
got the big attention eventually, which that was just me being like new
and lucky and naive and just doing this shit because I was stressed.
00:34:36 - Speaker 2: I think it counts for a lot in any business,
right? Yeah, I think, um, I keep hearing about this is one of the best
phrases to it’s not just you’re there and you’re still there. It’s
something about I keep hearing about this. What, what is this? I need to
look into it. I want to give it some of my attention because of that,
yeah, repetition.
00:34:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you were, if you or kind of the PR
people are the only ones nagging a journalist about something, they
would never find it interesting. But when they start reading or hearing
about it from different sources, that’s when they, wait a minute, I
need to look into it. So, so that’s why if you cannot target lots of
different things, then eventually the big fish will find you interesting
as well.
00:35:11 - Speaker 3: We’ve alluded to it here, but I think it’s
important to note that we’re somewhat disconnecting the product changes
from the messaging and marketing that’s going out. There needs to be
some coupling, of course, and you want some of that, but also they, they
don’t need to be super hard coupled together so that the same day you
launch on TechCrunch, you’re letting your first user sign up, right?
Right. There’s some apps where you need to do that like maybe consumer
apps or something, but mostly you want to have more control over these
axes independently.
00:35:33 - Speaker 1: No, I think you definitely need to separate. To,
because it’s simply too risky to onboard lots of new users, um, and you
don’t really know how things will behave.
You also want to have the freedom of iterate and and keep releasing new
features and new ways of working, so you can’t be too, you can’t have
the message too kind of literal, if that makes sense. Like it can’t be
too descriptive of what the product actually does or describing all
these features because those features you want to keep changing or
iterating and the overall message needs to be repeated and repeated and
repeated.
When we worked with consumer apps, we had like these video. And then we
did them, but then two weeks later they were outdated. I think you have
a lot of videos, but you show very specific features in those videos and
they’re extremely helpful. But if you kind of have telling the entire
story with a lot of screenshots, it doesn’t make any sense because in a
couple of months, you have to redo it.
00:36:20 - Speaker 3: Maybe the most extreme version of this is just to
schedule a release, you know, for the same day every year, um, which is
what, of course, they did at Salesforce. And I just, when that day
happens, like, whatever you have, that’s what you launch. It actually
works really well. As an engineering manager, I like that a lot because
I think it’s best to limit. and that scope and so a calendar based
marketing release does that for you.
00:36:37 - Speaker 2: This is Dreamforce you’re talking about their big
convention and they basically tries to figure out what what are you
going to have for Dreamforce it’s sort of the internal function of the
company. Exactly.
00:36:46 - Speaker 1: But Google is the same, right? They always have a
couple of news around Google I and a lot of these tech companies have
actually copied that part, and it’s probably because it works and and
people can have and then the press starting to get excited and and they
know it’s coming they can plan it in the editorial planning, so they
have space for it.
00:37:02 - Speaker 2: There’s some. Energy inside the team.
I’m a big fan of continuous delivery to the point that I spent quite a
lot of my life, uh, building a product to make that easier and sort of
iteratively letting stuff out and not doing the big bang release and
what have you.
But on the perspective of getting folks excited both externally,
potential customers and so on, but also internally on the team, there’s
something very powerful about rolling stuff up and do a big release.
I’m reminded of a classic post from uh Mark Shuttleworth, uh, the
Ubuntu Linux project.
And they had a, uh, they very famously brought in a 6 or famous to me.
Maybe that reflects my interest in, but Uh, they brought in a 6 month
release cycle where they would do a new release every 6 months and just
if your stuff’s ready to go into the release, it does, and otherwise
it’ll wait for the next one.
And this was in contrast, you know, they were building on the Debian
Linux project and Debian was famous for we release it when we’re ready,
but that meant that their stuff was always felt pretty behind and out of
date and they would go years between sort of major revs to the, to the
system. And that was a bit of a problem in the fast moving technology
world and creating this rhythm. We try to get stuff in, but don’t worry
if you don’t make it. Hey, there’s another one coming up in 6 months,
was a really powerful thing for them internally as well as the external
factor of explaining it to the world or sharing it with the world.
00:38:21 - Speaker 1: I got to know this behavior quite a lot when we
were at RAP at a previous startup, we worked with the biggest, some of
the biggest retailers in the US and in other places and I worked then
closely to their market. social media teams and retail, they have their
retail calendar and they have a holiday or there’s something going on
always.
It’s back to school. It’s Halloween, it’s Thanksgiving, Christmas,
New Year, you know, starting of a new year, and I got crazy. I was like,
oh my gosh, there’s so much going on.
But then for them, that was how they planned everything. And that was a
reason for the customers to get in back into the store.
Oh, yeah, school is starting, so I need a pair of new pants and.
Halloween is here, so I need whatever outfit and then there is always a
reason to have a sale around a specific theme, but that retail calendar
if you want to have like plan your marketing around calendar, that’s
that’s somewhere to look because it’s fascinating. Maybe wouldn’t
choose to do it myself, but just learning that and see how they were
working with this calendar it was absolutely fascinating.
00:39:20 - Speaker 2: It taps into something that you hear in sales kind
of skill development, which is you need to create urgency. There’s a
reason not just buy generally. To buy right now and creating events for
things like, yeah, you generally need new clothes in life, but do you
need it now or do you need it in 3 months or do you need it next year?
Creating an event is a reason whether it’s a sale, whether it’s a
calendar holiday or something like that.
Now, for me personally, a lot of what happens in the retail world around
that kind of stuff is that’s where maybe I would almost say that’s the
inauthentic parts of marketing and the parts that feel maybe
manipulative is too strong, but this thing of there’s Always a sale.
It’s always this made up reason why you need to buy right now, and
it’s gonna expire in 2 days. And I’ve seen that creep a little bit
into the software world as well, and it always kind of icks me out a
little bit. And I understand that it works and people, you know, they
have businesses and they need to sell their products so they can put
food on their table at home. Fair enough. But that’s something that is
a part of the sales and marketing world that I’m a little less fond of.
00:40:21 - Speaker 1: So we won’t see any Halloween specials coming up,
bad news.
00:40:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, but then maybe on the flip side, you know,
I, I have ended up buying, I think I remember, um, 23andMe many years
ago, they did like a DNA Day special where they sold sold the thing for
much less, and it seemed like a good reason. Oh DNA Day and that that
connects to my values, right? Like it’s a holiday celebrating an
important breakthrough in science. Um, and so yeah, that totally worked
on me. So, you know, I kind of understand where that, where that comes
from. I don’t know, maybe there’s, yeah, if, if someday there’s a,
there’s a holiday that somehow connects to thoughtfulness and deep
work.
00:40:56 - Speaker 1: I think it’s a really hard balance and I agree
with you, and I, I kind of hate it, but it kind of works, but I also
don’t, I don’t really prefer doing marketing that way.
But then sometimes there has to be a reason where the why now is
actually pretty big. Why can’t I wait until tomorrow? And I think if
it’s something that is very the messaging focusing on why this product
makes you better or a better person, a better creator, then I think that
is a really strong why now.
Because I want to be a better creator today. I don’t want to wait until
tomorrow, but I think the fundamentals are still similar, even if you
don’t have Halloween, but you, you, you have something else that makes
it relevant and a little bit urgent to actually download it or try it
out now.
00:41:33 - Speaker 2: I like that coming back to your earlier example of
the running shoes, you buy the running shoes because you want to run
more. You want to be more fit, you want to do this thing that you know
brings you both. Faction and health in your life. Maybe there’s an
angle like that from M. Muse is sort of the running shoes equivalent for
being thoughtful, for decision making, for being creative, for being
productive. And so the urgency is more, I want, I want to start
investing in myself, in my mind and my creative output today.
00:42:00 - Speaker 1: I definitely think so and I think you’ve been
pondering that a little bit with a thinking tool and help you think and
help you like this modern. better and I think also, yeah, just working,
you know, working the creative sides of the mind is, I don’t have any
tools for that. So like that sounds awesome. I, I know how to work, you
know, I can, I can do some math. I can do some writing. I can read a
book, but working that creative side is trickier. It’s harder.
00:42:24 - Speaker 2: Well, it sounds to me like we’ve got the muse
marketing and positioning all figured out. It’s running shoes for your
mind. 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’d love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes.
Lisa, thanks for coming on to talk with us here for being such a great
advisor as we navigate this, how to explain what we’re doing here to
the world and of course for otherwise supporting us on our journey.
00:42:55 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me.
0 min
January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think the process is just inherently much
messier than that, and you need to let go a little bit and say the tool
is going to help you make this stew, and then you’ll sleep on it for a
few days and then somewhere else, something new will pop out. Hello and
welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is 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.
I’m Mark McGranaghan, and I’m here today with my colleague Adam
Wiggins. How’s it going, Adam?
00:00:30 - Speaker 2: I’m pretty good, Mark. I just got back from a
short trip up to the Baltic Sea, which is a pretty easy train ride from
where I live in Berlin.
This is the first real trip I’ve taken since, I guess, pandemic
started, so about 667 months. And it was really refreshing, even though
it was just a couple of days, and I was reminded of something you said
when we, I think it was in our very 2nd episode of the podcast about
having good ideas, which is how fresh surroundings refresh your brain
creatively. And yeah, I had that there and it was really, was really
that came to mind because I was really reminded of how much I, I missed
that in this time where travel is not a part of our lives the way it
used to be.
00:01:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m always surprised by how powerful that
effect is. So today our topic is tools for thought. Now Adam, what does
that mean for you?
00:01:21 - Speaker 2: Well, Tools for Though means a lot of things to
me, but I think the first place my head goes to is Howard Rheingold’s
classic book from, I think it was the 80s, where he details Xerox PARC
and many of these visionary folks who are thinking about computing in
its early days and what that could do for humans and our creative and
productive lives.
But I actually stepped back even a little bit from there because the
original tools for thought, I feel like are anything that lets you
externalize your thoughts. And so pen and paper, you know, writing,
language, uh, is the starting place there, the printing press maybe. Uh,
but more in modern times, things like sketchbooks or I don’t know, in a
startup office, you’ve got whiteboards in a school, you’ve got
chalkboards, Post-it notes are a great tool for thought, in fact,
because you can write down these little snippets of information and move
them around maybe in a physical space with colleagues.
Um, there’s even something like, I remember at a team summit we had a
few years back, might have even been there in the park in Seattle, you
wanted to illustrate a point and ended up grabbing a stick and basically
drawing a very simple diagram in the dirt, right? So anything that lets
you really either make visual or somehow externalize what’s in your
mind, I think is, is a type of tool for thought.
And that also includes, I think the cult of the consumption side, which
is Um, what I usually call active reading. So a book and a highlighter
together, I think is, is a type of tool for thought. The act of
highlighting passages that you find impactful or relevant to what
you’re trying to learn about makes this learning, this reading process
into an active process and a learning one, and that, that becomes a tool
for thought as well.
