Metamuse

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I actually say mostly seriously that games in the world of gaming predicts a lot of trends. So it goes from kind of pro games to mainstream games to consumer software to software for startups to software for enterprises.

00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. U is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. How are things in Seattle, Mark?

00:00:37 - Speaker 1: Going all right. We got the cherry blossoms this week in Seattle, which is exciting, and it’s a sign that we’re turning into the strong half of the Seattle weather calendar in the summer here.

00:00:47 - Speaker 2: Very nice, yeah, we’re seeing just a little bit of flowers starting to peek out on the trees. Here in Berlin, although it’s always an experience where you see the first flowers kind of try to come out when it seems like it might be warm enough on those first sunny days in March, and then inevitably it turns really cold again and they all die. Yeah. So you see this thing where there’s the pioneers that are trying to break through, and then eventually the weather turns and it comes into full bloom, which is absolutely excellent for those that like colorful flower rich environment, like me, probably pretty bad for those with allergies, I’m imagining.

00:01:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. All right, so I’m excited to do an episode, Adam, about learning from games. Now, games, gaming, the gaming ecosystem, something that’s come up on a lot of previous podcasts. We’ve mentioned it here and there, but I thought it would be a good time to do a proper episode, collecting all of the things that we’ve learned and gleaned from that industry.

00:01:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we mentioned in passing lots of times.

I think we talked about it last time with Rasmus Anderson. It was a big part of our conversation with Andy Works, and he’s since published a great article essentially on exactly this topic called Serious Play.

I’ll link in the show notes, of course, talking about his journey of playing a lot of games when he was younger, then eventually becoming, I don’t know, an adult with responsibilities and, you know, you don’t have As much time for that sort of thing anymore, and then rediscovering really rich uh world of of games that exist now, both the big budget stuff and the indie games, and also what we can learn from that, why these are important as artistic, as cultural, and certainly as inspiration for design.

So Mark, when you’ve been inclined to reference games in connection with news, productivity, software tools for thought, it seems like they don’t have much in common, right? The productivity world is very focused on, well, being productive, which is almost the opposite of what you think of games are for, which is entertainment. So why is there a connection? Why are these two things so relevant to each other?

00:02:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s kind of the question of the podcast, isn’t it? Maybe we can start by motivating a little bit because I think we’re kind of sleeping on games as an industry. It’s something that in the typical world of Silicon Valley kind of flies under the radar for a variety of reasons, but in fact, games are a huge deal. It’s an enormous industry. They’re extremely influential in terms of the amount of time that people spend on them and the culture, and as we’ll see, I think there’s a lot of technology, products, social things that games have figured out. I think there’s a lot to learn there.

00:03:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one comparison you can make there is Hollywood, right? Films, TV, and I think it’s well understood, or most people would say, yeah, of course, Hollywood and films broadly have this huge impact on our culture.

It’s this really big industry. The celebrities from that movie stars are lionized in our world and in our culture, and everything from patterns of speech to social change has happened often through seeing things like, I don’t know, gay couples on TV and movies. I think that helped pave the way for a broader acceptance and legal change of that. And so, that seems fairly clear, but games maybe, as you say, we’re sleeping on them, they fly under the radar, they’re seen for some reason as less influential or less important, but of course, if you look at something like just the dollars or the total kind of money that goes into the industry, it’s actually larger than Hollywood, much larger than films, um, and maybe on par with maybe something like professional sports. So, this is something that is ongoing, already has had huge cultural impacts, and I think that’s even more so as new generations rise up.

00:04:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the professional sports analogy is really interesting and apt.

For me personally, I kind of grew up watching sports. That was one of the things that I did.

You watched American football and baseball primarily, but when I was an adult, it basically became illegal to do so. It’s actually very hard to watch American football if you don’t have like the satellite dish, you have to buy the package and, you know, I have. Apartment or how do you even get a dish, you know, it’s a whole mess. And likewise with baseball, it was actually quite hard to buy a subscription to watch baseball. I tried, it was not fruitful. So one of the reasons that I ended up getting more into this community of games is that it’s actually just much more accessible. So Adam, I’m curious to hear a little bit about your story and how you ended up there too.

00:05:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think mine is typical in some senses that I played games as a kid and they had a really big impact on my life, and this was particularly true when for a while we lived in a pretty rural area and basically there was not a lot of other kids around and I’d go like get up to trouble at the river behind our house or whatever, but at some point, did manage to get access to a computer and that was certainly when I learned to program, but that was actually largely motivated by thinking I want to make my own games because I played these games and I had these really powerful and mind expanding experiences and I thought I want to do this too.

And I dreamed of growing up to go into the game industry.

In fact, I did exactly that, basically dropped out of college to work in my first game company, and went from there to working at some other relatively high profile companies, and after a few years, I got disillusioned.

And essentially that was because sort of the tools and practices were so bad.

This is post hoc. At the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I saw these really talented people working these crazy long hours, 60 and 80 hour weeks, and death marches to ship products and what have you, and maybe somewhat. Ironically, or maybe that’s not quite the right word for it, but there’s an interesting thing here where that’s part of what got me interested in tools, creative process, and I thought, OK, I love the output of this. I love games, or at least games as an artistic medium, I think can be really excellent, but that at some point the big budgets and the complex technology that went into it. And some dynamics of the industry just meant that the process of making them was kind of terrible.

Now, this was the late 90s, I think a lot has changed since then, including the indie game revolution, but interestingly enough, that was my path.

One way you could put it, or I could postdoc describe it is that the developer experience for game developers in the late 90s was terrible, and that’s one of the things that got me interested in developer tools, but also the creative process generally. So, Roku was about developing. Experience and great tools and a smooth process and of course Muse is a tool for thought and on that dimension, but they all kind of feed into that. So the bad experience I had in the game industry pursuing what was my childhood dream in fact led into what turned out to be the uniting theme for my career.

00:07:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, interesting. So you originally sort of came at it from the developer experience as well as the user experience side, and I came at it more from the user experience side and I’ve since been learning more about the engineering side as I’ve explored the world of technology.

00:07:45 - Speaker 2: Interesting. You came in from a perspective of eSports as a replacement for sports, sort of. What were some of your first experiences or first games or first things you, I’m not even sure what you call a tournament, an e-sports tournament. What was it that was the seminal thing that opened you to this world?

00:08:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s funny. The beginning is sort of the present.

So one of the games that I had played when I was much younger, like 20 years ago, it’s called Age of Empires 2. This is a real-time strategy game where you have a little civilization that you collect resources for and you use it to build armies and take over the world and so forth.

And this is something I had played when I was a kid in the 90s, as one does, and had kind of forgotten about it.

But then a few years ago, I saw that the game had basically been revived by this new sort of social technology around games that includes things like YouTube, Discord, pro tournaments, Twitch, all. These things to make it more like a professional sports ecosystem or community.

And I sort of dialed back into that, it was such a fun game. And sure enough, there was this incredible vibrant community and ecosystem around it.

And based on that, I started poking around more in the world of gaming and e-sports in general.

And I saw more of that pattern. And then I looked into some of these more popular games.

That’s kind of a really niche game. There’s very popular games like Counter Strike, which is another one that I played when I was a kid, and that is now a huge eSport. That’s a game where you have like a million people watching the big tournaments. It’s the real deal.

There’s many professional players and teams, people do it basically for a living, and there’s an incredible amount of social energy around it as well as people just playing it for fun, of course.

00:09:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the competitive aspect is super interesting because I personally much prefer weird indie games that are more exploratory or puzzle games. You take it at your own pace, something like, I don’t know, Fez or Papers Please or recently been playing a lot of Babas you.

So these really competitive games, particularly. I guess I can appreciate them, but maybe I’m just not a very competitive person, but I agree that the social aspect that comes with it, which includes these huge tournaments, which I have some insight into, there’s a great YouTube channel, Kora Gaming. Basically is by an insider of this competitive world of, I don’t know, Street Fighter and StarCraft and all these kinds of tournaments.

And I also read a great book called Playing to Win by David Serlin, where I think he was a pretty high ranking maybe Street Fighter player, if I’m not mistaken, and he kind of goes and breaks down the elements that competitive games have their own special flavor because in the end, the thing that’s interesting about it is The other players and they can forever evolve, and that’s why games like chess and poker, for example, to take two, even though the rules haven’t changed in, I don’t know, decades or even hundreds of years, the game remains interesting and evolves because I think the meta game they call it, Playin talks about this, and Sirlin puts games like StarCraft which are still played professionally in these tournaments 20 years later, maybe like the Age of Empires you mentioned.

Some of these Street Fighter games and so on, and that in fact is a sign of a truly good competitive game, that the game doesn’t need updates, it doesn’t need new content to stay interesting because what keeps it interesting is the other players.

00:11:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think that’s a big part of it. Games that are competitive in the classic sense where like you’re a competitor and you’re competing against someone that can be interesting for a long time, as you were saying, as the meta evolves. There’s also this whole other layer which gets to the sort of professional sports analogy where the reason these games have become really huge isn’t because people personally want to compete competitively.

In the same way that American football isn’t huge because you want to be a world class football player, is because you want to be cheering for a team or a personality that you believe in, you want to kind of get into the play calling, you know, and understand that it’s basically a substrate for having a social dynamic. And people, they just like the competitiveness, not necessarily in all cases to compete themselves, although there are some people do.

00:11:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s fair. And I think there’s a few elements there again, looking at the sports.

Example, which, while that was never a big part of my family life growing up, sounds like the way that it was for you, I’ve actually gotten more into European football since living in Germany because it is such a huge thing, particularly when the World Cup came around a few years ago. I mean, when a World Cup game is on, particularly when Germany is playing in, the streets are silent. There is nobody out, but you actually hear everyone’s TVs on or kind of Like in sync, but with like slight delays from the speed of sound, travel, and even like convenience stores will set up a TV they’ll just basically drag a TV out onto their front stoop essentially and set it up so you can walk by. So it’s this very unifying experience and actually a lot of fun, even though this particular sport of these teams are not something I follow a lot. That social element, that unifying element is, let’s say something I appreciate more now. Yeah. I feel also with sports, and this goes for e-sports as well, there is something about maybe something like the Olympics, which is maybe less directly competitive in terms of a lot of the sports they show, but it’s something about seeing humans kind of performing at their very best, like the very best at doing a kind of impressive thing. And people who have trained their whole life, and we’ve chosen the very best people in the world and put them on the spotlight to do this, and I think there’s something similar and it’s a different thing when you watch these, I don’t know, amazing StarCraft players do what they do and you watch them sitting there. It doesn’t look like much, right? They’re barely moving their wrist. to flick the mouse around, but if you know how the game works and you’re drawn in intellectually and you see what’s happening on the screen, and then of course you have the announcer voiceovers that help you understand the significance of what they’re doing and why this is interesting and the cheering of the crowd and yeah it’s quite interesting.

00:13:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned that. I think one of the reasons the Olympics works so well is that there are very universal athletic acts, running, jumping, swimming. It’s something that anyone can relate to. And so when you see someone doing it at a very high level, you can say, oh, I kind of understand what that would take and why it’s so impressive. And yeah, if you’re watching a game that you’ve never played before, it’s probably not going to be super interesting. But the reality is people are growing up on games now, and it’s becoming a huge part of people’s lives, and so a lot more people are in a position to appreciate and engage with these communities.

00:14:06 - Speaker 2: Now when it comes to the things that the productivity software world or the tools for thought world can draw from games, certainly there’s social elements which I think are interesting, but there’s also at a more I don’t know, pragmatic level there’s technology. The technology that has gone into games, I guess they’ve really driven a lot of computer hardware advances from the beginning, essentially, but especially in recent years, I feel like it’s pretty unbelievable how games are sort of pushing the envelope in terms of what computers can do.

00:14:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, GPUs, displays, input devices, latency reduction is something that’s all been driven basically by games again, cause there’s a huge amount of dollar demand for high quality hardware.

So there’s a lot of incentive on the part of hardware developers to improve it. I do think probably the biggest category for me from games is performance.

Yeah. I make this joke that I can load up a game on my other computer, it’s like 300 FPS photo realistic 3D world, walk around, do whatever you want, and then I’m over here scrolling on whatever this web page and it’s like choppy choppy at 60 FPS. It’s just a kind of a whole another level of performance and focus on that, and something you probably have understood from the day you started working in games.

00:15:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. I think the culture there on performance. is both inside the game companies. I mean, first of all, there’s probably like you said, a lot of financial incentive that drives these companies like Nvidia and so forth to just be continuously pushing the envelope on what can be done with graphics, for example.

But then within companies it’s just, for example, very, very standard to have frame rate counters and all kinds of performance metrics really built straight into the app and That’s something we’ve tried to duplicate on the Muse team a little bit.

We had a frame rate counter right from the beginning, and it was part of our vision to be, you know, the iPad Pro is 120 frames per second or can update at that speed, and we wanted to see if we could keep that full frame rate throughout, and that’s a huge difference compared to, you wrote about this in your slow software article, you go to load up Google Drive or Ocean or some other thing.

It’s not measured in frames per second. It’s multi-second delays to do just a very simple operation like just listing out your current documents, which by the way you looked at that same list 5 minutes ago. It’s probably in the cache somewhere, but it’s just there just isn’t that same culture of performance.

And yet when you worked at a game company, it was just really standard. You had all these on-screen displays about frame rate counters and all this tooling, and of course you make it fast. You have to make it fast. It won’t feel good. If it’s not smooth, and that just doesn’t exist as much on the productivity tool side, and I’d furthermore say it’s also driven by users.

Users care about frame rate, they pay attention to that, they are thinking about particularly people that I don’t know, build these PC gaming rigs. I’m probably the definition of a casual gamer. I’ve got my Nintendo Switch and I play games on my iPad and I don’t want to have to do anything. I want an appliance that makes it really easy.

But people who are into pushing the envelope and getting the best graphics they can, they enjoy the process of assembling this hardware and then even running these benchmarks themselves and being able to say, OK, I can run the, I don’t know what it is, the latest Doom or some other high demanding graphics game, turn on all the settings and then be able to get this many. Frames per second, so users' care and then the developer’s care and the hardware manufacturer’s care and together all of this culture of really deeply caring about performance over the course of decades just means that games now can do incredible things and yet by comparison, most of the software we use for work is kind of sad in comparison.

00:17:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s been going on for so long that they’re now almost completely bifurcated engineering cultures. Games is C, C++ programming the GPU mostly, whereas a lot of our productivity software is now it’s like JavaScript, electron apps, Ruby back. And stuff like that. It is a kind of totally different way of thinking about engineering stuff. But notably, I think that divergence is starting to collapse because people are realizing the power of this more game style programming model, where you have an efficient language and you’re programming against the hardware more directly. And I think we’re starting to see more of this. I will be some examples of that.

00:18:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Rick Aaron’s work on MakePad comes to mind immediately, so this workshop hit switch for us sometime back, but there’s basically a code editor that uses rust and maybe web assembly, I’m not sure. It is built on the web stack, but he gets rid of the DOM, and he’s essentially just trying to render straight to GPUs. For example, when the code folds or unfolds, you can get some really nice smooth animations of that happening, which is not the sort of thing you’re used to in a programming editor.

Yeah, exactly. Now I will give ourselves ourselves here being folks making uh productivity tools a little bit of leeway on this, because one thing about games is that you do get this very much just blank canvas, build everything up from scratch.

So for example, like a great way to make a game is you write it in C, use something like SDL, which is essentially just lets you draw pixels and polygons onto the screen. It’s this and take input from the mouse and keyboard and game control or whatever else, and it’s just this very, very simple stack, and the interfaces are very simple, and productivity tools you really need to integrate extremely well to the platform you’re on if your web app, or for example, for us where we’re on iOS with Muse. You know, we need to integrate to drag and drop and various kinds of ways you can size the window and what happens with with the sharesheet, bringing things in, bringing things out, and copy paste, and all these sorts of things, and these are expected and desirable. You can do things like, I don’t know, change various settings on the device, including language and all sorts of other things, and that cascades down through the application. And I think all that’s good and necessary, because when you’re working with applications, you often have several side by side, you’re sharing data between them, this sort of thing, they need to play together. A game can just take over the screen completely, it’s got this just draw pixels or draw polygons thing. It does not need to interoperate with anything else. It can be a world into itself, and that’s just, I don’t wanna say it’s easier, but you can have this more streamlined thing. You don’t need to play what next with others quite the same way.

00:20:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s fair. Speaking of developing these apps, I’ve always felt like there was something here with games, like with movies where they do seem to be able to plan and execute on very complex projects successfully.

There’s kind of this meme in the world of typical called enterprise software development, where you have to do things super incrementally and, you know, and nothing is predictable.

You can’t estimate anything. Basically, who knows? This is kind of a meme in Silicon Valley engineering, whereas if you look at things like Movies or games, they say things like, yes, we’re going to invest $200 million in this, and it’s going to be a massive creative high risk enterprise and it’s going to involve many disciplines and we’re gonna ship it, it’s gonna be awesome. Done. And I feel like we could use a little bit of that attitude in the world of enterprise software as well.

00:21:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, now there are many famous. Big attempts at big projects. I think a recent one that comes to mind is this game Cyberpunk, which was hugely anticipated, as you said, like a huge breakthrough in terms of sort of the depth and richness of the game, or at least the game world that was promised, and in fact they did deliver something very impressive, but it was full of bugs and all kinds of problems. It didn’t work right on different platforms. There was lawsuits and You know, lots of broken marriages and fired people, and I think at some point they may have even written about it in our favorite financial newsletter money stuff about essentially like becoming securities fraud, that the game was bad because of all the money that was on the line for it.

Maybe that one was pretty large in scale just because of the amount of time and money that went into it. They’re similar, called boondoggles or just struggles.

Duke Newcom Forever was a really famous one on that from years back, or maybe a more indie one was this game, No Man’s Sky, where again, they set up expectation for it, which may be part of it is just the game industry is so incredibly good at hyping games that have not been released yet, which Find kind of crazy how emotionally invested the audience gets, and then if it doesn’t quite deliver, then there’s a lot of broken hearts, I guess. So it’s hard and they don’t always achieve it, but to your point, there’s also many, many cases of and probably more cases of really grand and ambitious things like for example the Mass Effect games or one really ambitious one that I played recently that I liked a lot is Horizon Zero Dawn.

And yeah, it’s just amazing the amount of stuff in it, the richness of the universe and the story and the characters and the voice acting, and all the skill trees you can traverse and the modeling on the creatures, and yeah, it’s really, really astonishing what goes with these games. And that’s the technology side of things. Do you feel there’s things we can learn on product or design side, kind of as any works has talked about a little bit?

00:23:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I feel like there’s some things that have been so discussed that they’re almost cliche. This is like gamifying stuff. But I do think there’s some stuff there around, for example, games have very carefully designed incremental onboarding processes where you get introduced to more and more techniques and skills and moves as you become more familiar with the antecedent ones.

00:23:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’ll link in the show notes to our podcast episode on onboarding with our colleague Julia, who led that up.

So Muse went through several attempted kinds of onboardings, and none of them quite clicked, and eventually we did take this game inspired one that essentially, well, there’s a few games that take this approach, but the one that was top of mind for me at the time was Untitled Goose Game, where it essentially gives you a to do list of stuff to mark off, and you don’t have to do it, but it gives you some direction while also giving you freedom, and that’s what the muse on boarding uses, and that was Yuli’s good work, and she talks about it in depth in this episode.

00:24:24 - Speaker 1: Nice, yeah, but I think perhaps the most interesting aspects of products are things you don’t jump to when you think of games.

You think of games, you think of like, you know, 3D immersive worlds and noises and stuff like that, too, that I would call out our end user programming and monetization.

Mm. These are both huge challenges for the world of computing and especially kind of indie enterprise type software, but I think games actually do very well, so there’s an incredibly rich ecosystem around games that allow it of end user programming of various forms like scripting, modding, skinning, different variations, but people are so motivated to create their own experiences in these game frameworks that if you give them anything at all to control their world, they’ll go wild on it.

00:25:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the modding thing is pretty impressive, including the whole new genres have been invented by people taking a game that you can kind of chop up and customize a little bit. Tower Defense, I think one was famously originally a mod of an existing game and is now its own dedicated genre.

00:25:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, another example there would be Counter-Strike, which is one of these games that I mentioned earlier, that’s now one of the biggest e-sport games in the world, and it was originally like some guy in the basement doing a half-Life mod, and he shared it with his friends on the internet, and then 20 years later it’s a huge deal, right?

00:25:43 - Speaker 2: And that’s some of the argument we make with end user programming is to say that if you create a smoother on-ramp for more people to be able to get in there and make smaller pieces of software, that some, not all, but some may blossom into something that maybe would never have existed before if that large hurdle to sort of full professional, quote unquote real programming was the only option.

00:26:08 - Speaker 1: And I do think this world shows.

The incredible importance of access and motivation versus the programming environment per se.

I think when computer people talk about end user programming, they talk about things like languages and IDEs and things like that, whereas my sense is that what really drives end user programming access is people really, really wanting to do something in that environment and having some ability, even if it’s honestly it’s a mess, to do something with it. And at least with that, you can get the types of ecosystems you see with games where it’s not like everyone is doing.

End user programming of their game environment. It’s more like there’s out of the tens of millions of people who are part of the community, maybe 10 are really into it, and they jump through all the hoops to figure out whatever the end user programming situation is for this game, and they’re able to create 5 mods, one of which becomes a huge deal its own whole game.

00:27:00 - Speaker 2: Funny little story on that as well.

So many folks who followed me in my work on Hiroku might know that I’ve written about end user programming and in particular that I was inspired by this book, A Small Matter of Programming, which is an academic work from the early 90s, that essentially made a lot of the arguments that we now repeat in this kind of what we’re seeking in the end user programming utopia, driven by an academic named Bonnie Nardi.

I actually Managed to get her on a video call some years back, and she was quite amused because, you know, she had written this book 20 years ago or something at the time, and I think it was even out of print and was vaguely surprised that anyone was still interested.

But as I asked her what she was doing now, and it turns out she actually went on to anthropological work within multiplayer online games. And the book, I think she had just written at the time is called My Life is Night elf priest. She spent several years doing anthropological studies of World of Warcraft, which at the time was sort of the biggest multiplayer online game and really one of the biggest gaming phenomenons ever again. I think this was kind of the mid 2000s, late 2000s, something like that. And when I asked her about end user programming, actually the first thing that came to mind for her was the modding that happens in the World of Warcraft world.

00:28:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s great that you mentioned World of Warcraft, because I think that’s a very important piece of the story around monetization and social. So with monetization, back in the before times, you would have boxes that had, you know, CDs in them and you would buy it once and that would be the game, and that would be the way that you got the game, and that would be the way that the publisher made money.

And then I think it was World of Warcraft, maybe there was someone else who pioneered the subscription model, which we know from Enterprise Sass is an incredibly powerful economic model and also great for the users in many ways.

And likewise, World of Warcraft, which had a subscription model, brought that to the world of games and like you said, it was a huge success, and there still existed a world of games you sort of bought once and there still are, but it’s sort of adding another layer or area of opportunity.

But then there’s been this sort of 3rd wave of games where it’s not even monetized necessarily by a subscription, it might even be free to play, but it’s monetized by the broader community, or some other way in the game, so this could be cosmetic items in the game, it could be.

Tournaments, it could be other things like that.

And there, it becomes important for the creator of the game to invest in basically building a really big community and enthusiasm around the game, and they find other ways to monetize it that aren’t initial purchases and that aren’t subscriptions. And this kind of leads into the social thing which we can talk about next, but to my mind, those are the most advanced forms of game communities right now because there’s so many things going on that are combining to build a very rich ecosystem.

00:29:45 - Speaker 2: I’m not mistaken, one of the pioneers on the free to play with purchase cosmetic items was Team Fortress.

Essentially, you could play it and you could buy stuff that I don’t think it made you stronger, just made you look cooler, get a cool hat for your guy.

That game’s made by Valve, and Valve is one of the most, definitely a, I don’t know if I’d call them a small giant at this point, they probably are just a giant, but they are an incredible creative powerhouse that has done many, many great games over the years. You mentioned Half-Life and There’s Steam Fortress and there’s Left for Dead and many others, and then, of course, they made Steam, and Steam has been a total revolution in kind of the economic model, particularly for indie developers. We’ve talked here multiple times before about sort of the Steam early access program and how we see folks that bought subscriptions early on from you and Today as being in some ways similar to Steam early access, you know, supporting what the app can be rather than what it is today. So Valve is a really great one to study and look at if you like to see an innovative company. And by the way, their employee handbook is absolutely fantastic. I’ll like that in the show notes as well.

00:30:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, classic for sure. And this type of monetization, by the way, that is not initial purchase and not subscription, for example, in a cosmetic items, it really surprised me. Like when I first heard that there were big game ecosystems funded by this, and honestly didn’t make sense. Like, why are people gonna spend a lot of money to like get a cool whatever nice skin or something. But in fact, it’s a really, really, really huge deal. The games are able to bring in tons of funding with this stuff. So it’s an example of where you really need to follow the empirical reality and see how things are actually working.

00:31:26 - Speaker 2: Now how do you fit that in with this category of games like thinking of maybe Candy Crush or, for example, Boga, which is a pretty big employer here in Berlin, actually our colleague Julia started her career there. And they tend to make these games that are free to play, they kind of draw you in. Oh, maybe Farmville was one of the classics on this and can easily turn into a maybe a slippery slope of spending, I don’t know, hundreds of bucks a month. You sort of like accelerate the game play with special tokens or something. That whole category I always feel vaguely uneasy about the model on that.

00:32:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I felt very uneasy about it, and I think it’s actually quite disjoint from this world of more professional games, which often have this attribute that for either the initial purchase price only or perhaps nothing, you can play at a professional level forever. Like you don’t need to buy anything to be able to play it, unlike the games where you buy like power-ups or coins to keep playing or whatever.

So I’m much more interested in these games that are more, maybe you call them skill-based. And they have communities of practice around that, versus games that are more, like, honestly kind of more like gambling oriented. So I can consider them quite differently.

It’s a shame because I think the Candy Crush style game taints the world of gaming on the surface, maybe it looks similar, but

00:32:44 - Speaker 2: yeah, to your mind really is not. And yeah, I think I agree with that as well.

00:32:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so speaking of communities, this brings us to the social aspect of the games, which to my mind is the most interesting part, and it’s kind of hard to explain what’s going on there on a podcast, but we can try.

00:33:00 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you mentioned Twitch earlier, and I do think that’s a great starting place because, well, it can be honestly mystifying, I think it was for me when I first encountered it, and seeing that there’s this whole giant platform that is almost exclusively watching other people play games. And again, maybe this comes back to the sports thing, but in many cases you’re not necessarily watching people who are great at playing games. Maybe it’s just someone you like that is playing games. I don’t know, it’s a very interesting phenomenon there.

00:33:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think the sports analogy with Twitch is a good place to start. So some groundwork here, Twitch is a streaming platform and was basically created for people to stream their gameplay, playing games on their computer. Now does a lot more stuff.

00:33:44 - Speaker 2: Fun bit of history there, if I’m not mistaken, Twitch was a pivot from Justin.tv.

00:33:48 - Speaker 1: It was, I was actually there. This was in the, what was it called, the YC startup school is when they rented out an auditorium in Palo Alto, and Justin Khan walked down onto the stage with his camera, which is like filming his entire life 24/7. And so I saw the very beginnings of that, and eventually that would pivot into Twitch, yeah.

00:34:06 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the startup idea was one guy filming his life around the clock with the idea that that might lead to others, and I think they ended up building a pretty robust. Video platform at the time, this might have even been before or roughly coincident with YouTube.

00:34:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so from those humble beginnings, you get this platform for streaming gameplay and then having a lot of social interaction around that you can think about this kind of the main window, which is the streamer, and then there’s a sidebar, which is people chatting and stuff. And it’s like your situation in Berlin where people are around the family room or around the convenience store watching a game and they’re sort of cheering on you, as well as watching the game, you’re watching your friends basically and seeing how they react and enjoying that. And yeah, I would say it’s mostly kind of pro players or strong players, but there’s also people who cast like normies or whatever, just for fun.

00:34:55 - Speaker 2: One of the ones that blew my mind is this guy CGP Gray that makes these educational YouTube videos that are pretty popular, I think.

He’s done some Twitch streaming and he mostly plays games like, I don’t even know the name of it, but you’re just a truck driver, and it’s a real-time sim of driving a truck.

And so it’s just him on like an open highway, you know, the simulator of a highway. And it’s precisely as boring as it sounds, that’s kind of part of the point is that it’s kind of this meditative experience, and then I think the reason in that case, it’s not that he’s a pro player. I don’t know, maybe he’s good at it, maybe you’re not, but it’s more that you like him and his personality, and it’s fun to kind of interact in this real-time way around this casual activity.

00:35:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so there’s Twitch now.

One of the things that’s really important here with the social ecosystem around the games is that they’re open source, let’s call it. So if you are broadcasting the NFL. You need to be the one broadcaster that’s licensed by the NFL and you gotta go to the one channel that’s displaying at the time.

And in fact, there’s only one caster, whereas in the world of games, it’s usually a much more distributed and open access. So a given tournament, for example, will be running, and anyone can jump in and cast the game and you get as much audience as you can. And you people can watch multiple casters at once. People can come and go. And so it’s this world in the same way that with open source software, people can kind of jump in or leave or and mix and match versus commercial software which is very closed and controlled. Typically in these game ecosystems, it’s very open access for the participants to come in and make a career as a caster or commentator or a pro player or what have you.

00:36:36 - Speaker 2: Do you feel the, maybe I’ve read something about there’s actually a legal gray area with the Twitch live streaming of games where essentially that’s copyrighted content and kind of in a way the game companies actually would have legal grounds to sue them to take that down, but of course it’s it’s incredible marketing for them.

I think it was something like Among Us, which is this indie game that blew up last year, we’ve played it at our. summits where you kind of hunt down this imposter on your ship, and apparently that was a game that didn’t do that well when it came out, but it blew up essentially because, you know, a big streamer started playing it.

Now everyone, including like US senators are are playing it in public places. But yeah, it’s this interesting thing where they just choose not to enforce copyright or the DMCA or whatever it is because it’s such great marketing for them.

00:37:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. My understanding is that companies, if they wanted to, can exert varying levels of control over this.

So they could say that I think they could say you can’t stream this, they could definitely say we’re going to control the officially sanctioned tournaments, and I think there are some games that especially for the latter are trying to do that, but you have this classic trade-off between Exerting that control and therefore extracting more of the consumer surplus out of the ecosystem into your company versus creating a vibrant open ecosystem where you generate a bunch more consumer surplus and even if you take a small percentage of it via say, cosmetic item sales, it ends up being a bigger deal for you.

And my intuition here is that the social dynamics around these games are so powerful when they’re firing on all cylinders that it’s really hard to compete with that.

00:38:20 - Speaker 2: Another thing that comes to mind for me here as we talk about tournaments and Twitch and so on is there are actually tools that have come out of the game world that I think are what I would call productivity tools. In fact, we may even use them in our work, so Discord is one that’s become quite huge, kind of group chat, that’s very, I mean, their, their logo is a game controller, right? You think of them as a slack competitor, in fact, they’re very similar in terms of what they provide, but their culture is all comes from Gamer world, right? That was what it was made for originally.

00:38:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Discord is actually one of the other really big pieces in the ecosystem, so it’s worth drilling in a little bit.

So you have Twitch, which is for live streaming, like the live broadcast. Typically you have recorded content on YouTube, and then for your communities, primarily those are in Discord these days. There’s some activity on Reddit, but Discord is the main one.

And again, these are very granular, focused, unique, quirky, weird things happen all over the internet. So for any given game, you typically have one Discord for each personality, like each pro player, each major caster, they have their own Discord where they have like basically have their own channels and doing a bunch of random stuff, their own weird community. And so when you become interested in the game, you might join one or two of these Discords corresponding to the casters or the pro players that you follow. And there you would hear about their upcoming games and their discussion of the games and various social commentary and stuff like that.

00:39:48 - Speaker 2: Hm, I wouldn’t have guessed you would have Discord servers around a person, that almost makes it sound more like Twitter or something, you’re like following someone whose career you want to follow along with, but then I suppose the point is now you can also talk to the other people that are there who are interested in that same thing.

00:40:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is a very important point. The job of these pro players and these casters, because it’s such a big deal, it’s going way beyond just doing that single job. I think of it more as their social entrepreneurs. They’re creating communities of content, of people, of forums, of ways of interacting that are something that people want to participate in. And in fact, It’s kind of cool as an entrepreneur to watch these people because they’re basically running their own business. They’re hiring full-time staff, they’re hiring video editors, tournament coordinators, content moderators, map scriptors, they’re hiring whole teams and turning into this whole social enterprise to create a place where people want to come in and enjoy themselves.

00:40:47 - Speaker 2: What are some examples of folks you think are doing this well?

00:40:51 - Speaker 1: I’ll give you one, it’s kind of a niche example, but there’s this guy T90 official, he’s one of the casters for Age of Empires too, he’s probably now the biggest caster, and I think it was actually largely because of his work as initially a very small time streamer and caster to help bring this game out of obscurity. Again, it’s a very old game and at one point it had quite a modest number of players, but because he worked so hard over the course of, I think it was like 5 years to build up this community of players, of audience members, of tournament organizers, and so on, it brought a lot of vitality to the game.

00:41:27 - Speaker 2: YouTube is one that’s interesting to me as well, because there seems to be a pretty substantial number of what I call game critics, which maybe is a little bit different category than what you’re talking about, but to me it does have a similar kind of sense of not just community building, but it’s something that’s around the games, it’s not the games themselves.

Right. Yeah, some critics are more just almost for fun. They do funny reviews, things like zero punctuation. or girlfriend reviews. The one that I love, who’s kind of a critic meets design school, is Mark Brown’s Game Maker’s Toolkit. I can highly recommend this series.

He does these sort of like 20 minute long documentaries, sort of mini documentaries where he will take a particular game or a set of games and break down essentially design elements within it.

And coming back to how this connects to muse and tools for thought and productivity tools, I’ve seen a number of things in there, including how you ramp up difficulty and how you make complex controls comprehensible, and so on that I find, if not directly applicable at a minimum inspiring for doing my own work, because, of course, games are this mix of Obviously they’re artistic, and they are entertainment, and they’re expressing something, but they also have these practical, lots of practical elements.

You have this complete world that needs to all hang together, and trolls have to work well, and there’s physics, and there’s how the player learns it and all these elements. So diving in on that game design, in many cases for games that I have never played and probably never will, but it’s still very interesting to watch a 20 minute breakdown with lots of footage from the game about exactly what the design choices they made were.

00:43:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and in general, I think learning socially and learning via video are extremely powerful, and this is now the main way that people are learning games. Like 20 years ago, when we were playing games as kids, I think you mostly just kind of figured it out by yourself, or maybe you had some friends who could give you some pointers or maybe there were magazines back then, I guess.

00:43:32 - Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, I remember playing Metroid.

Just one of these great but essentially defined a genre in many ways, this kind of discovery oriented game, and I think the only way that my friend and I got through it is I had this issue of it was probably Nintendo Power that essentially had maps.

You kind of look at it and figure out where you needed to go and that sort of thing, yeah.

I don’t know if that’s cause I was just a kid that I couldn’t figure out, or maybe I would have been able to figure out if I hadn’t, but yeah, the knowledge you could get out of something like a magazine or that one kid in the neighborhood who was a really good player, it was just like gold, yeah, the fact that I don’t know what it’s like for a kid playing nowadays or the solution to anything you could find by Googling.

00:44:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think it’s much more high powered now, because you have this high resolution video and you have a ton of it, and you have the social connectivity that makes you more incentivized, like you’re a better listener, you can find content that’s a better fit for your interest and your skill level. So people are learning how to play games much faster and much better. I haven’t seen a study on this, but I would guess.

Between that social video factor and the new matchmaking capabilities, which match you online to play players of an appropriate skill level, that people actually play the same games at a much, much, much higher level now than they used to.

That’s certainly my experience. Like if you look at even casual players today at some of these games, they’re actually quite good, because basically, they’ve been watching people on YouTube a lot.

And as you were alluding to, I think that’s something that’s going to bleed over from the world of games. I actually say mostly seriously that games in the world of gaming predicts a lot of trends. So it goes from kind of pro games to mainstream games to consumer software to software for startups to software for enterprises. And you’ve seen that with a lot of stuff. And so therefore I predict that. In 10 years, you know, we’re gonna be basically doing our enterprise work on Discord or something like it. Actually, I kind of believe that.

00:45:28 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think a lot of technologies, I wanna say maybe something like haptic feedback, for example, you know, tends to come first for games and gets adapted later on for more, call them practical uses.

That actually reminds me of a just small tangent. We took some inspiration from a game called Batman Arkham Asylum for one of the you can switch projects. I don’t know if you remember this, but this game has something called detective mode. This is essentially a button you push that essentially changes your vision. It kind of inverts everything and lets you see things like power lines and maybe hidden entrances and the game’s very good at making you basically feel like Batman. That’s the point of it. And so having this special mode is part of that, that’s visually interesting and distinctive. We use that for when you can switch projects where you could hit a key and it was kind of like a developer inspection mode, but it would invert all the colors and it was very inspired by that game.

Nice. Following up on your point about, basically people are better at games, I just finished reading an article about Tetris, which apparently, again, this is another one of these games that its code base hasn’t changed in decades, but people keep getting better at it. And partially this is because of being able to share this knowledge socially, and I can’t remember the exact details, but I think it started with no one thought you could get max score. Someone did it once, recorded it on VHS tape. That tape circulated. People could watch the tape and see how they did it. You start to have this analysis and then this analysis starts to reveal that things that were believed to be a good choice or a good strategy in the game, eventually they figure out actually are. Essentially they evolved the strategies and now these are all very standard. Someone new coming in can go watch a bunch of these YouTube videos and essentially it’s within reach of anyone that wants to put the work in to get a max score on Tetris, where once upon a time that was assumed to be unachievable. It’s a good example of how a whole, I’m not even sure what the word is for it, it’s not a field or an industry, just a community can advance the state of the art through simply sharing knowledge with each other.

