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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.
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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.
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
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.
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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: So we think a lot about how do you give agency back to people, but we think about if this is your web browser, this is your operating system, this is your home on the internet, how do you feel agency over Hello and welcome to Meta Muse.
00:00:16 - Speaker 2: Muse is a tool for thought on the iPad. This isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, and I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and a guest, Josh Miller. Hello. Thanks for being with us here today, Josh. You’re an accomplished entrepreneur and also have a background in both the startup world with Branch, which I think later became part of Facebook, but also you’ve done a stint in government with the White House, if I’m not mistaken, and nowadays you’re working Obama White House just want to clarify that.
00:00:51 - Speaker 2: Fair enough. And now you’re working on the browser company, which is super interesting. Why don’t you tell us what you’re doing there?
00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Sher, thank you so much for having me. Honestly, I feel like I’m at Whole Foods right now doing my grocery shopping routine, listening to this podcast. So, uh, really awesome to hear that intro live and grateful to be talking to you both.
My name is Josh, uh, working on the browser company.
As the name might imply, we’re oddly fascinated by web browsers. We feel like we spend a ton of time in web browsers in 2020, too much time, maybe, and as we were looking at the kind of arc of web browser technology, it felt like the interface of the web browser and the jobs it did for you. It was fairly stagnant and honestly was just curious about why and what else it may look like. So there’s a group of about 10 of us, uh, in a room together, well, I guess a metaphorical room together experimenting pretty widely about what a web browser reimagined for 2020 might look like. So figuring it out as we go along and really happy to be here. So thank you for having me.
00:01:54 - Speaker 2: We’ve had a lot of informal chats through Twitter and other kind of conversations, but where maybe I really felt like I got my head around what you were doing was when your colleague Nate Parrott came and did a little workshop for the ink and Switch crew to show us the experiments you’re working on, and that was very. Interesting partially, you know, just to see inside the machine and what you’re doing, but also because it seems to me like you’re really taking what I would call a research approach. I think you are a startup or a venture funded startup. Is that the correct characterization?
00:02:23 - Speaker 1: Yes, that’s a correct characterization. I agree with that statement.
00:02:28 - Speaker 2: But even so, it seems like this approach you’re taking these very throwaway experiments while you figure out what your initial product is going to be as opposed to the maybe the more classic mode that I’m used to, which is you start with an idea that you love, you build that until it’s clear that it’s totally unviable and then you pivot to something else when you’re forced to.
That’s a different approach.
So when Nate demoed to the switch crew and it was really interesting to see those experiments, but he said something. In particular, that gave me an idea for a topic here, which is, he said, OK, we’re not innovating on the browser engine. Things like JavaScript run times and how the HTML is rendered and all that sort of thing. There’s been incredible technology developed on that in recent years. You’re innovating on the interface, all the stuff that goes around that core engine. Can you expand on that for us a little bit?
00:03:17 - Speaker 1: Sure, of course. First, worth noting. I am one of many people on the team, so I appreciate being the representative, but you know, everything I say, I’m trying my best to speak for everyone else doing the real work back in the office.
In terms of innovating on the interface, I think the thing I want to touch on first was your comment about the R&D and experimental approach, because in some ways, that’s the core of our product philosophy.
Whether or not it’s correct or not for us or others. I think with our first company, Branch, we’re 20 years old. Didn’t know what we were doing. We still don’t quite know what we’re doing, but we know a little bit more. And in our first company much more focused on let’s whiteboard everything, and then let’s mock up three directions, and let’s narrow it down to the best answer, and that will be the best answer and let’s go build that. And I think from our experience and maybe just our dispositions as creative folks, very much believe in that no one has any idea of what they’re doing. And in many ways, some of the most interesting innovations may sound like a dramatic word, but the most interesting progressions of interfaces and software products we’ve loved and we’ve built have sort of been accidental or if not accidental, we never intended them to be that big of a deal or that part of the product or that part of an idea to be that interesting. So from a philosophical perspective, our view on product iteration is bias towards experiments, quick experiments, hacking. Experiments, be intentional about what you’re trying and why, but be open-minded and succumbed to the fact that you don’t really have any idea what’s going to be meaningful and what’s not. So I think that’s generally our orientation, which I should note, we think is great for our specific prompt and our specific team. I don’t think is the only way to do things. And so for I just want to represent that as one viewpoint and one lens which we take to the product problem.
00:05:02 - Speaker 2: I was just gonna support your sort of we don’t know what we’re doing and that’s fundamental to innovation. I like the Einstein quote, which is, if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research. So I think of it as a discovery process that doing something new that no one has done before fundamentally means no one can know what they’re doing and you kind of have to embrace that a little bit, have this beginner’s mind, this humility, and just realize that it’s, it’s more of a treasure hunt than a Engineering project.
00:05:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I have one story on that note from a mentor of mine when I was 20 maybe. I really looked up to Evan Williams.
He was the co-creator of Blogger, you know, really the publishing platform that in many ways popularized what we know is the concept of blogging.
Then he went on to co-create Twitter. Obviously we know the impact that Twitter had on publishing in the world, and then went on to work on Medium, and I idolized him in a way when I was 19 or 20 because what passion for a single problem and what from afar looks like he had it all figured out. It was just over the arc of time, he was gonna come up with all the good ideas and just came out of him effortlessly and when we were 19 or 20, I had the lucky fortune of Getting a meeting with him and convinced him to kind of mentor us and invest in our first company branch and invited us to come work out of his office in San Francisco after he left Twitter and was sort of in R&D mode. And we viewed this as this aha moment. We were working on this new publishing platform. It was gonna be a different thing, and we had the Godfather, the genius, the expert that was just gonna tell us how to make it the next big thing, cause here’s the person that knew everything about publishing. And in our first meeting together after we moved to San Francisco, I laid out this 6 month plan with a bunch of questions for him of is it the right plan. And he stopped me, he said, Josh, I hope I didn’t get your hopes up. I have no idea what the right answer to these questions are. And actually, quite frankly, let me give you some advice. I’d be aware of anyone in Silicon Valley that purports to have the answers to questions like these, we’re all just making it up as we go along. We’re all just trying our best. So, let’s keep talking about this. I’m really excited. But I don’t have the answers and no one does. It’s obviously one worldview, but it was a very humbling, informative experience to hear the co-creator of blogger Twitter and Medium say, I’m just trying my best to making it up as I go along. And I’ve continued to subscribe to that worldview and philosophy as I’ve had a little more experience building software. It’s not the only one, but it’s definitely the one that I believe in.
00:07:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can see why that would be really powerful, and there is clearly a skill, a talent, a whole world of capabilities for effectively searching for something new or a better way of doing things, improved technology and improved design, what we’re kind of broadly calling innovation here. So it can be tricky when I do describe this kind of process to others or you hear someone really successful like Kevin. Williams talk like in the story you just told that it seems like, well, we’re just making it up as we’re going along. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a skill there and a structured way to go about this and discipline that’s needed and that there’s, you know, certain teams that can be really great at doing that and others that struggle more, but it’s a different mindset than this visionary top down. I just woke up one morning with the future in my mind and now I’ll spend the next 10 years building it according to that plan. It’s a very different mindset.
00:08:25 - Speaker 1: I think that’s totally right, and I think I describe it as a spectrum, and either end of the spectrum, in my opinion, is too far, and so one end of the spectrum, as you described, top down, we know the answer, we just have to build it. Other side is, we’re just aloof floating through the world, hoping to stumble across the next thing. I think every team that I’ve known that is extremely effective at interface innovation and Development has their own part of the spectrum, but I think in my experience, I’m curious to hear from you, Mark and Adam, is our teams that are very principled in what they are building for and why they’re building it and opinionated at that highest level motivating factor. So as an example of the browser company, I’ll share two hypotheses that end up becoming thematic buckets for experiment. One is our view is that if you look at the browser in 2020, it’s actually more like an operating system, not in the technical sense of the word operating system, but it’s no longer one of many applications on your computer that you go to momentarily to surf the World Wide Web and track down information. You’re doing all of your work in the browser, all of your apps, all of your documents. And so that’s a hypothesis and a principle, which suggests a certain type of opinionated experimentation and exploration, even if the exact implementation is something that we believe we don’t know and we’re gonna have to find out. I think another one is we think a lot about digital spaces as being analogous to physical spaces, and you think about a living room or a bedroom or an office, and those rooms are supposed to make you feel a certain way, and they may look different, even if they, from a utility or features perspective, all have chairs, you sit in them, you can exist in them. Generally speaking, they make you feel a certain way. That’s not as low level as we have a feature idea that we know is gonna work, but it’s not so vague that we could just build anything and count it as progress. How do you think about this Muse? I’m curious what your principles are. So I mean, first off, it’s worth stating, I know you invited me on this podcast. I’m on this podcast right now cause I am obsessed. With everything that you’re building at Muse, and ink and Switch as well. And I’m inspired by the way you do product development and interface innovation. It sounds like directionally, we’re pretty aligned in the way that we build things, but how do you think about somehow narrowing down the scope of what you experiment on while also leaving open the possibility that you actually have no idea what’s gonna work?
00:10:54 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, first of all, thanks, Josh. I do think what you’ve described reflects the attitude that we have at Muse and ink and Switch.
This kind of goes back to the previous episode where we talked about principled products where I do think you can’t expect to get there with pure brownian motion, you know, just randomly bouncing around. You need some sort of principle, vision, direction, valence, something that kind of tends to pull you and the team together in a unified way in some direction. I think that can take different forms. It could be principles, it could be this kind of postulates, it could be hypotheses, it can be an end goal that’s important to everyone. You just need something that’s kind of pulling people together. Another comment I would make is this idea of balance between theory and practice is also reflected in the literature on technological development in general. If you look at how things have improved in our material world, this is a point that’s made on the Roots of Progress blog by Jason. I’m sorry, I forget his last name, but Jason Crawford. Jason Crawford, there you go. Thanks, Adam. He makes this point that if you look at an empirical matter, innovations that have happened, they tend to be from groups that have been kind of bouncing between the realm of theory and practice, and both of those inform each other. And so I think that is reflected in how we work on software at Mu and Inc and Switch where we have some theories that are developing over time, and we have some experiments, some tests, some engineering, you know, field work, and Those kind of go back and forth, and you can’t expect to get very far just on one of those two legs.
00:12:14 - Speaker 1: One thing I’m curious about that we’ve thought a lot about, and I’m not sure we have the right answer, is I’ve seen some teams where the principal or guiding light is a hypothesis about what’s possible with software, or what’s possible from a product.
Some people call it jobs to be done. I think other teams articulated in terms of a target demographic. Uh, elementary school teacher, a back end developer in Silicon Valley.
I’m curious as you think about Muse, what I find so inspiring about the product is the tool for thought aspect that can be melded to my own instantiation of tools for thought and what I want to think about. I can imagine that direction is also difficult at times to know who you’re building for. How do you think about that balance between what and why, who, and I’m, there are other vectors I’m not covering. How do you think about that?
00:13:07 - Speaker 3: So there are some direct answers I can get to that. Maybe I’ll actually give Adam the chance to kind of articulate the specific things that we think about there. But I would also point out that I don’t think we can actually always expect to be able to articulate what’s drawing us in a particular direction. This is a kind of Hayekian idea where you Yeah, the hunch thing is a big part of it.
00:13:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, just because something can’t be written out in words or articulate doesn’t mean it’s not there in people’s implicit knowledge. And so that points to another. The thing we very often use to draw us in directions, which is the energy that an individual person has for some idea. And that often just ends up being a quite good predictor of promising areas.
00:13:43 - Speaker 1: I’m so happy to hear that because I wasn’t sure if I was going to share that part of our process, because it’s true to us, but I don’t know how quote unquote good it is, is we are so motivated by the energy and emotion of the team, maybe to a fault, but I think, you know, I previously worked at Facebook and I think that a lot of large organizations, they’ve codified their approach to product development.
This often may look like a design document that has a goal, problem statements, set of assumptions, input data, and you almost have to justify what you work on in a relatively formulaic way, which I think is extremely effective.
Again, I think there are many ways to build products.
We find ourselves a lot, oftentimes all of us are the plurality of us coalescing around a single idea or direction. And oftentimes, as you point out, it’s hard to justify it empirically, and it’s just something feels right, or we’re energized by it.
In the early days of the browser company, we’ve definitely been driven a lot by that.
It’s felt great so far, but it’s definitely a different posture that I’m sure has pros and cons, but I’m excited to hear that Muse works that way as well, because we found it to be really fun and fulfilling.
00:14:48 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to be clear, you often have this raw data that’s influencing these opinions. So we have some use cases that we have in mind. We have some archetypal people that we’re working for, we have some technology theories, and those end up influencing the directions that we’re personally excited about pursuing. It’s just that you can’t always expect to be able to formulaically in close form, describe, given these inputs, here’s the function that determines where you should go next. Totally.
00:15:13 - Speaker 2: Mark and I might have talked about this before, but I think of the active entrepreneurship and product creation, which to me the building the company that builds the thing and building the thing is one unified whole, but there to me it’s about half and half or for me to be satisfied with the result. I think it has to be this balance of practical business needs to have customers and solve a problem they have in a way that’s useful and fits into their life for.
Price that they find fair and that you have a reasonable distribution channel and all those business fundamentals, you have to have that, but then it’s also an act of expression, artistic expression. There’s something inside me that I want to express, something meaningful that I have to say, or me and my colleagues, part of the reason we’ve banded together is we think we have a thing to say together, we share some values or some sense, this hunch, this drive to make something that doesn’t exist in the. and I think that part of it, it really is like an art project, like painting a painting or writing a book or or something like that.
You just have a thing you want to express, but part of the fun, intellectual challenge, satisfaction, but also hard part is actually balancing those two things together.
And so it does mean on one hand, for example, following that energy that you’re both describing that feeling of like this seems right, there’s something here, let’s pursue this. That that building what’s in your heart is the way that my colleague Ryan sometimes put it. I think you have to do that, but you can’t do that at the expense of building a business that has those fundamentals, or you can, but you know, that works until the VC money is gone and then you won’t get more of it. So I think it’s that balance between the two that’s what makes this act such an interesting act of creation.
00:16:53 - Speaker 1: I think the discipline that balances this very well at their best are architects.
So for example, we’re working on collaborating with the architect David Adjay. He designed the Museum of African American History in Washington DC and if you look at the building, it is very much an artistic expression.
There’s a story behind it. You feel Adjay’s personality in the building, you feel his heritage and the heritage of. People he’s commemorating in the building.
And you better believe in Washington DC at a publicly funded museum, there are some budget constraints, and there are some ADA rules to comply with, and there are bathrooms to build, and so I don’t yet know, and I don’t know if I’ll ever know how they do it, but I think architecture, not only for the analogies between digital spaces and physical spaces, but I also think for the mixture of practical realities.
Jobs to be done, combined with artistic expression and emotion and personality.
I’ve always admired how the greatest architects seem to tread those very, very well.
00:17:55 - Speaker 2: I see a lot of parallel there as well. I’ve read a number of architecture books less because I want to ever design or build a building and more that I see these really strong parallels and on one hand, yeah, you’re trying to express something beautiful that is art or can be, but at the same time, your building has to stand up. It can’t go down when the earthquake hits. People need to move through it. People have physical dimensions that need to be accommodated. Air needs to flow through, light needs to come in. Right?
00:18:19 - Speaker 1: You need HVAC. HVAC’s not pretty.
00:18:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. That brings to mind.
I’m looking at some images here of the museum you mentioned of course I’ll link that in the show notes. It also brings to mind. I saw this fellow, Danish fellow Jark Ingalls, I think.
The name speaks some years ago and the Netflix show Abstract had featured him in an episode, and he’s a really good example of almost avant-garde, very kind of forward thinking to the point of being quite weird sometimes with his designs, but also really Sort of challenging the status quo and again, same thing listening to him talk about each building and sort of what he was trying to express through that and how that fit into the time and the cultural moments and whatever else felt very close to some of my motivations when I start companies and build software.
00:19:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and also to connect this architecture topic a bit to interfaces, it reminds me of the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. So this is a book that basically catalogs patterns and architecture from the very small to the very large that Alexander had observed as being successful over decades and hundreds of years of people interacting with buildings. So the very small scale it might be that people really like to have shelving at waist heights. That’s kind of where you conveniently put stuff. At the very large scale, it’s like your city should have greenery accessible to people within, I don’t know 10 minute drive or something.
And the patterns in the book are very interesting, but also the way that he arrived at these understandings, which are basically about interfaces between people and buildings, is observing, it’s kind of this like archaeology of what has actually worked over the many years that people have interacted with buildings.
And I think it’s interesting that with software, we’re now getting enough data where we can do that, and instead of having to invent things from first principles, we can say whenever people use software. They really want to like cut out stuff and like put it somewhere temporarily and hold it. And that’s something that it’s really important that software does. And you don’t need to invent that idea from first principles. You can just observe that people want to do that all the time. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in there that can draw on this kind of pattern language type thinking.
00:20:15 - Speaker 1: I think that’s a great connection and making the connection back to interfaces again, a thing we and I have struggled with is When do you reinvent the wheel? When is it worth questioning the interface, given that there are these patterns in the physical and digital world that over some number of years, decades, we have proved work extremely well and evoke a certain type of feeling or action. When do you question them and when do you accept them? So in our first company Branch, you know, being 20 reinvent all the things. You have a follow button, we have a watch button. You have vertical comments, our comments branch to the side. And it felt like, because it can be so exciting and tempting to question and reimagine interfaces because they are spaces and touch points that we encounter so much in our day to day life. There is an excitement to the novel, and there’s an excitement to the new.
But as I learned, and you’ve probably learned, I think the more advanced or accomplished product designers are the ones that know what to focus on, and they know what are the highest points of leverage in the interface, or what are the parts of the interface that are. broken and deserve reinventing.
And so one thing common conversation we have at the browser company is, should we be reinventing the wheel here? Is this the right place to focus on pushing the boundaries? Again, I cannot purport that we have a good answer to those questions yet, or that we’re experts on this topic. But I do think it’s a temptation and a talent to know when do you rely on Christopher Alexander’s-esque observations about patterns that are wonderfully human, and when do you question whether or not we’re doing things the right way.
00:21:58 - Speaker 2: To even ask the question, when do we reinvent and when do we go with the known pattern is the right place to be.
I think there’s a natural tendency certainly goes with youth. I was there as well at age 20 which is you just want to blow up the status quo because that’s like in your spirit at the time. That’s what young people want to do.
And definitely entrepreneurs, I think, are by their nature, people that like change, novelty, new things, shake it up, try something new, blow it all up, and then you have others who Maybe you’re more stasis oriented, like to conserve, protect, go with what’s working, tradition, that sort of thing.
And I think the art is to learn to step back from either of those tendencies wherever you may naturally fall and instead try to analyze where is there opportunity, where is there something that society can really benefit or individuals could benefit from a reinvention and a rethinking versus we have a known pattern that works and, you know, stick with that.
00:22:55 - Speaker 1: On that note, earlier in my career personally, I think I fancied myself more of an artist. I’m giving myself a little hard time and being a little self-deprecating, but I think I viewed things like revenue strategy and business model and market structure as being things that corrupted the creative process and the innovation on interfaces process.
And I spent two years working at an investment fund. Observing the sort of startup technology landscape from a venture capital perspective. And one of the things that struck me is that some of my favorite products from uh innovation on interface’s perspective actually fundamentally took advantage of business model innovation and misplaced incentives in generating the product experiences that I, from an emotional perspective, fell in love with and changed my experience.
We’re actually driven from looking at where companies Incumbents were making money saying, wait, that seems a little flawed or perverse, and extrapolating from there. And so I think even that’s interesting to say, even if you care about feelings and emotion and the way buildings hit the street, sometimes to know where to focus can come from something that could be as boring to some as, well, how’s the incumbent making its money? What incentives does that cause? One example from Facebook, Snapchat, one of its core innovations, was opening to the camera. And, you know, it’s hard to imagine that. That was a huge deal. Talk about interface innovation. It broke every rule in the playbook of social networks.
00:24:27 - Speaker 2: I was actually going to cite that exact one, which is in the Snap S one, they actually articulate this pretty well, which is they consider the camera in the phone to be the most important interface, and they lead with that on absolutely everything from their little snap codes to the fact that the apps open straight into that. And it’s more obvious now we live in a world where smartphone cameras really are this cruel. crucial input device alongside touch screens and keyboards and whatever else, but probably at the time you’re talking about, that was quite a shocking idea.
00:24:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I don’t purport to suggest that Evan Spiegel was motivated to put the camera first from a business perspective, but if you have an incumbent like Facebook who monetizes through showing ad units in a news feed right when you open the screen, structurally, they are not incentivized and it will be difficult for them to compete on that vector.
We think about this at the browser company. As you mentioned earlier in the podcast, Chrome and the Chromium team specifically is responsible for insane technological progress on the browser front, and we’re building on the backs of that and grateful for that.
From a business perspective, Chrome is useful to Google because it’s lead generation for search ads. The more you use their web browser, the more you use the internet, the more you’re gonna do searches on Google. The more searches you do on Google, the more ads they can show you. And if you talk to their the Chrome team members, they’ll even explain the genesis of the Chrome team was not that they wanted to go into the browser market. They just thought Internet Explorer was so shitty with all of its IE toolbars, that it was making the internet experience poor. And if the internet experience was poor, you’re gonna do far less Google searches. And so that’s interesting and at the time that was novel. Flash forward to today, Google and Chrome are not incentivized to make a more feature rich. Powerful web browser that stretches the definition of what a web browser is, not because they’re not capable, not because they’re not creative, but their incentive structure from a business model perspective is one in which they just want you to type little searches in that URL bar as much as possible. So if you open 40 tabs, that’s 40 potential Google searches, and so it’s not that clean as anyone that’s listening to this podcast that has worked at a large organization like Google. I’m dramatizing a bit, but again coming back to interface innovation. And where do you know where to focus? I agree that often that comes from energy, often that comes from principle and product hypotheses, and oftentimes it might come from looking at the market structure you’re competing and say, where is everyone else weak, where are they incentivized, and what sort of perverse side effects does that lead to?
00:27:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is actually a big part of the ink and switch and muse origin story where we had observed the economics of the industry were very heavily rotated towards a social slash advertising and be enterprise sass, and those were the most obvious things to make. economical and so the lion’s share of work in the industry was being put behind those to the exclusion to our mind of classic creative computing for individuals. And so we saw an opportunity product wise that was like you said, kind of created by the economic dynamics.
00:27:34 - Speaker 2: I think it’d be interesting to return to the item you brought up earlier there, Josh, about the kind of operating system, the web or the web browser is kind of a set of operating system primitives that sort of exists separately from the host computing operating system.
I strongly agree with your characterization there that the web is kind of its own OS and in fact OS. It has a really specific meaning in terms of kernels and. Vice drivers and things like that, but I think of it more as the operating environment or the way in which the mental models and the set of primitives that you interact with.
So on classic desktop computers, that’s things like copy paste, files, mouse cursor, maybe on Mac OS you have the menu bar at the top or on Windows, you have the start menu in the lower left, and then the web and the web browser has its own set of those core primitives that includes URL. includes something like the back and forward button, maybe something like tabs was a major interface innovation that came from the sort of Mozilla Firefox early days, and I see a similar thing for Muse as well, which is for Muse I see something similar, which is I in many ways envision Muse as kind of being a reinvention of the file browser, something like the Mac OSinder or even. stretching back to the DAS days, something like Norton Commander, the files, I think are this cornerstone primitive in how we interact with computers, particularly how professionals interact with computers, but in many ways they’ve kind of aged to the point and become very static in a way that they haven’t really made this jump to, for example, the mobile world very well. And a lot of the way we think about Muse, or at least I do, is as taking this set. Of things that typically are part of the operating system, essentially how you manage your digital stuff which is expressed as files on a file system, but bring that into a mobile touch, you know, more visual interface. What can we bring forward that works really well about files and then what are things that maybe we want to leave behind and embrace more modern elements that have been brought to us from, for example, the touch environment. So I’d love to hear what you see as being the areas your team is either currently working on or just most excited to innovate on in terms of the browser as a set of operating system primitives.
00:29:51 - Speaker 1: Sure. So we think about the answer to that question really is a series of observations, and really the observations that guided us wanting to start this company. Some of those observations include, if we looked at our Mac OS docs and we looked at the quote unquote local applications we use the most, obviously they were all internet-based, but they were also all built on Electron, which meant they were secretly just Chrome, which means we were running 7 versions of Chrome on our computer instead of just a single browser. So that was interesting.
00:30:20 - Speaker 2: And just for listeners that might not know it, Electron is kind of a container that lets you run a web application as if it was something native to Mac OS or Windows.
00:30:31 - Speaker 1: And it’s an incredible technology in the sense that as a budding group of developers, you get a ship a cross-platform application that feels native to the operating system without writing native code. And so grateful for Electron, we’ve prototyped an Electron. It’s a great technology.
But as you’re pointing out, we actually ran this early experiment where we launched the Notion app. We use Notion. I love Notion. The company runs on Notion, so this isn’t a criticism, but we launched the Notion Electron app, the local quote unquote Mac app, and then we built a prototype of our browser which was just the pure internet. There was zero browser Chrome, and we loaded Notion in that, and you put it side by side, and it’s almost indistinguishable which one is the Mac app and which one is the local app. That doesn’t suggest what we’re building, that doesn’t suggest how to make a better browser, but it just struck us as an observation as, huh, hmm, that doesn’t seem like it makes a ton of sense.
Another one is, if you think about Mac OS, you talk about the file system. A large reason operating systems exist is to help us manage our files, and that files mean more and more things, but all of our stuff.
I observed again. Just for me, I feel like I live in a post upload world. My files are all permalinks, random strings of characters that I enter in my web browser. I have Figma URLs, I’ve notion URLs, and so on and so forth. And so even from a file and folder perspective, I’m looking at my desktop right now. I got nothing but a conglomeration of screenshots that I wish would go away and I didn’t intend to be there. All of my files are in the browser. And so on and so forth. So I think, you know, I was a sociology major in college. I’m inspired to work on technology and software and interfaces, not because of the technology, but because of the people. And so I think as we just observed how people are already using their desktop computers and how they’re already using web browsers, it just invoked a series of questions and observations that, again, we’re trying to answer, we don’t have answers to yet. We may never answers to, but just struck us as almost cultural shifts in how we use technology that may just maybe may warrant a new browser interface that could look more like an operating system. But at the end of the day, my wife, my mom, my niece, I don’t think they care at all about the word operating system. And so we also think a lot about what are the metaphors or what’s the right way to talk about the scope of our work that is not just geared towards people on this podcast.
00:32:58 - Speaker 2: Could you give us a hint of some of the stuff you’re working on? I noted here on your recent tweet of comparing kind of a browser to a figma canvas. Obviously things of spatial zooming interfaces are of particular interest to me. I think again your colleague Nate there tweeted some short videos that he used at that. You want to speak to that or give us another example of what sort of things your team is doing to try to push the boundaries or to try to improve what a browser experiences for a power.
00:33:27 - Speaker 1: Sure, I think first and foremost, I’ll plug Nate Parrott, a designer on our team who, one of the things he does, which I love, is we share, I don’t want to call them failed experiments, but past experiments that we learned a lot from, but weren’t quite right.
00:33:42 - Speaker 2: The primary output was learning. Yes, exactly.
00:33:45 - Speaker 1: That’s what we talk about those. Exactly.
So if you’re curious, I think better than my terrible radio voice, I check out Nate’s Twitter account and he shared a series of these, and we’ll continue to share more.
I think that just building off of the canvas prototype that you reference, what Adam’s talking about is we prototyped a view of a web browser, which is, imagine all of your web pages or tabs, lay down, if you spread out a big white sheet of paper on the table or desk in front of you, and each 8.5 and 11 piece of paper that you plop down on it was a web page, what if that was your interface for navigating and interacting with the internet and your web browser? Because it was tweeted, it did not quite work, but I think, you know, one of the themes that that touches upon is an observation we made about the way we use web browsers is when the concept of a web browser was originally popularized 25 years ago. The internet was a document network. It primarily revolved around retrieving and finding and reading information.
00:34:45 - Speaker 2: Sure, well, I mean, it was invented by a physicist working at CERN that wanted a way to share his research with other researchers, right?
00:34:52 - Speaker 1: And it was wonderful.
And however, in 2020, I’m doing everything in my personal life in the web browser. I’m doing everything in my professional life in the web browser.
In my professional life, for example, that can mean focusing on a specific task and writing a long document and not wanting to be interrupted. It could be going on a rabbit hole late at night.
Probably some of the topics we’re talking about today. I’m gonna go Google them later, and 8 hours later, I’m gonna end up in some random Wikipedia link.
And given the breadth of parts of our Life we turned to the web browser for. And given even within those parts, the different modes or moments that we rely on the browser, it just seems silly that every incumbent browser was a one size fits all. The window never changes, the tab bar never changes. It’s all the same all the time, completely consistent and unchanging. Which could be correct, you know, the counterargument to this perspective is that there’s some solace or comfort in the fact that you know what it’s gonna look like.
Our view is, if you take the analogy to the real world, sometimes you want to read in your bedroom, sometimes you want to read in the living room, sometimes you wanna host a party in the dining room, depending on what You’re doing and what part of your life and the time of day and how you’re feeling, you might want different spaces.
And so what would that look like in the web browser if there was no Chrome whatsoever? What if there was nothing? It was just a pure web page.
What if you had 28 web pages tossed onto a table and you could move them around and see them spatially? What if there was a view to, you know, manipulate 13 at a time and take bulk actions and move things around and export them and I’m kind of making this up as I go along. I’m not suggesting that our final product or current product has all these things, but that’s an example of starting at the top level principle, how we end up going down, down, down to prototype that might be, what would FIMA look like if it was a web browser, for example.
But what about a use? I think you are tackling an equally broad and large surface area. So how are you? in recent days prioritizing what you work on.
00:36:51 - Speaker 2: It’s hard. My experience has always been if you’re working in a company you’re on a product that has a lot of possibility, it’s very fertile territory, and the biggest problem you have is in fact being pulled so many directions because there’s so many great things you could make, or as I think there’s a quote somewhere that’s great startups die of indigestion, not starvation. We definitely feel that in MS, there’s so many directions we want to go from new kinds of content type, video and tweets and lots of other things we have on our list, but there’s a whole other track that has to do with kind of collaboration and sharing, whole other track that maybe has to do with kind of programmability, whole other track that has to do with much more powerful kind of spatial manipulation and non-spatial manipulation, and it’s all really good and all potentially really valuable and You know, that’s even combined with the small things that users are asking for, at least once you, you know, are to the stage that we’ve been at for a little while now, if you have a pretty solid user base and they’re using it for real things in their daily life and there’s a steady stream of bug reports and small feature requests and things like that. So it’s tough to find the right thing and keep your focus, but you really do, especially with a small team, you know, we’re 5 people and don’t really plan to expand beyond that foreseeable future. It’s so critical.
To come together, consider all the options, but then pick a thing and say, we’re gonna do this for a little while because we think this is a really compelling space. We like to kind of time box that. We’re gonna spend 2 months going really deep on one theme, see how far we can get on that, and then step back and, and see what we’ve learned.
00:38:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s worth noting for us at least, as much as it’s fun to talk about these heady directions and observations, and it’s earnest and genuine.
At the same time, if my team was here, they would point out that some of our favorite features and honestly favorite themes of directions have come from very quote unquote uninspiring simple couple hour feature development that actually turned out to feel a lot better than we thought.
I’ll give you one tangible example. We multitask a lot in our browser, as I’m sure everyone on this podcast does, and we prototype the ability to click a tab and drag it and drop it on another tab and automatically create a split screen mode that you can move the dividing bar left and right and kind of adjust the view of the split screen. Drag and drop for split screen, not inspiring, no one’s gonna come work for us because of that. And it was fucking fantastic, and one of our most used features, cause guess what? What do people do today or some people do? They open a second window, they resize both windows and do this dance where you pull that corner up and that corner up and so it may not be part of a connection to architecture or anything that gets us really excited, but turns out it’s damn useful and the fact that it was that useful, even if it was that small, suggested a kind of direction to keep exploring. So I think it, it would be honest, most honest to also mention that it doesn’t always come top down from themes. Actually, I found more successfully it comes from tiny little features and extrapolating, like, why did that feel as good as it did? What does it suggest and you go that way?
00:39:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think the bottom up extraction of the pattern and that there is a bigger theme there that points to an underlying need that maybe you could double down on.
It’s not, hey, we just made a small random thing and it happened to work, maybe sometimes that’s it, but probably someone on the team followed a hunch or did something according to what they saw from user behavior. It worked out way better than expected, and then you can stop and reflect on why.
Why did this work so well? Why is a side by side of two tabs? Why is that? Key to how people use the web and what can we learn from that and maybe there is a bigger theme we can work up to from there.
00:40:30 - Speaker 3: It’s funny that you mentioned fluid multitasking. This is something that we’ve studied a lot in ink and Switch and Muse because our user research has shown that’s very important for the creative process.
It is an overwhelmingly common thing that you do. You have a few documents open, you want to read them and put them at the same time.
But notably, it’s still an unsolved problem on iOS.
You basically can’t really do good multitasking on the platform, even on the big i. Ads. You can sort of get these sort of split screens, but they’re not fluid and they’re really hard to bring in, and they kind of go away when you’re changing them and they come back. That’s also interesting because it, uh, it’s, it’s very much dictated by the platform. So on the web, or web-based platforms, it’s quite straightforward to add a horizontal split and to fluidly move it. It’s kind of built into the engine, whereas an iOS, as it is kind of a platform thing, and if you want to do it in a way that would incorporate multiple apps you need, basically the platform’s help. So it’s a different beasts.
00:41:16 - Speaker 1: Operating systems rearing in their head.
Yeah. One thing I’d love to get your guys’ advice on, uh, since I have you here, is we had an experience recently where we prototyped direction that we were super excited about, didn’t work, clearly didn’t work. There’s some things about it that we liked, but all in all, considered it uh let’s move on.
Couple months later came back and had this inkling that maybe some things had changed in our product that might suggest this feature would work again.
Tried it again, and I think specifically took it to a much higher fidelity than we had previously, and all of a sudden, I think it’s the coolest thing we’ve built so far, not to tease too much, but the larger question is, as a team that experiments widely and quickly and iteratively and is not afraid to take the research process, which means tossing stuff out.
Any tips for how do you know when it didn’t work because it’s not gonna work, and it didn’t work because you didn’t take it far enough to master the fine details that as we know from our favorite software products truly matter.
It’s just this experience, which was an accident, and again, I don’t think we did well. Makes me wonder what else we’ve missed just because we didn’t take the extra week to do that extra design polish or animation or rev on a slightly different iteration that we were so close, but we gave up because we took the wrong conclusion. I know these are very broad questions and so, you know, maybe there’s a specific example that comes to mind, but I think that’s the risk of being a team that doesn’t take to high fidelity and to user ready production code with every iteration is that some really great ideas need that in order to work.
00:42:56 - Speaker 2: Also a really tough one. I think it is largely an act of judgment or even taste, probably something you develop with experience over time, but yeah, I’ve been in that exact position many, many times and Yeah, maybe people point to that. I can think of high profile examples on that.
This is more the product level than the prototyping level, but maybe it’s a larger scale version of the same thing. Why is it that Slack was this breakout success when we already had hip chat and campfire, and most people would just say Slack was just nicer, it was just better executed. They just took it a bit further and Really put that extra polish on it. And you could point to some features or whatever, but it just had this higher degree of craftspersonship, maybe more love put into it, more attention to the user experience. It turned out group chat is this incredibly useful and central thing for many and most teams. Yeah, Slack just kind of broke through that boundary.
Another one for me that’s like that is back when I was first living in San Francisco and realized pretty quickly that a car, private car ownership was not the way to get around, but public transit was weak and whatever else, and I eventually realized taxis are a pretty good way to go when you need to get across town, but it was really hard to call one and I thought, why doesn’t someone have an app to do this? Why can’t I just press a button and summon a car to my house and I can use the GPS on my phone to know where I am. And then I was delighted when I came across someone actually in the Ruby community who was building this exact thing.
I think it was called Taxi Magic, and they hooked into the dispatch system and they would summon a taxi for you. And they even had a little map that tracked where it was. And I used it for a good while because I really wanted this product to exist, and I really believed in it and they did pretty well, but ultimately it was just kind of not a great experience and the taxi would get lost and it would take a long time or the address wouldn’t be right. And so I tried to stick with it. Then Uber comes along and they just nailed the experience completely, partially because they weren’t using the dispatch system. And that was for me and clearly lots of other people, this revelatory moment of like, wow, it turns out calling a ride from your phone is really, really great, but they didn’t execute far enough or they didn’t take it far enough to find that out.
00:45:03 - Speaker 1: One example for me that I’ve been thinking about recently is I had this moment with superhuman. I’m not sure what listeners think about superhuman, but I have found it to be a better email experience for me, putting aside the cost.
I work in email in an unfortunate amount, so I probably am more attuned to the little details and bells and whistles, but I was just floored by how fast I felt, how productive I felt using it, and my colleague turned to me and enumerated how every feature I was describing has been in Gmail for like a decade or something.
And somehow superhuman tied it together in a way, I don’t know if this was marketing, if this was design polish, if it was interaction design, if it was, I mean, who knows, but I think it’s another great example I’ve been thinking about of it’s not just about building the correct features, it’s tying them together in a way and with a level of polish that I don’t know, has that special quality to it.
And so it’s one thing to think about a production email client that you’re charging $30 a month for, but how do you know which need that extra level of polish in order to kind of break through and which things like there’s some features we’ve built where it’s, this is just so damn broken that it could be ugly, and People would flock to it.
And I think those are some of our most favorite beloved products were ones where you see V1, you’re like, that was the first version of Acme Co. but it turned out itself such an acute need that we didn’t need that last mile. But I think superhuman relative to Gmail is an example of where, like, wow, Gmail had it. I guess they’re doing fine. We shouldn’t feel too bad for Gmail, but at least at a personal level was a snooze is not new, it turns out.
00:46:45 - Speaker 2: Another piece of your anecdote about building something, not working, setting it down and coming back later, and then finding it does work. That’s something I’ve experienced a lot in my career.
00:46:57 - Speaker 3: Adam, isn’t this one of your Hiroku rules?
00:46:59 - Speaker 2: Uh, could be. I have to look it up. Yeah, certainly we talked there about throwing things away and that sort of thing, but timings, timings. That’s what it is.
00:47:09 - Speaker 1: Speaking of timing matters, yeah, I’ve been really curious at a personal level, and I think this applies to you, Mark.
How the both of you ended up trying to innovate on interfaces when previously working on a company like Hiroku or I believe Mark, you were at Stripe previously among other jobs.
Not that those products did not have great interfaces, but I assume the podcast about why Hiroku worked or Stripe worked would probably be a different number of topics than the ones we’re discussing today. So I find it really fascinating and interesting that both of you have gravitated towards Muse and the interface challenges you’re working on. Curious to hear what, if anything changed, if I’m thinking about it the wrong way, if, you know, how did you two get here from where you were before?