00:03:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I’m sure we’ll dive into a lot of
different kind of specific instantiations of tools for thought. But
another way to think about this is, what is the problem you’re trying
to solve here? Two possibilities, one would be, you’re trying to obtain
the knowledge that has already been generated by someone else. You’re
trying to learn some facts, memorize some figures, maybe uh retain some
ideas and different tools for thought can help you with that. Another
angle would be, you’re trying to generate new ideas, novel thoughts,
and uh a tool might help you accomplish that as well. And I think
actually which one you’re trying to do is quite important for which
tool you choose.
00:03:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, another reference I was looking up in prep
for this episode was Andy Matzek’s work, and he’s got a piece called
How Do We Develop Transformative Tools for Thought, and his work, his
current research track is more on that learning, retaining side of
things, these mnemonic devices and so on.
This is a nice article. I’ll I’ll link it to the show notes because he
does on the later part of the article, he describes a lot of this
history, particularly around the computing tools for thought, Steve Jobs
and the bicycle for the Mind. Uh, he talks about that he thinks, quoting
Alan Kay, who’s who’s one of the sort of big visionaries in this
world, uh, as saying that actually medium for thought in some cases
might be a better, better term, but for whatever reason, the, uh, the
tools for thought seems to be the, the label that that stock.
So Andy’s work, I think it’s a good example of the how do you how do
you get more out of what you’re trying to learn about and then there’s
the having ideas or generating new thoughts or generating original
ideas, which is obviously the space Muse is trying to plan or at least
we’re trying to create a tool that can help the the end user to have
better ideas to develop their ideas.
So yeah, coming back to the digital space, the Tools for Thought book
spends time on, for example, the Xerox PARC lab that invented a lot of
the modern GUI operating system and other things that we, we sort of
take for granted in the modern computing world. There’s also folks like
Doug Engelbart and his vision to augment human intellect. There’s
people like Alan Kay who invented small talk and object-oriented
programming, had this vision for a thing called a DynaBook that I guess
you could say physically looked a lot like an iPad looks today, but was
more focused on the creative and productive uses of computing. And
there’s even stuff like, uh, or folks like Vever Bush, who wrote an
essay that people still quote today from the 1940s about this thing
called a Memax or this vision he had for a thing called a Memex. And I
think one thing you get when people talk about these, uh, the Engelbarts
and caves and bushes. They’re often sort of lamenting a future that
maybe we were dreaming of in these times that then you look at today’s
computing and for all the really impressive technology that we have and
all the things that computers and software and the internet can do for
us, in some ways, we didn’t really fulfill some of the beautiful vision
that these folks had. In fact, I think some of those folks are even in
some ways a bit bitter, you know, towards the end of their careers when
they see all these startups and whatever, putting all this money into
these shiny products that in fact are more kind of entertainment boxes
rather than something designed to really elevate the human race.
00:06:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and Andy makes a point in his article that
there are good economic reasons why that’s the case or why we would
expect that to be the case. Um, essentially because new ideas and tools
for thought are sort of public good, so it’s hard to capture economic
value when you make innovations in that space. Um, but we still think
it’s possible, um, both to have new ideas here and to build a business
around it.
00:06:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I guess if we fast forward a little
bit from the Halcyon.
Days of these, these computing visionaries in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, a
little bit more to when personal computing became commonplace, maybe the
1990s, and I think what you see is when you, or at least when I think of
productivity software really broadly speaking, I tend to think of
authoring, what I usually call authoring applications. This is something
like you use Illustrator, if you’re a designer or you use Microsoft
Word, if you’re a writer, or use Excel if you’re a financial analyst.
These are really designed for an end artifact. You’re producing
something to be consumed by someone else. When you type into your word
processor, it’s because eventually you want to publish that book or
publish an article online. I think folks often do use these offering.
Tools for the thinking phase. If you’ve ever opened your word processor
or programmer, maybe use a text editor or something like that to sketch
down some ideas, not what the intention is that’s ever going to be
given to someone else, but to get your own, your own head together. Just
because that’s the tool, you know how to use, it’s right there, but
it’s not really designed for that. In fact, in a way, it’s it’s a
poor fit, you just happen to know about it. And I’ve seen some really
creative uses, uh, certainly on the, for people that like laying things
out visually and spatially kind of like we. We strive for with Muse.
We’ve seen, for example, um, we saw someone that did a master’s, did
all their master’s thesis research in illustrator, because they wanted
to lay out all these papers they were reading and the excerpts they were
taking from them and how they all connect together. They wanted on this
big spatial canvas. And it turns out that illustrator was the best
choice for that at that time. Maybe nowadays people do that with figA
somewhat, which I think is great, uh, that people are doing these
innovative uses. But that was part of what led to the impetus for us
wanting to build a tool for thought that was more something that’s
purpose built for enhancing the individual’s or even a group’s
thinking. Now in practice, because we’ve seen so few commercial tools
for thought, I wonder if that means that either people don’t value that
ideation step enough to want to invest in that. So that’s, you know,
monetarily, do they want to pay for software, but it’s also just taking
the time to learn a piece of software. Uh, or to put your data and your
thoughts into a piece of software when that’s not the end place it’s
going to be. Um, so I think that’s, that’s certainly a, you know, a
risk or an open question for Muse and really anyone else that’s working
on a Uh, on a tool for thought.
00:09:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think there’s a commercial piece there
where the obviously biggest market is when you’re close to the end
product that you’re producing for a business, and you’re producing a
presentation, you’re producing a book, there’s obvious economic value
that you want to attach to that and there’s a bunch bunch of people who
obviously need to do that.
00:09:28 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that’s most notable when you,
when you try to sell software to professionals, if you say one of the
best pitches you can offer is this will make you look really good to
your client. You will close more deals or you will impress your boss or
you will get that big, that big deal that you’re trying to do and so
presentation software or really good, you know, financial modeling or,
you know, the word processor, that’s, that’s the value there is, is
really clear to people. If you say this will make your ideas better or
make your decisions better for some reason that that’s a less poignant
sales pitch, I think.
00:10:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I keep coming back to this idea that
there’s an incomplete understanding of the creative process.
We’ve long advocated for this. 3-step process where you’re 1,
gathering raw materials, 2, actively reading, processing, ruminating,
brainstorming on those materials, and then 3, offering an end product.
I think a lot of people think of the creative process as 1 and 3,
because there’s obvious, you know, physical content that you’re
dealing with in each of those cases that you have to pull in some raw
materials like site in your paper, and you have to produce a paper at
the end to send to the publisher, but you can kind of get away without
doing the middle stuff without, you know, thinking. Um, or you can just
do it all in your head, but the premise with Muse is that there’s a
very powerful and important second step there that with the right
tooling support can give you even more power as a thinker.
00:10:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one place that Tools for Thought has come
back into the current conversation is the product Rome Research, who’s
been getting a lot of traction among people who I think like to think
deeply, particularly built around a daily journaling practice, which I
think is a really A good way to get your thoughts out in a free form
way. Uh, one of the things I remember them complaining about, if that’s
the right way to put it, is being trapped in this category of note
taking. Note taking is an interesting category because it seems to span
a lot of things. You’ve got a classic like Evernote. Which in theory
should be kind of a tool for thought. It’s supposed to be sort of a
second brain. You put stuff into it, you can find it later. But the
reality is it doesn’t necessarily help you find connections. I think it
sort of failed to deliver on that promise. It’s maybe more of a
knowledge base or knowledge store.
I use Dropbox for that, for example, and I think that’s true for a lot
of notes apps, things we’ve talked about here before, something like a
bear, for example. It’s a really nice way to quickly capture a thought,
you know, on your smartphone and then you have access to it later, but
it’s not really a place to do a lot of deep ideation. I don’t know,
maybe you sketched down a few, few thoughts you have in bullet point
form, but it’s not a good place for really freeform ideation and maybe
that’s a place where Rome is helping change.
Things a little bit.
Uh, I also see this tool for thought, uh, sometimes applied to some
other hot new products which include notion, which is more of a team
wiki team brain kind of thing, but I think it can fit with that as well.
FIMA, as previously mentioned, sometimes people use it as this kind of
visual canvas, even something like Air Table, which is a spreadsheet,
but often again, people use it in these team contexts to capture
knowledge, uh, and to basically find shared understanding on the team.
It’s not in. there’s no end artifact for the client. Uh, it’s more
internal to what the team’s own sense of understanding of problem
space.
00:12:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, now what’s interesting to me is why are
tools like this useful tools for thought.
I think some people would say it’s because for example, you can capture
and store all this information and you can form explicit links between
them and everything is organized and searchable, and I think there’s
something to that.
There’s certainly um value.
In that use case, but I believe that most of the creative work the mind
does, especially around generating new ideas, is not done in your
thinking mind. It’s basically not done consciously.
You have this massively parallel process running in your background,
including when you’re sleeping, that’s generating new ideas, forming,
forming new connections, and you basically can’t think your way, can’t
put 1 ft in front of the other to get to new ideas like that. You have
to just kind of let it go wild and hope, hope it comes up with
something.
And the way you feed that process is you ruminate over a lot of
interesting intellectual material.
So the reason I think these apps are useful for two of thought is
twofold. One is people like to use them. They just like to spend time
writing notes in Rome and kind of regardless of where those notes end up
or if you ever read them again, just the process of writing and thinking
as you’re writing. Generates a lot of fodder for this process in your,
in your sleeping mind. And number 2, increasingly these tools support
multimedia, and I, I’ve long said creative thinking never takes uh just
one medium, it’s never just text or just images and tools like Figma,
it’s very easy to make a canvas where you have images and text and
vector graphics and so on, all in one place. I think that’s important
because that’s again, naturally how the mind thinks creatively.
00:14:08 - Speaker 2: For sure. I’m a big believer in the, as you said,
feeding the sleeping mind problem, working on problems in the
background, stew, and yeah, this externalizing your thoughts in some
form is a way that helps you turn it over.
And that can be lots of different forms. It can be sketching, it can be
writing, voice memoing is another interesting trick, even just talking
to another person, right? This is where an open-ended chat, you know,
the classic water cooler talk or just taking a walk and talking with a
colleague, working through something that that helps see that that’s
doing that background process in the brain, and I agree. Whatever it is
should be enjoyable and comfortable. And so that means for uh something
like in one of these analog tools, I think the reason why sketchbooks
and mole skins and whatever have continued to have such a place in the
heart of creative people like me and many others is that they’re just
enjoyable. You grip a nice pen and the feeling that tactile feeling of
your, your hand. Moving across the page, I think whiteboards, the
whiteboard can have a similar feeling as well. And with digital tools
you need, you need the same thing. If it’s fun and enjoyable to open a
new notion page and assign it an emoji and drag in some media and type
out your text and then share it with a colleague for discussion, then
you’re going to want to do it. And then that in turn is a nice virtuous
cycle.