00:47:34 - Speaker 1: Nice, it’s like the 4 minute mile phenomenon for speed runs and high scores.

00:47:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Well, in speed running, there’s a whole other door we could open, right? But yeah, without going too deep into it, just type speed run space, name of your favorite game, I don’t know, Super Mario Brothers or something in the YouTube and watch the a whole rich genre unfold in front of you. All right, so we got Discord, we got YouTube, we got Twitch. What are some other examples of social technologies that are coming out of games that perhaps we’ll see migrate their way to other parts of the software ecosystem?

00:48:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so those are all big foundational platforms for these communities. Let me give you an example of a smaller, more specific pattern that I see, which I think is illustrative of the type of thing that happens in these communities. So that is emojis in Twitch. Now, one view of emojis is that they’re kind of a goofy, unimportant thing. My view of emojis is that they’re actually incredibly expressive and personal and interesting.

00:48:37 - Speaker 2: I think you’ve said on the podcast before that notions embracing of signing an emoji to a page as kind of the visual indicator for you, that was the killer feature that tipped you over from Google Docs.

00:48:50 - Speaker 1: It was a big deal, yeah, I really like my emojis.

And Twitch actually takes it to the next level, where again it’s open access, it’s open source.

So the deal is as a Twitch streamer, you get some amount of emoji spaces for your channel, maybe it’s 15 spaces, and for each of these spaces you come up with a little keyword that corresponds to the emoji, and you upload your little graphic for that emoji. And then typically the way that it works is that anyone can use some subset of the emojis, and then people who are basically patrons of the channel at increasing levels can use some of the rare and elite emojis on that channel. And this thing is fascinating because, again, these are all kind of unique flowers of ecosystems and So you get their own like language and memes all encapsulated into these, into these tiny little emojis. And so you have whole discussions that happen over these emojis that are unique to the channel. And it’s actually a fairly big motivation to be able to access the rare and elite emojis for a given channel. But the most interesting thing to my mind is that these aren’t silos, they’re networks of communities and. And while the emojis are specific to a given streamer, it might be prefixed by like Mark Smiley, and then whatever my unique smiley emoji is, shows up. You can use that emoji if you have access to it anywhere on the platform. So what happens is, say you get a channel around a specific game and it’s for streamer A, but streamer B is also A member of that game community, and his folks come into the channel and they start using streamer B’s emojis. And that way the emojis and therefore the streamer spreads virally. So you see, oh yeah, that’s a cool emoji. So you hover over it and it says, oh, streamer B, and then you go follow them on to their stream. And so it’s incredibly like networked, social, dynamic, fun, very Vibrant thing. And then economically, like this is a whole economy. There are like full time Twitch emoji artists, that’s all they do. And they accept commissions, and you have the entry level Twitch artists and the like elite Twitch artists who charge a lot for their emojis. You know, it’s the whole thing. So, again, I think it’s an example of something that seems very small, but it’s actually very big socially and economically.

00:51:01 - Speaker 2: ties together a lot of things. There’s the unique economic model, as you’ve said, there’s the social technology side of things and some of these things that are only possible in software sort of internet era media, some of the virality and of course emojis themselves are very internet or computer age form of communication and so all of those together make for something. Well, let’s say it’s the sort of thing that would have been hard to imagine. Even 20 years ago, let alone further back than that, but this is how internet culture is evolving and something that, as you said at the beginning, games are on the forefront.

00:51:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I do think we’re gonna see it transition over into the world of enterprise and productivity software. Like you have a notion, there’s a fixed set of emojis that you can use and Slack, there’s emojis and they’re a pretty big part of the product. You can even customize some of your emoji set for your enterprise, right? But again, it’s very siloed and you don’t really have a lot of control as a user. I think you need to be like an administrator it’s like upload emojis or whatever. I can imagine a world, in fact, I expect a world where eventually products like Notion or Slack or whatever supersedes them, adopt more of this model of open networked emojis.

00:52:14 - Speaker 2: Nice. Well, before we wrap up, I bet folks would like to know what’s an example of your favorite games.

00:52:21 - Speaker 1: I got 2. So the first I’ll give is in the classic boxed genre, and that’s missed. I still have very fond memories of playing this game, and I think for a long time it was the best selling video game ever for quite a while, and actually I replayed it not too long ago, some years ago, and it’s still great, so got to give that a spot. And then for the more modern pro style or social style game, I would go with Age of Empires 2, which is a total classic and what I’m still a big fan of.

00:52:50 - Speaker 2: And if I’m not mistaken, a nice little bit of background on missed, I think it was built in Hypercard originally.

00:52:57 - Speaker 2: Oh wow, yeah, it ties us back to the end user programming, right, again, something that may be a specific game and a very influential game for a lot of people, and even maybe kind of a genre that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for this kind of more accessible programming tool.

00:53:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I feel like that also might be an example of driving consumer hardware, because if I remember correctly, that was one of the first things that used a CD because it was kind of unique in having all this graphics content, and so you needed at least a CD to fit it. You couldn’t put it on floppy disk, which is how you used to get games, and so people were like, well, I better get a C drive cause I want to be able to play MT.

00:53:33 - Speaker 2: That’s right, that’s right, yeah, I remember that now.

For me, I could name so many, going back to my childhood, arcade games like Strider, for a while, I was into Angban, which is one of these roguelikes that, you know, sucks up a crazy amount of time, but in more recent times, where I’ve really been enjoying a lot of these indie games, I think I mentioned Baba as you earlier, the doll name is a favorite here, Papers Please by Lucas Pope.

So this is a game where you are working as a border agent, and your job is to check people’s passports, and that’s the whole game. Yeah, they present their documentation, you look it over, and you stamp it either proved or denied. And to me it’s just a great example of how games are such a unique medium for artistic expression, so in the same way that a film or a book can transport you to this other world, show you a new perspective, maybe that you had not encountered before, but something where you are making choices actively, which obviously is what games are about, can actually show you something different. You can express something different artistically and without spoiling too much, the nature of this game is you start out just kind of like stamping these passports and deciding who to let through the border, it seems very prosaic and kind of boring, but very quickly it turns into something where you’re approached by members of resistance or someone comes through and says, please, my mother is dying. And yes, my passport expired two days ago, but can’t you just let me through so I can go see her and someone who’s smuggling, you know, some kind of contraband, but they offer to slip you a little money and as it turns out, you also have to pay the bills for your family and your child needs medicine and so on, and pretty soon you get all these complex moral choices. That are very powerful, and you can see how you get, depending on the choices you made, you, for example, can easily go down this path of corruption, but you see how you got there through active choices you were making. So it’s a really, really impressive indie game, and also just a lot of fun. And in general, I can recommend everything by Lucas Pope, his newer one is Return of the Oberin, and he just has a unique style and every game expresses some unique take on the world. Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at museAppHQ or via email, hello and museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Mark, we’ve been having fun with some collaborative games in our recent team summits. I think I’ve got a new one for next time, so it be interesting to dive into the game with the team with everything we talked about here on our minds.

00:56:09 - Speaker 1: Nice, I look forward to that, Adam.

00:56:11 - Speaker 2: right, till next time, Mark. See you.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I can really empathize with it because even in my own sort of maths degree, I really struggled with terminology and notation. And I think a big problem in kind of maths education generally is that there’s a lot of focus on notation and terminology, and you kind of miss the forest for the trees.

00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined today by my colleague Mark McGranaghan.

00:00:39 - Speaker 2: Hey, Adam, and our guest Tamir Abdul of Kazul.

00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Hey guys, how’s it going?

00:00:44 - Speaker 2: And tamer, I understand you’re enjoying London Springs so far.

00:00:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually went outdoors for the first time in, I don’t know, 6 months or something. Yeah, I I’d forgotten just how nice it is to sit on the grass in the sun, just chatting with friends about nothing in particular. Yeah, it was amazing. What an experience.

00:01:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the ability to go out and enjoy, we’ve had sort of triple threat here in my household because we’ve had one, the lockdown, which has been pretty severe, of course, for the last 6 months or so.

2, we had a pretty serious winter. In fact, it was snowing today, and 3, I’ve got a, a young child at home, so all of those things mean that I basically barely leave the house.

Happily I do have a dog, so I have to go out for walks on that. If it wasn’t for that, I would never see the outside, I think. Yeah, that’s pretty rough. Well, Tamara, maybe you can tell our audience a little bit about your background, including your podcast and the product you’re working on now.

00:01:41 - Speaker 1: Awesome. So I’m Taymor. I’m one of the co-founders of a company called Causal. We’re building a spreadsheet just for number crunching. So anything involving numbers, we want causal to be the way to do that. On the side, I have a podcast with my brother where we just catch up once a week and chat about whatever’s on our mind. And my background is mostly in maths, so I studied maths at university, and specialized in statistics and machine learning and that kind of stuff.

00:02:06 - Speaker 2: And what sorts of things do people use your product for? Is this a total replacement for a spreadsheet or just a subset of that?

00:02:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s really just a subset of that. We can sort of think of spreadsheets as something like causal, our products, plus something like Air Table. So Air Table is kind of taking Over all the non-numerical stuff you might do in a spreadsheet. So making lists of things, managing processes, you know, internal tools and that kind of stuff. And we want causal to be used for anything involving numbers. So any time you need to sort of write formulas that do calculations or visualize data, that kind of stuff is really what causal is about.

00:02:42 - Speaker 2: And I certainly think that one of the main uses for spreadsheets for me in my business life, I guess, as well as helping others, is this modeling, often financial modeling, where you’re just trying to understand, cause of course, money is the lifeblood of a business, but how you earn money because that proves you’re providing value to people, as well as just not running out the money in the bank so that your business doesn’t die, and spreadsheets as a what if tool to understand. Both what might happen in the future, but in many cases it’s just the viability of your business model.

One example I remember is I had a friend who was starting a retro kind of 1980s arcade, and they really wanted to run the games off of quarters, because that gives that authentic 80s feel, and then I’m saying, well, OK, but if you look at the inflation since the 1980s, a quarter isn’t what it used to be. This is a US dollar quarter, of course. So we actually modeled all that out and plugged in a bunch of what if values and basically figured out that under no reasonable, we’re just taking guesstimates for how many games an hour someone’s gonna play, how long they’re going to spend in the arcade, that sort of thing, but basically nothing we modeled showed that it would be viable to stay in business with all the costs. And eventually did settle on a model which was more like a flat rate, you pay $10 or $12 or something when you come in the front door, which ends up both feeling maybe more fair, more fun for the patrons, but also is actually viable. And I think it’s maybe an example of where having ranges, which we were talking about a little bit earlier, where necessarily know what exactly each patron is going to spend on drinks or quarters they’re going to put in or how many games they’re going to play an hour or whatever, but you can plug in reasonable ranges and from that you can infer maybe it ends up being like a Drake’s equation kind of thing in that scenario where you can figure out what’s viable and what isn’t.

00:04:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this idea of ranges is really powerful.

And I sort of, personally, whenever I’m giving an estimate for something, I get really anxious that my estimate is gonna be wrong. And it just gives me a lot of comfort in providing a range, because then I, I know that it’s probably right, rather than sort of precisely wrong.

And so I find that even when just sort of communicating day to day, if someone asks me for an estimate of something, if I give a single number, then for the next 5 minutes, I’ll be like, thinking through it in my head of like, Oh, maybe that was wrong. Whereas if I I had a range, like, yeah, I think it’s between 5 and 10, then I sort of have the peace of mind of knowing that I haven’t sort of been too inaccurate, I guess.

00:05:06 - Speaker 2: And I think that’s also a way to train yourself to give estimates. I’ve run into this with a lot of folks who, exactly as you said, don’t feel comfortable giving an estimate because they feel like, well, I don’t know, but you can always kind of start with, OK, you know, can you guess the price of product X in a supermarket, or can you Guess the weight of this and maybe you can’t do that or you feel like you don’t, but you can come up with a number that is so low that it’s clearly outside the bottom of the range. You come up with another number that’s clearly so high it’s outside of the top of the range. All right, so now you’re working on it. Now let’s narrow this window in.

00:05:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite tactics is a strong word, but one of my favorite things is, if I’m like talking to a friend, and, yeah, exactly like you described, I think if you ask someone to try and quantify something that they’re not used to quantifying, then they’ll probably just say, Oh, I don’t know, I, I could possibly put a number on that. But then if you ask them, Well, is it more than 10? Is it less than 500, you know, you can actually get to a pretty good range. And it is actually helpful to know that range, rather than just put your hands up and say that it’s unquantifiable.

00:06:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, maybe that brings us to our topic for today, which is thinking and probabilities, and I thought it was really interesting that you mentioned this as kind of a founding idea for you and then maybe in some ways you moved away from it in the product or maybe just in the marketing. But tell us what it means to think in probabilities.

00:06:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So the sort of origin story for causal, it kind of comes from some work I did as a data scientist in a previous job.

I was working for a property tech company where, essentially, the company was placing big bets on houses. And so, in typical fashion, we had a bunch of spreadsheet financial models that would forecast the company’s cash flow, and some pretty big decisions were made on the back of these models, like how many deals can we do every month, how many people can we hire, so on.

And one of the really important things for this company was understanding the risk that we were taking on in each deal. If we were placing a big bet on a house, the house might be worth a lot more than what we thought it’d be worth, or it might be worth a lot less. And actually understanding how those would affect our bottom line was really important. And, you know, in spreadsheets, Google Sheets, in this instance, we had to do a bunch of work around. and hacks to try and get at this idea of essentially a probability distribution for how much a house would be worth. And there’s various kinds of ways to try and approximate that in a spreadsheet. But essentially, trying to sort of get at this idea of probability added so much complexity to these spreadsheets that they became unmaintainable. No one really understood how they worked. It was very hard to actually iterate on them. And so that was kind of my first exposure to this problem of how do you crunch numbers when some of them are uncertain? How do you build probabilistic models to try and understand the world? And our starting point for causal, and, and sort of our original mission was kind of to bring probability to the masses, to build a tool that makes it so easy to work with probability and uncertainty and so on, that it becomes sort of the standard way that people sort of think numerically. Does that kind of make sense?

00:07:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, to me it leads into the question of how much is it a tools gap that the average intelligent educated, let’s say knowledge worker that has a reason to want to be able to think in probabilities or model uncertainty numerically, how much is it that the tools make it tricky like you described with spreadsheets, and how much is it more a matter of It’s very hard for humans to think this way, even intelligent, educated people, it doesn’t come naturally unless you’ve studied math or made this your career or your passion in life that you’ve sort of struggled to apply this approach.

00:08:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a really good question and it’s hard to know which side leads to which. An example that I often think of is this idea of having a line of best fit for some data set. It’s quite common, even sort of newspapers, magazines, to see like a 2D chart with a bunch of data points, and there’s some kind of straight line drawn through these data points to kind of extrapolate some kind of trend and tell some kind of story. And if we think about what does that actually mean? I think most people, if they look at a graph like that, they will understand immediately what the graph is trying to say. The graph will typically be trying to say that as this one thing increases, this other thing increases as well, or as this one thing increases, this other thing decreases, without a particularly maths-y background, you can read a chart like that and you understand what’s going on. I think the really cool thing about the line of best fits that is now just sort of super common and everyone gets it.

Is that very few people, unless you’ve sort of studied maths or maybe computer science, very few people will be able to tell you how you’d arrive in that line of best fit.

And the best part is, they don’t need to be able to tell you that. They don’t need to know that behind the scenes, you have to invert a matrix in order to, like, figure out this line or anything like that. And I think in that sense, just visualizing something in the right way is kind of a powerful tool to unlock intuition that we already had.

And so, in the example of line of best fit, I, I can describe to you some effects, like, As you get closer to the center of London, property prices go up. You know, I can describe that to you. You understand what that means in your head. And if I showed that to you on a chart, you’d immediately kind of get what I’m trying to communicate. And so, I think the probability stuff might be similar, where so far, we haven’t had the line of best fit moment for probability. We haven’t found the sort of killer tool or killer sort of visualization that anyone can sort of look at and understand.

I do think probability is just really unintuitive in general as well. But again, it’s hard to say whether it’s unintuitive because we haven’t had some really basic tools like just being able to visualize it, or whether it’s sort of inherently unintuitive for humans.

So I studied a lot of probability and statistics in my degree. And so, after graduating, I kind of felt like I had a good handle on this stuff. But it was after actually facing a lot of these problems involving how do you account for uncertainty in models and things like that. I kind of realized that studying the theory of probability and, you know, being able to prove certain theorems and things like that is actually almost a completely separate task from having the right intuition about these things. And so, I think there’s a really common example that Naseem Taleb is a big fan of, which is that you wouldn’t want to cross a river that is 4 ft deep on average. And, yeah, obviously, if it’s 4 ft deep on average, it might be 8 ft deep in one particular part and you might drown.

And so I think he often talks about the dangers of working with averages.

I think another kind of Illustrative example, sort of to do with a buffet. If you imagine, you know, you’re putting together a buffet and there’s 10 dishes in the buffet, and each dish takes on average, about an hour to prepare, and the whole buffet is ready once all 10 dishes are ready. So each dish has an average time of 1 hour. And if you were trying to think about, you know, what is the average time for the whole buffet to be ready, it’s tempting to think that.

00:11:50 - Speaker 2: Each dish is ready in an hour on average, and so the whole buffet will be ready in 1 hour on average, but the two, the two answers you would jump to to there is either 10 hours because it’s sequential, or 1 hour because it’s all parallel.

00:11:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So actually, even in the parallel case, it turns out that the average time for the buffet to be ready is actually a lot more than 1 hour and.

This is sort of like the most basic example of where average outcomes don’t always come from sort of average inputs, essentially.

But I think even after studying statistics at a university level, that would be the kind of thing that I wouldn’t immediately spot.

And now having sort of spent a lot of time thinking about this and kind of building a product around this concept of probability. Any time I hear the word average, an alarm bell basically goes off in my head as to like, OK, what are like the sort of 3 or 4 different traps I can fall into when thinking about this problem through the lens of averages.

00:12:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree. I tend to think there are two big hurdles people have to overcome.

The first is recognizing that you’re in a probabilistic situation, which is almost all the time that you can’t use a point estimate, you can’t use an average, you need to understand the distributions and the samplings.

And the second is, what is the correct formula basically to use or how exactly do you mathematically navigate this probabilistic situation? And in my experience, most people miss the first step. They go to a point estimate and then it’s already over before it started, you’re not even wrong, right? You’re in flat land. Your answer has the wrong shape. And so I think there’s a lot of value in having tools that Help you navigate the mathematics once you’re over the first step, but perhaps even more so, tools, stories, experiences, histories that help people be more likely to raise the probabilistic flag, like warning, we’re entering probabilistic territory, that alarm bell should be going off almost all the time. And so I’m very interested in things that will help people get more acclimated to that idea.

00:13:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I think one sort of common-ish thing people do with spreadsheets is that, you know, if you do want to understand the uncertainty of whatever you’re trying to model, you know, some people might have 3 different scenarios, like a best case scenario and a worst case scenario, and like a sort of average case scenario. Yeah. And then you’d kind of run your whole model for the best case and the worst case and average case. And then you have these sort of 3 estimates for like, OK, this is what my outcomes could be. So some people do make an effort to do that in some settings.

And it’s a step in the right direction, but actually, under the hood, the maths doesn’t really work out there, right? You know, back to our buffet, we have these 10 dishes, which we can prepare in parallel, so we can do them all at the same time. If we said that, OK, on average, each dish takes 1 hour to prepare, and in the worst case, it takes an hour and a half, and in the best case, it takes half an hour.

If you were then trying to figure out what is the total time for the buffet, you might be able to get some kind of range based on sort of assuming they all hit the best case scenario, and that would be like the best case scenario for the buffet, and then assuming they all hit the worst case scenario, and that would be the worst case scenario for the buffet. But the math doesn’t quite work out there. And it’s mostly because our definition for best case and worst case changes from the start to the finish.

So, by best case scenario for a single dish, in our heads, we probably don’t mean the absolute best case scenario. We probably mean that like, this is, uh, 95% of the time it’ll be slower than this or quicker than this or whatever. And same for the worst case, you know, the worst case scenario is the dish doesn’t get ready for 3 years or something, right? And so you don’t actually think about the best case. And the worst case, you are thinking about this sort of plausible range. But the issue is when you start to think about this plausible range, and you’re doing this lots of times, so we’re doing this 10 times in this case, because we have 10 dishes, the equivalent plausible range for the total buffet. It is not when every dish hits the bottom of the range or every dish hits the top of the range, because every dish hitting the top of the range or the bottom of the range is actually extremely unlikely. It’s like very implausible.

00:15:42 - Speaker 2: I think that scenario you just described is how engineers estimate their time in a sprint, which is that every single thing they’re going to implement is going to be the best possible scenario.

00:15:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think this is why it’s so hard to plan projects, because if you just do it on the basis of averages, then, you know, there’s a decent chance at least one of your tasks is not going to be delivered on time.

And if you do want to get some kind of bounds on, like, best case and worst case scenario, if you have like 10 tasks or whatever, you can’t actually just take the best case for each and sum them up, or take the worst case for each and sum them up. And so the only sort of rigorous way to do this is by running lots and lots of simulations for possible scenarios that could happen. And so, you know, in one simulation of the buffet, you know, 3 dishes might take less than an hour, and 7 dishes might take more than 1 hour or something. And another simulation, they could all take less than an hour, and so on. And if you ran a few 1000 simulations, you could get an idea of, like, you know, 95% of the time, how long does the buffet take. And so, actually running these simulations is actually the only general and rigorous way to understand the range of possible outcomes for your buffet. Does that kind of make sense?

00:16:51 - Speaker 2: And what you’re talking about here is a Monte Carlo simulation, is that right?

00:16:55 - Speaker 1: Exactly, yeah, yeah. So in maths, this would be called a Monte Carlo simulation.

And actually, you know, running thousands of Monte Carlo simulations for a basic calculation that you might be doing, it’s usually pretty tricky.

The only way to really do it is to write, you know, a script that can loop through some calculation 10,000 times and then show you, you know, 95% of the time your buffet takes between this time and this time. And a big part of what we’re trying to do with causal is sort of abstract away all of this stuff around simulation and probability distributions, and let people just say, Hey, you know, each of my dishes takes between 45 and 90 minutes to cook. And now, can you just tell me, like, what is the equivalent range for the total buffet?

00:17:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can see how simulation does cover it, but there is something fun about the Monte Carlo name a little bit, and when I first learned about that, I don’t, unlike, I think both of you, I don’t have any kind of solid educational background in mathematics, but I later learned about it when I was kind of digging into the data science world of things, particularly with working with the R programming language, and they had essentially some exercises that involved doing these simulations, some very visual ones that I quite liked where essentially Allowed you, they said, OK, you can calculate the area of a circle with the formula, or you can run a simulation where you essentially, you know, draw a circle on the wall and then throw darts that land in random XY locations and if you do that 1000 times and count how many darts are on the inside of the circle and how many on the outside of the circle, you can close in on the value of pi, essentially, which I found somehow very amusing and fun way of going about things.

00:18:35 - Speaker 1: I love that example. Yeah, I think simulation is a surprisingly powerful tool where if you can reframe any problem as almost like a probability question where you can run simulations, it’s surprisingly generally applicable.

And so in the example you gave, you’re sort of reframing the question of the area of the circle in terms of.

The probability of a dart landing in the circle versus outside the circle, and as soon as you reframe it in terms of probabilities, then you can just like run a bunch of simulations, and it takes a while, but you don’t have to be particularly smart about it.

I think most complex problems in maths, they’re often intractable. You know, it’s very hard to express them as a clean equation that you have to solve.

And even if you can express it as a clean equation, there’s often no general way to solve this equation. And so reframing things in terms of like, how can we just do this really dumb thing a million times to get like a really good approximation to the answer is surprisingly generally applicable.

00:19:28 - Speaker 3: Yeah, very powerful technique and especially useful for situations where you have multiple steps or branches, even just a few of those, they can be very simple to describe in human terms, if this then that some chance and so forth, but Once you have any complexity and situation, it often becomes impossible to get a so-called closed form solution, which is what you were alluding to where you have basically some formula you can write down, you plug in numbers and you get the result. Mathematicians always like such closed form solutions to the point where I think initially they kind of pooh poohed the Monte Carlo world, but I think now it’s shown its power and folks are more open to the numerical approaches.

The study of probability is so interesting because it pops up in so many domains. Once you know to be looking for probabilistic situations, you see them everywhere.

I can give two examples from my experience. The first was in college, I worked on this thing called RoboCup. RoboCup is where you have toy robotic dogs play soccer. And these are dogs that can do basic seeing, and then you use video processing algorithms to extract information and you program the dogs to play soccer autonomously on this sort of toy soccer field. And anyways, one of the big advantages that our team had was the ability for the dogs to locate themselves on the field, which is, as you can imagine, is a sort of fundamental thing for programming dogs to play soccer.

And the reason that this was so hard was because these are like really bad cameras basically so you’re getting really choppy visual information. Really the only way to deal with that is probabilistically, because the data that’s coming in is so noisy, you can’t do anything on it if this and that basis. You basically have to say, OK, given all of these observations I’m making about the different landmarks I know about on the field, what is probabilistically the most likely location for me to be in? And furthermore, what is my sort of probability cloud of where I plausibly am on the field, and if I have enough certainty about this probability cloud, then I can undertake certain actions like kick the ball towards the goal and so on.

And then to give a very different example in the world of engineering management, I think it’s very fundamental to understand that engineering is a risky endeavor, especially when you’re like developing new products. This is the area where I think a lot of people think too deterministically. So one example that I like to give is, imagine you have a multi-step software development process you need to do A and B and C, and this is actually kind of similar to the buffet example. Each one takes an engineer, one unit of work, and an engineer can do 1 unit of work at any given time. Now you might think you should just assign one engineer to A, one engineer to B, and one engineer C. and in a totally deterministic world, that works perfectly. The gears, they all mesh everything turns in unison, it’s perfect, but you have to recognize that there’s inherent variability in how long these tasks take. And so what can happen is if you’re running the entire team at So-called maximum capacity, then if anyone experiences a task that’s slightly harder than you anticipated, you basically grind the gears for the entire thing because A is holding up B is holding up C, and then you go from this world of everyone is fully optimally working to everyone is basically stuck waiting for someone else and everything is kind of ground. up. And that’s where this idea of slack comes from, where if you’re in a situation where you have uncertainty about how long things are going to take and you have dependencies, counterintuitively, the correct thing to do is to spend some of your time twiddling your thumbs, basically. Because if you try to be doing stuff all the time, you’re inevitably going to be getting in the situation where you’re grinding the gears out.

00:22:50 - Speaker 2: And I think there by Slack you’re referring to the concept of slack, not the product, and perhaps there is a book that was influential to me, recommended by one of our mutual colleagues at Hiroku, that’s essentially a management book that’s titled Slack and makes that very argument. It’s sort of a. theory thing a little bit and there’s some things about creativity as well, but ultimately, even if you just want to think of everyone on the team as being a worker automaton that needs to provide end units of productivity, it actually turns out you have a more efficient system when there’s space in the system, there’s slack in the system.

00:23:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and along these lines for people who enjoy thinking in probabilistic terms, I would also highly recommend principles of product development flow. This is basically a mathematical cutheoretic treatment of product development, and when I first heard that, I’m like, how can you possibly write interesting equations about product development, but if you just approach it with this lens of probability or alternatively risk, all kinds of interesting things fall out. So for folks who have a mathematical inclination, I suggest that book.

00:23:54 - Speaker 2: Hm. Yeah, I guess a risk and probability the same thing in what we’re talking about here? It seems like one is sort of just like the inverse of the other, at least in my kind of layperson’s understanding, but I don’t know if that’s correct.

00:24:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s my intuition. So you could think of risk in engineering delivery time means that there’s a probability distribution.

And in fact, it’s probably long-tailed, where there’s some chance it goes on time, there’s, uh, frankly small chance it happens before you expect it to happen. And then there’s the real possibility it takes 23 times as long, it never gets done, right? That’s what I mean by risk and Similarly, there’s probability distribution around how customers are likely to value or not a given feature, and that’s another thing that’s important to consider. So you can’t say customers are definitely like that. And in fact, there’s some chance they like it, some chance they don’t like it, some chance they really like it.

And in the same way that you need to correctly consider distributions when you’re planning your buffet preparation, you need to consider these distributions when you’re doing product development.

00:24:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think just to add to that, when I think about sort of risk and probability and kind of how are these concepts related, I think risk also kind of captures, I guess, kind of the magnitude of what could result from something. So, for example, if you knew that there was a 1% chance that you’d die by driving a car, yeah, that would be a much higher risk than if there was a 20% chance of getting wet, you know, from walking outside. So I think risk also sort of captures the actual impact of some low probability event. Right.

00:25:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s some good discussion of this, the 80,000 hours group which I follow, they spend a lot of time talking about these kind of tail risk events, pandemics, which they were big on before we had one that captured the Western consciousness.

But also things like meteor strikes and other events that obviously things that are climate related and in many cases it is an acknowledgement of, yeah, the chance of this happening, the probability of this happening is small, but maybe this is sort of the expected value of something is the likelihood of it happening times the result.

And so if the result is this huge, huge event like a species ending extinction event, even a very small chance of it is something that maybe it’s worth investing some resources protecting against.

00:26:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is an area where even if you do take that first jump of thinking probabilistically, you can still fall short, in particular, if the cases that end up mattering in the expected value calculation are outside of the intuitive probable range.

So you can think of things like meteor strikes and nuclear war and so on, but one that’s very familiar to us, Adam, is earthquakes in.

So the chance of a very serious earthquake in California is on the order of 1 every 100 years.

So if you just take that, you know, it’s basically outside the 95% confidence interval. So we could say, if we weren’t being too careful that basically we’re not going to have an earthquake, don’t worry about it. But in fact, the expected damage from such an earthquake is enormous. So therefore, any year the EV on earthquakes in California is actually non-trivial and therefore you should do some amount of preparation.

00:26:49 - Speaker 2: That also highlights another challenge or fallacy or just a way that this whole thing is nonintuitive for the way that humans think, which is you often hear folks in California speaking in terms of quote unquote, we’re due for a big one because you hear that we talk about it that way, we should. one every 100 years and that actually masks or does not correctly capture the probability that we’re trying to express. And so people convert that to more of a cyclical time thing like that we expect the sun to rise once a day.

In fact, that is not at all what it is. So working on casual and working with your users and customers who of course are again smart people educated, need to think in terms of probabilities or risks for their work and yet maybe don’t have the same mathematics background that both of you have.

I mean, there’s countless, I don’t know, well known fallacies, I don’t know, expecting a string of coin flips to have fewer.

Long runs of heads and tails, for example, than it does in actuality.

But what are some of the things where either one you see folks have their intuition not matching what reality is, and then two, what are some things you found in the product or maybe it’s even more of a almost like a marketing thing, and explaining thing to help folks bridge that gap without necessarily getting the mathematics degree.

00:28:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think we’ve had a ton of learnings on the more sort of marketing and positioning side of this kind of product.

In the very early days, you know, our mission was to really focus on this probability stuff. And so when we, you know, on our landing page, we would literally describe causal as a probabilistic modeling tool. That means something to us.

But I think what we didn’t realize is that for people without a maths background, words like probabilistic and words like Monte Carlo simulation, They’re just quite scary. I, I initially found this a little bit frustrating because, you know, the term probabilistic model to me, it means like a very specific thing and it was really hard to try and describe this concept to folks with less mathematical backgrounds.

But actually, I can really empathize with it because even in my own sort of maths degree. I really struggled with terminology and notation and things like that.

And I think a big problem in kind of maths education generally is that there’s a lot of focus on notation and terminology, and you kind of miss the forest for the trees.

And so, you know, even when I was in my 2nd or 3rd year of university. Anytime I would see a capital sigma, you know, the big sort of sum symbol, which is basically everywhere in every branch of maths, you’re going to be summing things up.

Any time I’d see like the sum of like some expression, I’d immediately think, oh man, this is so hard. This looks really complicated. There’s all these symbols going on. And so I’ve definitely felt that pain of. Being intimidated by terminology and notation. And I think that was part of the problem initially when we were using words like probabilistic, when we were using words like Monte Carlo, you know, it took me sort of, yeah, I’d say, in my 4th year of my maths degree, I didn’t have notation anxiety anymore. But it took me a long time to get over that. And I think a lot of people who didn’t like maths in school or feel like they were bad at maths, I think a lot of it just comes down to notation. You know, once you’re introduced to algebra, you start seeing all these symbols like X and Y and so on. And it takes a while to get comfortable with that. And it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking, Oh man, I find the notation confusing. Therefore, I am bad at maths. Therefore, you know, I shouldn’t tell you this thing.

But I think getting past the language, getting past the notation is actually a big hurdle. And so, for causal specifically, you know, it took us a few months to figure this out, but we stopped using words like probabilistic. We stopped. Using words like Monte Carlo. I think generally, people understand the idea of uncertainty. And so, in terms of how we position, I guess, the probabilistic aspect of causal, is that we usually describe it in terms of, you know, hey, if you’re uncertain about a particular number, so writing a single number, you can say, Hey, I think it’s between 3 and 5, or I think it’s between 5 and 10. And people, you know, pretty intuitively understand ranges. They can probably come up with a range for. Any quantity in their day to day life that they might want to model. And saying, like, I think something is between 5 and 10 doesn’t require any sort of technical knowledge, it’s sort of pure intuition.

And so, in causal, people just need to apply their intuition at the point where they can do it well. So at the point where they can estimate a range for a particular quantity, where the intuition breaks down is, you know, you now have this model with a bunch of formulas, a bunch of calculations, where you’re taking all of these 5 to 10s and 10 to 20s. and so on, and combining them in some weird way to get a final result, that’s where intuition really breaks down. It’s actually very hard to punch those numbers in your head.

And that’s where Corle handles it for you. It runs, you know, 10,000 simulations, and then just shows you the sort of 10 to 20 results, rather than you having to worry about that side of things. So I think, yeah, lots of learnings on the sort of positioning and kind of the marketing side of things.

In terms of actually getting people to think more probabilistically. I think most of the folks that use causal previously used spreadsheets and if you’ve had to build a financial model in the spreadsheets, you’re probably somewhat familiar with the idea of best case and worst case scenarios, but I think most people just don’t do them because it’s just very fitly, it requires a bunch of formulas and things like that. And so.

Actually, getting people to start thinking in terms of ranges has been pretty easy because people have wanted to do that anyway. It’s just so much of a pain to set that up in a spreadsheet that they haven’t ended up doing it. And so being able to just write in an expression, like 5 to 10 in causal comes very naturally to people, and they do tend to do that quite a lot because causal handles the complexity of all of that.

00:32:16 - Speaker 2: In terms of the output, they see, you mentioned just seeing, you put in a range or a series of ranges, and you get out a single range, but there’s also maybe you found ways to represent that visually in plots or Yeah, so representing it visually is trickier.

00:32:28 - Speaker 1: I mean, so cos all under the hood, you know, running all these simulations and so.

It has a lot more information than just the range of your possible outcome. It also has the sort of precise distribution of your possible outcome.

And you know, the range might be 5 to 10, but it might be more likely to be closer to 10 than closer to 5, and so on, where it might have this sort of bimodal thing where it’s really likely to be close to 5 or 10, but not likely to be anywhere in the middle.

And so there’s lots of different distribution shapes that might underlie a range, like 5 to 10.

We found that.

Most folks don’t have too much familiarity with reading probability distribution charts. It is a featuring causal.

You can actually see it, like a bell curve if it happens to be like that, or other equivalent charts.

Most people aren’t too familiar with those, and so most people don’t end up using them.

What people are fairly familiar with is sort of like fan charts. So if you’re projecting something over time, you know, you might have like a single line or something. And then instead of a single line, you might have like a sort of fanning out range where there’s kind of visible upper bound to this range and invisible lower bound. And most people really intuitively understand what a fan chart looks like. And so those are really common, but unfortunately, it does kind of hide the underlying distribution, and we haven’t yet figured out a really intuitive way to show people the actual distribution in a way that they’ll understand.

00:33:44 - Speaker 3: I do feel like those fan charts, which now I know the name for, that’s useful, are perhaps the closest thing we have to the line through a dots in terms of comprehensibility and universality.

I’ve seen those a lot in the financial domain where you have a balance or a bankroll or similar investment balance and you run a 100 simulations, and you can kind of get a sense of the probability distribution if you have the right amount of lines in your fan chart because you see that there’s kind of more lines in the middle and fewer lines. And the scraggly edges, not perfect, but it’s pretty intuitive. I also like those because they do show the dynamism. So if you’re looking at a bankroll, for example, you see that some of these lines, they really dip close to zero and some go way up but then come back down and a lot of them just kind of chunk along, so you get some sense for the randomness.

00:34:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’ve had to put a lot of thought into how much detail we want to show in these kinds of visualizations.

So when it comes to fan charts, for example, causal does have all 10,000 of their simulations, and we could draw on, you know, each of those 10,000, maybe with like a sort of 1% opacity or something. And so then you can actually get an idea of the distribution.

But it just adds a lot more complexity to the visualization. And so we’ve had to sort of try and find the balance between sort of complexity and comprehensibility, where if we try and be super rigorous and show every single simulation on the charts, chances are most people will look at it, get a bit confused, and not be able to make any sense of it. Whereas if we kind of show the sort of 90% range or the 95% range, it’s much more understandable. And at least People will have an idea of a range of possible outcomes, and then maybe if they want, they can kind of double click and zoom into the distribution itself. But it is very challenging to actually visually represent uncertainty. There’s a few research departments and a few universities that are doing a lot of work into figuring out the best ways to visually represent uncertainty. But, yeah, it’s all about the balance between sort of complexity and comprehensibility.