00:47:52 - Speaker 3: Well, there is more in common than you might think. So those are all basically tools, and there’s a lot of generalized tool thinking that goes into all three of those companies, I think, as well as obviously, you know, building software companies.
But yeah, then in terms of timing for me, I mean, a lot of it was, I had fully experienced the world of enterprise, and there’s a lot of great stuff there. And obviously it was how I started my career.
To be really honest, I just wasn’t thrilled about looking at Gmail and Google Docs for the rest of my professional career. I just couldn’t see myself being really excited. About it.
And at the same time, Adam and team were working on ink and Switch, where they had kind of the other piece of that puzzle. They saw this opportunity for developing software that’s about enabling people’s creative potential. And that really resonated with where I was at the time. And then of course, I loved working with Adam before at Hooku and I definitely want to do it again.
00:48:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like there is a pretty strong connection to, yeah, work you did at Stripe around say APIs as well as at Hiroku. Speaking for myself, I certainly have gotten from a lot of folks that it feels like a non sequitur to go from cloud developer tools to call a productivity iPad app.
And there is obviously some big jumps to make there. There was a lot of education I had to give myself. In order to learn about building apps on a mobile platform by comparison to the web stack that I spent a lot of my life on.
But to me, there is a really a through line and a connection, which is it is about tools and enable people’s creativity and productivity, and that just gives me a thrill. And I would say at Hiroku, a huge part of that was the interface. We had to build a lot of infrastructure. Make the interface that we wanted, but I knew that I wanted this idea of servers and configuration files as being the main way that I get my software in front of my users and needing to go fucks with those every single time I want to ship a change to them didn’t feel like the right interface anymore. So I think of Haruku as primarily a whole other interface, and that of course also led us down this path of command line tool. And this kind of term developer experience, which I don’t know if we invented that, but I think we had a lot to do with popularizing it, which is the idea of, OK, just because you’re building an API or a command line, those things are very technical tools and very technical interfaces, but you can still bring the user experience design ethos that I think at the time, now we’re talking 15 years. Back was kind of on the rise with maybe more consumer products, but then you can take that same thing and say, well, developers are people too. They like nice experiences. They like tools that are easy to understand and use that serve their needs well, and they like different kinds of experiences, text-based experiences and keyboard-based experiences, and they’re comfortable learning technical things that maybe a lot of more non-engineer users would not be comfortable learning, but You can bring those same principles to bear there. So I think of Haruku very much as an innovating on interfaces and the tools for Creative people company, and then Inkot Switch was a research lab that worked on those things as well, and now Muse is, it happens to be on this other platform and have this other kind of business model, maybe even a different kind of target user, but fundamentally there is that through line that ties it all together.
00:51:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and back to timing. I didn’t understand this when I first started working with Adam and team at the lab, but it was definitely a big influence in deciding to go off and do Muse.
Muse is really riding a particular technology curve.
So if you look at what has happened and especially consumer and gaming, which drives a lot of the individual level of technology that we see today, you could basically plot the size, density, refresh rate, and responsiveness of touch screens over time. And if you Kind of draw those dots out a few years, you see something like, we should have a kind of small desk size touch screen that exists, and it’s quite good. And in that world, what is the software that powers it? And it definitely wasn’t a big phone. It wasn’t a desktop transliterated onto that thing. And I wasn’t convinced it was the iPad is currently existed then several years ago. I felt like you needed something quite different, and we saw a particular timing opportunity with Muse to go and try to build that.
00:51:59 - Speaker 1: I think there’s also something interesting about, I love the way you talk about both of your stories is actually there being a through line, and they’re not so different as portrayed. And I also think there’s something interesting about the merging of worlds and perspectives.
It’s one thing we’ve thought a lot about because if you had told me I was going to work on a desktop web browser in 2020, 5 years ago, I would have laughed at you.
And actually, quite frankly, the origin story was the browser company was supposed to be a web browser for work specifically and an enterpriseas tool, and I actually gave the idea to my now co-founder and former co-founder Hirsch, and I said, I think it’s really boring, but I think it’s a great idea. You should go work on it. I’ll fund you. And that was the original intention.
And then as I started collaborating with him from that original relationship, I realized that the web browser was one of the only pieces of software that is in the middle of the Venn diagram of tools and apps that my mom uses, my little niece uses, I use. The web browser is.
Almost the most consumer tool out there. And I hadn’t really thought about it that way before. And, you know, we’ve hired people from Instagram and Snapchat and take a very consumer lens.
So I think what you would say, our desktop web browser, we probably rely on more for work and getting things done than fun time on a Sunday these days. So anyways, I just think there’s something interesting in both of your stories and how you arrived at Muse and what you did before, as well as kind of how we think about the browser company, which maybe some of the more interesting interfaces we’ll find out, arrived from multidisciplinary teams that bring the intersection of different experiences that others may see as not compatible or different, but actually there’s an interesting through line, as you said, Mark, that ties them together in some way.
00:53:42 - Speaker 2: Josh, do you feel like there’s a theme or a narrative arc in your career, you know, going from social media space to government to now reinventing the browser?
00:53:54 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely the sociology major in me.
I was a pretty poor student, so I wouldn’t say I’m a good sociology major, but I’m a people person.
I literally was sitting back 90 seconds ago thinking, man, the internet is so fucking cool that I met you guys through the internet, reached out cold.
We’re now having a podcast, having a topic about something that I would love to geek out more, but I don’t feel like I have an outlet to do it.
And so what drew me to technology is like this podcast is happening right now and how cool is that? And I think I am driven by people and what we do and what we do together, and That’s what drew me to, you know, I also did urban studies and urban planning in college. I just like the meeting places of people and the ways in which we come together, and I think the internet’s one example of that. Public policy and our government’s one example of that, and the civic Commons, a web browser is one of those things, and so I think that’s the through line for me personally.
I mean, I’ll tell you a quick story about the way I even got into technology. I was interning for my senator. I did random internships. Definitely never thought about technology. And then a professor from Harvard came to guest lecturer named Robert Putnam, and he wrote a book called Bowling Alone. And Bowling Alone is about social capital, and the decline of social capital and these kind of meeting points in the real world where you bump into your neighbors and fellow citizens, and what that is doing for society. And I was just floored by it. And I went up to him after and I said, Hey, Professor Put. I’m Josh. What should I do with my life? And he sort of said, I don’t know you and I have no idea, but if you liked my book in this lecture, there’s this entrepreneur in New York who started a company after he read my book and he was inspired too, so you could go work for him. And that company was Meetup and that entrepreneur was Scott Heiferman, and I went to intern at Meet Up, and the first day at Meetupp, I went to an all hands, and Scott got up on stage and gave this impassioned lecture about the internet was bringing us together and we were turning away from banks with Kickstarter and it was bringing us together and we were turning away from universities and it was a little idealistic, and I’m not sure it played out exactly right, but it was damn inspiring. And I, he took me to an event called the New York Tech Meetup, which, man, 8 years ago was a bunch of people in their 20s, mostly getting on stage and being like, I built this for fun, check it out. And there was no anything other than that enthusiasm, and so I think for me personally, it’s even the way I arrived the technology was through meeting spaces like meet up and meetups and yeah, for me the through line is people and what we do together and I think This podcast is a great example of that of how we got here.
00:56:40 - Speaker 2: I actually like that so much. I almost feel like that should be our closer, but I wanted to ask what other major topics we should make sure we don’t uh leave off.
00:56:49 - Speaker 3: One thing I wanted to be sure we touched on was the topic of scripting and extensions. So we’ve long been interested in the ink and Switch lab with this topic of end user programming, people customizing their own computing, things like that. And there’s also this great history in the browser of web extensions, Greasemonkey, people fiddling with everything, and that seems like it could be up your alley, Josh. I’m curious if that’s something you and the team have thought about.
00:57:13 - Speaker 1: This topic gets me so excited, unreasonably excited, so I’ll try and keep it short. I had this formative moment where, again, I’m a sociology major and so I’m not the most technical person in the world, but I remember one of the first times I used the inspector in Chrome, and I realized I could delete that damn annoying Twitter sidebar with all the trending like I can delete it. I can edit the internet like I can make it, I can make that go away. That’s a thing I can do.
And it was this moment where if you’re an engineer, you know that, but as a plebeian over here, I have been taught since day one, more or less that I live within the spaces that people create for me, and I’m beholden to their buttons and to their flows. And so at a personal emotional level, that was like wow.
Now obviously there are a lot of things that web apps like Twitter and Facebook do to make that very hard, but I think the concept of Greasemonkey and user programming, whatever you want to call it, fascinating. I think I would take it up one level though.
And I think we think about in terms of agency, which if you go back to the metaphor analogy to physical spaces, and you think of the web browser in 2020 is almost our digital home because of the time we spend in it, we all live in the same home that basically looks the same.
At best, we live in prefab houses where you can pick like one of 5 variations and you get one of 3 countertops.
That doesn’t feel very human. That doesn’t feel like it acknowledges the unique personalities and spirit and needs of every individual in the world. And so we think a lot about how do you give agency back to people.
Scripting is one way to do it. It can also be somewhat exclusionary. I think there are tons of avenues you can go down to give people agency.
But we think about if this is your web browser, this is your operating system, this is your home on the internet. How do you feel agency over it in the same way you feel agency over, I like the little lamps that I’m looking at behind you, Mark, like you got a spirit and style and agency over that room, you should have that over your computing tools as well.
00:59:11 - Speaker 3: We’ve thought about this scripting and extensibility question quite a bit in the lab, and honestly, we found it pretty gnarly because there are several things you probably want in a system.
You want the system to give the user agency, as you said, but you also want it to be pretty fast so that you can have high performing, high quality software. You want it to be secure so that the users aren’t getting their data or systems compromised, and you also probably want some amount of consistency across the platform so people can develop for it in some coherent way.
And there’s a bunch of existing systems, but they tend to compromise on one factor or another. So for example, Unix is scriptable with C, but it’s a total, you know, wild west on the security front. And the web is scriptable with JavaScript to some extent, but that has performance challenges. iOS takes away the agency leg, but gives you all the other things. And so we haven’t found a good way to get all these at the same time. So I’m wondering if that’s a problem you’ve grappled with in the context of giving users agency in the browser.
01:00:07 - Speaker 1: You have to grapple with it. I’m not sure we have a great answer yet, but I would say one of the ways we think about the browser in general is trying to come from somewhat humble perspective of we’re not the end all be all.
Our goal is to not build the only and the best browser for everyone. And if anything, our theory is that actually what’s missing from the browser landscape is that all the browsers look the same, and they all do the same things, and there’s very little variation.
But the internet is such a diverse place in terms of the people and needs and all of the above, that we need more diversity in our browser tools and capabilities. And so I guess what I would say is in this theme, I think what exists is tools that are more restrictive today, and they’re for a good reason often, right? So I don’t think there’s nefarious at tent. I think it’s often the name of the things you’re talking about, especially in Chrome, keeping you secure, speed, exactly what you said. To us, I think what’s missing is further down the agency side. Now they’re trade-offs, as you say, security, performance, etc.
However, I think one of our philosophies is, if you are transparent and you’re communicative, trust people to make the best decisions for themselves, right? So if we tell you, hey, be careful in this regard, or just so you know, this is gonna happen, giving people the option, I mean, that’s what agency is. The whole theory of agency is that you should have control over which set of trade-offs you care about.
Now, I don’t think this can apply across an entire. Your browser product. I think you definitely want performance, you definitely want security. You definitely want consistency and interface. And so I think even if you believe in agency and you believe what’s missing from our software tools, especially in the browser space, is giving more agency at the risk of security at moments or privacy moments. I think they’re natural limits, but I think it’s all about being forthright and transparent about the trade-offs and giving people the option to decide which tools they use and when. Again, I know it’s very broad, but I think again going back to the like, I want to delete the Twitter sidebar, is that gonna break every few weeks with certain Twitter release cycles? Yeah, why don’t you let me know that, and maybe I can fix it if it’s so valuable for me, versus what I think most people say is, man, we can’t perfect it. It can’t be a delightful, perfect experience and thus we’re not gonna build it. Who are you to decide what I need and what I want? Now, I think that’s where the chrome extension landscape comes in and serves this need another way. But I think what’s missing right now is tools that push the agency side more. And I think one example of this, it’s only slightly further, and it’s not what you’re talking about, is notion. And I think it’s still far in the spectrum of lockdown control, not a ton of agency. Anything’s a page. Put pages within pages. Put whatever you want in a page. It’s like, it feels so freeing in a way that, as you know, notions actually not that free, but almost felt revelatory to use where it’s like. Yeah, you know what? Fuck this layout. You know, I wanna put a database in there. Like, let me put a database in there. Like that’s really cool. And I don’t care if everyone wants to use it. And I’m sure Air Table’s a better equivalent of that specific block, but maybe people don’t want the best database ever. They just want a database on this page. Let them do it. So, I don’t know. The risks, and I would love to hear your skepticism about that or pushback or things that you would encourage us to think about as we kind of go down that route or explore that route further.
01:03:29 - Speaker 2: I certainly think that the tradeoff element and let users decide, even letting users decide what trade-offs they want to make is a trade-off, and I think this is something that is part of the discussion, particularly in the tech world now, because you do have folks maybe that have been in computers a longer time, someone like me that grew up with them, we’re used to this great deal of agency because the whole thing had this very DIY sense to it, and computing tools have gone so much more mainstream. And now the things that make them more accessible is taking some of those choices away from people. So when you get the lockdown phone, whether it’s iOS or even Android has very aggressive sandboxing and sort of the mobile operating systems are very, very limiting on that agency side by comparison to classic desktop computers, and that’s really a feature because the average person that’s using a smartphone for the first time or even just in their daily life, that doesn’t have the Time and desire to invest in learning all the things about the trade-offs they will get if they can, you know, run arbitrary scripts, for example, it’s actually better for them, or at least the market seems to indicate that it is better for them to be able to get this lockdown device that doesn’t allow them choices. Then there are people who do computing things for a living or want to invest that time or they have needs because they’re power users and they need powerful tools and they need to customize those. for their needs, for their work or for whatever needs they have, and then they’re annoyed and frustrated at the feeling of being dumbed down for the sake of security and walled garden stuff and even something like performance. So I think that’s, yeah, the trade-off can be in the choice for a trade off as well.
01:05:09 - Speaker 1: One idea that we briefly considered and I’ve since tossed, but I’d love to get both of your feedback on because it relates to this is. What would it have looked like if we built a browser that was more of a platform that let anyone make their own browser, and not anyone make their own browser in terms of my mom, but a lot of the work we’re doing, we have an infrastructure engineering team.
My first startup did not have an infrastructure engineering team. There’s a lot of work we’re doing to allow ourselves internally to innovate on the browser and on the interface level. What should tabs look like? Should there be tabs? Where should they go? What color should it be? And we’re gonna make a series of opinionated decisions. Some of those opinionated decisions may involve giving users agency over the decision and the output, but it’s still an opinion. What would it look like to almost offer a browser as an infrastructure platform or service where you can make a new browser, you can make a Slack browser, and we’ve abstracted all the complexity, so you gotta make your ideal browser, make a brows.
Those are for architects, go for it. Who cares if 10,000 people use it? It makes you happy and that’s enough for you to make a small business.
I’m obviously sharing this level of detail because we decided it’s not in the spirit of what we want to do. But I’m curious, do you think that that’s a good idea? Should we be an API driven company and we’re striped for web browsers and let the web browsers flourish and the browser for everyone and all the colors and all the shapes, or is that a step too far in terms of agency?
01:06:31 - Speaker 3: No, I mean that kind of circles back to my original question, right? So there are two ways you can think about how you get more stuff on all these axes.
One is you can make different trade-offs. So you can choose 7 on performance, but only 2 on security or vice versa, depending on what you want. And it’s good to have different people choosing different things. But there’s also a sort of production possibilities frontier to borrow a term from economics where, given the technology that we Have broadly defined.
There’s only so far extreme that you can go in all different directions at one time.
That’s kind of what I was alluding to is if you really want to go high on performance, you have to compromise something else right now, for example. But you can develop new technologies.
So, for example, rust gives you basically all the expressivity of C and all the performance of C, but it’s much more secure. And that Required a big technological investment because before you had to make some trade-off there if you want to get see like performance with safety and to use, you know, for example, a higher level programming language that was much slower.
So what I think we need in addition to all these experiments with picking different points in the space is something that actually expands the space.
So you’ve described it as one way, as a platform for writing a new web browser, but you could also say in the same way that, you know, a web browser is. of analogous to an OS, you can write an OS that gives you an expanded frontier or a new programming language or a new runtime. You know, they’re all kind of variants in the same theme of technology that gives you a, a bigger expanse of space to choose from. And I think that’s a really important research project. I’d love for us to do something like that in a lab or to help someone do it independently.
I think it’s a really important problem.
01:07:57 - Speaker 1: In and Switch browser collaboration. You heard it here first. Muse browser coming 2022.
01:08:04 - Speaker 2: Well, if any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at museapp.com via email. We always like to hear your comments and your ideas for future episodes. Thanks for coming on to talk browsers with us. Josh seems an area of mutual interest. I suspect we could fill at least another episode on interfaces and operating systems and browsers and more importantly, the people, which is frankly why we’re doing it all.
01:08:31 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me and just like I met you as a stranger on the internet, you’re to meet all of your listeners at some point too, so thanks for having me.
01:08:39 - Speaker 2: All right, see you guys later.
01:08:41 - Speaker 3: See you, Adam.
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I cannot overemphasize the first run experience, that’s when you have the most energy and the most enthusiasm and momentum coming from the user.
00:00:14 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, and I’m here today with my colleague Julia Rogats.
00:00:28 - Speaker 3: Hi, Adam, nice to be back.
00:00:30 - Speaker 2: And a guest, Jane Portman of User List.
00:00:33 - Speaker 1: Hi, Adam. Hi Julia.
00:00:34 - Speaker 2: And Jane, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background and what you’re working on at user list.
00:00:39 - Speaker 1: Well, thanks for having me today. My pleasure to share a little story. User list is a tool for sending activation on boarding, life cycle, email and other kinds of messages to Sassy. Users, so we work specifically with SASS founders and provide great tools for them to run their SAS companies. And uh user onboarding that we have as a topic today is so hard for us because that’s like the primary application for our tools. So we’re sort of on a mission to try and help founders establish their better onboarding practices.
00:01:13 - Speaker 2: And just because I always like to unpack abbreviation, SAS stands for software as a service, so this typically would be web applications, often ones that are sold to businesses rather than either consumer applications or mobile apps or iOS apps such as Ms. Yes, that’s correct. What was your journey? What brought you to be passionate about this area or be working on this particular company?
00:01:38 - Speaker 1: So if we go back in time a little bit, this is my 2nd SAS product and I’m running this one together with my amazing technical co-founder, Benedict Die. He’s a real engineering wizard, like I would never pursue this conflict of a product without him.
When I was doing my first product, which was a little productivity app that didn’t go anywhere because it was not as crucial to the business, it didn’t like have a major mission, it didn’t have a good audience, and also while I was running it, there was no great tool that I could use for life cycle messaging, for user onboarding, etc. except for Intercom. Which back then wasn’t even pretty, to be honest, so it was super expensive, not very attractive, and it was not targeting small founders like myself.
So a couple years later, It was pretty obvious what to build because I was very sure that Sa founders need help in that area and I recruited two more people, Benedict and we had a marketing co-founder, Claire Suentrop. She later on decided to stay as an advisor.
She works on a popular marketing project, Forget the Funnel and Elevate these days. So that’s the story of fuselist and before that, I’m a UIUX consultant by trade. For the last 8 years, I’ve been working online with international clients and running my personal brand, UI Breakfast, and I also do UI Breakfast podcast, which is a nice design show. So that’s been out for a while as well.
00:03:08 - Speaker 2: And notably, we’ll have a crossover episode there. Mark, Mark’s going on with you at some point.
00:03:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m so excited to have him soon. So that show is sort of catering to my design interest and user list is something that we’re all passionate about is helping fellow founders pursuing that like bootstrapper dreams, slow and steady, kind of not funded, but self-funded growth.
00:03:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, having the pain yourself, that is having previously done a business and see where this is needed, that’s certainly one of the best ways to drive you to create a great product, I think.
And you already kind of teed up our topic here, which is on boarding. You actually suggested this one, but it ended up being serendipitously apropos because Yuli was actually deep in the project at the time.
We’ve, we’ve since released it, but deep in the project of redoing our onboarding, which we’ve done several times and is a challenge for various reasons we’ll get into later on. But before we do that, let’s start with the fundamentals. Can you tell us what is on boarding and why does it matter?
00:04:11 - Speaker 1: Well, firsthand congrats on your recent launch. That’s a big one.
Also very exciting. Well, going back to user onboarding, that’s the process that software people use to receiving value from their product. And this can mean different things in people’s heads because we often associate this with like tool tips or guided tours, so very like specific interventions, but it should. be perceived as a more abstract thing, sort of a larger situation in life that the person is in and how you can help them using different kinds of tools, interventions and no little things to achieve value using your product and your product plays a little role there because they usually don’t strive to be good users of your product, but they’re striving for achieving something else which is much, much bigger and important for them.
00:05:00 - Speaker 2: You wrote this piece that we referenced a little bit titled Inspire, not Instruct that focuses more on the helping people understand what I usually talk about the aha moment or the understanding how something can fit into their life or help them in some way or solve their problem rather than the nuts and bolts minutia of how exactly do I use this.
00:05:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s kind of meta because user list is a tool for user on boarding, but it’s also quite a big challenge for us to onboard our own users.
Once one of our users uh wrote back and said that they loved what they saw inside the app on the first run experience, and basically what we have is a single welcome video that does have not a single instructions inside it.
And our goal is to sort of set up the tone and then we just rely on their own skills to continue with the journey, because different software applications have different levels of complexity and ours is definitely not on the easier side of the spectrum. It has a lot of elements for the user to become successful, they have to complete the integration, they have to actually write the emails. Of course we do have like templates and everything else we can, but. You can take the horse to water, but you can’t make them drink if they’re not inspired, so we really strive for this inspiration component more than trying to like instruct them, um, towards performing certain steps.
00:06:23 - Speaker 2: And I suspect there’s particular challenges when you get into B2B, as they call it business to business stuff, as well as very technical products.
We ran into that with Hiroku and it’d be interesting to compare that to the maybe the mobile app world a little bit later on, but you know I was curious to get your take on onboarding here.
And again, this has some nice historical touch points for us.
And that we met at a company called Clue, a reproductive health tracker, and while we were both there, you were leading a project to build the out of box experience or the UI, it’s kind of the cute acronym there, which you said maybe UB and onboarding aren’t quite the same thing, but in any case, I’d love to hear how you think about this now being a veteran of having built multiple first run experiences for apps.
00:07:08 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. The way that I understand the UBI or the out of box experience is basically The way that the user sets up a piece of software, in many cases, this is, you know, if you’re installing something first, this would be part of the UBI. If we remember like for Windows users, I think this is still a thing where you have to double click on a thing and then you get the dialogue, where do you want to install the tool. So this would all be part of an Ubi. Obviously, in the app world, you just download an app from the app store and then you open it, and then what happens in those first couple of minutes, I would say, is the out of box experience. And so in the example of clue, there was actually different guided steps to make you see the app with some initial data, so it would ask you how old you were. If you remember when your last period was, if you know roughly how long your period is, and based on the data that you input there, you will then end up at basically the app’s main screen that already has a little bit of data filled in. So this was both a way to kind of get to know the user and get information from them that are relevant for the app to work correctly and also avoid then bringing them to an empty start screen, basically, because if you have an app that’s fundamentally about data input, The first thing that you see being an empty screen is kind of uninspiring, of course. And so to compare this with the new experience, I think what we’re trying to do with the onboarding here is to both inspire them to realize what the product is about and how it could fit into their lives, but then obviously also teach them how the app works and Muse, as we all know, is kind of a, a pro tool that does things quite differently from other apps. So some of the gestures are fairly hard to discover on their own, which is I think why it is important to teach the user a little bit on how to use the app without overwhelming them with too many things all at once. But at the same time also show them a little bit of content, motivate them to get some of their own content in. And so based on all of these incentives, we we’ve tried to put together a little on boarding, which I think we will get into this later. That hopefully brings all of these components together.
00:09:23 - Speaker 1: I’m super curious to hear what you decided on that because you have so many hidden things in news and um that really requires some instructions. So what is the form and shape that you decided to go with?
00:09:36 - Speaker 3: Well, we’ve historically been through a couple different steps here. I think the very first version when we were still in beta was basically just an empty board with 2 or 3 cards on them, and one of them, I think was a pretty long text describing what news is about. And obviously that was neither teaching the user anything nor being particularly inspiring because the last thing that people want to do. When they first opened an app is read a huge block of text. So that was discarded fairly soon.
00:10:03 - Speaker 2: In our defense, I’ll jump in and say that the earliest onboarding was actually that we didn’t let anyone try the app unless one of us was sitting right there to help them.
Onboarding was what you might call white glove or high touch, which often goes with, yeah, high-end kind of enterprise sales type products, but also I don’t know, maybe someone like superhuman has kind of popularized this a little bit, at least in the tech world’s imagination.
But yeah, we would just sit there either in person in some cases or over video chat and either first give them a demo, try to show them what they can do with it once they get better at it, but then once they’re in it, kind of direct them around a little bit and then, you know, that obviously wasn’t very scalable, but it was a good place to start where we combined the usability test with a user interview with an onboarding was kind of all one thing that was just done completely outside the software.
00:10:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s right.
So I think the thing that we did after this was to focus more on the inspiring part, so to really show people what you could do with Muse, what a muse board looks like when it’s filled with rich types of content. So we actually had a fairly extensive bundle of like pre-made onboarding content. I think it was one main board and then maybe 5 other different boards and different topics inside there.
With some, you know, hand drawings or sketches on there, different types of links, PDFs, basically every content type that’s supported in use was in there, but there was no instruction at all on how to use the app.
So people were kind of left to just explore on their own, which I think worked well in some regards, but I think one thing we also learned there is to just throw a bunch of random content at the user. Without any context on why this is important or why they would care about it seemed a little bit weird to users as well.
Like they come in wanting to do a certain thing and if they then find a board that outlines, you know, notes on a book that someone wants to write that maybe doesn’t align at all with what they’re interested in.
And so where we went from there, I think it was to try a little bit more of a learning the muse interactions based on a stack of cards that was in your inbox, like right when you launched the app, that was basically just a blank board and I think something like 12 or 15 cards that are arranged in a little stack in your inbox.
This is where your content lands when you bring anything into Muse. And that definitely had a little bit of a threshold for users in terms of figuring out what to do with that stack of cards. I think for some people, and even if I remember correctly during one of the app reviews, this was actually reported as a bug, like there’s a bunch of cards or like a bunch of little things hanging off the side of the screen, and we don’t know what to do with it.
00:12:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, in the ideal world it was sort of. And they would tempt the user to grab it and drag it out and it’s a way to kind of draw you into that interaction without explicitly saying it. And I think that did work in a lot of cases. I ran some usability tests where I saw people be kind of puzzled what’s going on with these things on the side, and when they pull it out, they have kind of an aha moment and a sense of delight at having kind of figured something out, but just as often as not, it was uh what’s going on here, this app looks broken.
00:13:21 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I, I definitely think the moment of like when you do figure out what to do with it and then you realize, OK, you can drag these things around. There are a couple, just, you know, I, I think it was like a gardening project, so we had like a set of cards that had some inspiring images, and then a little bit of text explaining what Muse is and what you can do with it. It also pointed you to a little panel that you can open from the main menu that we call it, I think just a learn panel.
That had some of the main interactions of the app explained just with some icons, and it seems like most people figured out how to use that and then notably a while later we actually introduced our handbook, I think there was an entire podcast episode on this, but we really went through lengths of recording videos of basically every interaction and everything that you can do inside the app. And put it on a website. So linking to this also from the main app helps. So if people really get stuck or they’re curious to learn more or to figure out how everything works, they can go and look at the handbook.
Basically, the new onboarding that we designed based on the pain points that we saw with the random stack of cards in the inbox is a bit of a combination of everything we did before, combined with like a quest-based system. So our main incentive here was to motivate users to figure out the app while Using the app without necessarily forcing them to do something in a certain order, or I think we all know these types of onboarding tutorials where you first open an app and they, they really don’t let you do anything but click on the thing where the error points and you feel a little bit like a child that is taken through like an obstacle course and There’s basically no freedom to just explore on your own.
00:15:08 - Speaker 2: Jane, I think your article talks about this, right, like the tool tips and the guided tours and basically says that stuff doesn’t work.
00:15:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and also there is this famous person in the industry of user and boarding, Samuel Heli, and he wrote a book that I’ve read like ages ago, that was kind of laid the foundations for my own thinking and we recently had a conversation with Samuel and yes, he confirms like up to date. This does not really produce great results because everybody wants to have an autonomous experience. They want to explore things on their own at their own pace, while tool tips like enforce working within the UI at some predefined scenario, and this is just not a great practice.
00:15:50 - Speaker 2: Just as an aside, it must be fun to to read a book that had a big impact on your career and what you’re working on and then get to interview the author later on.
00:15:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and we’ve been friends with Samuel for many years as well, so we have this kind of multifaceted relationship, uh, him influencing my thinking because he’s the UX consultant who only does onboarding for the last decade or so. It’s interesting how life has unfolded that these days we’re also establishing ourselves as an authority and user on boarding because we have a tool for it. And like, I don’t want to personally compete with Samuel’s thinking by any means, and neither do I want to reproduce his ideas, but it’s so amazing to be thinking in the same direction, sort of.
00:16:33 - Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, well, give me the link to that book, as well as the episode after and I’ll put it in the show notes for the.
00:16:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, he’s been super famous for these onboarding tear downs, and he has plenty of mobile experiences as well. So we just do web apps and he does all those consumer apps that have interesting first run experiences for end users.
00:16:55 - Speaker 2: Now Yuli, I think you’re about to start talking about how we landed on the onboarding we have now, maybe called the quest style. I’ll use this opportunity to tell a little anecdote from my own history, which is that many years ago I worked on this kind of a side project, some online multiplayer games.
It kind of early days of the internet in the 90s and ended up doing an onboarding. I wouldn’t have called it that then. I didn’t know that term, but that first run experience to help someone learn the game.
And the one I was inspired by was, or there was another game similar kind of one of these kind of D&D style online multiplayer games. And in this particular game, you had a magic sword that you started out with when you began the game. And I thought it was very clever because the sword would just talk to you and tell you what it thought you should do. So it would say, OK, maybe you should go over here now, maybe you should try talking to this person. Maybe you should pick up this object and we kind of take you through a bit of a, of a sort of a step by step tutorial. But the great thing was it was just saying that you could do whatever you wanted and you could just ignore it. And in fact, if you got annoyed and tired of it talking, you could just drop the sword and walk off. and basically just throw it away. So it was a really nice way to both give that guidance for someone that wants it, but then not. Take away in any way the user’s sense of agency or freedom.
00:18:13 - Speaker 3: Nice. I think that reminds me a little bit of the little animated paperclip character in early versions of Microsoft Word. I don’t know if they still do this, but I have a very strong memories of like my young teenage years having this little paper clip set off to the side and telling me things that in most cases, I didn’t really want to know. But sometimes also just helpful tool tips, but I think you also could, if you get an out, you could just remove it completely from your view, I think.
00:18:40 - Speaker 2: Well, notably there, I believe this fellow’s name is Clippy and has become a punching bag for sort of dumbing down professional products in the software industry. So while on one hand, I think maybe had some good intentions in many ways represents for a lot of people what’s actually wrong with tutorials and software on boarding.
00:19:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree.
00:19:03 - Speaker 1: It could also take forms of different animals in addition to the paper clip. I recall.
00:19:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the amount of work they put into making that thing be really distracting was quite outstanding, I have to say.
00:19:19 - Speaker 1: We’ve just talked about how important it is to keep the user autonomous in their journey, but on the other hand, as a UIUX person, I cannot overemphasize that the first run experience, that’s when you have the most energy and the most enthusiasm and momentum coming from the user, so. Those like first few steps that you make really mandatory, yes, sure, you have to make them shorter so that they can then autonomously explore the app. But on the other hand, you shouldn’t really neglect that energy that’s coming with it, and if those steps are pretty fine that you might still want to take advantage of that momentum that the user has that very moment. So it’s not always that you just leave them hanging. Sometimes you really have to enforce something.
00:20:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think we struck a fairly good balance with the new onboarding and new. So what happens now when you open the app for the first time and you made it past authenticating yourself, you get onto basically a root board that has a couple cards on it.
One is another empty board, one is a text card, and then there’s another little text card on the side that just gives you a very brief intro about what news is and why you should care about it. And then the other text card is basically already a mini tutorial or suggestion. It just says take this card and zoom into the empty board next to it and then drop the card there. And notably, this is one of our, I would say, most complex or surprising interactions. We often get people to write in feedback that they can’t figure out how to move a card between a board and Based on this, it actually seemed like a lot of users really couldn’t figure this out, so we decided to make this sort of key interaction to be the first thing that we’re trying to teach users.
In a way, also because we think that it gives users a good idea about how new is different from other tools. It immediately teaches you this, you know, you can use both hands. It’s not all just use your finger to do something. You can use one hand to pick up a card and then you can use the other hand to do something else. So teaching people how we’re doing things a little bit differently from other apps was quite key to us here.
And then once you completed this first task, basically, We guide you to open a little panel that then has a list of other interactions that you can do in Muse, and they’re laid out as a sort of checklist, but you’re also free to just close that panel and explore on your own. And the next time you come back, you can come back to it and open it again. So it’s not like it forces you to do these things and do them in a particular In order, but it does sort of give you a rough set of what basic interactions are possible in the app, and it entices you to explore them a little bit. And if you get stuck on any of them, you can actually, and this is where we’re making use of the handbook and all those video content that we created to really teach you in a visual way how the app works. If you get stuck anywhere, you can tap a little button for each of the tasks, and it actually drops some cards into your inbox. When you drag them out, you’ll see that they’re like a little instructional card that explains how a certain thing works. And then also a card that plays the video. So a video of demonstrating, basically, you see two hands on an iPad actually doing the thing. So this way, we’re really trying to explain to people the things that are possible in the app. And then also motivating them to add a little bit of content of their own and to basically start exploring how the app feels when they use it for a real project.
00:22:50 - Speaker 2: I’ll say that the use of the two-handed card carrier that put a card into a board as the very first thing was a really great insight by you in terms of it’s this thing that not a lot of people figure out how to do because it is different. They expect that, oh, maybe I should be able to drag a card with one finger and kind of drop it on a board and it’ll go inside there, but that’s Muse has a. Different model and using both hands to do this complex gesture is not what they expect.
But we also see that when we show that to people in many cases just through our support channels they write in and ask how to do this and we explain it somehow or send a video or something and then they have this, oh, that’s amazing. I love this. It feels interesting. It turns on a light bulb a little bit.
So maybe to Jane’s earlier point of they have this energy right at that moment to try to kind of challenge themselves a little bit or try something a little different. And it’s something that’s hard to figure out on your own, but if we guide them to doing it, and then maybe you have a not only a little light bulb about here’s how I do this specific thing, but a light bulb of, like you said, this app works differently. I can use both my hands. I should be prepared for a slightly different experience.
00:23:56 - Speaker 1: Um, buckle in. For a different experience. I’m curious, you have such amazing videos with this over the desk camera and the hands using the iPad and everything. How did you produce those? Are there any secrets because like you can’t really do that on your own, to have some magnificent video editor hand or any other secrets?
00:24:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s our colleague Mark. So he set up a little home recording studio, which is not too fancy.
I think it’s sort of a boom arm that holds everything’s recorded with an iPhone camera, which of course are amazing these days. They do, you know, 4K 60 frames per second. And then the lighting turns out to be a really key thing so getting some lights on all sides so the shadows aren’t too heavy.
We talked about this a little bit in another podcast episode that I can link back to, but basically kind of came down to a combination of these a few pieces of equipment using the iPhone. Camera and then what for me was a surprise, which is filming a screen seems weird to me, but actually it works really well because the high quality of cameras these days combined with the brightness and pixel density of the iPad screen means basically looks great.
00:25:08 - Speaker 1: So it’s an actual screen recording, that’s quite amazing. I thought it’s a combination of some magic editing. As they do.
00:25:16 - Speaker 2: Right. I’ve seen, um, I read a post somewhere someone doing this for I think an iPhone demo video where they essentially did like a green screen or a chroma key on the phone screen, and then they record the hands doing the motions and then they record a screen recording and composite them, and that would be nuts for us to do. I mean, even aside from that we’re a small team and just don’t have the resources for that kind of thing.
It’s also that we have these really complex interactions and trying to replicate them twice once for screen recording and once for like recording the hands would be tricky, but yeah, weirdly enough, just filming an iPad screen works fine and actually I’m pretty sure that’s what Apple does for a lot of their videos too, so I guess it works.
00:25:51 - Speaker 1: Do you have any other tips for the video content during onboarding, like from my experience, keeping those short is very useful, but also a big challenge because the shorter you want to be that the harder it is to record a good one. Because I’m the one on the team who does all of this stuff and it’s amazing how much infrastructure there is in a software application that does not relate to software that’s got to be done, like the docs, the videos and everything.
00:26:17 - Speaker 2: That is a really great point.
00:26:18 - Speaker 1: So what are your tips for the videos?
00:26:20 - Speaker 2: Well, we, you know, maybe we did it easy because we’re in some ways, it’s a very simple format, right, just hands and an iPad on. and these things are often 5 seconds long or something. What do you do in your videos and actually maybe that’s a lead in. I was going to ask you more about this whole other world of B2B apps and the fact that I think onboarding is not just what’s in the software, but it’s also email exchanges, maybe there’s a sales component or demos, obviously videos, which could be on your YouTube channel or whatever. I’d love to hear the larger picture of what that whole experience is for your customers.
00:26:54 - Speaker 1: I think experience for our customers is one thing, is what we offer, but there is this whole spectrum of different interventions that you can apply to try and affect people’s behavior to some success or maybe to no success. It really depends.
We only cover as a tool, we only offer email as the most classic and powerful way of getting in touch with the people, and we also offer. In app notifications, which are like a little chat bubbles, but without the chat that appear in the corner of the app that you can use to supply some helpful information.
But there is also such a wide range of tools, and I don’t mean tools like autopilot or chameleon or a dozen other tools that offer guide through tours and things like that, but you can also offer demo calls such as white glove on boarding, as you mentioned before. You can invite people to. book with you at certain stages of the app, you can, you can make fun of a little bit.
00:28:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, super cheesy, but it actually does work, you know, it’s a little more scalable than a one on one thing, but you get on a video call and you can kind of walk through. Some script, but then you can also answer people’s questions, that sort of thing can work really well for the right kind of product.
00:28:16 - Speaker 1: You can do office hours, you can do an online community where people try and even help each other, but I would never recommend that at a small scale because it takes so much energy to support that.