00:15:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is a podcast about tools for
thought, and I think it’s appropriate to, you know, keep it scoped, but
I would say the human creative process is so much bigger than tools,
things like uh the social element, you know, who you’re talking to and
who you’re motivated by, uh, the physicality element, the position of
your body, how it’s moving or not, the location element like we’re
talking about in Intro. These are all super important and I think it’s
easy for us as technologists to over rotate towards what’s on the
rectangular screen when there’s so much more to the creative process.
And again, it’s something we’ve tried to tap into with Muse so that for
example, you can use it while you’re reclining on your comfy couch or
you can use both your hands at the same time and use all the degrees of
freedom you have in your arms, things like that.
00:16:04 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Related to that, one thing I wanted to
ask you about. is whether you’ve read this book Thinking Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman.
Yep, classic. Yeah, I found myself thinking about that in this tools of
thought context. So just to briefly summarize for for those that are not
familiar, the author basically categorizes our ways of thinking in daily
life in these two creatively named System One and System 2 brains. Where
system one is more the, the fast thinking, the, the quick judgment, the,
the immediate reaction, and the system two brain is slower, more
analytical.
I especially like the system one brain’s main, the framing of the
system one brain’s main job is this assessing normality, they call it,
that is to say we have these built-in habits and assumptions about the
world’s worldview and this. Just this way that we expect things to be,
everything from how my furniture is arranged in my home to what the
political landscape is like in my nation. Our system one brains are
constantly taking stock of whether what they’re seeing fits into that
established pattern and essentially kind of raises a flag or raises.
Something into our attention when something breaks that pattern.
So that system one fast instinctive emotional brain, I think is pretty
natural to reach for in certainly in social settings, but especially in
information age, style, um, online gathering places, the social media
and so on, whereas the system too. is obviously what we’re most
interested in in our team and with the tool thought that we’re
building, which is the slower, more deliberate, more logical,
analytical, slower both in a literal time sense, but also in a sense of
more consideration and purposely breaking the habits that are already in
your mind. And trying to form new connections.
00:17:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s true, but I also think
there’s value in domesticating if you will, the system one mind. It’s
so powerful, but it’s also by default very wild and instinctual, but if
you know, give it the right care and feeding with uh the, the right
intellectual material. That you’re ruminating on to continue the animal
meta for here, um, it can be very powerful. And again, I think this is
especially true in your sleep, basically, where if you take in the right
materials, do the right active reading, and if you give that a few days,
you’ll often form interesting new connections and ideas.
00:18:26 - Speaker 2: For me, a go to technique is to literally sleep on
it. And in fact, I’ve even brought this up often enough on Teams
sometimes that people poke fun at me that my solution to any tough
problem is to go to sleep, but I really find that so many breakthrough
solutions or new ways of looking at something have occurred to me after
that stepping away and particularly the restorative power of, of sleep
and what happens to your mind at that time, and that obviously just
actually requires Time you can’t if you’re trying to turn around a
decision the same day, you can’t, you can’t sleep on it either
literally or figuratively and so trying to maybe arrange your creative
life or set things up in your work or other places where you want to
make good decisions and have good ideas to allow yourself this time.
I know on the Muse team we often like to do things in part or each of us
I’ve seen. likes to do things in parallel.
We may have a few different projects going on at a time that even maybe
you switch back and forth between a little bit. Sometimes that can be
lack of focus, which is, you know, a bad sign, but in some cases, I find
this is a really effective way to work on something for a while, maybe
get a little stuck or not be sure what the best path forward is, sort of
step away, switch my contacts for a few days or something, and when I
come back to it, I’m because in a way this background process has been
working on the problem the whole time.
00:19:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and then bringing it back to tools for
thought. I think it’s important then that the tools not try to draw too
straight of a line between ideas and steps.
Often I feel like tools are trying to, you know, you get the inputs in,
you form the right connections, and then somehow the tool will like lead
you to the right answer.
I think the process is just inherently much messier than that and you
need to let go a little bit and say, The tool is going to help you make
this stew and then you’ll sleep on it for a few days and then somewhere
else something new will pop out and you might not even be able to see
that straight line, right? and it might not be refied in the tool, but
you have to trust that that process is going to happen in your sleeping
mind.
00:20:19 - Speaker 2: Another area under tools for thought I was curious
to get your take on is the role of attention and focus, and I touched on
that with the System one brain and how it surfaces things to the to the
system 2. In the process of doing deep work and going deep on a problem.
We know it’s important to be able to focus on something deeply, but how
do you see that as interacting with a tool for thought like news or
these others we’ve talked about?
00:20:44 - Speaker 1: Well, now that you mentioned it, my half joking
answer is that perhaps the most powerful tool for thought that I have is
industrial strength noise canceling headphones, like the type you wear
when you’re using a chainsaw. It’s actually very helpful in in
slotting out the noise that I have here in the city.
00:20:58 - Speaker 2: On controlling noise in your environment. I think
it was one of our very first email updates from use that we linked to a
what I think of as a very useful tool in the Creative person’s toolkit,
which is a white noise generator. In this case, it was one for the, for
the iPhone, but I’ve used a web-based white noise generator that does,
you know, rainfall and fireplace crackling and whatever that I can put
into a pair of headphones, especially noise canceling headphones.
It can be really nice for particularly you’re in a noisy environment
like trying to work on a plane or a train or something like that,
because absolutely, it takes effort to keep your attention on something
and the more that your environment demands your attention, the more you,
the less effort you will have to spend on the thing you’re trying to
focus on.
That’s why I like quiet office, uh, physical. that’s conducive to to
doing work.
00:21:46 - Speaker 1: I think if there’s even the possibility that
you’ll be distracted or pulled back from your creative thought process,
it’s, it’s hard to get into it. I remember this when I was a full-time
programmer, even that I had a meeting on my calendar at like 3 p.m. made
it hard to do certain programming problems in the beginning of the day.
It’s because you knew at some point you were going to be in. and you
had to break your train of thought. I think there’s the same dynamic
happening if you know that that little red dot could come up or if you
could get a notification pop on your screen.
So one idea we’ve had with Muse is to really be respectful and giving the
creator control over if they’re ever going to have anything interrupt
their work and anything else appear on their screen.
00:22:20 - Speaker 2: The reason I brought it up was that I see this as,
I guess, coming back to this glorious vision for what computers could do
for people. Some decades back and where we are today, attention or
really a direct conflict between what you want out of call it
consumption technology.
So when it comes to your phone and your messaging apps and your social
media, precisely what you want is to feel connected.
You literally want to be interrupted. That is the feature, the feature
of it. You want to feel connected to what’s going on and you know about
the breaking news right away.
And when there’s some important message from from a thing that’s
happened with your team. Or a thing that’s happened in your family that
you’re going to find out, be connected to that, be able to turn around
and respond immediately.
And that’s well and good, but it is just in direct opposition to what
you want. If you want to sit down and get a really big chunk of
productive work done, or particularly bring your energy and attention to
bear on a problem that is maybe just past what you’re currently capable
of doing, whether that’s a new thing you’re trying to learn, whether
it’s because you’re an academic that’s trying to Develop a fresh idea
that’s pushing the boundaries of science, whether it’s you’re a
product creator or a startup person and you’re trying to You know,
figure out the strategy for your company or something like that. You’ve
got, you’ve got to really push yourself and you need every spare, or
you need every single cycle of your brain computing power you can get
and anything that draws your attention away or demands your attention
interferes with that, makes you slightly less able to go after solving
that problem.
00:23:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. I think a related idea on this. The
theme of headspace and how you’re feeling is the aesthetics of the tool
environment.
I think it’s really important that creators have control over the
aesthetics of their environment and can change it to their taste. I
think if we told an artist that you have to go into this studio, has to
be exactly the size, you can only paint the walls this one gray color,
you can only use this one paintbrush, you have these, you know, 4 colors
you can use. Uh, you can only paint in the style. It’d be like, what
are you talking about? We do that all the time with software. Your
environment has to look like this and, and by the way, it often looks
and it can, it can feel trivial just like to give us users this basic
agency over what they’re doing in their environment. But I think it’s
really important. One small example from you is we have these setting
panels type things and most apps, when you open the settings type panel,
you know, it goes in the upper left or it goes in the upper right, and
that’s that, and hopefully you’re OK with it if it’s covering some of
your content, well, too bad, but we had this idea that even for
something as simple as Settings panel, you should be able to put it
where you want to put it so that if you have something on the right hand
side of your screen that you’re working on, you can put the settings
panel left or vice versa. And just giving users basic agency over like
over their environment like that I think is really important.
00:25:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think one of our get switch research
pieces touched on the desire for creative types to nest, where basically
when you walk into the professor’s office, when you walk into the
designer’s studio, you tend to see an arrangement that reflects their
personality, their certainly the needs of their work.
But also as a kind of home, kind of a creative home, and I think that
connects not only to the utility of it, OK, I, I tend to use this one
tool, physical tool, so therefore it’s sitting in a place that’s easy
for me to reach my desk, but also just reflects this feeling of comfort,
safety, familiarity, and I think you’re able to do your best work and
be, be creative and productive and focus when you feel those things. And
it’s much harder to do it an unfamiliar. environment, a sterile
environment, one that, um, one that maybe isn’t adapted to your needs
in the same way.
Going back to Andy’s great article about tools for thought, he has a
section there where he talks a bit about sort of the machine learning AI
stuff. Now I guess GPT 3 is the new, the new buzzy item, and this is a
question I think I’ve run into quite frequently and when I talk about
what I’ve worked on, what I’m working on here at Muse, what I’ve done.
As well in the research lab, which is to kind of oversimplify the
response that often, you know, if I say I’m working on tools for
thought and kind of describe what that is, there’s a reaction that’s,
well, pretty soon AI is going to be here and do all our thinking for us,
so like what’s the point of that? And I don’t have a great answer to
that. Uh, I don’t believe that in my heart, but maybe that’s because
I’m incentivized not to believe it because I enjoy building tools for
people to think and create. So maybe I’m, I have a little bit of a
blind eye to it, but have you run into that question? If so, how do you
think about the role of, let’s say AI, however you want to define that
in tools for thinking and creativity?
00:26:49 - Speaker 1: Well, let’s say first that there are a lot of
interesting areas where AI is vastly superior, but people are still
really interested in learning.
So my favorite examples here are chess and go and other games like
that.
The computers now are insanely powerful. People still love learning
those games because there’s the intellectual challenge and the reward,
and I I actually think a really interesting frontier for tools of
thought is how do you leverage this amazing AI power to help people
learn these games faster in a programmatic way. So I can imagine
something in the style of Andy’s mnemonic medium, which is, in his
case, it’s using space repetition to help you stay at the frontier of
your knowledge, so you’re kind of when you’re on the brink of
forgetting or when it’s most important to learn a concept is when it
challenges you with a question. Um, I can imagine a similar thing um
applied to a domain like a game where instead of having Some linear and
predetermined set of lessons or problems, it plays you and says, OK,
these are your weaknesses, um, you need to do some exercises in these
three areas. I’m going to keep giving them to you until you master
them, and then we’ll move on to the next area and that can all be done
programmatically because these computers have a much better
understanding of the game than we ever will, even experts.