00:35:35 - Speaker 3: Now we’ve talked mostly about modeling in the sense of going forward, so you were about to begin preparation of the buffet, what should you expect in terms of the completion times approximately one hour from now. I also think there’s this very interesting world of probability, which is basically going backwards. You’ve observed that everything completed in 1 hour and 15 minutes. What does that mean about the underlying tendency for us to complete individual sections of the buffet? And there are all kinds of other examples that we could talk about. I’m curious if you see those sort of use cases in causal or if you have other thoughts on that space.

00:36:07 - Speaker 1: We definitely see less of those use cases. The one time it does come up is if you have a bunch of historical data about a particular quantity, maybe you have a bunch of historical exchange rates between the dollar and US start or something. If you then want to kind of use that exchange rate to project something forwards, it is helpful to kind of look at, you know, what has been the distribution of this exchange rate historically.

And then let’s just assume it’ll probably have a similar distribution going forwards. And so, in that way, instead of just sort of plucking a range out of thin air of like, oh, I think the exchange rates between 0.9 and 0.99 or something like that, you can actually infer the distribution from historical data.

And that is a feature that we do have, where if you have a A bunch of historical data for something, we can sort of try and fit an empirical probability distribution, is what it would technically be called, onto that, so that you don’t have to put your finger in the air and come up with a range. We see a lot less of that, and the more useful thing does seem to be being able to apply ranges based on your own assumptions rather than figuring out ranges or distributions from historical data.

00:37:09 - Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe we can just talk about some examples from our own experience of this type of probability.

One example that I think is really cool, and this one’s due to Sammo Beria, I hope I’m pronouncing his name correctly. This is Sammo of Bismarck analytics, we can link to him in the show notes, but he’s made this point that with how we’ve historically thought about archaeological discoveries, our timelines only go backwards.

So say for example, we’d find the first cave painting and we date it to 5000 years ago, and we say cave painting has been around for 5000 years. And then we find another cave painting, and it’s 8000 years old, and then we say, I guess cave painting has been around for 8000 years. Now, the first observation is that if you take this naive approach, our timelines are only ever going to go backwards, cause anytime we discover a newer one, OK, we’ve known about that, anytime we discover an older one, our timelines for when humans were doing certain things are going backwards. And perhaps Then the correct way to think about this probabilistically would be to say that when we discover the 8000 year old cave painting, there’s some underlying distribution of cave paintings, some of which are probably older than 8000 years old. So therefore, the correct estimate is probably older than that. And if we were in fact doing that correctly, we wouldn’t always be getting older. We would be kind of getting more and more refined around the true date on either side. It’s just one example of how if you don’t think about things in careful probabilistic terms, especially when you’re doing this sort of backwards projection onto the underlying distribution, you can very easily make mistakes.

00:38:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a really interesting example. I think this actually came up during some of the stats courses that I did at the university. We did a course on Bayesian inference, so using kind of Bayesian theory of probability.

And I think this is one of the few areas where people have actually been applying sort of Bayesian ideas of probability in practice in real life. And I think we actually had a bunch of examples in our sort of lecture notes specifically around archaeological digs. And if you dig up something that’s 50 layers of, I don’t know, sand deep or something, and you think that that’s dated from a certain period, how should you actually think about your new best estimate for how long we’ve been doing the cave paintings? And so there’s a bunch of maths that can actually sort of help you with that. And from my understanding, people are using that maths in archaeological stuff.

Nice. I’m curious as to how you guys personally think about how much to trust numbers, how much to trust data and statistics. I found that for myself, I’m just very skeptical of any numbers that anyone tries to throw at me. And I’m, I’m usually much more convinced by a theory or an argument that I find highly plausible than by someone trying to convince me of something. Using data, where do you guys fall that spectrum and like, in what context do you trust numbers that people throw at you and in what context do you not?

00:39:56 - Speaker 3: Oh man, so this gets us into the conversation of what you should believe when you read in the newspaper according to a study.

And so for me that’s very little, basically nothing. And so I have a lot of trust in statistics and numbers and experiments, but you gotta consider the whole ecosystem.

And when you’re looking, for example, at the ecosystem of publicly described science, there are many, many steps where Where the data gets systematically corrupted. And so what you’re likely to read at the end is just not that useful.

So just to give some examples here, when a newspaper reports on a scientific study, they’re very likely to report incorrectly because of probabilistic illiteracy.

And then, even among the studies that they choose to report on that, they’re sampling from the universe of studies, and they might have biases or reasons to only. Report on a subset of them.

And then furthermore, the stuff that gets published, that is systematically corrupted because only certain types of results they get published.

And then in terms of the data that goes into both the published and unpublished studies, there’s a lot of fraud and other issues with it. And so by the time you get out to the end, it’s just not that useful.

And if you want to have a chance, you basically need to do a meta review or a meta study. I forget what the exact term is, maybe you know. But Basically, where you round up all of the studies that have ever existed, both published and unpublished, and try to synthesize all the data to say something useful. So because these universes tend to be so complex and because of all the principal agent problems involved, I tend not to trust them that much. But when I have my hand on a specific experiment that I understand end to end, and ideally was pre-registered, then I’m quite likely to trust it.

00:41:29 - Speaker 2: And pre-registered here means they didn’t extract a meaning or find meaning post hoc once they looked at the data, but rather that they were using it to test or falsify or prove or falsify a particular hypothesis.

00:41:43 - Speaker 3: Right, so this is one of the areas where historically scientific publishing has gone very wrong. So say you have a new drug, for example, or you have 100 new drugs.

And you privately conduct tests on 1 hundreds of the drugs using the standard 95% confidence interval. Well, you would expect that 5 of those will falsely return, even if all the drugs are placebos, they do nothing. You would expect that 5 of those placebos return, given you’re 95% confident intervals by definition, that they are helpful. And so if you have the opportunity to publish or not. Publish whatever studies you want, you can just publish those 5 and say, hey, look, well, we have 5 drugs that are magic. And in fact, you’re attempting to fool the public by randomness. Whereas if you pre-register all 100 studies, then you can’t do that. People can see that, you know, wait, 95% of the stuff that you think might be useful is actually not useful. So therefore, you’re just not a very good development company.

00:42:33 - Speaker 2: That makes me think of a related concept in terms of like, yeah, 95% sort of effectiveness, which is essentially medical tests. And that there’s a pretty strong argument against sort of testing. You would think that the best thing to do, whether you’re talking about a disease or early cancer screening or anything like that is just test as much and as often as possible.

But the challenge with a lot of these things is that you get this asymmetry between the false positives and the false negatives, which is essentially if the test is even 99% accurate. But the disease only appears in 1 out of every 50,000 people. The number of people who get the false positive, that is to say, saying that they have the disease when they don’t, vastly outweighs the people that actually get correct positives on it, and then they spend a bunch of time with stressed out people.

Thinking they have a terrible disease and in fact they want the doctors to make the judgment call if there’s some reason, some symptom we see here that makes us want to do the test rather than kind of a proactive test, which I thought was very interesting and again to me was a surprising result. I think coming back to that.

Intuitively, you don’t think of a test that has, for example, 99% effectiveness as being something that would produce such kind of skewedly wrong or just misleading results, but without knowing that other number, which what’s the incidence of this particular disease in the population that you’re running the test against, you actually don’t know what the balance of false positives to true positives is.

For me, the question of whether I’m convinced by data. Certainly, I think for me it does come down to putting numbers on things, quantifying things, brings a I don’t know if rigor is quite the right word, but perhaps a concreteness.

When you say something is really, really big versus saying it is 50 m tall, those two have very different qualities to it, and I feel when people either do bring numbers in either from their own volition or because they’re forced to by scientific practices or something like that. That that actually sharpens the thinking.

Now that doesn’t mean that numbers are a magic wand and by quantifying things and turning that into data sets, whether it’s a spreadsheet or something else or the new favorite magic wand which is data science, that just because you bring those things in that now your results are unimpeachable, but rather that I in general that is gonna probably do better than more kind of broad abstract kind of reasoning by analogy or something like that.

But yeah, I guess, certainly the specific case marked names of studies as reported on in the news is something to be very suspect of, but looking at a data set and using that to draw some conclusions, I think can be a very powerful way to understand the world. Tim or I might also turn the question back to you on product development, and say to what degree, being a, certainly a very numerically literate person, to what degree do you use some kind of data or quantification in Making product decisions or business decisions, or do you really guide that, especially maybe in the early days, where just the end in terms of number of users, number of customers, total time elapsed, just isn’t big enough, you need to just kind of go with building what’s in your heart, as I said earlier, or following your product intuition and not getting hung up on trying to make sense out of a small data set.

00:46:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think, ironically, we very much err on the side of our intuition and conviction on things. I think, particularly when it comes to big product things, like, you’re just not going to find the answers in any data set. And so one a really big thing that we kind of grappled with from day one was, we’re building this tool for working with numbers, it’s very general, and so on.

What should the UI for this thing actually be? And, you know, we were always kind of aware that, well, maybe we could make it look a bit like a spreadsheet, cause that’ll be more familiar to people, and so on. But, you know, maybe we want to move people away from that and get them to stop thinking in those terms and maybe don’t, don’t do that. We actually kind of had our own proprietary UI until about 4 months ago.

And maybe about 6 months ago, we decided, actually, you know what, a lot of people are having trouble getting onboarded. You know, no one is explicitly telling us that, look, give me a spreadsheet interface. No one was explicitly telling us that, but You know, there was a lot of like friction. There were a lot of things which just quite weren’t working out. And so we had to, you know, in the absence of data, we had to ourselves, come up with an analytical model of the world of like, hey, you know, we’re having these problems because our interface is too hard to use for new people. It’s too confusing. And so we should build the spreadsheet. And I can’t imagine, you know, maybe we could have run some survey asking people, like, hey, you know, would you prefer a spreadsheet interface or another interface? Like, you know, but again, I think like designing a survey in a way that I would actually trust it would be really tricky, and I don’t know how much I would trust the results of that kind of survey. So I think big product stuff generally does not come from any kind of data. It’s more around our own intuitions. I’m very happy to trust data. To sort of tune an existing thing that we have created. I think data is very good for tuning something that you’ve come up with. Uh, so I think like, an onboarding flow is an example of this. So, you know, yeah, I think you guys had like a previous episode just about onboarding or something like that in the early days of the podcast. Onboarding is a big challenge for causal, and we have like a guided onboarding. Once you make an account, we then show, like, little dots on different parts of the UI saying, oh, click here, now type this thing in, now press enter, and so on to guide people through kind of the main flows. Uh, of the product. And that’s the kind of thing where we can come up with the structure of like, OK, we think these are the five steps, and this is what we should tell people. And then we can look at the data to kind of optimize this structure that we’ve come up with. And so we can see that, OK, you know, loads of people are falling off after step 3, so there’s probably a problem there, we should probably change that. Data wouldn’t tell us what the steps should be. We have to come up with that structure ourselves. And then once you have the structure, then data is good for refining it and tuning it. And so that’s really how I see data as like, you know, it’s up to us and our own conviction to build the main structure, and then we can use data to kind of refine it a little bit.

00:48:42 - Speaker 2: That reminds me of something a product manager from Pinterest told me that they did there, at least at the time, which was to use split tests automatically just to check that there isn’t a regression in whatever their core metrics are, which might include, you know, monetary things, people converting to purchase or Whatever was there, but also things having to do with, yeah, basically check their core metrics and make sure this exciting new feature they rolled out didn’t just cause something important to tank. It’s kind of a safety check, so it’s almost more of a regression test rather than something that was intended to decide product direction.

00:49:20 - Speaker 3: This conversation reminds me of a couple of things. One is so-called AA tests, where you test your AB testing framework and analysis by making the two sides of the test exactly the same.

And so that’s a good way to see if you are likely to fool yourself by randomness, because if you come back with the result that A is bigger than A, well, something’s probably wrong with your probabilistic reasoning.

When you mentioned the idea of a spreadsheet interface, that’s something you see in a lot of tools for thought and productivity apps, for example, notion and air table will have this idea of a sort of spreadsheet like thing that you can put in.

It reminds me of the phenomenon of carsonization, which is the tendency of crustaceans to evolve into crab-like things. Spreadsheets are sort of the crab of the productivity tool world. It’s like everyone kind of wants to be a crab slash spreadsheet, depending on where you are.

00:50:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s really funny. We had similar things. So one of our sort of investors slash advisors is a chap who’s kind of been in the financial modeling game for a very long time. He sort of has a business selling Excel financial model templates. And so he’s tried every sort of number crunching tool under the sun, really. And early on, you know, he basically predicts this, and he, he sort of told us that, look, every tool that I’ve ever seen would be created for this, eventually ends up looking like a spreadsheet. That’s all I’m saying, you know, do whatever you want with that information. Um, but he called it about a year and a half ago.

00:50:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, sometimes the process of being a product creator, especially when you’re trying to do something truly novel, is to try all your weird and exciting ideas, and unfortunately, most of them will probably turn out to be not effective, and then you realize why it is that the boring standard thing that everyone uses is boring and standard, is because it really works. But hopefully you find those few weird ideas that, in fact, are breakthrough and can make a difference in the world.

00:51:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we almost sort of had to figure out from first principles that a 2D grid is a good way of displaying two dimensional data.

00:51:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I like a little bit that approach of throwing out assumptions and throwing out kind of a sense of, well we’re doing it this way because that’s the way we’ve always done it. I think it’s very easy to build products that way to say, OK, well, obviously you start with the login page because everyone has a login page and then you have a page that’s like this and a screen that’s like this. And you’re just going based on assumptions of following established patterns and throwing those out and saying, OK, now what are we trying to accomplish here and what if we design something truly new? And more often than not, you do end up back at those established patterns because they’re good for a reason or they work well for a reason, but I feel like it’s a truer and more pure way to arrive at those, kind of building it up yourself, as opposed to kind of just imitating without knowing the underlying reasons.

00:52:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely.

00:52:06 - Speaker 3: This is actually reminding me of the importance to my mind of studying combinatorics and probability as a predecessor to statistics. So a lot of folks I see these days, they study statistics and so they just get the formulas for like how do you do a two-tailed tea test or whatever. And I don’t have the underlying intuition, whereas I think it’s much more useful to have the underlying intuition of especially combinatorics, which is the study of counting and therefore gives you probability. So yeah, if folks are interested in this space, I would suggest starting with how to count things in combinatorics.

00:52:39 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ or via email, hello at museApp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. And Tamar, I’m glad you’re building a tool for thinking and probabilities because I think we all need it.

00:52:59 - Speaker 1: Cool, thanks a lot for having me. This has been a lot of fun.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I believe, which is that a product that comes with the manual implies it has depth, that it fits together with being a professional tool, where probably the things you want to do with it are things that require skill and take time to learn, even separately from the tool itself. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague, Mark McGranaghan. And Mark, how are things today?

00:00:42 - Speaker 2: Doing all right, thanks, Adam. How are you?

00:00:44 - Speaker 1: Doing well, we just had uh the spring weather break here in Berlin, so even though we’re still on home lockdown, uh, going out to enjoy the flowers in bloom and trees, uh, in starting to turn green and the kids out, uh, families out and taking my dog out for a walk. It’s uh it’s a nice break after the the long winter. So I’m very excited about our topic today, and that is manuals. So we just finished, uh, really should say you and Leonard just finished the Muse interface handbook. Put a link to that in the show notes. And I think this is a, a lovely piece of work that sort of shows the command vocabulary gestures that you can, uh, you can use with the Muse application.

But the path that we took to get here is maybe an interesting one. I want to tell that story a little bit. When the team started talking about whether we needed some kind of manual or handbook or user’s guide or something like that, it really caused me to go and start reflecting a lot on what I thought makes a good manual.

One experience for me that really stuck in my mind was this experience of getting a rocket espresso machine. Do you know these devices?

00:01:49 - Speaker 2: I think I’ve maybe seen it at your place or I know of it, yeah.

00:01:53 - Speaker 1: I think I got this machine around the same time as I also got some other kitchen appliances. Maybe there was like um like a slow cooker, rice cooker thing, and there was a stark contrast where the, the slow cooker came with this.

Thin black and white tiny print thing that was like in 8 languages and I had to hunt through to find the English and even then it was. I don’t know, pages of boilerplate about, you know, plugging it into the right socket and don’t take it to the bathtub with you and so on, and just getting to the information I wanted, which was how to use the device to cook things, uh, was quite difficult.

The rocket machine by comparison, has this lovely, uh, manual that’s sort of this a full color, it’s bound and the right on the cover it says something along the lines of how to use your machine and and make beautiful coffee. And describing what I want to accomplish as a user and it’s, it’s a quite rich technical manual that covers a lot of, has a lot of depth and certainly I think it has the safety warnings and whatever in the back somewhere, but it really was this inspiring thing that gave me enthusiasm and excitement to uh get using this product versus such a stark contrast to the basically the very sad, uh, manuals that come with uh other kinds of kitchen appliances. So that was, that was a powerful experience for me. What for you Mark makes a good manual?

00:03:16 - Speaker 2: Well, I think your example points to a few things. One is the sense of like impute that you get from actually first seeing the manual.

You infer the quality of the product and the experience that you should expect from what you see in the manual. So it’s a very dull, poorly designed, uninspired manual. You might expect the same thing in the product reasonably, whereas if it’s a very, you know, well done, well designed, uh, well thought out, um, piece of work, you might again expect the same thing on the product side.

Two products that I have some experience with here. One is go by example, um, which is.

On the edge of being a manual, it’s kind of a website, you know, this is the site for learning the Go programming language, uh, but the idea there was to have a very example-based approach to learning. Uh, the Go programming language instead of a very abstract word-based approach. So here you go to the site, it’s basically a series of, of lightly annotated example programs so you can see just exactly how to do it. It’s a show don’t tell situation, which I think is by the way similar to the espresso machine manual you mentioned. You can imagine trying to work an espresso machine just on the basis of text. It’s like pull this lever, then depress that knob and put more water in here. It’s like what does that even mean, right? It’s so much better when you can actually see it illustrated.

00:04:30 - Speaker 1: So some examples of prior art, I think we collected we’re thinking about this, um, included uh things that we’ve worked on, of course. Go by example is a good one. for me, the, um, the early Hiroku documentation, which I think was just a little static website that had, I don’t know, a dozen pages on it, each one of which was describing how to do. Particular thing with the platform, very simple, but easy to easy to navigate.

Nowadays, uh, the product has this huge dev center that is, you know, fits the sort of complexity and and quantity of capabilities that exists in that product.

So sometimes maybe the the earlier products because they can have such simple manuals, uh, that can be that can be more fun.

When I was looking for prior art on, um, manuals, maybe more currently, particularly around the iOS and particularly iPad apps, I looked at Ulysses, a working copy has a pretty nice one that’s sort of embedded in the, like the, the settings menu, but you can also go to his website. Uh, Goodotes has some interesting documentation with some nice kind of animations and and visuals.

Um, and then Procreate was a really interesting one because they have this really beautifully made, um, so Procreates a sort of a professional art application. And fitting to that product, they have this really beautifully made, I think you can get it as an iBook, but it almost unfolds more like a presentation or something, something like that. So I think it fits the the visual style and the the beauty that you would expect from an art product.

00:05:56 - Speaker 2: Uh, another example that that I had thought about was the stripe API docs. And again, there’s this very example based practical approach where they give you, they literally give you commands that if you paste into your terminal, will execute completely the uh API endpoint in question. And for me, that’s always a huge thing with documentation. What is the specific series of actions that I need to undertake to get the result that I want, like enumerate step.

00:06:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, instructions I think are a underrated thing. Format is huge, and I, I think that almost always you want multiple formats.

So for example, yeah, the Unix man pages for those that aren’t familiar, it’s basically the Unix is a command line driven environment so you type type commands. And you can type man, short for manual space, a command that you are interested in, and it will basically show you the documentation for that. So it’s very in line in, in, it’s right in the environment where you want it.

Um, and I think some of the folks some of the examples we went to look at, um, had a version of that as well. So I think the, you know, the, the working copy users' guide, you can look at it in the app, but you can also download it as a PDF, but you can also go view it on the web.

00:07:09 - Speaker 2: One other format that was actually an inspiration for me here was YouTube.

YouTube has become incredibly important for uh transmitting tacit knowledge on the web.

There’s actually an article we can link to this, uh, in the show notes, um, but video allows you to Um, understand all the implicit and subtle, you know, physical movements, um, you know, mental models people have in their head when they’re telling you how to do something. So for things like, you know, cooking or woodworking or playing a game, these are quite hard to explain like in text, even with diagrams, um, and having the, the video there is super helpful and um I think we’re just gonna see more and more uh things moving to video and YouTube because it’s such a powerful medium.

00:07:49 - Speaker 1: How did people figure out how to do like DIY things around the house before YouTube existed? I mean, YouTube didn’t exist for a lot of my life, and sometime I figured it, I figured it out, but I honestly can’t remember what I did back then.

Yeah, it’s an incredible repository for, as you said, tacit knowledge and things that certainly things that cannot be conveyed well in the abstract. Nature of just uh written prose.

One thing we talked about when we were thinking about the manual as well is the, let’s call it the bottom up versus the top down. And I think the uh the bottom up was more what you see when you view an individual man page, when you Google something and see a stack overflow, you’re looking for a solution to some specific problem in the moment, and you don’t want to see all the documentation, you just want your specific nugget of information.

But I think another, uh, maybe underappreciated role that manuals can serve, they or they serve for me is they provide this overview.

So we spent a good bit of time trying to figure out what the right table of contents would be, because there your information hierarchy or your taxonomy of how you’re sorting things out. Uh, offers a chance to give an overview of what is this product and what does it do.

So I imagine someone, for example, might go to the Muse handbook and look at that and get a sense for what actually is this thing, what are the, what, what are its capabilities in a very practical nuts and bolts sense.

00:09:16 - Speaker 2: This actually points to two things that I think are really important in manuals. One is if the manual is well done, it, it provides that comprehensive. Uh, enumeration of things that the tool can do.

So you can go to the manual and you can read it and then you know all the things, which sounds simple or obvious, but so many tools because there’s so many entry points to the functionality, you know, menus, hot keys, shortcuts, you kind of don’t know if you actually know everything yet and you’re always being surprised like, oh, this is a new, you know, button I didn’t know about before. Um, and I really like the feeling of I now.

You know, I know Kung Fu, you know, like from the Matrix, uh, but the, the other thing is this idea of reference versus narrative docs which I think is similar to what you were describing. Uh, so references like there’s a, a specific. Thing you want to do, you know, I want to move a card, but that that often needs to be situated in a broader workflow, a broader, you know, use case motivation, and so often you see documentation complement that uh the the reference with a more vertical slice and narrative of here’s how you do a X in this tool and it kind of touches many of the specific things that would be covered in more detail in the reference docs.

Those two types of documentation are potentially especially important with Muse, because yes, there’s a bunch of specific things that you need to know how to do, but there’s also this question of what is Muse for, which isn’t maybe as obvious as other tools like a word processor, like you know you’re going to go write a document in a word processor, whereas Muse is kind of a new type of tool, a new category, so we have some explaining to do on that front.

00:10:43 - Speaker 1: Now, do you think the handbook as it is right now accomplishes that? I felt like the even calling it the interface handbook, we really were more focused on the the nuts and bolts part rather than the broad, like what is this thing and what is it good for? Right?

00:10:56 - Speaker 2: I think right now it’s mostly reference and I could see it um expanding to include more narrative or having a complimentary source of documentation later that covers that.

00:11:06 - Speaker 1: One other memory from my past, uh.

Experience working on manuals is how it feeds into product design.

I think you, you brought this up when we were first brain storing the the manual. I think of it as almost like a hygiene or it brings a certain coherence when you’re forced, when you write down, even the table of contents can do that. Uh, one experience I had was working on the Hiroku add-on system, and I ended up essentially writing the manual for that in tandem with designing the way that the technical design for how the system worked.

And I found it incredibly helpful for sorting through these pretty abstract concepts and the the real unlocker was writing a glossary.

So I was trying to take down, I’m like, OK, I’m using all these special words throughout the throughout this documentation.

What does each one mean? And I actually found that taking inventory in this way.

I realized that I would use one word to mean two different things in two different places or other places. I had several words that referred to the same thing or basically the same thing, and so I forced myself to pare down to a set, a fixed set of con uh concepts, the primitives that really built up the design, and then went through and made sure I only ever used that one term. And that was, that was a much harder job than it it sounded. Um, but I felt like the, the end result was something simpler and more comprehensible.

00:12:29 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally agree. I think it’s a super valuable process, especially to get the, the glossary, the words right, and relatedly this idea of mental model, often when you’re having trouble writing clean docs or explaining a product to someone, it’s because you don’t have or it doesn’t exist a good mental model for how the product works. Um, and once you can write a really crisp glossary and a really crisp table of contents indicates that um there’s a, there’s a clean set of gears, you know, behind the clock face that, that, um, dictates how this product works.

00:13:00 - Speaker 1: Mental model is, is huge, particularly when you’re doing something that’s either highly technical product or a highly sophisticated power tool. Or just something that’s relatively new, that doesn’t have a clear, you get the mental model somewhat for free if you go to implement something well known in existing a to do list a word processor, when you’re doing something a little bit category breaking and a little bit new, like what we’re trying to do with Muse, that’s a much we need to develop that mental model fresh.

00:13:29 - Speaker 2: Then also more tactically, just when you go to, you know, basically test out every single thing that you’ve put in the manual, you might be surprised how many weird things you find. Like we found a couple of bugs in the course of doing the muse manual where it kind of basically works, but there was a little hesitation or you need to like do it twice, and that’s the sort of thing that you might be able to gloss over in the course of casual queueing. But once you’re, you know, filming in this case yourself, it becomes very obvious when there’s any sort of glitch.

00:13:55 - Speaker 1: Well, the filming side I’m super interested to hear about because you did some, uh, did some very interesting work on that. Uh, but before we jump forward to that, maybe we could start at the beginning of the story. Uh, I always like to hear war stories about how, uh, product features or product, uh, capabilities get developed. So maybe we can tell the story a little bit of, uh, why this handbook came to be.

00:14:18 - Speaker 2: Well, I feel like we’ve had this challenge for a while of um explaining news to our new users. And we’ve been thinking about and trying different things, you know, we’ve tried some onboarding material, which is sort of some example content with some instructions woven in. We’ve tried giving people advice over email, um. We’ve, we experimented and we thought about different, you know, more standard documentation formats like uh text with some diagrams, but we were having trouble really getting through to people basically, um, and the, the genesis of the handbook was maybe video is a especially good format for what we’re trying to show with Muse.

00:14:57 - Speaker 1: I’d previously grappled a bit with the how do you show an application, a tablet application that has sophisticated gestures and uses a stylist, more from, I guess like a marketing perspective. So for example, we have a video up on our website right now, which is just a screen recording. You can’t see the hands, and it’s a little, it works OK, but it’s a little confusing because how is the person doing these things that are happening.

And with a, for example, recording a desktop operating system, you have the mouse, and there’s other kinds of things built into screen recording software to help, for example, when you type keys, they can put basically cues, put annotations for what’s being typed. So it’s much easier to see that. Uh, and then I think with like phone applications, for example, you just tend to have a big button and it’s kind of clear when you tap on the button and that’s sort of it.

But for our chromeless interface where there’s not a lot of buttons and many of the um ways you do things are these sophisticated gestures, that’s that’s tough to show. So I had been down that road a little bit and went around and kind of looked at the way that lots of uh different uh companies that do have these kinds of applications do it. And there’s no real gold standard. Um, but it definitely showing the hands seems to be crucial. So we, we felt like, but, but that’s tough because we had done some video recordings in the past, both for the Muse design article, uh, as well as the capstone manuscript had some really bad low quality videos and I just knew that it was a, a pretty big production effort to to do that well. And so I kind of had the idea of, well, maybe we should stick to still images, and I experimented a bit with let’s do like a 123 that shows the steps of the gesture a little bit uh inspired actually by the rocket manual, which also has things like this where it’s, OK, turn the handle to the right and then push this button and then fill up this reservoir and they they would sort of imply motion or imply um the passage of time. So I did a version of that with uh what we called the shadow hands, which were basically um outlines of hands. Apple does this, of course, beautifully in some of their uh marketing stuff, uh, where you see some hands, but they’re sort of dark and uh maybe maybe slightly uh transparent, and the idea is you don’t want people to be focusing on the hands exactly, but you do need to see what the hands are, are doing, but you don’t want them to fully obscure the screen or the content. Um, so I experimented with that a little bit in a static format. Um, but I think that pretty quickly led to like, OK, this is OK, but we really just need to see the motion. But the idea of trying to do full motion animation using, I don’t know what after effects or something, that seemed like a huge production and sort of out of reach for our, you know, small team that has a lot we should be working on.

00:17:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we tried basically every way we could to avoid having to film live action hands. It’s quite hard, but none of them were quite satisfactory, and I think there are at least two reasons. Um, one is there’s this feeling you get when you use muse, like when you touch a card and it moves instant instantly or when you start pinching and it fluidly zooms in, that is really important, but it’s really hard to explain without just seeing it. I mean I really wanted to capture that. I felt like the only way to do it was video.

00:18:12 - Speaker 1: So yeah, you, you were inspired to do that and you dived in with your uh with your AV gear, which I know you’d already been kind of experimenting with in the past, partially at at I Switch, but also you’ve done a little bit with your uh virtual piano lessons here now and so I think you, you’d had interest in some of that stuff anyway, so you already had some of the gear. What, what was the final set up or what is your um hand recording studio now look like?

00:18:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so there are 3 pieces that are key. I found.

One is something to hold the camera. So we found that the top down shot is best. We tried other angles like looking at it from the side, looking at it like kind of over the shoulder, but when you have uh multiple hands and the screen, the most consistent way we found was just to shoot it overhead and I just use an iPhone camera works quite well. And so you have a tripod that’s on the floor and then it kind of booms over and there’s this little device that clamps onto the camera and it’s attached to this kind of ball and socket joint so you can move it around and so that altogether gives you the video recording.

Uh, the second really important piece is the lights, and so I use a couple uh commercial lights that are usually used by streamers for lighting themselves, but in this case I use it for lighting the hands and the desk, uh, and I use either 2 or 3. Um, lights from one from the left, one from the right, and one from kind of across the table from me.

Uh, and the third thing is something to put the iPad on. So an important difficulty we had back in the Ink & Switch days was we would try to film, I try to film the iPad on my wooden desk, but the thing is that then you have the horizontal line from the wood planks, the horizontal line from the iPad, and then the, you know, the horizontal line from wherever the camera is. Uh, located and so you need to line up all three of those things exactly or it looks really weird. And so I ended up putting the iPad on a leather surface which is sort of like directionless so you can basically um fix the camera and then line up the iPad exactly to line up with the camera and it doesn’t need to be lined up exactly with the desk at that point, um, and that was actually a pretty big uh unlock for us.

00:20:19 - Speaker 1: Hm. Yeah, that was something I struggled with a little bit was um even getting the the tablet square with the camera, which I guess you can, as I say, fix it in post, right, if you have sufficient video editing software, you can kind of even that out.

So I can see we’re having that many things I have to align would be a would be a problem.

And then the lights, uh, from all these different angles. I know that another huge one that we ran into even just giving a workshop, we would do kind of video chat uh workshops about progress on our research prototypes and the overhead lights in the room were just absolutely killer because that turns your, uh, turns your tablet into a little mirror and you see the person’s face, not to mention that smudges all over the place, you know, the finger smudges all over the place and it’s very hard to see what’s actually on the screen.

00:21:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so I’ve only partially solved this. So I turn off all the the lights in the apartment and I try to do it at night, and that gives you pretty good cover so you don’t have too much light coming in from overhead.

But if you actually turn off the iPad, you can see the reflection of the camera overhead. So currently it only really works when you’re on a fairly bright screen, which you’ll notice all of our videos have.

Um, I actually tried recording one with my stock, uh totally black iPad background, and there was a huge camera reflection in the middle of it, so I had to change it for the video. Um, but I think we could fix that with basically cutting out more of the external light so there’s less coming in from overhead.

00:21:42 - Speaker 1: And you say at night, is this about consistency that you want all the videos to have consistent lighting, or is it more about um the direction when it comes through the window, you can’t control the direction of the color temperature or whatever.

00:21:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, just consistency and also the overhead thing. So if I have a huge window in this apartment, so if I do it during the day, you have some diffuse light coming in from overhead, which, which exacerbates that um reflection of the camera problem.

00:22:06 - Speaker 1: Do you imagine kind of going forward that when it comes time to add a new feature that we need to, um, then add a new kind of section in this handbook for? Will it be challenging to recreate these conditions? Do you have like everything’s written down of exactly where stuff should go or there’s tape on your floor or something like that, or is it not that important? Is it actually fine to have some videos that maybe have a slightly different. Feel or the tablets in a slightly different position in the frame or something.

00:22:36 - Speaker 2: I think there’s some forgiveness here, but I would like them to be pretty consistent.

Um, so as long as the equipment is sort of out, it’s not too bad.

And then in Muse, where I do the filming, I actually have a little checklists, you know, right in Muse, of course, um, and there’s quite a few things you got to get right. Like you got to, you know, make sure that uh your home screen isn’t weird, make sure that you’ve cleared out your, um, You know, iMessage contacts, they don’t show up in the share sheet. There’s a lot of little steps need to take um to actually do the filming, but once you figured it all out, it doesn’t take that long to run through the process.

00:23:06 - Speaker 1: Well, there’s the sample content element uh here as well and we’ve we’ve, there’s another one I’ve grappled with, um, when I’m often and for example, we want to show a new feature in one of the email updates and I want to show, uh, as much as possible, I try to show real boards either mine or other people’s when they, um, consent to share that and so you get a sense of what Muse is really used for in the real world rather than.

Something that’s kind of made up. Now, in this case, because I think this stuff was more, I guess, produced would be the word for it. It was supposed to be longer, um, it’s the word for it, a little more timeless. You did create boards that were not necessarily ones that uh you had in your, I guess your real used to call it that, is that, is that right?

00:23:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and we did them all around this theme of gardening, which is the same theme that we use for our onboarding sample content when you first open the app.

Uh, and we like that because it’s very, it’s very generalizable, it’s very relaxing, it’s very meditative, and those are, you know, properties that we want to encourage and use.

And also the I think the content that you would tend to want to film with is maybe not exactly the same as what you would use day to day and use, because basically, these videos get compressed down to pretty low resolutions and so things like bigger images work better for the video versus, you know, a whole page of handwriting.

It would just basically look like a bunch of scribbles from that far away. um, so it’s a, you have to kind of um be mindful of the medium.

00:24:28 - Speaker 1: Is it a problem at all that you, you’re filming a screen? Uh, I’ve seen techniques where you basically use a green screen, simulate the movements, and then do a screen recording that you composite in later so that you get the crispness of the pixels, but it seems like they came out, it seems like they came out pretty nice. That wasn’t necessarily a problem in the final video quality.

00:24:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems fine. And you know that the iPhone camera these days are are wild. Like this is a 4K camera with really high quality. Um, and so when you’re rendering down to something like 1080p, you have a lot of, uh, resolution to spare there. We have thought about actually doing the reverse and putting a green screen, like filming the iPad on top of a green screen so you can compos it in a different background, um, that’s either, you know, for example, maybe it’s always exactly the same, or maybe it’s actually transparent, so it just blends right into the the web page, um, but that’s, that’s pending, you know, our Amazon green screen order which because of the virus is.

00:25:24 - Speaker 1: Now, can you tell me a little bit about how, sort of, you, you and Leonard were the ones that ended up uh working on this towards the end, and you ended up with, first of all, that this is a web page as opposed to a PDF or something, so you need to load that browser separately alongside Muse in a split view or something.

And secondly, that most of the, um, you have all these videos that have, uh, they’re kind of these little cards that then have text, some explanatory texts below.

And I know some earlier iterations when I was working on it with you a little bit more, were much more classic heavy text manual, maybe the kind of stuff you and I have done in the past, like go by example or the rogu docs or whatever where it’s mostly text with a few figures. And at some point here, we realized this is just such a visual thing and especially if we get the videos, it’s really more Images and more imagery and just a little bit of text to explain, but I’d be curious to hear how you landed on this cards expository text attached to a video or a still.

00:26:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, we knew we wanted the video from the beginning and so we started with something that was more like go by example or standard manual.

We have 1 or 2 videos per page and then a little bit of text, but then we found you only need maybe 123 sentences per. Video and so you have these pages that we mocked up and we did some HTML mockups, and it would just be very sparse and then you need this whole apparatus around navigating the documentation because you have multiple pages and then to get through all the docs and to get an overall sense we have to click through each of these individual links.

And so it was both more work for us and it was in a way less satisfying for the user because they didn’t um get everything they were looking for right away. And there was one site that we saw that was uh an inspiration. Uh, what was it?

00:27:06 - Speaker 1: Uh, Loom, kind of a new cool indie animation app.

00:27:09 - Speaker 2: Loom, yes, and they have a cool, um, manual page of sorts, which is in this style, but it’s all text. So I think it has the kind of two or three things per row and then a series of rows on the page, um, and we liked that one page idea, but then of course we want to bring our, our video. And then when we mocked it up, it it worked quite well, so we ran with it.

00:27:30 - Speaker 1: Another notable point on the cards that are shown, some of them are clearly news. Here’s how you move a card, here’s how you delete one, here’s how you navigate and out of boards. But then there’s also things like how to take a screenshot, which is an iPad or an iOS feature. Uh, there’s some other things that are, are like that as well, like search. How did you decide where the boundary between what you can do with Muse and the full capabilities of the operating system? What, what caused something to be in or out of that list?