But if you have that, there’s this people out there who seem to be, you know, revived by communications with others like we’re not among those, so.
Having multiple customer conversations in a forum that would like drain our productivity to zero and we’ll never get things done, so maybe later when we have like a community manager or someone, and also the docs, videos, everything that’s in this materials ecosystem that you can produce and help the people.
There’s this delicate play of the formats and different calls to actions that are all around the place in the emails and inside the app. For example, in Muse, if you have a handbook, how do you help people open it? How do you leverage this uh different experience, you have the app and you have the browser, how do you not lose attraction? It can be really, really different for multiple products. So you put together this delicate play, and then it’s usually traditional to have email as sort of the main thread. where you pile up those interventions and offer different kinds of help along the cycle. And, uh, there might be opinions.
For example, there’s this wonderful email expert called Val Geisler, and she’s amazing. She has wonderful email on boarding tear downs, but she says that whatever you undertake that makes you send less email is not great.
Well, we might be missing out on that, but we do think that less stuff is actually better. And the best email is that the one that’s not sent, so we highly encourage our customers to use behavior data to actually filter out some of the communications that are already irrelevant, like if the future is used, there is no need to promote it anymore. In the ideal world, the user will just like figure out themselves and not have to do anything. So yeah, it’s so interesting, it’s so specific to a particular product.
00:30:21 - Speaker 2: The email one is, I think, worth drilling in on a little bit there.
I mean, you mentioned it as being kind of the standard or the center point for the back and forth. I think that’s really true in B2B enterprise stuff, which is where I spent a lot of.
My career, it is unusual, perhaps even non-existent for consumer applications. In fact, we’re in an age now where I know younger people that just don’t have email, right? That’s just not part of their world.
And in any case, the way that for example, the App Store and so forth is set up really doesn’t encourage that sort of thing.
We discovered that same you discovered pretty early on that this was a really important Channel for our target audience because our target audience tends to be kind of thoughtful reader types. They like reading and writing long form things and so we made the perhaps controversial choice to ask for an email right off the bat. We don’t ask for a name or anything else like that, but we want to be able to have that direct communication channel and if you send feedback from the app, that comes from your email address so we can reply to it. And we don’t use it for a lot. We don’t do any kind of like drip campaigns and stuff like that. I know that sort of thing is very standard when you sign up for Notion, you get a series of emails saying, here’s some information for, you know, your next step in using the app or whatever. But yeah, it seems to me like email, at least certainly for us, and definitely the more B2B world is a key piece. How do you think about or or how do you approach this whole world of, I don’t know, drip campaigns and follow-ups and that sort of stuff.
00:31:46 - Speaker 1: Your app is really at that price point when you’ve got to have a more serious relationship with the people about their billing, about their content, and you really have to use email, at least a little bit to make sure that this relationship and that this content is intact if they lose like their device or something like that, isn’t that true?
00:32:08 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Even aside from the practicalities of the reset, I think.
Being kind of a spectrum where on one far extreme you have consumer products which are big scale, you download from the app store. There’s not really much of a relationship.
It wouldn’t be practical for an application maker that has millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users to have personal relationships with their users. They just can’t do that and the users probably don’t want that either.
And then on the other extreme, you might have the classic, you know, multimillion dollar top of the market enterprise sales where it’s, you know, you have a personal relationship with your salesperson, you go out for steak dinners, they come to your, you know, your wedding or whatever, that like really, really deep long term.
And then of course there’s a bunch of stuff in the middle. I think for Muse we kind of discovered that we ended up maybe kind of in the middle, little closer to the lightweight side, but having that email so we can build a personal connection when you send a message with a question, you get an answer from some me or you there or someone else on the team. You build up that relationship over time and it builds trust in the product and maybe makes you more inclined to part with money or believe in the product both now and in the future.
00:33:18 - Speaker 1: That reminds me of a phrase that I really like and there’s high touch, there is low touch, and there is tech touch. Which means that you can imitate the high touch relationship, but it’s scale, because you have like thousands of downloads and you can’t really honestly offer your hand to everyone, but you can offer your help using automated means and then some of the people will use it to generate genuine relationships.
00:33:44 - Speaker 2: I’m a little bit, and again, I’m curious to hear what you think about sort of the drip campaign method. I’m a little skeptical of some of that myself when I get those follow-up emails from a product I just signed up for.
I don’t really tend to read them that much, but maybe a version of the tech touch or at scale thing is something like our email newsletter, which now goes out to thousands of people, and I write this in my voice. It comes from my email address, and when you reply, that reply comes to me, and depending on the the issue, we get more or less responses, but I respond to every single one of them.
And I really enjoy making that connection with our audience and with our users. We’ll see how that scales over time already with this recent launch, we found ourselves pretty buried under the communication, but that’s important to us is to feel connected to the folks that we’re helping or trying to help our product.
00:34:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, as makers of the tool that does that, we’re under no false impression that this is a magic bullet to nudge people with email, but it’s still the most reliable channel, so you can use this to make super personable. And then maybe that will result in some real life communication and that’s as much as you can do. If you don’t have any other channels, you can’t really call them well, unless you ask for a phone number, which also is an option, but that’s as much as you can do as a founder to get in touch with them.
00:35:04 - Speaker 2: Julie, I know you’ve done a lot of kind of usability tests and in particular kind of there’s the ad hoc form of usability test with, you know, grab a person that’s nearby, a romantic partner, a roommate, a family member, as well as maybe the slightly more structured, try to reach out to people you know are in your target audience, but you don’t know personally. How do you think about that as fitting in with and and particularly for this recent Muse on boarding? And we’re a little bit restricted in the in-person usability test these days, but what’s your approach there?
00:35:35 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the sort of ad hocability tests where you actually watch a person use the app for the first time. are super helpful and super insightful because I think you often tend to have the user stumble over certain things and then eventually they’ll figure it out, which is probably fine, but to actually identify those initial hurdles, it’s quite hard to do that just by looking at maybe, you know, aggregate analytics data or something like this.
So actually physically watching someone use your app, get really stuck or frustrated with something, then figure something out, having the aha moment. is always super insightful and it’s also always a little bit painful because of course, you know, if this is a piece of software that you look at every day because you’re developing it, you develop a certain blindness to certain things. So seeing someone get confused by something that you just take for granted is, yeah, is obviously always a little bit surprising. But it is super important to do these tests and to take your learnings from there.
So we did this a little bit with the current onboarding and definitely restructured a few things that some of the wording wasn’t quite understandable to people, but where we were maybe using some internal words that for us is super clear what they. but the user who sees the app for the first time is not quite clear on that terminology. So this is always a good sort of feedback check if people actually understand the way you communicate. And then on the bigger scale, I think what we’re trying with this new on boarding as well is to actually try to measure. The success of how well users are onboarded, and I think that the task list that we came up with basically lends itself really well to this. So whenever the user completes a task in the list, we send like an event to our servers and based on that can calculate a sort of onboarding score that each user has. So how many of the basic interactions have they performed at least once. And then based on this, you could imagine doing some IB tests, maybe you reshuffle things, you slightly change the wording on a couple of items, and then you can compare the score of that version versus the other version and see if, you know, those small tweaks really make a difference in the long run.
00:37:49 - Speaker 1: Were there any surprising discoveries that you’ve learned using these AB tests?
00:37:54 - Speaker 3: I think one of them is still the basic interaction of picking up a card and then dropping it into a board after you zoomed into it is still not clicking with quite everyone, even though we feel like we’re explaining it the best that we can.
And maybe that means that it’s still just too weird and people just aren’t used to doing these things, or maybe it means that we have to think about explaining it better again.
Or maybe it also means that the interaction just should be changed and maybe we should come up with a different way of doing this.
So definitely by looking at the data we have now, there’s quite a few things that we want to try to tweak and potentially do differently. So it’s quite helpful to have that information.
00:38:32 - Speaker 2: Also noted on the split test front, I think we, you, I should say ran the initially ran the previous onboarding, which was this deck of cards garden thing kind of alongside the new on boarding and so then we could just compare how far looked at those aggregate analytics to just see in general the people that in this group got this far and the people in this group got this far, and I think that’s a, we don’t have a necessarily a lot of split test work on.
Our team, we’ve done a little on the website here and there just to try some small ideas, but this is a practice that I know a lot of Silicon Valley firms speaking to a product manager from Pinterest some time back that said they had a really good practice that they never rolled anything out without kind of a 90/10 split test, that even the new thing would be up alongside the old thing for a week, and they could look at some of their core metrics and just sort of, first of all, make sure nothing regressed, but also have a pretty specific idea of well. is we’re rolling out this new thing. It’s not just that we like it better, or it looks better or it feels better to us intuitively, but that we can actually show the way that it affects our core business and it’s probably not quite the way that Muse would go about things, but that approach of trying to be a little bit rigorous in, OK, we want to help people be more successful. Does this help people be more successful and that that’s not just based on our intuition or even these anecdotal reports, but it can be based on data to some extent.
00:39:58 - Speaker 1: You just touched upon a pretty important topic that how do you transform like one-off efforts on improving your onboarding into some organizational practices that help you be consistent at improving that. And two things that are super easy to do is one assigning a. On boarding champion in your company who will take care of this thing in your app, and they would vote for it in the internal meetings and things like that. Another one is regularly, maybe once a month or once every quarter, going through the entire boarding experience of your app, including the payment. The sign up and everything and everything changes so fast, you just gonna have absolutely fresh mind every time and you’re gonna have some surprising discoveries.
00:40:46 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. I think you feel like you designed a good onboarding experience and now you can go off, develop new features for your app, but you have to continuously keep in mind as you’re adding new features or as you’re changing things that that might affect how the user goes through the. the first time, like maybe you need to promote those new features, you need to make it part of the onboarding. I think for us now is the case that every time we add a new interaction or a new feature into the app, we basically have to record a new video for the handbook, which made it extra important to make the lighting situation and the videos cropping and everything easily reproducible because we don’t want then the new video to look completely different from the old one.
But yeah, I definitely agree to what you’re saying, to always keep this in mind and to regularly revisit it and see if it needs to be adapted to how your app evolved since.
00:41:33 - Speaker 1: I once interviewed Max Zillemann of Ulysses, and I know you’ve mentioned Ulysses a bit on the show, and they have so much of this infrastructure in different languages that introducing new features and producing materials to support that in like dozens of languages. It’s an enormous part of what they do as a company, like you can’t overlook that by any means.
00:41:55 - Speaker 2: And once you start to localize, you make the cost of every change higher, and you’re adding on to your earlier point, I think, which is that the onboarding tends to get less tension just because it’s naturally in front of not only your team members, but also your longtime users.
Because of course, they go through it at the beginning and not so even if you’re in good touch with, you know, we tend to have the best relationships and the most ongoing communication with our customers, those are sort of by definition, people have already not only successfully onboarded but found value for the app in their lives enough that they’re going to pay for it.
And so as a result, the onboarding experience is something that we just personally see less of, and you can go back to run through it. And and realize ways that it’s come out of date or there’s rough edges or something’s changed in a new version of the operating system that makes something funny about, you know, the screen where you type in your access code or what have you.
So creating some kind of organizational practice to make sure that stuff gets attention because that is your first impression and that is the place that’s the sort of the moment you can convert someone into a Someone that’s gonna use and love the product, or they kind of shrug their shoulders and say, huh, I don’t see what the big deal is and never come back.
00:43:10 - Speaker 1: And it’s so much economically viable to invest in that because sales and marketing costs are enormous compared to the cost of these little interventions that you can add to like dramatically increase the activation rate and just make better use of your marketing money. It’s scale with every single user, virtually any improvement is a great improvement.
00:43:33 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, I think that’s one thing we were kind of trying to achieve with this new onboarding is that we have lots of users coming into the app and of course, naturally people will always turn for one reason or the other, like maybe they just realized the product isn’t for them.
But we really wanted to eliminate the risk of using someone just because they can’t figure out how the product works.
So once you kind of went through the app a little bit, you tried out a few things and you then realized, yeah, I don’t really know what to do with this. That just maybe means that the product is not a good fit for you. But if you actually do have the motivation and that there is a way that it fits into your life, but you can’t figure out the most basic things, and we saw this by users emailing into support by like, how do I delete something or how do I erase something. And so really putting some focus on teaching them the basics so that they then based on that can decide whether or not this product is a good product for them was quite important to us.
00:44:27 - Speaker 2: Looking forward to the future a little bit, we’re seeing lots changing, including, for example, the importance of video content, but Jane, with your eye on and your specialization on the onboarding space, what do you see as potentially being improvements through technology or practices to onboarding for the future?
00:44:47 - Speaker 1: Well, we’ve been pretty mature in terms of the tool set that people can use, but it’s great that organizations in general are starting to realize the importance of user onboarding and just investing resources in that more and more, and even smaller founders can now afford certain tools that were previously just for enterprise companies.
And that’s an amazing trend because previously it felt like this ecosystem of marketing and growth hacking and everything, it was really mature, but what happened after I sign up was a little bit kind of vague and not touched upon.
And these days we can observe a wonderful trend of this product led trend word, product led growth and things like that, which essentially means just looking at what’s inside your product and what’s better for the user. So that’s definitely a wonderful trend.
00:45:35 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a great point. The cultural awareness, whether that’s within a particular company or in the whole industry, you know, we saw that happen in this huge way with design, for example, it’s not that design didn’t exist before, but it came to be something that probably originally pioneered by Apple, but now it’s in the zeitgeist where people say, OK, we should be thinking about design as a first class thing and I think onboarding is not something that has that same. Awareness as this is a critical piece of any product that you’ve ever build. It’s a huge opportunity both for your product and for your marketing, and it deserves its own attention and name and people to think about it like you said earlier, like the assigning an owner on your team, so that aside from any technological improvements, the culture shift seems likely to only produce better onboarding experiences in the future.
00:46:26 - Speaker 1: And I think that 2020 has already taught us a lot is thinking about sensitive moments about how that intervention that you’re applying can be relevant to the user at this particular moment, uh, because a lot of things have been going on and your drip campaign is definitely not at the top of their priority list, like reading through that. And it feels like there is no hack of just sending more email. Now you have to be really thoughtful and considerate and maybe send less but be more personal and sensitive to all these things and we’ve had a lot of big lessons this year about that.
00:47:03 - Speaker 2: Excellent. Well, yeah, thoughtful, considerate and personal, those head on 3 of our values here on the Muse team and I think that.
And I think that furthermore, you’re right, in 2020 specifically just because of the state of the world and society and so forth, those things are perhaps especially important, but I think they’re important all the time and if we can get more in the habit of our products and our companies and the way that we engage with customers and potential customers as being a little more personal, a little more tuned in, I think that’s a win across the board.
Absolutely. Well, with that, I’ll just say that if any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at museApp.com by email. We’d love to hear your comments and of course ideas for future episodes.
Jane, thanks for coming on, for pioneering slash advocating for better onboarding through your work at user list and where can folks find you online?
00:48:00 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely user list.com as our primary internet touch point, and we are at the moment working on a comprehensive on boarding guide, which puts together all the resources and what we want our customers and our audience to know for the right mindset about user onboarding and that’s gonna be up very shortly, should be live by the time this is out, and it’s available at userless.com/user onboarding.
00:48:27 - Speaker 2: You heard it here first, folks, breaking news. Alright, thank you both for taking the time today.
00:48:33 - Speaker 1: Great pleasure.
00:48:34 - Speaker 3: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us, pleasure.
00:48:36 - Speaker 2: And we’ll see you around. Bye.
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I really thrive off of urban energy, but I also I’m at a point where I want a little more green, a little more quiet, a little more space, and can I get those two things together. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, and I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Mark, what’s the air quality like in Seattle right now?
00:00:33 - Speaker 2: It’s much improved. We got hit really bad by that smoke, but we got some proper Seattle rains, and now it’s really clean out here.
00:00:40 - Speaker 1: I love the uh smell of the air after a good rain, and I can only imagine how different it must be in the wake of the wildfire smoke. Our colleague Julia found it a little funny because actually in the demo video that’s on our website that you recorded, there’s some content related to Seattle and there’s actually a whole board about natural disaster risk and wildfires explicitly called out there, and I think it’s pretty low, mostly in the Pacific Northwest, I assume because it’s raining or whatever, but apparently not in that calculation is what happens if wildfires hundreds of miles away happen and then the smoke drifts.
00:01:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. The immediate area here is safe cause it’s very wet, so it’s hard to catch fire, but we definitely can get smoke as we were reminded the past few weeks.
00:01:23 - Speaker 1: So our topic today is leaving San Francisco, and we both have a personal story on this.
You moved to Seattle a few years back, leaving the Bay Area, and I moved to Berlin 7 years ago now, after 7 years in San Francisco.
And there’s a little in the zeitgeist in the discussion here, the pandemic has led a lot more companies to remote work, and in turn has made people who work for those companies have more sort of flexibility where they can work from wildfires are probably a piece of that as well, but in general, I feel like I’ve seen in my Social networks and colleagues, people considering leaving the Bay Area or in some cases they’ve done so. There’s a great article by Kevin Lana who speaks about that, that I’ll link in the show notes. And we’ve also got tech companies like Stripe and Zapier being willing to essentially pay you to move someplace cheaper, which is sort of interesting. But the topic here isn’t to debate the merits of the Bay Area, but I thought it would be really interesting to reflect on not just our personal stories, but how you make a decision like this. Because it feels like an unprecedented social shift in some ways, which is most people, and me included, most of my early life, I went to where I needed to go for school, you know, university, where can I get a good education that will have me, and then later on to pursue employment. And I didn’t make any kind of calculus of where do I want to live. I made the calculus of where can I get the best job for myself, and then that naturally dictated where I was going to live. And it’s something I feel like I’m seeing a lot of lately. I had a bunch of conversations with folks where people are going through the same process that I went through some years back when I embraced remote work, maybe you did as well, which is to realize that you have the opportunity, the privilege to just pick where you want to live and have that be based on some criteria that’s not coupled to your employment. But also realizing maybe the weight of that responsibility or it’s not the right way to put it, maybe that it’s a great opportunity, but how do you decide if you can do more or less anywhere in the world or within some time zone band, what criteria do you use? Where do you even start? So that’s why I thought it would be an interesting topic for us today. So Mark, I know you moved to the Bay Area, kind of at the start of your professional career. That’s when we got the chance to work together and I think for you it was like me, an incredible opportunity to build your early career and then just a couple of years back, you moved to Seattle. I’d love to hear a little bit of that story.
00:03:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so I moved to San Francisco originally. It was 10 or 11 years ago, I think. And at the time, I knew I wanted to be in startups and San Francisco was basically the place that you went for that.
Another possible option would have been New York City, but it was definitely second place as compared to San Francisco, and actually at the time, San Francisco was much cheaper than New York. Jokes kind of on me there eventually, but that was a factor at the time.
And yeah, I was there for maybe 7 or 8 years or something like that. And an incredible experience, you know, learned a lot, met a lot of interesting people, including obviously you, but a couple years ago, I was ready for something different and moved up to Seattle after a bit of a process thinking about that.
00:04:29 - Speaker 1: Yes, so I had a similar story. I moved to the Bay Area in 2007 because our company got into Y Combinator, and yeah, accessing the networks there, certainly the venture capital, but also just the wider world of tech was absolutely fantastic for our business and for my career.
But then when I set down my work with that venture 6 years later, I found myself a little more flexibility. I realized that some of the day to day life there wasn’t quite what I wanted, and that led me to starting to think about where to go next and went through kind of a pretty detailed process by which I made the somewhat surprising decision to not only relocate from San Francisco, but actually move to another country, but that I think worked out really well for me.
So you mentioned going through a process and I had one of my own as well and I guess this is what I’ve been talking to folks about recently is when you have this capability to choose a place, how do you actually do that? It struck me how that’s similar in a lot of ways to the two-step creative process we’ve talked about in the context of Muse before and we can get on to that a little bit, but I’d be curious just to know even setting aside process criteria, what makes one place or another better for the stage of life that you’re in or what it is that you seek.
00:05:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I had an interesting angle on this. So the original impetus for looking to leave San Francisco was mostly the usual reasons, which I don’t think we need to go into too much here, you know, it’s extremely expensive, it’s overregulated, and so on.
But a more subtle thing that I think is really important is what was happening to my cohort.
So I’m in my early 30s now, and what was happening was all of my friends and peers who are mostly a similar age, were hitting that period. Where they want to start a family, they want to have a bit more space, maybe they have other hobbies, just kind of entering that phase of adulthood, and they were all really hitting a wall in San Francisco. A few people were able to make it work, having one or a few kids, for example, but most people, when they hit that point in their life, they just couldn’t make it work in San Francisco anymore. So they had to leave. Some of them went to the East Bay or the North Bay, but a lot of them just completely left. They went to Texas or To Portland, for example, or to Seattle, where it was possible for them to pursue that phase of their life. So a lot of my peers were basically leaving all around me, which is a problem from a personal perspective, of course. But also, I was starting to sense that the magic of Silicon Valley and of San Francisco was starting to break down. And here’s what I mean. The reason San Francisco has been so special for tech is that you have people who have been there for 5, 10. 15 years who are helping to bring up the next generation, right? You get that mentorship, that experience, that network. And what was happening was the amount of time that people tended to stay in San Francisco, I felt like it was getting less and less to the point where it was starting to knock on that threshold of being there long enough to kind of fully contribute to that cycle. People were jumping out after they’ve been there for 5678 years. And as that amount was coming down, I was feeling like there was a bit of a collapse in the San Francisco magic. And on the flip side of that, I had this intuition that the future is on the internet, right? It’s not going to be limited to one city. We’ve been developing these social technologies for people collaborating and forming communities across physical locations, and it was very nascent at the time, but I figured it’s only gonna get bigger. And so what I want to bet on is that it’s not being tied to one physical place, it’s having a network that actually spans more of an area. So when I was looking for a place, it wasn’t as much finding everyone being in that one city. Like it’s not that everyone who I want to collaborate with and be with is in Seattle. But for me, that’s a very good home base, and it kind of personally is a very good fit for me, and I can talk about that if you’re curious, but also it’s a great jumping off point. It’s in the right time zone for collaborating with a lot of people in San Francisco and also the East Coast has an amazing international airport, in my opinion, like basically one of the best you can get. So it’s a good place to start a business. It’s of course, where we’ve HQ use. So that’s kind of how I was thinking about moving from San Francisco to Seattle.
00:08:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when I was thinking about or you know, enumerate a little bit, maybe my criteria for or what I discovered was my criteria for a place I like to live, but I was thinking more in terms of greenery and transportation and architecture. But here you’re talking about networks, which obviously is much as people I think like a lot of the history and architecture and nature in San Francisco and rightly so, the networks is obviously the real reason or is the big reason, the overshadowing reason for someone that’s in technology. I note that the places that we both chose. I wanted actually to be, if anything, in less a completely saturated place where I love being around these people that are in the same field as me and being connected to that, and that was very powerful at first, but then at some point I started to feel saturation where I can never get away from it. Totally. I was, you know, going to a coffee shop, every single conversation you overhear is about someone’s funding around, driving down the, what’s the main freeway there, every single billboard is a recruiting thing for some tech company and I’m not saying that’s good or bad, it’s just for me, what’s right is I want a mix. I want to be around some people who are in the same field and share this passion with me about computers and technology and the internet, but I also want to be around a diversity of people, young people, people, kids, people that do other kinds of work, artistic people, people in different professions. So trying to find a mix of those in Berlin was a good one. I feel like in 2014, there were some really fun up and coming. Companies and even now has a small but vibrant startup scene so I can be around people to do that stuff. There’s some great co-working spaces and companies I can connect with and all that sort of thing, but it’s not everything, it’s not everywhere. And I feel like Seattle has something similar. There’s obviously the legacy of both Microsoft nearby and then Amazon in the city and other smaller companies. So there’s plenty of tech around. It’s just not the defining characteristic of the city.
00:10:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. That was definitely a factor for me. And to be clear, there was a whole series of kind of personal factors on why I chose Seattle as this home base instead of, for example, Austin, Texas. And yeah, one of them was getting this better balance between being plugged into the community but not being overwhelmed by it. I actually like Seattle in that respect because Well, first of all, I think people underestimate how big of a tech hub Seattle is. You know, two of the three biggest tech companies in America are based in Seattle, not the Bay Area, for example. Also, it is really the hub of like cloud back end services, even maybe enterprise, it’s very strong in those areas, games, whereas San Francisco is more. Startup and consumer focused, I would say. And the Seattle flavor is more of my expertise. So that was a good fit. And yeah, I did want to be in a place where I still had 1 ft in the world so I could go down to downtown Seattle and talk to people about tech stuff and you know, even have that option career-wise in the future, but not be so overwhelmed with it as you are in San Francisco.
Also, I would say, I was betting that Seattle was just going to keep riding that curve up while San Francisco struggled. You know, it’s really hard for people to build an office in San Francisco and expand it somewhat notoriously. The Bay Area recently had this proposal to like, basically ban commuting for most of your Employees for large employers, it’s really wild. I’ll link it in the show notes. But on the flip side, the offices in Seattle are just growing big time. I was really impressed with how quickly Stripe, for example, was able to stand up a really solid and thriving office here in Seattle. And so I just figured there’s going to be more tech in the future here.
00:11:51 - Speaker 1: And you’re quite good at or quite connected to, let’s say local governance and being aware of and evaluating how well a city or state government is making an environment for infrastructure projects and certainly businesses, which is something I quite like and respect.
Because I think there’s a tendency to focus on national politics and election horse races, and those things are important, but many times, especially for something like your business, it’s actually the local level stuff that probably matters a lot more. It’s like a little less dramatic and a little more long term important in some ways. So I’d be curious to hear, I know you’ve looked in quite a bit in Seattle, maybe done some of that in San Francisco around things like ease of starting a business, tax rates, that sort of thing. And again, this comes back to this making a decision about where you’re going to live, if you’re someone who’s an entrepreneur or an investor or a mix of those or a freelancer, which is that it may actually be not just, hey, I like. This place because the schools are good or I like the public transit, or I like the sports team, but actually may have impact for your work life if you’re more of a solopreneur, freelancer, entrepreneur type person. So it is both a professional and a personal decision.
00:13:06 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that local and state politics are a really big deal. Maybe this is an American thing, but at least here in the US it’s really important. I think people underestimate that. I certainly fell into that bucket when I first moved to San Francisco. I didn’t really understand any of the California or San Francisco stuff when I got there. So for example, somewhat to my embarrassment, I was not aware of the rent control laws in San Francisco, which is a huge deal. And I kind of lucked out and ended up being fine, but I think understanding those dynamics is really important.
You know, it’s funny, this was actually one of the things that really pushed me over the edge on San Francisco. I was getting more interested and involved in local governance, especially around land use and housing and transportation and taxation. And the more I understood what was going on there, the more alarmed and dismayed I felt about.
Situation. And it also seemed like it was quite structural, like it’s not something that was just a little bit more organizing and a little bit more democracy, you know, you can push through and fix this thing.
It’s very deeply structural in California and San Francisco. And I just didn’t see it getting fixed anytime soon.
Whereas on the flip side, I was looking into the governance of other cities and states around the US. I think Seattle actually does relatively well and Washington State compared. to the other big coastal piers. So if you look at, for example, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston, Washington, DC, Chicago, I would put in that bucket. They’re all to varying degrees troubled, but I think Seattle and Washington is probably the best run of all of those cities. And so that was nice for me. And also there’s good structural reasons why Seattle and Washington are going to be, I think in much better position than those others.
00:14:39 - Speaker 1: And I wonder what effect this greater freedom and flexibility for so many knowledge workers will have in the longer term on city governments, and I’ve come to think a bit of government generally, but especially local government as maybe there’s just my bias because I’m a product guy.
A city is a product of sorts. It’s a very all around you, all encompassing product, but nevertheless, it offers a series of things and.
Requires a series of things as a citizen, and I wonder how much people, I guess it’s already the case that cities competed for or do compete for employers.
For example, you saw this when Amazon was considering their second headquarters and they essentially put out like an RFC to cities around the United States and said, you know, make us a good offer, and I think that boils down to some pitch that mostly in the end is tax breaks or something, but if individuals again these People who have a little more agency now in their own careers and they’re deciding, I wonder how that will change if governments, city governments are thinking in terms of how to attract these sorts of people and provide them a good product, essentially a lovely city to live and work in. I don’t know how that will change things, but for me, that helps the mindset you’re describing, which is not thinking of as well, the government’s just given, it’s a natural monopoly.
I don’t know, either complaining it doesn’t work well or Satisfied or whatever it is, but treating it as an unmovable force versus, well, actually I can choose. I can go here, I can go there, different cities are governed in different ways and some of those produced places that I find more amenable to living a good life, to running a business, and so I want to go give my business, so to speak, or give my citizenship or my residence to a place that is doing a good job at making a good home for its residents.
00:16:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s going to be very interesting to watch this reshuffle play out over the next few decades. I do think it’s going to be challenging for some cities who see their tax bases realize they’re less captive perhaps than they were in the past. And I think for a lot of it’s going to be a huge boon because people have the flexibility to move there and take advantage of the quality of life and other benefits. So I think it’ll be interesting for sure.
00:16:44 - Speaker 1: Well, maybe now we can talk about the process element here.
You mentioned that and I have one of my own.
This is the Muse tie in to me, which is, I think of one of the key purposes or one of the reasons this product exists or why I’m motivated to be pushing it forward is that I think of making decisions as a thing we could all use help with, making thoughtful decisions.
I often think of the Muse mission as being to help individuals and maybe someday even the society as a whole to be more thoughtful.
We live in this age of hot takes and the next outrage wave and sometimes it seems like we just lack space for contemplation and of course one version of that is, you know, build a log cabin and disconnect, but I don’t think that’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater kind of thing and this is a place where I think There’s potential for it to help and something like deciding where you’re going to live and work, if you have that flexibility is a great example of this really deep important decision that involves both facts and research, but also just a lot of thinking and a lot of reflection on what’s important to you or what factors are in your life.
So I’m curious when you were in the position of considering moving and considering options, what did that process look like for you?
00:17:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there were a few angles. A big one for me is just spending a lot of time in the actual cities. So for several years before I ended up moving, I actually had a habit of spending time visiting different cities, often long weekends or working remotely from a week for different cities in the US and around the world. And I’ve always found that you get very different energies, just being in different cities, being on the street. I always feel very different depending on where I am.
And the only way you can know is to go there and do the actual. So I Did some more of that with cities that I was thinking about more seriously, including Seattle.
Come here during different times of the season, which by the way, is something people always warn you about in Seattle. You know, you visit in the summer, people like, oh, this is amazing. Why isn’t everyone move here and like, wait, you gotta, you got to experience the winter before you make any rash decisions. So I was sure to do that. And also, you know, see different neighborhoods, see the city at different times of day, early in the morning, at night, things like that. So that was a big bucket.
Another bucket was, frankly, it’s a fair amount of reading. Again, to me, the governance situation is quite important. So I did a lot of reading about the politics and the land use situation and transportation and taxes and business law and all that stuff in some different municipalities, and also researching some basic stuff like the weather, for example, and seeing how that’s going to line up with how I feel about where I want to live.
So, it’s kind of a mix of the more analytical, explicit, studying the situation and the more emotional, just dive in and see how it feels and then ultimately get to intuit a decision from there.
00:19:19 - Speaker 1: How many places did you seriously consider, particularly when you talk about the reading and research side. It’s one thing to go visit a friend for a weekend and just be like, oh, the city’s nice. Maybe I wouldn’t mind living here, but it’s a whole other thing to think, you know, I’m going to really consider this as a serious place to live and what would my life look like and let me do some deep research on it.
00:19:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so honestly, there weren’t a ton of candidates because I did want to live in a global city with an international airport and a reasonable population.
And even if you include other westernized countries in addition to the US, there’s not a ton of cities that fit that bill. Actually, another thing that was pretty much a hard criteria for me was walkability. So especially in the US that limits you to a pretty small. Set of cities.
So in my kind of first round of consideration, I did have maybe a large handful of cities in the US in the bucket, including Seattle, New York, Chicago, and then a few others internationally, Berlin and Tokyo were two big ones for me.
But actually it pretty quickly got narrowed down to Seattle and Berlin, and I ended up spending a fair amount of time in both those cities and thinking about it pretty hard. How about you, Adam? Did you just dial in on Berlin right away, or is that more of a winding process?
00:20:28 - Speaker 1: Definitely more of a winding process, yeah, similar to you both more focused research, but also, yeah, the visits. I often would use, I don’t know if maybe this was on the tail end of my experience. I was still getting invited to speak at professional conferences or yeah, just would have a friend to visit or something like that.
And if I had an opportunity like that in a city that I was interested in, I would be more likely to go and do it and then I would purposely plan extra days to just, yeah, go feel the vibe of the city, go to a coffee shop, try to not go hit the top tourist attractions on TripAdvisor because that’s not what your life’s gonna be like when you live there, but see this is a place where knowing someone that lives there versus landing in the natural tourist districts is helpful, but just try to absorb that urban character. And this is something I love about cities. I’m very much a city boy and I love that they each have this personality that seems stronger and bigger. than even in the national character. People say Berlin’s not Germany, for example, which is absolutely true, but it’s the same thing. Yeah, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, these places all have a very different character, not only than the United States generally, but even in their immediate surrounding state. And I love that and trying to go and get to know whatever that character is, is a fun part of travel.
00:21:43 - Speaker 2: It’s funny that you mentioned going to coffee shops. People often ask me, Mark, what do you do when you go to these cities? And I’m like, uh, I uh go to the coffee shop and uh walk around the neighborhood and I don’t know, maybe go grocery shopping. It always feels weird to them, I think that you would go halfway around the world and do this very mundane stuff, but the grocery store. But for me, that’s like that’s the vibe. That’s what you’re looking at and that’s what’s in some ways, that’s just daily life. So it’s the most interesting thing.
00:22:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, coffee shops, libraries, another one I like to do. And then I’ll also just look for big public parks or if there’s a dock or a waterfront or some space like. That it kind of open public spaces where people naturally walk or cycle or walk the dogs or just hang out with their friends. A really good way to get a feel for what the people who live there are like, right, because that’s a lot of the energy. When we talk about the energy, often what we’re picking up on is that vibe from the people. What are the kinds of people that are here and how do they behave when they’re out in public.
00:22:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, speaking of vibe, one interesting thing for me about Seattle is I had this sort of 2 by 2 quadrant that corresponds to the geography of the US.
So in California, I think of it as being informal and kind of cowboy, and in the Northwest, I think of it as being informal but professional.
And in the Northeast, I think of being Being formal and professional. So in the Northeast, you have like the bankers in suits, and in Northwest, you have the really elite systems programmers, but they wear like t-shirts. And in California, you have sort of people wearing flip flops, right? And for me, actually, that upper left quadrant, the Washington State Quadrant was a good vibe for me.
But it’s kind of hard to figure that out until you spend some time in the place.
00:23:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so for me, I did some visits again both in the states but also internationally. Another thing I did quite a bit of was just talking to people, to people that I knew had either lived in one place or another for a long period of time and would have thoughts on it, as well as just asking them, even just asking well traveled people where they thought I would be interested in. I at one point I ended up I think with the 4th ranked list of five places and Berlin made it to the top there based on often the conversation I would have is saying something along the lines of not just what did you like, but what do you think I would like.
That question often had people answering Berlin, which they turned out. You write about. So yeah, there was very much that kind of open ended process and yeah, the cities did include some places in the states like Boston and Austin, Texas, but also I was really interested in this living abroad experience.
And so yeah, Berlin, Amsterdam, Cape Town, Tokyo were all under consideration.
One of the things I like to do, and these days I didn’t have Muse, of course, so I would use just kind of my paper sketchbook and Dropbox, I think it’s kind of my collection point, but I would take a few notes or my Google Maps, I would kind of star places that I thought were interesting and then photos was really big for me. I would just snap photos and of course you can snap photos when you’re traveling and those are memories of the.
But for me, it’s a very evocative way to remember that vibe of the city. What was it that I liked or didn’t like about this place and putting all those together and then I have a pretty distinct memory actually of scribbling in a sketchbook one morning when I was actually visiting Denver, which is another place I was thinking about just because I’ve had some friends move there and having this feeling of looking at all this together, kind of looking through the photos and some notes and Writing in my sketchbook and kind of an emerging for me that, you know, I really think I want to try one of these European cities.
And that was basically a surprising result for me. I would not have thought that before, but I feel like that is the benefit that can emerge from a more not systematic process exactly, but it’s not based on going to one place after another, and then at one point you feel good enough, you think I’ll do this. Kind of being able to zoom out a little bit and look at all of it together if that makes sense and having these reminders which include your notes and your photos and so forth. And you know, when I describe it that way, of course, that experience and others like it are exactly what I wanted Muse for. I wanted a digital tool that was built around that exact process versus this weird hodgepodge. So I wonder what it would be like considering a new place to live with Muse in my toolkit.
00:25:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, interesting. Now, when you came to this realization about the European cities, were you able to back out the reason for that? Like the factors that unconsciously had come to that decision for you?
00:26:00 - Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, there was a lot of the collect all the raw data, which is largely making visits, but also, as you said, some reading and also talking to people.
But then having this sense of, OK, I like these three cities but not these two. And there was also some sense of coming back to my home in San Francisco and Seeing the ways that San Francisco wasn’t meeting my needs.
You mentioned walkability, that’s a big one for me. I walk to think, to get fresh air, to just move around and exercise, and at least where I was living at the time, just was not a very walkable place, not a lot of green, not very pedestrian friendly.
I don’t want to slam on San Francisco. It’s just that I had the comparison of being in some of these other places, particularly these European cities, which tend to be amazing for walkability and they have cycle paths and public transit is good and lots of trees and Berlin in particular, you know, San Francisco is very constrained by being on this little peninsula and so there’s kind of a not quite a space limitation, but things are tight and I know that ties together with the governance and all these sort of things and that low amount of space, I think contributes to this.
Everything’s packed in and it’s always a little too small and there’s never quite enough space to walk by something in Berlin by comparison is this big giant flat Northern European city where there’s essentially all this space. Sidewalks are very wide and it feels much more open and comfort.
And maybe what I’m describing, a lot of people go to the suburbs for that, especially once they have kids for that exact reason, they want more space, but I wanted the density and the vibes of the city. I just wanted to see if I could do that while being a little more comfortable when I took a walk.
And so visiting a number of cities, which included again, some in the states but also particularly stood out in Europe, trying to look at that and say, OK, what’s the pattern here and even looking at photos of them side by side and just reflecting on my experiences and realizing that, yeah, the walkability, the greenery, and it’s not just parks, it’s not just that I want to go to a park, but it’s the amount of green and plants and things that are on each street, it’s the history and architecture.
Yeah, of course, it’s things like, is there a good coffee there and bohemian vibe and some other stuff like that. So I saw some patterns, and there’s some things that are specific to places like, for example, Berlin has this music culture.
I was a music creator earlier in my life, and being around that feels good to me even though I’m not involved in sort of music stuff anymore. So that’s kind of unique to Berlin, but then I also saw these patterns across and again it’s something I think would be hard to get if you didn’t look at them in relatively short succession and then from there I could back out.