00:27:51 - Speaker 2: Chess actually makes me think of this book I read
a little while back by Garry Kasparov. I just looked it up. It’s called
Deep Thinking where Machine intelligence Ends and Human Creativity
Begins.
And famously, this guy is both the chess, one of the world famous sort
of um what’s the word for it, chess grandmaster or whatever, the the
highest ranked chess player in the world for, for a period of time.
But he was the one who was first, the first time that the best human at
chess in the world at the time was beaten by a computer, and many really
heralded that it was this huge, certainly PR win for the people that
were building these AI algorithms, but for a lot of people that it
really heralded the beginning of call robots taking our job or the AI is
going to be here or or what have you.
And he gets, it’s, it’s so interesting because on one hand, he just
reflects on the experience of that just being so, I’m not sure what the
word is for the, the, the, he walks through the experience of grappling
with this alien intelligence or this thing that plays the game in a way
that is so different from any how any human would.
Then he goes on to talk about how the game has changed in the years
since, which is now it’s just taken for granted that chess computers
are better than human players period.
But it didn’t necessarily lead to A generalized artificial intelligence
for now you just, it’s computers can be extremely good at playing chess
and that doesn’t really seem to lead to something beyond that.
You know, you can obviously go from there to, OK, now they can play go
and they can play StarCraft. Maybe that does eventually lead to
something general purpose. But the, but the point you mentioned that
made me think of the book was he talked about how the game has changed
in the form that really what it comes down to is humans and computers
collaborate. To play their best game.
They analyze, for example, the games of the players that they’re going
to go up against. So even if you’re not using a computer at the time of
playing the game, your game has changed substantially because you have
this computer, I don’t know what it is, assistant helping you in the,
the training, the analysis, the pre-game, the postgame, um, and so in
fact, we’re seeing that it’s not really that chess AI replaces human
chess playing, it’s more that it’s, it’s just morph.
00:29:57 - Speaker 1: The whole mor the whole sport, right, and I think
that points to the, the general future here. It’s, it’s not AIs taking
over all our jobs and our work it’s more of a symbiosis and
collaboration.
Perhaps the most obvious version of this is, uh, the AI is very good at
generating a bunch of plausible possibilities, especially one like GPT
3, you know, just spits out a bunch of texts and maybe 90% of them are
no better than plausible, like you read them closely, don’t really make
sense, but 1 out of 10, the human can say, ah, that’s actually quite
interesting. I’m going to pluck. That one for my business email or what
have you. Um, so I think we’ll see a whole wave of tools like that, but
otherwise I’ll believe that the takeover of AI when I see productivity
statistics, which of course we haven’t for some decades.
00:30:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think on the creative tools in tandem or
in symbiosis with a human generative design, I think is one area that’s
got some, some buzz on that, and that’s the basic idea that you can
feed a computer algorithm or or an AI of some kind.
A set of constraints for a problem you have, you know, you’re designing
a building and you want it to be this, hold this many people and have
these kinds of structural qualities and have these kinds of aesthetics
qualities.
And it essentially generates you a bunch of options and then you can
choose between them and kind of winnow winnow down this kind of
assistive tools often that has to do with more the called the brute
force, the ability to generate lots of options and lots of weird options
potentially. Uh, actually, one place that um I’ve used that thing, not
a, not AI but just an algorithm is in naming several different
companies, including Hiroku and Inc and Switch. I basically wrote little
programs that took some of our raw input that we brainstormed. And
combine them together in every feasible way. In the case of Inc and
Switch, we knew we wanted two words separated by an ampersand. We came
up with every word for each slot A and slot B that we wanted, and I just
wrote a program that spit out every single possible combination, and we
could go through them and look for what we liked best. That that that’s
pretty far from generative design, I suppose. But, but it fits into this
general assistive tools thing. And certainly one thing I, I hear from
folks a lot when they talk about this is, OK, we, we’ve come to accept
autocorrect in our writing.
00:31:58 - Speaker 1: Uh, what’s the autocorrect for though I feel like
autocrack is getting worse. It’s just like it’s going rogue. It says
underlining random words now.
00:32:04 - Speaker 2: I actually did an experiment some, I, I got it
irritated enough with autocorrect in terms of it’s great when it works,
but when it doesn’t, it’s way more effort to go back and correct or,
yeah, it’s way more, more effort to get what you want.
I did an experiment for a little while of just turning off autocorrect
on my phone.
Actually, you know what, I think I was about as fast. I was like slower
overall, uh, or slower on individual words that autocorrect would have
gotten, but if you took away the correcting for mistakes, uh, thing that
I so often had to do it, I think it came out as kind of a net wash, and
then also not being there was definitely an emotional win to not being
frustrated with the thing, uh, auto correcting a person’s name or
whatever for the 10th time.
00:32:46 - Speaker 1: Another potential angle on AI and tools for
thought is via social networks.
As much as I like tools and and software, it’s probably the case that
the most powerful technologies, if we will, that we have for thought are
the social networks and the institutions that we participate in.
The thoughts that we have are so influenced by our friends, our
colleagues who are talking to what we’re seeing, and of course, we’re
seeing a lot of that happening via social networks these days, and
there’s a lot of ways you can say that’s bad or troublesome, and
there’s certainly some work to do, but just something like YouTube or
Twitter, being able to help you find people in your area of interest. To
talk to and learn from is, is very powerful and I think there’s
actually a lot more we could do in that space that is using AI to build
robust social networks and in turn helps you have better thoughts.
00:33:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that also connects back to the creative
fodder idea, as we’ve said many times before, ideas don’t come from
nowhere. They’re they’re brickage of other ideas. Where does that come
from? Well, exposing yourself to as many different ideas as you can
through as many sources as you can. Something like Twitter, for example,
is just a really amazing place to do that. YouTube as well can be.
Now, I think it’s hard or even impossible to have your own ideas or
have original ideas if you’re constantly plugged in. Same thing is true
at a like a work or a team level, your company’s slack, your whatever
other formats you have for connecting with your colleagues, it’s really
powerful to be connected to that group mind. And be influenced to
bombarded by and influenced by all the ideas and opinions.
But in the end, if you want to have an original thought, I think you
need to disconnect from that a little bit. But to completely disconnect,
you’ll just won’t have that fodder.
But if you’re plugged in all the time, you’ll just never have an
original thought because you’re just being pushed to and fro by
everyone else’s ideas. And so there’s some pendulum swing of
connection to isolation, where you can connect for a while, get all that
fodder, disconnect a little bit, go a little deeper on your own ideas,
come back and reconnect.
So thinking about the future, we’ve already seen some exciting movement
in tools for thought, making it into production or commercial
environments with things like notion, Rome, Sigma, as well as great
research work like Andy’s work on mnemonic devices, or something like
Aki, the space repetition. Uh, system that’s, it’s kind of related to
that. What do you think the future holds, particularly given the, the
public goods problem you mentioned earlier of how this stuff gets
funded? Are we gonna enter a renaissance where we can maybe finally
reach the beautiful vision that these folks from the 60s and 70s, 80s
outlined? Do you think there’s a new direction where things will go?
Uh, is it going to continue to be hard to get tools of thought? Built in
today’s world.
00:35:27 - Speaker 1: The economics problem is going to remain hard but
not insurmountable, which I mean these things are inherently somewhat of
a public good. It’s hard to fund them slash capture the value when you
make great tools and I think that’s going to be the case for the
foreseeable future given the social technology that we have.
But that said, I feel like it’s still very doable to make a lot of
progress in these areas and it just takes a bit of, of will and vision
and perhaps The the willingness to forego maximum economic return for
yourself personally, but I feel like even small teams with today’s
technology can make a lot of progress and I think we’re seeing that.
And then I think in the substance of the tools, I think first of all,
we’re going to continue to see certain trends keep playing out. So one
is this trend of uh mixed media and multimedia in the same tool. I think
that’s very important, I think with tools like Notion and Sigma and
Rome, people are becoming more and more accustom. that and that’s going
to be baked in and we’re going to be less tolerant of tools that are
strictly for one medium. I think another trend that we’re continuing to
see is the improved aesthetics slash the consumerization of industrial
strength thinking tools, which again I think is great.
00:36:26 - Speaker 2: Needs to be fun, fast, a little playful. You could
argue that Moleskin, which is a, you know, just a sketchbook company,
but I definitely count them as a tool for thought. They’re more
expensive than but no better in a practical sense than a GP paper
notebook, but people like how they feel, they like how they look, and
that aesthetic element makes a difference for, I think you. Your ability
to do good creative work.
00:36:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and one other existing trend that I see
continuing and accelerating is leaning on video slash video games.
These are mediums that were hard to use or hard to produce content for
even 5 or 10 years ago, and now the technology is such that basically
anyone can make really high quality content in these areas and so we’re
seeing more more and more of that, YouTube being the predominant
example, but I think video and Slash the video game model will be
integrated more into Tools for Thought.
And then looking forward, OK, I think there’s a fairly obvious bet
about AI that we talked about. I think that one’s been played out a
fair amount on Twitter and so on. So I won’t go into that too much
here.
But if I had to pick one less obvious trend to bet on, it would be, but
if I had to pick one new trend to bet on, it would be leveraging
software to enhance these traditionally non-toolly aspects of the
creative process. So, the social side, the physicality side, things like
that. I think those are kind of two pretty different worlds
historically, um, but I see more tools, uh, bridging that gap and
leveraging the importance of those spaces for your creative process.
00:37:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, very interesting. What are some examples of
products or companies or um tools that you’ve seen that tap into this
community and people’s side of things.
00:38:00 - Speaker 1: So it’s often the case that gaming industry was
the leader here. So there are now these incredibly sophisticated
communities around individual video games where people follow creators
who they’re really interested in, and it started as just kind of watch
someone playing the video game, then they become these, these social
environments where there’s a kind of community around it, and then it
becomes a way to learn how to play the game. Like there’s a bunch of
tutorials and lessons and you learn from other people in the community
and you watch each other play and stuff. Like that, and that’s all
mediated by technology, um, because it’s, it’s otherwise very hard for
these people to find their community because there might be 1000 people
in the world who are really into this niche video game and who are
playing at a high level with the right tools and platforms between like
Twitch, YouTube, and the game itself, for example, and Discord, you can,
you can form a community.
00:38:44 - Speaker 2: And I’ll note that that includes not just playing
games.
But also like speed running or something like that, but also includes
creating the games.
Many indie game developers stream themselves, program the game designing
game on Twitch. People jump in and watch that and learn from them.
And there’s also, yeah, huge YouTube communities and channels and
things around just generally learning to program and learning all kinds
of technical skills.
Certainly I’ve learned things about video editing and things like that.
Through, through YouTube.