00:28:01 - Speaker 2: Well, we wanted to include all the things that you might want to do with Muse, broadly defined.

So for example, bringing in a piece of content from another app on iOS into Muse is something that involves Muse is an important and our experience with iOS is that There are all these, these important platform features that people don’t know about. Even very experienced iOS developers and advanced users are surprised when they see uh some of these workflows, you know, whatever the magic gesture is for bringing up search or like sharing between apps or whatever.

Um, and so we thought it was quite important that we gave people those instructions because without it, they might be missing this key piece of how you actually use Muse in the context of iOS.

00:28:42 - Speaker 1: This is a good reminder that one of the challenges here is iPad OS is moving in this direction of becoming more, more, more capable, more powerful, trying to be a tool for professionals, but it comes from this, uh, legacy or this foundation of the iPhone. And the iPhone, of course, was the iPhone you could argue is maybe the most successful product, certainly the most successful tech product of all time, and partially that’s because it took the complex world of computers that was always. Just out of reach for maybe a lot of The mainstream world, people who weren’t um Sort of computer nerds, so to speak. The iPhone helped make it so that everything was kind of um comprehensible without a manual. And in fact, I would say it’s part of the design ethos in the mobile world. And probably for a good thing that if you need a manual or you have a manual of some sort, you failed, right? That the um the classic uh refrain from the computer message boards, RTFM right? that’s read the fabulous manual, is something that is a legacy of the desktop operating systems where things were just too complicated. And that now in this enlightened mobile era where everyone’s got smartphones and you expect to download and install an app, and you should be able to figure it out by kind of pawing at the obvious buttons on the screen within 10 seconds. And in fact, if you don’t figure it out, you probably delete it pretty quickly. But that’s not really viable. In fact, that’s not even desirable for professional tools. You want something, of course, they shouldn’t be specifically hard to learn, but a learning curve, if it pays off with more power, more flexibility is worthwhilele.

But now you have this, not only this, um, the whole operating system of iPad OS and the device and all that sort of thing, but actually a design ethos, a design um set of um values that comes from something needing a manual as a bug. Versus what I believe, which is that a product that comes with the manual implies it has depth, that it fits together with being a professional tool where probably the things you want to do with it are things that require skill and take time to learn, even separately from the tool itself. Whether you’re writing, whether you’re creating art, whether you’re doing science. These are not things that a person figures out by pushing a couple buttons, obvious brightly colored buttons on a screen. There are skills that you learn, and the tools that go with it are skills as well.

00:31:08 - Speaker 2: Exactly. We want the tool to be as easy to learn inherently, but no easier. We don’t want to sacrifice uh the power, and the capabilities on the high end. Um, for the sake of that those initial 2 minutes. That said, we have tried to meet our users, uh, somewhat in the middle because they often are coming from this mobile world where this expectation is very strong. So you can open this manual with one link, it has high production value, it has this kind of YouTube style, very quick to ingest video, um, so I think that helps a little bit bridge the gap between the standard mobile world and this world of professional tools.

00:31:43 - Speaker 1: That also reminds me of something you mentioned earlier, which is onboarding content, which is sort of the industry term or um as you likes to call it the out of box, AKA UI experience.

So the onboarding content is what you see the first time you open an application. Sometimes there’s a little tour, uh, but I think for creation applications, it’s kind of nice to show content that is in the format of the application itself. So, for example, I think Bear, uh, which is a really nicely designed notes app, it just comes with some default notes that are in there that essentially explain how to use the app and will show you what its capabilities are.

Notion, I think loads up with some templates, that sort of thing. So we explored this quite a bit. We, we had a couple of major iterations of our onboarding content where we tried to include sample boards and some instructions and we would walk you through all the things.

And I think it, I don’t know if it’s a legacy of that kind of iPhone world where people just want to try it, they skip all the tutorials, they just ignore anything you put on the screen.

They just want to start trying stuff out. And and I understand that because honestly I do the same thing, but what we discovered in some of these usability tests when we would try out our onboarding content is that people not only did not read it, they thought of that stuff as being in their way and they were pushing it out of the way, deleting it, erasing it, just trying to get past it, but then they would get frustrated and stuck because they didn’t, you know, the interface had these different uh approaches that they didn’t necessarily know, and then they would then they would sort of feel stuck.

And that led us to thinking. OK, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna get it with the initial content. People just want to play, they want to try it out. And that led us to this garden themed, um, content we have now, which explains fairly little. It just gives you a little playground or it gives you some elements to play with. And then there’s a tips panel you can go read when you wanna kind of go to the next level.

And now we’ve got this handbook. I doubt that’s all we’ll need, but I thought it was interesting that we made this journey through trying to solve the, how does this thing work through onboarding content and eventually deciding that was a dead end.

00:33:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it’s notable that in most Pro Tools you get the totally blank page.

So when you first fire up the eye, for example, it’s like the super intimidating black screen.

It’s actually quite hard to figure out how to do anything at all, um, and that’s, that’s kind of standard in the Pro Tools world, but that actually points to a third leg of the stool.

So there’s how is the tool, how easy is the total. on its own kind of intuitively, there’s the manual and there’s the kind of social element where with a tool like Photoshop or VI there’s often someone who’s basically teaching you or encouraging you or giving you pointers, and we haven’t explored that too much with Muse, but I think that will be an important uh third leg in terms of how people learn to use the app and learn to be productive with it in practice.

00:34:30 - Speaker 1: So looking forward to the future here as we add new capabilities to Muse, uh, we’ll want to document those.

My experience with documentation, one of the challenges there is keeping it up to date when you have a fast moving, agile team, you’re cranking stuff out, uh, and it’s easy to overlook that when you’re shipping new stuff or it feels. Maybe like a costly step or the people who are making the documentation aren’t totally plugged into what you’re creating.

We’re obviously a small team here, so maybe that helps avoid some of this, but then we have a new problem I guess which is that as you said, these have pretty good uh production value that you really invested a lot in.

How do you have ideas for how we’re going to keep this up to date, or do you expect there will be periods where they’re, we’re testing new features and those just aren’t documented, and then when we sort of decide they’re going to stick around or whatever, then we, then we lock it in by putting it in the handbook.

00:35:26 - Speaker 2: I certainly hope that the handbook continually converges to the real state of the app.

It’s tough though, you know, I’m tempted to just say be diligent about it, uh, but our mutual friend, Peter would say that diligence doesn’t work. Um, one, One idea I have here is leaning on the handbook for sort of marketing purposes. And in the same way that uh document, documenting your product forces you to think through the user experience, I think the uh the expectation that the material is going to be shared in a marketing capacity is going to encourage the team to like really think through the quality of it and make sure it’s complete.

Um, it’s just things like when someone asks, how do IX with Muse, you send them the anchor link in the handbook to that video. Um, I think that kind of constant exposure will help maintain the quality.

This, this actually reminds me of another adage about data quality in here the data quality is like kind of the handbook quality. It’s that data quality is a function of how often and how thoroughly the content is read, not how carefully it’s written, um, and so the more exposure we get on the read side to the handbook, I think the better it will be.

00:36:33 - Speaker 1: Canonical URL for something is an incredibly powerful thing in my experience, whether it’s internally in a team because I don’t know, you have someone new joins the team and they say, wait, how does X work? and you could send them the internal Wikilink or whatever that describes that. And then externally, yeah, when you’re doing support for your customers, someone asks on Twitter, whatever it is, and you can basically just respond with bang. Here’s a, here’s a URL that explains it all.

Often when you go to do that, you say, oh, this is, this is documented, it’s in our manual or whatever, but then you realize there isn’t a good link to it because there isn’t an anchor tag or it’s kind of spread around a couple of different areas. There isn’t one like single place to go to get that crisp answer. That’s exactly what they’re, what they’re looking for and, uh, that’s a chance to potentially go and prove it. Good. Well is there anything else on the topic of manuals we should, we should talk about today?

00:37:26 - Speaker 2: I think that covers it.

00:37:28 - Speaker 1: 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. Love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. And Mark, congratulations on your new career as a hand model. Thank you. It’s great work and uh I’m really glad to have it out in the world. Thanks Adam. Alright, talk to you next time.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think that the lack of interoperability or standardization between digital tools today really it means that all work created within a tool is confined to that tool, and to me that seems very clearly antithetical to creativity and specifically the collaborative aspect of creativity.

00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, Molly Milky.

00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Hey there.

00:00:45 - Speaker 2: And how was your spring break, Molly?

00:00:47 - Speaker 1: It’s pretty good, not long enough, but it was a lovely little escape in Berkeley, and I worked on a final project for my producing class, which was a pitch on a feature film on the Whole Earth Catalog, which didn’t go over as well as I had hoped, but I’m still fingers crossed that it’ll become something.

00:01:10 - Speaker 2: And the whole Earth Catalog here being the Stewart brand work from what was the 70s or 80s.

00:01:15 - Speaker 1: Confirmed, yes, it was basically a biopic on him and the era of the whole Earth Catalog, and it was very dramatic.

00:01:23 - Speaker 2: Oh, I love that. First of all, I just love biopics. I’m a big fan of like abstract. Act on Netflix or that sort of like kind of maker documentary, but when you throw in like the weird history, I feel like the whole Earth that catalog was sort of, I don’t know, psychedelic culture meets rebel computing or something like that.

00:01:41 - Speaker 1: 100% agree, yes. In a very interesting way that I think would translate really well to film, but we’ll see.

00:01:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, let me know where I can sign up to screen that I guess.

00:01:53 - Speaker 1: Amazing, yes, you’ll be the first to know.

00:01:55 - Speaker 3: Wasn’t there actually another film about Stewart Brand in general that came out recently?

00:02:00 - Speaker 1: Yep, Stripe is on it. They made a documentary that’s coming out very soon, actually, I think, and it’s as part of the SF Film Festival currently, and it was more of like looking at his whole life and his impact legacy and also the more recent like environmental stuff he’s been doing, which is much more comprehensive and honestly a much better idea. But I started this project my freshman year, so I’m pretty committed at this point.

00:02:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think it just shows that there’s a lot of interest in his work.

00:02:30 - Speaker 1: It’s really interesting, like, the deeper you dig, the more you find, and the more like of a web you discover, especially on Wikipedia, in the best way, so.

00:02:39 - Speaker 2: You seem to enjoy some unearthing the history of weird characters here, your collection of computing history, folks. I’ll link that in the show notes here as well. But before we get on to that, I think the folks would love to hear your background. You’re quite early in your career and yet already have a very impressive CV here. You’ve worked at Figma, you’re now at Notion, and you just finished a thesis at UCLA, so I think we all just want to know. What’s your productivity hack? How can we all be as uh as productive as you so early on?

00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Oh God, that’s not. First of all, my little background blurb. My name is Molly. I’m currently a student at UCLA. I studied digital media, and I’m in my last year. I only have a couple more weeks left, which I’m very excited about.

00:03:26 - Speaker 2: Wow, congratulations.

00:03:27 - Speaker 1: I know, so close, yet so far.

00:03:31 - Speaker 2: The senioritis kicked in already?

00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Oh man, yes, it has been very, very present in my life ever since like September of last year. Every single week is like counting down the days, but we’re getting there.

And I’m currently designing a notion, and I will be returning to Sigma at the end of the year.

And I come from more of a background in visual design and storytelling, specifically filmmaking, and I got my start leading design at a startup in the Bay Area while I was transferring schools, and through that I found product design specifically, and I found that it was like this very unique fusion of the creative and the analytical at the same time, that just really clicked for me.

And ever since then I basically was just exploring kind of different industries and company sizes and problem spaces more broadly, and through that and working at startups and Sigma and most recently notion, I found that creative tools were what I was the most like just completely pulled towards and really wanted to just dig deeper and explore what impact they could have.

I think that there’s something about making something that enables other people to make other things that is just like incredibly gratifying for me in a way that no other product design projects really touch.

And I think more broadly, I’m really interested in the combined power of like design and tech to foster creativity and community across the board, and that was definitely like the inspiration behind this thesis and also like a through line to just things that interest me across the board and in terms of like doing school and work at the same time, I think it’s really just about The space that the pandemic has provided for free time, sadly, I definitely have profited.

00:05:30 - Speaker 2: Uh, so that’s your productivity hack is be doing this all during a massive lockdown that prevents other kinds of fun things that.

00:05:38 - Speaker 1: Exactly, it’s the best one. I highly recommend. No, it’s kind of the worst, and I feel honestly a little bit guilty to have like done so well during such a terrible time, but then at the same time, I’m very grateful. So there we have it.

00:05:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of that hits on things that speak very much to me, and I think others that I feel like are in our field, however you want to define that, they’re making tools to help others create, which I think is in many ways a harder or more interesting product design problem.

It’s one that maybe historically has not been seen as very sexy when you think of, I don’t know, productivity tools, whether it’s a word processor or a video editing tool or something like that. They don’t have the same kind of sleek attention to detail that often more consumer products do.

Maybe that’s starting to change now and at least I hope a little bit this concept of a tools for thought field which we talked about with all the way back in our podcast episode with Andy Matuschek about kind of transforming. From the stodgy idea of, I don’t know, word processors have been the same for 25 years and very utilitarian and just the word design doesn’t get associated with them. Maybe that’s starting to change now, which I’m very excited about.

00:06:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I completely agree. And also it’s interesting because I think I’m young enough to have grown up with those tools and like been in Photoshop from a very young age, and there’s something. Definitely about them that is just so intimidating and so difficult to comprehend from somebody who is not like acclimated to the environment and doesn’t understand the principles that they operate on, and I think that that’s slowly changing, but it’s definitely like, it’s still happening, we’re still figuring out the best way to do it cause it is complicated, and they’re offering a lot of different things in the same place.

00:07:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one thing about computing in general and creative tools in particular is they’re just so new on a relative time scale. We’re still figuring it all out. There’s some established practices, but when you compare it to a lot of other fields where I don’t know if you’re a woodworker, the best tools for doing woodworking have been slowly refined over the course of hundreds of years, and here in computing we’re still kind of just banging two rocks together to figure out how to make things, so.

00:07:52 - Speaker 1: 100%, yeah, we’re definitely still figuring things out.

00:07:56 - Speaker 2: Have you found there’s any particular, I don’t know, skills or approaches that came from this kind of film visual design background that you talked about that translate well and give you unique insights that maybe some of your colleagues don’t have doing digital product design?

00:08:10 - Speaker 1: Hm, that’s an interesting question. I mean, inherently audio and video software is.

Incredibly hard to understand, and I think that it takes a preexisting like knowledge and investment and really being able to go into these tools that are just like an incredibly blank slate, and they offer so much possibility, but where it is is like up to you to really figure out and even understand what you’re looking for.

And so I think Having that background in feeling comfortable just tackling these like interfaces that are very unfriendly, honestly, it does help, and I think it also helps me to understand a lot of the principles that some of the other creative tools are just beginning to adopt, and there’s a lot of like efficiency and abstraction work that has been developed and cultivated in Video and audio tools that is just beginning to kind of pop up its head in just more simple, more like consumer everyday creative tools.

And I also think that fundamentally having a background in like video is also just like a Background in storytelling, which is applicable everywhere, and I think it’s becoming even more applicable in tools like design tools and writing tools and being able to help foster those stories and also to kind of weave in the story of the tool is kind of an underrated thing. And it’s not the primary concern, but it definitely is a piece of the broader puzzle of getting people to feel comfortable enough to create in the tools. So there’s something interesting there, but it’s definitely still in its nascent form.

00:09:52 - Speaker 3: Molly, it’s interesting that you mentioned growing up with complex tools like Photoshop and that being a help in using other tools in the future.

I didn’t grow up on Photoshop, I grew up on Kipics. I remember when I first tried to learn programming, the tools were so foreign and unapproachable that I almost completely bounced off the field.

It was like VI, which is an incredible maze and like all the Java server side stuff. It was just completely wild. And it was only because of Ruby on Rails that I found something that I could basically get working and running end to end. And once you go through it a few times, you kind of calibrate on like how terrible things should be when you’re first learning something. But I do think a lot of people just bounce off these complex Pro Tools for a reason like that.

00:10:32 - Speaker 1: 100%. I feel very lucky to have become comfortable in them at a very young age, and that was through like pirating Photoshop and getting gifted a Wacom tablet and just really starting by making really, really rudimentary like digital art and things like that.

But it definitely was like the type of thing that I would try to teach my friends and things like that and kind of bring it into other areas, and it was just not adopted.

It was like my understanding and knowledge of the tool was something that I definitely took for granted for a very long time.

And it definitely has made me think differently too about creative tools across the board of like, wow, if you really invest in like getting people in these tools at a young age and really acclimated and understanding how they work, like there’s a lot of potential there, but it’s not scalable. So like there has to be other approaches other than that, so interesting problem that we’re only beginning to run up into.

00:11:31 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is computers and creativity, which is not at all coincidentally, the name of your thesis which you published recently, and of course I’ll link that in the show notes here, and I recommend everyone go read it. Not only is it great content, but a beautiful presentation that really takes good advantage of sort of the web as an article format. So naturally folks can go read it, but maybe for those that haven’t yet, just to prime the discussion here, maybe you want to give us a brief summary of its contents.

00:12:01 - Speaker 1: Most definitely, yeah, so my thesis is really about how can digital creative tools best augment human creativity and collaboration.

And it’s really looking at the potential of creative tools as co-creators with human beings and examining kind of returning to the original vision of creative tools and how we can extract some of the things that were realized and some of them that weren’t and kind of analyze that for the present of creative tools and to kind of contextualize that with an observation, from my vantage point, I really think that the power of tools lies in their ability to Amplify human action or thought versus the power of human beings is really about our ability to think creatively. And so if that’s true, then why do computers often ask us to act as almost execution machines ourselves to create something when that’s like very uniquely the computer’s strong suit. So the paper delves into a lot of different areas and kind of the history and analyzing the present, but The main point here and like the TLDR that I kind of reach is that to foster optimal human innovation, digital creative tools really need to be interoperable or basically talk to each other. They need to be moldable or customizable to different phases of the creative process. They need to be efficient abstracted, which is similar to moldable. They basically just need to Accommodate more or less complexity at different stages, and lastly, they just need to be community driven so that people can be inspired and get help when they’re creating. So that is the very abbreviated version of my very long blog post, but I’d love to dig deeper into all of that.

00:13:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, all of that resonates very much with stuff we’d love to talk about here and things Mark and I spent a lot of time talking about.

Yeah, I guess maybe to dig in a little bit on, for example, that first section where you look back at what you called the original vision or or sort of the history.

And folks who’ve been banging around in the tool space for some time will certainly recognize a lot of this, Engelbart and K and Hypercard and Flash, and Dynabook and so on, but I think it’s one of the nicer collections of summarizing all that, that isn’t, I don’t know, a super long book, so it’s a nice way to get up to speed on that. Now, it is interesting with Sort of look at this history, which I think is often presented as kind of yeah, there was these amazing visionaries who saw the potential for computers and creativity, sort of laid out a vision way back in what seems like just the Stone Ages to us, the 1960s, the 1970s, and then in some ways we lost our way and we ended up with, I don’t know, social media and Kind of lock down appliance like smartphones and in fact there’s this glorious world of I don’t know, small talk and dying a book and mother of all demos style stuff that we still need to build or we haven’t built or something like that. Do you see it as like that’s an unfulfilled vision or the flip side could be, OK, well, they had some cool ideas, some of those worked out, practiced, some of them didn’t. The reason. We don’t have everything there is that maybe some of it wasn’t practical, and I’m never fully sure how to think about the kind of lionization that we do some of these past figures.

00:15:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel the same way.

I think that there’s a lot of tension and just basically more analysis that needs to be done there.

I think that it’s very easy to put these people on a pedestal and just say, wow, look at this incredible vision that they outlined, and we do that, and I think that they do present some really compelling ideas and their way of framing computers as being a tool to almost augment human intelligence is something that I particularly am pretty compelled by, but obviously a lot of their ideas did fail and there’s reasons for that. Um, and I also think that they were operating in an environment that was largely kind of independent from the actual business environment and like the technology sector as we see it today. So, like, will those ideas actually thrive in reality and especially in the consumer preferences and like relationship we have with tech today. Maybe not, but I think that they Still present some really interesting kind of principles and ways of looking at computers that we can definitely take some inspiration from. And I also think that like we rely on a lot of the principles that they established. And I think it’s just really important to like recognize that and kind of piece apart what we took and what we didn’t, and maybe what we can take more of or what we should reconsider. I just think that fundamentally This is great of history, especially in a field like tech, which is kind of in some ways pretty disconnected from its own history. And there’s almost kind of like a pride in that of moving so quickly that we don’t even look to the past.

00:17:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, or I’d almost listed as a sort of willful disregard of history because I think there’s the classic, I don’t know, why combinator or startup founder.

Out of school, it’s actually their naivety that allows them to reinvent, you know, they’re not dragged down by the legacy baggage of how we do things today. They can just think about it in kind of a green field way and dream up a new idea and maybe technology has changed enough that there’s new parameters and they can really do something new, but that comes at the expense of, well, actual naivete and reinventing everything. And not using scholarship of the past to learn what’s worked and what hasn’t in order to kind of stand on the shoulders of giants or build the way that any other field would.

Of course, you learn from the past and then you use that to inform what you should do going forward into the future. And yeah, the young naive startup founder or other types that we hold up as our role models sometimes in technology are not into scholarship of the past, let’s say.

00:18:11 - Speaker 1: Very well put. I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. I’m very curious though to hear what both of you think of, as you put it like the lionization of Engelbart and Kay and all of those people, cause it seems to be a pretty disputed topic.

00:18:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this opens a quite an interesting door for me. My sense is that a lot of people look at what these early pioneers did, and intuitively they feel like that is good, it should have succeeded. Why don’t we have this? They had it 50 years ago, what’s going on? And at the same time, the current reality, like you were saying, is not exactly that. And I think it’s really important to understand why that is, and I think you were alluding to what’s happening where a lot of this study and analysis has been at the level of the tools.

So it’s like what’s on the screen, how do you program it? What’s the user interface even, but there’s an entire complex system around how software is developed and used.

And like you were saying, I think the reason that the vision for the software and the reality of the software don’t line up is because we haven’t understood or Accounted for how that ecosystem works.

So sometimes I call this the political economy of software development. There’s weird path dependence, there’s economic incentives. You got to understand all of that if you are going to understand how we came to where we are now. And on the flip side, if you want to predict and guide the future in that direction, you need to become a sort of political economist of software and get in not only the interfaces in the code, but also the funding and the incentives and legal stuff and all that.

00:19:39 - Speaker 1: Hm, yeah, that’s very well put too. I definitely agree. I think there’s so much complexity and also just like context that’s missing from so many of the analysis of these past tools, and they’re very like independent floating ideas versus actually tangible grounded concepts that could be turned into something real.

00:19:58 - Speaker 2: I think a lot of what you both said to me kind of just describes that these folks were visionaries in the sense of also being sort of ivory tower academics or whether or not they were an academic, they were purposefully somewhat disconnected from, for example, commercial realities and that is part of what allowed them to have big dreams.

And those dreams are still inspiring to this day, but then if those dreams are to become reality, at some point they do have to be connected to the real world, and this is a huge problem in research generally, which is there’s a technology transfer, how does something go from the lab or From that more idea space that science excels at into something practical that you can use and there isn’t a good path.

This is something that the I can switch research lab where Mark and I are both participants is trying to improve upon, but yeah, it’s a really hard problem because a lot of times the same people, it’s a very different kind of person that can have the big dreams versus that can kind of make it into reality.

And when you think of one of the most famous examples, Xerox Park, and some of the ideas they had there, and Steve Jobs basically got a glimpse of it. He was a guy that was good at actualizing things. He got a glimpse of it and then basically stole it and then went and made a practical thing. And of course, often the visionaries feel, no, you left out important parts, but leaving out parts is actually part of how you make something come to reality.

So I don’t want to dismiss these historic folks as The academics that don’t know how to bring their ideas to reality.

In many cases they did make great working software or even hardware that in some cases went on to turn into underpinnings of tools we have today, right? Small talk turned into Objective C and that, you know, fed into Ruby and. SWF and other languages that, for example, we use heavily on the Muse team, you know, these are very much things that are in the real world. But maybe there is an acknowledgement that the big dreams aren’t enough, you need to do something to connect it to reality. Yeah.

00:21:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I also think there are two separate axes here.

So there’s the axis of What are you looking at? So it could be pure software, or it could be called the software ecosystem, and then there’s the axis of visionary and idealist versus in the weeds pragmatist.

And I think in our discussion that we might have been kind of conflating those two things, but in fact, I think you can have, and I think we need more visionary idealists on the political economy side of software.

Probably the closest thing we’ve seen to that is the original free software movement and that obviously got some traction and made some progress, but I think we need to re-date that for the world of cloud and mobile, where the original free software vision basically broke down, I would say.

Just as an aside, this is one of my favorite creativity techniques where you identify the axes, you know, the rows and the columns of the spreadsheet, and you label each row in each column, and you see often you know what the entries in certain of those boxes are, but you can perhaps intuit that one of the boxes hasn’t been filled. yet or given a name or explored and just by sort of drawing the map like that, you can identify new quadrants. There’s a cool research paper that I read on this about data structures where they kind of identified all the different ways you can build data structures and then found the blank spots in the maps and went and synthesized those new data structures just on the basis of this cell in the spreadsheet should exist.

00:23:24 - Speaker 1: So fascinating. That is awesome. I can like visually imagine that in my brain. It’s great.

00:23:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if it sounds like I have a critique for some of these historic visionaries, let me bring the positive side, which is I do totally agree that they did lay out a vision for computing that is grounding in a world where we do seem stuck in, yeah, social media, consumer, I’m not.

Exactly sure what everything is oriented around commerce and again, things that are all good commerce, entertainment, these things are fine. I consume these, but the reason I got interested in computers at a very young age is seeing their potential for creativity and unlocking the noblest parts of the human spirit.

And it’s a good reminder to go back and look at some of this history, maybe especially because these folks didn’t have any of that prior stuff.

Computers were still so new, particularly personal computing was essentially, you know, they were in the process of inventing it, thinking what could people do if they had access to computers with graphics and networking and all the things that nowadays we take for granted, but they dreamed of something very different from the world we have today, and that can be very grounding to look back at that and take a bit of a blank slate from where we are today. So yeah, I personally take a lot of inspiration from all their work as well.

00:24:44 - Speaker 1: Totally agree. I think there’s something too very compelling about.

At least for me when I was reading these texts, how they kind of frame computers as partners with human beings, and I kind of integrate that as like a co-creation relationship, which is definitely a very squishy one that I think we’re still defining, but there’s something that feels very like a breath of fresh air to think about the computer as like a counterpart instead of something that is Potentially replacing us or stealing our attention or something of that sort, even just asking so much of us.

It’s more like, oh, the computer is here to help. And I think that that in particular is something that I hope we optimize more for in creative tools specifically, and there’s a lot of potential there.

00:25:26 - Speaker 2: Very well said. I do feel like more often than not in the modern world you’re stealing your attention as one example.

You’re sort of fighting against the computer and perhaps it’s not the computer itself, it’s the whole world of computing, the internet, or email inboxes, notifications, the way that the web works, and so on that you’re often either fighting.

Again this thing trying to make you do things you don’t want to do or take away your attention or distract you, or it wants you to do its chores, you know, click this, update this, do this, fill out this box, and it should be a tool quietly waiting for what you’re asking of it and to, as you said, co-create and help you in what you’re trying to do.

I like this quote from the original Tron movie which is at one point the bad guy basically says, look, you know, the systems are overloaded because we don’t have time to handle every little user request, and the guy he’s speaking to is kind of the wise and old computer sciences, actually user requests is what computers are for, and I feel like it’s so often forgotten.

They are here to serve us and sometimes it feels more often the human has to serve the computer or perhaps the business. Interests and I’m a capitalist, so don’t get me wrong, but the business needs, the KPI of whoever designed the product, it’s asking me to do things to serve that rather than my needs.

00:26:49 - Speaker 1: I love that quote. That is fantastic. I want that on a bumper sticker.

00:26:54 - Speaker 3: It’s great. Related to this, Molly, one thing I really appreciate about your thesis was you surface this idea of, I forget what you call it, but I would call it like vibe, basically, it’s like emotion, motivation, valence. I think that’s so important because if you have software that’s giving you a hard time, it’s not just a tactical or mechanical issue. It’s now you’re in a whole different mindset of, uh, you know, I’m dealing with the check boxes or whatever, and you’re much less likely to be creative and to keep doing it going forward and so I thought maybe you could talk a little bit in your own words about that aspect of creative software.

00:27:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that this is one that is like just beginning to form and it’s mainly because we’ve advanced to a point where there’s enough competition that we can actually focus on vibes or whatever you want to call it.

And I think when I was writing about this, and it’s something I think about a lot. I definitely think about software like Figma, which I think that there’s something to be said for just bringing a more playful approach and just treating the user with more respect and really trying to validate them, not get in their way.

It really comes back to establishing the baseline of being like a very good piece of software that does the job well.

But beyond that, how you can actually differentiate the piece of software, especially in creative tools, it’s really just about like the personality and the kind of attitude that the software brings to the user, and I think you see that reflected in the way that it talks to the user and the colors and just little visual things and even just like the ambient environment of their landing page. It’s just very small things, but they do add up, and it in the increasing A larger landscape of creative tools, people are going to pick the one that they identify more with.

And I think that that is incredibly interesting to me personally, from like a storytelling perspective of like how we can try to create things that are more inclusive to more people and just try to get more people in the tool that might not have a background and experience scaling these tools and really navigating these usually dark gray interfaces. But yeah, I think vibe is, it’s a nascent field for software. We’re still figuring it out.

00:29:04 - Speaker 2: So there’s a section in here titled Standardization, which I think is about file formats and ultimately is how tools work together and actually something we’ve talked about on this podcast before, including with Balant from Kraft talking about the different ways he wanted to try to have essentially toolmaker humility, which is realizing that the tool you were creating for your users.

One of many that they are using and you should try to as much as possible, be a good citizen and work together, although in many ways it seems with the highly sandboxed world that we get in kind of mobile apps as well as to some degree, maybe the web and cloud, you have these silos and they just aren’t really designed to work together.

So what do you see as kind of the future going forward from here for, I don’t know, tools working together?

00:29:51 - Speaker 1: I think honestly, if I had to pick one concept for this project that I really like strongly stand behind and is like the hill that I’m willing to die on, it would probably be this one. I think that the lack of interoperability or standardization between digital tools today really it means that all work created within a tool is confined to that tool, and to me that seems very clearly antithetical to creativity.

And specifically the collaborative aspect of creativity. I think that there’s so much to be said for tools amplifying the power of our brains and really taking over the mechanical aspects of human thought and limiting creation to a single piece of software’s capabilities is just kind of crazy if you step back and think about it.

And I just think that standardization and having tools talk to each other would just fundamentally change the tide of how we use them and introduce in more collaborators and really just expand the project’s constraints beyond any One tool.

And this is a really hard one. Like, solving this problem is something that I feel like is a huge problem that I just don’t even know how to approach because it is pretty much in direct contradiction to the current business models of most creative tool companies. But I’d love to hear both of your thoughts on this because it’s a huge topic and it’s definitely one ripe with controversy.

00:31:28 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and just to expand on the motivation here, I think collaborating across tools can mean several different things. It can mean, like you were saying, you have a given project and at different stages of the project, you want to be able to use different tools.

That’s one case where an open format would help.

You might want to collaborate with other people.

And they might want to use their own tools, which is different from yours.

It’s another case. And also there’s this element of time where over time software tools tend to atrophy.

Companies come and go, you know, platforms change, but you at least want your data and to be able to carry that with you in some sort of archive at least.

So there are many cases where having such interoperability would be helpful.

Yes, it’s extremely hard and by the way, I think this is a prime example of the political economy issue. It’s very easy to say we should have X, and even if X is relatively easy to do, which is not in this case, there’s still this huge issue of the.

We should. That’s quite the weasel phrase, right? Really, it’s, if we were to accomplish this, we would need a bunch of companies or individual developers to temporarily make more work for themselves, lower their profitability, make their products worse for the customers in the short term to get to some other global maximum.

It’s a case where the coordination problem is really important.

00:32:36 - Speaker 1: Completely, yeah, and it’s definitely like invisible work that does not really result in much actual profit for the company, it’s much more of like a long term investment that would require all the companies getting on the same page and really agreeing to terms and it’s really a long term relationship with each other too, which is kind of crazy to even fathom how that could happen.

00:33:00 - Speaker 2: I guess to highlight what I consider a bright spot or a positive version of this, I do think files on some of these flat file formats, which includes plaintext.txt, markdown. Image formats, PNG, JPEG, probably yeah, MP4 movies increasingly audio clips, PDFs.

Now PDFs come with a lot of baggage. They are very complex to render, but ultimately there are pretty standardized ways to do that. And importantly, yeah, PDF does not demand. You have, for example, Adobe Acrobat, maybe it did at one time, but now it’s a tool you can open with. very standard viewers on any platform you can edit it and so on.

It’s something we strive for in Muse because we kind of have this value but again where we are subject to the same constraints as others working with, especially making an app on a platform like iOS.

But for example, we do store most of the raw, you know, when you drag an image in, we store that as a raw image in one of these standard file formats and in fact, if you do a bundle. Export you just get a zip archive that it contains as much as possible formats, you know, the ink is in SVG and that sort of thing. So we try to do that as much as we can.

Now in practice, a muse bundle zip archive that has a bunch of loose media in it and is not sort of you know arranged on this board maybe is of mixed value. So I guess that does lead into maybe one of the more standard objections. The standardization, which is essentially that it is maybe counter to innovation. It creates a lowest common denominator. If every markdown editor, for example, has to support that format, if you want to do something interesting like make it really easy to embed video with captions of particular time clips, and that’s just not part of the format, so you just can’t do it or you break away and do something, you basically break the format in order to add that innovation to your tool.

00:34:51 - Speaker 3: I do remain optimistic that it can, and in fact will be solved. I think we will get a general purpose data medium that’s kind of like JSON is for the synchronous single user case.

It natively allows collaboration.

Obviously we’ve been working a little bit towards this with automerge and so forth in the lab, but I think it’s eventually going to happen, but it’s gonna take a lot of work and I suspect it’s probably not gonna happen by a bunch of people getting in a, you know, enormous room and everyone saying, OK, let’s form the consortium for X and do a two year study, and blah blah blah.

I think it will be an organic, messy process led by some champions somewhere, whether they’re individuals or companies, but I do think it’s possible. And when we get there, it’ll be great. And like you were saying, we are, I don’t know if you were saying this on the podcast or if I read this in your thesis, but we’re relatively early in this world of collaborative software. It seems so obvious to us that you have Google Docs and Figma, but that’s I don’t know what, 10 years old or something, so also just gotta give it a little bit of time.

00:35:49 - Speaker 1: Completely, yeah, I think we’re still figuring it out and really trying to understand like what to prioritize and what is the most important in the long term and just beginning to think long term, that this is going to be around and I think we’re still like even developing the social norms and values that we as like the users and the makers like care about.

There’s a lot of development still happening. There that is like incredibly interesting and I think it’ll all shake out OK, but we just have to like really nail down what’s important and how we’re gonna like think about this in the long term, because even though things like standardization are not particularly enticing, like if we want it to be around for a while and if we want our work to be compounding, then it’s like you said, increasingly important.

00:36:36 - Speaker 2: And we’ll offer as a counter example to the, you know, standardization and innovation dilemma, the web, where essentially there has been a lot of innovation on the web, but no one company owns that format, and perhaps there’s some complaints you can have about a particular browser monoculture at any given time, Google Chrome at the moment. It is truly an open format, you can parse it with a lot of different tools, and it will have, I think, the longevity that will go beyond any particular browser.

00:37:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there’s some, we do a whole podcast on protocols and stuff, but I do think there are some important lessons in the web stack, one of which is they’re relatively thin layers, or at least the layers that work the best are pretty thin.

So whenever you make a layer that’s an abstraction or protocol, you get the benefit of aligning some decision space, and if it’s a relatively thick layer, you get the benefit of you’re aligning a lot of decisions together, so there’s a lot of interoperability, but then you run a sort of exponential risk of one of those things being wrong and then the whole game breaks apart.

So the layers for the web are thin enough that, at least in the lower layers, you could plausibly say there aren’t huge mistakes, such that people would want to go off and do something totally different, at least for the original web use case. So here in this case, I think we’re more likely, for example, to have success with the interoperability standard that’s more like JSON and less like address book standard format, right? Something that’s less like the business objects, or if you have those, they emerge kind of organically out of more general purpose data medium, so I don’t know, we’ll see.

00:38:03 - Speaker 1: Can’t wait to see.

00:38:04 - Speaker 2: We’ve hinted a few times, I think you’ve mentioned a few times kind of the the relationship between collaboration and creativity and the co-creation element, and from my perspective, this is a relatively new element of computing creativity. You mentioned using Photoshop, growing up on Photoshop. That was a private activity. Maybe you could send a file to someone else at very great effort by putting it on a floppy disk and carrying it over to them.

But you didn’t really do that very often. It was typically a private activity and furthermore, I think for many creativity is often something that is a little bit done in private.

It’s sort of this vulnerable act, but then perhaps that’s changing partially because of collaborative software like Google Docs and FigMA and Notion and others.

And in fact, we had a whole episode with Nicholas Cline from Sigma, who I think you might know, basically talking about, he’s also a younger guy, and I think, you know, for him, there is less of this creativity is this thing done in private, of course you make stuff together with friends, with colleagues. That’s just how it’s been. So maybe that’s culture is changing partially because the tools are changing. But for the purposes of computers and creativity and how you see it Molly, what do you see as the relationship between creating together versus a more private activity?