Now I feel like I could actually make a pretty good list of abstract criteria. Here’s the things that I would want out of a city or a place to live, and that’s visible to me now because of that sort of data gathering and reflection process.
00:28:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so looking at the examples gives you the criteria instead of always insisting on going the other direction of starting with the criteria and applying them to the examples.
00:28:52 - Speaker 1: Exactly. I feel like I use this a lot in my work.
A good example here is user research. So I really like the exercise of, OK, we’re going to start to work on a new area of the business or a new area of the product. Let’s go and collect everything everyone’s ever said to us in support tickets and Twitter and whatever. Let’s also go look through our user interview notes, but maybe do some new user interviews and get everything that’s related to one particular thing.
I don’t know what, you know, reading long PDFs or something like that, get a bunch of quotes all together in one place that that pulling out the specifics of that and seeing it all together, that’s where the patterns emerge from. That’s sort of like key technique in my general toolkit.
00:29:32 - Speaker 2: So you did end up eventually deciding on Berlin and Germany, which is a big change from the states. Was that a hurdle for you to get over?
00:29:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, a huge one. There’s been some incredible benefits to, first of all, just the experience of living abroad and experiencing a culture and a nation that’s different from my own, as well as specifically the ways that Berlin really fits my vibe and makes my day to day life a happy one, but it comes with huge costs.
For sure going any new place, you have to learn new stuff, you have to adapt to the culture and even figure out, I don’t know, I remember when I moved to Los Angeles many, many years ago. I spent several years just struggling with trying to understand the freeway system and the intensity of the traffic, just trying to get around the city was just this really difficult thing. And eventually I figured it out. I figured out the rhythms and I mastered it and I was comfortable. Then I moved to San Francisco and it was a whole new story because things are very different there in terms of how you get around the city.
So there’s always some element of that. But going to a new country where there’s just different cultures, business happening in another language is always a challenge, but then German for whatever reason. Ends up being a particularly challenging one for a lot of native English speakers. Yeah, it comes as being an immigrant is a, it’s like a tax on your life and everything you do, certainly trying to start a business, but even something as simple as opening a bank account. I was turned down by several banks because they don’t really like doing business with the Americans because the US tax authority, the IRS requires certain reporting from foreign banks that it’s just sort of not worth their while to take on American customers. So the list is pretty long and it’s ongoing, even though I’m pretty settled and adapted now, having been here 7 years, basically not a week goes by that there isn’t something that would be much, much easier to get done in my home country. And I’m aware of that and that’s time and energy and money that takes away from things I could be doing otherwise. The fact that that cost is worth it to me tells you how much, I don’t know, what’s the word for it. I’m just living a happy life, and it feeds my creative soul, and I’ve found a sense of home and a sense of a nest that maybe I hadn’t had in other places I lived. So, in the end it’s worth it, but it comes with a big, big cost. So, certainly moving within your own country is a much safer bet if you’re not prepared to bear that cost.
00:31:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I ended up on the other side of that equation. In terms of the city life of Berlin and the vitality of the city, it’s probably my favorite city in the world.
Just being in the physical environment, it’s so energizing.
There’s so many interesting people. There’s all kinds of different families, amazing businesses and art and history. It’s just an incredible place to be, but I couldn’t get over moving. From the US to Germany, it didn’t make sense for me. I was trying to reflect back like you were saying, like kind of trying to pull out why that was. And I think for me, I really value understanding where I’m living, and not just the language, but the history, the political environment, the legal environment. That’s all a big deal to me. And I had spent, you know, several decades learning that stuff, and I really valued that security here in the US. I was feeling actually, in retrospect, really bullish on the US. I know that’s not a popular sentiment now, perhaps, but I was surprised to see that, you know, I came in with this very global flexibility, could live wherever I want, maybe I’ll move to New Zealand, who knows. But in the end, it was like, actually, I’m willing to bet on the US and that’s where I want to spend the next years of my life.
00:32:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll second that the United States remains one of the best places in the world to live. It’s certainly a great place to work and start a business, and I feel incredibly lucky that that’s where I was born. And in fact, one of the reasons I was motivated to go have the experience of living abroad is I met so many people living first in Los Angeles and later San Francisco who are immigrants that came from other places, sometimes very far away. I had so much respect for what they went through to transplant their whole lives, to come pursue the opportunities and the lifestyle that’s afforded to Americans and Californians. But because I happen to be lucky enough to be born in California and be a Californian, I could certainly Just sit back and enjoy the fruits of that serendipitous occurrence, but I felt like I wanted to have the experience of living in another place. And it certainly has given me new appreciation. Being an immigrant just gives you a whole new perspective on nations and cultures because you’re outside of As programmers like to say there’s 1 and there’s N, so most people only have ever really seen the inside of one nation and one culture. Once you’ve seen two, now you can see the, call them pros and cons, but even more than that, you just see the variations, you see the ways that human nature is pretty constant across all these cultural differences, but you also see things that are maybe more accidents of history or fallout of particular geography or history that a culture evolved in.
So yeah, it’s a really mind expanding experience, but certainly I am and continue to be thankful that I was lucky to be born in a time and place that is really, frankly, a great place to be.
So another interesting factor of this decoupling of where people live from their sort of work and school life is that when it comes time to incorporate a business, now you have also a similar decision. So for example, in our case, we had 3 founding partners and they were all essentially located in different places and so basically you just got to pick where one of them is located and that’s where your business is going to be. In our case, that made sense to be Seattle, but you can even take it a step further. Other than that, for example, it’s been for a pretty long time. I think most San Francisco tech companies are incorporated in Delaware. I don’t have exact numbers there, but I’d be willing to wager it’s in the 80 to 90% range.
00:35:13 - Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it might even be higher. And to be clear, we are a Delaware corporation, you know, we’re incorporated there, and our HQ is in Seattle. It was kind of funny because you basically have to pick an HQ and, you know, we don’t have an office and I guess we’ll pick Seattle because it needs to be somewhere and Mark lives there and that’s where the lawyers are sure.
00:35:32 - Speaker 1: We did the same thing for I and Switch, which was again, distributed founding team. We just arbitrarily picked Miami because that’s where my colleague Ryan lived, so, yeah.
Some are taking it even a step further.
You’ve got services like Stripe Atlas or Firstpace is a company I just recently invested in, where they actually take this a step further and say, OK, you can be anywhere in the world, most anywhere in the world, and in corporated company in the United States, and it’s really more of a shopping for a jurisdiction, a legal jurisdiction, a legal home for your legal entity, which again takes that uh Whole another step that fits into this globalization story, but all of these mechanisms I feel like were created for, yeah, I live in any town USA and I want to open a restaurant on Main Street, so of course, what do I do? I incorporated the local jurisdiction because that’s just what makes sense. And now in this global internet connected world, the both people and the companies kind of can choose their home based on, I don’t know, more expansive criteria. But what do you think about the whole, yeah, stripe Atlas kind of phenomenon?
00:36:42 - Speaker 2: Well, I think first of all, anything that makes it easier to start a business and gives the opportunity to more people is awesome.
I think entrepreneurship is such a powerful force in our society, and I think a lot of people are limited by just the practical things of it costs money and time and expertise to know how to start a business, especially before these two things existed, and they’ve made it much easier.
So that’s huge.
I’m also pretty bullish on this idea of having more flexibility in jurisdictions. I do think there’s a lot of benefits to that. There’s the long running example of being able to incorporate in Delaware, and just gives a lot of practical benefits for people to have familiarity and confidence in their jurisdiction and There’s some sense of competition, dynamism among the different jurisdictions to be a good home for businesses. So I think that’s quite good. I do think they’re going to be some big challenges. I think one is going to be the tax situation. I think honestly, that’s going to be a fiasco. I mean, it already is internationally. So the deal there is companies take advantage of being able to move jurisdictions for tax purposes, so they might flow a lot of profits through, I’m not an expert in this, but like, you know, Ireland or something, and it’s basically totally artificial.
00:37:46 - Speaker 1: As I say, wasn’t there a big court case with Apple over that a lot of their profits flow through Ireland and so the way they were paying taxes, maybe to the at least American authorities felt like they were not doing their fair share.
00:37:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s kind of one of many examples of what’s going on here where historically you had businesses where the business, the physical plant, the employers, the customers, transactions, they were all in the same place. Like if you have a mom and pop shop that they’re all in the same place, for example. And so it’s kind of obvious what to do.
But if you have a business where you’re incorporated in one place, your headquarters in another place, your employees are in different place, your customers are in different place, the transactions. Nominally somewhere else, the servers are somewhere else, your lawyers are somewhere else, who gets that tax money? And it’s not an obvious question. And there’s a lot of wrangling over that right now. And by the way, it might actually get even worse this coming year because everyone’s going to have to do their taxes with everyone working from home. And you know, is your income in where you used to work, or is it in where you spent 7 months or yeah, it’s going to be a mess. But I’m confident eventually we’ll be able to figure this out.
00:38:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s one of these problems that society needs to tackle and find a way that’s fair and comprehensible and navigable to everyone. I think of something like the Amazon sales tax issue, which I think took many years to sort out, but essentially collecting sales tax once. commerce largely moves online. You buy and sell stuff in the cloud and then where does sales tax get charged?
00:39:11 - Speaker 2: I’m smiling here on the podcast because while the sales tax situation is better, it’s still not fully figured out as we recently realized with news, we’re getting there.
00:39:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. And then when you have small businesses that should be focused on survival, they’re trying to, you know, in our case, try an innovative new product and see if people will pay for it, and we have a small team and we don’t want to be caught up in tax law jurisdiction stuff that’s just going to drain energy and time and everything else away from just making a good product and pleasing our customers.
But at the same time, yeah, it’s often not clear. I have a personal story on that, which was funny. I living this immigrant lifestyle is I often mystify my working with tax advisors or attorneys or other things like that. For example, a state planning, you know, I pay into both the American Social Security system but also the German pension system, and there’s all sorts of weird ways that those interact.
Many cases, there’s international treaties that govern that kind of stuff, you know, is a driver’s license from this place accepted over here, or can you Diverted or if so, how? So yeah, things get thorny and then my partner, my life partner is from yet another country and then we’re living in this, so you’ve got two people from different countries who are living together in a third country and they want to do things like I don’t know, a joint bank account or purchase a home together or something like that. Yeah, things get confusing fast, even hiring experts, attorneys and advisors and other things, they’re often just mystified or You know, who’s going to be an expert in either 2 or certainly all three of these jurisdictions and sometimes it’s just not even clear. One good example for that is because I do so much work for companies where I earn equity rather than cash or some mix of cash and equity, which is of course really, really standard in the startup world, but I have earned equity from companies over the course of many, many years, have a portfolio on that that I’ve built up over. Time and of course it takes a long time to pay out. Most of it’s never worth anything, but some of it eventually is worth something. And I recently had a company I did work for back in 2010 went to IPO, so I made some good money from that and that was nice, but I’ll tell you what, trying to figure out the tax situation as it relates to Germany is quite interesting because there you go, OK, well, I worked for a company, you know, almost 10 years ago at the time, almost 10 years ago, in a country. The company was in the United States. I was in the United States. I had never even been to Germany at that point. I had no work visa or anything. That’s when I did the work and I earned the equity then and of course it wasn’t worth very much then, basically, effectively worth 0. And then here I am, but now I’m here in Germany, I have a work permit and I I should be paying taxes on my earnings. The work was actually done previously and honestly, no one really knows. It’s just a legal gray area and you end up in this position where you have to try to figure out, obviously I want to pay what’s fair to all of these nations who are involved in it, the United States that was hosting me and the company and at the time as well as to my new adopted home, but it’s in many cases people don’t know what’s fair and then you’re trying to figure that out as you go along.
00:42:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the tax stuff is quite a rabbit hole for sure.
00:42:15 - Speaker 1: Well, maybe we can end on, if you were to give advice or give you at least your thoughts on how someone could or should approach thinking about where they want to live, if they have that flexibility in 2020 in this new Zoom centric world that we live in, what tips would you offer them?
00:42:33 - Speaker 2: Hm. I think I’d go back to a sort of personal motto of mine, which is to be honest with yourself, and this means really understanding what motivates you and drives you. So whatever your process is, try to dial into what is in fact really important to you and where you live. And I think it’s being open to the possibility that that is not obvious, that’s maybe a little bit alarming to you, that it’s not what your friends expected or think should be the case, but really being true to what you actually want and need, and then going forward from there. What about you, Adam?
00:43:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that.
I’ll add on to it that I think when I’ve been in the position of offering this perspective to someone, I’ve compared it to dating, which is you can have some idea in your mind of who your ideal partner is just like you can have an idea of what your ideal home is, but in many cases you don’t know until you see it because you don’t really know what the variables are, what the options are, and sometimes a place or a person just has some special combination of. Elements, some chemistry with you that never would have predicted just from the on paper analysis. So I think that’s for being a little open, maybe trying to cut free of what is expected from you by your culture, your friends, your family, and being open to seeing what place you vibe with and then doing that reflection and trying to understand for me, a lot of the reflection. was realizing, you know, I thought maybe I was in a place in my life where I want to be a little bit out of the hustle and bustle of the city, the big bad city with all its crime and dirt and intensity. That’s a young person’s game. But I actually found when I looked at the different options, now, I really thrive off of urban energy, but I also at a point where I want a little more green, a little more quiet, a little more space, and can I get those two things together. In fact, you can. There’s a huge amount of diversity in cities in the world, and if you’re open to absorbing and seeing what your experiences are in terms of this place feels good to me. I feel at home or I feel comfortable here and the self reflection on understanding what that means for you in terms of understanding what you value, but maybe also stage of life. Maybe you have an image of yourself in the mind that I’m a young dynamic person and I want to be in. Some young dynamic oriented place like Manhattan, but maybe in fact, that’s not really what you want. Maybe you wanted it when you were younger and you don’t want it now or the other way around. So I think being very open but also self-reflective is the key.
00:44:56 - Speaker 2: Right on.
00:44:57 - Speaker 1: If any of our listeners out there have feedback, maybe a little about your own journey in thinking about where you want to live and work, then reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or by email, hello at museapp.com. We always love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. And Mark, thanks for holding down Muse World Headquarters there in Seattle for us. You bet. Thanks, Adam. See you next time.
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The purpose of design is really to marry the kind of far out there crazy ideas with what can be practically achieved and serve some practical function.
00:00:16 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name’s Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam and Andy from Andy Works.
00:00:33 - Speaker 1: Hi guys, thanks for having me.
00:00:34 - Speaker 2: It’s great to have you on. I understand that uh you’re a woodworker. I was just looking at your clock project.
00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, when I moved to Seattle, I finally had the space after moving from New York to open up a small woodworking shop here.
00:00:48 - Speaker 2: And how would you compare doing things with your hands where once you make a cut, you cannot take it back to the digital virtual space that is your day job, let’s say.
00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it definitely requires a greater degree of thoughtfulness, I’d say, and the material is certainly a lot more expensive when you screw it up. But it’s been, you know, woodworking, I think has just been a great kind of like new creative field to get lost in and feel like a newbie again as someone who’s been in the design field now for 16 years or so. It’s great to just kind of get back to something and feel lost.
00:01:24 - Speaker 2: And maybe you can tell us just a little bit about your background.
00:01:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I came into design really through filmmaking first, and that was really sort of the first creative expression that I had sort of growing up in a, you know, small fishing village in Alaska and then found my way into design here in Seattle at the University of Washington, studied graphic design, and then started finding my way into this interaction field kind of combining filmmaking and storytelling with design and communication.
This was definitely at the early years of product design, wasn’t wasn’t even called UX or product design at the time. And came through some different agencies, worked with Nike for a bit, worked at the big corporation Microsoft for a while on a project called Microsoft Courier, doing some ink and touch.
00:02:13 - Speaker 2: Courier, absolutely. That’s a, perhaps not a commercial success, but a um say a source of inspiration for future notebook computers, right?
00:02:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, we like to say it’s the new duo now, it just took 10 years or so to finally get out there.
00:02:29 - Speaker 2: Unfortunately, in this business, being early is the same as being wrong. Exactly. That’s a quote I often reference.
00:02:37 - Speaker 1: We used to joke at Microsoft that back in the Balmer era that they were either 5 years too early or 5 years too late with all their products. So in this case, maybe it was both. So 10 years off.
But I did that for a while and that’s really what got me interested in tool making in the digital world and so left Microsoft and then ended up starting a company called 53 with some people from Microsoft. And that was really about taking that idea of building creative tools forward.
And at the time, creativity wasn’t really a market that anyone was really looking at. The iPad had just come out and we started to see a lot of interesting opportunities with this mobile touch space on a larger screen and came up with a product called Paper and Paper was like a digital sketchbook and is still out there and doing well.
00:03:29 - Speaker 2: I suspect a lot of our audience knows paper and I certainly think of it as being one of the first apps that maybe really demonstrated the potential of the iPad, and especially back in those days, you know, there wasn’t an official stylus yet, and it was a much more nascent piece of. And yet if you saw an app like this and you thought, OK, now I can kind of picture what this might be for, how it could be more than just a big phone, not just a weaker computer. Right?
00:03:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s great because that was our intention. I think people forget when the iPad first came out, it was primarily marketed as a consumption device, you know, as Steve Jobs leaning back on a couch on the stage there. Reading books and watching movies.
And, you know, we just always felt like that’s one view, but really technology for us really amplifies what makes us human, and a lot of that is creativity.
So we just saw a lot of potential there. So we built paper, we built a stylus called Pencil before the Apple pencil, and really tried to kind of build out this ecosystem of creative tools. So we did that for a while and then ended up joining up with We Transfer and I worked there for a couple years heading up one of their products called Paste, and recently jumped away from that to start up this thing called Andy works.
00:04:54 - Speaker 2: And maybe that brings us to how we in fact got in touch, which is I came across here, let’s call it your uh initiating blog post.
I don’t know, it’s the first article on your site in any case, uh, called No More boring Apps, and in fact, that’s our topic today, and maybe I can just scroll back in our, we have a slack inspiration channel here, and I posted the link when I first saw it a couple of months back or last month I guess.
And I have a couple of quotes I pulled out here.
One was, if you’re small, it’s to your advantage to be weird, you can build apps that the big tech companies never could.
And secondly, when I use your app, I don’t want to see your company’s KPI that’s a key performance indicator. I want to see your point of view. And so those ideas being weird, particularly being weird and small, and not necessarily surfacing the business’ needs, which I feel so much of technology today is something where they’re asking me for something because it helps their business, not because it helps.
Me and the point of view, the perspective on the world, which could of course be wrong, but at least it can be unique and fit with your app and fit with your team’s vibe and dynamic, that sort of stuff is what I’m in this business for and hopefully is what we’re doing on the Muse team.
I’ll link the article in the show notes, of course, but Andy, maybe you want to briefly summarize why you wrote that article or what you think the thesis is.
00:06:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll try and summarize it as kind of succinctly as I can, but That statement, no more boring apps really was something of a rip off of the artist John Baldassari, who was a painter back in the 70s, who famously, you know, at the age of 39, well into his midcareer, done hundreds of paintings of landscapes, took all of his paintings, lit them ablaze. And took the cremations and made cookies out of them and it was a whole performance piece, but one thing that he did is he proclaimed, I will not make any more boring art and recorded a video of him writing that thousands of times over and over again. So I just loved that story, that sort of like epic moment of kind of renouncing your past and then going on to something else.
And he went on to become one of the seminal conceptual artists of the 20th century. And sort of hesitate to put myself at that same sort of epic moment, but a few things kind of started coming together for me and one of those was simply kind of looking around at the industry.
Again, I’ve been in this industry for a bit now and talking with friends, you know, I just wasn’t finding that much inspiration from the product industry itself. And the more I started to look at other design disciplines, you know, fashion, architecture, industrial design, furniture design, you see so many inspiring things there and when you talk to people from those fields, they have their heroes, they have like these amazing pieces that are coming out, people that are really pushing the boundaries of what can be done in that field, even though many of those fields are many decades if not hundreds of years older. Than product design. And at first kind of thought it was just me, you know, I was like, maybe I’m just reaching that age and I’m getting a little jaded, but the more I started asking others, the more I started to hear the same response, you know, people struggling to find interesting work in this field.
00:08:28 - Speaker 2: And I’ll add on to that point by it was actually just a couple episodes ago on this podcast that Mark and I were talking with Josh Miller from the browser company and we got onto this topic of architecture and buildings and how architecture we find inspiring both because it’s sort of an active. Creation that’s like art, but at the same time has these practical and functional elements, but notably there we all got excited about this. We knew the names of specific architects whose work we find inspiring. That’s exactly an illustration of your point. I think that we look for inspiration outside our field, not within it.
00:09:03 - Speaker 1: Exactly. And I think, you know, some of it is because it’s a younger field, like some of those titans are probably still yet to be really christened.
But I think all the ingredients are there for great things to happen.
You think about our field compared to these other fields, there’s so many people in product design today and building products, it’s an incredibly vast field. It’s one of the largest creative disciplines there is today, and there are many more product designers than there are furniture designers, for example, but you know, furniture designer doesn’t struggle to find inspiration within their own field. That was part of it, you know, part of it was just feeling that sort of frustration and some people have asked, does that mean I can’t have any boring apps, you know, does that mean, what about my bank app or something a lot more sort of cut and dry? Does everything have to be breakthrough and different? And that’s not really what it’s about. It was meant more as a kind of manifesto for Andy works itself. So what I’m trying to do with Andy Works is really push on this idea of design driven products, a truly sort of design differentiated software business. Because there really aren’t that many of those, I think when you actually strip it back.
00:10:25 - Speaker 2: Certainly a word that people use plenty in this world shaped by the Apple juggernaut, and that word went from being not really a part of the computer industry that I was part of 20 years back, let’s say, to being something that I feel like every company does talk about use that word in some way, but it sounds like you feel like they’re not getting quite right or at least it doesn’t push the button for you.
00:10:48 - Speaker 1: I mean, I think for sure design plays a role, but I think there’s a big difference between design, driving a business in something like fashion. I mean, fashion, it’s clothes. It just needs to be as functional as software. Like it still has a purpose and a function, and yet there’s an expressive element to it that’s very important. And there are fashion studios that wouldn’t exist. It’s entirely about the design, right? And same with architecture, there’s architectural studios that are entirely about the design, and it’s really the design that sells the product. And something that I’ve come to appreciate, I think more so over the last 5 years or so is, and this is not a knock on business, but how much business drives everything at a company. And it can be for kind of good or bad.
And I think a lot of this is gonna sound either really obvious or maybe unintuitive, uh, depending on who you are, but business really drives everything in a company and it drives the goals and the objectives of what you’re trying to achieve as a company.
And design serves that goal, just like anything else, just like legal development, everything else, all the other operations at a company. And that’s not always aligned with people or users. And so if that goal, it can be really be based on anything. And it can be based on some like core revenue metrics that you want to hit, but everyone sort of has a different pathway there to get to those goals.
And it’s not always coming directly through design.
A lot of products that we use today that we think are well designed, they may be well designed, but I contend that a lot of them aren’t actually design driven. Examples of things like, I mean, I love the design of something like Airbnb, great design, great design team, but I think the truth is that like, I don’t know if it’s truly a design choice that you’re making when you go there. I think it’s actually a number of other factors like price, maybe some other aspects of convenience. There was a time where Airbnb design was not so good, and they did pretty well, and they found a great foothold. It’s not to pick on Airbnbs.
00:13:16 - Speaker 2: Is that partially a function of the business you’re in or who your customers are, you know, maybe in the Airbnb case, you just want access to the inventory that they have to offer. Exactly as you can imagine something else where you mentioned the bank example before, and I do think there is, yeah, we can come to the best practices versus the more original. Approach, but I do choose banks based on whether they have a good user experience in the way that I interact with the services they’re providing me because lots of banks can hold my money, but being well designed is in fact a differentiator and a big one for me, a deciding one.
00:13:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think there are these key kind of companies like that that really, for me, it comes back to how much of it is what you’re doing and how much of it is how you’re doing it.
And I think design really comes into that latter portion. It’s really about how you do it. So where everything else is equal and you’re offering sort of the same thing as someone else, design really comes in and helps differentiate it.
You know, paper is a good example of this. Paper was not the first drawing out on the iPad. There were literally, you know, 40 or 50 others. That we looked very closely at and just felt like they weren’t capturing the right sort of spirit of creativity and weren’t executing on it very well. And we took all those insights and thought, well, let’s formulate it into something else, something that focuses really on some of the key things that we knew were really important to the creative process.
So it took those sets of values applied to something that already exists and I, I mean if you looked at paper just from a bullet point standpoint.
It would have looked very boring, you know, if you just had a feature list. It would have looked like nothing. I think it’s that really that approach that you take that really makes it driven by design.
And I think there’s just so much happening today where people are trying to find new problems to solve. And I think that’s great, but for me, I’m at a place where I don’t feel like I need more or I don’t feel like I have a ton of new problems to solve. I kind of want better, you know, when I look at my phone, it’s full of hundreds of garbage apps, to be honest, stuff that I just kind of downloaded in the moment. And I’m just finding this desire to have like that well crafted thing just like as we are in our homes, you know, I think you look around and the things that you choose to put in your office or on your desk or in your kitchen, you want those things to be considered to reflect your values. There’s nothing revolutionary about a new tea kettle, but maybe you want something that just like really reflects your values and your aesthetics and maybe even be a little bit inspiring.
00:16:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. So my perspective on your post was that there’s potentially a lot of degrees of freedom that you have when you’re designing a business and a product, but it feels like design is often the last variable, so you end up fixing things because of the economics, because of your or structure, because of your product goals, or because of just, um, assumptions or constraints that you impose on yourself.
And then after you’ve done all of that, you don’t have a lot of room, basically.
On the design, so everything ends up looking the same, right? And when I think of when I hear no more bad apps, it’s like break out of those constraints, let design be a more free variable, give yourself more degrees of freedom, so you can make different choices and not take on so many of these assumptions and premises and see what comes out of that.
Yeah. And I think that speaks both to, by the way, the product in terms of where you end up with the design, but also speaks to you as a designer, right? It’s not super fun to be the last free variable where you’re very constrained. You want to be actually to have more agency over how the thing works in the broadest sense.
00:17:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think we’ve kind of seen this sort of central premise of like user centered design. We’ve seen its flaws now, we’ve seen where it can fall short.
00:17:17 - Speaker 2: So here you’re talking about user centered as in more driven by kind of user research, as opposed to, I don’t know, a designer’s internal sense of what’s interesting, special and good.
00:17:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in a sense, I mean, again, it’s one of those things that can sound very obvious, but as people like we’re we’re terrible at knowing. What it is that we really need, right? You know, you can kind of ask us what we want, but we’re pretty bad at knowing what we really need. So that’s kind of a direct hit on the idea of user centered design.
Now, there’s a lot of good with user centered design, but I think with anything, you know, once it becomes a dogma, it can go too far and we can start to see its flaws.
You mentioned architecture earlier. I’m a fan of America’s greatest architect really, Frank Lloyd Wright, and His household name back in the first half of the 20th century. I think he was on the cover of Time Magazine like twice. Like everybody knew him. He was like a superstar back in the day and really shaped American architecture in the first half of the 20th century and even beyond that really. But, you know, his last work was the Guggenheim in New York and It’s a weird building. It’s not quite in line with much of what else he’s done. But when it first came out, it was super controversial. You know, now we think of it as this great pillar of architecture. It was very controversial at the time. People were complaining about how it was very disrespectful of the art. I don’t know if you know it, it’s a building that’s basically a giant spiral. So you walk along the outside on a slope. So you’re walking around this large atrium on the exterior around the slope, spiraling upward, and then you walk back down, spiraling down. And it’s kind of antagonistic to users in a way. It’s not very conducive to appreciating the art, but it’s become like one of the best places to build installations because it has become its own kind of unique place that has created its own sort of unique artwork. So artists will sometimes create paintings that follow the curvature of the floor and have this slight bend to it. And I think about that sometimes because I think, again, that wasn’t listening necessarily to what an art museum should be. It was creating this new vision and then having other people jump in and react to it. And that’s something that I think again is kind of missing like user centered design can be this great kind of iterative approach. It can get you kind of to this local maxima. But if you really want to step into new territory and see some new vista, you know, sometimes that takes some crazy leap of faith by like individual minds, right?
00:20:16 - Speaker 3: To look at another art form, Keith Raboy makes this point with movies. You don’t make a movie by surveying 100 people and then taking the average of what everyone said and then filming that, right? If someone has a vision for a movie that should exist and they pull together all the pieces to make that happen. They find the actors, they find the photographer, and so on, and then you test it, and you see, OK, people do where they don’t take that up, but you have to work backwards from a vision.
00:20:41 - Speaker 2: Which once again seeking inspiration from other fields, and actually that strikes square on one of my favorite books in this kind of maker biography category is called Making Movies. I can’t remember the author’s name, but it’s a pretty successful Hollywood director who basically wrote a, here’s how I make movies, he just kind of like walks through the whole process giving specific examples from his work. And the director is this sort of the visionary CEO type of the thing, he, she or they are doing some kind of artistic expression, but they also have all this practical management stuff of just getting the right people there and the technical stuff with the camera and Dealing with weather and dealing with municipalities and zoning and permits and you gotta sort of pull all that together while at the same time keeping the line of sight of the vision that you’re here to make a piece of art and make something that moves people and you do that by having a unique idea and sticking with it through all those practicalities.
00:21:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love, as I mentioned, my first creative outlet was filmmaking, and I loved those as So I tend to use filmmaking as references quite a bit. And one thing that I love that a lot of great directors, Tarantino, Scorsese, the advice that they’ll give to up and coming directors is really to make the movie that you wanna watch, you know, find something that you want to see, that you want to exist, and make that. And if you’re lucky, there’s probably other people like you out there that are really gonna connect with it.
But that’s really the only way to make a great story, is to really, you know, feel something personal about it.
And I don’t really say it in that piece, maybe I hint at it, but Part of my hope is that the product design and products in general can actually be this vector for interesting culture to emerge. Again, our products are used by billions of people every day, and there’s so much time and so much attention put into these products that I think it’s just this great medium that we haven’t really fully explored in terms of creative expression.
00:22:55 - Speaker 2: Can you think of some examples of digital products as vectors for culture?
00:23:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I can, believe it or not. But it doesn’t come from the product world, it comes from gaming.
00:23:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Mark and I reference games and both technology inspiration and design and otherwise more often than you might think for a productivity tool.
00:23:19 - Speaker 1: I think gaming is amazing, and I hadn’t sadly really been following it that closely. You know, you’d think someone in UX design and filmmaking, like the intersection of that is gaming.
But I hadn’t really been following it.
So this last year I’ve really jumped in and kind of immersed myself in gaming, and it’s just fascinating.
I mean, yeah, if you’re talking about ways to really connect with individuals at a brand or an emotional scale in the digital world, I think it’s gaming and so, yeah, I mean, a lot of work from Play Dead Studio like inside. Limbo.
Yeah, I love Limbo. There’s a Swedish game designer, Oscar Stolberg. I don’t know if you guys have heard of him. He did a game called Bad North, uh maybe a couple years ago, but he just came out with a game, you know, it’s, it’s hard to even call it a game, it’s almost a creative toy. But it’s called Townscaper.
00:24:20 - Speaker 3: Oh, that guy, yeah, I just know him as the townscraper guy, yeah.
00:24:24 - Speaker 1: It is fascinating. I mean, the execution on it and the thought put into something, again, like to explain to people like you literally just click.
Like a sort of empty grid and you create these little like cubes of a town and so you build a town. That’s kind of all you do. So it’s almost like digital Legos in a way where you’re like building structures, but just the thought and attention that goes into how these things are built and how they connect and how one connects with another.
He has lighting, he has just amazing sense of polish and execution. On something that’s really just so simple. So those are the things that I tend to look at more and more these days.
00:25:08 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s interesting when I was thinking about inspiring digital creators, the first big category that I came to was these maverick game designers, and often it’s just one person who somehow builds the whole game end to end.
A few examples that came to mind for me was Jonathan Blow with Braid, Notch and Minecraft, Jordan, I think that’s Bechner on Prince of Persia, and oftentimes they did not only the idea and the story, but the programming, the graphics, they composed the music, sometimes they record it.
It’s an amazing breath, but going back to this idea of degrees of freedom, that gives me the ability to have this vision and to build it up using all of those different angles and aspects to the way that they want it to exist.
So you get these very unified, polished, inspiring experiences from it.
And they’re able to do things that are really out there, because when you have this new idea for how a game should work, you really need to change all those other aspects at the same time.
And it’s hard to convince a bunch of other people to do that. So by having everything under your own control, you can often make that happen.
00:26:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and wouldn’t it be great to have some of that seep more into our everyday lives? That’s kind of my dream, I guess. And what we’re trying to pursue with Andy works is like, can you take some of that playfulness, that fun. That challenge it at times and bring that into everyday experiences, maybe.
00:26:26 - Speaker 2: Now games and film both are probably more on the, there’s obviously many practical aspects to implementing them, but the output really is art and it’s more pure form.
It’s designed to give you an experience or show you a perspective on the world that doesn’t really serve a practical purpose, whereas the clothing and architecture examples we used earlier, those maybe are closer to something like digital tools, productivity tools in the sense that, On one hand, they can be inspiring. They can express an artistic vision and in the best cases they do, but they also need to do practical things. They need to stay on your body and keep you warm. They need to house humans or in the case of productivity tools, they need to solve a specific problem that a person has and is willing to pay for.
How do either of you think about that trade-off between the express something original or inspiring or playful or soulful versus solve a problem such that someone wants to pay you for the product?
00:27:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m not sure there needs to be a trade-off. actually, as I was thinking about other examples of inspiring creators, I came up with this category of like the vertical integrators, this would be again Raboy with and team with Open Door, Ryan Johnson at Cul de sac, obviously Elon Musk and everything that he’s doing. These are people who like, in the case of cul de sac, for example, it’s like, I want a more walkable neighborhood. So do that. I’m just going to go to, I think it’s Arizona, buy a bunch of land and like build an entire neighborhood from scratch. OK, that’s a lot of real stuff to achieve a real end. And likewise, of course, with, you know, Elon sending stuff to Mars and so on. So I think you can get both of those and actually I think when you undertake a more ambitious and inspiring mission, you can often attract more talent, resources, and so on to your venture.
00:28:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll even go a step further. I honestly think that is kind of the purpose of design, is really to marry that the kind of far out there crazy ideas with what can be practically achieved and serve some practical function.
And I think without those two ends, it sort of gets lost or the design falls a bit flat or loses touch if it goes too far and the kind of playful.
I mean, I’d be tempted to just build a game myself, but something in me, I think growing up in Alaska, feels like everything I do has to have some practical purpose to it.
And so I like this idea of trying to bring those two together and again like I think we see it in so many other aspects of our lives, you know, the furniture that we buy to the items that we use every day.
We use them, they serve a practical purpose, but we don’t just buy any chair, you know, we buy a chair that speaks to us, fits within our surroundings, maybe reflects something that we think is interesting.
And so it’s always kind of this combination of the two, and again, yeah, you see it in fashion, you see it in architecture. We just haven’t really seen that much in the digital product space.
00:29:19 - Speaker 2: I like your connecting items in our daily life, physical items in our daily life to some of these digital products.
And for me, this is why I like using the word tools. For me, my bike is a tool for me to get around the city.
And my kitchen knife is a tool to help me do a better job at making healthy food, and the furniture, for example, a chair is a tool for me to sit on either to do productive work at a desk or relaxing chair to sit and read or feel cozy. These are all tools that serve a purpose, but also can make me feel inspired or make me have certain kinds of positive feelings and digital tools are no different. The apps on my phone, the software on my computer, the services I use for email and calendar and all these other relatively prosaic things, but in the same way that sitting and cutting and writing are all prosaic everyday things, so too are these digital things. I mean they can’t be inspired and that they can’t, as you say, marry together the practical function that they fulfill with something extra, something special.
00:30:21 - Speaker 1: Especially because we’re spending more and more of our lives in the digital world now, and we expect to spend much more of it over time. I mean, especially now, of course, with the quarantine, but we’re spending so much of our time here. And that was another thing. I just started to see where this was going. It’s like, oh man. This world needs to look a little better and be a little bit more inspiring if this is, you know, where we’re gonna be spending the majority of our time down the road, you know, where we meet people, where we connect with people, where we get our work done. And I’m really drawn to these everyday things.
00:30:59 - Speaker 2: So when we think about everyday physical items in our life, one that comes to mind for me is this clock project that I saw you document on Twitter. How does that fit into what we’re talking about here?
00:31:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so that really came about through one this interest in furniture making and just really like, again, getting really deep and lost in like a brand new field.
As soon as you get that new talent and that new ability, I feel like you start to see everything around you as something that can be rebuilt or redesigned or or recreated.
And one thing that I had my eye on for a long time was a clock. And the reason for that is that my kids, I have two young kids ages 3 and 5, and they would constantly ask me, as young kids do, is it time for bed yet? Is it bedtime yet? Is it time for lunch? Is it time for dinner? They didn’t know how to read an analog clock, and at first my thought was, well, let’s just teach them how to read a clock, but then the design brain kind of kicks in and you’re like, well, maybe the problem isn’t the kids, but it’s the clock, not the user’s fault.
00:32:10 - Speaker 1: Exactly. So you start digging into it and you start to realize how many of the conventions that have really been set.
You know, how arbitrary many of them really are like the sort of twice around 12 hour dial clock that we think of as the analog clock, was more of a mechanical limitation at the time, and it’s just kind of hung around for a few 100 years.
So I started to think about what a clock could be.
It turns out like an analog clock is really hard to read actually. It sounds simple cause we’ve learned it and we looked at it all the time. But if you’re a young kid, or if you’re, you know, it’s even used as mental aptitude test for people that may have like early onset dementia. And so it’s actually quite a complex abstract test.
You know, you have to think of which hand is what, you know, there are multiple hands, they represent different increments of time, and you have to know which direction they’re moving. You have to know that like the large hand pointing at a 3, multiply by 5, that means it’s 15, that’s a fraction of 60.
There’s a bit going on, and that’s just too much for a 3 year old to really grasp. But it’s silly like they understand time, in a sense, they understand that things take time and that something isn’t now or it’s later. They understand the concepts.
00:33:33 - Speaker 2: They just can’t the cyclical aspect of the day as well that there is a dinner time every day that is at the same time and it’s the day that changes, uh, even though there’s a, there’s a, there’s a new day, but maybe the only thing they understand is that there is a schedule.
00:33:45 - Speaker 1: But I started looking at that and just going down a rabbit hole of like questioning every assumption and actually ended up coming back to the first clocks, which were sundials. And that was the first goal was to fix the model rather than spinning twice. We see the sun move around the earth, or that’s how we perceive it, once a day.
So, OK, let’s have a 24 hour clock rather than 12. And then I got rid of the hands that was clearly like just too much information.