So this kind of watch a creator or producer use some sophisticated piece
of software to do some, do their creative process, maybe thinking out
loud as they do. That’s a really powerful way to share tacit knowledge
about how people do what they do.
00:39:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and then I think it’s like you’re saying,
it’s trickling down from games into more like professional environments
or tradecraft environments, things like you said, Photo editing, video
editing, or things like woodworking, there are now sophisticated
communities around that and online tools we can learn.
But then I think bringing it back to tools for thought, we’re starting
to see these, these communities and tools form around more like
intellectual topics and ideas.
So there’s, there’s a bit of a progress studies community developing,
for example, now we have podcasts and classes and Twitter. Cohorts and
some slacks and some discords and those feel pretty early, but it feels
like we’re bringing some of those patterns and sensibilities from the
gaming world and into these more intellectual domains.
00:40:12 - Speaker 2: Well, that comes back to that I think when we say
tools for thought, sometimes you talk about maybe for example
methodologies, how to work things like getting things done or inbox zero
or building a second brain or something like that. Um, so you’ve got
communities, you’ve got Software that you run, you’ve got analog
tools, you’ve got uh techniques and methodologies. So really this is, I
guess, a lot, a lot broader than just as you said earlier, what goes in
the rectangle.
00:40:40 - Speaker 1: And also I think technology is going to infuse all
these other areas and we’re going to have a sort of Technologies for
thought, if you will, um, both software per se, but also communities,
networks, methodologies, habits, institutions, Twitter threads, and so
on, all working together to help people develop better ideas.
00:40:59 - Speaker 2: Well, that makes me pretty excited for the future
of being a thinker and a creative person.
00:41:04 - Speaker 1: Well, with that, I think we can wrap it, and if
any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to
us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at musesApp.com by email. We love to
hear your comments and especially ideas for future episodes.
00:41:18 - Speaker 2: See you later, Mark.
00:41:19 - Speaker 1: See you, Adam.
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January 12, 2025
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Mark McGranaghan: Uh, so I, I imagine something like that
from you where you can pick, you know, your favorite black ink, your
favorite highlighter, your favorite accent pen, put them in your little
toolbox, and you have this small, very curated palette that you can
swipe in and out when you’re actively working on a document, and
you’re not confronted with like the Photoshop style 200 buttons, most
of, most of which you don’t know what they do.
00:00:33 - Adam Wiggins: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use the
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 Adam Wiggins and I’m
here today with my colleague, Mark McGranahan. How are you doing, Mark?
00:00:52 - Mark McGranaghan: Doing all right. You know, it’s uh
interesting times over here in Seattle with the virus, but otherwise
doing pretty well.
00:00:56 - Adam Wiggins: This is a good moment to be on an all remote
team, right?
00:00:59 - Mark McGranaghan: Indeed.
00:01:00 - Adam Wiggins: So the topic we wanted to talk a little bit
about today is tool switching.
And so this is the idea that if you take your stylus, your Apple pencil,
and you touch to the screen, what happens? You know, what color is it
inking? Is it erasing? Is it something else? What color is the ink? Is
it something else totally different, like a a lasso or a scissor tool?
And this is a a deeper topic than it might seem. Uh, because it comes to
some values that I think Muse has or that we try to fulfill some
principles, perhaps you could say in our design, including things about
modelessness and things about sort of on-screen Chrome. But it also
touches maybe on our journey from being a prototype in a research lab
through to a sort of an MVP of beta and hopefully on our way to a
publicly released, uh, commercial product that anyone can use.
00:01:51 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, it it’s been a really challenging
problem, much more so than I thought it would be coming in. Uh, one does
not simply ink on the iPad, it seems.
00:02:01 - Adam Wiggins: Indeed, yeah. And there’s a whole set of
technical challenges that maybe one of these days we can get Julia on
here to talk about would be great. Um, but yeah, maybe we can go back to
the beginning. Can you, can you frame up the problem for us a little
bit? What, what were we trying to accomplish? Uh, why, why not just sort
of have a toolbar at the top, you tap on the thing like you would in
Photoshop or any procreator or something to pick a tool and then off to
the races.
00:02:24 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, so as a reminder just mechanically
what we’re trying to do here is when you touch the uh Apple Stylist to
the screen, do you get ink, do you get Eraser, what type of ink are you
seeing, things like that.
And the very standard way to do this in iPad apps is you have a
persistent toolbar, often at the top of the screen or some other
palette, where if you want to erase, you tap the erase icon and if you
want to red ink, you tap the red ink icon. If you want to highlight, tap
the highlighter and so on. And that’s a sort of mode where that is
persistent until you go back to the toolbar and tap it again.
Uh, so there are two main problems with the standard approach. One is
that you have that toolbar in your face all the time, uh, which is a
pretty big deal on the iPad. It’s a relatively small sized device and
you want, uh, we want as much space as possible for your content and for
your work, and to not always be looking at like Chrome and toolbars and
buttons and other stuff that isn’t what you’re actually trying to
think about and do deep work on. So that’s kind of the the chromeless
goal. Uh, the other thing is modelessness. So a mode is um a property of
an interface whereby when you go to do some physical action, The result
depends on some hidden state of the app. So in this case, that that
mode, that state is like what um inking button you have pressed in your
palette toolbar or whatever. And the problem with that is that these
toolbars, they tend to be off to the side of the device away from where
you’re working, so you have to basically have your attention in two
different places. It’s you’re looking and thinking about your, your
work, the text that you’re highlighting, for example, but then you got
to remember constantly what’s the actual thing that I’m currently
working with. Uh, this is subtly different to, for example, if you have
a physical highlighter. So you have a physical highlighter and you’re
going to highlight like the highlighter is thicker, it’s bright yellow,
it’s very obvious what you’re doing because you’re looking at the,
your hand and your instrument and your work, which are all in the same
place. But again, that’s not the case with a typical toolbar. Um, and
so we wanted to try to find an interface that didn’t have this modeful
property that wasn’t moded like this, uh, as well as it didn’t have,
um, all this chrome in your face all the time.
00:04:33 - Adam Wiggins: And a great articulation of this uh modes
concept is in the Humane interface by Jeff Roskin. And he talks about
the, I think the really classic example there is the caps lock. This is
just confounded many, many generations of computer users where when caps
lock is on, different things happen when you press keys, specifically,
you get the upper case rather than the lower case. And of course, this
is really confounding for something like a password field where you
can’t even see that feedback immediately. But even in a uh another case
where you can see what you’re typing. You type a word or two and then
you realize everything’s upper case because the caps lock indicator
that being on or not, you either have to remember it, or you have to
kind of look down and see an LED or some kind of indicator, and you tend
not to do that because your attention isn’t there, your attention is on
what you’re writing as it should be.
00:05:23 - Mark McGranaghan: Yep, this also points to a third issue with
the standard moded interfaces, which is that you actually need to
physically do the action of moving your hand away from your work to the
toolbar and back again. And if you’re constantly switching between
inking and erasing or different types of inks, that actually becomes
quite troublesome.
00:05:41 - Adam Wiggins: So let’s go back in the story a little bit and
kind of Work through the product or design problem.
So we started from this place of let’s, let’s do the Raskin thing and
try to be modeless and also that we don’t want a bunch of junk on the
screen or we want as little stuff on screen as possible, be focused on
the user’s content, keep all the, keep all the space for your stuff and
not for the applications, uh, administrative debris. And so, uh, back
when we were working on this in a research context, which probably
explain what that means a little bit, but Uh, we set out with this set
of goals and, and how did we first approach that or what what were some
of the first things that we tried to see if we could fulfill these,
these goals while still letting you, of course, do lots of things with
the stylus.
00:06:23 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, well, so I don’t think we, we fully
knew what we were getting ourselves into.
Pretty early on we had these two goals. We don’t want to have any
Chrome and we want it to be modeless, but if you If you do both of those
things in any obvious way, you basically can only have one thing that
the stylist does. um, so for a while our solution was you can only do
black ink, that’s it, uh, which actually got us surprisingly far, um,
but then we need to try some other things and, and then we did a whole
uh litany of experiments.
We, we did try some standard toolbars and palettes. We tried to make
them as small and minimal and nonobtrusive as possible. Uh, we tried
using various uh quasi modes, which is a term that I want to introduce
here. So, uh, a standard mode is when You kind of do an action to
trigger the mode and then you go and do your work and then you go back
to the, the mode switcher to switch it again, whereas a quasi mode is
when there’s something that you’re basically holding down, it’s like
when you use the shift key or the command key or holding down some other
control button, you know, that sort of thing while you’re doing the
action with your other hand, basically.
00:07:28 - Adam Wiggins: Yeah, so going back to the capslock example,
Caps Lock and shift do the same thing. But the difference is that with
shift, you are not likely to forget you’re in the mode because you’re
physically holding the button down. And if you ever get confused about
how to leave the mode, you basically just release, stop doing things,
and you sort of go back to your default state, exactly.
00:07:47 - Mark McGranaghan: So, we, we tried all kinds of quasi modes,
uh, we, we didn’t necessarily have a keyboard, which is the obvious
place to invoke a quasi mode with some kind of control key, but I think
we tried, um, Using a physical keyboard, which you can sometimes get
with tablets. We tried pressing like the volume button on tablets, we
tried putting your thumb over the camera so that it registers a black
image. Um, we tried pressing on various special places on the screen
like press in the bottom left corner if you’re a right-handed anchor.
Um, so there was various experiments with quasi modes.
00:08:21 - Adam Wiggins: Also worth noting there that in many cases, so
Muse runs on the iPad, but In the context of the research lab, we were
building for a number of different tablet stylus platforms, including
the Microsoft Surface, Google’s ChromoS, and, um, I think we might have
even done something with Android at one point.
And so those actually platforms have different affordances or different
hardware capabilities. So notably the Surface, for example, has this
reversible stylus where the back is a quote eraser, which actually is
really nice because again, You know, you, you have that physical
reminder, just like your highlighter, um, example, you’re holding the
thing in your hand in a reverse position. That’s clear, you can see it,
you can feel it. And so you you flip the thing around to erase and flip
it back. Fortunately, the iPad doesn’t have that. Uh, yeah, other,
other platforms like ChromoS, for example, have a barrel button, all of
that has certain restrictions tied into the operating system. So, we
tried quite a lot of crazy stuff on this.
00:09:15 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, uh, we also tried some stuff just
using the stylist differently.
So one experiment that you had done was using the stylist to write
special symbols. You called them glyphs, and it was something like if
you draw an X then it’s cut or something like that and if you draw a
downward V then that’s paste. um, so we did that experiment.
Uh, we also tried. Um, using the stylus with different attitudes towards
the tablet.
So typically when you’re using a stylus, it’s like pretty vertical
with respect to the tablet, uh, but you can by holding a different way,
you can make it almost uh parallel with the tablet, sort of like you’re
doing a a pencil shading motion, uh, and there, there are sensors in
most devices to detect that altitude. Um, so we actually use that angle
to trigger different behaviors of the stylus.