00:39:25 - Speaker 1: I think this is a really interesting one, and I think we’re still figuring it out from my perspective. I think creative tools, ideally should accommodate for both, um, from my perspective, I think right now they kind of still fall into two buckets of either solo or collaborative and collaborative in like the Google Docs or FIMA sense.

And I think there’s immense value in having tools that do both. They optimize for incredible solo creation and incredible multiplayer building upon each other’s ideas, and I admittedly, I think I lean more in the direction of like how Nico thinks about these things of allowing in more collaborators earlier on and feeling comfortable doing so because I grew up with these tools in a fully collaborative Google Docs form. But I do think that what’s interesting here is that these tools are so new, and we’re still just like as human beings figuring out what is expected and like what does ownership mean in these environments and just trying to establish like social norms there, and that is like a very squishy one that I think will just take time.

But for me, this really just like reinforces the value of moldability and ideally the tool would just accommodate, like I said, both solo and collaborative work and provide you like the resources and tools that you need to create those environments for yourself because I think Tools being less opinionated about an assumptive about what you need in those modes is going to be a great thing.

I would love to see for tools to give you the features that you need to really create your unique creative space, whatever that looks like.

And I think this also comes back to what Niko was talking about when he was talking about like the flywheel effect of collaboration. And really creating in the same spaces and building upon each other’s ideas. I think that that is a very different mode than like the solo creation kind of brainstorming, but ideally the tool could scale to both. So that’s like my current thinking. But I think that’s really hard, and I think that that’s two completely different things and optimizing for very, very different, almost in some ways audiences like those are sometimes the same person, but oftentimes they’re not or they’re a different subset of people and I don’t know, I think news is an interesting example here too, and I’m curious to hear what both of your thinking is because obviously that is optimizing more for the generative like solo environment in a really wonderful way.

00:42:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the challenge of a true thinking tool and really, you know, we’re trying to cover the very earliest part of the ideation funnel, let’s call it, or the creation funnel, which is that early ideation where you normally use a sketchbook or a whiteboard, something that is not at all intended to be a final artifact, but is about figuring out what you want to make in the first place or making a decision or just forming up your vision rather than any deliverable artifact.

And that is something that does tend to be maybe creativity at its most private, like something about a sketchbook is just something that you really feel is truly private.

And in fact, you know, we’ve been looking into things to try to add some collaborative capabilities, hopefully building on our values around privacy and sort of a calm sanctuary and all that sort of thing, but it is a real challenge.

We could easily lose what’s good and we have even heard from Users and customers, they say no, or they’re worried, right? They say, I don’t necessarily want you to add that because then it’ll turn into this more chaotic environment that I associate with these team spaces, for example. So, I think there is a way to cut that Gordian knot, but it’s a huge design challenge, obviously.

00:43:16 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the goal is definitely to eventually accommodate all the different types or topologies of social or non-social collaboration, and it is my hope that we’re able to eventually do it in one tool, because as you have a project, you tend not to want to be jumping around through different tools, or at least to do so only with very good interoperability, and every time you do do a jump there’s a bit of an activation energy costs.

And yeah, as we’ve studied the creative process by talking with creative professionals and in other ways, we have found that there’s maybe a half dozen different typical topologies.

There’s you’re basically ideating alone, there’s call and response feedback, there’s real time, kind of everyone at the whiteboard collaboration, there’s a sync building up a corpus together like a tracker, uh and there’s like presentation and sharing in real time.

And I think it’s possible to get all of those in one tool, but it will take some time.

The reason we started with the initial ideation phase was a felt like that was the most underserved, and the one we had the most unique angle on, and also there’s something to doing the first step first, if you will, just in terms of building up the full user journey over time.

00:44:25 - Speaker 2: One thing I do imagine with any tool that has both collaborative capabilities as well as solo capabilities, and by the way, exactly as Mark said, collaborative actually covers a whole host of different modalities, even just talking about synchronous versus asynchronous, for example, I think one of the big things we’ve learned. From Google Docs, it’s not really about the real-time collaboration. It’s about having a document you know is up to date and in practice it probably is asynchronous. You sent it out, you shared it out, and someone added comments or added something to it while you were asleep, and then you’re looking at it again later, so it’s asynchronous, but you know it’s up to date.

But I think if you’re clever or if you’re able to find the right combination, it shouldn’t be hopefully you’re serving those two audiences or the whatever all the modalities are, but that each one needs their own features and then pretty soon you’ve got this overstuffed product that does too many things that in fact you can find things that serve many or all of those cases.

One great example to me, which is very much about creative process and how you work as version control as a developer.

The first really good quality version control system I used was something called CBS many years ago. It’s kind of a precursor to this version, and then that was kind of replaced by Git in the world of decentralized revision control. But in any case, when I discovered revision control was sort of pitched as well, this is so you can work with someone else. And so in theory you don’t need it if you’re on a solo project, but I really quickly found, oh actually this is really nice. It brings a sense of OK, I’m going to work on something for a while and then package that up into what I would now call a commit, give that committed name. I can look back at my own history. I get kind of a log, you know, an undo, sort of like a large scale undo history, but it also creates a lot more structure for my own thinking about it. Obviously that’s made its way into now this collaborative space as well, which is when you’re writing the commit message, it’s for yourself, understanding what you’ve done, but also for your colleagues, so they’ll be able to see what you’re doing. And so it feels like a lot of the tools of revision control or a lot of the features of it, including how the discs work and how commits work, and all that sort of thing, both serve an individual working on a solo basis, maybe collaborating with themselves through time, you might say, and a small team or a big team working together on something.

00:46:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. I think it’s also just like retraining ourselves a little bit to once we acclimate to the standards of like a collaborative tool or something that’s optimized for that, usually that actually directly translates to the more solo experience, not always, but I mean, having different practices in different areas, that doesn’t seem particularly intuitive either, um, and a lot of these. Processes for organization are applicable everywhere.

There’s a lot of crossover between the features.

I think it’s just about like establishing where we are and really like, I think making people more aware of where they are in their creative process is something that’s going to become increasingly relevant to, and that’s something that we’re still kind of figuring out in creative tools is like, which tool is used for what and like how do they, again, how do they talk to each other? Can they talk to each other? And how are we going to like use them together, which is like the bigger question and very difficult today.

00:47:39 - Speaker 2: I’m definitely a fan of the pipeline approach, at least in my own work, which is, it’s less about that I want to use 3 different tools simultaneously.

At one stage, but more at a particular stage, I’m using a particular tool, so that’s the case for something like writing, where when I’m trying to figure out what I want to say, I’m using news or sketchbook or some other ideation tool for thought thing.

But when I’m writing, that’s actually not the right thing. Now I want a writing tool, a scrivenner, a craft, a Google Docs. But that’s not my publishing platform. From there I’m going to go to something that’s usually on the web, but it might also be in PDF or it’s Lawtech if it’s an academic format, and sort of at each stage, in a way, the transition to the new tool, which does involve some labor to translate it across, even when they’re fairly interoperable. For me, it’s almost good for my creative process because there’s this little ritual of now I’m ready to jump over into this next stage, it’s graduated.

00:48:37 - Speaker 1: Totally, yeah, and I think acknowledging that process and paving the way and making it as seamless, but also I don’t know, building in the opportunity for you to use that as a point of reflection and almost editing cause I totally relate to that as well as like moving from ideation to first draft or something like that. That’s really like also uh editing and refinement moment as well, and you don’t want to cut that out completely. So it’s again kind of letting people choose how they want the tool to behave. I think it’s gonna become increasingly relevant for creative tools.

00:49:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this idea of acknowledging is really important. So there is the underlying platonic ideals of multi-step creative processes of social creative processes, and in fact it’s like always has been, and we can link to the always has been me here.

But people have always been, you know, taking pictures of their whiteboard under their phone or like shuttling around USB sticks in the case of social collaboration.

So I think if you do the careful ethnographic research and take off your blinders about what software we currently do or don’t have, you’ll see these underlying patterns and a lot of what we’re doing with Muse and a lot of what we talked on this podcast is how do you align the software with those platonic ideals of creative work.

00:49:51 - Speaker 2: All right, Mark, I think you’ve signed yourself up to create the always has been meme with that content that we can include in the Twitter thread for this episode.

00:50:00 - Speaker 3: All right, I’ll bust out the meme editor.

00:50:03 - Speaker 1: Cannot wait to see it.

00:50:06 - Speaker 2: Now when I’ve worked on really long pieces, sometimes 5 or 10,000 word pieces we did for ink and Switch or the 12factor app or other larger pieces, for me it’s the case that you ship not by finishing writing everything you want to write, but by choosing to cut out a lot of it. And so I’m curious what things might have ended up on the cutting room floor that you think are worth telling us about here.

00:50:29 - Speaker 1: Oh man, so many. I completely relate to, I think it’s so hard to know when to ship something like this, and my current rule of thumb is like, if I have way more questions, but I know just how long it’ll take to investigate them. And it’ll kind of distract from the focus of the piece. That’s when I’m like, OK, maybe I’m getting closer than I thought I was.

But in terms of ideas that I’ve cut, this project actually started off focused on flow state, and I was very interested in how software could facilitate more flow state in human beings. And that’s a very broad question. I realized that’s exactly why I cut it, is because it is actually, the deeper you dig into. flow state, the more you discover that it’s very subjective and the definition of it is still kind of up in the air, depending on the discipline that you look at it through. So while it’s super interesting, that is definitely something I cut, but not before doing a lot of research on kind of the psychological conditions and what goes into flow state and how people report to experience it, which I think is really interesting still. And I would love to write a whole another thesis on that. But it’s still a tough topic to nail down.

00:51:46 - Speaker 2: And just to briefly define that one this is probably one of the most quoted or cited concepts from modern psychology, which is there’s a state that I think originally they were looking at athletes maybe when they’re sort of at their peak performance, but maybe in our own lives we’ve experienced this on running.

Or doing some kind of sports or something where you’re just in this well state of flow where everything seems to come effortlessly and it seems like you’re higher, somehow you’re questioning brain narrator shuts itself down and you’re just in the moment in a way that’s very satisfying. And we talk about this a lot in the tech industry because of, I don’t know, even just a simple thing like making sure you have big blocks of time to really focus on stuff. We’ve talked about deep work, for example, that concept here before, but the idea that you want to optimize for flow state and yet technology and especially The internet now is so kind of anti-optimized for that that it wants to offer you information about things that are happening in the world and messages and notifications about everything that in the right moment can be connecting, but when you’re in flow state can be distracting.

00:52:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a really rich topic and it is interesting too something I realized in some feedback that I actually got when I was focused on flow state specifically was more academics, but they were like, what is the relevance of this? This seems like something that you’re just throwing in as like a buzzword to get people to immediately understand that you’re talking about deep creativity, but do I actually know what flow state is? Not really.

And I hear that. I think that that’s true. I think we still need to kind of define what it looks like in different contexts. And that was kind of the reason that I decided to broaden up the inquiry to just look at creativity more broadly, because I think it Functions in a lot of forms, then you don’t have to be completely 100% into your work and thinking of nothing else and just ideas are flowing. Like there’s other forms where it’s more generative, or maybe you’re building upon other people’s ideas, and that’s not encapsulated into flow state, which is interesting, and I almost think that that calls for a more definition of like what creativity looks like in human beings, but that’s another topic entirely.

Another topic that ended up on the cutting room floor was actually just more closely examining the emergence of more collaborative software and like what that looks like and actually basically examining the social conditions and the psychological needs that we have when we’re in collaborative environments because from my vantage point and I feel like the collective experience of most people, it’s kind of just been a free for all, and we’re still figuring it out, and there’s a lot of potential, obviously, and we’re already benefiting from it, but it’s interesting to think about kind of returning to Some of the work that’s already been done in like academia that looks at what people need to feel comfortable collaborating and almost like in the context of arts education and creativity research, there’s a lot that can be pulled from that that is obviously much more squishy.

But it also has a lot of applicability to thinking about plopping people into creative environments and expecting them just to immediately generate ideas. I think that that is a common theme in a lot of tools today, especially collaborative tools, and I’m very curious how we can try to kind of break down what we know about human beings to address like their common concerns and possible drawbacks from the current experience.

00:55:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, obviously when people talk about collaborative software, it’s very easy for that to quickly get into design or even very technical things of, you know, is it using operational transform or CRDTs, and there’s very hard technical challenges that we’re still working on, but the social side of it, the social norms as you’ve mentioned, and also people adjusting their own attitudes about what’s expected of them or what they can feel comfortable doing.

You need to be comfortable to be creative, and we’re still figuring out how to do that well.

I’m reminded of Tuckman’s stages of group development, which is sort of a psychologist looking at just how teams work together, but really just any group of people, and that there’s kind of this process, these five stages that that they define, which is this forming, storming, norming, performing, and mourning, just sort of how the team comes together, but what I thought was really interesting is once I’ve read this, I can spot this. Not with just any kind of team loosely defined.

As a company or a subset of a company, but really any combination of people doing anything, even friends planning an event together or something like that, and there’s typically these early stages where everyone’s super polite and they don’t wanna step on any toes, but actually that stops you from really getting into it and really the true creativity happening, and then there has to be some level of conflict and discovering of roles in the group through, yeah, friction and problems and Even fights or whatever, and then social norms emerge from that, and then that’s when you really go into sort of the magic time, they’re performing stage because it’s sort of all figured out how to do things, and then you can be truly creative.

00:57:05 - Speaker 3: This also reminds me of the satir change model, which is a similar idea, maybe just generalize a little bit, where when things change, they don’t get uniformly better.

It’s not all up to the right. You have some foreign element that comes in and instigates the change, and then you go through a period of chaos where your performance is worse, people are scared and they’re reluctant, and then eventually you got to find some transforming idea to bring you into the period of better performance.

The way this connects back to this collaborative software discussion is. I think when we first introduced from a technological perspective, the ability to have real-time collaboration, that was a sort of foreign element where you have some of the things that you would expect with collaboration, like you can see what other typing, but you don’t have, for example, body language on facial expressions, you don’t have vocal intonation. And and so it feels like weird, like, basically you’re in the chaos of this Google Doc feels weird or something. But then we have things like, you know, emojis and so and so is typing and things like that and avatars that float around to show you where people are in the document. And so we’re building up the set of practices that will eventually allow people to have higher performances teams.

00:58:10 - Speaker 2: Even an initial negative reaction to why would you even want that. I remember when Google Docs came along, I actually used it when it was right before they were acquired, and that collaborative element, I said, wow, this is great that I can send a document to someone they don’t need to have Microsoft Word installed. We always know there’s the wrong latest version, and I tried to pitch people that I was working with on using it or saying, look, let’s use this tool because it seems so obvious to me this is A good way to do things and very often reaction was like, oh, like I don’t want people to be able to like see me typing or I don’t want other people to be able to edit my stuff, you know, I think maybe Figma relative to sketch actually had some of the same pushback as well. I don’t want people messing with. My designs that kind of a thing, and I think that’s quite natural, which is when you have existed in one paradigm in one set of capabilities, you take for granted that those capabilities or restrictions that that box is exactly the shape box that you want something new coming along offering new capabilities, you might even see those as anti-features.

00:59:16 - Speaker 1: 100%, yeah, I think that there’s there’s so much just push back and discovery we still need to do about people’s expectations in collaborative environments, and I think that there’s a delicate balance to be had to where it’s not completely like the tool’s job to facilitate all of those things and make sure that people are, you know, having the optimal like creative progression and like having All the indicators that they need, but it is something that I feel like we need to keep in mind and kind of identify ways that we can address or at least enable people to address or giving them best practices. And I think that it also just comes back to like inspiring people within a tool and giving them the things that they need is really important.

And that’s another topic entirely.

But it’s definitely, I feel like the farther we get in collaborative tools, the more we realize that this is really like a social problem in many ways, and that’s something that I think we’re beginning to address, but there’s still a lot of room to work with and to discover and to really see what people actually want because we’ve gotten used to these. Environments and paradigms in some way, and I think especially like my generation has gotten very used to it, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to make them more human and make them more ripe for creativity and the collaboration that we all want. I think it just needs to be much more customizable and open to different types of people as well.

01:00:47 - Speaker 2: Well, Molly, any final items that made it on the cutting room floor that you can tantalize us with what might have been?

01:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think one more is looking at the psychological conditions that people need to foster creativity, and I think for me, when I think about this, I definitely was looking at it through a broader lens and looking at not just the people that would come into these tools with like a unique intent and have comfortability in the tools.

I’m definitely interested in how can creative tools be more accessible to different types of people and like how we can Do that using like the psychology and like an understanding of it, and I think some things that come to mind for me that I wish I delved more into and hope to do in the future is really just The value of first impressions and abstraction and really trying to facilitate a really good first experience in a tool, and I think some ways of doing that are like providing templates and inspiration and really just holding their hand through that process and validating who they are and what they kind of bring in their existing understanding, and I think that this is something that Again, we’re still experimenting. We’re not completely sure what works best, but I think creating safe spaces for people to explore and mess up and creating kind of like a barrier between them and feeling like they could actually do real harm to the work, especially when it’s not their own work, is something that is increasingly important and definitely a big part of like the psychological safety that people need to be creative is just feeling like They’re not gonna break anything. They can just explore, mess around a little bit. They might create something great or it could be terrible and it’s fine. Yeah, that’s something that I think could use a lot more exploration in the future.

01:02:41 - Speaker 2: I agree. I think comfort is really important for being creative.

Being relaxed is important for being creative. Being able to think divergently and openly and being relaxed is a function of comfort, both physical comfort, but certainly psychological comfort.

There’s a tendency for the. Tools often going back to what you mentioned at the beginning, for example, video or audio editing tools, they look really cool, but they’re also incredibly intimidating, even to someone who’s pretty comfortable with computers, say like all three of us, and Something that makes you feel relaxed, at ease, comfortable. I mean, I even sometimes feel vague anxiety going into shared documents where I have right access, you know, someone sends me their Google doc. I just want to read it, but I’m just terrified that I’m going to press the space bar somewhere and insert a space, unreasonably terrified because I That’s easily fixable, but the sense that you’ve been invited into someone’s raw and vulnerable work, they’re sharing it with you because they value their feedback and you want to respect that and somehow messing it up is like, I don’t know, messing up someone’s home or being invited into someone’s private garden and then stomping all over their tulips.

01:03:53 - Speaker 1: That’s a great visual to imagine, yeah.

And I often think too about even like an analogy like tracing paper or something that you can overlay over someone’s work that just allows people to feel more comfortable going in.

And I think tools like Google Docs have done some interesting things to that end in the form of like suggestions and things of that sort, but it’s not exactly what we’re looking for, at least from my vantage point, I think.

Tools have a lot of work to be done to accommodate like the different types of feedback and collaboration that we do, because not everything fits in the context of like editing or adding a comment.

Like what if it’s a higher level thing? It’s all treated the same, and so we end up doing these really weird things like adding a comment to the title, when it has nothing to do with the title, it’s just a higher level thought.

And I don’t know, I’m very curious what we can do there to just get people to kind of foster the type of feedback or collaboration that we want by making the tool have features and functionality for that, that aligns with how they think about like the creative process.

And I think that that also comes back to replicating more of like the physical environment in these tools and really creating that like instant recognition of like, oh they’re asking me for high level feedback because it’s in this state. And this is me adding a post-it to their work, or something of that sort. I think there’s a lot of things there that we haven’t explored yet.

01:05:17 - Speaker 2: Nice, yeah, let’s bring back skew morphism, not for the imagery, but for the sense of comfort and the parallel to things we’re familiar with in the physical world and encouraging the kind of creativity that often you do have in the physical world, both because in person, brainstorming is sometimes more fun and higher bandwidth way. But also just we have all these techniques including post-it notes and whiteboards and little stickers and desks and making a mess with paper, and we haven’t necessarily managed to get a lot of that sort of messiness into the computer world that’s naturally very structured and sterile by nature.

01:05:57 - Speaker 1: Couldn’t agree more, yeah.

01:06:00 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at @museapphq or by email, hello at muapp.com. Help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Molly, thanks so much for contributing this work to the world, and I look forward to seeing what you’re going to do next in your career.

01:06:20 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much. It was my absolute pleasure.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I do think there’s a distinction between velocity and virality that’s important to make, right? Like a good book can go viral, a podcast can go viral, it just will go viral slowly, be a slow spread, and I think that’s actually kind of a goal is to have potentially like a low velocity, a high virality.

00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad.

This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company, and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest, Tobias Rose Stockwell. Hey there.

And Tobias, Mark and I just recently did an episode on video games and how Mark’s thesis that video games are where technologies kind of emerge first and later they make their way to productivity and enterprise software and that sort of thing, and I feel like our meeting, which was in an online game, a text-based. They called them back then in the 90s was a good example of this.

We knew each other virtually before we ever met in person for, I don’t know, a year or more.

And nowadays we take for granted that you meet people and even have great friendships, I think in, you know, your Slack channels or online conferences or colleagues you’ve only ever met through video calls, but I feel like that was quite unique for the time.

00:01:22 - Speaker 1: Truly, truly, I remember your characters on the mud, you had to. An amazing automation system in place for your characters, you just, yeah, you crushed that game.

00:01:32 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I totally forgot the mud world because it was all tech space, almost kind of had a Unix style in that sense, you would type commands and you would see these descriptions of what was happening with the action was very scriptable because you could make what were called triggers where you would essentially say, OK, if when you see the word you When you see someone’s name react in this way, when you see this happening, you could cause it to trigger another command.

People would do in some cases very sophisticated scripting.

I used a thing called Tintin. I think I was pretty simple with it, so I’m glad to hear it seems so impressive, but I think that did probably influence a lot of my thinking on kind of end user programming, personal scripting world of things.

00:02:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was super impressive. Like this guy knows what he’s doing on here.

00:02:15 - Speaker 2: And Tobias, maybe you can tell us a bit about your background, what you’ve been doing kind of in the post mud time and then leading you up to what you’re working on now, which connects to our topic today.

00:02:25 - Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me, guys. I really love what it is you’re working on and I always appreciate your Analytical and pragmatic perspectives on the world, understanding things in a more precise way. You know, we’ve known each other for quite a long time. I feel kind of honored that you have known me through several phases of my life, different chapters of my professional endeavor which have brought me here.

But when I was really quite young, I went and lived and worked in Cambodia for ages of about 23 onwards for about 6.5 years. I lived and worked on the ground in Cambodia. Crazy wild story for how I got there, but essentially met a monk when I was traveling through Asia, who was looking for help in rebuilding this irrigation system. It had been destroyed during the Civil War there, got sucked into this project that I thought would take maybe 1 year, I ended up staying there for 6+ years, rebuilding this big reservoir that affected farmers and helped them rebuild after this very, very problematic time.

And just was very, very interested in what I could do to most, help people figure out how to improve their own lives, and ended up rebuilding this irrigation system, getting interested in scale, interested in the motivations behind helping people help others more effectively. Which ended up, once I finished the project in Cambodia, I ended up coming back to Silicon Valley, where I grew up and started working on various projects to help people connect more effectively to humanitarian causes, and this was between 2009 and 2012, and it brought me to the world of online advocacy and really this is the earliest days of social media at scale, and I was part of this cohort of designers and technologists and Developers and documentarians that were really doing their best to try to motivate people to capture altruistic action from the largest possible audience, right? There was this promise around these tools that was very kind of intoxicating at the time, this kind of inherent goodness that could come from connecting humanity. And there was this thesis, this broader thesis, I think that was implicit at that moment, which is, you know, if you can connect the world, like we can solve the problems of the world, right? If you can just make people feel, if you can make people feel the poor people in India, the people that are struggling in Southeast Asia, if you can really just connect people to the feeling effectively, then you’re gonna come much closer to solving those problems, and that optimism was very real at that time. And it bled not just into the advocacy world, but I think it was very much a part of Silicon Valley at that time too. So I worked on a bunch of campaigns that were really trying to capture virality and maximize human attention and get people involved with causes, get people to feel, and that was its own very special era. I worked on a few campaigns that reached millions of people, it was very exciting time, and the tools enabled that in this very special way, and I was part of this cohort, you know, I’ve known. People similar to you have known many of the same people that were early at these companies that believed that these tools were fundamentally good for the world and, you know, in many ways they are, but I think that, you know, as we’re saying, there are questions about some of their byproducts. So fast forward a few years, I was working in New York doing design and management consulting, basically helping the executive teams of very large media organization that kind of storied in traditional journalistic institution that you would know if I named it, that was their executive team as the bottom was falling out of their business and they were trying to figure out how to Make money in this new media environment, and I was watching them as an institution begin to make decisions that reminded me fundamentally of types of attention capture tools that we had used. And the years previously, and they were making decisions that were very much based on trying to utilize this new media environment that many of my friends had built in such a way that I think we would recognize today as problematic, but at that moment in time we didn’t. They were really starting to change the editorial tenor of the stories that they were making, of the tools they were using to capture attention, and it was changing the editorial bent of stories of content and pushing it towards the extreme. And this was in 2014, 2015, you know, just the years leading up to, I think our great awakening to some of the problems associated with the stuff that came in 2016, but they were really fundamentally changing the tenor and the content of stories to capture more attention using these tools and these strategies.

00:07:16 - Speaker 2: This is what maybe nowadays we talk about is the classic clickbait titles and yeah, emotional activation that’s designed to in a very short time just get you riled up or activate some more primal part of your brain, and maybe that ties to your nonprofit work as well, which is also about emotional activation. But here you have this media environment where they have a very brief time to capture. Your attention and they’re just basically motivated to optimize for these headlines that push these buttons and activate you emotionally, even if that’s not sort of good journalism or really a healthy information ecosystem.

00:07:50 - Speaker 1: Definitely, yeah, and it’s not just headlines. The headlines are the most visible things.

The stuff that tends to be a little bit more pernicious is the editorial decisions that are made around stories to cover like what to cover, right? Journalism is this kind of important function. I see it as having three different fundamental pieces to it.

One is the basic verification of facts, right? It’s like, did something happen? Did the event happen, did it not happen, right? The next layer up is selective facts, like which facts are actually important for us to pay attention to in the world, right? And the top one is really like why does this matter? It’s editorialization, like why is this important for us to pay attention to? And what I felt like I was watching in real time was that the selective interpretation of facts that the sourcing pool that editors and journalists were using to start trying to kind of find nuggets of stories, they started to trend towards the outrageous, they were finding the stuff that would make people the most mad, right? You might see this in a headline and a story in which the headline will be, people are angry about X, right? You said, well, people are angry about X, wow, this is important, I should read why they. angry about X and then you look at what they’re actually sourcing for the quote unquote people that are angry about X, and it will be a Twitter user, maybe two, that have, you know, some 20 followers that a journalist was able to kind of go in and find they kind of spun a story out of almost nothing online and wrote a whole article about it, which is terrible if you’re you’re trying to get a proportional understanding of what people are actually angry about out there. And that’s just one strategy of many that are now available to every journalistic institution or traditionally journalistic institution.

00:09:36 - Speaker 2: For me, the first article of yours that I read that I think got a good bit of traction was titled This Is How Your Fear and Outrage are being sold for profit. Where you kind of broke a lot of this down, and I think nowadays as part of the mainstream discussion, especially with something like, for example, this Netflix documentary, the Social dilemma, yeah, I think we have more cultural awareness of this now, but at the time, for me it was a real eye opener, even being someone that was in technology that you were kind of breaking down the mechanisms, just sort of shining a light on exactly how You’re being emotionally activated or even emotionally manipulated and why that’s good for these media companies in this new era, and then you went from there on to a series of other articles including the dark psychology of social networks, which I think was a cover story in The Atlantic with Jonathan Hay, is that right? Getting to write with a high profile author, which is a whole other probably interesting topic to discuss.

Your latest article, which is how to stop misinformation before it gets shared, collaboration with Renee Dresta Unwired, which talks a bit about this kind of friction and so to me these paint and you’ve written other stuff, but if you read the three of these, and of course we’ll link them in the show notes, they show a building up of what feels to me like a thesis or a sense of trying to understand or grapple with the societal effects of this new information technology that defines our world now.

00:10:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like that’s right.

So the second piece you mentioned, the piece with Jonathan Haidt at NYU, he’s a professor of moral psychology, and we did a almost a forensic unpacking of what happened between the years of 2009 and 2012 in terms of the feature sets that were implemented at these various companies, invented then copied, then propagated across our traditional social media kind of ecosystem.

And what that did, what these specific features did, and it’s a few features that we very much understand today as being kind of core to our information exchange, but having a simple one click share to send a piece of information out to your entire network. Likes, right, like fundamental likes and visible metrics associated with that content. And then the ability to algorithmically sort of feed. There’s kind of three pieces of the puzzle have dramatically changed the types of information that we are now seeing on a regular basis. And like each one of these features in themselves are great. I appreciate both the ability to reach a massive audience. I appreciate the signal that comes from knowing whether or not people are liking a thing. And I appreciate the ability to curate the crazy massive stream of information that’s not coming my way, but each one of them has kind of conditional failure modes that I think we need to understand and reckon with because Having access to what’s essentially kind of the brain stem of humanity now, right? If anyone can put something out there and anyone can make something go viral, there are tendencies within the system now towards what Daniel Conman would call System one, right? System one thinking being this emotional, reactive, impulsive, kind of instantaneous, fast thinking. Right, which is one of these partitions in our brains, and the other being System 2, which is this more reflective, deliberative, slower processing and thinking, that the entirety of the architecture of the internet in its current form, it’s built for maximum speed and morality, it’s orienting towards system one. And that I think can be seen in so many institutions and so many changes and so much of the zeitgeist of our exchange now is in this kind of emotional space.

00:13:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that’s a great tee up not only for our topic today, which is the promise and peril of social media, but also what the muse tie-in is because a lot of what we talk about on this podcast is product design, but it tends to be more tools for thought, productivity, kind of more private things versus these public sphere, you know, political and social discussions.

But I think there is, when you talk about that System 1, System 2 brain, a big part of what we want to see Muse do or part of what our mission with our product and the company is, is to help us all activate our system two brains more reliably.

Then when we realize there’s something important we need to think about whether it’s in life, work, social issues, what have you. that there’s a way to kind of remove yourself from that energy and those outrage circles or even just the heightened emotional, more primal state and go to a more thoughtful, reflective, slower thinking because we believe at least as complex as the world is today, you sort of need that in order to really make good decisions.

00:14:30 - Speaker 3: Yeah, in addition to the System one versus System 2 access, I think there’s an axis of de novo ideas versus remixed ideas, and I think basically all good ideas are social, they’re remixed, they’re transmitted from other people and developed that way. And obviously, social media is an incredibly powerful technology potentially for facilitating that. And so we use the product right now, it’s quite single player and it’s focused on developing content. You bring in content and you build from there, but I think if you look at the broader process of thinking and developing good ideas and coming to useful conclusions, the social ecosystem is so important.

00:15:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I have my own, I think there’s a lot of creative people do.

Twitter is certainly my social media of choice.

I’ve heard it described as sort of the social network for ideas, and if you’re a person that’s, you know, looking to seed ideas in your work in your life, I think Twitter is the right place for that, but it has these two sides, which is it can be a source of incredible ideas. Inspiration, connections with new people. Certainly that’s where my professional network is. I’ve met many amazing people, including a lot of the guests for this podcast, but have just had the seeds of good ideas so often. I mean, there’s a reason why we want to add a lot of media cards to use, but one of the first ones we did was a Twitter card precisely because bringing in a thought provoking tweet. As a foundation for some deeper thinking is a very natural thing. But the flip side of this is what you’re talking about these loops for journalistic outlets and individuals as well, seeking that the sweet, sweet dopamine hit from those likes, right, and you discover that those controversial or outrage generating things or things that just do those emotional System one activations get you. More of that positive feedback and so then you’re sort of inclined to do that and it just creates a setting where you have these kind of information pathologies and negative loops and yeah, it sort of is very counter to the thoughtful, having good ideas, focusing on your work. So there’s this duality, there’s these two sides of it that I feel are equally strong.

00:16:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s really important. As you spoke about how the general zeitgeist has kind of absorbed some of these memes about the internet being a place that prioritizes outrage and the people tend to kind of understand.

The problems associated with this now, there’s, you know, a lot of great content out there and a lot of talking heads that speak about the ills of technology.

I do think that the hyperbole around it is actually kind of a big problem. I think that if you’re too hand wavy about what the problems are, then it actually doesn’t help us solve them. It doesn’t help us build better tools, doesn’t help us fix the tools we have. I think it actually just is pretty detrimental to the conversation as a whole.

00:17:21 - Speaker 2: Right, so there’s this progression where I don’t know in the Mid late 2000s, it was the sense that this up and coming new information world was unmitigated good, kind of a sort of exuberance that in hindsight seems naive.

Then sometime around the time you’re writing these first articles, 2016, 2017, 2018, there’s a few folks like yourself that are kind of raising the flags and society struggling to figure out, wait, what happened here, things are changing, maybe in a way we don’t like, it seems related to this new technology, you know, what’s going on.

And then you come to today, and again I do feel there is a more mainstream sense that OK, social media is this powerful technology, certainly these internet giants in general wield a lot of power.

It does seem sometimes boiled down to uh Mark Zuckerberg is the devil, if we can get in from the front of Congress and slap enough regulations on him, then everything will be OK.

It feels like a vast overciplication that feels like this is a to borrow one of Mark’s way of talking about things that Society needs to metabolize the change, and that’s going to take some time, and we need to thrash around and try some weird stuff, and maybe some of the solutions are governmental, some of them are technology product solutions, like some of these ones you’ve proposed in your various articles here, and some of them are personal, right, how we choose to cultivate our information diets and make good choices that will allow us to get the most out of this brave new world of information without being maybe sucked down its worst rabbit holes.

00:18:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I don’t know if either of you had a chance to catch the tech hearings that happened a couple of weeks ago.

00:18:54 - Speaker 3: I feel like there’s one of these every month, so I feel like, yeah, totally.

00:18:59 - Speaker 2: I’ve seen some of them, at least for understanding what happened there, I rely on people making dunk tweet jokes.

00:19:06 - Speaker 2: You’re part of the problematic, and then I extract what happened based on that, yes, yes I am.

00:19:09 - Speaker 1: What was very clear to me, and I took notes of how many different members of the house had their own personal grievance about technology.

I’d made a distinct list of 18 different areas that were very much not related, other than the fact that they involved Facebook, just this whole kind of panopoly of different grievances that they had and what came to mind for me is this. This is not just technology’s fault, right? Like we’re just inhabiting technology more and so we’re bringing all of our problems with us, right? We’re now just living in these digital spaces more and more and more, so we’re bringing a huge portion of these problems with us.

Now that doesn’t reduce the importance of focusing on the tools and the specifics of the tools, but I think it is important to remember that humans are complex and our problems are complex naturally. If we add a whole new layer of kind of virtual existence onto that, we’re going to end up with a bunch of new problems and also all of the old ones manifesting in a different way. So I think it’s just important to recognize that a lot of these issues are things that we’re bringing into the fore with us.

00:20:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, part of the concern would be technology is an amplifier for some of our natural sort of bad traits. We’ve made the comparison before to food, for example, where we came to this realization that a lot of fast food is actually quite unhealthy and feeding into a lot of health problems in the modern world, but that’s because it was sort of optimized to push our sweet and savory and salty buttons because these are Tendencies we crave these things in our natural environment, but we’ve found a way to kind of like supercharge what you get in a way that has these negative effects.

And I feel social media has a lot of that. For example, follower counts, I think is what I hear folks talk about, which is like we have this natural status seeking behavior and getting a certain number of followers shows that you’re, I don’t know, important, you have prestige, people care about you or something like that. And so then that turns into weird status games maybe of trying to game the system or just treating people differently based on their follower accounts or whatever and you know one question there is should we hide that because that basically just brings out some bad qualities in us.

On the other hand, will people find other ways to seek that same because again it’s not the technology that’s something that’s inside us as humans is to kind of be status seeking.

00:21:31 - Speaker 3: And just to elaborate here and to further motivate, I think there are a couple other dynamics that are making it even more important.

So there’s this baseline dynamic of there’s like a very high powered social technology and people have always talked to each other and written stuff down, but now just like a lot more of that with much sharp edges. OK, that’s kind of what we’ve talked about so far.

There’s an additional dynamic that I would call the revolt of the public na. This is the, I think his name is Martin Gary thesis, he wrote an amazing book about how basically people able to talk to each other outside the confines of traditional hierarchical structures is highly threatening to those structures, and this would be like traditional journalism, bureaucracies, higher education. And those institutions correctly perceived this huge existential risk, so there’s some kind of fighting for their own lives happening there.

And then another angle is a lot of the most contentious stuff has to deal with politics, and the reality is that politics, especially federal politics, play a much bigger role in people’s lives. Now than it has in the past, you know, government spending is what, 40% of the economy plus all the indirect impacts like people are correctly interested in what’s happening there. So these three things stacking on top of each other and creating huge stakes. So it’s not surprising to my mind that people have strong feelings about this stuff.

00:22:42 - Speaker 1: There’s a great article, a Paul Graham article from, it was 2007, 2008, the golden age of Paul Graham essays,

00:22:50 - Speaker 1: so to speak, yes. About how to have better arguments online. One of the anecdotes that he has in there is that people are now just accessing more information.

There are more opportunities to collide online. There are more opinions that we’re being exposed to, and because of that, people are going to be arguing more, right? There’s this kind of natural trend towards increased opportunities to disagree in a public forum. And there are certain things that happen in a public forum when we’re disagreeing and the kind of ergonomics of that space or the design of that space online will push people towards a particular kind of disagreement or a particular kind of agreement potentially depending on how that space is designed.

One of the things that we speak to in our Atlantic piece is this kind of idea of what’s called moral grandstanding.