And the truth is, if you’re a kid is at 1253 or 1255, like that level of precision doesn’t really matter typically. So I replaced it with just a single hand that moves around a 24 hour clock, and then I painted half of it dark and half of it light.
So the dark half was nighttime, the light half was daytime. And then probably the best move was just, I did this right at the end. I just slapped a sticker next to bedtime on the clock. So just a little red dot. So the hand is like a nice bright red and this red dot. So all they have to know is like, has that hand hit that dot yet or not? That’s when they know it’s bedtime.
And kind of, you know, whenever you make something, you don’t know if it’s gonna work. This like surprisingly worked really well. Like, they immediately got it, didn’t have to really be taught it. And now they can read it and they can tell me the time, they could tell me if it’s bedtime or not. And so it’s really kind of changed their abilities and really like opened up their own sense of agency.
But probably the most interesting thing is I found that for me, it was also a little bit easier. I didn’t quite realize just how those micro moments of kind of looking at an analog clock to kind of compute the time. How much that was really in the way.
It’s kind of like uh uh it’s hard to explain, but it’s almost like screen refresh rates, you know, once you jump to 120 from 60, suddenly like, you notice it, you feel it, and it’s hard to go back. It’s that same kind of like mental exercise that suddenly it feels easier. And the other thing is that I noticed that of all the things I built, I mean, paper’s been downloaded 50 million times and I use it every week, but I don’t use it as much as this clock. This clock I use 20 times a day at least, and it’s just like making those small moments better and easier and more delightful. And that really got me on this path and what we’re trying to do with Andy works around taking that idea of like, no more boring apps and the everyday, and you make these everyday moments. Marry them with great design and build something that’s truly like design differentiated. So all these little digital moments that touch our lives throughout the day, you know, I wake up, I check the weather, I set a timer, these things like this, can you elevate those to something interesting, inspiring, maybe even simpler.
00:37:01 - Speaker 3: I think it’s such an interesting example because it shows. How often bad design or boring design is really directly downstream from the wrong assumptions or constraints. So yes, if you assume your clock needs to go around once every 12 hours, it needs to have second accuracy, it needs to have two hands, it needs to have 12 at the top, it can’t have any other markings. Like you basically back yourself into the boring old clock, but when you break free of those constraints, when you allow yourself to analyze the problem from first principles, there’s a lot more you can do. That’s a power and I see a lot with things that end up being boring apps.
00:37:33 - Speaker 1: Well you guys are doing this too. I feel like testing some of the assumptions around navigation, input, creativity.
00:37:40 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. And not only assumptions on the design, the solution that is, but also on assumptions on the sort of problem or the inputs. So for example, a big one for us is we broke the assumption that you need to be flexible to people having a stylus or not. Basically, Muse requires the Apple pencil to. substantially and a lot of apps, they just would never accept or even consider that being a possibility. We realized, hey, actually, basically, everyone has a stylus, the people who don’t, they’re happy to buy one, so let’s just roll with it. And that gives us a lot more degrees of freedom to use that as an input modality in a more powerful way.
00:38:12 - Speaker 2: Thinking about established conventions like 24 hours on a clock or do the hands go around twice and thinking about Muse and where we’ve tried to sort of challenge the status quo because we think things can be improved, such as requiring a pencil versus places where we just go with what people know and expect. I feel like with apps and software, you have the platform conventions and in many cases even rules, right? Apple and their human interface guidelines and the the app store rules and the review process and there’s a different but similar set of conventions for say web software, desktop software and so forth and.
I think part of the hard part of the journey we’ve been on building this particular product and I expect it’s the same for anyone that wants to do something a little bit original, is trying to decide where to take your weird thing and just really take that all the way and just double down. on the fact that you’re breaking on what’s expected or even breaking the rules of the platform and in other places, you just want to be as simple and standard and boring and exactly what’s expected on the platform as possible because that’s not where you’re really innovating.
How do you navigate the trade-off between those two things?
00:39:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you can’t really play either extreme, obviously, and you see that happen sometimes, especially with younger product makers or designers trying to reinvent everything in their experience or their app, and you can very quickly go down a path of just everything’s too new. Everything’s like, look at me. I mean, you’re really calling attention to something when you are rethinking it. And so just like with, you know, a great piece of graphic design, you kind of know how to control someone’s attention. You can’t make the whole thing loud. You have to know where to put white space and where to draw attention. And that’s really the trick is kind of finding what’s unique about you. That’s usually where you want to put the innovation. I don’t know if you guys have heard this before, but sometimes we in the past talked about things like an innovation budget, you know, you have a certain amount of innovation that you can plug into your app that people are willing to kind of learn because there’s something new and unique and interesting behind it or that is unlocked by it. And so you have to really, I think, know what’s unique, you know, like what is it that you’re bringing that’s unique, and that’s where you focus on what becomes, you know, unique and interesting and rethinking common conventions. But honestly, like most of an app, oftentimes or any sort of product is convention, and that’s important because you need the important stuff, the truly innovative stuff to pop out, to jump out at you. And you can’t have it all jump out. So there are places where you kind of need it to recede a bit, and the best way to do that is to follow some convention. There’s nothing wrong with conventions, like they’re there for a good reason. But they become the sort of like receding sort of principle.
00:41:12 - Speaker 3: This actually reminds me of another great blog post called funnily enough, Choose Boring Technology, which seems contradictory to your blog post title, but it’s actually making a similar point to what you just said, which is, I think he called them innovation tokens, if I remember correctly, this idea you have like 3 to spend in your entire business and so choose wisely what you invest your novelty in.
00:41:32 - Speaker 2: Maybe that one is on the implementation side. And Andy’s talking about sort of the user side, users only have so much willingness to kind of struggle through figuring out something new, so you want to spend that call attention to the things that really matter and everything else kind of follows conventions and on the implementation side, such as technology. It’s just your team is going to need to push hard and invest more and spend more time to get the weird stuff right, to get it good or get it interesting versus following conventions. It’s kind of almost mindless. You just do what is known to be the best practice and that’s it, you can move on.
00:42:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think one of the challenges or shortcomings that I see today is that there are a lot of products that are almost all convention and you sort of struggle to find it, at least again from a design standpoint.
I see a lot of companies innovating on business models or distribution or various services, but in terms of design, execution or a user experience, there are very few that I think that are really kind of pushing the innovation button there, but there are things like design systems are great, but again, that’s like a tool you’re establishing a convention, and if your entire design.
It’s just kind of hinged upon pulling components from existing design systems. Then, you know, your index experience is gonna look pretty conventional.
00:42:56 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and ultimately, well, I think it’s important to have a sense of how you’re going to navigate this tradeoff of convention versus originality, I think you ultimately need to go back to first principles and just make a great design. I think some people sometimes get lost in how they’re relating to the convention or whatever. You gotta ask yourself, is it good? I sometimes joke with our designer Leonard, like, Leonard, you can design this however you want as long as it’s good. And I’m only half joking when I say that.
00:43:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, to go a little further, I, I, you have to realize, like, why do these conventions exist? I mean, the truth is a lot of conventions exist. A lot of the guidelines for these things exist. Like think of who is building an app like Google has to build these guidelines for everyone. Like somebody that knows nothing about design. They’re kind of building a base layer and also one size fits all, right?
00:43:40 - Speaker 2: So it’s not just the skill level of people implementing, but just all very different kinds of apps or in some cases weighted towards just where their existing customers or revenue bases, right? That’s part of what we run into with Muse, which is so much of the iOS platform and design conventions are based around phone used with one finger or small screen. And so those conventions are basically good there for consumer apps on the phone, but they become quite restricting and even very counterproductive on the iPad for a professional tool.
00:44:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah. So in many cases, the conventions are just that, they’re conventional, like they’re not going to get you to something interesting because they’re not really designed that way. These guidelines are put in place to provide some very base common denominator experience for everyone. Like you’re not gonna be able to kind of push above the noise and achieve something truly great by following those alone.
00:44:38 - Speaker 2: I’m also reminded of a lesson that my high school English teacher taught me, which is I was complaining that we were taught all these rules of good writing and even grammatical rules, and then we would read these classics who were held up as these amazing works, and I would point out all the ways that these authors broke the rules. I said, why are we learning these rules if these great works break them? And her answer was, well, you have to know the rules first because then you can break them in interesting ways.
00:45:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. Thumbs up. I’m curious for you guys, what you think your most controversial belief is. Hm.
00:45:14 - Speaker 3: It was very interesting.
00:45:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, and part of the premise of MS is that I believe that computers can help us think, not just author, but think our thoughts. And actually maybe with some of the tools for thought stuff that’s breaking into the zeitgeist a little bit this year, that’s slightly less controversial, but the counterpoint to that is everything about the way that they’re created now, particularly when you get to the realm of web and mobile platforms, which is essentially where all the action is, let’s say, is designed really specifically to keep you from thinking. There’s literally a bible of user experience design titled Don’t Make me Think. And my view is, no, please, make me think and actually help me think.
00:46:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s related to my belief as well, which is, well, I guess I have 2.
Maybe I’ll throw 2 out there.
But they sort of formed some of the the backbone of Andy works and what we’re doing.
So the first is that a product can challenge its user. So at times maybe even be antagonistic or seem to be antagonistic towards the user, but again it’s something that you see in other aspects and so many other experiences that we experience in the physical world in other areas, you know, again, films, if it doesn’t challenge you, it’s not interesting, right? And so, I really think that design can challenge, it doesn’t have to be invisible. It can kind of be right up there in your face.
And we just have yet to see it. That’s one. The other one is around pushing back against the idea of scale in software, and it really kind of cuts against, I think, what is just natural in the software world, or, you know, software just naturally wants to be high volume, low margin, but thinking about, you know, is there a way to flip that around where it’s, you’re talking about very low volume, high margin value though, and Ship something and create products that are only for a few people, but really deliver a ton of value to them in the consumer space, not just in the like specialized professional space, but in a consumer space. I don’t even know if that’s possible, but I’m really interested in it. And like we’ve been trying some things with Andy works to do some of that, but it’s really cutting against the grain of software. Everything about software wants to be completely open and available to everyone, you know, we’ve been exploring ideas around like making limited edition versions of software. That’s something that is just like, you wouldn’t have to think twice about that in the physical world. It would just come naturally. But like in the software world, you have to do extra work to limit it, you know, you have to like track quantities and things like that. But I’m really interested in that sort of sense of exclusivity and personalization and having this like high impact on fewer people.
00:48:16 - Speaker 3: Nice. I like that a lot.
And that also resonates with what I was thinking about from my controversial opinion, and it connects back to this idea of design is related to everything else in the business.
It’s related to your work structure, it’s related to your business model, it’s related to the economics, it’s related to your users and your protocols.
So I think the flip side of that is that if you really want to do something innovative with design, you have to grapple with those other aspects.
I actually saw, there was a tweet from Patrick Colson yesterday about people who are doing interesting work on desktop designs. And to me, that’s, you actually can’t tackle that without tackling the whole problem of funding that work and getting it distributed.
So I think the most interesting design problems are really these system problems of how do you organize people over time to come to this future that you want.
And I’m excited that people are now starting to try that a little bit, like in your case with software, I’d like to see a lot more of that experimentation.
So before we close out here, I want to bring it back to where we started, which is working with your hands and woodworking.
So Andy, I have a sort of pet theory about woodworking in particular, and I’m curious if it resonates with you as a woodworker. And I developed this theory because a lot of my programmer friends and acquaintances have wandered into the field of woodworking. So I think there’s some particular attraction for people who work in technology. And here’s my theory. So, There’s the kind of obvious piece of it’s a new and different creative endeavor. In the same way that I, you know, play the piano, and that’s a creative thing, woodworking is also a creative thing. But I think there’s more factors at work. One is, it’s a very physical undertaking where you use your whole body and also the work product is something you can, for example, sit in or lie in. And so that is something that I think a lot of people who work in technology are missing because it is very digital, unsubstantiated work products. But the thing that I think is most important with woodworking is you have a lot of agency. As a woodworker, you can go all the way from the tree to the end product yourself. You have control over the exact wood use, you can choose your tools, you can choose what you build. You’re so much creative freedom and agency as an individual woodworker, whereas with Modern programmers, it’s like, OK, you basically got to use iOS and you got to use Swift, and if you don’t like that, too bad, you know, find another job. And I think people are increasingly grinding up against that as developers and when they see woodworking, they see all those ideal qualities as a creative person. So I’m just curious if that resonates with you.
00:50:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, that does. And like you said, I think it’s a common feeling. I think even outside of woodworking, you know, you see a lot of people baking their own bread during the pandemic, right? I mean, to the point where it’s almost becoming a joke. But look, if you’re gonna go out and make something, I’m not gonna make fun of you. I think there is something about, yeah, going back to some very fundamental materials and being able to shape it into something again that you can use and you can use every day. And that was definitely part of it for me.
Another part for me personally was I’ve always been interested in 3D and getting deeper into 3D. But you know, like, uh, when I left we transfers at the start of the year, I’d just been kind of burned out on digital things and just needed to like step away. But a great way to get into 3D is not actually through the 3D software. 3D software is like some of the most complicated software in the world. I mean, uh, the modeling, the rigging, animation, texture, I mean, like building a game is pretty sophisticated stuff, and it can really be a beast to try and get into. So the way that I kind of wanted to break into it wasn’t actually through the software, it was through like playing around with 3D form and thinking about three dimensional form. I mean, again, I come more from a graphic background. So for me, it was a great way to just start thinking and playing in 3D, getting back to basics. I feel like I learned a lot actually about product design now that comes from woodworking that I’m sort of bringing back into product.
But yeah, wordwork is great. I mean, it’s amazingly deep. It can seem so simple, but I mean you could spend a long, long time just trying to figure out the right finish for your desk or your bench or whatever it is, because there’s so much history there, so there’s so much depth, so much history. To dig into and you can never really reach the bottom of it. I feel like you talk with super experienced woodworkers and they’ll all still say like, uh, I don’t really know what I’m doing, you know, like, there’s someone who’s a better expert out there than me. And so I really love that, the sorts of combinations of things, the depth of it, like you’re saying, the kind of like elemental nature of it to take something very primitive and transform it into something that you can use every day. And then again, personally for me, it was partly just like Getting my hands into something 3 dimensional. Hm.
00:53:09 - Speaker 3: Very interesting.
00:53:11 - Speaker 1: Do you guys do woodworking?
00:53:13 - Speaker 3: I had dabbled in it a little bit. I actually took some courses here in the Seattle area, and then when I was younger, I did a lot of model working, which is like, you know, balsa wood type stuff, and I had a lot of those properties of you have agency over what you’re building and what you end up with is something very physical and potentially interesting, if not, you know, useful in the classical sense.
00:53:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think the reason a lot of us, like a lot of people from our generation got into this sort of like digital product world. It was partly because of how open it was. Back when I got into this 20 years ago, there were no tools to design this stuff. There wasn’t a software application to design software, you know, you had to use photo editing software or like, you had to hack Flash, you know, which was meant for animation to build something with scripting. And so we kind of got into this, I think, because of its ambiguity and its openness and now over time as it.
That open field is like slowly started to pave pathways. And then lay down the asphalt. Now things are very set in many ways. And so, yeah, moving something to a discipline like woodworking or metalsmithing. I know some folks jumping into that. That’s just kind of going back to this idea of like, well, now anything’s possible again, kind of going back to something that’s very elemental that you can really shape in any way that you want.
I personally think that there’s still room in the digital world. Oh yeah, totally. And we just haven’t, maybe to your point, haven’t set up the businesses and the sort of fundamentals right to make it possible yet. I’ll stop there, cause I’ll probably keep going.
00:55:00 - Speaker 2: I think that’s a great note to end on because it leaves me feeling inspired. Great. Well, if any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or use email with hello at museapp.com. We’d love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. And Andy, this was really inspiring discussion. Thanks for coming on and thanks for pushing us all to not be boring. Thanks for having me, guys. All right, see you both later. Bye.
00:55:26 - Speaker 3: See you, Adam.
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think at some point I would love to go back to just work on, I don’t know, album artwork, or just lock myself away in a cabin and just draw typography. But for now, I feel like there’s some stories I want to tell. And for some of those stories to really resonate, they need to be put into people’s hands and experience. And so until I’ve told those stories, I feel like there’s unfinished business.
00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about use the product, it’s about mus the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest, Jason Yuan. Hello. And Jason, you are a prolific creator of all sorts. The one that struck me as very interesting from your background is that you got your start in stage design, which you described as a bit of a two-way interface. I’d love to hear about that.
00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think what’s interesting about stage design and theater design in general is that It’s so inherently multidisciplinary. So even if you say I’m designing on a show, you might mean costume design, stage design, set design, sound design, and all of those have to be choreographed perfectly. They have to work together.
And then, obviously, the stage needs to be used by the actors. It needs to be functional. People need to be able to enter and exit. It needs to be safe. So that’s one aspect of like, I guess the people that it needs to work for and then obviously you have the audience who rely on. The culmination of how the stage design works in conjunction with all the other elements to bring them into a world and to tell the story. And so it’s fairly high pressure because so many people rely on it and because theater is sort of in the moment, if something doesn’t work or God forbid if something unsafe happens, like that’s on you, partially, so. Design has always sort of felt very high stakes, even in interaction design now where you could always ship a bug fix or you might be able to delay the launch or incrementally improve things over time in theater unless you’re a very prolific show, you don’t really get that luxury.
00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can imagine the live performance element creates a sense of, well, I suppose drama would be the word for it, but for the people who are creating it as well, you have this showtime moment and everything’s got to come together and work right, and if it doesn’t, the problems are all up there for everyone in the audience to see very dramatically.
00:02:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, something that frustrates a lot of people that I’ve worked with in tech, sort of, I’ve always carried the show must go on mentality. That sometimes, you know, applies, but then if you’re working on indie projects where like there’s no real deadline, people are like, why, why though? It’s ready when it’s ready. And I’m like, no, like the show must go on. So that’s been interesting trying to find elements I want to keep from my past now that I’m practicing something that’s fairly different.
00:03:01 - Speaker 2: At some point you made the transition to the digital technology world and lots of interesting work in your portfolio there, including Mercury OS we’ll talk maybe a bit on a little bit, which was how I first discovered your work. You’ve also been working on MakeSpace. What else is on the recent portfolio.
00:03:21 - Speaker 1: You know, after Mercury came out, there was so much feedback from people who wanted to see it become real in some way.
I worked on several smaller spin-off projects that were inspired by the initial vision, like, I don’t think it was ever designed to be a thing that I saw ship as this. It’s a very point of view.
Mercury was designed from a very specific point of view through the lens of someone who is frustrated that my own mind as someone who lives with ADHD and PTSD and just, I find a lot of things particularly stressful in computers like file systems and how I have to constantly open and close apps and switch context uses. It was a very specific point of view there about like operating systems, but, you know, trying to think about a way to make some of the ideas actually happen.
Has taken up a lot of my past year, I think. And in some ways makespace is kind of an offshoot of that in the sense that I think the spirit of reimagining something that I felt like could have a lot more potential exists in Maspace.
And, you know, when Asa and I first started working on it, the code name was untitled OS. So I think from Makespace came this fascination. Of like exploring platforms, but then also exploring smaller, more contained experiences that attempt to deliver sort of flow state to people. I think I’ll be sharing some of them soon, is what I’ll say. There’s two particularly I’m excited about. The first one is sort of looking at screenshots as a metaphor, sort of inspired by. I saw this guy tweet once like screenshots and then you save and then obviously Omar’s work on screen notate.
00:05:15 - Speaker 2: Universal solvent is usually the way we put that now.
00:05:18 - Speaker 1: A screenshot sort of experience is something I’ve been working on with a collaborator called Tyler Egert, and he’s currently at this startup called Reple. And then a separate project is sort of like a take on a to do list that sort of imagines to do lists in the context of your social media feed. But that’s a much longer conversation, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of that soon.
00:05:40 - Speaker 2: We’ll be excited to see those. Well, yeah, I’ll link the projects we’re mentioning here other than the ones that aren’t out yet, of course, in the show notes. So yeah, Mercury OS, which is kind of a rethink everything in the sort of the operating system interface, and then MakeSpace, I can see the thread there, I can see how that’s related. Makespace is an app for lack of better word for kind of spatial video chat experience if I’m understanding that correct. But you can see how that’s an offshoot or a different way to cut the kind of the operating system space, but maybe a little bit more focused specifically around the video meeting domain. Does that sound about right?
00:06:18 - Speaker 1: Yes, and I think the original prototype that Asa hacked together was just spatial browsing. I think video was the second thing we added.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, so it kind of started as a vision for a spatial browser.
And when we brought Wei Wei into the project, she had all these amazing ideas about like bidirectional linking and then we had ideas about like how to use web apps, like how this might enable people to disassemble and reassemble web apps.
And like use them as modules and how you could essentially author your own ideal interface environments.
And then sort of the faces going into that experience is sort of like COVID was raging here.
It was having a grand old time and we just felt like, why not coexist next to, we think about breaking boundaries between app silos. What about the silo between what I do on my computer and people.
So yeah, that’s a little bit about how that project came together.
00:07:14 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good way to tee up the topic that we’re kind of theming around today, which is rethinking the OS, and I wrote an article recently kind of talking about some core interactions and I listed off some of these what I would call concept projects. You tell me if you think it’s fair to group these together, but I put Mercury Desktop Neo is one that our colleague. Leonard, the Muse designer did while he was in university. There’s another one called artifacts, which is very interesting, goes very deep, and all of these have maybe the quality of sort of really rethinking from the ground up.
It’s not just how do we remake one part of this, but if we really had a blank slate, how would we, how, how would we want. to be knowing what we know now in terms of new software, new paradigms with, yeah, whether it’s social media or video capabilities or really large screens or touch screens.
A lot has changed since the core interactions that make up certainly the desktop operating systems, even mobile in a way is now well established compared to all that’s come up.
00:08:19 - Speaker 1: I remember I seen Desktop Neo and then this other project artifacts and around the time that I was writing the story around Mercury, and I remember thinking like, oh fuck, am I allowed to swear?
00:08:32 - Speaker 2: Oh, it just means that when I edit the XML for the episode, I have to flip the explicit switch from yes to no. Although it is very good that the podcast RSS feed format lets you flag specific episodes. I had to first do this for Josh Miller from the browser company. He was an enthusiastic swearer, and I felt like editing that out would be taking away some of the. The character. So please proceed.
00:08:55 - Speaker 1: You, you can feel free to add a bleep somewhere. I think that’s always fun and dramatic and it feels like you’re in a sitcom.
Anyway, so, yeah, I remember seeing Desktop Neo and artifacts, and I was like, fuck. People are gonna be like, you ripped them off, because the things that I recognized was this desire to extend the desktop horizontally.
To have the component of like your windows should be able to flow horizontally and off this arbitrary bounding box.
And I think like Mercury is definitely not the first project to sort of envision that.
And I really think that all of these speculative projects point towards that future of people wanting, for lack of a better word, more space, and also, I think it’s something that I would be curious to see.
Happening in some way. I mean, one could argue that with iOS 14 widgets, I know that it seems like quite an incremental or even catch up, so to speak, but if you look into the future and you imagine like widgets and also app clips, and now things can live in your home screen that are more than just icons, and then your home screen having the ability to obviously swipe between pages, some interesting connections there that I would be curious to see where that leads.
00:10:11 - Speaker 2: Hm. Mark, what’s your take on rethinking the OS, these concept projects, and then more to the point maybe where they point, which is, do we need or is there value in a fairly dramatic rethink of the fundamental interactions versus, you know, what we have is tried and true.
00:10:30 - Speaker 3: Well, I think it’s certainly always worth trying. There’s so much upside if you get it right, if you land on something interesting. So I’m glad to see all the experiments, and I do think that the fundamentals underpinning all of our work are changing, so we’re getting bigger screens, we’re getting touch screens, we’re getting new. Graphics pipelines that are much more GPUs and parallellyzed, and I think a huge one is we’re getting very different economic models around the operating systems and the platforms and all of those have, and I think will continue to drive changes. So iOS was about touch and the new economic model mostly. And things like these new desktop explorations, I would say are more powerful, bigger screens and touch moving into the desktop platform and things like that, as well as having enough processing power and media that things become much more rich, interactive, visual in a way that they weren’t really even 10 years ago. So, I think it’s worth pursuing.
00:11:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s one of the things I think a lot about with what do computing for productive uses look like in the relatively near future is we now have this huge screens, the multimedia stuff, you know, video is just absolutely everywhere, for example, but we also have the diversity of input. This is one thing I like a lot about the. iPad stylus, touch with the fingers, trackpad, keyboard, you can throw voice in the mix there, and then if you go to, OK, everyone’s waiting for that drafting table sized or maybe just IMAX sized iPad that seems likely to come in the not too distant future or something like it. And then you can imagine something that feels a lot more like a room-sized thing where maybe you have multiple screens, which is already the case that we all kind of have our phones sitting there in the desktop and maybe you’ve also got the tablet. You got the voice interfaces, you’ve got the different kinds of inputs, and you put all that together and I don’t know what it adds up to necessarily, but it does seem to imply some fundamentally different relationship with your computing devices, even just how you relate to them in physical space, your posture as you use them.
00:12:28 - Speaker 3: And speaking of the human element here, we’ve done a kind of systems analysis of why might you different operating systems to emerge. There’s also the human side, which is when you put these new OS’s in front of people, you get a very positive reaction. They say things like, yes, this is how I want to feel as a user of my computer. It’s a very visceral reaction. And so I think there is a, there’s a gap between how computers currently work and how people want to feel when they’re using their tools. And that I think is still a big space to explore.
00:12:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think when I started with Mercury, it started as a purely like surface level ergonomics project.
It was so funny. It started as a design system of like, let’s make things look better. And then I’m like, wait, no, like that’s not actually why I don’t like my computer.
Things look OK, generally, and I’m like, OK, well, maybe let’s make things move better. And then I’m like, hm I don’t know that the choreography is necessarily a problem that much. And then there was a phase where I realized that the ways that we are conditioned to think about interaction design. When I first started learning about it, it was like you use sketch, and then you, which is basically illustrator, and you have art boards, and then you link art boards together and then you basically make a choose your own adventure presentation thing. And that’s interaction design. And I realized like the real ergonomics part that I felt like was missing was the in between. Each moment of transition should feel like a moment of power, should feel like you can sort of change your mind or keep going, but the way that we’ve been conditioned to design sort of digital products don’t really. I don’t really feel like it affords that way of thinking about how interfaces work, unless you use something like origami or court composer or code. And so it was at that moment that I’m like, maybe this ergonomic problem goes a little deeper, and that’s when I started to think on more of like a system level. I think before that, I didn’t feel like I had permission to, you know? During my internship at Apple, it was actually a friend of mine, Marissa. We were just having a conversation about Siri one night and she just started asking like, do you think this is really like what voice interfaces should be like? Do you think there should be all these different modes? Do you think that having a little brick in your phone that holds all the power is the right way for computers to sort of expand into and. I had just never thought about things like that before. I was just trying to make screens that moved, that looked and felt ergonomic. I wasn’t thinking about the actual base layer, why? And so after that, it sort of felt like suddenly a whole new world of just asking questions and digging myself into a rabbit hole was just possible. And the process behind thinking of Mercury was very similar. It was basically that, but in a design process. And I think what you’re saying about people being drawn to These very tactile experiences, I think, in the process of researching for Mercury, I read a lot of like white paper style things. And I was just incredibly bored or not stimulated by them because I’m like, yeah, you kind of have these drawings that look like memes of diagrams that look like they go in a patent. I care about this because I happen to like designing computers, but you put it in front of anyone else, and they’re like, why should I care? And so it became apparent that If I wanted to create a vision that people cared about, that I would have to focus a lot on the craftsmanship, the visual design, and also the storytelling delivery.
00:15:45 - Speaker 3: It’s funny you mentioned that Adam and I were just talking about this this morning. You basically can’t explainm to people with text. It just doesn’t work as an empirical matter. What really works is video and animation. And I think this is resonant with what you were saying, where you need the right medium to convey your emotional message.
00:16:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I learned about the concept of a tool for thought after moving to the bay. It’s one of those things where I just like kind of don’t get it, where kind of everything is a tool for thought. Um, but I kind of understand why there is this specific community that’s very obsessed over thinking about thinking tools, essentially. And I think giving something a phrase gives it power sort of reference points. And so I think absolutely like, I think when I first found news, I can’t remember the copywriting, but I can remember seeing the gesture on the iPad and seeing things zoom in and out and seeing writing being just all over it and just thinking like, yeah, that’s how it should work. And I think it’s successful in that it makes things seem very obvious in hindsight, and I think that’s sort of a quality that I really aspire to achieve when I design.
News is interesting because you can tell a lot of OS or platform level thinking goes into it and it’s an app. And same with sort of makespace where even though internally we think about it as like a social collaborative operating system, it’s an app. And then my instinct is that there’s going to be a lot more in the coming years slash months, and I would be curious to see like, you know how Android has like launchers, that, but for my desktop experience.
Though I’m unclear how that might happen. But something very compelling someone said to me was like, Google search is basically an OS now. And when I think about operating systems, it’s less like Unix and like how you actually what this is, and engineers are probably going to send me death threats, but like I really don’t care. Why should I care about that? As a person who likes computers and likes to play with computers, I just want to worry about how it feels and looks, and that’s really how customers were users. I don’t like that word either, but customers would think about it or people. So double edged sword, probably.
00:17:51 - Speaker 3: I think this is also kind of inevitable because operating systems are, by definition very general and complex. It’s about being able to host other programs, and it’s the nature of complex things that they inevitably arise from simple things. I forget the person this is named after, but that’s a lie if we can put it in the show notes.
So that’s why we see most of the platforms evolve from something simpler, either from an app, so I would put the Web browser in this category, it started as an app on, you know, Windows and Mac and so on, but now it’s basically a whole other platform.
Or you see basically a small kernel of fixed apps evolve into a platform. This is the iOS story. There wasn’t an app store, remember, it was just, there was the calculator and the male app and Safari, and that was, you know, kind of it. If you want something else too bad. But eventually they generalized it into a real platform, a real OS that can run user supplied apps.
00:18:36 - Speaker 2: If you want that back even further, I usually think the iPod is the start of the iOS story. So it really was a completely dedicated device for playing music and had a very, very simple, but in fact innovative interface, the little wheel was recognizable. It was fit for the purpose of on the go, music listening. Very simple screen, but all designed to really solve that problem extremely well in a way that maybe MP3 players at the time didn’t. And then yeah, that evolved upwards into more and more complex platforms to the point that today I think it’s one of the world’s most sophisticated places to build applications.
00:19:12 - Speaker 3: And this to me is a really interesting and important research question in. Operating systems, what’s the path that you take in the path dependent sense to get to the place you want to be? Like you need to have a vision, you need some provocations for, OK, I think we want this style of operating system, but it’s very much a social, economic path dependent question on how you actually get there. It’s extraordinarily expensive to develop an operating system these days. So you can’t just suppose the final step.
00:19:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and now it also has to live up to everyone’s expectations of not only what it can do, but the ecosystem that it brings. And I think, you know, I have zero idea how any of this will happen, slash if it’s ever going to happen, but I would love to live in a world one day where instead of having like 500 note taking apps, I can just piece together and buy a la carte elements of different experiences that I like. Obviously there’s an entire conversation around like how capitalism works and what’s profitable and blah blah blah, but, you know, one can dream.
Mainly I’m just tired of I’m tired of opening all my Adobe apps, and they’re basically like a canvas that you draw things on and then different ways to make things adhere to or not adhere to the grid and treating things as faster versus vector blah blah blah.
Like to me, uh, it just seems like mentally I just envisioned it as a canvas that I can bring in different tools as needed and that should be how my workflow is, which one day like, it would be amazing if something like Makespace would turn into that sort of platform. Given its inherently spatial nature.
00:20:50 - Speaker 3: The Canvas thing is interesting. We’ve seen that emerge as a key content type, I would argue over the past few years. By Canvas, I mean it’s free form, it’s mixed media, uh, you have some flexibility, so Figma, Makerspace, makespace, Muse, a lot of these apps have developed this and they’re all kind of circling around a similar idea. It’s like this thing where you can put whatever you want, however you want. And that hasn’t quite been baked into an operating system proper yet, although it’s funny, it kind of harkens back to the old school classic desktops, which we almost forget about, but that’s like the OG canvas.
00:21:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Something that we’ve talked about a lot internally is how used to our people to this canvas metaphor when they don’t spend their days clicking around in FigMA or using Adobe Suite.
00:21:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s sort of the opposite of the particularly the phone innovation of you have one app at a time, it’s full screen, and that’s all you can do. And actually that’s an improvement for certain cases on the desktop complex windows that overlap with buttons on them, and you can minimize things and they have these menus and there’s focus and there’s all this confusing stuff to keep track of, but at the same time.
Time for a more powerful environment where you do have multiple documents open, you need to move things around between them. You have different kinds of media, different kinds of things that you need to look alongside each other, move stuff between things, copy paste, and so on, the mobile one app at a time is the wrong metaphor. And so yeah, in a way, these tools where the primary document is a canvas that you can put things on in a very free form way that does. and back to the GUI operating system, uh, metaphor that came out of Xerox PARC, but there you had something where you have one document, which is sort of your desktop, maybe you have 4 if you have virtual workspaces, and then the windows that you arrange, they’re very kind of temporary, right? They’re just what’s in memory, there’s no persistence, there’s no sense of a board and certainly I can’t share it. I guess there’s screen share, but.
So in a way, there is something to that metaphor.
I think what you find when you reinvent or rethink something is that the best qualities of a previous or of an older idea come through, but you also leave behind a lot of the things that maybe you don’t want or you can improve upon it in a dramatic way, but you can only do that, I think by having a little bit of a break.
It would be hard to imagine, for example, Linux, Windows and Mac. Evolving into Figma or evolving into makespace or uses. I don’t think that could happen. They have too much baggage in history.
00:23:25 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the primary change that I’ve experienced in my year in the valley is, you know, last year I was all like, it’s not too late to we start delete everything, you know, everything sucks. We need to start from scratch, just everyone to stop, like, no more software.
Um, whereas now I’m a lot less. I mean, I still live for speculative proposals or provocations. I love when people ask questions and when people rebel a little bit, but I think working on the sort of future stuff like it’s Tends to be a very lonely process, and you don’t get that satisfaction of like opening night when like audiences actually get to experience the work and walk away with a little bit of their lives may be changed. Sound like such a theater kid right now, but I swear that part has not died.
Silicon Valley can’t kill me. Um, but I think I’m learning more as a creator to hold both truths at once, to have a series of clear North stars that I think. would really help people that I’m curious about exploring and also finding practical concrete ways to head there. So I’m not just like randomly in a lab somewhere, which is like that’s fine too, but I don’t think I’m there yet.
00:24:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that duality is really important. You got to dream big, but also be willing to find ways to bring that into practice.
I feel like you have the one extreme, which is, you might call it ivory tower head in the clouds, dreamer thing, and it’s much easier to think the big thoughts and the inspiring ideas because you’re free of the baggage of, I don’t know, reality or the status quo or what have you. But I think it’s ultimately unsatisfying and I think I’ve seen people who are Maybe tend towards that dreamer side, be even frustrated or even become bitter because they think I have all these great ideas. I figured it all out, but those ideas, if they don’t see them come to fruition somehow, it ultimately feels sort of unsatisfying.
But the flip side of that, of course, which is people who are really in the day to day and the practical and being very pragmatic and incremental, which I think certainly the tech world has a very strong iterative, you know, just make your MVP and build on that. thing which I think is very good for getting going and discovering a problem and so on, but sometimes you do that that means you’re losing the ability to think big thoughts, dream big dreams, go further, move past what’s here today.
And so there’s some, I feel there is some way to resolve that duality, although in a way, I think as an industry and certainly for me as an individual, I’m still trying to figure out exactly how you get the best of both worlds and hopefully the worst of neither.
00:26:04 - Speaker 1: I kind of just do things through the lens of culture to get anything to actually take off or have impact. Essentially, you need to change culture in a certain way or to have an idea influence culture. And I think there’s a place for it, you know, speculative or utopian dystopian ideas, and certainly, you know, those ideas are exciting and can excite a lot of people as like sort of aspirational pressure. Which is a term I stole from Asa, where you make something and then if enough people care about it, then that creates momentum towards that one day. And then the sort of more incremental thing is a slower way to more immediately start bending culture. I don’t think everyone should care about computers as deeply as like, maybe I do, or obviously you guys do, cause people have their own stuff going on, divorces, and I think that’s it. I think that’s the only thing that happens to people.
But Um, so like, like we don’t have time. Like, don’t make me fucking worry about that. But at the same time, because computers are basically worlds that we live in now, people should feel empowered to think about it or question it if they want to. It’s sort of like, I guess politics in a way. It affects you whether you like it or not. And I think more people feel empowered to have an opinion on politics versus on like the operating system. And I think I would love to help make that conversation more accessible in some way.
00:27:24 - Speaker 3: You might not be interested in operating systems, but operating systems are interested in you.
00:27:30 - Speaker 1: The old saying, oh my goodness, is that it really, that’s that’s the same.
00:27:34 - Speaker 3: Well, it’s a classic thing with politics, right,
00:27:37 - Speaker 2: um, yeah, right, you can ignore that I don’t want to think about that, but in the end it does affect your life and that’s why it’s important for us all to be concerned citizens.
Now happily, part of the magic of capitalism or just the world we live in generally is that there’s specialization. And so it’s OK that there’s people like 3 of us who for some unknown reason seem to be. obsessed with computers and we’re devoting our careers to trying to make them better as we, um, as we see, take that word to mean, whereas there’s others who are obsessed with other things and they can work on those things and hopefully we can all together make a better world for all of us.
But that said, I think it is a really great point. I’m often struck when I speak to friends who are not from the tech world, and I can talk about. I don’t know, a design decision that Facebook is making, for example, and for them, it’s more like just a force of nature. There’s no the concept that there’s people behind it who are actively making a decision to do one thing versus another thing versus that it’s far away, yeah, unchangeable thing, doesn’t even enter their minds. And I understand why technology is hard to understand if you’re not in the field. Even if you’re in the field, frankly, it’s pretty hard to understand to keep up with everything, but as you said, empowered to have an opinion at the very least seems worthwhile.
00:28:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember as I was trying to think about Mercury or operating systems, I think certain people I worked with were mentors would be like, why is it something you care about? Like, are you gonna ship this thing? Like, are you gonna go propose it to like Craig Federation? Like, why? Like it’s not gonna ship. What’s the point? And I disagree still, I think. If we just stop caring about anything that we can’t change, you might as well just stop caring, period.
Certainly these days it’s quite easy to just associate your life away. I mean I’ve I’ve certainly been doing a lot of that. I think something that was very interesting to me when I first arrived here, I think one of the first things.
I did was my friend took me to Dynamicland. but my friend informed me of who Brett Victor was slash I, I knew who Warrior Dream was, but not who Brett Victor was, you know, and then about Dynamic land and that it existed.