00:10:06 - Adam Wiggins: Yeah, notably, that one was the one that we
kind of found most promising. I think we published maybe our Muse design
article included that as well as Yuli’s. Yuli gave a talk at a
conference last year with that approach where basically when you would
hold the stylus overhand, it would allow you to move cards. Uh, or
resize them, but when you held it in the, uh, more the, the standard
writing grip, that would give you ink. And I, I really loved that. It
worked really well, uh, in a lot of ways. It was very intuitive and, uh,
you know, different grips is something that comes naturally to humans
and it was pretty hard to get confused between them.
But ultimately actually that one was. Killed by a technical challenge,
which was the iPad, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other platforms have
the same problem. I suspect it’s a hardware thing, but as you get close
to the edge of the screen, for us, it was, I don’t know, 50 to 80
pixels, which maybe is, I don’t know, yeah, a couple centimeters. Uh,
it would basically start to produce bad values.
We did a bunch of digging on this and filed some bugs and some other
things, but ultimately and and saw that this is just behavior that’s
systemwide, but I think no one else ran into it because who the hell
cares about the exact, uh, you know, why is it critical to hold the
pencil at a certain altitude when you’re near the edge of the screen?
Even like typically the only apps that really make use of this data are
art kind of art drawing apps, Procreate or. by 53 or something like
that, and you can see when you use them, if you move towards the edge,
you lose that that sensitivity or the data gets bad about the position
of the stylist, but it doesn’t really matter because it just changes
fairly subtly what’s happening with the brush. But for us, the
difference between moving a card, which could even have the effect of
deleting it if you flick it off the screen and inking is huge. And so
that ended up being a To a total non-workable thing for us, and we had
to step back from it.
So where did we land? So, so we went through this whole process of
trying different things on different platforms, again in the research
context, and then later, once we had kind of resolved onto the iPad as a
platform and the prototype of what would eventually become a spin out
product of Muse, by the time we went, went to make this transition from
the lab to A commercial product we had actually settled on this, uh,
position of the stylus as the solution, but then I think it was the
early MVP and the early beta testing with with real users, not the
initial usability tests. I think those, you know, if you got someone and
to just try the thing for 20 minutes and and taught them how to use this
different grip, that worked fine. It was more in practice over longer
use in the real world where the edge of the screen problem became. Uh,
basically a show stopper. And so now we’re in this mindset of, OK, we
need to make this more reliable for real world use and we, we had to
make the transition.
So what did we eventually do on that?
00:12:55 - Mark McGranaghan: So we ended up with two mechanisms. Uh, the
first is for erasing. If you press on the screen with your non-writing
hand, say your left hand, while writing with the stylist in your right
hand, that will actually do an erase. So while you, while a finger is
pressed down on the screen, You have a quasi mode to do a race with a
stylus, and then when you let go of your, of your finger, then the
stylus goes back to inking.
And then for selecting which ink you use, currently we have three
options, a standard black ink, a sort of accent, purple ink, and a
highlighter in yellow.
Uh, we have this uh flow where you can drag from any edge of the iPad
screen. With the stylus, and when you drag out from the edge, it reveals
a small subtle um ink palette where you have those three options, and
then you can select among those inks like a standard ink toolbar.
Uh, and then optionally you can swipe back from that toolbar back to the
edge of the screen and hide it again.
So this is basically the best, uh, set of compromises that we can come
up.
We really like the quasi mode or you’re fairly limited on the iPad with
much hardware options you have.
Uh, so for now we’re just using the one finger down and that works
quite well for racing, but that only gives you one, you know, degree of
freedom. And so for the other inks, we have this, this toolbar that you
can slide out, and it is still a mode, but you have the option, but not
the obligation to kind of see what mode you’re in by uh swiping the
toolbar out. And if you want to just, you know, go into pure note taking
mode or pure highlighting mode, you can just hide the toolbar and you
have 100% of your content again. And there are also other subtle
benefits to this approach. So like, for example, you can bring out the
toolbar wherever you want. So if you’re making a note in the bottom
right hand corner of your document, you can just swipe out the toolbar
there, pick whatever ink you need and hide it again. Right?
00:14:49 - Adam Wiggins: And I think this is a great example of the, I
guess, rectifying the big ideas or the dreams or the just fulfilling
these principles which create constraints in trying to make something
interesting, special, unique, solves a problem in a way that hasn’t
been solved before.
But then you need to rectify that against the real world.
And in some cases, even though we set out to make a fully modeless
interface, the color of your ink or the type of ink is in fact a mode.
Uh, but I think maybe that one feels a little less dramatic, or a little
less problematic by comparison to the The much um more diverse modes
that you have in like a Photoshop, for example, where the difference
between a selection tool and the fill tool is huge. And so you’re gonna
maybe, you know, in that case on the desktop, uh, program, you’re gonna
click on the screen somewhere and something’s going to happen, and it
could be completely fill the screen with a color when you’re expecting
to do some selection, and that’s extremely surprising and disorienting.
With ink colors and ink types, OK, getting the wrong color ink is not
desirable, and you go, OK, I’m gonna undo that, go back and and switch
to the ink I want. But it’s all making a mark on the page. So the level
of surprise and confusion the user feels, uh, if they don’t get what
they’re expecting, I think is far more minimal compared to the classic
full fledged toolbar.
00:16:08 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, and this actually reminds me of a
subtle reason why modes are more viable on the desktop than tablet,
which is on desktops, when you switch in a mode in the app like
Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, it usually changes the cursor. So if you go
into a fill mode on a photo editing program, it probably gives you like
a bucket with paint flowing out or something like that. Uh, where
obviously you don’t have a cursor on a tablet. So that’s another
reason why you have to think more carefully and more creatively on
tablets about modes.
00:16:35 - Adam Wiggins: And that comes back to that where your
attention is, your locus of attention, which is you’re looking at your
cursor because that’s where you’re about to do whatever you’re
doing.
And so if that’s in the shape of a particular tool, obviously it’s not
as nice as the holding the big yellow highlighter versus holding the
pair of scissors, but it, it achieves some of that purpose.
Now, maybe we could talk a little bit about that kind of path from uh
prototype to early product to maybe production product. Um, which might
beg some more fundamental questions of why were we trying all these
weird things? Uh, why, you know, why, why didn’t we just sort of go
with the status quo? If we wanted to make an app that is good for
collecting together research and pulling together some excerpts and
making a few notes, there are some very well established human interface
guidelines from Apple and just general UI, um, paradigms that exist both
in the desktop world and, uh, increasingly in the sort of the
touchscreen world.
And we could just, I guess, like any other app maker, make an app based
on those standard paradigms and just put it through the the channel of
what what our users want to accomplish. Uh, what, why weren’t we doing
that here?
00:17:47 - Mark McGranaghan: Well, we, we have a very specific vision
for how these tablet creative apps should look and feel, and we can go
into what that is. Uh, as for why we haven’t just copied other tablet
apps, I, I think there actually hasn’t been. A ton of original thought
on tablet interfaces. Most tablet interfaces that I see are actually
transliterated from either the desktop or the phone. Uh, especially see
this with, um, like casual apps. They’re usually transliterated from
the phone, by which I mean the app just kind of assumes you have a big
phone and you’re still using it with like one finger at a time, for
example, on one hand, uh, which we think is totally not, you know, the
right way to think about tablets, or for creative apps, often they’re
transliterated from there. The desktop cousins and you get things like,
you know, toolbars which don’t necessarily make the same amount of
sense on a tablet.
We think that the tablet interface is unique because it, it feels very
natural to do a certain type of work, work where you’re reaching in
with both of your hands like directly into the content and manipulating
it.
So certainly things like inking but also things like, you know,
arranging content um very directly on an interface. And so a lot of what
we try to do with our interface design is make something that’s that’s
true to that ideal. So one of my favorite examples here is moving
something on a tablet. The standard way to do that on iOS is you press
and hold and wait and then move and then maybe uh the app like snaps it
into some box or grid or whatever, whereas surely the more natural thing
to do is you just move your finger over the thing and it moves, right?
Um, but that actually is requires quite a bit of technical and product
work to actually make work correctly. Um, so we had a similar set of,
you know, requirements if you will, with, uh, inking. It needs to be as
modeless as possible, it needs to be incredibly responsive, it needs to
not get in the way of your work and this process of going from a
prototype to a production app, we basically maintain. Our same vision
and goals, that’s been constant throughout. It’s more like
understanding the limitations and the challenges that we’re going to
have on the platform and confronting all the realities of getting apps
in the wild with with users and uh finding something that’s still true
to our vision, but that can really work in production.
00:20:09 - Adam Wiggins: Yeah, the typical paradigm for applications is
you got the desktop world, which is you’ve already Mentioned is tends
to be mouse cursors, keyboards, command keys.
There’s usually multi-winded Gy gooey stuff, and that is where powerful
professional applications tend to be today. They’re obviously very well
established, and you’ve got all your video editors and audio editors,
and programming editors and word processors and architecture tools and
and so on.
Uh, then you’ve got basically, new generations are growing up with
touch screens. The touch screens are where most of the innovation is
happening, but clearly a phone is not the place to edit a spreadsheet or
write a long email or write a book or something like that.
Um, and so part of what we were, uh, researching as part of this, this
lab, which is called Iot Switch, maybe a topic for another day, but was
this kind of question of what does computing look like in 5 to 10 years
and specifically for these kind of productive creative apps.
And productive and creative apps have the qualities that you described,
which is you need to move very fast. For example, but you also need like
a rich command vocabulary. You need to be able to do a lot of things.
And so that kind of led us down this path of like, OK, we live in a
world where touchscreen interfaces have become both the most dominant
platform, but also where all the innovation is happening and yet
they’re very restricted for doing more serious professional. Uh, type
work. And so, that led us down this path of, OK, how can touch screens
get more expressive? That leads you to tablets pretty naturally, cause
they’re bigger, because you can use two hands, because there’s often a
stylist that goes with it, um, and that kind of took us down this, took
us down this road.
00:21:51 - Mark McGranaghan: And the endgame that I envision here is
that you actually have 3 devices and 3 environments for creative work.
So, your phone is used for on the go, reading, quick note capture, take
a picture of something, save a tweet that you saw, that sort of quick
action.
Your desktop, I imagine is still used for the most sophisticated and
complex authoring environments, things like uh editing a big video,
writing up a big paper in law tech with a ton of references, um, just
the amount of, of real estate that you have, the richness of the
controls with keyboard and mouse, um, I think that’s here for a while.
The place that I imagine for tablets is the sort of intermediate step.
Where you’re, you’re reading, you’re annotating, you’re
brainstorming, you’re forming ideas, you’re sketching outlines,
you’re rearranging concepts and materials, and that seems really well
suited to the tablet form factor.
You have a, a moderate amount of space, you have this direct
manipulation where you can move things around with your hands, you can
use a stylus which is very natural for freeform ideating and annotating.