If you imagine us having this conversation right now, this is a great example. We’re having this conversation, this is over Zoom. I can actually like see your faces, we’re having interaction, right? There’s not an abstraction layer, you’re responding to me, I’m responding to you, I can see your eyes. If I say something mean to you, if I disagreement with you. There’s a desire that I have to reduce any kind of empathetic stress or sadness I might cause you. I’m not going to call you a name because I’m actually getting some kind of empathetic response from you in this physical stimulus that’s coming back to me, this visual stimulus is coming back to me. In the digital world that’s hidden from view, right? So you’re abstracted out into this profile pic, if you even have a profile pic, you’re just a kind of abstract creature out there. Make sure you’re even a creature in my mind, right? You might just be a thought in my mind that I’m angry about. But not only that, there is this additional layer in most of our social spaces online in which, I mean you can imagine us having this conversation live with An audience of people around us, right? And like an audience of people around us live that were rating us and there was a number attached to our faces that was going up or down depending on the quality of our arguments and what was actually happening in real time.

00:24:56 - Speaker 2: I already feel anxious with that description.

00:24:59 - Speaker 1: It would fundamentally. Change the content of our conversation in a drastic way, and it would not push us towards conclusions between us or attempting to find truth. It would actually push us towards the approval of the people watching us and that is what a large portion of our social media platforms are designed around right now.

00:25:19 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, this kind of gets into the personal information, hygiene and personal information, gardening.

00:25:26 - Speaker 2: Yes, so Tobias, in your articles you often are speaking essentially to the platform creators, you’re saying, OK, Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, here are features you could build or maybe users could demand those features, but essentially change the tool in order to have better social dynamics, and absolutely I think the tool evolution, we’re seeing that happening already, you describe a lot of that in this kind of friction concept in your most recent Wired article, and I’m sure that’s going to be ongoing for a while.

But for me there’s also this question of to what degree I’m not working on a social media tool, so therefore, what actions can I take in my life and I’m curious how you see the balance between what we need to do here is kind of demand changes from these tool creators versus we can make choices in our own life and for me, part of the value in your article. has been, I have a more critical eye or have more self-awareness about my own how I engage with social media and how those things trigger my primal emotions and with that awareness, I can then make maybe better choices about making sure I get what I want out of these tools and avoid the negative spirals.

00:26:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a really important balance, I think, to be made for, you know, with the designers of the space versus the things that we can do as individuals, and I, I do think there’s a lot of things that we can do as individuals, fortunately. It depends on the particular type of problem that you’re facing online, but in general, if we’re looking at it in the context of like the System One, System 2 dynamics. Usually, if I am triggered by something I see online, a good kind of mental model for me is to try to force myself in those moments where I feel the desire to basically like rage tweet back at someone or share a thing that I am incensed about, right? And that’s one of the big ones is just kind of propagating highly emotional content. And you know, not all emotional content is bad, right? Emotions have a purpose in our lives, right? I think it’s like important to recognize that they spur us to action and bring us passion.

00:27:22 - Speaker 2: I’m doing what I’m doing in my life because I’m passionate and have strong emotions about those things.

00:27:30 - Speaker 1: Exactly, exactly. So emotions have reasons and they’re kind of, you know, internal heuristics for us to determine what is important on a day to day basis.

It’s like they’re helpful directors for what we should focus on, and you know, biologically and socially they have kind of foundational adaptive purposes in our lives.

The problem is that in, you know, talking my application in these digital spaces, we’re actually taking some of these emotions which are kind of meant to pass through our bodies and just like and be noted and then direct us towards a specific action. We’re encapsulating those in little time capsules, right, we’re textualizing them. And then we’re sending them out on their way into a network to go on and kind of trigger other people and have a life of their own as they’re ping ponging around our networks and causing other people to be emotionally activated, and they kind of live in a semi-permanent state, even though initially an emotion is just kind of meant to pass through our system.

00:28:20 - Speaker 2: I hadn’t even thought about the sort of responsibility to others by passing on emotional content. I tend to think in terms of again how can tools be improved, but then how can I make changes to my own information tooling and sort of managing those processes in my life.

Mark and I talked about this quite a bit in our previous podcast on what I call the information age. There, I think we were focused more on just the raw quantity of information that we’re attuned.

Through most of human history, we lived in time where information was scarce and so we seek to get as much news, like even the word news implies, yeah, like what’s what’s the latest? I want to be in the know, I wanna be connected, it’s important to know what’s going on, and now we live in a time of it’s such incredible information abundance that actually the problem is curating and calling all that out, but Mark, I’m curious, you know, expanding on what we talked about there, I feel like you have a pretty good Set of approaches for cultivating your own information ecosystem, putting it together with some of what we’re talking about here, what are like techniques that work for you or you recommend for others.

00:29:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s a lot here. One quick thing on the like emotional front with weird things coming at you on Twitter and stuff, I adopted a simple practice of whenever something gives me bad vibes on Twitter, I just block, or, you know, turn off we tweets or mute or whatever is appropriate the situation. So I found like, you know, life’s too short for bad vibes coming through of your own choosing, right? You have total control of what you see on Twitter, just choose to close that stuff off.

00:29:49 - Speaker 2: I feel like the immediate devil’s advocate on that is there are bad things in the world and it’s not helpful to not be exposed to problems.

00:29:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s not like things that you disagree with or things that are bad that are happening, it’s things like bad faith and People being obnoxious and stuff like that. And it’s the default that you continue to see people that you’ve previously followed, and for a long time I just had this out for whatever reason, I wasn’t inclined to change that. I just kind of accrete followees over time, but then I took more responsibility for my timeline and things are much better now.

And that in general is a big theme for me with personal information management.

Like no one’s gonna save you. In particular, the algorithms are definitely not going to save you.

If you just go to facebook.com and click on whatever’s at the top, you’re gonna have a bad time. Likewise, if you just go to like washingtonpost.com and read everything there, you’re not gonna be very well informed. So you need to take a lot of responsibility. For your own information ecosystem, and that’s why I like things like Twitter, podcasts, email newsletter, niche Discords and Reddits. These are places where you opt into individual small creators, curators, communities who you believe have good insights and relevance to you. By the way, I just realized, Tobias, when you were talking about the three like pathological features of social media, that podcasts are kind of uniquely resistant to them, so podcasts can’t be retweeted. They haven’t really been subjected to algorithmic feeding.

00:31:12 - Speaker 2: Spotify is working on it, I think, but yeah, so far.

00:31:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, but mostly they’ve been quite resistant. I think that’s an important dynamic.

00:31:19 - Speaker 2: We see that on the side of being podcast creators or what have you, which is, it’s actually hard to market or spread a podcast and happily and quick aside, I’m very thankful for everyone who’s tweeted out links or referred us to their friends, but yeah, it’s just a podcast can’t go viral, that’s all there is to it. It can grow pretty slowly and steadily and organically over time. And it’s a downside in some ways, but actually really a benefit in the sense and probably why I’m drawn to podcasts often as a place to get more called System two inputs into my life.

00:31:52 - Speaker 1: Definitely. I do think there’s a distinction between velocity and virality that’s important to make, right? So like a good book can go viral, a podcast can go viral, it just will go viral slowly. spread and I think that’s actually kind of a goal is to have potentially like a low velocity, a high virality thing in which people are like, oh, you should listen to this, you know, like a word of mouth recommendation goes a long way, especially for something like podcasts. Mark, what you’re talking about, you know, your personal curation systems, I find that to be so critically important these days. I like to think about algorithms as kind of like a dog. It’s something that is like an intelligence that has a very simple understanding of what it’s trying to do for you, right? And it’s using limited inputs to determine what it is it’s trying to serve you on a regular basis, so the same way you might train a dog. I aggressively, for instance, train my YouTube algorithm. It’s constantly serving me up things on a regular basis and probably once a week I have to go through and say, I don’t like this, I don’t like this, I don’t like this. And as a result, I get, and I use this kind of personal heuristic, which is like, how do I feel after watching this video? How do I feel after going through my feed here and checking in with yourself, taking a moment to recognize, I think there’s. The regret test, very basic test. Like if you regret your experience on this tool, then you need to change the tool or get off the tool, right? Unfortunately, that is something that we can do. So I have aggressively called and trained my YouTube feed and now most of the time, you know, again, with this kind of weekly training regimen, it becomes a beautiful source of inspirational educational content that I really get a tremendous amount of value from.

00:33:35 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think on this personal curation stuff, you need to be really willing to go against the grain, because the grains in the wood here are leading down to places that are bad and in many cases just misinformed or wrong, especially with like the kind of complex topics of the day, for various systemic reasons, the stuff that you get in the prestige outlets isn’t very good.

And so you really got to go around and crawl and find the weird Twitter accounts. I’ve joked that on many complex topics like the recent pandemic, a lot of the very best information on the internet came from cartoon Avy pseudonymous Twitter accounts. I mean that 100% seriously. So you need to be willing to embrace that kind of weirdness in your own personal information curation if you’re gonna want to have good outcomes, I think.

00:34:22 - Speaker 1: So what you’re speaking to there is really interesting because you’re absolutely right, there’s been both like a decline in trust of journalism at large, right, that’s a big, big problem kind of we’re facing right now is that we don’t feel like we can trust historical institutions that we used to rely upon for this basic validation of perspective and worldview that, you know, we used to have kind of the forced to feed, essentially, right, we had a forced algorithm, which was major news and media, that was our content.

00:34:47 - Speaker 2: There’s 3 channels. They all kind of say the same thing. You can pick one based on whether you like the color of the presenter’s tie, but they’re basically giving you the same information, like forced consensus essentially about what is factual and what is not, yeah.

00:34:56 - Speaker 1: And so as the internet has kind of detonated and exploded this traditional media hierarchy, it’s also along with it, detonated this trust network that we had, right, of trust and specific authorities, and for a lot of people, that’s laid bare and especially during the coronavirus, is this kind of proxy network of what I call reality anchors, right, we used to have kind of media anchors, which We looked for, we had the Walter Cronkites and the Dan Rathers who we looked to for specific points of reality, how this happened, this didn’t happen. Now everyone kind of has their own proxy network of reality anchors, right? It might be the follower on Instagram, there’s the anti-vaxxer, it might be the IDW intellectual dark web thought leader, you know, it could be any broader group of humans, but there’s a really tremendously on display because In a way that they weren’t previously I think that’s laid bare a lot of the problems of our epistemic environment now because we no longer have a specific kind of source of consensus that we can look at collectively. We instead have this decentralized individuated network of reality anchors that we point to.

00:36:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and it’s super messy, which I think circles back to a lot of your work because a lot of these so-called reality anchors, they’re not based in reality, and we’re asking every individual to come up with their own notion of reality and inevitably, most of them are wrong and all of them are at least different. And so what do you do with that? It’s an extraordinary mess, not an easy answer.

00:36:24 - Speaker 2: Right, yeah, I find myself conflicted about, on one hand, the centralized force consensus, as you called it, I think that left a lot of important viewpoints out in the dark and Living in a world where I do have access to much greater diversity of opinion and ideas and perspectives, I think I once heard the, it was Megan McCurle that described the internet as a quote freak liberation front. And I like that because I’m interested in lots of weird things and weird things were sort of hard to find when you did live in a world of broadcast media, there’s only a few channels, there’s only a few newspapers and what have you, and I’m basically much happier in a world where I do have access to much nichier things, but then yes, we lose that shared consensus, shared understanding of reality.

And I would not have thought this previously, but I think in past years I’ve seen where in a way there is something to be said for whole society basically agreeing about the basic facts of reality, even if some of those facts are actually wrong, but if we agree together we can at least make decisions together, whereas if we have a totally different view of reality, we are paralyzed. And an action maybe is worse in some ways than taking action on a false understanding that that then perhaps in the future you can correct as you realize, I don’t know, for example, that the concept of the food pyramid is ridiculous.

00:37:48 - Speaker 1: Totally, you know, if you look at history and if you go back.

Far enough, you can see there’s a correlation between our ability to organize in the larger and larger groups with our ability to kind of understand each other and share common cause, cooperate better, share good information together collectively, that kind of thing.

Um, good information, qualified good share information together at all, right, share ideas and myths together and we kind of emerged from this fog of, we think about misinformation being a new problem, but we kind of emerged from this fog of misinformation that was actually really just kind of endemic in society, right? Like we used to believe crazy, crazy things, you just have to scratch the surface. of history, you don’t have to go back that far to see that there was just this kind of constant barrage of falsehoods or half truths that would pretty much become accepted truths, right, commonly accepted truths for a long period of time. You probably remember a handful of these from your childhood, maybe even, right, which like a Ouija board might summon the devil or a story about aliens or something, but we had this like really strong. Consensus forced consensus mechanism in place to kind of keep everyone on the same page, but I think the natural state of human exchange is much more oriented towards misinformation than it is towards fidelity and truth, and I think that’s important that what we’ve done with the internet is just kind of backspaced to a previous era in which misinformation was emergent and common, right?

00:39:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that brings to mind to me what they call the yellow journalism era. We talked about clickbait headline titles, but in fact there was a version of that for when they were selling sort of one off newspapers by the newspaper person, probably a young man standing on a corner just yelling the headline, and there were these patently. Ridiculous headlines about you know we’ve gone to war, other things have happened because they just wanted to sell papers basically and I think eventually journalism settled on a better model that was more kind of oriented around longer term useful truths rather than one off attention grabbing headlines. But yeah, to say that that’s new to this era would be quite incorrect.

00:39:56 - Speaker 1: I’ve been especially fascinated with that particular era of when we basically began to use advertising to propagate journalism, right? So the era of, it was actually the era before yellow journalism. There’s this whole century in the 1800s in which we kind of figured out that you could sell ads with newspapers. And in that process, you could also make a lot of money by making sensational claims.

The New York Sun was the first paper to do this in the early 1800s, and they began their whole business in this whole kind of enterprise of ad-based journalism by literally making up fake stories and propagating fake stories on the corner with the guys hacking it and getting people riled up about stuff. There’s a story about animals escaping the zoo and marauding and killing people that they put in the stories, extremely irresponsible journalism. That like caused a mob to go out and try to find these animals and put them down because they read it in the paper and they thought it was real, which is literally just a falsehood, just an entirely made up story that they wrote to sell papers. And the years after that, there was a story about bat people on the moon that there was astronomical observations of bat people living on the moon, life on other planet, that was a sensation, sold a lot of papers and you know, kind of caused this crazy confusion about life on other planets that was a hugely popular hit.

00:41:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it also makes me think of George Orwell and the War of the Worlds broadcast and just yeah, the power of media, particularly when it’s new, I think maybe we build some, I don’t know if it’s resistance or just awareness, ability to separate and say like, well, because I hear something on the radio, doesn’t mean it’s true or because I see it on the TV doesn’t mean it’s true, and maybe we’re still in. era for a lot of these internet technologies where, well, certainly I hope people realize that when you see something on the internet, it may not be true, but maybe we haven’t yet developed these antibodies or coping techniques for you see an outrageous tweet and you immediately reach for the retweet or the reply button and we haven’t quite developed the better practices for managing that.

00:41:56 - Speaker 1: I think the word is antibodies. I think that’s a great way of thinking about it like a cultural antibody against the thing.

The way that changed in that era in the mid 1800s, it was through this process of professionalization that was actually also market driven. It wasn’t like the government got together and was like, we’re going to tell you what is true, what is not true, but it was this process of consumers learning that they couldn’t really trust specific papers and they could trust other papers, right? So in the New York. Newspaper scene that was the sun and these other papers became kind of like trash papers, you know, you fool me once, I’ll believe you, you fool me twice. I’m definitely not going to buy you again, right? And one of the papers that tacked up the brainstem as opposed to down the brainstem was the New York Times, and they actually started to build a reputation around actually reporting. facts and being consistent about that and being trustworthy.

If you think about it as a little bit like an iterated prisoner’s dilemma for us and accurate information, right, in a world in which there’s nothing but crazy outrageous headlines, month over month, you’re going to learn to try to focus on the things that are verifiable and reputations come to matter. They actually are built over time.

00:43:09 - Speaker 2: It does seem like the value of news is in it being true.

It gives you information about how to navigate your world, you know, in the previous, more pre-civilization time news that there’s a dangerous bear prowling around outside the village is really useful for keeping yourself safe if it’s true, but if you’re spending much of time avoiding bears that aren’t there. You’re just draining energy on something that’s not valuable.

Now I will argue that a lot of our news and information consumption is fundamentally entertainment nowadays. I think the degree to which political news is essentially a kind of entertainment kind of following your favorite sports team kind of thing, and I think that’s fine, but at least it seems like in theory, bad information. or incorrect information doesn’t help you navigate the world and has a maladaptive effect and pretty quickly you’re going to see, OK, I made decisions in my life based on this incorrect information, therefore my life went less well than it could otherwise and then eventually you’re going to want to turn that around and get true information.

00:44:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s an important point.

00:44:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s very much the case. Like, I don’t think we’re going back to the world of mainstream journalism as the purveyor of verified facts. Even entities like the New York Times are already on the train of entertainment and aligned analysis, let’s call it, and they’re moving even harder to that model now as they catch up with substack.

And so the question then becomes, where are we actually gonna get these true facts, which are the sort of public good, and once the fact is out there, you can’t charge for it. So who’s actually going to provide it, and it’s a very tough question and right now the honest answer is that it’s almost no one, so you kind of have to do it for yourself.

And we’re starting to see now people can fill this hole a little bit by becoming named individuals who have a secured. attached to them personally, and that way you can bootstrap up into something that you can trust in the way that you can’t trust a large institution because it can launder and transform reputations, right? So it’s pretty gnarly out there right now. And I think it’s important just to be honest about that and to expect that you’re going to have to navigate that. And furthermore, that the whatever new equilibrium we reach isn’t going to look like the old world. So be ready for that too.

00:45:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. The tools that we have now.

And this might be a good moment to segue into my most recent article just quickly about friction, just like there are ways that we can potentially reorient the system to at least trend towards accurate information versus falsehoods, right? If you look at the trends of misinformation right now, it occupies the same reach as a traditional media broadcast, right? Some viral mistruths can go just as far and as fast.

To a wide audience as traditional media broadcasts where they can reach millions of people, you know, Pandemic was a great example of that, 12 million people that saw it.

So potentially there’s a concept of friction, which is basically throttling misinformation as it spreads through a network and kind of reducing just the inherent capacity for virality across the board, right? So WhatsApp did this, they reduced the net number of possible shares. They reduced the number of groups that you could actually share a specific message to, right, and they just throttled that down. I forgot what the final number was, but they basically just, I think it was, they throttled down to 5 groups from infinite groups essentially, so you could before just copy and paste a message into as many different WhatsApp groups as you wanted to be before. You wanted to get, to get your message into and they just throttled that down and that fundamentally improved the speed at which misinformation could potentially travel, can still travel, but it just travels more slowly and is less impactful. And so I think that shifting things towards a slightly slower propagation system can actually dramatically improve the types of misinformation we’re responding to on a regular basis.

00:46:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think as we’ve discussed, we’ve already seen some evidence for that in the different types of discussions you get in the different mediums. So again, the ones that I find most compelling these days are podcasts and email newsletters and small Twitter accounts that you can’t quote to a podcast, and that’s in many respects that feature or not a bug. I’m more optimistic about those types of structural approaches than content-based approaches, cause the content-based approaches is so fraught, and you’re back to the oracle problem of what’s actually true versus not, and I’m sure people are gonna try that and continue to try it, but yeah, I do think the structural approach is more promising.

00:47:27 - Speaker 1: Definitely, and there’s The problem of censorship and kind of the rights of saying what you could say, you know, Reneeres, my co-author on the most recent piece, she has this other article and this letter saying, which is the freedom of reach is not the same thing as freedom of speech, right, which I think is a really important distinction when we’re talking about this stuff, because, yes, like you do have the ability and the right to say whatever you want, but virality is not a right. OK, yeah, you don’t have the right to reach hundreds of millions of people with whatever you want.

00:47:57 - Speaker 2: Well, looking forward to the future, Tobias. What do you see the solutions potentially being? Is it individual information curation? Is it these companies that run these products, making these feature changes? Is it government regulation and involvement, or is it something else? Where does a happier future for our relationship with social media, with information spreading, with virality, how do we get there?

00:48:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I really think it’s a mix of both, it’s both thoughtful design changes on the platform side to help us make better decisions and better defaults, to have better defaults about the types of information we’re regularly exposed to.

And then I think as we’re speaking, this kind of cultural antibodies piece of it, it’s like, it’s really important for us as individuals to be aware of the information ecosystem that we’re living within.

And to approach stuff with good faith skepticism, if that makes sense, and to really try to make decisions about what we’re sharing consciously and to try to push ourselves, I think, to a more reflective state.

As opposed to this more impulsive state, and I think that’s a big piece of it, you know, a quick anecdote about when I’m triggered by something online, I will invariably, if I feel the desire to reach for the retweet button or the rage tweet, I will take 4 deep breaths before I do anything. And in that moment, just that small act of taking. 4 deep breaths will usually allow for my emotional reaction to dissipate in such a way that it feels like a much more healthy thing I’m about to say or act I’m about to make online.

I think that just for deep breaths would go a long way in improving the type of internet we inhabit if everyone can do something like that.

00:49:37 - Speaker 2: Couldn’t agree more. Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write to us on Twitter at @museapphq or via email, hello at museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. And Tobias, loving all the work you’re doing on this, and if I’m not mistaken, you’ve got a book coming down the pipe here somewhere.

00:49:59 - Speaker 1: Am I correct? That’s right, yes, book is due out next year. It’s about outrage on the internet, how to navigate this new strange digital world, and how to make our digital tools better stewards of our humanity.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Pricing is uniquely susceptible to getting gridlocked. Everyone has opinions about pricing, as they can and should. It tends to be an emotional topic. There usually is not a team or a person whose full time job it is to do pricing, unlike product design or product engineering, and it often takes more effort than you think or realize.

00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse, the company, and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, and my colleague Leonard Zaburski. Hi. And Leonard, you are a longtime member of the Muse team, you are the design powerhouse behind all the lovely things that people I think are familiar with, but it’s your first time on the podcast here, so maybe you could just quickly tell us about your background, what was your journey that brought you to Muse.

00:01:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I started about 2 years ago with MS and I actually came from studying interface design in Potsdam near Berlin here and just had done some freelancing, basically found out that wasn’t really for me and was looking for something else. So I saw that I can switch design memo you posted about news. And yeah, we kind of started working together and sort of just worked on going from a prototype into a real product.

00:01:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if I’m not mistaken, maybe Mark originally found you through two works you published. One is Desktop Neo, which is sort of a rethinking of desktop operating systems for kind of more modern productivity, which obviously is quite on point for us. Then you have another done one called the Cloudfall, which I think is a bit more about consumer data, how apps could potentially in a hypothetical world kind of give users more control over their data and privacy while also giving you a lot of the benefits of the aggregation. I’ll link to both of those in the show notes.

00:02:01 - Speaker 1: The other side of the origin story is whenever I’m working on a hard problem, I like to search for the prior art on it to see what other people have done and to learn from that. And so back in the early days of Muse, when we were thinking about the core design problems, I went into DuckDuckGo and typed like direct manipulation touch interface, and one of the very best things I saw was the work Mener had done like, oh man, we got to email this guy and see if we can get him to come work with us and one thing led to another.

00:02:27 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I think it was actually really good timing. You had just read the Ink & Switch piece on the Muse Studio for ideas at that point, still very much a research prototype, we were still thinking about even whether to try to commercialize it, so it was maybe hot on your mind, so the timing was very good.

00:02:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I was actually really surprised after I published both of those essays, like how much feedback you can get and how well it actually works to basically publish something where you’re working on exactly the thing you’re interested in, which maybe, you know, isn’t something that a lot of people are interested in, but sort of the more niche it is, the more feedback you get from the people that also care about the same sort of stuff. And so it actually works out really well to find sort of the people you want to work with.

00:03:11 - Speaker 2: Exactly right. Find your tribe by that weird thing that only you and 20 other people in the world care about, and if you publish that and put it on the internet, you can all kind of find each other.

So our topic today is pricing, and this is a big one for a lot of reasons. So Muse just launched new pricing, we kind of call it pricing V2 internally, and just really briefly, you know, I’ll link the new pricing page and we’re gonna write a memo on it, that sort of thing, but basically we’re going from having one price, which was $100 a year, to two tiers of membership, a pro plan that remains $100 but then kind of a starter plan that’s $40 and then you can also pay for those on a monthly basis, so you can potentially get started for $4 a month.

And we’ll talk a little bit more about our journey there, but I think for me one of the most important framings on this is that pricing is incredibly important. It’s really important to your business. The stakes are very high, right, the right price and you can make a successful business, the wrong price either too low or too high, and you can basically fail. And furthermore, in my experience on this, because I’ve been involved in a number of teams setting prices for products, there’s no real playbook. I feel like almost any other type of product development, business work, particularly in the startup space.

Marketing, sales, engineering, design, there are playbooks and best practices and lots of material that you can find. There’s a few books and things on how to price your sass product or how to price your hourly rates as a consultant, but I found them pretty unsatisfying and it feels like a really just kind of.

And frontier and no one really knows how to do it, but it’s critically important to your business and it’s really important to your customers, obviously.

So I think that makes it a pretty rich topic and why I’m also really pleased we did manage to get the second iteration of pricing out because I’ve been on many teams that have done it and it’s hard, it’s hard because the stakes are high.

00:05:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and the context for Muse is that we were in a relatively unexplored part of the pricing IDMAs.

So if we go back to pricing V1, this is back in the early days of MUS, we had this aspiration to create a professional grade software product for.

The iPad and in order to do that, it would require a lot of development work and therefore we need to fund the business reasonably and so if you kind of do the math on this stuff, we realize that you realistically need a professional price for the business to work out and for us to be able to produce and maintain the software where professional prices caught on the order of $100 a year or $10 a month.

00:05:45 - Speaker 2: And I did some search on the priority there, it’s remarkably consistent, whether you look at something like Microsoft Office back when it was sold in a box, you know, it was $300 and you’d kind of need to buy a major new version about every 3 years, whether you go forward to today with SAS subscriptions, Photoshop, that sort of thing. Some things are higher, some things are lower, but that’s quite commonly, no matter how they package, it ends up being around that amount, again, for professional software, which is typically on the desktop or on the web.

00:06:14 - Speaker 1: Right, and that’s where the first big challenge came for us. There’s very well established precedent for pricing professional and especially enterprise products in the SAS model.

This is where your company uses ocean or whatever, and every seat in this app cost, I don’t know what notion is, but they’re almost all $10 + or minus $5 a month. I would bet notion is too. And the software is distributed in the usual fast model.

Now, for product reasons, we really want this to be an iPad native app and a pricing challenge there is that of course you need to sell that through the app store then and pricing the app store for professional product. has historically been almost nonexistent.

There are almost no products sold to the app store with a professional price. It’s much more dominated by consumer pricing, which might be free, it might be ad-based, or it might be consumption based, like a free to play game or a dating app or something. So a big question for us, a big risk for the business was can we actually deliver a professionally priced product for the iPad through the App Store. So we decided very early on to confront that question because it was a big risk and basically to try and see if it worked. And so that led us to pricing V1 which briefly was, there was one option, it was a one year membership for $99 or $99.99.

00:07:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and for the record, I’m not a big fan of the 99 cent trailing thingies. I know why psychologically that. Yeah, $399 seems like less than $4 but that’s not a choice because we sell through the app store, that’s imposed upon us by their system, so we end up with $99.99 dollars, but I tend to, you know, just refer to it as $100 when I am speaking informally.

00:07:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. So we had this one membership option for one year for $100 and we wanted to see to what extent that would land with the market.

00:08:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I remember when we first turned on sort of the paid product, which was very, I don’t know, nerve-wracking, exciting, but also nerve wracking, both because one we knew we were taking kind of a bold position to charge sort of a desktop product price for an iPad app.

Of course I believe the iPad can and should have great software. It’s an incredible piece of hardware and it seems a shame to me that there aren’t more really good professional tools for it. And so that’s part of our kind of whole hypothesis with this business. But yeah, we went to turn on the pricing, which was a little more than a year ago because we just had our first renewals come up and, you know, it really was this kind of bold experiment. We didn’t even have a monthly option, for example, and that was partially for simplicity, but it was partially to really see, OK, like if we really do this litmus test, does someone believe either the software today or more plausibly kind of the concept of what they think it could do for them is something they would pay this price for. And I remember turning it on and I thought that was very plausible that we would just get 0 people making a purchase, and pretty quickly we got our first few. I think our first few were kind of friends and family or investors or something like that just showing their support, which I appreciate and, you know, making sure our payment flow works and everything, but it wasn’t long after we turned it on that we got our first purchase from someone we didn’t even know who they were, they had never contacted support, you know, they just made a purchase and I ended up, you know, writing to some of those early people and basically kind of Not too pointedly, but kind of saying like, why did you buy this? Just to see if what they conceived, you know, what they thought they were buying or what was in their mind matched what we thought we were offering, but that was very promising. So even though early on, we’re basically still in the beta phase and we had a few users anyways, or pretty small number of active users. The fact that some of them wanted to purchase, and they wanted to purchase at this kind of unforgiving price, that didn’t even have the monthly option or whatever, that was a validation, that, yeah, we can do something in this range.

00:10:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I remember sort of prepping the team on what we should expect and look for, which was we’re really trying to get a non-zero number of non-affiliated customers to buy.

So it’s like excluding friends and family and investors, people who show up and believe in the software enough to pay in $100 and I say some small number because regardless of what price you charge, like if we charged 99 cents. A lot of people would say it’s too expensive. You’re always going to have a bunch of people saying that.

What you really need when you’re early on is, is there some non-zero evidence this has traction and then as you go on, you need to worry more about conversion rates and so on and so forth, and we’re starting to do more of that, but it was really, can we get some initial believers and I think we did.

00:10:39 - Speaker 2: And as a product person or just speaking to kind of the product management discipline generally, will you pay or actual proof that they will pay is one of the main ways you kind of seek validation for your product market fit hypothesis, because just liking something or being enthusiastic about it or thinking it’s cool or even using it, these are all good, but enthusiasm alone. There is an indicator, but it’s not enough. There’s something really, the rubber meets the road, or it really puts a point on it to say, OK, yeah, you like this, but enough to part with your hard earned cash for it, and that’s really an important moment in those early days, it’s less about, can you make enough money and just will people pay at all, because that’s an indicator that you’ve created something of value.

00:11:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that was also a huge motivation for the whole team to go from people saying, OK, this is nice, and you know, we did use the tests and people liked it, but it’s a different level of people actually start paying for the app, you know, then you’re actually working on a product and not on a research prototyping thing anymore.

00:11:46 - Speaker 2: Oh, I agree, yeah, I totally felt like a moment of growing up, maturing, things getting real, and also on the support side right now when someone writes in and we have like a little kind of plugin in our system where we can see if they’re a paying customer or not, and if they are, you know, of course we tend to give them priority support, particularly if they have a problem, and it wasn’t right away, but I remember the first day we had essentially an angry customer where something wasn’t working the way they wanted and Yeah, they were upset because they had parted with money for this and again, it’s just a very different dynamic when you’re in this business transaction. They might like your podcast or your cool vibe or your nice design article or whatever, but at the end, now they’re using your product to solve a real problem they have. In their personal life or their professional life or whatever, and if it’s not doing what they expected or what they want it to do, they might get upset and then you have an obligation to them and it’s just very different from, check out my cool research prototype or even my MVP that I’m letting you use for free.

So yeah, once we got that initial data of people would pay and they would pay this professional price, that was a good learning, but then from there, having been active for a year now and especially after we launched, there was kind of the steady trickle of beta users converting, but the launch was where, you know, the graph kind of started to change shape.

In a really nice way and we started to see, OK, there really is a business here, but in the meantime, you know, we knew this was just our first stab at pricing. We knew it was never going to be the end state and so we over the course of this year, and particularly post launch when the numbers became, you can start to see patterns when the numbers are bigger. I think we learned quite a few things and that’s what kind of motivated our let’s do a pricing V2 roll in the things we’ve learned because I think price is just like product you have to iterate on it to improve it. It’s hard to do for those previous mentioned reasons, the stakes. High, it’s emotional. People hate price changes if you have to do that, but I also think it’s critically important because the price being comfortable or accessible, having to be a fit for what people want is crucial, and you just won’t get there without iteration and experimentation.

00:13:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so we did notice some patterns with this V1 pricing.

There were, first of all, a friend of people who were happy to pay it, so that was good, stayed 0.0, and there were not surprisingly, a lot of people who were unwilling to pay the $100 a year price.

Now we expected most of that, of course. So you gotta drill in a little bit.

In particular, there’s a lot of comments that essentially implied that they would never pay anything for this type of software, which is fine, you know, it’s your life and your money, but that’s not something that we were gonna be able to help them with. In the near term.

But there were some more interesting cases. One group of cases is people who valued the software a lot, but have less ability to pay for various reasons. So students actually were a big group of this. A lot of students use and like Muse, but they’re in a different situation for most of the professionals who might otherwise use Muse.

Another one was people who were in different countries and for reasons of the local economy or the currency, the price as it was translated originally by Apple might not have been suitable. And then I think there were also some people who were not happy about or unwilling to do a subscription, which we should talk more about.

Then there were people who I think are open to the idea of using a product like Muse, but they were looking for a few more features.

I think the most common things there would be sync slash collaboration and just some more core features around richer data types and so on. So I think that roughly summarizes what we learned with the one.

00:15:07 - Speaker 2: And that point around folks for whom the price wasn’t accessible, students, maybe folks globally, that leads into, I think to me, one of the underlying principles here is we’re making the software because we want as many people as possible to use what we’re creating, right? We fancy ourselves artists or artisans or something like that. We’re making this to help people and I feel incredibly good and happy when I see people using what we’ve created to do interesting work.

But at the same time, we also have to make a sustainable business.

I like this, I think I’ve heard people say that, you know, money and cash flow for a business is kind of like oxygen for a person. You don’t live to breathe, but you definitely need oxygen if you want to keep living. That’s not the purpose of life, but it is a necessary sort of mechanism. So for us, we’re sort of looking for that happy balance where as many people as possible can use this software and get value from it, but also make a sustainable business, and that’ll lead into, yeah, some of these other topics we might talk about, but how we could, and what we hope the V2 pricing has done is to try to make it accessible to more people, not everyone, for sure, and I’m sure there will be a V3 and V4 down the road, but to me that was both one of the biggest things we learned and one of the big goals with the next iteration.

00:16:24 - Speaker 3: So when we actually ended up with pricing is a set of changes and maybe the most obvious one of those is the introduction of a cheaper plan, what we are calling the starter membership. So before we are yet, this single membership, $99 it gets you the full thing.

And now, the startup membership is less than half of that, and it has the same set of features, but it basically puts a limit on the number of cards you can have and the size boards can have.

And then the other thing we are doing is adding monthly pricing to those membership options.

So before, you would have to pay the yearly price upfront. And it turns out that a lot of people actually just want to pay monthly, and so we just support that.

00:17:08 - Speaker 2: And I will say that I think part of my motivation in having only the yearly before was you were a little bit sort of supporting our Kickstarter.

Or sort of helping fund development for something that you believed could be good and then now because we have a more mature product that you think it’s pretty well proven to solve a set of problems for a certain kind of person that you might want to subscribe for a couple of months and then that proves its value to you and you want to get the discount on the yearly plan, or maybe you just, you only have a need for a project for a couple of months and you just want to pay for the time when you’re getting value and not when you’re not.

And that fits better with, we’re less in this mode of aspirational, and onto we have a real product, it works really well, lots of people use it, lots of people get value from it, and I wanna open that up more.

00:17:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this concept of gradually getting people more and more involved in use is really key to our new pricing, yeah.

Before we kind of had this free trial option and we specifically said M as a free trial. And now we are kind of reframing that as, as the base version of MUS and specifically saying, OK, it’s not a trial anymore.

You can actually use this for months, basically, or even for years. And we have seen a lot of our users do that. And then, you know, many months after using the free version, they discover, OK, uses actually works for them now and they become a member. And maybe, you know, they become like a startup member at first and then a year later they can become a pro member. And that is sort of, I think what we really need to support with news and the prising.

00:18:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, before we asked you to make this pretty big leap of faith commitment, now we have a way to ease into things, and as it proves its value, you can use it more and pay for what you need, or if it’s not proving its value, you hopefully haven’t lost too much.

Notably the new base, what we’re not calling the free tier, that’s no different than the trial we had before. It’s still unlimited time, 100 cards, but I think when we first did that, I don’t know if we thought that maybe it was more limited, or maybe we knew it was pretty generous, but we kind of wanted to frame it as a trial to really say, you know, this is software you need to pay for, and I think we’ve gotten that message across and so now we’re softening a little. We’ve basically been framing them all along, but this is just kind of explaining it in a way that makes that a little more clear.

Depending on who you talk to, software subscriptions are seen as either the absolute savior of the software industry and just a great deal for both businesses that get to support their ongoing development and customers who can pay for just what they need when they need it and not have a big upfront cost for software that they may or may not. Use long term, or there’s many people who have a deep dislike that it feels like renting your software, you’re going to get tricked into paying when you don’t really need it, that you’re going to get locked out of your data somehow, that it’s just a really uncomfortable or unpleasant way to fund software development.

And then we have an additional wrinkle here with doing all this in the iOS App Store world, which inherits so much of the iPhone consumer ads supported data monetization world of things where the big apps on a phone are Facebook and TikTok, not productivity tools that you pay for, and so the iPad ends up sort of inheriting that, so. That’s a huge topic there, but I guess before we get into philosophy there, it’s worth talking about what we actually did on this pricing B2, which is what I like to call alumni mode. I don’t know that we actually call it that in the software at all. I’m not sure that phrasing appears anywhere.

00:20:39 - Speaker 1: I think that’s actually interesting because they basically didn’t need to think about it for the first year.

00:20:44 - Speaker 2: It’s true.