So I went and like the first thing that I thought was like, oh my God, people should be using this to make theater. This is interactive theater. Like, why isn’t this in my black box? Where are the artists, you know? And that’s something that from what I understand, maybe community outreach is not necessarily like a focus of theirs in this present moment, but I think if you’re serious about getting people excited and therefore affecting change on a cultural level, I think it starts with getting culture makers excited and. It takes me longer to do write-ups than to design things because it’s so important to me that people who had no idea of why they should care about an operating system can read the story I wrote and then walk away feeling like, yeah, I care now too.
And I received lots of emails from people who are also had certain neurodiverse tendencies or just like friends in theater who I didn’t think I had permission. Like, I, I didn’t know that. Like, now I’m a lot more angry at my devices, and I’m like, you’re welcome. And I love that. I want to be remembered for making lots of people really angry. In a good way.
00:30:56 - Speaker 2: Well, yeah, people in my life often point out how I seem to be more dissatisfied with the digital technologies that we interact with every day than anyone else they know, and that sort of maybe seems like a strange, a surprising juxtaposition when I work in the field and claim to enjoy computers and the internet and software and all those sorts of things, but my patience for things that, you know, are trying to hijack my attention. Or faces that are too slow, or things that just treat me in ways that I think are not the way that these devices which are designed to serve us and help us and make us better, often do sadly these days, but it’s connected part of my passion for it is precisely because I think we can do better. Yeah.
So when you talk about Brett Victor, his work is just the pinnacle of inspiring, but as far as I know, he is not doing things to really Bring his work to practical. He’s not trying to produce spin out startups or take one of his code bases and make it open source so someone can build on it. He’s trying to show what might be possible to get us to aspire to something higher to to get us excited. And I know many people who point directly to his work as something that got them maybe specifically interested in design or specifically interested in productivity tools design or specifically interested in. And user programming or some other aspect of this kind of computing for thinking and productivity and creativity.
And so you could say that that, you know, you could do it just that way and Jason, I see your work is seeing a lot of that. You do these pieces where it’s not just the design you’ve made, of course, but it’s also like you said, the write up where your intention is to help people understand why. And get excited and follow the story and you probably would be OK to stop there. Now you don’t have much say over maybe you lack the satisfaction of getting to deliver something all the way through to a customer and see it put a smile on their face. But one way to do it is kind of say, well, I’ve done my part, which is to inspire and step away, assuming that you can make that into a livelihood and let others kind of productionize, you might say. But it sounds like you don’t find that satisfying enough, or you want to take it past just that inspiration stage.
00:33:13 - Speaker 1: Um, I think if I lived in my ideal world, I would never worry about shipping anything ever.
I kind of view that sort of more as art though, versus design in a way. Like it feels more like a personal provocation expression, like a need to do something driven internally and design is a lot more.
I interpret it as a service, and you could argue that doing aspirational conceptual work is kind of a service, but I think of it more as art versus design.
And so I think if I was able to, and if I had that pedigree and following and just sweet, sweet cash.
Live in capitalism, can’t pretend to live out of it, you know, whatever. I would do it.
To be honest, I don’t know how long I will spend in the tech industry because I think at some point, I would love to go back to just work on, I don’t know, album artwork, or just lock myself away in a cabin and just draw typography.
But for now, I feel like there’s some stories I want to tell, and for some of those stories to really resonate, they need to be put into people’s hands and experience. And so until I’ve told those stories, I feel like there’s unfinished business just for me personally.
00:34:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to me, part of the motivation for bringing things into the real world is to understand if you got it right, because here’s the deal with reality.
It’s so complex, you can’t actually understand it.
These design heuristics are about coming up with a better guess and then incrementally perhaps arriving at the solution and really the only way to know is to try it.
So that’s one of the reasons why I like the balance we struck with ink and switch and Muse. You have this combination of academic thinking, far out planning and vision. But then you also force that to confront reality and see what comes up, and often it’s surprising, and it’s a little bit of a bummer when your visions are contradicted by the cold hard truth, but that’s important data if you ultimately want to move the needle in the real world.
00:34:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love exploring all the interesting gestures that you guys have in use, and there’s a certain point where I’m like, if I wanted to take this out of a layer, do I just hold on to it and then move and it turns out you actually just do that, which I loved. I love when things just naturally feel like. Connected to my intent in some weird magical way.
Just ergonomically, I love it.
And I think on the note of like designing productivity software, I think something that I wish I had done with Mercury or just in general, is thinking about all the ways that new paradigms are fun and playful. Like, I’m sure notion and Air Table are exciting advances towards tool for thought or whatever. But like, I don’t really associate spreadsheets and databases with fun. It’s like intriguing, but it’s not fun. And the thing you mentioned with iPod click wheel was it’s just fun. It was inherently fun. There’s no like real reason why that is more efficient than buttons or like a deep pad, but it was fun and because it was fun, people cared about it and it was also great for fidgeting, which I love. I think. Part of the reasons why I get so distracted in social media nowadays is my computer. I can’t really fidget. I can like move my mouse around and or I can like sort of just like fidge on my screen just by like moving things up now. But the interface itself is not really designed to let you fidget. Anyways, so iPod was so fun, and I want to see more tools for fun. Or tools for thoughts that happen to be playful and fun and really unapologetic about it. Like I could care less about bi-directional linking, like I have no fucking clue what that even means if it’s not fun and visually palatable.
00:36:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is a huge deal. And to my mind, the real poster child for this is emojis, and emojis, they seem goofy and insignificant, but they’re actually a huge deal. They’re a huge deal for Slack and to me, they’re a huge deal in notion. I was having trouble. It’s like, isn’t this kind of just like Google Docs, but you know, better and it’s like, well, yeah, but I can pick the emoji for each of my docs, oh, you know, and it just it gives you much more energy and it also allows you to communicate. more effectively, I would argue so. Yes, I think that’s a big thread.
00:37:15 - Speaker 2: The fun, the playfulness, the maybe joy, I think is one of the biggest things to come out of the mobile touchscreen iOS world.
And of course, consumer applications sort of were the first to get that, but I absolutely think yeah, even the term productivity tools I use that just because, well, it’s the kind of the industry name.
But I think when you look at, I’ve used the example before of Slack, and why I think Slack was successful is they make talking to your teammates fun. And it wasn’t really that much fun with hip chat and Campfire and IRC somewhat the Slack somehow tipped over between, I don’t know, animated gifts and unfurl cards and emojis and a couple of other things and just maybe the sleekness of the overall experience, good mobile app and stuff like that. They just made it the thing you wanted to do. And I think there is a version of that for almost any, yeah, what’s a spreadsheet for the TikTok generation, right?
00:38:11 - Speaker 1: So a cursed phrase. Oh my God, no. Oh my goodness.
00:38:17 - Speaker 2: But sort of embracing that, hopefully not the bad, you know, I think there’s a lot of downsides to the kind of engagement oriented social media stuff that is dominating a lot of, let’s say mainstream design thinking, but there is a version of that which does come down to the fun, the playfulness, the emotiveness, the just general joy you get when you think I want to use this. to do the thing you’re going to do more of it.
And that’s, that was absolutely our thinking with Muse. We’re a little more understated. We’re less of the emojis everywhere and animated gifts everywhere thing, but we do try to make it fun and interesting and fast and a little bit playful to interact with your ideas.
And so I think thinking of our overall mission to help people. Be more thoughtful when I talk to people about sort of deep thinking who maybe they know, maybe, for example, there’s an important decision in their life, they should really think through deeply, but it’s really hard. Deep thinking is hard. But if you had a tool that made it fun and you thought, well, this was a chance to use that thing, and I know it’s fun to use that thing, so therefore, you’re likely to do the activity, then maybe just a few more for more folks will want to do that.
00:39:25 - Speaker 1: I feel like play and fidgeting are just my tools for thought. I can’t think if I’m strapped to a chair somewhere. And some of my most exciting sort of revelations just always come from doing improv, which I deeply miss. But it seems like the world is kind of just on improv right now, in a way that’s really hard to say yes to. Anyway.
00:39:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, a little more specific nerdy tangent is like part of the reason why I think spring dampening works so well is because when you give something physics, Spring dampening here you’re talking about when you have a transition of some kind that instead of being a linear movement, it sort of speeds up at the beginning and then slows down as the transition is coming to a close, yeah.
00:40:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, except I don’t even like to think of it as a transition.
I kind of think of it as just reaction, um, because like if something is like If, if something is responsive to physics, you like bounce something a certain way, then theoretically you could also bounce it from the other way and you can start to play with it.
And it doesn’t actually have to serve a concrete purpose. It’s just by nature of being responsive to physics, it makes it more playful because it kind of grounds it in the real world somehow. Whereas like, the reason why I don’t think of this transition is sort of Because it’s not like a set timing that you’re like, this transition will last for 1 2nd, it means if it’s the middle of doing something and you want it to stop, you Very difficult to describe. But that’s the more nerdy take on it is that because when you think about motion, not animation, but motion design and how things respond and react to your touch, they enforce, they create the physical world of your application. And when there is that sense of physics, there is a sense of play because then people can start experimenting with like plotting things together or breaking them apart or things like that. And to me, that’s fun. Although I feel like I hesitate to promote this.
00:41:26 - Speaker 3: It’s like very trendy right now, so you’re just like throwing it everywhere and I feel like not everything has to bounce be bouncy, but anyway, well, I think you’ve come to a very interesting distinction here because transition and animation, it almost implies that there is this point where as a user, you’ve indicated what wants to happen, the machine will now take over and for the next 200 milliseconds will direct the activities and until then you can’t do anything else.
And at the end, OK, the transition is complete. Now you can go resume clicking on things, whereas physics is more like every millisecond, you’re doing something and the machine is responding to what you’re doing and you’re never giving up control. And to me, the animation for the point of showing something isn’t as interesting as making it responsive to what you’re always doing, right,
00:41:58 - Speaker 3: the physics.
00:41:59 - Speaker 1: My pet peeve is when. Everyone designs motion for interfaces on the aftereffects and just have these like really specific 3 point motion curves and I’m like, literally no one’s gonna like that after the first round. They think, oh, this is fun and smooth. And the second time they’re gonna swipe something and it’s gonna have this perfectly choreographed transition and you’re like, oh, I don’t feel like that’s because I did something. I feel like I just triggered a 1 or 0. And that’s actually like, I think like for touch, like bounce and spring dampening works because your fingers are soft, so there is the inherent element of the input device has bounced. Whereas like, I don’t, for example, for mouse cursor interactions, since it’s very much like your mouse is either down or it’s not, it might be less appropriate.
Yeah. But on the most surface level, it’s fun and that was my first impression, you know, I wasn’t like, oh, this responds to my input and therefore, it’s a prosthetic to like, no, this is super fun swipe to unlock. So therefore, I shall sell out my soul to tech forever.
00:42:56 - Speaker 2: Maybe what you said there ties together a couple of themes we’ve touched on here, which is the mouse versus touch and how the system should respond in terms of like how things feel within the physics of the virtual world you’re interacting with.
I think there is this tendency, Mark usually calls it transliteration, which is if you take an application or a type of application that’s sort of for the desktop and you put it on to say a tablet or. vice versa, to basically bring across some of those same basic interactions. But in fact, the mouse or the trackpad is a much more precise tool than the finger. And there’s pros and cons to that. Sometimes the precision is actually really annoying. It’s too precise, it’s too fussy, and then other times it’s what you want, but in any case, the system responding to that.
And so I think, for example, one of the places that the Windows. The surface platform falls down a little bit is that it essentially treats those as the same thing. When you touch the screen, it’s essentially just kind of moving your mouse cursor there and clicking. And you know, that’s a very sort of obvious thing. They’re both ways to point, so why not do the same thing? And to be fair, they were pretty early, so they were still just exploring this, but a more thoughtful or a more considered way to go about it is to think of each of these input devices and as we have more and more of them and the diversity of them, as we talked about before, and making each one serve its different purpose, and that also means that the physics of the system should react and feel different. And obviously, it will take us a long time to build all that out potentially, but I think it’s really worth doing to make the kind of creative environment, at least that I want to have.
00:44:31 - Speaker 1: When I think about things like head tracking or eye tracking or even voice recognition, those are the moments that I’m curious to look at.
You know, not necessarily like, hey Alexa do blah blah blah blah blah, and it’s like very clear start and end, and you have a single thing you want to do, but more like as you’re in the process of doing something, maybe there are small ways that your body naturally responds to something that informs some part of the UI or how, I don’t know.
That starts a whole other conversation about muscle memory, modular interfaces, pros and cons, but it is a specific curiosity of mine, especially as I think we start moving away from.
We’ve been accumulating more and more devices and now I think we’re naturally headed to a world where your points of contact and essentially the, the power of the computer is more distributed.
It could be all over your home, it could be everywhere you go because of headphones that you’re wearing or certain headsets. And I think when that world arrives, I’m interested in seeing the ways that interfaces change to sort of see if interfaces kind of move towards the direction of like multimodal input, if at all.
00:45:39 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s exciting. This is another example of where the fundamentals are changing because until basically very recently, voice recognition wasn’t viable, wasn’t fast enough, it wasn’t cheap enough, it wasn’t accurate enough, and it’s just now, I think, crossing the threshold and probably similarly with eye tracking, but I know for a while they’ve had specialized hardware that you can use at labs but it was expensive and uncomfortable. That’s also, I think they can do it with commodity cameras now. So interesting times for sure.
00:46:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and something that I hope to see more in new tools for thought or productivity tools is just, as I mentioned, more embrace of just fun, physics, and also things just being more sexy in general. I think making something desirable is Oh God, I was reading this tweet the other day of some like thought leader going like, if you have to pick between like what you’re wearing in the morning, that you’re not doing real work, I’m like, shut the fuck up. Like, literally take your Patagonia vest and I don’t know, jump off the go but that’s too harsh. Just like, no, like, that’s so important to people like that. That’s what makes people human. Like we just naturally or instinctively, we just find certain things desirable, and that’s OK. And that should absolutely be a part of the consideration and focus for when we design new sort of environments and interactions that we hope people will care about.
And right now, Adam, I think you mentioned that it’s very hip and trendy to work on things like, you know, perhaps Instagram. Although probably not anymore, but like maybe TikTok, spreadsheets less. And I think part of it is just the inherent fun factor. And the other part of it is like, you don’t really associate culture with spreadsheets, but you absolutely associate culture with social media.
And so I really think that if you can create software with the intention of creating a cultural movement or a cultural shift, that will really perhaps help you in some way. I say you as like a disembodied you, not like you, um.
It’s like if I were, I don’t know, a meme generator, I would just have that diagram of Steve Jobs with the liberal arts and technology crossroads in his background, but yeah.
00:47:45 - Speaker 2: Now I love that tools are about the communities and the culture that come along with them.
We don’t use them in a vacuum. We don’t get excited to use them, and we don’t continue to use them and we don’t certainly in a collaborative work environment which we almost all find ourselves in, yeah, sharing.
You could argue that for For example, a collaboration tool like GitHub or one like Figma, those bring along with them certain culture. And that’s part of why you, let’s say get into the tool and part of what keeps you there and part of what shapes your work and part of what makes it fun, and part of what inspires you or upsets you, maybe depending. But the point is, it’s not this dry, sterile, just kind of solving a problem and moving on. Uh there is culture with it.
00:48:30 - Speaker 1: I love that. And there’s that continued discourse between culture and impact and what you’re making. And something I hope to see more is like, you know, as we create these new environments to live in and live with. That we become more aware of certain implications or results of use and misuse, and that we take responsibility for those results.
That if our tool for, I don’t know, if I were to create a collaborative tool for thought and it was used to orchestrate DDOS attacks on women and minorities, I would personally take a long hard look on like the things that enable that, the culture that I have created around my tool and recognize that like.
I’m a human, I’m a creator. It is OK to bring your own perspective into things because you’ve made it, and that’s just something that is on my mind a lot these days, and there really is no way to ensure that your tool is not being misused to harm people, I don’t think.
00:49:27 - Speaker 2: Design ethics has become much more of a topic or perhaps technology ethics very broadly and more here you see this in social media news and news tools and things like that that are more about spreading ideas on a wide scale, but one could imagine that coming to more sort of productivity tools style space and then maybe you want to think ahead and think, OK, so the folks that were working on social media 15 years ago didn’t really picture the ways that their work could be used for harm.
And of course, you can never stop something. There’s always the potential to use something for harm, but there are ways to design it that maybe encourage more positive uses and strongly discourage more negative uses.
And I think there’s a tendency for tech world people who skew young, who skew optimistic to just think of the positive cases and not think of the negative cases and therefore not hedge against potential risk and think about the responsibility of the power that they’re wielding.
00:50:27 - Speaker 1: Something I hear a lot is like you’re so negative, but I think at the root of everything, I think I’m very optimistic about what people can be as a species, as cultures, and what technology could help with. I’m very optimistic about technology and people in general, but because of that optimism, sometimes it is expressed as anger or negativity, but I really admire those who kind of just believe.
Uh, fuck, I’m just gonna head into some, I’m gonna not say sappy shit on your on your podcast. I’m gonna save it for my memoir or my stand or my Netflix special.
My Netflix special is coming out in about 15 years. It will be called My Career, and that is the joke. Um, I, I predict massive success from over two audience members, but um. Yeah, oops, nice.
00:51:22 - Speaker 2: I actually just watched uh David Attenborough’s uh sort of career memoir. So yeah, all, all you got to do is have um 60 years of really impressive career like that guy, and then you two can have an inspiring Netflix special.
00:51:38 - Speaker 1: 60 years is a long time. Um, I don’t know. It, I’m curious for you both is thinking about computers and tools for thought and operating systems and essentially world building. When was the first time in your life that you noticed that instinct or curiosity?
00:51:59 - Speaker 3: For me, computer programming in particular came relatively late. I didn’t really get into it until college, which is late for a lot of people that are, for example, currently in the industry, but I’d always had an interest in building things more generally, you know, model planes and rockets and Other things like that. So I think I just more struck on the right medium eventually versus a general interest.
00:52:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, for me, I certainly was fascinated by computers from my first encounter, but I think it probably connects to exactly what you said, which is the world building. So the interest in computers and the interest in games kind of came together and I pretty quickly got on from playing games to making my own games, and making games is fundamentally an act of world building and the really appeal to the systematic part of my mind. And I think it definitely influenced a lot of my views on the world, which includes calling back to right where we started, which is that the world around us is mostly constructed, the society we live in, the governments, even the physical structures, they’re constructed by humans and we can choose to make them different. very hard to change those things, but they’re not, well, I would say not set in stone, but some things actually are set in stone.
But actually, even those are changeable. You just need a good jackhammer, right? And thinking of it as both this combination of, if you think systematically about the emergent effects of the world you’re building, whether that’s a game or something in the real world, something economic or social.
And then similarly, as we have these increasing virtual worlds, even beyond games, but productivity tools. And collaboration spaces and online forums for a meeting to converse with our fellow citizens about the society we all live in. These are all things that we construct and we have the ability to think systematically about how the design choices that go into them, the outputs in the form of the world that we live in, and the way that that causes people to be prosperous and happy or not. And so to me, yeah, right from the start, I think that shaped how I see everything about the world.
00:54:06 - Speaker 1: When was that start for you?
00:54:10 - Speaker 2: I think maybe about 8 years old.
00:54:12 - Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah. Oh my goodness.
To paraphrase one of my friends and collaborators on Makespace Maily, she often speaks of her different disciplines. I mean, she’s an interaction designer and also a DJ and also she’s interested in the culinary arts, and she just thinks about like those different practices as kind of canvases of art, and then You connect the canvases through your life to eventually create a path of your own.
That’s purely paraphrasing and probably fucked it up. My fascination also began with video games. Tomb Raider was the first movie I ever saw, very interesting choice for a 5 year old. But after that, I was just obsessed with this idea that you could inhabit someone’s life and body and adventure, and inhabit a space that might feel safer in some ways. Obviously a very utopian view on computation. And then I started graphic designing and PowerPoint. I don’t think I used a real design tool until college.
00:55:12 - Speaker 3: It’s the power of general purpose tools.
00:55:15 - Speaker 2: Well, it’s to your earlier point that everything is a tool for thought and so in this case, everything can be a way to design, right? I do designs and text files with AskiR where needed, so.
00:55:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah. What’s exciting about talking to folks like you is it reminds me of, and it opens my eyes to all the things that I’m so deeply curious about exploring and learning about. And it’s really inspiring in the sense that It feels like if you’re digging for diamonds and the more you dig, there’s more interesting shiny things and you just want to keep going until you end up burying yourself and then you end up living in Oakland forever alone. But that’s a different fanfiction.
00:55:56 - Speaker 2: That metaphor did not end the way I was expecting it to.
00:55:59 - Speaker 1: I don’t know. I feel like if you dig a tunnel deep enough, it’s eventually going to end up in Oakland. I feel like, I don’t know why everyone’s like, I’m in Oakland. Like how did you get there? But yeah, something I’m curious to hear your thoughts on. It’s sort of, as I’ve been more acquainted with the culture of human computer interaction, including important cultural figures and milestones and perhaps dreams that once were.
I’ve moved through several stages of like, let’s say grief. Of like denial and then sort of acceptance or Hm, that’s poorly phrase. As I’ve I’ve accumulated more knowledge into this specific cultural dome. I hear from a lot of people that their North Star is they want to achieve Engelbart’s vision of computation, or they want to, you know, make Brett Victor proud or something, something Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, something something Xanadu, you know. And I’m curious to hear if that sounds familiar and in what ways do you relate or not relate to those modes of thought.
00:57:04 - Speaker 2: Oh, incredibly familiar. Mark, I’m curious to hear what your journey was on this, but there was a kind of Let’s call a research rabbit hole or just path to go down of discovering the works of these visionary folks that you just described and seeing the big ideas that they had and so long ago that it’s just really eye opening when you compare to on one hand that we’ve achieved so much and technology has come such a long way, particularly when you look at say just the raw horsepower, computational power of computers, but then you look and you feel like maybe we haven’t quite achieved. As much as it seems like we should in terms of what computers actually do for us, and all of those folks that you mentioned and others in that world are absolutely a source of inspiration and ideas in work that I’ve been doing in the last, I don’t know, now 5 or 6 years of my career.
At the same time, I do think you can over, not sure what the word is, fetishize that, which is this kind of romanticized past or You know, first of all, that these folks as visionaries, they didn’t fully manage to make their ideas come true, and I think that is a gap and that is one reason why I’m so interested in the topic we talked about earlier, which is not just how to have the big inspiring ideas, but how to bring them to reality.
And then the second part of it I think is that there is a version of the kind of the Aristotle problem, right, which is you don’t move on with new ideas because you’re so busy kind of treating the ancients as having the ultimate wisdom and you just need to unlock, you’re searching for the philosopher’s stone, and you know you can find it in the books, the coded books written by the ancients, and if you just look long enough rather than thinking, well, These folks were really impressive and amazing humans that did amazing work, but at the same time, I can do that kind of work too. And maybe there’s new ideas and fresh directions for us to explore.
It’s not about somehow achieving some ideal that was set forth previously, but more that we can fold those ideas in, and also learn from what worked and didn’t work with them and then make new ideas for an inspiring future.
00:59:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a lot of similar thoughts. For me, certainly the desiderata that were laid out by these visionaries resonate a lot. Things like computers should help us have better ideas, it should feel amazing to use them, bicycle for the mind.
Yeah, so at that level, it makes perfect sense.
But when I was researching this body of work, it actually made me fairly concerned because it’s so old, it means that something went quite wrong or failed. It’s kind of like how every year we find older and older cities and older and older human. Bones, it’s like we realize that more cities and civilizations have risen and fallen than we previously realized. So it’s actually just this aing set of cautionary tales. And so that’s why I focus so much in my thinking and research on the system’s problem of what’s the path, what are all the factors, and again, really grounding in reality, because there’s something about this problem that we don’t seem to get yet because we all say, bicycle for the mind, let’s do it. But 50 years later, we’re not quite there yet. So what’s the, what’s the thing that we’re missing? It’s something that I’m always looking out for.
01:00:14 - Speaker 1: I don’t think we’ll ever be there. I think there is always moving target.
And so my real benchmark now is sort of like when I set out to do something, it’s like, how do I want something to feel? And then maybe some work from like Xerox Park or whatever is an interesting poke at that and it’s an interesting thing to build on the shoulders of.
But then ultimately, when I come back to the things that I’ve made, I kind of just simplify it into like, does this evoke the feeling or emotion that I wanted it to. And I find that it’s much less stressful making that way compared to constantly trying to see if you can live up to some impossible standard. Even as an industry, I think it is a highway to burn out and cynicism. Like, I’m what, one year out of school and I’m already like, maybe I’ll go into fashion, like that seems like a more ethical industry and it’s like, and the narrator is like, it was not, um, but. Um, but, you know, from talking to a lot of folks here, like something that struck me was like, people didn’t really seem to believe that I was creating based on like, how something feels emotionally, or that that was a viable North star. But I look back on some of the things I was trying to explore, and I just wanted things to feel more fluid. And it led me to learning about all sorts of really cool inventors and inventions and That sort of set me off the beaten path a little bit, and I began to think like, oh my God, like motherball demos like Englebar, like blah blah blah blah blah, bicycle, tricycle, I don’t know, circus elephant for the mind, um, and, and I was just so frustrated. I’m like, it feels like, I don’t know, Dumbo with its ears clipped, but then one of my mentors just was like, you just simplify it. Like, why did you start doing this in the first place? Was it because of Englebar and I’m like, who? No, but. it wasn’t. I just wanted to make something that felt fluid and felt playful and fun and mentally I tried to guide myself back to just It’s the sort of the acting actor’s creed of like, a lot of people think acting is about pretending to be someone else, to pretend that someone else’s life is yours. But I think acting is about honesty. It’s about finding the things that resonate between someone else’s life and yours, the things that make you human, emotions, mistakes, trauma, hopes and dreams and. As best you can inhabit the things that are honest, and that’s how you can really reach sort of the hearts of people. And so I feel like when I came to the bay, a lot of people pointed me at certain directions that Progressively make things feel less and less honest to me. I’m just now a year later, finding my footing again of thinking like, maybe I don’t need to carry on someone’s torch or try to impress someone who couldn’t give less of a rat’s ass about me. Maybe I’ll be happier and more creative if I was just more honest. If I was just honest about the things I didn’t and didn’t care about. And I hope we create more spaces for people to be honest with themselves and the world around them.
01:03:20 - Speaker 2: I think that is a lovely noteend on.
01:03:21 - Speaker 1: Thank you. Oh, exit my soapbox. Wait, no, the term is get off my soapbox. I don’t really see how you would fit inside.
01:03:31 - Speaker 2: Maybe in the COVID times, you have a soapbox that has a self-contained plexiglass room.
01:03:37 - Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. That’s my ideal habitat. If I become extremely rich, I will move to a forest somewhere and live in a glass house within walking distance to Boba and CVS. And occasionally I will go on Twitter just to remind myself of. The fact that I can still feel angry. But also hopeful.
01:03:59 - Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, if any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at museApp.com by email. I really like to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes, and great that you’re out inspiring us all, Jason, to think bigger about things that we can improve and change about the world, and thanks for coming on to chat with us today.
01:04:22 - Speaker 1: Thank you for letting me ramble for so long. I feel kind of emotional. So yeah, thanks.
01:04:30 - Speaker 2: Well, when it’s such an interesting ramble, it’s easy to do. All right, see you both around.
01:04:34 - Speaker 3: Goodbye. See you, Adam.
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Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: To us, it’s very important that we design this all holistically. There’s a lot of research, for example, on cryptography schemes that assume key management or on collaboration product designs that assume the server can just read all the data. And in order for this to work with Muse, we need all of the product design, the collaboration technology, the key management, the cryptography, the mental model for how people think about documents that all need to line up.
00:00:31 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and Mark, I like to listen to podcasts in the morning, but I understand that you have a slightly more unusual and in-depth source of audio.
00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this morning I was actually listening to the real-time oral arguments in the US Supreme Court on their very important ACA slash Obamacare case.
This is obviously a very big case for the US and for many of us personally, and so I was keen to listen in and see what the judges were thinking.
And this is notable because I think until recently you couldn’t actually listen to these broadcasts in real time. There wasn’t the C-SPAN equivalent for the US Supreme Court until I think COVID hit and they started doing everything via audio, audio, you know, Zoom or equivalent. And I think at one point actually, they didn’t release the audio to the public until quite a long time after the arguments had concluded. I think they did it every term or something, which is 6 months or something, and then more recently they changed it to be every week, and then now they release it in real time.
And of course, that’s interesting as an interested citizen, but also it kind of connects to our topic today of privacy, because one of the ideas that we’ll talk about is how visible or non-visible your work is while it’s in process.
00:01:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, privacy is a huge topic and something on our minds right now because we’re making some product decisions for the sharing and collaboration features that will be forthcoming from use.
So in the process of working through this as a team, where do we make trade-offs on things that necessarily results in a kind of a zooming out, you can’t help but to look at the larger context, which is OK, there’s what do we want to do for our product, what matters for our customers, what’s technically feasible, what do we value as a team.
Then you zoom out a little bit from there to OK, what’s going on in the technology industry.
Obviously this is a very, very big topic for the tech industry right now, and then you can zoom out even from there and talk about the society-wide impacts and you know, what does privacy even mean? What can we expect, what’s important or not important in terms of our lives as citizens, but also just as technology changes, we may need to adapt to what we can reasonably expect in terms of privacy.
Yeah, as you know, I always like to start at the beginning with the definition or something of that nature. So what does the word privacy bring to mind for you, Mark?
00:02:58 - Speaker 1: Hm. Well, I don’t have a super nice prepackaged definition, but what’s coming to mind is a sense of agency over who does and doesn’t have access to your work. And you might exercise that agency by saying only I can read my personal journal, for example, and so that’s private to me. Or it could also mean that we are working on a project together and so I want you and me, Adam, to be able to see some work product, but no one else. Or it could be that you want to share it very broadly, and that’s your choice as well. So some sense of controlling who does and doesn’t access your work.
00:03:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when I went looking for kind of what is actually the definition here versus my own vague sense of what counts or doesn’t count as privacy, which probably, by the way, has changed over the years, but the canonical one that’s often linked back to is a piece in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 called The Right to Privacy.
And they point out that some of these American values of right to life, right to pursue happiness, right to secure property originally maybe meant something more practical, you know, property was your cattle, for example, but now you fast forward here now over 100 years ago, they’re writing and they say, well, wait a minute, we’ve.
Started to recognize more of a spiritual nature of man’s feelings, his intellect, and so maybe these rights that we talk about broaden a little bit and the term property may include intangible things like your notes, like your thoughts, for example. They actually just use the phrase at one point, the right to be let alone, you know, maybe in modern phrasing, we would say the right to be left alone, but the idea of Maybe why you don’t want everybody in the world to have your phone number is you don’t necessarily want the equivalent of spam calls coming in. You want to give that to people that you have this trusted relationship with that you believe they’re gonna call you because there’s someone you wish to speak to, you have an existing relationship, something like that. So that lens for privacy I found thought provoking.
00:04:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a very interesting definition because it gets at a problem that I’ve seen with a lot of the privacy discussion, which is It’s very tempting to try to imagine or infer or argue for some very natural and fundamental right to privacy.
Obviously, if you like privacy, you’ll tend to do that, and I often see this in the form of privacy is a human right or privacy is a natural right. And I certainly think you can make arguments to that effect, but it kind of dodges, to my mind, the real fundamental question here of what are the trade-offs, what are the benefits, what are the costs, and what work are we willing to do as a society to bring about those benefits if we want them? Because unlike something like perhaps the right to life, you know, you can get that just by not ending other people’s lives, right? Whereas privacy is is much more complex than you need to build cryptography, you need different business models, right? It’s much harder to grapple with.
00:05:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, another way to think about, at least for these intangibles for information privacy, which is chiefly what we’re concerned with in our business and in the technology industry generally, it’s really communication is often the thing, you know, Muse as it stands today keeps all your information on the device there and putting aside some threat vectors like someone stealing your device, for the most part, that means there isn’t so much to worry about.
It’s once you go to share it with another person or share it digitally over the internet, that’s where. Things get trickier and I liked your courtroom example because another one I had kind of sketched down was the social contract or the common legal protection that’s given to what they usually call client confidentiality or patient confidentiality, so attorneys or doctors or therapists.
The idea is that You are going to have a private communication with them and you can expect both kind of from just a manners perspective but also in some cases legal protections for what you say there. and that gets a little bit to what’s relevant to our business, which is in one of those communications speaking to your therapist, for example, but also sketching in your notebook.
If I need to think about, OK, everyone in the world can see this either now or in the future. Maybe that is going to consume some part of my brain figuring out how comfortable I feel with that, whether I want to alter what I’m saying or writing a little bit, and there’s something freeing where I say I’m in this communication with one other person or with my notebook only, so essentially myself or my future self, and I can reasonably expect that no one else is going to hear this. or be privy to it, and that frees me in a lot of ways to be creative or to really open myself up. And it seems to be a common human experience that it’s easier to truly open yourself up when you know exactly who’s on the receiving end of that.
00:07:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. If I think about the benefits of privacy, to me, that’s one of the three big legs is this idea that when you have control over who has access to your thoughts, your work, and your data, especially when that’s quite limited, it encourages and allows creativity.
And that might be creativity in terms of your personal journal, right? You’re much more inclined to write something to share it with yourself, if you will, if you know no one else is gonna see it.
But it could also mean You’re doing some private brainstorming, and that would be very different if it was just you and me versus if we were in a stadium with 50,000 people watching, right? And it’s just that’s kind of how humans are.
I think that’s a big piece.
And also, it connects to what I consider to be the second big leg of privacy benefits, which is it allows you to manage communications.
So it might be the case that you eventually want someone to know something, but while you’re working on it and you’re preparing the communication. You don’t want them to be processing all of the raw stuff. It’s something that I encountered a lot as an engineering manager, you know, if you’re working on an organizational change or something, right, you don’t want people to be reading all of the raw discussions and debates about how it’s going to happen. You want a clear and coherence and well executed communication plan. That’s again, you need privacy for that.
And just to mention what it is in my mind, the third leg, and we can perhaps talk about it later, but it does have protection from governments and other large concentrated powers. And for me, that’s especially important with electronic data and communications.
To my mind, this stuff is so sharp because it’s so easy for it to get replicated, for it to get distributed, for it to be intercepted, for it to be eavesdropped.
In a way, that’s just not the case with something. Like paper, you know, with paper, it’s actually quite hard to make a billion copies of paper. It’s also very easy to reason about where the paper is going because it’s in this physical world that we have a lot of familiarity with.
We don’t have the same intuitions or ability to reason about electronic data in terms of how long it could be persisted, how many people can see it, and all the ways that it can be processed. So I think overall, it makes this problem of concentrated data in the hands of large powers very sharp.
00:09:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think in the analog world where you’re just thinking about who might be overhearing me in my office, or as I walk down the street having a private conversation with a friend.
That you can kind of scope and time and impact, but when I put my photos, my notes, my whatever it is into electronic databases that can be replicated potentially forever, I think of something like LiveJournal, which was this journaling slash blogging site 20 years back that was very popular. A lot of people, especially young people, poured their very private thoughts and things about their lives into under the reasonable expectation that was only going to go to the few friends they’ve scoped to.
And then in the meantime, it’s been sold several times to several different choirs. All that stuff is in there, what someone wrote 20 years ago in a database that’s now in the hands of someone very different from who originally it was in the hands of and and I think it’s just we don’t quite yet have the capacity. to actually reason about.
00:10:33 - Speaker 1: Totally, and just to expand on this a little bit, this points to two other ways that electronic data privacy or non-privacy can be very sharp.
One is this time element where the data can persist and indeed accumulate and move around for a very long time. So we might say, oh, you know, with our current privacy practices, nothing that disastrous has happened. Well, we actually don’t know because the half-life of this data is probably 50 or 100 years. So we’ll know in, I don’t know, 200 years if this is actually a bad idea, but we can’t really say that it wasn’t until all the data has fully dissolved into the ocean or something. The other huge thing here is how humans are or aren’t part of the process.
So again, with electronic data for collecting it, for storing it, you just need to convince basically a few people, it’s a good idea. So if the NSA wants to read everyone’s emails, they convince a few people at Google and Yahoo, and that’s basically it. And then they get billions and billions of emails. Whereas if you wanted to eavesdrop on someone in the physical world, you got to pay someone, they got to go out, you know, to the rooftop and That’s expensive.
And if you have a ton of them, you have to actually convince all these people to do this every day and maybe actually have trouble convincing thousands and thousands of people to do this. So there’s this kind of like human rate limiter friction that you get if you want to do wide scale data collection in the physical world, but you don’t have it in a digital world. This is another reason why I think the digital stuff is so sharp and potentially dangerous.
00:11:53 - Speaker 2: Feels like there’s a parallel there to spam, postal mail versus spam email, which is people sending you unsolicited advertisements in postal mail has always been a thing, it’s still a thing.
But it’s limited by sort of physics and the cost of actually getting that brochure or whatever into your mailbox, and digital is just so cheap and so fast and so easy to do in this kind of anonymous, unaccountable way that then it goes from being uh maybe an advertisements in your postal mailbox or a minor annoyance to being something that potentially Overwhelms the systems of the internet and makes, you know, at one point threaten to make email a completely unusable service, and I think basically every kind of communication technology that comes online and gets substantial traction has to deal with that same kind of spam and abuse problem for that same reason. It’s just so cheap to do that and try to grab people’s attention through these automated and unaccountable means.
00:12:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, spam is also notable because there was a very powerful technological problem, basically people sending out zillions of emails for essentially free. There’s also a very powerful technical solution, probability-based spam filtering. And so there was this battle for a long time. I think we could say that eventually the spam filtering won because they have access to all the leverage you get with electronic data that the attackers have. But yeah, that wasn’t a preordained conclusion, and I don’t necessarily think we should count on that being the case with privacy.
00:13:19 - Speaker 2: And looking at the things going on in the technology industry there, we have something like GDPR is a pretty big deal in Europe, that’s been in force for a few years and then they’ve, I think, are looking at doing more to strengthen it, sort of trying to give people more control over their personal data, more insights over what’s being captured and when it’s deleted and that sort of thing.
Another notable trend in recent time is products, privacy focused products that have, if not broken into the mainstream necessarily have been pretty successful. There’s something like the Brave web browser that has built in ad blocking and essentially makes a privacy oriented pitch over using something like Chrome. And they just posted recently, they had 20 million users, which is a pretty good number.
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that in many ways you could say is worse than Google in terms of results, but it’s privacy protecting and so that one selling point seems to be enough for quite a lot of people to use it. And there’s a long list of others of these protonmail for email, fathom, which we use for analytics on our website.
There’s this whole class of messaging apps like Signal and Telegram that have really got a lot of traction. And it’s interesting to me, almost all of these that I just named, they’re basically worse in every way than whatever they’re competing with.
Not always, I like Fathom better than the Google Analytics, and I think Brave is nicely made mostly because it’s just kind of a fork of Chrome. But in many cases they are about the same or worse, you know, using Telegram to communicate with someone versus WhatsApp or SMS for example, it’s basically the same kind of experience, but that one benefit of some kind of privacy protection or some kind of assurance that privacy is something that people who create the product care about is enough to get a lot of people to use it.