Uh, and it’s very flexible. You can take it on your couch and your
chair, which is better for like, you know, reading and brainstorming
than, you know, sitting at your, you know, stiff desk. Uh, but if that
vision is going to come to reality, we have to treat the tablet as a
third and unique environment. It can’t be designed like a desktop and
it. Can’t be designed like a phone. It needs to be its own thing.
00:23:19 - Adam Wiggins: Do you think it’s asking too much for people
to buy, maintain, and carry around 3 devices or I guess they would be
carrying 2, although potentially 3 if you count the, for a lot of
people, a laptop computer, clamshell laptop is really their desktop
computer.
00:23:33 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, I think that’s a fair question.
When we’ve talked to users, and we’ve done a lot of user research for
Muse and previously in the lab, a lot of people bought an iPad already,
like on their own volition, because they had the same intuition, even if
they didn’t quite have the words for it, they were like, I, I feel like
I should be able to use my iPad for this like creative work, for
reading, for note taking.
You know, it’s kind of, I want to be doing that. um, so they, they were
already halfway there, but they consistently found that the software
wasn’t there, you know, they had their social media apps and they had
their, um, you know, transliterated desktop apps, but it wasn’t that
they weren’t very satisfying. Um, so, so I, I think you guys actually
are already well on their way to having this 3 device set up. What’s
missing is the really good tablet specific software.
00:24:23 - Adam Wiggins: What do you think about other kinds of larger
Touch screens or just touch screens in different, um, I guess, forms. So
there’s the uh the Microsoft Studio Surface studio, I think it is,
which is kind of a drafting table. They’ve got these additional
accessories like this um this little puck control dial thing, or
there’s something like Google Jam board. I think Microsoft has a, has a
bigger one like that. There’s a few of these where they’re basically
very large touch screens that go on the wall. You can kind of interact
with them the way you would interact with the whiteboard, for example.
00:24:53 - Mark McGranaghan: So I think that’s very interesting. I
think there’s a hypothesis that you move to uh 3 or maybe 4 devices,
but they’re all slate style. They’re all touchscreen style. Um, I
suspect that’s further off for a few reasons. Uh, one is there’s just
a huge library of desktop. Software, and this is the most sophisticated
software. This is where you have your most complex authoring and editing
environments, things like, you know, Final Cut Pro. Uh, it would be hard
to rewrite all of those from scratch, but you know, perhaps we do it at
some point. Uh, another reason is just the hardware is not there yet.
If, if you want to get a sufficiently high resolution times a
sufficiently large physical area that that’s a huge amount of pixels.
Our GPUs can’t handle it yet, obviously we don’t have the screens for
it. The the touch resolution isn’t there yet. The touch latency isn’t
there yet. Um, I, I would say we just got there for tablets in the last
few years with the iPad Pros. Those have sufficiently high resolution
and sufficiently quick response times that they can be used, uh, with
your hands and it and it feels good enough, like the latency is low
enough and the resolution is high enough. We’re not, we’re not quite
there yet with these bigger surfaces, but I think if we get there with
the hardware, which I hope we do at some point. Uh, then we could follow
with the software and you would have a more unified, uh, touch base
environment just with different form factors.
00:26:14 - Adam Wiggins: The makers of those operating systems are
actually very actively working to try to merge them together.
The surface platform I previously mentioned runs Windows as an operating
system and it uses, it also offers a trackpad and a keyboard, so it’s a
totally standard, you know, desktop operating system in addition to
being a tablet.
And then, of course, Apple’s taking baby steps in this direction with,
for example, mouse support on the iPad. There’s rumors now that there
will be a trackpad in the next folio keyboard, uh, but whether or not
that’s there, you also have things like Catalyst to bring iOS apps to
the Mac desktop, and so you just see this, uh, this, um, these efforts
to try to blend or bring these, these two platforms together.
00:26:55 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, for sure. No, I do think there is a
risk here of transliteration gone awry, uh, either on the app level or
the OS level. So for example, if you just made a really big iOS that ran
on a desktop, I, I think that would be totally inappropriate for
professional apps. You don’t have the input richness, you don’t have
the arbitrary processes, you don’t have the plug-ins, um, so I, I, I
think we, I think Apple and others need to be careful there, but
there’s definitely a world where they’re able to create, uh. Touch,
um, touch OSs across uh the three form factors. This does remind me
though 11 other thing I forgot about, uh, the, the bigger touch form
factor is text input. This is something we’ve thought a lot about in
the lab and as far as I know there’s no good answer for this, uh, onto
devices yet.
00:27:42 - Adam Wiggins: So by this you mean you want to like enter in
two paragraphs of text for an email or something and you’ve got a touch
screen. What do you do?
00:27:50 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, and actually just like typing out a
two paragraph email is the relatively easier case on desktop, there’s
also a lot of like uh random access editing, like where you’re editing
an email or you’re editing a document or you’re writing code and
jumping all over the place.
And keyboards are also used very heavily as control devices, like people
who are good at like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, they do tons of stuff
on the keyboard, they have all these shortcuts, all these control keys,
and that requires like a very, you know, precise uh mechanism where you
can do it without looking at your hands and you know exactly what
you’re doing and you hear the click when you actually go to do it,
things like that.
Um, so I think we actually have quite a bit of work to do on the, the
input, the text input, the control input front for. Um, these devices to
work and it may be that you actually don’t want to have a pure flat
piece of glass. You actually want to have some, some physical devices
like a keyboard or something else, um, to allow really rich, precise
input for these, these bigger devices.
00:28:46 - Adam Wiggins: Yeah, for me, I think of the kind of the folio
keyboard and the stylus as being required accessories for my iPad. With
those, it ends up being a big phone. Which is fine, but I have a small
phone that fits in my pocket.
00:29:01 - Mark McGranaghan: So, yeah, I think it depends more with the
tablet on your use case, like I think there’s a use case where you’re,
you’re reading a PDF for example, and you’re annotating it. I think
you can get away without, with just a stylus in that case.
00:29:12 - Adam Wiggins: So as a sort of a a closing topic, can we talk
generally about the research mindset versus the production product
mindset you mentioned here that like the the text entry problem. I think
it is very much a research problem.
00:29:26 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, well, the thing about research is
it’s OK not to come up with a an answer or the correct answer. So I
mentioned with the ink switching problem for our original research work.
Our conclusion was like, we don’t know, sorry, you can only use black
ink for now, it’s too bad. Um, that’s not an acceptable answer for
people who are paying to use Muse, for example, they need to be able to
select an ink. Um, so sometimes you have these problems where you just,
you have to come up with something for the production app. Um, so by
default, you would start with a, a non-research answer or a non-research
approach.
00:30:01 - Adam Wiggins: For me, it’s really important in My work and
on teams that I’ve been on to understand where something is on that
spectrum.
So at Hiroku, for example, we did a lot of pretty innovative things. So
this is a company both you and I, um, we’re working on some years
back.
We did a lot of really innovative things, uh, in our space, but it was
often important, I think when someone was working on something that was
a truly novel problem, literally no one had ever, no one in the history
of the universe had ever tried to solve it. Uh, or, or had solved it
successfully.
And then you’re in there trying to, to, to solve that.
It requires a longer time horizon, a much more divergent set of ideas.
You need to really break out of the constraints of the box that you’re
operating in day to day, and that’s totally at odds with what I would
call like the operational mindset, which is exactly what you said like
you have to. You’ve got customers, things are on fire for them,
metaphorically speaking, and you need to deliver them some kind of
solution and it doesn’t do to say, let me go into my ivory tower and
think deeply about this for the next 3 years and eventually publish a
paper that said this is a problem that can’t be solved right now that
that doesn’t work, but. The operational mindset naturally keeps you on
shorter time horizons. It keeps you sticking to things that are more
known quantities as much as possible. You want to look at what are other
people doing. Uh, what, what are other similar, uh, applications or
software packages or companies do to to solve similar problems and
borrow from that as much as you can because those are known paths.
Whereas research is all about this total unknown discovery thing, and
that can be very rewarding in in the sense of stumbling across novel
inventions, but uh it’s it’s not super practical for production.
00:31:51 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, exactly. And because these domains
are so different, the constraints, the requirements, even the people who
tend to like working on them, um, it’s often best for them to be in
quite different, like different different organizational setups and like
that’s one of the reasons why I think the Ink & Switch lab plus Muse
is so interesting. Muse is inherently more industrial, commercial
focused. Uh, the lab is inherently more research and exploratory
focused.
00:32:18 - Adam Wiggins: Yeah, the the typical set up there and actually
some of our inspiration for how we did set up I can Switch was the
corporate R&D lab.
So this is something, uh, Xerox PARC is probably one of the most famous
ones in the computing. Um, industry. So there you had Xerox, which is
this big company that makes copiers and has money to spend and wants to
think about, uh, what their future facing products are going to be in
PARC being the small band of misfits that are working on basically
inventing what came to become the desktop computer. Uh, but there’s
other examples of this. Bell Labs is another very venerable, famous,
successful, uh, lab that works this way.
And the idea is that you, you actually need and want to If not, uh,
isolate, then at least partition people who are doing research, the kind
of wild mad scientists thinking way outside the box stuff from the
people who are responsible for the, the, the product that you’re
selling today. And hopefully people can move back and forth between them
and hopefully there’s mutual respect, but they just require completely
different modes of operation.
So going forward from here, there’s more tool switching problems to
solve. For example, a some kind of selection blasso thing is probably
something that’s needed. Uh, do you have an inkling of how we’ll go
about kind of solving that problem that stays consistent with our
values, but also knowing how much we’ve grappled with the with how hard
that problem faces?
00:33:43 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, so I have 3 ideas here. One is, I
suspect we’ll move from ink selection to instrument selection. So
again, if you go back to the physical world, you think about how you use
your hands. You don’t only use it for inking, you use it for erasing,
you might pick up an exacto knife, you might pick up a brush, uh, you
might pick up a ruler. Um, and I think that’s, that’s a powerful
metaphor. So I can imagine, for example, if you have a lasso, that
becomes a sort of sibling to the inks that you can pick in the same way
from the same sort of palette.
00:34:15 - Adam Wiggins: Now does that bring us back to, you know, where
we started, which is basically the, you know, the on-screen toolbar that
has all your tools, the Photoshop, the Procreate, and that sort of
thing. Are we essentially have we, have we worked our way around backed
ourselves into what is for good reason, a standard pattern?
00:34:31 - Mark McGranaghan: Well, I think that could happen. Um, but,
you know, for one, we have this thing where you drag it out from the
edge so you can hide it if you want. Um, but the, but the other idea I
have here is going to a model where you have a small number of
instruments that you’re actively working with.
So again, to go back to the physical metaphor, if you’re working on
some projects on your desk, you don’t have like 100 pens, you know,
strewn all over your desk, which is what happens when you have a toolbar
on desktop app which has a And buttons, right? You are working on
something, you know that for this project, I need like a black pen, an
exacto knife, and an eraser. So you go to your shelf, you bring those
three things to your desk, and then it’s very easy to switch among
those for this current project, and then when you want to, you know,
change your project, you go and you get different instruments from your
shelf.