00:20:45 - Speaker 1: There’s actually been a whole series of these things.

00:20:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s many elements of the subscription model to talk about, but when it comes to that being locked out of your data and feeling like you’re being held hostage, and it’s a very reasonable thing to feel because so much of modern business models in general have to do with sort of data. Control data swamps, but particularly for something like productivity tools where you want to access your work, you know, you want to be able to go and pull up the source documents for a master thesis you worked on 3 years ago or 5 years ago, regardless of whether you’ve been paying for the software all that time.

So the way we wanted to address that specific thing, because it is really the case, we’re not trying to monetize your data and ownership and control and access to your data, we’re trying to monetize great software, a great tool that feels good and provides you really a supercharging your thinking experience, and you’re paying for that value while you’re getting it, and when you don’t need it anymore, you don’t pay and your data is not something you need to worry about.

So kind of our solution to that was What I’m usually calling alumni mode, which is basically that once you cancel or don’t let your subscription renew, then all your data is still there, you can still access it, you can navigate, you can search, you can move stuff around, you can even still scribble with the pencil, but you just can’t add new stuff. And so I hope we’ll see how it plays out, but I hope this is something where someone could, if they wanted, subscribe, become a member to Muse for a few months or a year, or however long they need it. And then if they’re not getting value from it currently, they let that expire, and then they can still access all their data, they don’t need to worry about it being locked up, and if at a later time they want to resubscribe because they have a new project, they can do that. And we’ll see how that works out in practice, but at least my hope is that will help address that getting locked out of your data, that that’s the purpose of the subscription fear, I think very reasonable fear that people have.

00:22:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this brings us to the philosophy of subscription pricing for software. It’s a huge topic. One thing I’d say is that I do believe most software is fundamentally subscription, whether you want to be or not or whether you call it that or not, that’s what’s really going on under the hood.

Now there are different periods that are possible. Adam, you mentioned it used to be that you might buy Word and use it for 3 or 4 years, and then you would buy the next version. So effectively you have a subscription period of 3 years, or you can have more like the modern situation where you have month-based pricing. So I think there are actually a few things that are happening when people are concerned about subscription pricing.

One is call it the annualized total cost of ownership and however it’s charged, they don’t want to pay, say $100 a year for a software tool.

And again, that’s fine. I think a lot of cases it’s not viable and that software is not going to get made and so it is what it is.

I think there’s another piece of it, which is a sense of agency and control. And in the case of buying boxed software or buying something like a car, you have much more agency over when the period ends and what you do with the thing as it’s approaching the end of the period. Like you can choose to ride out the car and keep using it, running to the ground, or you can sell it. And, you know, Ford can’t come and like yank the car out from under you because they changed their mind about cars, right? So it’s a sense. Of you have more agency over your stuff, and I think that’s a large part of what people are objecting to with traditional subscriptions. First, the price and paying monthly per se. So insofar as that is the case, I think this model where you have a credit card charge monthly, but you have essentially indefinite control over your own data through a alumni mode and B exporting to very standard flat files that have been around for decades, perhaps that threads the needle.

00:24:20 - Speaker 2: And maybe another point related to software subscriptions is acknowledging how much it is the case that software is a living thing that needs care and feeding, and even if you’re not improving it, which hopefully our team’s hard at work trying to improve our app, make it even far better in a 12 month period than it was at the start, but even if you take that out, there’s just an ongoing maintenance thing, right? And I have old side projects and whatever that I don’t know, a game that I put in the app store and you know at some point we didn’t have time to maintain it and it just fell out because you got to keep up to date with the APIs and you got to like make it match the modern world and you could complain, OK, is this just some kind of treadmill of Microsoft or Apple or whoever the platform provider is that’s making you do the latest API because they want to get you on their latest operating system version and there’s probably some of that, but honestly, I think it’s just the internet.

And software and technology is this really dynamic place and every year we have huge leaps forward in everything like screens getting more vivid to internet connections getting faster. You can do more, software gets better, computers get better and get more capable, and that’s great, but it means that all of this is.

Kind of a living ecosystem and everything is connected together, and there’s lots of older programs that I love, but they aren’t maintained and as a result, they stop, even if they don’t completely stop working, they just stop being relevant to the modern world, right? And that’s a shame. You need that maintenance if you want the software to sort of stay relevant.

00:25:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, that’s sort of the underlying reason for why most software is fundamentally a subscription, and I mean you can look at it the other way. What would it even mean to buy a one time software product of Muse’s nature in the iOS store? I think realistically. Buying a license for like 1 to 3 years depending on the whims of Apple and so forth, right? There’s no reasonable expectation that that software could work forever. And if you were thinking, you know, the software works forever and you get indefinite upgrades, that seems unreasonable to me. So I think the subscription makes more sense.

00:26:18 - Speaker 2: I think there are a number of, particularly indie apps in the app store.

I think of things as one of the better examples of a really well made and kind of professionally priced.

I think it’s like a one time purchase, camera, $50.70 dollars for the iPad and you then it’s $30 for the phone, and I forget what it is for the desktop, but they do major new versions.

And those major new versions are paid upgrades and they do those major new versions every few years.

So that’s more like the kind of Microsoft Office in the box model and there you feel maybe a little bit more like you paid one time, you’re not going to be surprised by a recurring charge coming on your credit card, which I understand that is very unpleasant feeling.

And then also you feel like you have indefinite access to this, but of course, what’s gonna happen is the developer’s gonna move on to the new version, the old version’s gonna become less relevant.

I don’t know what they do for long term maintenance, but in the end, yeah, I just feel like software is a living thing, and if you’re continuing to get value from it, paying for that value is sort of best for everyone.

00:27:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and a bit of an aside here, but I do think there is a place for software that is designed very specifically to be packaged and distributed, and this is software for use in what I would describe as austere or even adversarial environments where you don’t want your ability to use the software to be jeopardized by, you know, for example, the payment processor doesn’t like what you’re doing anymore. So if you’re working on an encrypted messaging app, for example, you might want to distribute that in a way, engineer and distribute in a way that has a real chance of working for several years after you do that. But that’s like a huge effort and compromise and you’re not going to be able to achieve the level of productivity and quality that you can with modern living software, but for certain specialized use cases, I do think that makes sense.

00:27:56 - Speaker 2: You know, the software in the Mars rover or in the Mars rover is the first thing that came to mind on that, something that needs to keep operating at a distance, some new version of whatever Linux or iOS or whatever coming out can’t break it. It should be a very kind of static, it should be in a kind of stasis and self-contained. That makes sense there, and there are other examples of that, but most of us were using these devices that are connected to the internet, that are in collaboration with other humans, and protocols are evolving, and file formats are evolving, and there’s new capabilities all the time, and necessarily the software is kind of a living thing.

00:28:32 - Speaker 1: This is even more out there, but I could imagine someone undertaking the project to design a whole ecosystem for software that was designed in this way.

There’s been this sort of change recently towards more static linking of programs where if your program has software dependencies, you basically bundle all those things up into your program and distribute that instead of looking for those dependencies at. Run time on whatever machine you’re running on.

So you could imagine a system that kind of took that to the next level is where you bundle in maybe the OS, maybe actually hardware, so you design the whole thing from the bottom up to be runable for a very long time. But that’s the whole undertaking and importantly, it’s not the software ecosystem that most of us are operating in.

00:29:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think what Apple has been trying to do by pushing subscriptions in the app store is exactly to enable developers to continue developing the app and being profitable without having to constantly create a new version of the app and basically confusing all the previous users.

That works out great when the company actually wants to do that.

I do think there’s a problem by basically Apple forcing all apps into this subscription model if they want to be profitable because, you know, it’s not really that viable for us to have a one time purchase in the app store that is priced above, say, $3 or something.

And you can’t really invent your own payment model or anything in the app store, you kind of have to choose what Apple has to offer. And so I think a lot of apps end up.

Basically using subscriptions without really giving the user of the benefits that should come with it.

And then, of course, the user kind of easily gets frustrated and feels like, OK, subscriptions are kind of a scam. And then for us, it becomes really difficult to kind of differentiate from that and, you know, try to frame our pricing in a way that still makes sense for users.

00:30:20 - Speaker 2: The App Store side of it is a whole set of challenges. On one hand, it comes with very turnkey ways to take payment and currency conversions and product packages and promo codes and essentially there’s a lot of software in a box stuff that you get, I don’t say for free but just built in, but it’s also very constraining.

I have the sense that it’s optimized for indie developers, you know, like a single person making an app that kind of fits into a particular. Box and the more you need to or wish to do something a little outside that box. So for me, for example, there’s a lot of frustration and things I would like us to be able to do to give a really great experience to people to help start change that perception of subscription software, especially on iOS as being not desirable. For example, I’d love to do a 30 day money back guarantee. You can try it. There’s a button right in the app if you decide. Yep, this isn’t for me after all. You can basically go in there and just click the button and get an instant refund. And to me that’s different from free trials. We don’t even have a free trial on the new subscription because I feel like I’m making the decision or pushing a button to make a purchase for the future and then inevitably I’m going to get surprised and it’s going to charge me when I wasn’t expecting it and it’s, I think it’s just kind of a bad experience where I think an instant refund in some period could be a better experience, but we just can’t do that. That’s not part of the App Store mechanics. So pros and cons on that, but I think part of the challenge again is that it’s working within this whole payment system, an app ecosystem that evolved out of the iPhone, consumer apps had supported data monetization on the back end, or in some cases, you know, here’s 399 1 time purchase for a fun little casual game, that kind of thing. You need something very different in terms of payment infrastructure and in terms of just how you have a relationship with your customers, things like being able to do refunds or partial refunds or whatever. That is something that makes a lot of sense for business software, for productivity tools, and doesn’t yet exist in this ecosystem.

Another element of the App Store is for a lot of folks, particularly if they come through a search or something like that, maybe they never even saw them use website, their first exposure to what is this product, what does it do, and Importantly, what is the cost is the App Store, but actually the way that it’s set up now, it’s not that obvious whether sort of what the pricing model is, because the App Store was originally built around or designed around these kind of one time immediate purchases where to even download the app, you had to like press this button that had a price on it. Now it was pretty clear and subscriptions were kind of added in after and you can surface them a little bit with these kind of featuring. Things, but it’s just not that clear what the pricing model is really someone should read our pricing page kind of in tandem with evaluating whether they want to download and try the app, but if they come through the app store, they don’t see that and they don’t really have a sense of what is this cost, what is the model, what can I expect on that. I think that also creates a lot of friction or confusion or just mismatched expectations, because as Mark says, there’s people for whom they’re not interested in or able to buy a professional tool on their iPad, but if they download it, spend a little time trying it, and then find that the business model, payment model doesn’t match what makes sense for them, they might feel kind of frustrated at the time they invested there. But putting aside App Store listing challenges, Leonard, you worked a fair bit on how we communicate the free plan in this new B2 pricing. How would you describe where we landed on that?

00:33:53 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s especially difficult for use because it’s such a different app from most others, and people really need to try it out to even know what it is about and you like get a sense of whether it might be useful for them.

So we really need people to, first of all, try and use and not think too much about the pricing basically upfront because they don’t even know yet what kind of value they might get out of it.

And so that’s why we kind of try to really change the communication from, OK, you can use Muse as a free trial and then you kind of have to pay up to the base version of Muse is free and you can use it however long you want. And then when you’re ready, you can become a member if you want to. And so the danger there for us, I think, is that it kind of devalues the product a bit because it is now like a free product and people can use it for free. And before we were kind of trying to build this image of news as a premium product and we You know, we are a professional tool that you pay for and you get the corresponding value out of it. And it’s a very sort of elegant, simple transaction that you make and in that way, I think we all really like that idea of, yeah, use as a paid product and that’s it. But yeah, I think it’s a really good experiment, at least for us to see how far we can push this free plan of use without sort of sacrificing the paid plans.

00:35:17 - Speaker 2: That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought about that before, but Fremium, that’s what you call sort of the business model where you can use something for a limited time for free, but then there’s some kind of gate you cross where you need to upgrade to paying, and this makes me think a bit about, of course, another product I’ve had quite a bit of experience working on pricing for, which is Hiroku. And in both cases, I think you know Haroki was kind of a category breaker or as an invention of a new category. It sort of predated a lot of the server list and other stuff that exists today. And so yeah, you really have to try it to get it. You can’t just say it’s a better X because it is something kind of truly novel and it’s not for everyone, but if you try it, you can find out if it is for you and then once you know if it is for you. Then that can lead to, you know, thinking about whether it’s something you wish to pay for, and Muse is very much the same thing, you know, if you come in thinking, oh, it’s a sketching app, or an artistic painting app, that’s wrong, and you’ll find that out pretty quickly in trying it, or if you come in thinking that it’s more of a text-oriented note taking app.

The point is you have to try it and you’ll know if it resonates for you, but at the same time, people don’t want to invest the time to try something if they Feel like they’re going to be surprised by the price, right? You probably have this experience even window shopping, which is you walk by a store or display or something, you’re like, Oh, I really like that jacket, and then the shopkeepers, hey, you want to try it on, but if you glance at the price tag and see that it’s way out of your price range, you probably don’t even want to put it on because you just don’t even want to tempt yourself with it, which is I think a very reasonable kind of place to come from. So I think we have this challenge in general of we want to get people in, we want to have them try it to find out if it resonates, we want to give them as much time as they want, it’s not time limited, you know, it may take a while for it to really click, maybe you need to try it on one occasion, you know, really get it, come back a little later, you try it again, maybe you have a new project that it makes more sense for to make kind of taking the pressure off, you can try it as much as you need to until it clicks. And then once it clicks, then you can think about, OK, I wanna make this part of my life, part of my work, and I wanna be a paying customer, so I get the benefits of that. Now, what can I do to make that happen?

00:37:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think on a very practical level, then the challenge for us is when do we actually tell people how much it costs and when do we confront them with the price that we need to pay to actually use it fully.

And so we discussed this actually quite a bit whether we maybe want to put the price basically on the first screen and tell people so that they aren’t surprised.

But I think what we settled on is to, to only tell people, OK, news does cost something, basically, but you can try it out first and then as soon As they kind of went through our first onboarding steps, which is maybe like 5 or 10 minutes of trying the app and kind of getting a sense of what it is and what it might do for you. Then we kind of start pushing them towards opening our sort of pricing dialogue and actually seeing the different options and seeing what new actually costs.

00:38:16 - Speaker 2: It’s a really subtle balance to try to be upfront and set expectations and let people know what to expect, but also not being really pushy about, here’s the price, or you gotta buy this or whatever. We wanna make it clear, but we also wanna give you time in a low pressure environment to just figure out that more important question first of is this for me? Cause it really isn’t for everyone. It is a niche app, it’s a specialty app, it really resonates with certain people, but not with others. And you should find that out first, but you also don’t want to be surprised by the price tag.

00:38:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think this idea of users being in the right mindset and having the correct frame of reference is super important, because ultimately, especially for a prosumer project, this is gonna be a very emotional decision. There’s going to be verbalized rationalizations of your underlying emotional decision, but really it’s a, how do I feel about buying this thing ultimately? And that’s very much colored by the mindset you have as you’re going.

Through and using the product.

So I think it’s good that we try to establish this is a premium product early on and then when you go to make the actual emotional buying decision some months later, that’s been the context that you’ve been marinating in. You know, going back to the Hiroku example, I think this is an area where we struggled with because a lot of people came to use Hiokku and used it for a very long time because it was a place to do free stuff. And then when your business started to take off and you needed to spend $20 a month on dinos. People were having all kinds of weird and highly disproportionate emotional reactions to that because they were in this frame of reference of this is a place for free stuff, even when from a rational perspective would have made total sense to spend a little bit of money to support their business.

00:39:53 - Speaker 2: And one of my big learnings from the Hiroku experience was, first of all, having that smooth ramp, and I’m not even sure, certainly by the time I left that we had nailed that. You could even argue today it’s a little rocky, but something where, yeah, if you’re getting a huge amount of value for something totally for free for some number of years, you get almost an entitlement, and I don’t mean that in an accusatory way, you just get used to, oh, this is what I have for.

Free. And so then when you need to pay, it feels jarring or discontinuous, feels almost like a trick or something, whereas if you’ve been asked to pay earlier, then that’s a more natural, oh yeah, of course this is a product I need to pay for. And of course having those smooth steps and matching the value you’re getting to what you’re paying and that’s an Incredibly difficult thing to do. I don’t think there’s any ideal way to do it. I like a couple of books in the show notes on pricing that I basically think are not great, but at least they’re the best things out there about how to price your business, and one of them talks quite a bit about pricing consulting, how to pick an hourly rate if you’re a freelancer, and what it comes down to is hourly rate. Matches very poorly to the value a client is getting, right? You might spend 2 hours and do some amazing work for them that is worth $10,000 and then later you might grind away at a project for 50 hours and end up delivering something that’s not useful to them. But in the end it’s hard to really charge for value with sort of freelance work, so you kind of have to go with hourly and how do you try to match that up and you do the best you can, but I think one of the places that for me, I have some battle scars from the Hiroku pricing experience was this situation where certain people were getting tons of stuff for free, just an insane amount of value. Other people were getting basically charged too much for what they were doing and it was just very lumpy. And some people were in the right place. Many, many people had this mismatch one way or the other, and over the long term, that’s a bad thing.

00:41:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this issue of values is especially challenging for a prosumer product like Muse.

If you look at an enterprise product, which again is almost all sass, there’s much more obvious places to differentiate for enterprises, because when you become a capital E enterprises, you have a set of requirements that are quite unique. You want things like role based access control and advanced permissions and audit logs and whatever the weird compliance things are that you need, right? And these are things that match almost 1 to 1 with large enterprises that have large budgets and have complex use cases for the software. And so almost all enterprise staff ends up looking something like that, you have kind of an enterprise tier that has all those things. Whereas in the prosumer world, the whole point is that you’re giving a very advanced tool to anyone and everyone who wants to use it as individuals, so it’s much harder to find places to differentiate on value. The best hypothesis we have so far is basically the extent to which you’re investing and using the tool as measured currently by the number of cards in your corpus.

00:42:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this is in contrast to differentiating based on the features and basically limiting features to people that pay more or that didn’t pay at all.

Which makes sense at first, but really gets difficult if you don’t have specific features that are like a 1 to 1 match to a specific group of people, because then it’s really hard to, first of all, try out the full app for users.

Like you only have a limited set of features available. If you maybe need that specific feature that isn’t available, the app is basically useless to you and it’s really hard to sort of be convinced that it’s not, but that it’s worth the full price. And then it also just makes the design and development work really difficult. You can’t really design a cohesive interface if only part of the people can access all of it and the other half can only access a few features and maybe you want to shuffle around things between plans.

00:43:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, and especially in this world of living software that we’ve just described in the context of subscriptions, you have potentially this wild feature matrix where you have different combinations in there, plus the additional dimension of every version is its own beast. It’s just a complete mess to deal with, so I’m glad we haven’t gone down that path yet.

00:43:58 - Speaker 2: It was part of my experience at Hiroku and some other previous companies as well, which is feature-based pricing seems obvious. It seems like the way to differentiate between your different tiers, but it basically doesn’t work for all the reasons you just said.

And so doing something that’s more a proxy for use. Dropbox, it’s gigabytes of storage, maybe for something like a web hosts, it’s something to do with sort of scale and requests.

Even there is really a challenge because a lot of times we might have a very valuable internal enterprise app that has a very low volume and pays very little, but you can never find a perfect fit. And yeah, with Muse we settled on this cards, which is a unit that hopefully the user understands.

Notion has a similar idea with their blocks.

Nowadays, I think they fully sort of fund their personal product through their enterprise product, but at least a year or two back, they had, I think, 1000 blocks limited for sort of the free plan, and then you could pay to upgrade to their roughly $100 a year, kind of more professional product, and yeah, basically the idea.

The idea that fewer features with the one exception of those very specific differentiators for say enterprise and that makes the whole thing more cohesive and everyone can use everything and then you’re just a proxy for usage.

And I hope at least yeah, kind of our new base, our free tier with 100 cards we’ve found that’s kind of like one project, give or take, or maybe a few small projects and so if you really want, you can kind of use Muse for one project. When you’re done with that project, you archive it out by exporting a bundle to your Dropbox or iCloud or whatever, and then you have space for a new one, and you can, and lots of folks have used, used for a year and a half for as long as we’ve been running the product completely for free. And sometimes some of those people, they do tip over and become a member, maybe because their financial circumstance changed, or they just finally felt like they were getting enough value or they had a big enough project or something like that to justify that, and I think that’s great, that’s the way I’d like it to be.

00:45:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I do think it’s an interesting challenge then how you communicate the different limits to people, since it’s not always immediately obvious, people will know that they need a certain feature or not, but they don’t necessarily know how much they are going to use the product or what a certain, what what a certain value means. And I think you can also use that to your advantage in some way. If you look at Apple, they differentiate a lot based on storage and people kind of know how much storage they use right now, but then Apple also explains, OK, you can actually get like 10,000 songs on this many gigabytes.

00:46:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn’t that part of the classic, iPod marketing was, yeah, 1000 songs in your pocket, or something like that.

00:46:37 - Speaker 3: Right, yeah, and then they kind of upsell you on higher storage versions, right? And then you can do, OK, maybe I actually want 2000 songs in my pocket and maybe a year from now, I’ll have more songs. So that’s a way to kind of make people pay more.

00:46:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Apple does well with the what I call price discrimination.

I guess hardware, computing hardware has always been natural, bigger screen, more computing power, more storage, but it’s funny because of course if you look at Apple products, Apple computers or iPads or whatever as just like raw compute, and in fact folks do this who come from it, from the, I don’t know, build my own PC from OEM parts, gaming rig world, and they look at the Apple prices and they say this is ridiculous when you’re just looking.

At the gigahertz and the RAM and the storage, but that’s not really what you’re buying when you buy an Apple product.

You’re buying this integrated top to bottom thing with the operating system and the built-in apps and everything’s been thought through carefully, you know, but there’s no line item on your receipt for design, which is a huge part of what you’re paying for.

So they differentiate around these kind of computing primitives, even though in many ways that’s not really what people are paying for when they buy an Apple product.

00:47:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this goes back to my idea about how buying is often emotional, at least for individual users.

One of my favorite techniques here is the licensing for Sublime, which is the text editor that I use, and I believe the only difference between a license and an unlicensed version is that if it’s unlicensed, it just says in capital letters unlicensed at the top of your screen all the time.

Maybe it asks you every once in a while if you want to buy a license. And that really reflects onto you as a user and potential buyer of software. And even though the functionality is totally there, you just don’t want to be that person who’s looking at capital U unlicensed all the time, at least it worked for me. Another example of this is the Windows, like you can download a fully functional window image and run it, but there’s a little watermark in your screen, it’s like, please register.

00:48:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I like that model, it’s sort of a little bit like the old shareware, nagware model they sometimes call it, but very low key, and it’s just like, look, you’re a professional, you’re using this tool to like do things, pay for your software, please.

00:48:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it’s kind of a subtle difference between nagwear and reflecting the image that you’re presenting to the software provider of a casual versus a professional user say.

00:48:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when you talk about also Microsoft Windows, you know, now I think most Microsoft products and Adobe have all gone to kind of subscription cloud stuff or whatever, but I think in the old days, the freemium model was piracy. That was kind of this open secret in the industry was that the way that you use Photoshop as a student was not that you could afford $500.

For it in a box, but that you would pirate a copy and then obviously once you graduated school or you know were on to a real project or working with a real client or something, OK, now I gotta kind of grow up and get myself a proper copy, and I think that the industry benefited from that for a long time and now Fremium is a more, let’s call it above board version of that same model.

00:49:33 - Speaker 1: OK, so we’ve been having a lot of price theoretic discussions here. Maybe we can turn to what it actually took for us to ship a V2 pricing change in a production product.

00:49:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a lot harder than it sounds, and I think it comes back to kind of where we started, which is this is emotional for customers and it’s emotional for the team, like we really want to get the right price, that feels good for everyone, that feels fair, but it’s gonna allow us to have a sustainable business that will still be here 5, 10 years down the road, and In these theoretical discussions, and this is something I have a lot of battle scars on from my Haruki days, which is you come up with a pricing scheme and everyone’s got an opinion on it, which is good, but then you can always kind of find a flaw in it or you find a way that it doesn’t make sense or it looks wrong or it feels weird or there’s some edge case, and it’s very, very easy to go around in circles debating theoretically, and this is a place where I think it’s so important to get out and experiment and try stuff.

And that can come in the form of, for example, I first experimented with the $100 a year price in one of the early newsletters, I think it was maybe the 3rd or 4th newsletter we put out. We weren’t ready to charge anything, but I just said, hey, you know, we’re thinking about professional price and we’re thinking about this. Level, give me your reaction, give me your honest reaction, and got a lot of responses to that, including some that were upset and didn’t like it, and someone that said, yeah, I love that, and a lot of others that were sort of more of a, hm, yeah, I’d pay that, you know, if you can deliver on these promises. So that’s one way to experiment with something, right, as you put up a landing page or you some way publish it to the world and just see how folks respond.

But in this case, we actually took it a step further and did essentially some split testing. So we’ve talked about that on the show here before with kind of onboarding and AB testing, but this is the idea that you take a subset of typically your new users and you show them one thing and you have a control group that sees something else and then you can kind of compare that data over time. And I think that is a way to Not just judge the efficacy of does this get us more customers, how do people react, but also it’s a way to kind of bring to an end these circling discussions where everyone’s super emotional, we can’t price it this way, we can’t price it this way, what about this, what about this, and you just say, well, look, I’m not sure if I agree with this idea of a starter plan, for example, but let’s try it. Let’s do a split test, let’s see who buys it. Let’s see, are they happy about buying it? How do they respond? What do they expect? Does this make sense? And then when you have a whole different kind of discussion, when it’s around real responses and real results from people making a purchase, or even just considering making a purchase of some price point you’ve come up with.

00:52:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think doing those experiments really helped us get a shared goal as a team basically and get behind. OK, let’s work on pricing without having this big discussion and let’s set a goal to ship something and be confident in it.

00:52:35 - Speaker 2: So that’s another good point is that it’s very easy to in trying to make price or set of prices that will fit all the different cases, all the different circumstances your customers might be in, it’s very easy for those options to proliferate. So you’ve got yearly billing and monthly billing, and maybe there’s also a 6 month billing, and then you’ve got these 4 plans and then there’s a student discount that can apply and pretty soon you have this huge matrix of options.

And it’s confusing for everyone, certainly it’s confusing for the company, but I know lots of products I go to look at and I just look at their pricing. I’m like, tell me what it costs, I can’t tell there’s too many knobs and levers here, and that comes from a natural place, which is trying to let someone customize, you know, match their needs and their means to what you have to offer, but it very easily can get complex. So.

Having something that is simple and comprehensible that gives you the right number of options. And so for us, for example, you could say, well, add the starter plan or add the monthly billing, add the whatever, throw it in there. What’s the harm if no one buys it? But to me the harm of having a thing hanging around that no one really wants is you’re just cluttering up your pricing and making it all more confusing. And so another reason to actually test this stuff is do people buy it? Do they want it? And if they don’t, then, you know, why have it, and you can just kind of quietly shut down the experiment, and no one needs to be faced with that clutter in the future.

00:53:58 - Speaker 1: I’ve also become a big fan of this idea of just get out and do it with pricing. I think pricing is uniquely susceptible to getting gridlocked, because as we said, everyone has opinions about pricing, as they can and should.

It tends to be an emotional topic. There usually is not a team or a person whose full time job it is to do pricing, unlike product design or product engineering, and it often takes more effort than you think or realize.

We had some of this before we undertook this proper.

Project we were thinking, oh, you know, maybe we should change the pricing like this or like this, and we realized that, well, one does not simply change the price.

It’s actually a big deal. You got to change the product, change the marketing, there’s analytics, there’s testing, there’s support. It’s like it’s a whole thing.

So I think there’s a lot to be said for blocking off some time as a team across multiple functions to go in there and do something with the pricing, even if you aren’t sure yet exactly how it’s going to land. I’m really glad that we did that in this case.

00:54:52 - Speaker 2: And on the customer side, it can be emotional as well, just because, yeah, you don’t want something yanked out from under you or price changes are always a little shocking or confusing or shake your trust in the company and In this case, we kind of, I don’t wanna say we made it easier, but we did a strictly additive thing, right? We added new plans and options, we added a few more perks to our existing plan, but you could imagine a future where, yeah, something else needs to change.

Maybe we realized yearly billing actually isn’t that useful after all and everyone should be on monthly.

I’m not sure, but I think one of the key things there is a great Understanding how emotional this can be for everyone involved and how you really don’t want to, unlike the product itself, which, you know, you should be careful with changes, but if you reorder a menu item, I don’t know, people can get upset about any product change you come up with, you’d be surprised, but if you reorder a menu item, the stakes just feel lower there, even if someone comes back and says, I don’t like this, I don’t like this change.

With the price, I think there’s a lot of tricks you can use, including grandfathering people in as much as possible, so new people can’t buy some plan you’ve decided to sunset, but existing people can stay on it as long as they want.

I see this all the time in Sass products. I think maybe my website on NetI is this, like when I go in and look at it, it’s like, yo, you’re on the something something plan parentheses legacy, and it’s like, who knows, it was whatever plan they had.

Out of the time I signed up and that’s it.

Actually, maybe they have new prices now that I would like better. I don’t really know, but the important thing is I don’t want to have to think about it. They bill my credit card, my website stays up, and I’m happy for the moment, so I don’t want to have to reevaluate it.

So you need the ability to make changes, but you also want to treat your existing customers with great care and trying to like keep things really stable for them and not have them be surprised in any direction.

And trying to pad things over as much as you can with, yeah, someone, we do really need to sunset a plan or something like that for logistical or even legal reasons, you know, here’s a promo code for a little extra time or just try to smooth it over with support basically as much as you can.

But I think trying to make it so that you can both make changes, try stuff, iterate, experiment, but also not have people who have committed their money to feel like they’re suddenly on a shifting foundation or things that’s gonna change out from under them. That’s the tricky thing is to get both of those at once.

00:57:10 - Speaker 3: And for a lot of companies, I think that’s really scary to basically work on pricing because it has all these ripple effects to other areas and you need to be careful not to upset anyone basically.

But in a way, I think we were actually kind of lucky because a lot of our users were already upset. Well, not our users, but our potential users.

So let’s say, like, they were unsatisfied with the pricing and they were letting us know. So we kind of knew, OK, we probably have to at least make some adjustments here.

And so that kind of serves as motivation for running these experiments and instead of getting the team behind the project.

And I hope we can keep up that spirit even if people are happier with our pricing now, and just keep experimenting and learn from that experience.

00:57:49 - Speaker 2: And we talked on this podcast before about being an independent team and trying to be as much as possible funding with customer revenue, and focus on long term sustainability, small giants, all that kind of good stuff versus kind of venture rounds of investment and kicking the can down the road on how you make a viable business.

But I think one piece of that, you know, we talked about Steam early access and some of these other ways, including Kickstarter and Patreon, where you can support teams and products that you want to see exist in the world.

Typically smaller teams and they’re working on something that you like and you want to support it in a more. way and I certainly think a year ago or a year and change ago when we turned on our pricing, it was more this aspirational thing. Now I think it can be more transactional, but in terms of communicating that kind of media value versus supporting the team, I don’t know, what do you guys think we kind of fall on that right now.

00:58:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it has been really important for us in the past since, yeah, we are a small early stage independent company. We can’t really compete based on pure features and what you pay for them.

So if you compare us to most other apps on paper, you kind of get less value out of it. So instead, I think what companies like us would need to do is find this really small group of people for which the small set of features basically is a perfect fit.

And then those people will be ready to pay for that because they want that product to exist because it’s such a good fit for them. And there it’s not about comparing it to other apps based on features, but really just believing in the vision of the product and the long term potential and wanting to support that. And yeah, just voting with you what it really.

00:59:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I might expand this framing slightly from just supporting something that you want to see in the world to potentially a bundle of psychic goods one gets in buying a software product in the same way that you get features and usage and capabilities, potentially, you get some emotional goods.

Basically, I think this is an interesting frontier of software pricing.

There’s one aspect of this, which is supporting something you want to see in the world. Another potential aspect is becoming part of a community. A third potential piece would be some sort of unique or special interaction with the team, for example, previewing and providing feedback early on on features. I’ve talked a lot in the podcast, but I do think something around community and interaction as part of software and here it’s pricing does have an interesting future. We’ll see it’s early days.

01:00:14 - Speaker 2: The thing that comes to mind for me as you were describing those qualities is buying vegetables or food at a farmer’s market, where potentially it’s probably less convenient than the supermarkets, and you could say, OK, you get a higher quality or a fresher food item, you know, vegetables, fruits, whatever you’re getting there.

But I think a lot of it is, certainly you’re supporting, you wanna see more independent farmers or more healthy eating, you want to have that interaction with the farmer or the people who are there vending their goods.

Maybe you want to have the experience of just being at the market and being around other people who value the same thing as you, healthy eating and ecological sustainability and that sort of thing, so you get, as you said, a bundle of psychic goods, even though the transaction is around that bundle of radishes, or whatever you’re buying from the booth.

01:01:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it’s especially interesting for tools like use where the transaction is not just that they buy the product and they get something, but they actually buy the product to become invested in this tool and become invested in this work that they are doing.

So they don’t need to commit just the money, but they also need to actually commit time and spend time learning the tool and getting into the habit of using the tool and then they’ll get something out of it.

And so there’s actually beneficial to have like a paid product because then you’re already making the money investment and it’s kind of becomes easier to also invest your time and start using the product since you have already made a commitment to it.

01:01:43 - Speaker 2: That gives me a memory of an earlier podcast we did with Lisa Ankle, where we talked about Muse’s running shoes for your mind. Many times when folks want to get more active, maybe they want to start running or something like that, they buy the equipment, right? They buy the shoes or the running outfit or the gym outfit or something like that. And of course that can be in a big upfront investment. It’s easy to drop a couple 100 bucks, especially throw in some nice sport earbuds or something like that, but part of what they’re actually getting from that is they are signaling to themselves, OK, I’m really committed to this. I don’t want to have wasted this. I spent on those sporting goods, and I really want to put them to use to try to become a more fit, healthy, active person.

Maybe there’s an equivalent for a lot of tools for thought, I think, or potentially other kinds of software products, but certainly M where you say, I want to be more thoughtful, I want to be more reflective, I want to spend more time doing deep reads of academic papers, for example, or I want to do more active reading where I’m taking excerpts as I’m going. Or I just want to expand my visual thinking repertoire. Making that purchase is a way to decide to do that and to commit to that. And of course, the money is just the beginning, because in many ways, building the practice of it, learning a new weird tool, maybe you’re not even that steady of an iPad user, and learning to externalize your thoughts in this way and think through problems in this multimedia environment. That’s a skill and a habit to be developed potentially over a longer period of time.

Before we go, I thought it would be fun to mention that since it has been a little over a year since we first turned on payments, we’ve been in the process of sending out our first renewal emails. And of course, the first few dozen folks who signed up, I just sort of emailed them personally, and many times they’re folks we’ve had a lot of great support interactions with, and they’ve given us great feedback over the year or more and basically wrote them to say, hey, I hope you’ll renew, but even if you don’t, we’re super appreciative of what you’ve done here and we just love to hear your reflections when you’re on, and we got some really, really glowing feedback. I think some of the nicest things. that I’ve heard folks say about the product and our team came from not folks that were kind of on the front side where they were, I don’t know, dazzled by the newness of it, the the shiny new toy, but they really become a part of their lives and their thinking process, and that was a really fulfilling experience.

We ended up putting a couple of those folks quotes into the purchase dialogue. So that was absolutely wonderful.

Those are the moments when I feel that this is why Doing what we’re doing is to help people and to have an impact on people’s lives and on their work. And if they feel that way, even after parting not only with the $100 for the first year, but in fact, the $100 to renew for another year, that says to me that we’ve done something that, again, for a very small number of people or a very niche group of people that have a particular need, but for them, what we’re offering is something pretty special and I feel really proud of that and very thankful to the folks that believed in us early on to help us get here. So we’ll wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write to us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ by email, hello at museapp.com. can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and let me just give a huge thank you to all of our existing members who have taken the time to part with a little bit of their hard earned cash for our still very early days product. It’s why we keep doing it and it’s going to make this the sustainable business that can be around for the long run. So huge, huge thank you.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Something I really admire about Tokyo is that they are able to, while it’s a very desirable place to live, the housing costs in Tokyo are actually not that high, and people are pretty liberal about tearing things down and building new things, and it seems almost like a cultural love of newness, and people are always excited to like rebuild and create a new thing in the place where an old thing stood.

00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest Devon Zugal, hey. And Devin, not too long ago, I would have said, of GitHub, but I believe as of a few months ago, you are now a free agent. How’s life treating you?

00:00:54 - Speaker 1: It’s been great. I left GitHub about 2 months ago, and I also moved to Miami around the same time from San Francisco, and so I’ve been spending my time exploring the city, writing a number of blog posts about it, talking to people in the government and like housing developers and that sort of thing, just because that’s what I do in my free time is learn about cities. So it’s been really fun to explore my new home.

00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, typically when people think of Miami, the first thing they think of is speaking with members from government agencies to better understand how the infrastructure of the city works. So it makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. And can you tell us what your background is, how you came to GitHub, what came before that, and what might come after?

00:01:39 - Speaker 1: For sure. My background is computer science, which is probably not a big surprise.

I studied that in school and then I worked as a software engineer at a number of San Francisco startups.

And then most recently, I was a product manager at GitHub for the last 2.5+ years. I was leading the communities department where we built tools for open source. Communities.