I’m curious how you think about that. Are you motivated to use products that are privacy protecting versus trading that off against other things? Do you think that those kinds of products will always essentially just be a niche for the few people that care enough about it, or do you think there’s a future where that kind of focus would be something more mainstream?
00:15:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s not an easy question, Adam. Yeah, so I’d say first that I definitely use some of these privacy focused products. Two examples that I would give, one is Safari, which I use because it’s faster and I think it has better privacy capabilities than Chrome. Another is D. Go, which for a long time I’ve used almost exclusively instead of Google. I find that it works great and has a much better privacy story. So for me, on the margin, I’m definitely inclined to look at the privacy angle and especially if things are comparable or if for some reason I care a lot about the privacy of that data, I will make the move.
And I’m glad to see that we have these offerings and people can make choices like that.
To my mind, the bigger deal though is the overall dynamics of the industry and what a lot of users end up choosing. And yes, it’s great if we have options for particularly privacy conscious or privacy sensitive people. And again, I’m very thankful for that.
But if you think about this third reason that I mentioned a while ago, data concentration in large powerful entities, that’s really determined by what most people do, right? So for that reason, I’m very interested in the overall dynamics of the industry and our governments and how those things interact.
And there I would say that it’s perhaps a more discouraging situation.
I think there’s things we can do and there’s still passed out of this, but I think it’d be very easy to imagine a world where governments just have access to all our data, which by the way, you did a good survey there of some of the current privacy focused products, but a huge deal is access to TLS. And it’s something we take for granted that you can go to HTTPS website, which basically our websites are now, and at least that data won’t be accessible to people online unless there’s some exceptional circumstances. And we take that for granted, but in my opinion, that was not a given. At one point, it’s my understanding that this public key cryptography was not a generally accessible technology. It was somewhat controlled by the government. And with Netscape and commerce moving to the internet, again, I’m not sure exactly how the story played out, but they eventually convinced the government to allow us to use that to export it outside the country, and so on. But I could absolutely imagine a world where that was not the case. Like if you can imagine, for example, that 9/11 happened before that stuff got out widely in web browsers, the government might have just said, you know what, we can’t have people communicating securely at all. This is now banned. And then that would have been a very path dependent thing where we might have stayed in that situation.
00:17:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m old enough that I lived through that process. I was in the computer world and in the industry for some of that.
The clipper chip was actually a US government initiative at the time to create cryptography that had a built in backdoor for government agencies to open. And there was also things like, yeah, up until the 90s, um get in trouble here recounting this all from memory 20 years on, someone’s going to fact check me, hopefully you will, but at least the way I remember it was in the early 90s, it was the case that cryptography technologies were very rare, so I think it was up to 40 bit keys were allowed, but of course that’s low enough that you can reasonably, I think even back then, you can brute force crack them, so it wouldn’t really be that viable for something like online commerce.
And then I think um the, I don’t know what you want to call it, technology, cryptography, folks, enthusiasts, slash experts uh on the then sort of growing networked world were really, you know, arguing for why this technology could be really enabling and there’s good reason for governments in the US government in particular.
To be cautious and treated as a weapon because, you know, in many ways you can point to the Allies winning World War II, that was basically done through science and one piece of that was maybe the atom bomb and the Manhattan Project, but less dramatically was the cryptography story, right? The Alan Turing and the Enigma machine. And the fact that one side could read the messages, another side couldn’t, and it was that asymmetric key cryptography, that was the technology that essentially allowed the Allied communications to stay stay secret. So thinking of that as effectively having won that war, the greatest, certainly most destructive conflict in human history, and then being really cautious about who has access to that seemed quite reasonable even, I don’t know, 40, 50 years on from said war. And yet, the things that potentially enabled were so great.
And of course now we live in that time where as you said, SSL and that little lock icon that you see in your web browser makes it possible to have this huge, I mean, what would the world be like without online commerce in a pandemic age, right? Just to name one thing. So, I’m glad we won that, or let’s say the people on the side of more access to encryption and privacy protecting technologies won that fight, but as you said, it definitely wasn’t guaranteed.
Now, coming to Muse specifically, historically, we’ve had everything, in fact, we even say this when you first fire up the app or first log in, which is we basically say everything stored on your device locally, it’s private. That’s important to quite a lot of people, sometimes for very practical reasons. There are, for example, an attorney that has case notes in there, but in many cases just coming back to that sense of privacy allows you to be freer and if you feel like you can write stuff down and not feel like the NSA is looking over your shoulder, um, and that’s just a better state to be in creatively. But now we’re starting to move into much requested features that allow us to not be essentially in the iPad silo. So right now we already have a browser extension and an iPhone app. There’s a very simple capture into the iPad, but eventually we would like to imagine that you spans all your devices, that’s wherever you need it to be. So that’s the multi-device side of things, then it gets even more interesting with the multi-user side. Of course, we know that all these collaborative tools like Google Docs and GitHub and Notion and FigMA have really supercharged our work in the modern world and certainly for remote teams like ours. Now Muse has a different use case, which is more about developing ideas than making these end work products. So what role exactly the collaboration and sharing side will play for us is not fully known yet, we’ll explore that as we build this stuff out. But here we are confronting this thing where we on the team value privacy. We know that many of our users and customers value that a lot. It makes you feel freer, but then we also know that being able to access your stuff from all your devices and share things with colleagues and friends is immensely powerful. So you’ve been leading the charge a little bit on thinking about the particularly the technology sides of that trade-off. Where are we at right now?
00:21:55 - Speaker 1: Well, let me start with the way this is done in almost all apps today, note taking productivity style apps.
There is a central server that’s run by the tool provider and that stores all of the users’ data in a way that’s accessible to that company.
So you might have a table that’s like documents and has the data for all documents for all users in it, and then. When you fire up your app on a device, it talks to the server and says, Give me the latest data on this document, and then it renders it on that device. And then if you share a document to another user, that just becomes metadata in the database that says for this document row, this user ID can access it. So when that user’s device requests a document, they can have authorization to get that data.
00:22:41 - Speaker 2: Right, so when I make a new blank document in notion or Google Docs, type in 3 characters, those 3 characters go into a record in a database somewhere in Google’s servers, and that the cloud, as I believe they call it, is precisely what makes it so easy to share because if I want to send this to someone else. That I need to take it off my device and put it on theirs. It’s already in Google servers. Google essentially has ownership of that. I’m just accessing it through this client or front end and so giving one other person or some number of other people access through their client or front end is a relatively straightforward operation, right?
00:23:14 - Speaker 1: And notably with these modern cloud-based tools like Google Docs and Notion, you typically don’t even have the data locally.
So if you type in this document, save, exit, and later you’re off the internet and you want to open up your document, well too bad the data is not there. So that’s the standard approach, and we remain open to doing that for use. It has a lot of benefits in terms of relative ease of implementation, of course, providing all of the features that you want, as well as things like backups in the case that the user loses all their devices or something.
But we’re also very interested in exploring a second way where you get the benefits that we’ve associated with cloud-based collaboration, being able to access your data from any device, being able to add collaborators and collaborate in real time, all of those things without the tool provider in this case Muse being able to read your data.
So the way I pitch this is like signal meets Google Docs. You have the security model of signal where data is and then encrypted and you’re talking to your collaborators and only you and they can read that data, but you have the rich documents, multimedia collaboration, multi-device synchronization that you would associate with Google Docs, and that’s quite a hard technology and product problem, but we are looking into it.
00:24:26 - Speaker 2: You and I were both co-authors on a paper called Local First Software.
And this was much more research outward thinking technology of sort of removing the cloud from the equation completely. Which is not what you were just describing there, but it does have some of these same elements of trying to make it so that it’s less about what’s out on these servers and more about what’s on the individual users’ devices. I think we touched on encryption briefly, but I think, I mean, as we described in that paper, we don’t necessarily think that building a truly 100% local first application is really in reach for certainly for a small team like ours today. So it’s really parts of that we do think are achievable and other parts maybe are still a little bit more, we’re waiting for the technology to get good enough.
00:25:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I might say that I still think local first, at least as I understand it is possible for us.
The thing that is less valuable and interesting is pure peer to peer. So there are some apps or technologies where if you and I are collaborating, we’re sending packets back and forth directly to each other, and there’s no server interposed, which has obvious potential security benefits, but it also gives you a certain resiliency.
Against DDOS and other issues with a central server.
And for me, having servers on the internet is not necessarily that big of a deal. And in many cases, there’s just no way around it.
For example, you need to talk to a central server to get apps onto your iPad because Apple requires it. And for me, the bigger deals are that central server being able to read all your data and you not being able to read and write your data if you’re not connected to the central server.
So the world that I imagine is one where you potentially have a server or even servers, but the servers are more like symmetric nodes, you know, they behave more like any other node like your phone or your tablet, and it’s not so much of a special superpowered case.
00:26:19 - Speaker 2: And then on the encryption side, you, you reference signal and I think one of the places they’ve been very influential is, I wanna say they started as this open whisper systems sort of security consultancy or something like that, and they not only made this secure messaging app, but they wrote a lot of articles and sort of publicized their approach, and that was something that’s then been picked up by others, including WhatsApp and Telegram and I think the hard part in this is usually the key management, right? So this is asymmetric key cryptography basically relies on the person having this block of data someplace and no one else having that data, but that’s tricky because that person has to keep track of it. Maybe it’s a bit like a physical key. You lose a physical key to your house, you potentially go to a locksmith and they can crack it open for you the way that these digital keys work, if you lose it, that’s it, you just can’t get access to that data again.
00:27:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so there’s a couple of things going on with an app like signal. You might break it up into key management and cryptography. So on the cryptography side, this is like, OK, assume magically for a second that everyone has keys and we know who has which keys, then you need an algorithm for using those keys to encrypt the data. And there’s been a lot of work on that in industry and in academia. It has been, I think, quite focused on the messaging use case.
And one of the things that we’re excited to do with Muse if we do pursue this end to end encryption path is making it more general case. Like, let’s encrypt data structures and documents and not make something that’s very specific to messaging.
Also, in the case of Signal, I do think they make some specific trade-offs that are more appropriate for the grade of security, if you will, they’re looking for like signal needs to be resistant to powerful nation state actors. And in order to do that, you need to make some specific trade-offs that maybe wouldn’t be appropriate for a productivity tool.
But anyways, yes, that’s what happens on the crypto side, but then the key management side.
That’s a whole big challenge, and many people will tell you that key management is actually the harder of those two issues, and there are different ways to do this.
There’s the fully distributed web of trust type model where you build up a model of who has which keys based on a series of ideally. In-person interactions. So, you know, you and I might meet in real life, we would exchange keys, and we might also exchange information about other people that we have, and we would sign that information and then over time, you kind of accrete up this web of process where the name comes from. That’s kind of the most distributed, but least practical model.
The most practical, but least secure model is just, you ask the server who has what keys, and that’s very convenient. You get all the benefits of a centralized server telling you exactly the right answer. The downside is the server can just lie and say, this is Adam’s key, when in fact, it’s just a server’s key and it’s read all atoms data.
And the thing that I’m most intrigued by and that we’re exploring a little bit with views is more of a middle ground where you get some of the benefits from the centralized registry, but you also get some of the benefits from direct or decentralized verification, especially where you need it. So one example of this in Signal, I think they have this set up where you can look up people by phone number and the signal will essentially send your data to their devices, but you can also, when you’re next to someone, you can verify each other’s QR codes and then that lets you know that you, you in fact verified. This person, I think it gives you a stronger level of security. So I think there’s more things we can do along that vein.
Another example from the Zoom white paper, you know, Zoom is working on and then encryption. They said for a long time they have it, they don’t really have it as we understand and then encryption, because they’ve had this key management problem where everything was encrypted, like TLS is encrypted, but they control and administer all the keys, so they could just impersonate people if they want to. But they’re trying to move to a proper model where you can, in fact, verify people if you desire to. And one of the things that they’ll try is, on your Zoom video, you’ll have a little code. And when you’re on the call, you can say to the person on the other side, you know, the security code is ABC 123, and that’s very hard to impersonate in real time, obviously. So if you’re correctly verifying the code on each side, you know, OK, this is not being tampered with. And there are other techniques that they’re exploring too. But this basic idea of you kind of mix the benefits of a central registry for keys with more distributed ad hoc verification where you need it.
00:30:14 - Speaker 2: I think we’ll be looking for the sweet spot there between trying to give some reasonable privacy protections, but not having a very difficult or very technical.
And demanding, for example, key management system. That’s probably exactly what Zoom’s grappling with right now.
I think of the canonical example of inaccessible as something like PGP and I’ve used the GNU PG for a number of years. I’m pretty good with it. I’m handy at the command line and even so, it’s just very easy to mess it up, get the wrong key, delete the key.
Encrypt the wrong thing, it’s just very, very unforgiving even for a technical user and so way, way out of reach for kind of more casual use.
And SSL is a great example, as you mentioned, HTBS websites is a great example where we did manage to find a way that was a middle ground of real solid encryption that really does make a difference in terms of the things that enables, but it’s very accessible. It does not require some kind of deep technical cryptography, key management thing in order to get the benefits of it.
00:31:24 - Speaker 1: The last thing I might say on key management and crypto and user interface trade-offs and stuff is that to us it’s very important that we design this all holistically.
There’s a lot of research, for example, on cryptography schemes that assume key management or on collaboration product designs that assume the server can just read all the data and In order for this to work with Muse, we need all of the product design, the collaboration technology, the key management, the cryptography, the mental model of how people think about documents that all need to line up. And I think that’s why this has proved quite challenging for us. It’s not something that I think very many people have grappled with, but I’m optimistic that if we can get all those things to line up in the right way, it’ll be a very powerful combination.
00:32:06 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m potentially excited for that, finding a new set of trade-offs. I feel like most tech industry products are essentially binary. You have either Totally local old school program saves on your hard drive, great, you know, no one else has it, but you just don’t have any of those sharing and collaboration features or you have the fully in the cloud thing, which is just so incredibly useful, and yet you just know, OK, I’m just giving up every single keystroke I type into this. I know that Google engineers and Google machine learning algorithms and the NSA and anyone in the future that may acquire this data for essentially an infinite amount of time. I’m just giving up and saying they have full access. It’s the trust us model, vendor model, and I’m excited that we can potentially find a different set of trade-offs, a different sweet spot, a different place to be that isn’t one of those two extremes.
Exactly, yeah. And normally when the topic of privacy comes up in the context of the tech industry generally, one of the key things is people are talking about my data, and I think we’ve almost been entirely talking about what I would call content and so maybe content privacy. I make a document, I write a note, I record a video, that’s my content and I want to know that I am the only person, me and people I have chosen to share are the only people that have access to that.
But the other category and maybe even a more common one to be in these discussions is more call it analytics or you can call it telemetry data, and it’s a really interesting question when you do frame it as data ownership, if there’s something like a motion sensor, for example, a smart home kind of motion sensor that is logging entry and exit to a location. If I put that in my home and I’m logging that into a computer I control, it feels pretty clear to me that that data about the comings and goings in my home is mine. But if it’s in another building, say a public building, and I walk in and my arrival is recorded, and of course, you know, cameras, they’re your faces, you know, in the data, is that mine? Well, probably not, but then I kind of, that is part of the discussion. It’s like, well, wait a minute, you’re kind of recording me or tracking me. I feel like that belongs to me somehow or you’re invading my privacy and it’s, but then you’re, you’re in that other person’s building, you know, the building is a public place or not something that belongs to you, so it’s a funny thing to discuss in a way.
00:34:25 - Speaker 1: Yeah, OK, so to unpack that, I think there’s actually 3 different things going on there.
One is the classic analytics data, and the example that I might give for that is, say you have a web app and it’s indicating how often this user uses certain features, like, do you use the export feature? Do you use the print a PDF feature, things like that. That’s what I would think of as analytics.
Then there’s the PII, the personally identifying information. This is information that ties some abstract user to you as a real person. So typically emails, as IN names, plus addresses, phone numbers, these are things that take an abstract account, you know, user ID, whatever, and tie them to Adam Wiggins. And then there’s this third issue of data in public places. I think that’s another huge challenge and to my mind, those are 3 different quite hard issues.
00:35:11 - Speaker 2: And notably the, you know, I mentioned GDPR in passing before cookie warnings are this huge thing in Europe where basically almost any site you go to pops up this morning and it’s kind of regulatory things gone wrong where they were trying, I think quite reasonably to say like if a site is going to track you in some way that they should seek your consent.
But now, essentially, most websites just do a kind of blanket consent seeking because most websites set some kind of cookie, but the detail of it actually is that it only matters exactly as you said, if it’s personally identifying some way, if it’s it’s sort of tracking you around.
So there are a lot of cookies that you might set that are more kind of anonymous or more kind of general telemetry, but are not about me specifically.
And so for example, the Muse website does have analytics, you can see that if you do view source, but it does not have a cookie warning and that’s because the type of analytics that we use is essentially anonymous. It doesn’t track you around, it doesn’t connect to what you’re doing somewhere else, it just counts essentially.
Gets to our site, which is very useful to have. It’s nice to know, especially with refers or whatever, it’s, you know, if there’s suddenly 1000 new users pop in, wow, where these folks come from? Oh, I see we got linked on some high profile site. We can see that in our analytics. It’s very useful to have for our business.
00:36:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and GDPR by the way, is I think a good example of the importance of systems thinking. I think the failure of that legislation, and I, I mean, that perhaps sounds blunt, but I think that’s the correct assessment was due to not thinking about it as a systems problem where you have to deal with the realities of what are people actually going to do, what our business actually gonna do, what are the capabilities or non-capabilities of the government, things like that.
I do think that the differentiation between analytics and PII is important and good.
To my mind, those are just very different beasts as well as being different versus content. This is something that we’ve kind of caught up in discussions with users and, you know, sometimes a privacy fundamentalist who says, you know, everyone has a right to privacy, no data should be ever transmitted over the network without my explicit permission. You know, maybe, but the reality is, it’s hugely valuable information that for most people has relatively low cost in terms of their privacy cost, if you will. So it’s not surprising that people end up sort of making that exchange. It’s much easier to, and therefore cheaper to offer software if you have access to this analytics data, whereas it’s a relatively low cost to individuals in terms of their privacy. I do think the PII and content stuff is much more tricky, and PII is also slippery because you can collect the data that’s like, quote unquote anonymous, but it’s actually very easy to deanonymize if you collect enough of their screen size OS version, browser version, yeah, the browser.
00:37:55 - Speaker 2: Fingerprinting stuff which is for a little while I was following kind of the Tor browser world of things, which is another one of these.
Well, that’s even a step further on the privacy focused products, I think.
It’s very interesting stuff that that team is doing trying to make truly anonymous web browsing. And one of the things they have had to face up against is the browser fingerprinting, which is exactly what you said, which is sort of knowing the exact resolution of the screen and you know what version of the operating system they’re on, you tie that together with some other data, some time stamps and things, you can work backwards from there to pinpoint someone, at least that it’s the same person repeatedly surprisingly well.
00:38:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I also think that the PII information can be separated from contact information and used to something interesting here.
We do require an email to use the app because we need to be able to communicate with you for various reasons.
But there’s no requirement that the email is like your only email or your canonical. email that it matches any other emails. So a lot of people just put in their default personal email, but a lot of people will create an email that’s specific to muse, kind of like a muse specific inbox, or they’ll just use like a burner email that has no connection, no identifiable connection to their real identity. And again, this is an example of where you can tease these things apart. You can separate out PII from ability to contact someone from analytics information from content information.
00:39:16 - Speaker 2: And speaking to use on the kind of analytics side of things, I mentioned our website, but the product itself, the iPad does report back analytics on usage, and that is for improving the product.
Huge one, for example, is crash reports. So when iPad OS 14 came out a little while back. We embarrassed to say had a very rocky patch for a couple of weeks of crashchiness, and that was partially changes in the OS, partially with problems on our side. We eventually sorted it all out, I’m happy to say, but if we didn’t have reliable crash reports to be able to see, first of all, that there is a problem, and secondly, to try to hone in on what that problem is, and then once we’ve fixed it, you know, we roll out a new release, has the rate of this particular kind of crash gone down. That has a big impact for our ability to not be blind or trying to improve the product.
But it also includes things like just features. So a little while back, Leonard was redesigning the action bar, which is what comes on the screen when you tap a blank space and you get the little couple of buttons down at the bottom, and we were really pondering whether the undo redo were worth including because they took up a lot of space and most people use the gesture or you can use the keyboard shortcut in the case where you have the keyboard. And so we thought, well, is it really worth the screen real estate this takes up and we could actually go ask this question of what percentage of people. are using the buttons or what percentage of the time versus using a gesture or keyboard shortcut, and I forget where it came out. I think it was like 15% or something like that, 10 or 15% of undos were from the action bar button, and I may say, you know, that’s just enough. I think it’s worth keeping. We’ll make them a little smaller maybe to represent that so we can make product choices.
And of course there is ways to, I don’t go ask people, of course there’s, you know, you should be doing that and occasionally we get to observe people using the product and so on. But the ability to go and get real data about those kinds of questions, they really help us to improve the product and so it can become a better product faster.
00:41:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. And again, this seems to me like an imminently reasonable and good trade-off for both sides involved. If we had to develop use without access to this information, it would be much, much harder, and it would be worse product.
You know, maybe it would cost twice as much or maybe be half as good. But is that worth this very marginal amount of privacy and In terms of analytics information, I don’t think so.
Now, I’ve discussed a lot of this in terms of favoring a sense of trade-offs and opt in decisions over fundamentalism in any direction. I do think a huge issue with privacy again in the electronic realm is it’s very hard to understand what’s going on. You know, Muse, I like to think we try to be a good actor, we try to do reasonable things and nothing nefarious, but it’s basically very easy to do really bad stuff in terms of privacy, especially on non-web platforms. And to my mind, that’s actually a big technology gap. You know, how do we empower users to actually make these trade-offs instead of just having to throw up their hands. And there have been some movement on this. I think Apple is coming out with some additional required information from developers soon about what information you collect and how you use it and so on, and that’s certainly a step, but I suspect there’s much, much more to do here.
00:42:30 - Speaker 2: In general, I think I and most people would point to Apple as one of the best actors in terms of moving the ball forward on.
What users can expect privacy wise, and I think this stems out from iOS from the beginning was a very securely designed operating system, much more than the classic desktop and server operating systems that that came before, and they’ve continued to do that.
I think of something like the on-screen notifier when an app accesses your clipboard, when they rolled that out a little while back, then suddenly you saw all these slightly shady things that many apps were doing, including, I think. TikTok pulling from the clipboard on every single keystroke, for example, and you need that, you need a clipboard that can move between apps and apps that are going to do interesting things need to access the clipboard, but finding ways to try to surface that so that people who are not acting in good faith, not using the operating systems capabilities for the benefit of the users, but for their own benefit, or at the very least just being deceitful perhaps about what the user expectations are versus what they’re actually doing. So certainly got to give props to Apple on that. They’re not perfect, but they’re definitely one of the best players, I think in our industry, certainly at that scale.
00:43:40 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean, lots of good things going on there and it helps when you have control over the platform because you can manage access to things like the camera roll and the microphone and so on.
I guess my point here is that I think there’s just a huge gap remaining, especially as you look at the meat of the data and the network connections.
You know, apps, they can basically talk to anywhere on the internet they want, and they can do whatever they want with data that you input into the app. So a good example of this is perhaps you have an app for composing a message. The app can, and in fact, many of them do, just send every keystroke. Type, regardless of whether you hit send or when you hit send. So, you might not realize it, but when you’re drafting a message, whoever is running this app has a copy of that draft forever, even if you layer decide, oh, that’s actually not a good idea to send that to backspace. A, that’s really questionable, but also it’s really tough to manage against. Like, what would the interface be that prevents apps from doing that, or even alerts users that it’s happening? It’s hard.
00:44:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I have a tendency to type messages in progress if they’re anything more significant than just a, you know, a few words for a quick reply into my local text editor.
Very programmer type thing to do, but first of all, I like the better editing capabilities, but it’s also the sense of knowing that it’s not a cloud connected thing, that it’s truly, you know, when I hit that close button, maybe it prompts me of whether I want to save but you compare to the cloud where anything you ever put into it is just always saved instantly, which by and large is a huge win for users, like unsaved documents or things you forgot to save and then your computer crashes and.
And whatever, that has been a massive source of user frustration for a very long time and this modern era of mobile apps and cloud that don’t really have a concept of needing to save things and just everything you type in has ever saved is mostly a big user experience when, but for me personally, yeah, when I’m composing a message, I like to know that it’s in this ephemeral place and that if I decide, ah, this isn’t quite right or whatever, I just delete it and I know it never went anywhere.
00:45:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, fair, that makes a lot of sense.
Oh and by the way, on mobile, another huge way that the mobile platforms achieve security is just banning huge categories of stuff, especially arbitrary code execution, plug-ins, extensions, and these are capabilities on the one hand, are incredibly powerful.
You could argue that they’re basically required for getting a lot of the power user workflows that you see on desktops, but they would be super gnarly to sandbox and To be clear, I’m not saying that that’s a wrong decision or that Apple or anyone else hasn’t done enough or that they’re making bad calls here. It’s more to point out that I think it’s an incredibly important research problem. Is there a way to get the benefits of third party plug-ins and security at the same time? Right now it’s very much one or the other. In the same way that is it possible to get collaboration and and then encryption at the same time, you know, it’s an open research question to see if you can figure out how to do that.
00:46:25 - Speaker 2: A little earlier you mentioned the term privacy fundamentalism.
And I like this concept of trying to just better understand how much does privacy matter to people, how much does it really matter? And for us, you know, from a business perspective, we can sit here and in fact we do talk about big philosophical things that we believe in regarding privacy and what the technology industry should do and the things our society are going to be grappling with having to do with this, but we’re a small business, we need to do things that, you know.
Makes sense practically for us in places we invest effort, time, energy, money, or places, you know, that is zero sum. We could be building out other features and if we’re looking into and then encryption to make a signal style thing for creative professionals to share their little notebooks, you know, that comes at the expense of other things.
How important is it really to our potential customers? And one of the pieces of prior I was just kind of looking at when we’re thinking about this episode was essentially a survey of people’s attitudes about privacy.
And in this case, I think it was like an internet of things kind of category, so I think this is in the context of smart home or something like that. But I like that they broke things out into three categories in terms of people’s attitudes.
There was the privacy fundamentalists, which you described, which were people who would trade off almost anything for the privacy aspect of things. And then you had another category which was also a small group, but still a significant one which they called privacy and Concerned, they just said, who cares? Nothing I do is that interesting. Google has all my data anyways, what difference does it make? I don’t care.
But then the biggest category by far is what they call the privacy pragmatist. That’s certainly the category I put myself in, which is this is something I care about. I think it is important. It has impacted my life in direct ways in the past, and I do see it as a big and important topic for our industry, for our society going forward, but I’m not willing to trade off everything for it. There’s a bunch of other things that I care about in terms of the utility of products that I’m using. And so finding that balance, I think, at least when I put it in this frame, I’m going to make a wager that I think a lot of users, both current and future are privacy pragmatists.
00:48:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s right, and I agree on privacy fundamentalism, I think that can actually mean two things. I think it can mean that one as an individual has very high standards for privacy, and I think that’s totally fine for an individual to say, and I think for some people, it’s absolutely the right decision.
For example, if you are acting as an informant, if you’re doing something that the government doesn’t like, so on and so forth, right? That’s the correct trade-off to make. The thing that I am not as sympathetic towards is the sense of privacy fundamentalism that sort of the entire system should be subject to it.
And this is where I come back to this idea of privacy as a fundamental human right. That sounds very appealing. But on the flip side, it’s saying that no, you should not have the ability to choose to be a privacy pragmatist. You shouldn’t be able to use software that takes a different set of trade-offs with respect to privacy. And that’s something that I’m not very sympathetic to.
And I would furthermore say that I also think it’s valid that you want to live in a society where many or all people choose to be privacy. Fundamentalists or choose to have very strong standards for privacy, but I think we need to recognize that’s an enormous amount of work. It will cost many, many millions of dollars to develop and operate that software, and it will require perhaps trade-offs in terms of our day to day experience with the software. And if you kind of ignore that cost, you’re fooling yourself and it’s being intellectually dishonest, you’re gonna end up not achieving that. One other possible angle on privacy fundamentalism is again going back to governments, there’s a possibility that a loss of privacy is a one way, very destructive ratchet, and that for that reason, you want to be very careful. This is the sense that once a government has access to data, they might be extremely reluctant to forego that grip. And over time, they’re going to tend to get access to more and more through various means. And if you see the endgame as being bad, which some people do and some people don’t, but if you see that endgame as being bad, then you’ll want to resist by basically any means possible, the progression of that ratchet.
00:50:37 - Speaker 2: Well, talking about governments makes me want to recount my personal journey into thinking about privacy in a broad way. I think for a lot of Americans, it was the case that the Edward Snowden incident, which revealed how much kind of digital surveillance the US government was doing on its citizens was a bit of a wake up call.
Now, for me, I think I’d always had the vague sense that, you know, this is something important and I know digital technology is going to change the game, but I don’t think I’d given a deep thought and by just a coincidence of life, this all was sort of unfolding right as I was moving to Germany.
And I watched the startup I was working for at the time in Berlin, they just organized a little outing basically to see this documentary Citizenfour in the theater, which was a very interesting experience where they followed Edward Snowden around the camera, and this was You know, before the news had broken, essentially, and so you see all that unfold, and you see the crazy lengths he goes to, you know, the tails Lennox distribution and putting a blanket over his head, uh, is actually a very reasonable security precaution when he’s typing in his password, that sort of thing, a very interesting film.
But that in turn led to me having kind of a lot of conversations with my colleagues there, many of whom grew up in Germany, and for them it was very much in the recent past, the East German Stasi, which was kind of a secret police that had, I think, at least as far as we know, is the most extensive government monitoring of its citizens to date.
Some crazy thing like 1/3 of the entire East German population was a Stasian farmer. And when these records were revealed when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and these records were revealed to the population and people realized how much had been tracked and largely using at the time the new technologies of things like small microphones and wiretaps and, you know, recording things, tape and stuff like that, just the extent of it just shocked people. They had no idea that such a thing could be possible.
Actually another great film worth checking out a fiction, but I think captures this well. It’s called The Life of Others, German film that sort of depicts a fictional Stasi officer and what they’re doing and they’re monitoring.
But yes, I spoke to these folks who, this stuff is in their living memory. They grew up when this was happening, right? This is only now 31 years ago at the time, 24 years ago. And they said, you know, we know what it looks like. Maybe I had almost a little bit of an innocence, you might say, insofar as being this American where I guess I basically just feel like most of the time, you know, government can be bureaucratic, it can sometimes be incompetent, but ultimately, most of the people that work in government and the systems that are in place are basically there to serve the citizenry. And yeah, there’s a lot of trade-offs about law enforcement getting access to wiretaps and stuff like that, but ultimately they want to do that to catch the bad guys, keep us safe, all that kind of stuff. And speaking to the German folks where they said, you know, no, we’ve seen what it looks like to have a society where government so heavily monitors its citizens in the name of protecting that society, right? Everyone that worked. You know, in this state surveillance apparatus believed they were doing something really good. They were keeping their home safe. And I’m not saying I necessarily converted to seeing the world that way. I do see it as a series of trade-offs, and yet that was a powerful experience for me, and I think has influenced strongly how I see this topic as it unfolds in the technology world.
00:54:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, and I think it shows how dangerous it might be to just assume or hope that everything will go well if we concentrate an enormous amount of data in a very legible way in one or a few powerful entities.
00:54:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Silicon Valley is maybe already grappled with this a little bit, which is you have a bunch of young optimistic people building powerful new communications and other kinds of digital technology, and they tend to think about the positive case, you know, I think people who get into tech tend to be optimists, they tend to think of technology as a force for good, and they’re not thinking about the ways that it can cause harm. It’s a, you know, technology is neutral and can be used as a weapon, can be used for harm, can Decay the things that a society holds dear, and I don’t think that’s a reason to fear it or to kind of have a knee jerk reaction, but I do think there is a clear-eyed sense of, OK, as we open up brand new ways to do all kinds of things with our information life thanks to these digital technologies, what’s that going to mean and not to say that we can fully know or fully predict what the impact of this stuff is, but I think being mindful and having some caution as we go. That certainly goes for you and I who work on new products where we’re trying to bring new capabilities into people’s lives. What are the risks, what are the downsides and certainly the privacy product issues that we’re grappling with right now are very much in that category for me, for sure. Well, if any of our listeners out there have feedback, for example, we’d love to hear how you think about privacy and digital tools, go ahead and reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter, or you can email us at [email protected]. We always like to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. And Mark, I certainly hope you’ll keep us in the loop about how you’re thinking about these trade-offs on the technology side, on the product side, and on the philosophical side as we continue to explore what we can do with the collaboration and multi-device capabilities of Muse.
00:56:11 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, I’m really looking forward to this work.
00:56:14 - Speaker 2: All right, have a good one.
00:56:15 - Speaker 1: You too, Adam.
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think that the future is not determined. I think that it is up to us, and I think that we should always believe fundamentally in the ability of human intelligence when properly applied to solve problems.
00:00:17 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest Jason Crawford from Routes of Progress.
00:00:35 - Speaker 1: Hello, thanks for having me on.
00:00:37 - Speaker 2: And Jason, when we first met, you were a tech founder working on Field Book. Tell me about that.
00:00:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. So most of my career has been in software and technology. I was a software engineer, engineering manager, and tech startup founder. Most recently, starting in 2013, I started a company called Field Book. Field Book was a sort of hybrid spreadsheet database, a lot like Air Table, so very much in the mode of a tool for thought and I’m very sympathetic to that general space of tools. I still have a soft place in my heart for it. In fact, Adam, one of the things That inspired me and helped give my mindset early on in developing that tool was a book that I think I learned about from you, A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi.
00:01:23 - Speaker 2: Um, yeah, so that was a 93. Yeah, you can believe that.
00:01:27 - Speaker 1: And still very relevant today, frankly, and so I told all my employees, recommended they read at least the first few chapters of that book and there’s a significant amount in there about spreadsheets, which are probably the greatest tool for thought ever created, so.
00:01:40 - Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I think the world’s most successful end user programming tool, which is almost everyone knows how to use a spreadsheet and probably can do at least the very most basic function like summing a column, and that is a small bit of computer code.
00:01:52 - Speaker 1: Exactly. So yeah, I built Field Book, worked on it for about 5 years. Unfortunately, didn’t work out, we ended up shutting down the product and selling the team. We did a sort of aquahire to start up Flexport.
00:02:04 - Speaker 2: And to be fair, the end user programming dream is one that many have chased and few have found there’s a few success stories, yeah, spreadsheets, you know, which are now decades old, maybe Flash, maybe Unity more recently, but it remains a really elusive dream to make a tool that both brings kind of the power of programming to an audience that is not already professional programmers.
00:02:27 - Speaker 1: It’s true, although at the same time, in the last couple of years, there’s been the notion of no code and low code has become, you know, much more prominent, and there have been a couple of major successes, so I’m happy to see tools like Air Table, tools like Notion, and, you know, a number of other sort of competitors in that space all keeping the dream alive and actually creating some pretty successful products.
00:02:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So going from there to, I don’t know, an independent scholar or educator or advocacy around progress studies seems like at least a pretty big leap. I’d love to hear that story.
00:03:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right.
So what happened was I got interested in the story of human progress early 2017.
It began as not even a side project, it began as just a reading list, really. It was what books am I gonna read next. I always like to be reading a non-fiction book and at a certain point I discovered that it was kind of a good idea to read books in clusters, sort of pick a theme and then read a handful of books on one theme, and you can learn a lot more from that than just reading random books. So I decided to learn about the history of human progress, and mostly in the beginning at least was interested in focusing on kind of technological and industrial progress, really fascinated by just the simple basic fact of economic living conditions and standards of living throughout history, how much those have really skyrocketed in the last couple 100 years after, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of years of very slow progress and very little improvement overall in living conditions. And I just wanted to know, like, how did we get here? What were the major breakthroughs, the inventions and discoveries that created this standard of living? And ultimately I’m interested in getting to the root causes. When I started blogging about this, I called it the roots of progress. You know, so ultimately understanding what are the conditions, what are the root causes of this explosion of creativity and invention that ultimately has made everybody’s lives so much better. So it started off as just me sort of reading books, and then the books were so fascinating that I decided to start making some notes on them and maybe publishing the notes on a kind of a little blog that I didn’t even care if really anybody read except for maybe a handful of my friends. And then a couple of years went by and I was still doing it and frankly, it just became my hobby, you know, people would ask me, do you have any hobbies? And I would think about what do I do on nights and weekends? And then I would say, well, I don’t know, is economic history a hobby? Can that be a hobby? Because that was where my time was going. And so then when I decided that it was time for me to move on from the last tech job and figure out something new to do, I asked myself, what am I really obsessed with right now? What’s the one thing that I can’t see myself not doing in the near future? And it was really doing this research and writing about the history of technology. In the meantime, a couple of things that happened. One is that my audience had actually grown somewhat, some of my posts kind of got popular, one of them hit number one on Hacker News and So I was starting to actually see that there was an audience for what I was doing, people liked it. And then the other thing was that a whole community began to form around this notion of progress studies, particularly after economist Tyler Cowen and startup founder Patrick Collison wrote an article together in the Atlantic about a year and a half ago, calling for more focus on the nature of economic and industrial progress and indeed calling for a discipline of progress studies. And so that article sort of galvanized a community around this notion and it turned out there are a lot of people who are interested in this concept. And so, you know, between that community and my new audience and my just personal obsession with the topic. It was a, I won’t say it was an easy decision to kind of make a hard left turn and just take my career in a different direction, but there was something that just felt inevitable and undeniable about it. So here I am, it’s a little more than a year later, and I’m quite happy with it. It’s still a topic that continues to fascinate me and I think it’s still very important for the world.
00:06:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I find it really interesting that my own journey as kind of tech entrepreneur, like if you go back, I don’t know, 56 years, maybe you and I had pretty similar jobs in certain ways, you know, starting a company, building a tool, sort of standard software as a service inside the Silicon Valley startup, combinator model, and then we each in our own ways got interested in the meta process of innovation, and my path was to go off and start this research.
Switch that Mark later joined up with about how we generate big breakthrough kind of step change, new digital technologies and that in turn led to me working on Muse because that was a spin out of that technology.
You went a maybe more scholarly path, but I feel like they come from the same place, which is working within that box, that Silicon Valley box, which is very much about change, innovation, new technology, but it’s sort of narrow in a certain way. It doesn’t take that broader view of Human history and how do we get here? And for me, a big personal breakthrough or something like that source of inspiration was going back and researching all these older industrial research labs like ARPA and Bell Labs and even back to Thomas Edison, and you were nice enough to invite me to give a little talk at Torture Progress about that exact topic. So maybe yeah, there’s a seed of something that started in the same place, even though we ended up doing very different things in terms of our day job now.