Uh, so I, I imagine something like that from you where you can pick, you
know, your favorite black ink, your favorite highlighter, your favorite
accent pen. And put them in your little toolbox and you have this small,
very curated palette that you can swipe in and out when you’re actively
working on a document and you’re not confronted with like the Photoshop
style, 200 buttons, most of most of what you don’t know what they do
type experience.
00:35:43 - Adam Wiggins: Although Muse probably also has the benefit that
we’re not a drawing tool. So you look at something like concepts, for
example, a really great iPad app with really sophisticated tool
selection, and that’s appropriate there. Because that it is supposed to
be a drawing app, technical drawing app with a lot of, you want a lot of
options in terms of things like pen thickness. Muse is a thinking,
scribbling, sketching app, and just as it would be inappropriate to have
50 different thicknesses of markers in front of your whiteboard, uh, it
would be also inappropriate to have a huge amount of choice, I think
for, uh, for the Muse use case.
00:36:16 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, and I think that’s true both for
kind of in the moment, you know, so we have this, this. palette, small
active palette that you’re choosing from, but also when you go to uh
load out your palette, um, I think we’re going to be quite deliberate
about how we present those choices.
So sometimes you see these interfaces where you can, you know, choose
like basically put in a float for how thick you want your pen to be. I
think that’s basically not coherent because the difference between a,
you know, 1.71 pen and a 1.72 pen doesn’t really make any sense. It’s
not useful. Uh, and indeed, if you go to a high-end pen store and you
look at like the technical pens, there’s a very specific way that
they’re sized. They’re basically size in increments such that if it
was a much smaller increment, it would kind of wouldn’t make a lot of
sense. It would be too small to be really noticeable or or obviously
differentiable, so they’re kind of there’s a set of. Of sizes such
that you can cover the full spectrum, but they’re not uh too finely
degraded, right? Uh, so I can imagine for choosing sizes, for choosing
colors, you have a, a carefully thought out, um, set of options such
that you have choice, uh, but you’re not confronted with more choice
that makes sense. Well, I think those were the main three things. So
curated load out, uh, the, the swipe from the side, and what I call the,
the high-end pen store where you’re, you’re given a set of options
that kind of makes sense versus putting in floats.
00:37:40 - Adam Wiggins: And do you imagine that then, um, having
grappled with all of this and, you know, Azimuth or uh altitude rather
of the stylus is probably out for a while and quasi modes don’t have
enough, um, dimensionality, uh, and there’s probably not going to be
some kind of extra hardware button or controller or something we can
make use of that the. Uh, hidden by default, small tool palette, uh, is
basically the, the solution we’ve landed on for the, let’s say the
medium term.
00:38:08 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, I think probably for the medium term.
I, I, I do think quasi modes are actually very good.
Uh, so I, I definitely think we’ll continue to do the press to hold.
Uh, I, I could imagine extending that slightly. So for example, maybe
you press two fingers and you get a secondary option.
Um, I can imagine that that is configurable. This is a pretty common
pattern in professional tools like you can choose what the shift key
does. You can choose what the command key does, and there’s a, there’s
an obvious default, um, but if you want to set that up, you can do it.
And lastly, I could imagine as a sort of optional set up for people with
a physical keyboard, you know, holding down 123, quasi mode engages your
ink or your instrument 12, and 3, and so on.
00:38:50 - Adam Wiggins: Yeah, or having some kind of optional
accessory. I think I saw this with uh Loom. It’s a cool little um iPad
animation app that came out pretty recently, and they have the optional
ability to use the teenage engineering MIDI controller, which is a
little dial thing, and you wouldn’t want to require that obviously,
but, uh, but maybe that is something that enhances the power of the
tactility of the app.
00:39:12 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, exactly, and uh now this gets beyond
a little bit the medium term, but Uh, one idea that I’m excited about
is using the phone as a sort of sidecar control panel. So everyone has a
phone, they always have it on them. What if you could just put it on
your desk and like, you know, you link your tablet and your phone, and
then your phone becomes your palette. So you could, you have 4 or 5
buttons there, you could have a finger cording there, you could have a
little slider there, um, and that would give you a lot more degrees of
freedom. On, you know, quasi modes without requiring a secondary
dedicated hardware.
00:39:45 - Adam Wiggins: And is the benefit there, you know, that that
in that case it’s not a tactile thing like an eraser you flip over or a
dial you turn, it’s another touch screen. What’s the, uh, what’s the
benefit other than I suppose just more screen real estate of having it
on a separate touch screen?
00:39:59 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, well, it’s uh more screen real
estate, it’s kind of separately programmable. Um, you can have it in a
physically different place. So if you think about how you use a keyboard
in your mouse, it’s if you’re right handed and you have your mouse in
your right hand and you have your control keys on the left side of your
keyboard, there’s 12 or 18 inches because that’s kind of the, the
correct and natural spread of your hands, um, if you’re in a very
neutral position, whereas if you’re, you know, have your hands right
next to each other, it’s a little bit artificial. Um, so it’s, it’s,
it’s an exploratory idea we to see, but I think there’s some promise
there.
00:40:30 - Adam Wiggins: And certainly the idea of having your offhand,
you see this with um Wacom tablets, often in professional like graphic
designers, artists, types, uh, or you see it even in something like um
uh people who play competitive video games, something like a. Um, yeah,
these first person shooters where you need to, uh, be very fast and
responsive, and you tend to use the mouse in one hand, which is kind of
your move, shoot, aim, uh, thing.
But then you also have the keyboard which you end up kind of putting
your, uh, fingers on certain keys that activate, I don’t know,
switching, switching weapons or something like that. And the important
thing is you don’t need to look at that hand because your fingers are
in a particular position and they stay there.
So I could picture that for the phone, which is you kind of have your
hand, your, your offhand, that’s left or, you know, left hand if
you’re right-handed positioned over the phone in a way where you, you,
you don’t really need to look at it. You can press to activate
different things, uh, and just go completely by feel, even though the
touch screen feels, of course, not like tactile buttons, but the shape
of the phone and the position of the phone is something that you sense
or feel even without looking at it.
Yeah, exactly. Very nice.
Well, anything else we should talk about on the topic of tool switching?
I don’t think so. And 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. I’d love to hear your comments or ideas for future episodes.
All right, it was a pleasure chatting with you. Likewise, Adam.
0 min
February 28, 202485 // Local-first podcast and conference
Metamuse is still on hiatus, but this is a brief announcement of some related projects. Localfirst.fm is a new podcast that Adam is helping to produce. And Adam is on the organizing team for Local-First Conf 2024, held in Berlin on May 30.
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Show notes
Localfirst.fm podcast
Local-First Conf 2024
3 min
October 05, 202384 // Retrospective
Mark and Adam take a look back at three years of podcasts to reflect on their favorite episodes—and the friends they made along the way. They discus Metamuse’s origin story, walk through the production process, and wax nostalgic on some of their favorite episodes. Plus: a look at what the future holds for our hosts and the podcast.
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
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Show notes
NPR
The future of iPad
Ferrite
Hello Internet, Gastropod, Lexicon Valley
This American Life, Gimlet Media
Most downloaded episodes: Computers and creativity with Molly Mielke, Sync, Growing ideas with Andy Matuschak
Mark’s favorite episodes: Local-first software with Martin Kleppmann, Local-first one year later, Hiring, Cities with Devon Zuegel
Adam’s honorable mentions: Progress with Jason Crawford, Rich text with Slim Lim
Metamuse podcast guest handbook
lossless audio
Riverside
Audio editor Mark Lamorgese
Post-producer Jenna Miller
Podcasting Microphones Mega-Review
XLR microphone
pro sound dampening material
RØDE Podcaster
Pop filter, plosives
John Michael Greer
1 hr 22 min
August 31, 202383 // End and beginning
Bittersweet news is the topic of this episode. Adam Wulf and Adam Wiggins discuss the end of an era for Muse, leadership transitions, and what the future holds for Muse 3.0 and beyond.
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
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Show notes
An end, and a beginning
Ink & Switch
Adam Wulf
Loose Leaf
Here, File File
prosumer
Industrial research with Peter van Hardenberg
Netlify proxy, Webflow, Hugo
Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change
1 hr 1 min
July 13, 202382 // Spatial computing with Yiliu Shen-Burke
Is virtual reality useful for productivity software? Yiliu is the founder of Softspace, a VR/AR tool for thought. He joins Mark and Adam to discuss the human brain and body as inherently spatial systems; the question of whether information is fundamentally 2D; and why social comfort is the biggest challenge facing VR today. Plus: how to avoid a dystopian future.
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Show notes
Yiliu Shen-Burke @softspaceninja
Softspace
Wim Hof breathing method
Studio Olafur Eliasson
The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces
Oculus
Oculus development kit
heads-up display
Scott Greenwald’s Media Lab thesis
Beat Saber
A Beautiful Mind
Softspace demo
force-directed graph
Steven Johnson on DevonThink
Google Glass, Magic Leap, Vision Pro
Supernatural
vergence
history of VR
PlaneVR: Social Acceptability of Virtual Reality for Aeroplane Passengers
1 hr 36 min
June 22, 202381 // Evergreen notes with Stephan Ango
Quotes from famous people or books can turn a feeling or a concept into a memorable chunk of text—how can we do the same for our own ideas? Stephan is the CEO of Obsidian, and he joins Mark and Adam to discuss notes as personal memes, the balance between freedom and cohesion in plugins, and why it's so hard to be messy in digital tools. Plus: why “tools for thought” rubs Stephan the wrong way.
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Show notes
Stephan Ango @kepano @[email protected]
Obsidian
Pillowy Swedish cinnamon rolls using the tangzhong technique
Lumi
Erica Xu, Shida Li
Growing ideas with Andy Matuschak
Evergreen notes turn ideas into objects that you can manipulate
Apple Notes, Apple Journal
Zettelkasten
stream-of-consciousness writing plugin
Obsidian developer docs
Launchers with Thomas Paul Mann
Infinite canvases with Steve Ruiz
Obsidian Canvas
Excalidraw, ExcaliBrain
.canvas format
1 hr 19 min
June 01, 202380 // Planning
Planning might have a reputation for being boring, but Adam and Mark believe it can be one of the most exciting moments in your team’s work. They discuss the importance of inspiration and collective knowledge; the musical rhythm of planning cycles; and how to “draw the line” when prioritizing. Plus: the importance of revisiting the plan in times of doubt.
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Show notes
Muse for Teams beta announcement
Against boring planning
agile methodology
ticket trackers
Gantt charts, burndown charts
Pivotal Tracker
kanban board
Jesper Jørgensen
V2MOM, OKRs
effort to impact chart
Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy
Amazon’s “working backwards” approach
go slow to go fast
Zoom fatigue
shared knowledge vs common knowledge
1 hr 11 min

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