00:07:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting to see how much overlap there is between the software, kind of computer and internet and startup community and the progress community. It seems like it’s probably not a coincidence, but it’s interesting.
00:08:04 - Speaker 2: And Mark, you’ve been a little bit involved in the progress studies community. How do you think about this? How do you even define progress might be one place to start.
00:08:13 - Speaker 3: Well, that’s a big one. You might define progress as our ability to satisfy human wants and needs and desires.
It’s a big area, right? I guess I came to it similar to Jason through the lens of economic history and reading about all the progress we had made over the past several 100 years in particular, but then also how curiously we seem to be going pretty sideways in the last 50 years.
And it’s notable, I think that both you and Jason described reading about or having the sense. of there’s some sort of stagnation going on, because actually, if you look at the literature, it’s very pervasive.
In many areas, it seems like we’re going a little bit sideways in terms of not making the type of progress we made in the first half of the 20th century, for example.
And so as I read more and more, you keep seeing this over and over again, and it drives me to wonder what exactly is going on and how can we make it better.
And I also have an interest similar to both you and the, you might call it the meta of why this is all happening the way it is and what might make it better.
But to my mind, that’s perhaps the main thing. What’s the system of social technologies, if you will, that allows us to make progress or prohibits us from doing so.
00:09:16 - Speaker 2: Where do you fall on the stagnation hypothesis, Jason?
00:09:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, short answer, I have come around to it after being initially skeptical. It was not my initial or primary motivation for sort of getting into progress studies or, you know, starting to study this story of technological progress. I was more motivated by sort of the opposite, which is how much progress there actually has been in the last few 100 years compared to the previous several 1000. Right, and I think we need to keep in mind that is still the bigger story. Even if progress has slowed today, it’s still significantly faster than it was, I think in any pre-industrial era, right? Like the big division is still between the industrial age and pretty much all the time prior to that.
However, after some amount of time reading different arguments, quantitative and qualitative, looking at it in different ways. I’ve come around to this idea that progress actually has slowed down in the last approximately 50 years. I now see that. And part of what actually really helped me to see it was mapping out on a kind of a timeline, major invention. In different areas. So I made a sort of two-dimensional timeline for myself or one dimension was, well, time, and the other dimension was just sort of breaking out areas of technology into a few major categories like manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and so forth. And then I started placing on here kind of like, what were the huge breakthroughs, you know, in each of these areas at different times. And just from that, you can kind of exercise, you can really start to see it. And so the simplest way that I can summarize stagnation right now. is to just point out that around the end of the 1800s and into the early 1900s, we had, by my count, approximately 4 major technological industrial revolutions going on at once. One of them was electricity and everything that I was turning into, motors and everything, light bulbs, etc. Another was oil and all of its ramifications, including the internal combustion engine and the vehicles made from that the car and the airplane. Another was, I’ll just call it chemical engineering, the science of chemistry really coming into its own and beginning to really affect industrial processes. An early example would be the Bessemer steel process, a late example of this that really kind of capped it off would be the entire plastics industry. And then the fourth one, which maybe doesn’t always get a listed or counted as kind of a quote unquote industrial breakthrough, but which I think essentially does fit in that category, is the germ theory, the germ theory of disease and all of its ramifications in improving hygiene, improving public health, pasteurization of food, better food handling practices, especially water filtration and chlorination that improved that. And so these 4 things, oil, electricity, chemistry, and the germ theory, 4 major, mostly scientific and overall industrial innovation breakthroughs that are completely transforming one or two of those major areas of the economy, and then each one of them is having ramifications pretty much on like the entire world and on all areas of the economy, and they’re all happening at once. Now by the time you get to the end of the 20th century, the last 50 years or so, you’re basically down to 1. It’s the computer and internet revolution, right? And that is huge, and I think we shouldn’t dismiss it or discount it or downplay it, and there’s a lot of breath wasted on people arguing it across purposes a sort of like missing each other’s point going back and forth. Where I blame Peter Thiel for this a little bit. The whole, you know, we wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters. Well, what’s the matter with 140 characters? Like, That’s a pretty dismissive way of talking about this amazing information revolution that created the entire internet and put a supercomputer in everybody’s pocket and gives you access to all the world’s information and has connected everybody like never before. I mean, that is, you know, you don’t want to downplay that. But I think it’s fair to say that the computer and internet revolution itself is roughly comparable to any one of those four revolutions that I just mentioned, oil, electricity, and so forth. I don’t think it can measure up to all 4 of them going on at once. So if you just in a very crude way, if you want to count major technological revolutions that are going on, we went from 4 going on at once now to approximately 1. And by the way, that 1 has been going on for several decades, it’s kind. starting to level off. It’s starting to plateau. We’re starting to get to the point where it’s saturated the world and there’s still a lot more value to be generated out of computers and the internet, but it’s not gonna last forever, right? In a couple of decades, certainly we’re gonna start to see diminishing returns if we’re not already. And I think there’s some ways in which we are already starting to see it. So what comes next? Do we have another revolution on the bench or waiting in the wings to take over, right? Because the only thing worse from going from 4 technological revolutions to 1 is from going from 1 to 0. So that’s my current take on stagnation.
00:14:10 - Speaker 2: It does beg the question of what is the right number of revolutions to have or ideal number perhaps.
There’s one version which is just more progress is better, and just 4 is good, 6 would be even better, 10 would be great, so 25, there’s another version where we say, OK, we like the world that existed and that it produced to have 3 or 4 major revolutions going on at the time.
One isn’t bad. Somewhere in there seems about right, but there is such a thing as maybe too much progress or that’s not the only thing that matters in the world. There’s other things related to just human happiness. So how do we decide, I guess what what what we want in terms of societal progress.
00:14:50 - Speaker 3: Maybe that’s an internal variable in the system because you can imagine different social technologies that is different political systems, different ways for organizing society, where you have more or less ability to metabolize change.
There are some structures that are very brittle, and if you put more than one, you know, industrial revolution on, it would just crumble and break. But we’ve also seen that there are systems that can handle 4 at a time, you know, reasonably well, at least get through to the other end. So I think there isn’t necessarily hard cap so much as you need the technology to be able to metabolize other technologies, if you will.
The other thought is, and this one was really driven home to me by the book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which paints the picture that Jason just did about the huge amount of change that we had in our everyday lives before 1970 and basically the stopping aside from the information technology revolution after that. That book really focuses on the everyday lives of people and what it was like to live day to day. And a point that the author constantly makes is there are a few areas that are really key, housing, food, transportation, medicine, and these are kind of the bread and butter of everyday life. And it’s easy, I think, to forget that as people who work in the information economy. And so one way to answer the question of how many revolutions should we have is, well, we obviously have huge gaps in all of those areas. So we need enough to at least make progress in the big spaces like that.
00:16:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that is a good book that really does drive home, I think the how much progress there was in that late 1800s to early 1900s time frame, you know, compared to today.
I deeply disagree with his conclusions about the future, where he sees basically no more progress ever, as far as I can tell, but I think his history is excellent.
If you don’t want to read all 700 pages of the book, by the way, I did summarize it on my blog at roots of Progress.org.
I have a sort of summary and book review. So I break it down, um, I mean, food, clothing, shelters sort of one way to look at it. I break it down as kind of manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, communication, and medicine. Those are sort of the big 6 that I think about in terms of areas of the economy.
And you can put almost all, not absolutely everything, but you can put almost all big breakthroughs and innovation into those categories. And so I see no reason why we shouldn’t have at least one major revolution, you know, affecting each of those things at any given time.
You know, if you want to ask, well, how many technological revolutions do we need at once, right? One thing to look at is the areas that haven’t changed much and especially the technologies that seemed promising and areas where people thought there might be a revolution. But either it was aborted or hasn’t arrived yet or just hasn’t lived up to its potential.
I mean, if you go back to the 1950s, everybody at the time thought that the future of energy was absolutely nuclear, you know, they almost just took it for granted that of course, this is the future, this is where it’s going, we’re gonna have nuclear powered homes, nuclear cars, nuclear batteries, nuclear everything. And I’m far, far from an expert in that technology and what is actually possible, but I think that far more is possible, at least according to the laws of physics that we know, than what we’ve achieved or than what most people actually believe to be possible.
So I strongly suspect that nuclear is a far under exploited technology, and in a world where everybody is very worried about carbon emissions, that really looks like an oversight, doesn’t it? Manufacturing is another interesting one. So another book that I recently finished and reviewed on my blog is called Where Is My Flying Car by J Stors Hall. It’s basically just sort of the polar opposite of Robert Gordon’s rise and Fall of American Growth. It’s in many ways a work of futurism, and the author spent a lot of his career in nanotechnology, trying to do, you know, true or, you know, investigating, researching true, like atomically precise manufacturing, where you have basically nanobots putting together. Whatever you want, assembling it atom by atom, placing every atom in the right place, that would be an absolute revolution in manufacturing, right? That would allow us to not only create things of enormously higher quality, building 100 kilometer towers out of diamond, right? But also would, you know, like pretty much every revolution in manufacturing enormously bring the cost of everything way down, right? Because you’d be able to do everything faster and with much less human labor.
You can look at genetic engineering technology and biotechnology, you know, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. Gosh, it would be really nice if we had had a broad-spectrum antiviral drug that was as broadly effective as our broad-spectrum antibiotics. We don’t have any such thing yet.
I’m really, really glad that somebody was working on Messenger RNA based vaccine technologies because the first two COVID vaccines that have come through and seem to have promising results in their phase through trials are both based on Messenger RNA. That’s a brand new technology, by the way. I mean, it’s been around in the lab for a while, but there’s never been a vaccine approved or in widespread use based on that technology. So this looks like COVID will be the first.
So there’s always more. More progress to be made. And I think that’s a really important theme of progress studies, something I think you learn by looking at the history and I think, you know, it was always very easy to take the current world for granted and just assume that kind of this is how things are. You know, the people 100, 200 years ago, many of them were quite happy with the world as it was. They didn’t see the need for these huge breakthroughs. They didn’t believe they were possible, they didn’t even necessarily believe that they would be a good thing. Every single one of them was fought and opposed, not only by special interests who maybe stood to lose if some new breakthrough came into the world, but also The original Luddites, right? Yeah, and also just by people who were generally afraid of the technology and didn’t know, you know, what to do with it.
00:20:27 - Speaker 2: So, yeah, well, by default, you could say that humans I think are Fearful of change, and I almost wonder if kind of the tech founder type is someone that, because I’ve always been drawn to novelty and I find adapting to change or even taking advantage of it, sort of making the most of it in some way to be an exciting and fun challenge and stagnation is sort of bad for me, but I’ve come to realize that that is very much the exception, not the rule. In general, change is just threatening, very simple.
00:20:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s right. So I think it’s very important that we remember that perspective and that we remember that. Now if there’s one message I really want to drive home to people, it is that the future can be as amazingly better compared to the present as the present is compared to the past. Are we in the future and our descendants can be as fantastically wealthy compared to today as we are compared to the people of 200 years ago, the vast majority of whom lived in what we today consider to be extreme poverty. So we should keep that in mind and always be working for that much, much better future.
00:21:31 - Speaker 2: And that’s part of what’s very powerful about the advocacy side of progress studies to me is that it’s probably a very crude summary of cultural attitudes about change, but I think from what I understand, most cultures through most of history, most of civilization.
Saw the world is largely static and it was really fairly recent that you had this, oh, we can actually steadily improve and each generation can be better than last, but maybe that was the Victorian era concept of progress, progress with a capital P, which was the sense that things must get better, that it’s sort of mandated somehow by God or nature or it’s in our nature that if we just keep doing what we’re doing, things will continue. get better and then maybe that the pushback to that is, well, wait a minute, it’s actually not quite like that. Things can and do get worse, you know, ask the folks in the declining empire like Rome or many of the others over the millennia, but in general, we can choose a society and as individuals to say that we actually think progress is possible and desirable and then do things to try to affect that.
00:22:36 - Speaker 1: That’s right. The most interesting book I’ve read on this was A Culture of Growth by Joel McKe came out just a few years ago. It’s one of the first books I read in my study of progress, and he says much of what you just said that the very idea of progress is a relatively new one.
It is not at all the default. In fact, a common view in many places and times in history was sort of the opposite, something he called. ancestor worship, where we looked back to our ancient ancestors as the most Aristotle.
Yeah, or even in the Middle Ages, people looked at the, they looked around and they saw the pyramids and they saw the Colosseum and the Roman aqueducts and, you know, they just thought, well, wow, these ancient people who and then especially in the Renaissance and, you know, when they started rediscovering some of the ancient texts, and they’re just getting this knowledge.
That had been lost in Europe for 1000 years, you know, like how to mix volcanic ash into your cement to make a hydraulic cement, right? That was something the Romans knew and worked with and was kind of rediscovered 1000 years later after the fall of the empire.
And I think it wasn’t just in the west either. I mean, I think the West had this special sort of historical thing where there was a kind of cultural decline for a long time and Than a rebirth, but I think in many places and times people have sort of looked to ancient ancestors as the wisest people who ever lived. We will never surpass their knowledge or achievements.
All we can do is kind of learn what they had to teach us. And so progress in a certain way requires reversing this notion and actually believing that we can do better, that we can discover knowledge that none of our ancestors ever had, that we can create things that work better than anything they ever made.
And that takes a little bit of hubris and Mir says that that notion of progress evolved in the West roughly between about Columbus and Newton, so say the 1500s and 1600s.
The Voyages of Discovery actually had a significant amount to do with it, because here we are out discovering entire new continents that the ancients never knew about. Francis Bacon had a lot to do with it, and he’s a pivotal role in Moyer’s book. Newton really put the cap on it with his system of the heavens and explaining the motion of the planets and clearly better than anything that, you know, Ptolemy or anybody ever came up with.
The summary of that book is basically it’s how the Enlightenment set the stage for and led to the industrial revolution.
00:24:55 - Speaker 3: This reminds me, one of the interesting things I see with the study of progress is that it’s very contingent and embedded. And by that I mean, you generally don’t have one person who strikes out and decides, I’m going to make some progress today. Instead, you have a culture, you have a society, it often takes several 100 years. Amen.
00:25:12 - Speaker 2: Speak for yourself. That’s what I think every morning. Perfect.
00:25:17 - Speaker 3: So you do think that Adam, but that’s because in part, it’s because you spent so much time in Silicon Valley, which has become the sort of magnet and amplifier of this attitude that if you spend enough time there, you can kind of catch as a contagious disease almost. And I think it’s important to understand these very human elements of how just the notion of the improving mentality can be transmitted and encouraged culturally or conversely, it can be lost if it becomes too diffuse.
00:25:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s almost a societal level growth mindset where, yeah, again, it’s the thing we can do and we can choose to do, but it is not automatic. It’s something we have to work out and over extended periods of time. Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah, and I certainly have plenty of ways that I talk about, and Mark, you and I talked recently about our decision to leave San Francisco, each on our own basis some years past, and some of that was for me at least was somewhat some Silicon Valley monoculture and feeling like I wanted to break out of that to have sort of new perspectives and new ways to pursue the things that are important to me.
But at the same Time for some of the critique I have there, it is really one of the few places in the world I feel where that it is a baseline cultural thing that we’re here to make changes that we think will improve and possibly very deep changes. We talk about disruption, which is sort of an overused word, but it’s this idea that it’s the creative destruction. You can’t go beyond very incremental improvement without some tearing down. What’s already there and hopefully that shouldn’t be in a disrespectful way. And sometimes Silicon Valley startups get into trouble with that a little bit, which is they get so wrapped up in there, we’re going to change the world and it’s gonna be better that they forget about that every change, every transition has impacts, some negative, and you should be aware of those. But at the same time, yeah, that perspective of we can make the world better is quite a unique thing.
00:27:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, now we’re kind of getting into the discussion of why we progress or don’t. So Jason, I’m curious, you’re looking back 50 years and you’re seeing we’re not making as much progress as we did in the previous couple 100 years, even though it’s more than we did 1000 years ago. Why do you think that is?
00:27:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah. I have 3 main hypotheses right now. My hunch is that they’re all true and part of the issue. The most fundamental is cultural and sort of philosophic ideas and attitudes towards progress. I think in many ways our world is not nearly as favorable to progress and doesn’t think of it as highly as we used to. We’re much less appreciative and much more fearful and angry.
And I think when you value something less, you get less of it. You get less investment, you get less resources going into it. Fewer people want to devote their careers to it and so forth.
Exactly why that happened and why it happened when it did, I don’t totally know. But if you go back to again, sort of the late 1800s. The culture in general, I mean, particularly in the west, and especially in America, was extremely favorable to progress. It was seen as a very good thing. It’s coming along and improving everybody’s lives. It was transforming the world. Humans were proud of themselves as a species and about our abilities and what we could do, right? That was sort of how it was seen. It’s this kind of Victorian progress with a capital P, you know, the march of progress and so forth, right? I mean, you go back and those things are, I don’t know, almost cliches now, but they were very real attitudes. People celebrated progress. You go and you look at the imagery, the posters from the old World’s Fair type exhibitions and the way that they saw. They really saw progress as this positive force moving forward. As what you mentioned earlier, yes, I think some of them even. Got to maybe see it as inevitable and unstoppable, which is wrong, it’s not inevitable in any way, but people saw it as something, you know, overall that was making the world better. Sometime seemingly around the, I’m just gonna say the middle of the 20th century, the tide seemed to turn, and by the end of the 60s and with the rise of the counterculture, you definitely see popular attitudes turning against this. I think you See most of all, but not exclusively in sort of the rise of the environmentalist movement, there was just much more concern about technology, fear for unintended consequences, a different set of values, even that may be put nature and animals, other species, the planet itself, the quote unquote ecosystem, all of that, even above and beyond what’s good for individual human beings. And overall, again, I think just people stopped believing in progress as this fundamentally good force and some people even started seeing it as a fundamentally bad thing. And so, again, when you give less honor and prestige and acclaim and social. Status to invention and science and technology and business and capitalism, you’re gonna get less of it. You know, you have fewer people devoting their energies to it and more people devoting their energies to stopping it. One of the lines from, I mentioned that book, Where is my flying car? He said something like, today for every person who’s out there trying to change the world, there’s somebody else who believes that they’re saving the world by stopping that person. So that I think is maybe the deepest explanation. So my second major hypothesis is the growth of bureaucracy and especially government regulation, although not exclusively government regulation, I think there’s been a general kind of growth of bureaucratic overhead even within private institutions. But there’s just so many more rules now, so much more, you know, that any new thing, both the invention itself and the process of research and development, there’s just so much more to comply with, right? And so much more overhead, and it’s just an enormous amount of friction added to the entire process. I mean, the multi-billion dollar FDA pipeline now, right? I mean, that’s how much it costs to get a new drug out there. The cost of getting a new drug out there has been increasing over time, over the decades. There’s sort of an inverse Moore’s law. In fact, there was a famous paper by, I believe Jack Scannell at Al. That coined the term E-room’s law. Eroom is more spelled backwards because the price of getting a new drug to market on average was doubling every 9 years. And I think that may have leveled off or so in the last decade, but still, the prices are enormously high. It costs multiple billions of dollars on average per new drug approved by the FDA. And uh you know, there’s a number of different potential explanations for this, and they mention a number in that paper, including things like, by the way, every time you add a drug to the market, all new drugs have to be better than everything that’s ever previously, right, so the bar just keeps going up, right? But you know, one of their hypotheses was what they call the cautious regulator problem or the over cautious regulator, just that the requirements for new drugs have just been going up and up. To the point where, you know, the FDA doesn’t even allow people to try drugs experimentally, even after they’ve been proven safe, right? They have a further standard of efficacy. And it’s the phase 3 of the clinical trials that costs the most money, by the way. Like, why is nobody even talking about something like a universal right to try, not even, you know, putting these drugs out there just kind of on the open market, but At least allowing people who discover them and know about them, give them the right to try in their own bodies, at least after these things are proven safe, you know, in earlier trials or once we have like a certain amount of data, right? I mean, these are the kinds of things where I think, I mean, coming back to sort of cultural foundations, I think we have evolved something of a safety culture, especially in the United States and in the world in general. And I often wonder if the safety culture has gone beyond true safety into basically safety theater, where we just keep adding overhead and processes and bureaucracy and regulation. Basically, we’ve gotten to the point where you can justify anything on grounds of safety, and you can pretty much kill anything on concerns of safety. And there just doesn’t seem to be any really ability to talk about trade-offs. And so I fear that what has happened is that we’ve kind of built up the safety theater, which is extremely low ROI like it adds tons of overhead and does not actually add an appreciable amount of safety. So I think we need to get smarter about the ways that we create safety. And this is not, by the way, to say that safety is not a valuable goal. It absolutely is. In fact, increased safety is one of the enormous accomplishments of technological and industrial progress over the last couple 100 years. Our lives are actually much safer now in many ways, although there are some arguments that they become less safe in some significant kind of, you know, tail risk ways. But in many ways, you know, our exposure to germs and disease, our exposure to air pollution, just the safety of our machines and our vehicles, all of these things, we’ve actually gotten a lot safer in many ways. So I’m not against safety, I’m very much in favor of safety. I just think there’s a trade-off in how we create it. And then the third major hypothesis, and maybe the one that is closest to the hearts of Ink & Switch, is the way we fund, organize and manage research. We have lost certain ways of doing this, in particular, it’s been a significant decline of corporate research and corporate R&D labs. At the same time, concurrent with that, there’s been a kind of centralization and bureaucratization of funding for science and research, especially in a small number of large and bureaucratic government agencies, and I think there’s a good case to be made that we don’t have ways of funding the real kind of. Contrarian maverick breakthrough ideas anymore. And that also closely related to this, that we don’t have great ways of funding very uncertain long term research that can’t prove itself with very predictable or short-term results, but, you know, is actually the kind of thing that makes long-term fundamental breakthroughs. And so looking at how we organize and manage and especially get resources to fund different types of research and development, I think is an important place that we should look at for countering stagnation. So those are my three big hypotheses. 1, culture, 2, regulation of bureaucracy, 3, funding organization and management.
00:35:23 - Speaker 2: There was so much in there, I’m trying to figure out where to start on the response. You touched on many things, I think are very interesting safety is versus like anti-fragile FDA approval is the thing I’ve been involved in in some of my advocacy work, funding research is obviously a huge one, and they can switch in kind of broader independent research world, but actually I want, if I can respond to something at the very beginning there, he talked about the potential change in attitudes about kind of progress and maybe technology and maybe capitalism is kind of a piece of that as well.
And you know, I agree with you that if you of some of these mechanisms that have brought us so many great advancements, I think that is a problem both for progress and humanity.
But I also wonder if in that time range you were talking about that I don’t know, 1960s, 1970s counterculture, people thinking about the environment, a lot happened in there to make people maybe have almost a reality check against the maybe more uns the word for it, unchecked, kind of just positivism of science and technology and capitalism and the modern world’s all good. And we saw that nuclear, which as you said was this great big hope for the future of clean energy, we had these horrible meltdowns were so deeply traumatic to the individual countries where they happen.
Maybe there’s something like discovering the link between cigarettes and cancer and that for many, many decades, generations really, these huge corporate interests had been basically pushing this addictive drug that turned out to be quite deadly.
Obviously the environmental stuff, rainforest deforestation and shrinking ecosystems and all that sort of thing and. Yeah, that basically it was sort of reasonable to have a bit of a, wait a minute, maybe we should think about some of the downsides of some of the progress, technological progress or growth in capitalism that we experience.
Now maybe the place where I land on that is having a little bit of a reality check, maybe was a good thing or is a good thing, you know, you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
00:37:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a major and significant factor actually was the World Wars.
So if you read what people were saying and thinking pre-World War One, the excitement and enthusiasm for progress, and it wasn’t just technical and economic progress, it was scientific progress and it was in many ways moral and social progress that people saw.
And the Enlightenment era was focused on all of those. And so, you know, people saw the and were hoping for, we’re looking ahead towards the perfection of morals and of society, just as we would perfect science and technology. And there was a belief and a hope that the new prosperity created by industry, the connections created by communications and transportation. The interlocking of peoples and economies created by trade, that all of this was leading to a grand new era of world peace, and perhaps even that war was a thing of the past. And the world wars completely shattered that illusion. They were, I believe, the most destructive wars in history, um, certainly they were enormous, highly destructive wars, and of course they were made more destructive through technology. You know, in World War One, we had chemical weapons, we have poison gas, right? We had the automatic guns, we had towards the end of the war, I think the tank.
00:38:44 - Speaker 2: One really powerful way to get your head around how shocking that was, the role of technology in essentially killing people in mass numbers is there’s this excellent history podcast called Hardcore History, and they had a series, I think it was like a 6 or 8 hour series on World War One, particularly the beginning of it and some of those first battles, and you know, at the start of that war, I don’t know, they have like French cavalry. Riding into battle with their blue jackets and their big puffy hats and their sabers on their side, and then you look at these battles where they pull out these new weapons that have been developed over the course of the previous few decades, and they’re able to just kill in just such efficient and brutal ways and it was just so shocking that war just took on a whole other meaning and I Listen to that whole series just as I first moved to Germany, which is of course a place that has very deep scars, cultural and otherwise from both of the World Wars and yeah, it was a really powerful thing and for me, even I tend towards techno optimism. I think I tend towards that like technology is unbalances for the good, but then listening to these kind of contemporary descriptions of the destructive power of the technology of that time. Again, it’s kind of a reality check.
00:39:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and then World War II, of course, was even worse. I mean, you know, World War 2 was the wizard’s war. If people could catch a glimpse of the role of technology in war in World War 1, it was very obvious by World War 2, right? I mean, we had planes and, you know, bombing runs and radar and and then to wrap it all up, the atomic bomb. And I think that when we think about people’s fears about nuclear technology and nuclear power and energy, I’m sure that a significant amount of it was the association with nuclear war.
00:40:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m pretty sure in a film if they ever want to give you the feeling of, I don’t know, technology’s gone too far, society’s gone awry, I feel like there’s a little montage of this in the Fifth Element, great little sci-fi movie from some years back where they showed that mushroom cloud, that is the icon for we went wrong somewhere and yeah, technology was a mistake, basically. Yeah.
00:40:54 - Speaker 1: So I think the World Wars were very significant in the psyche of the world overall, especially the West. But at the same time, I think that events affect people’s views of themselves in the world, but they don’t determine those views.
There’s always a question of interpretation. And so, for reasons that I’m not yet clear enough on.
To talk about them, people interpreted the wars in the aftermath in a particular way and in a way that caused many people to turn against technology as such, and in the phrase that you used to throw the baby out with the bathwater and to, you know, rather than saying, Well, we have put a lot of effort into creating these technologies that have made us very powerful, and we haven’t put enough effort into creating defensive technologies or creating safety technologies or Instead of just saying, well, our attention and effort has been misplaced, let’s refocus our efforts so that we make sure that progress serves mankind and not destroys it. I think a number of people turned to a particular kind of counter-enlightenment sort of romantic notion that had really been around for a long time. Had always been around in some form, a kind of a back to nature, you know, very Roussoy and sort of down to technology, back to nature, and let’s just live simpler, quiet lives rather than trying to sort of move forward and make everything better all the time the noble savage. Yeah, exactly.
00:42:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s an interesting angle in terms of the World Wars causing perceptions to be negative on progress. The people being negative on progress is interesting, because I think it’s kind of both a cause and an effect. It’s a cause for the reason that you just described, but I think something also went wrong around. The 70s in terms of how well the system was working for a lot of people.
And so to some extent you had people more or less rationally saying, this isn’t going well for me, I don’t want to sign up for even more of it. And this connects to a broader theme I have around our social technology. And I keep using that phrase, to me, that means the systems, the governments, the organizations, the norms, the patterns of behavior that we have that determine how we operate day to day.
It feels like that technology is becoming a worse and worse fit for purpose in the sense that a, it’s sort of Decaying, it’s becoming bloated and it’s losing the plot, but also the world is changing a lot, especially with information technology, and our social technologies largely haven’t caught up.
So this is why I keep coming back to this space as being a really important frontier.
We need better ways to organize and motivate our work as a better fit for our modern world. And I’m pretty optimistic that if we’re able to make progress in that domain, it will in turn facilitate progress in other areas like people feeling that the system is working better for them and also areas like funding more impactful research.
00:43:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s definitely true. I think that they’re reinforcing cycles in this, as with many things, I think in society, where the more you value progress and honor it, the more of it you get, and then the more people can see that it’s valuable.
Conversely, the more that you are fearful of progress and try to block it, the more you get technological stagnation, which then leads to people saying, well, what has technology done for us lately? You know, I don’t really see how technology is making my life better, so maybe it’s not even a thing to bother with or invest in.
It takes some cultural leadership with vision to break out of cycles like that. It takes somebody who can see beyond the recent past and see a different type of future other than what we’ve had to take things in either a positive or a negative direction.
00:44:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there’s an opportunity both for people to innovate within the system and to help create new systems.
So as an example of the former, I would probably give Elon Musk, you know, he’s basically operating with the parameters of existing governments and organizations and Our model for capitalism, he’s like, I’m going to Mars. It’s kind of a mess to get there because of all this weird bureaucracy, but I’m doing it anyways, you know, good for him.
And I think we also need stuff like Routes of Progress and ink and switch where it’s like, OK, let’s try to change the game a little bit here and rearrange the pieces. And I hope we can encourage people to operate on both fronts.
00:44:58 - Speaker 1: Absolutely.
00:44:59 - Speaker 2: Role models is another thing I think I would like to see more of and Jason, you referenced the celebrating achievements and yeah, the tickertape parades for Lindenberg when he crossed the Atlantic, celebrations of scientists that contributed to vaccines and things like that. And I don’t know if it’s an effect of kind of our TV oriented culture or something else, but when you look at the role models that people are likely to just the famous people, people are likely to name or people that kids are likely to say, I want to be like this person when I grow up.
You know, they play sports, they’re actors, they’re maybe YouTubers nowadays that we aspire to be maybe political leaders and to some degree, there is, yeah, the kind of tech world, folks, the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and so on.
But maybe we don’t have enough celebration of, and again it becomes a cycle, either a virtuous or non-virtuous cycle that if you celebrate the people who do these great achievements, and then people look at that and think, I want to be like that, I want to do what they do, and then you get more of those people.
00:45:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I do think that is part of the cycle, and yeah, in one sense, one of the biggest things that Elon Musk has contributed to the world is just people look up to him as a role model of like, wow, here’s somebody who’s defining really ambitious technological visions for the future and then going after them full throttle. And I think there’s a lot of people who will come in his wake and be inspired by that, him and others like him who are doing things like that.
00:46:26 - Speaker 3: I think that this idea of role models is super important because so much of human behavior and action is basically imitation, and so much of what we do is influenced by who we just basically happen to be around.
And so it sounds kind of weird, but you can make really different stuff happen just by putting different people together. And this is why one of the frontiers of social technology that I’m so bullish on is different types of organizations and replacements largely for what was previously the university.
Which are basically an elaborate mechanism for getting a bunch of weird people in the same hall, and there’s all kinds of apparatuses happening around that, but that’s the core engine of it.
And I’m excited to see people exploring new models that try to get that same core dynamic, but that leverage the internet so that the routes of progress community would be one of those, for example.
I think there’s just so much more to do there, and I’m pretty optimistic that we’ll figure out some cool stuff. So a lot of work to do here. Jason, is there anything in particular that you’re looking forward to working on next or that you are looking for help on going forward?
00:47:20 - Speaker 1: Let’s see, so a couple of projects that are big for me right now. So one is over the summer, I created a high school program in the history of technology. We ran it initially as a summer program and it’s now being incorporated into the history curriculum. Of a high school, private high school called the Academy of Thought and Industry, and I’m continuing to do some curriculum development for them and really excited about how that’s gonna turn out.
I think high school is a great time to begin learning about the detailed history of technology and how it’s improved everybody’s lives.
The other somewhat longer term project is that I am working on a book. So I’m gonna take the writing that I’ve been doing at the Roots of Progress and the kinds of stories that I tell there about the development of technology and how it changed the world and I’m gonna be putting it.
Together into something a little more long form and comprehensive, so that is kind of my main focus right now.
Can’t say at this point how far out it is. I’ve still got a lot of research to do, but that’s the biggest driving thing, you know, for me right now and the thing I’m most excited about.
00:48:26 - Speaker 2: I’m really excited about that one too, not least of which because I think a book makes a field or a movement more tangible in some way, but also because you were nice enough to give me a peek at the list of chapters and yeah, I’m even with all of the reading I’ve done of your material, I think having together in this long form format will be, well, something I’m really looking forward to.
Well, it may be a fun place to end.
I think an interest that Jason and I both share is jet travel and particularly supersonic jets, which had an interesting story here. I think just recently this company Boom has been out doing kind of big product rollouts to announce their basically prototype of their supersonic jet, but I got really interested in this when I read the biography of one of the main, what you call it product managers, maybe the lead of the team that worked on the 747. The 747 is basically the plane that defined the modern airplane.
When you see planes designed before that, they look kind of old timey, and the 747 and that have come after it share kind of the same rough body shape and the same style of interior and that sort of thing.
So it really ushered in this new era of air travel, but one of the things that’s powerful to me about reading this book, both because I’m a. person and I like hearing the inside story about how the stuff evolved, but you realize it was just a guy, very smart guy, and he had some really good predictions about the future and what these technologies might enable for travel, but you saw, again coming back to that theme of progress is a thing we can decide to do and work towards as individuals.
He had a vision for more wide travel. He saw the technology could make it possible. He got Himself in the position to work on that project and made it happen and basically ushered in this modern era of travel, which, putting aside the last year of relative lockdown has been an absolute golden age where essentially most people have the ability to get on a plane in a major city and go to almost any other city in the world for a relatively affordable price, which is a really amazing breakthrough when you think of it.
But we also thought at that same time that the 747 was being developed or the industry feeling was supersonic was the future. And so at the same time they were sort of designing and developing the 747 and some of the related technologies, there was also the development of what would eventually become probably the Concorde is the best known of the supersonic technologies, but that actually turned out to be a dead end or had this eventual abandon. where essentially a combination of the air pollution from the sonic boom, the fuel cost, and a few other factors meant that even though we have this technology that would allow you to fly, say from Paris to New York in just a few hours compared to the usual 6 to 8 hours it takes us across the Atlantic, eventually we shut all that down. And now there’s a new company that’s working on it saying basically some things have changed, some technologies have changed. We can do something different, but I find that story or that evolution to be an interesting example of progress as first of all, something that individuals drive and decide to do. Obviously in groups and through mechanisms like capitalism and government funding and all sorts of other, all those social technologies that Mark talked about, but ultimately it is just people deciding this thing they want to do.
But also this path of you. About the revolutions that we have, we had a revolution in air travel, but then we also thought there would be a similar or a next step change in travel based on supersonic, and that actually didn’t turn out to work out, or at least we stepped away from it. And maybe we’re coming back to it now, maybe we will be able to make it across the United States or across the Atlantic in just a few hours, but that remains to be seen. But it was exciting to me to see that banner picked up again.
00:52:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the speed of passenger aircraft over time is one of the clearest graphs you can look at that just sort of shows the stagnation of the last 50 years, right? It was going up and up and up, and then it actually went up to supersonic, and then it went down. We actually regressed, right? Forget about stagnation.
00:52:37 - Speaker 3: This is actual regress, especially if you count the time in airport security lines, which is increased significantly.
00:52:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, which ties back to the safety emphasis topic.
00:52:45 - Speaker 1: And the regress in passenger airplanes is not unlike and in fact came around the same time as the regress in space travel, right? We used to be able to go to the moon, and then it right at a certain point, we didn’t even have the Saturn 5 rocket anymore, and our space capacity had actually regressed. And in fact, there’s an argument to be made that you can chalk both of them up to very similar causes.
Both supersonic passenger travel and the space race were pursued primarily as government projects for government glory, I mean, for lack of a better word, they were put out there for national prestige and to show off technological capability. And they weren’t set up to be economically sustainable, right? And that was a real problem with Concord, wasn’t making enough money.
So I think part of the lesson of these things is that big showy government projects can temporarily push the frontier forward, maybe much faster or farther and earlier than it otherwise would have. And maybe that has some good effects, but they can also set areas up for regress and stagnation for decades. The way to make something actually long term sustainable is to give it a sustainable economic model, which means a profit model. And so I’m excited that both supersonic and space travel are coming back as private efforts from for-profit companies that are setting up sustainable economic models to actually make them profitable, make them pay for themselves in the long term. That’s how they will stick around and how they’ll grow.
00:54:18 - Speaker 2: So Jason, given everything we’ve talked about, do you find yourself at this moment optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in between about progress?
00:54:27 - Speaker 1: Well, I think it’s important to distinguish between two types of optimism, and I’ve used the terms descriptive optimism and prescriptive optimism. So descriptively, you can predict what you think is going to happen, or, you know, whether we’re on the right track, whether we’re on a path for good or bad outcomes. And I’m somewhat ambivalent, frankly, at that.
I think part of me wants to be optimistic or is optimistic. I think there’s a lot of good things going forward, you know, the vaccine efforts against COVID are just like a great example of what we can do when the best of our science and technology comes forward to. a major problem. For people who don’t know the history of vaccine development, developing a vaccine in like a year or less than a year is amazing and basically unprecedented. Generally, vaccine development is something that takes decades, and so this really shows how far some of our technologies have come and what we can do. To use a cliche when we put our minds to it and put our efforts into it and our resources. But you know, there’s a lot of things to make one pessimistic as well. I mean, the US government’s response to COVID has been mostly incompetent. I think there is a lot of buildup of bureaucratic craft, a lot of our social technologies, to use Mark’s term, are not in such a great state. And so I think we’ve got a lot of work to do and in some ways, you know, have slid backwards. But I think it’s important to distinguish that kind of prescriptive like descriptive rather, are we on the right track from the prescriptive optimism or pessimism of what should we do about it? And prescriptively, I am always and ever an optimist. I think no matter how bad things are looking. The only thing we can do is to step up, bring our best efforts to the game, and, you know, even if we’re on a bad path to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. I think that the future is not determined. I think that it is up to us, and I think that we should always believe fundamentally in the ability of human intelligence when properly applied to solve problems and to make the world better. So, descriptively, I’m sometimes an optimist and sometimes a pessimist, and it’s very case dependent. But what I’m not and will never be is defeatist, and I think there’s a lot of defeatism out there, you know, the notion that combining perhaps a descriptive pessimism with a prescriptive pessimism that essentially tells people to give up, or to scale back our ambitions or maybe even to deliberately regress to a safer or, you know, more comfortable world. So prescriptively, I’m always an optimist. Forward, you know, let’s confront the problems, no matter the odds, and let’s do our best to make the future better.
00:57:01 - Speaker 2: Can’t think of a better place to end than there. Yeah, right on. If any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or via email, hello at museapp.com. We always love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. Jason, thanks for inspiring those of us who are working on building the future, and I’m looking forward to reading the book.
00:57:24 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, thank you for building the future and thanks for having us was a great conversation.
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