And so it ties in a lot with my interests and love of cities and economics, because they’re both about sort of what can you do to create an ecosystem and a platform where people thrive, but without defining it all in advance? How do you create those building blocks so people can live their lives, find opportunities, build really interesting things that you never would have dreamed of and help give them that platform so that they can put those plans together themselves.

00:02:28 - Speaker 2: It’s pretty easy to see the parallels between communities of different types, which includes open source, and then cities as well, which is you can’t really do a top down thing.

I’m sure we’ll get into that a bit here, but unlike, for example, me, my experience in designing products or building software products is often that you sit down, you figure out what you want to make, and you make that thing, and it may or may not work out the way you want it in practice and you need to iterate on it and you need to get. Back, but it’s a very highly controlled experience, whereas something like a community can only be grown. It’s incredibly organic and I think at best you can kind of guide and obviously guidance matters a lot because that’s why we get some communities that thrive and others that don’t, but it’s just nowhere near as prescriptive as what at least I’m used to in product design.

00:03:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I moved over to product management from software because I really enjoy what I call social technology.

I think that that’s really a sweet spot for me where it’s thinking about the system in terms of how can you shape and encourage behavior that’s healthy, but also without mandating it, like, sort of more of a carrot than a stick perhaps, I’m not sure if even that’s like the right metaphor, but I think that cities are a really interesting lens to look at certain types of software because things like social networks, which I would consider GitHub a social network on some level, and certainly Twitter’s Facebook’s Instagrams of the world, they really are communities of people where you as the designer or the software engineer or whoever’s building it.

Don’t really control what ends up actually on the screen completely, so you have to think about what are the affordances that you provide? What does the design language say about what you’re supposed to do here? Kind of like how restaurants will have a sense of the space. So if you walk into a really quiet classy restaurant with like piano playing in the background.

Everything about the space is telling you like, don’t start yelling and like dancing and screaming and whatever. Like this is a place where you’re gonna have like a nice steak, you’re gonna sit down, you’re gonna listen to classical music, but then if you walk into, you know, a Miami club, it’s a very different vibe and it says like, you’re here to kind of go wild and have fun.

So I think that cities do the same of like, how does this Encourage you to live your life and different cities do that very differently. And I would love for more software teams who are building places for people to congregate online to think about it in those terms because I think it’s been a little bit lacking in the past, and I think it can lead to problems for both the creators and the people who are trying to experience the space.

00:05:12 - Speaker 2: I think that pretty naturally points to our topic today, which is Order without Design, which in fact is a book about urban economics and urban planning, and you didn’t write the book, but you do have a podcast by the very same name in which you interview the author of the book. Certainly this is not necessarily about the book itself, although I think there’s lots to discuss there, but also about this larger question of exactly what you said, how do cities become the way that they are? Each city has its own different character, and some of that evolved organically, but some of it was active choices made by people governing and living in those cities, and this is a topic that Mark and I talked about more in the, let’s call it the user perspective in a Previous episode, I’ll link in the show notes where we talked about our respective decisions to depart San Francisco and why he landed in Seattle and I landed in Berlin, and when you’re in the position of working on an all remote team or a distributed team, and you can basically choose to live anywhere where you have the ability to think in terms of not just I’m going to the city because my employer, my school is there, but you’re thinking, what are the qualities of the city that I like, what would make it a good Place to live that would be creatively inspiring for me at least, that was the experience that got me interested in urban design as a topic, which is seeing the unique character of Berlin and what it was that spoke to me, spoke to my soul about that and then thinking, OK, well, how did it get to be that way? What were the series of decisions and who are the people, and I know how digital products come to be, but how does the city come to be? So maybe you can illuminate that for us a little bit.

00:06:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is one of my favorite books, and I read it several years ago when it first came out, and instantly just had to become friends with the author.

His name is Alan Berto. And he and his wife Marie Agnes, they’re in, I believe their 80s now, and they’ve spent their life living in a bunch of different cities around the world, creating their master plans.

They worked for the World Bank for sanitation systems, transportation systems.

They’ve been in places really far flung, such like all over the world, really. They’ve lived in Bangkok, they lived in Sana’a. Yemen, they’ve lived in New York City. I’m missing another dozen or so places that they’ve lived.

Some of these cities I hadn’t even heard of, to be honest. And so they’ve seen cities from a lot of different dimensions.

They’ve experienced lots of different types of people who have different goals for their cities, and they’ve done their best to shape their work to fit those goals of the residents of those different places.

They’ve been in Port au Prince, Haiti, where they have a lot of really interesting stories. And what you’re talking about here about remote work and how the way we think about cities differently now that more and more people are working remotely, really an interesting lens to think about this book, because one of Alan Berto’s main points is that historically, cities have been labor markets. That’s what brings them together. It’s what sort of is the sinew that holds it all together. And what he means by cities are labor markets is that people come to cities to find opportunities to make their life better. And certainly they come for a lot of other reasons too, but finding work and finding a way to pay for their life and to better their life is one of the biggest ones.

00:08:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, at least the way I understood that argument of his was being a labor market is the root of everything else. If you don’t have that, the rest of it won’t come. The population density now leads into culture and, you know, art museums and Interesting cultural scenes emerging, but all of those are secondary effects. You have to start with the labor market.

00:08:45 - Speaker 1: Right. And I think he would point to places that are, let’s say, retirement towns and that sort of thing is somewhat exceptions to the rule, but those will never become massive cities. Those will never become engines for economic growth, for helping people’s lives get a lot better, pulling people out of. poverty.

They serve a role, but they’re not really what he’s talking about.

But I think it’s really interesting because we’re now going into a new era where more and more work can be done remotely. The labor market is in the cloud.

So if cities no longer have to be the labor market, what does that look like? How do we now think about the places that we live? How does that change the decisions that we make? And so that change hasn’t completely happened.

The vast majority of people still work in person, but there’s been a real inflection point, I’d say in the last 10 years and certainly with COVID that has made people really start to think about this new paradigm.

00:09:38 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and there’s sort of two dimensions of effects here. There’s the people are free to potentially move to different cities, so one can move from San Francisco to Seattle or Berlin or Miami, or you can move to not a city and participate in a sort of distributed labor market, and so there’s competition along both those axes essentially.

00:09:57 - Speaker 1: Totally, for a really long time choosing to live in a rural place dramatically reduced your opportunities, and some might argue that that’s still true.

I personally think that face to face has a lot of really important things that you just can’t get via Zoom, but at the same time, there’s a whole new frontier opening up here, and people from all different countries can now. in labor markets that used to be centered in the United States primarily in the case of tech.

For example, my boyfriend is from Argentina and he moved to the United States several years ago, but many of his friends and family were not able to get visas or weren’t interested in moving. They wanted to stay with their families. And so they’re now able to participate in Things that are happening in the United States and and vice versa in a way that they just couldn’t 10 years ago. So, in a really weird way, there’s people who are sitting in Buenos Aires but behind a microphone, who I feel are a closer part of my community than some people who are my neighbors, and that’s just a very different world and will really change the way that cities develop, I think, in the future.

00:11:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. And perhaps the most exciting piece for me as you mentioned this idea of social technologies, I think we’re gonna see some of the benefits and consequences of cities move out to the cloud, if you will, things like aggregation effects, quote unquote population density, self sorting. These are all things that you really needed to have a city in a physical space until very recently to get, but now people can, you know, whatever, join the right Discord or something, it’ll be very interesting to see that all play out.

00:11:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m tentatively excited about it. I have some concerns.

For example, I was talking to a friend who’s a venture capitalist a few days ago, and he was telling me about how in 2020, during COVID, roughly the same number of dollars went to venture capital investments in that year as the previous year, but it went to half as many companies.

And his interpretation of this was that the business that VCs are in is to find people that they trust and that they think will take that money and do something amazing with it. And his theory here was that because they couldn’t meet people face to face, they couldn’t build that trust with new people on the network, and so all of the money was going to people who are already in network and already trusted. And he was a little sad about this because he was thinking like there’s all these people who would probably be amazing entrepreneurs, but because they didn’t have that access that they would have had an in-person world, they didn’t have that. So I’m not sure if that’s completely the right interpretation, to be honest, I think there’s a lot of ways to look at that data, but it did give me pause and think like, oh, that’s like not great if that is the right interpretation.

00:12:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it’s still very early. You know, the world doesn’t owe it to us.

There’s no particular reason this couldn’t become very messy and weird for the next 10 or 50 years as it all shakes out.

We talk often on this podcast about how it takes some time to metabolize these big society level changes.

I’d say that our technology and our social technology is still very early, like the communication bandwidth over Zoom as nice as it is versus what we had 5 years ago, it’s very poor compared to being in person and likewise our social technologies are mostly transliterations of stuff from our previous physical world.

So I think we solve a lot in front of us to see how it all shakes out.

00:13:09 - Speaker 1: But I’m optimistic. I’m definitely optimistic, but it’s not a done deal for sure.

00:13:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah. So how would you answer the question that I sort of posed earlier or the question I posed myself, I suppose, on discovering a city that I liked really well and wanted to settle in just because I liked it rather than because an employer was there, which is how do cities become the way that they are and in particular who are the people that make that happen.

00:13:34 - Speaker 1: There’s a lot of components that go into that.

I think of cities as an ecosystem, and so a lot of different pieces have to be in place for them to be the way they are, but like geography makes actually a really big difference in the way that people interact, and that’s not human made usually. But it has a huge difference. Like, for example, I live in Miami Beach, which is separated from mainland Miami, it’s on an island, and so I’m much more likely to spend time with people who are like on the island with me than I am to like drive into mainland just because there’s a body of water between us. And so that really shapes the way life and culture work in Miami and similar geographical features make a big difference in other cities as well.

00:14:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one I noted in my own city exploration is San Francisco and Amsterdam, two places I’d spent time, were both on these kind of fairly smallish peninsulas, and so they’re necessarily constrained on 3, I guess an island is 4 sides, but here you’re constrained on three sides. And so, there’s sort of a limit to how much they can grow or things get denser, they get more expensive, and by comparison to other places, Berlin is one example, but probably most places don’t have as much constraint and as the city grows, they can spread outward and in that way kind of create more relief for just more space for more people to be there.

00:14:53 - Speaker 1: Totally, and other factors can have a similar effect, so London and Paris are interesting to contrast to each other, where both of them are in England, they’re not on the peninsulas or islands.

Well, I guess Britain is a very large island, but Paris is much denser than London, and a big part of that is because Paris was basically conquered and like overrun again and again, so they built these like city walls to protect it.

And they wanted to keep as much of the buildings inside of those walls as possible, and the denser it is, the easier it is to defend.

Whereas London being in Great Britain, which is separated by the channel, they just didn’t have those problems. They were much harder, much easier to defend, much harder to attack.

And so London is much more sprawling than is Paris, and that’s sort of a I don’t know if it was a conscious decision by any person, but just the factors that they had to deal with resulted in a very different city form. So I guess those are two answers, geography and like sort of exogenous factors that just kind of force you into this shape for survival.

I think another pieces, decisions that are made early on in a city’s history, there’s an immense path dependence in cities because it’s painful to tear things down, unlike in software where it’s like not. That costly and this kind of infinite space, you can always write more software for the most part.

00:16:16 - Speaker 2: Developers get excited when they see a huge number of red dashes in their pot, right?

00:16:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, they love it because it simplifies things. Whereas in cities, you know, someone like Creative destruction, yeah,

00:16:27 - Speaker 1: they put up a bunch of bricks and like they paid money for them to go up and it’s a more zero-sum game in cities than it is in software because anytime you build something, that means someone else can’t build something there until they tear your thing down.

And so it leads to very different dynamics and you get much more constrained.

Like a concrete example of that is here in Miami Beach, there’s a lot of beautiful art deco buildings. Miami Beach is really famous for this. And so there are rules protecting the art deco because it’s a national treasure and, you know, I really love them. But what that means is that you can’t build something else there, and this is a beautiful place to live. It would be awesome if more people could live here, but because the art deco is there, we can’t do that. And it forces you to make different types of trade-offs. Do you value this architectural heritage, or do you value having many more people be able to live in a place and every community is going to make different choices there.

00:17:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think an important thread through everything you just described is that ultimately it’s individuals making personal choices in this sort of organic chaotic mess that ultimately bubbles up to the emergent order, if you will, that you see in cities. And I think it’s so easy, especially as software people to think about, you know, that the city does this or we should do that, but really it’s just a bunch of individual human beings ultimately have to make the decisions and take the actions.

00:17:47 - Speaker 2: Well, and this, the, I don’t know, subtitle or the part that goes after the colon in the order without design book title is how markets shape cities, and of course markets are very much, yeah, decentralized, you know, individual actors pursuing their own means, but then that forms into a larger, something that is uh greater than the sum of its parts.

Also, if I’m not mistaken, one of the interesting things about the author’s experience is he had actually worked for a centrally planned economies, including, I believe, some Soviet work in the 1980s before the USSR ended, and then also for the Chinese government.

And so he had the chance to even compare a situation where there is no kind of classic market forces like rent to figure out, you know, efficient land use. Instead, there is urban planners that do just sit there and say we should put houses over here and restaurants over here.

00:18:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and he also worked in China during the period where they were liberalizing economically and moving from a completely communist planned centrally planned government to trying to make things a little bit more free market from the economic side.

And one of the things that he pointed out was that like, there are a lot of very strict rules that the Chinese government adhered to. So, for example, there was a rule imposed by the government said, Every single room in every building has to have at least one hour of sunlight throughout the whole year.

Now, that sounds like a good idea, like, I wanna have sunlight in my house, sunlight is a nice thing, and even one hour almost seems kind of low.

But the issue is that China is a really large country and goes very, very far north, where there’s actually just not that much sunlight at all during much of the year. And so there’s some cities in northern China that were forced to build the buildings extremely far apart, so that the angle of the sun would like properly hit the inside of the buildings for like the minimum number of hours a day.

And what this meant was that cities in the north are much less densely populated and much more spread out than the ones in the south, and it correlates almost perfectly with this angle to the sun.

And what it means is like, this has a lot of other implications for the cost of infrastructure and all these trickle down effects that, like, weren’t really conceived of before, you know, when they put this rule in place, they weren’t trying to say infrastructure in the north has to be extraordinarily expensive. They’re just trying to get everyone to have sunlight. And so he came in and sort of noted some of the rules and said like, this is actually hindering development in these places because this is a limit that is not gonna work out.

00:20:20 - Speaker 2: So in more market-based economies that probably most people nowadays are more likely to live in or be familiar with, what is the role of an urban planner? What do they actually do?

00:20:31 - Speaker 1: Well, I think Alan would say that historically urban planners in non centrally planned economies still think of themselves as central planners, even if they don’t explicitly say so. They still think that if they put a rule in place, it will be followed, and it’ll work out the way they’re imagining, as opposed to thinking of it as a dynamic system that will react to the rules and sort of mold itself in a way that has a lot of unintended consequences.

So, I guess there are a lot of urban planners still that think of themselves as architects who can like shape a city in exactly The form they want something like a Disneyland, but I think Alan would say, and I would strongly agree that urban planners should think of themselves more as like protocol creators in the way that a software engineer might design a protocol, but not say everything on top. So TCP IP is a brilliant design because it’s not that opinionated. It’s only opinionated about the things that need to happen to help people coordinate. So, a city that I think has done this really well is New York City. And I believe it was 1811, the city put together a master plan that laid out the grid that we all know today of, you know, streets and avenues, and you can actually see which parts of the city were created before that plan was in place in the southern tip of Manhattan. They’re all this warren of streets that is, I think, beautiful, but also quite messy and like hard to get around. But then everything north of that is a grid, very, very precise, and something that the New York City plan did really well, I think, is make it very clear from the get-go what was public land and what was private land. So instead of saying we’re gonna control everything, or instead of saying we’re gonna let everyone just like be anarchists and do whatever they want. They said we needed to find rights of way because people need to be able to get around. We need to keep space for like sewage and other sanitation systems that we all need. Like no one wants poop in the streets, and we’re going to define spaces for public parks. That’s why Central Park is so big. They just carved it out before anyone actually started developing there. And then they left everything else to the market to decide. And I think this works really well because it enabled the key methods of coordination that people needed, while also leaving space for people to be creative and to make their own idea of what the city should be.

00:22:55 - Speaker 2: In New York, I think many would feel is the city, a cultural powerhouse, a place people love to visit, and many people love to live. Maybe it’s also incredibly dense and incredibly expensive and dirty, and all those negative things you associate with the collection of people, that is cities, but nevertheless, truly the prototype city in some ways.

00:23:16 - Speaker 1: And it’s been an engine to pull people out of poverty for hundreds of years. Like immigrants have landed in New York and poor Americans have ended up in New York. Black people ended up in New York after the Reconstruction, and they found this place where they had more opportunities and they were able to like build themselves up and like it has a lot of flaws, but it’s something that enabled both the coordination while also remain keeping space for people to make their own lives what they wanted it to be. And I think it’s just been one of like The greatest engines of progress in America, and I know that sounds really melodramatic, but I stand by it.

00:23:53 - Speaker 2: Absolutely.

00:23:54 - Speaker 3: No, for sure, all the more significant than that we’ve conducted this sort of quiet experiment on rolling back market dynamics in American cities over the past, I call it 60 or 70 years, you know, like you said, it used to be that you basically do whatever you want. If you had private property. Now the model is like in San Francisco, which we’re both familiar with, that you basically can’t do anything to a first approximation. Everything is set forever, don’t change it. And I think we’re only now starting to see the consequences of that experiment and to evaluate how well it did or didn’t work.

00:24:25 - Speaker 1: Totally, and it’s a very complicated issue. So, one of the reasons I left San Francisco was this growing feeling that you’re just like not allowed to do things there anymore.

And for me, what that meant concretely was like, I was very active in housing policy because I wanted San Francisco to build more housing, so more people could move there and have access to the awesome opportunities that the tech industry has offered, and other industries as well, but tech being the primary one. And after several years of it, I just kind of got a little down about it and didn’t feel like we’re making much progress because San Francisco has very strict zoning laws.

It has a very granular local control where neighbors can stop projects in their tracks that are near them or really anywhere in the city, but it has a really complex history because the place that it comes from.

It’s actually a place I agree with, and then I think it’s just gone too far.

So the place that that’s come from is in the 50s and 60s, American cities all over the country built many highways and the way they built these highways was they primarily tore down African American communities, other communities of color as well, but primarily African American communities. And they just did it without really asking. They would just bulldoze an entire neighborhood.

00:25:37 - Speaker 2: this eminent domain or?

00:25:39 - Speaker 1: It was through a variety of different methods. Some of it was eminent domain, yeah, and there were a number of different ways that they could do this and like each city had a slightly different approach.

The effect was that like these highways would just cut through these communities and destroy them. So, there were these things called the highway revolts that started happening in the 60s, where people were saying, hey, you’re destroying my life. That’s not OK, you can’t do that. And one of the ways that San Francisco reacted was putting rules in place to make it easier for locals to defend their neighborhoods and to have a voice in the process, which I think is a very good goal to have.

But where that has ended up is that today, one of the specific tools that was put in place is something called discretionary review.

And discretionary review basically says that if you have an issue with a project as a resident of the city, you can like file a complaint and stop it, or at least force it to pause and like have a hearing about the project and In theory, that was supposed to be used by, you know, people who were getting their houses bulldozed so that a highway could go through or whatever, or, you know, someone’s putting up like a really loud factory next to you or something like that.

But practically the way it’s used today is that like, really wealthy people who live in Pack Heights, Pacific Heights, which is a neighborhood in San Francisco, will like complain about how their neighbor who’s building a two-story house, is putting a shadow in their vegetable garden. And, you know, like, you don’t want a shadow in your vegetable garden, I get it, but my personal opinion is that making it possible for a family to move in next to you is like way more important than if your squash gets sunlight.

So it’s this tool that ended up going so far as to give people local control that like completely blocked the system. And as a result, San Francisco has added far more jobs than it has housing for the last like 10 years straight. And the housing prices just have completely shot up. Anyway, I shouldn’t rant about that way too much, but the point is that it’s a really complex issue where it’s always a balance between local control and also maximizing sort of for the greater good, and for the greater good is like a really complicated concept to define.

00:27:47 - Speaker 2: Or as you mentioned earlier with the art deco buildings where there’s heritage to protect, you want to protect the character of a place that makes it unique and special and not just tear it all down and replace it with highways and strip malls, which maybe sometimes pure economic forces would take you in this homogenizing direction, which I think is also part of the argument against gentrification which There is a big, big talk back here in Berlin these days. A lot of demonstrations and things. There was a 5 year rent cap law that had been passed and then was struck down by the German Supreme Court. It’s a real huge point of debate between the people who are here already and want things to basically stay the way they are.

They want to preserve the character of the city, which I agree is very special, but then Life has changed and the city should grow, just like all things, grow and change to be healthy. In addition to just the simple fact that we’re adding more humans to the planet, and if we’re gonna have more humans, then we also need more houses for those humans to be in, and just because you were there first doesn’t necessarily give you a special privileges for housing as opposed to the needs of others.

00:28:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the rent controls issues is a really interesting one, because I understand where it comes from, which is we don’t want people to get displaced when the place around them becomes more expensive, but at the same time, when you have rent control, I think it’s akin to aristocracy in the sense of saying like, you got here first, this is like your land, you have some special privilege over it. And newcomers who may also want to make their life better and may also want to have access to what that beautiful city has to offer, now don’t have access, and like sympathetic to the goal of locals, locals being in a position where they can stay in their home, and I think that is a problem to solve, but rent controls are a very blunt instrument that don’t actually quite do the thing that people say that it should do.

Rent control is a tricky situation because it encourages things like landlords neglecting to actually take care of the building. I think there’s other ways to achieve the same results that are also not perfect, but result in fewer issues.

One final thought on that is like, rent control also increases the price for other people who weren’t lucky enough to be in a rent controlled building. So, Berlin, for instance, has a lot of immigrants who are coming in, who I think they should have a home and should be welcomed, but because they weren’t in a building at the time of rent control, they’re now forced to the outskirts of the city, or they’re forced to pay a lot more for the remaining buildings that are not rent controlled because it’s rent controlled effectively removing supply from the market. It just sort of puts everything in stasis and people don’t want to move from places even if they need to upgrade and I’m sympathetic to the goal, but we have to look at like the outcome of what actually happens when you put something in place, not just say what you wish it did.

00:30:42 - Speaker 2: Some of that sounds like sort of understanding market dynamics or economics, and that reminds me of another thrust of order without design, which is, he’s basically talking about urban economists, which is essentially the academic study of cities. And then urban planners, which in fact was what his job is, which is people whose work for governments in some form to figure out things like zoning laws in an attempt to shepherd the city in whatever direction.

The government would like it to go, and he talks about that at least at the time this book was written, they didn’t have good communication with each other. So planners might be not that aware of economics and kind of market dynamics generally, but then also the very specific dynamics of the role of markets in cities and of course vice versa as well. The academics are a little disconnected from the reality of the decisions that the planners need to make every day.

00:31:39 - Speaker 1: Totally, and some of those realities are political realities, like what we’re just talking about with rent control, people do not feel good when they see what they consider gentrification happening, or when they feel like they’re being priced out of the neighborhood that they’ve lived for their whole life, and so they get angry and they want something to be done. And the problem is that doing something doesn’t always make the problem better. Doing something sometimes actually makes the problem worse if you don’t understand the causal model of what’s gonna go on. And so there’s been a lot of actions that people take that I think actually worsen the situation to their own goals because they don’t appreciate the level of dynamicism that’s happening. So like a similar example, it’s not about cities, but is sort of a similar dynamic economic system is like taxes. Since moving to Florida, I’ve met a lot of people who have moved to Florida from New York to California because New York and California have been hiking up taxes for companies and for themselves individually. And I will not make any judgment about whether I agree or disagree with that, but just to make the point that like, when you increase taxes, people will find ways to not pay them often, not always, but it is a reality that you have to deal with, and you can’t just like moralize it. And say, oh well, they’re bad people for not paying the taxes that the society around them agreed upon. You have to actually deal with the problem. And so I think a lot of governments will raise taxes and then be shocked that like, they get a lot less revenue than they expect because people just move away. And so, cities often have similar issues. Like, for instance, there’s something called a privately owned public open space in San Francisco, and I believe New York and a number of other cities have this too. And the concept is, you’re a big developer, you’re building like an office building or a bunch of condos or apartments or something, and the privately owned public open spaces is POOS is the acronym. It’s a rule that says like if you build a development of a certain size, you have to build at least this much public space for people to enjoy in the building.

Sounds like a really nice idea, and some of them actually are really nice. Like, there’s this really beautiful cafe in the LinkedIn building in San Francisco that is a popo, but there’s a lot of other popos that are sort of hidden because the developer sees the letter of the law and they say, ah, but they didn’t say like where it needs to be. And so sometimes they’ll put these popos on like the rooftop of the building and put like no signage. Whatsoever for people to find it. And so it’s effectively just a private space for the building. And, you know, it’s a nice amenity. Maybe the people who live in that building like it, whatever, but it’s not solving the problem that the government wanted to solve when they put that rule in place. And so something that complexifies this is that politicians and bureaucrats usually get points for starting something, but not for the actual. And so they say we did something to create more public space in San Francisco, people clap and like re-elect them.

But then 5 years down the line, you realize like, oh, there is no extra public space really. These are really hard to get to and people have to put together like special maps. There’s all these like lists online that you can find, and there are all these like secret little nooks, which is, you know, fun in its own right, but really not what the city was going for.

00:34:53 - Speaker 2: I think accountability loops is one of the biggest things missing in public policy debate or politics, and I don’t necessarily think anyone’s quite to blame there. It’s a systematic thing, but it’s something where when a project like that is set up, we don’t even define what success is necessarily. We say we’re going to do a project to change our spaces somehow, more public space, more greenery, different transit options, but what will success be and how we measure that 5 years down the road and if it’s not working, we’ll pivot or transition or sunset the program, but that’s rarely the way the government works.

00:35:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, and I think it’s doable. A lot of organizations do this all the time, and I’m sure that some government organizations do as well, but It doesn’t usually loop back to the voters, and I still don’t have a clear model of why that is, but I think it’s a really important problem to solve because in the situation that we’re in now, Without that accountability loop, politicians who even want to do the right thing will have a hard time doing it because they’ll spend all their time doing the right thing and not like doing the flashy things, and then they won’t get re-elected. And so they’ll only have their what, 2 or 4 year stints or whatever it is before they’re booted out, and you can only have so much impact in that time. So, building those loops is really important, and I think I’ve seen some cities like Singapore, for example, have like dashboards with certain statistics, which I think are An interesting start, but it’s definitely not normal, like a normal practice and not something that more people are aware of.

And like, no person wants to create a system where they now have to be accountable cause now it only increases the chance that they won’t succeed at the goal. So something that has to be imposed. And actually, before that, even, it’s even hard to even agree what the goals should be, right? So like, in the instance of historical preservation, we are talking about different cities have made very different trade-offs, uh, but individuals within those cities all disagree really strongly. So like Paris, for example, has Effectively decided to be kind of like a living museum. There’s rules like you’re not allowed to build buildings that go above a particular line relative to sea level, so that you can have a good view of, can’t remember which church, but like a particular church on a hill that’s just gorgeous.

00:37:12 - Speaker 3: Is that Notre Dame or am I imagining that?

00:37:14 - Speaker 1: No, I don’t think it’s Notre Dame. I think it’s the one on the hill with a really beautiful view of like, uh, has like this like, I can picture in my head, but it’s not coming to me.

But it’s gorgeous and you’re supposed to have a view of it from roughly everywhere in the city, and that’s a choice to make, you know, but the result is that Paris is extremely expensive, especially for Parisians, and a lot of people end up having to move to the outskirts, or similarly like, it’s tough to have a large headquarters for a business in Paris because there just aren’t that many big buildings.

So they’ve created this whole new business district called La Defense, which is like way off. In the outskirts and like nowhere near the core of the city, which has big skyscrapers. And like there’s a tradeoff that Paris chose to make. And I think it has hurt their economy, but it has like preserved this gem of a city that I’m super happy exists and I’m like really glad that I can go and look at these beautiful views and beautiful architecture. So every city needs to make those choices itself and there will always be people who are benefiting and hurting from it, and it makes it really hard.

00:38:26 - Speaker 2: One example of kind of preserving what’s there, living museum, like you said, versus investing in the future, which sometimes means taking risks, was the building the Eiffel Tower.

Uh, I read a great, uh, biography of Gustav Eiffel, who’s a pretty inspiring fellow, but did quite a lot of work, um, but if the Statue of Liberty and the, um, or the internals of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower being two of us.

More famous pieces, uh, but when, you know, when they put up plans to, to build that for I think it was the World’s Fair, the outrage in the city was, was huge and even immediately after it was built, the feeling was, it’s this eyesore, it dominates the the the skyline, it’s this super modern thing that doesn’t fit with our, um, you know, quaint, uh, quaint architectural vibe, um, and it took a long time before it became what it is.

Now, which is this total icon that not only stands for Paris but in fact for France, and you couldn’t couldn’t even imagine it without that. But that was a bold move that a lot of people were um were against. And so in order to in order to build that next Eiffel Tower, whatever that’s going to be, you need to be willing to take risks, but then that comes at a cost.

00:39:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s such a good example.

And I mean, I think I should probably express my bias here is I like building things and I like taking risks and like seeing other people take risks, and so I like to live in a place that allows that.

That’s one of the reasons I moved to Miami from San Francisco is it it feels like it’s more welcome here and like, you know, Paris seems like an even more extreme version of San Francisco. But I also respect the idea of a community coming and making that decision to make the opposite choice, but it becomes really challenging to decide like, what does it mean for the community to make the decision, because it’s hard enough to even know what one individual wants, I think, let alone to capture the views of everyone. The most common form of voting, for instance, is like, first past the post or whoever gets the majority rule vote, and that works, it’s like better than a lot of things, but it has a number of really important flaws. Like, for example, what if the majority of people kind of like the Eiffel Tower, but a minority hates it, and I think it’s the worst thing ever. So there’s a majority that weekly would like it, but also they don’t care that much if you don’t have it. And they voted in, but then there’s a minority who’s like totally harmed by it. To me, like, if you had that distribution of preferences, I would actually prefer not to build it because like it’s harming people extremely in a way that no one is actually benefiting from that much. But you know, that’s the values question and like designing these systems is the values thing. And I think every single voting system has like some very valid criticism that you could have. So it’s not clear even how communities should make these choices, which brings us back to markets, which I think is like something I really like about having every city make decisions differently and having a little more decentralization. Where, you know, a central government, like a particular country isn’t making all the rules, because then every city can come to its own decision about how to make decisions, and you can end up like, leaving places and making choices for yourself if you disagree with that particular place. And so it By allowing diversity, it’s gonna create more situations that you personally disagree with, but it also create more situations that you really love and you can go live there. And so diversity is really crucial, I think, to solving this problem, and then the other pieces, people have to be able to actually move, and that’s really hard, you know, in a world with a lot of borders, there’s actually quite limited choices for most people in the world.

00:42:04 - Speaker 2: I’m a huge fan of Let 1000 flowers bloom, and then individual choice to kind of have a bottom up emergence of what’s working or what is into a natural sorting.

You’re absolutely right.

The world that we live in that’s built on nation states which sort of assume you’re born in a place and you probably live your entire life without going more than about 100 kilometers from that place and you have kids there and you die there. That’s what I think a lot of the sort of national systems and immigration and customs. Systems that we have now are kind of assuming, but I think that has not been the case for a while, and that’s going to become even more so with a lot of mass migration in the near future and certainly for those of us privileged enough to be in the tech world where we have disposable income and choice of where we want to work, perhaps because we’re on remote teams. It is really the case just as I decided to go to another country, not because I wanted to go to another country so specifically, but because the city I wanted happened to be located in that other country. I ran up against very much still do run up against all the challenges, the significant challenges of being an immigrant, and quite a lot of it is related to this assumption that people don’t move.

00:43:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think growing up in a country like the United States, you have a lot of options cause it’s a really big country, so you can move a lot of places, but honestly, even that is very limiting to grow up without a lot of money, it’s hard to move to San Francisco because it’s an expensive place and like, sure you might be able to get a job with a high salary once you’re there, but it’s gonna take time, and you don’t know, you haven’t been there, maybe you can’t get a job, who knows, so a lot of people are stopped by that as well. But in a smaller country, like again, Argentina is one that I know really well, there’s one really big city, it’s Buenos Aires, and a third of the country lives in that city. There’s a lot of other cool places to be too, but Buenos Aires is the place you want to go if you want to have like a really ambitious career. And, you know, if you don’t Like Buenos Aires, tough luck. Like it’s tough, you know, it’s a beautiful city. A lot of people do love it, but if you want something else from your life, you want to be a Hollywood movie star, you now have to get a visa. You have to like uproot your entire life and move to a whole another country on a different continent. And so I think it’s something that we’re going to have to find new models for it because what’s happening now locks a lot of people out of opportunities, and I think it’s honestly a moral issue. There’s people who live in places with very little opportunity, and they themselves have a lot of potential, but they’re stuck somewhere that has poorer systems of coordination, and they just can’t get out. And so we’re going to need to find new models for that, but I don’t have solutions. I’m just criticizing at this point.

00:44:42 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the mobility question is really tough. To what extent do governments have a heightened obligation to their current citizens versus future ones who might yet be born there or might move there? That’s a really tough question. I don’t know. I don’t think there’s an easy answer. But looking within an existing polity, I think our discussion of voting and markets was really circling around the crux of the issue.

The reason I think cities are so hard and potentially so much more valuable. is you have this mix of public and private impact.

So by public and private I mean a private good with something that you kind of you yourself purely consume and the effect only touches you, like if you consume a pencil or something, you know, by consume I mean like you write with it. That basically only affects you. It doesn’t really affect your neighbor. It’s a totally private good and a totally public good, an example might be national defense. It’s like everyone in the country gets it or no one gets it. That’s not exactly true, but that’s a good that’s basically purely for the benefit of the group as a whole.

The thing about cities is you get this really messy mix. So to go back to your example, Devin, of building a two-story building in a previously one story lot. There’s a huge chunk of private benefit you get space for the family and there’s all kinds of other secondary public impacts like there’s shadow and there’s noise, and there’s traffic, and then you’re consuming some of this precious lumber off the market, it’s all this kind of stuff going on.

And I think the issue we have with cities is we only have a few relatively primitive technologies for distributed decision making and coordination.

We We have first past the post voting, we have corresponding representatives with that model, and we have called laissez-faire economics, and the pure economic model works really well for private goods, and the pure voting model can work well in cases where we have a single public good that everyone cares equally about, but we don’t really have the social technology to address this mess in the middle. And that’s why I feel like we end up with so much issues with cities, and then the flip side of that is that I think there’s enormous potential on the upside if we have a coordination technology that reflects that underlying reality better, we could get into a much better spot with cities. I’m so optimistic that we’ll figure something like that out.

00:46:49 - Speaker 1: I think that’s really well put, and that actually clarifies a lot for me, honestly. That space in the middle is really challenging, and I think right now we have these massive oversimplifications where we just pretend like they’re private goods, or we just pretend like they’re public goods, and they’re really not, they’re a mix. And so I think one of the reasons why we haven’t had more innovation in those sorts of coordination mechanisms for things in the middle is that there’s a limited amount of land and it’s really hard to Just start fresh. Like there’s kind of no frontier anymore on earth at least. And also in combination to that for the land that does exist, the people in power would have to agree that we should try a new system which would probably lessen their power. And so they I want to give it up.

And like, you know, if I was in power, maybe I wouldn’t want to give it up either. I don’t know. Like, I think I have some pretty good ideas, so of course I should have the power, right? Like I think that a lot of people have that view. So it doesn’t make them bad people or selfish necessarily, but just, why would I give up control that I have? Some concepts that I’ve been really excited about that are a bit out there, but I think are really important for us to take seriously. the idea of building new cities, and 3 projects in particular have come to mind. One is seasteading, if you’ve heard of that, which is the concept of like building floating cities in the oceans, effectively creating new land. Where there wasn’t any before. A second one is charter cities, which is the idea of carving out land in a place that already exists, and creating sort of a special economic zone, much like how Shenzhen in China was a new experimental city. That ended up dramatically changing the way that all of China works ultimately because so some background, Shenzhen is this part of China where several decades ago, they carved out this place and they said, we’re going to like kind of experiment with capitalism here. We’re gonna like see if it works. And it works, like really well, according to the metrics that the Chinese government cared about. And so they started adopting those across the rest of China as well. So charter cities are kind of like taking that idea and scaling it to more places. And the third one is, a lot of people are really interested in the idea of going to space and going to Mars, and I don’t actually know a ton about that. That seems really hard, but I think that comes from this place of people saying, you know, there’s no blank slate anymore, and it’s really hard to change these kinds of things and systems that already exist. So, where are the places that we can create new land or create space to run these experiments? I think all of these are really far fetched, like, I’m not sure if any of these experiments will work. I mean, I mean charter cities have the most potential given that they worked in the past with places like Shenzhen or Dubai in some senses was a special economic zone, but I think the experimentation is where you get these new ideas and you develop confidence that they might work.

00:49:40 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I have some optimism that we’ll see experimentation in those types of new cities.

I’m also very bullish on experimentation with land like places in the non-physical world. So one example that I can kind of run through is spectrum.

So electromagnetic spectrum, you need a slice of it to be able to communicate over the airwaves, basically things like radio and Wi Fi, go over this, and it’s kind of like land and that’s sliced up and it’s sold or licensed currently by the relevant regulatory authority.

And that has a lot of the same challenges that we see with regular land, whereas if for example you have naive pure private property, you could, for example, say someone buys the slice of Spectrum for Wi Fi 100 years ago, and then someone else develops Wi Fi, well, the person who owns that Wi Fi slice just got massively rich by no. Work of their own, right? That’s really wealth that doesn’t in any way belong to them. And in fact, they could now not be a particularly good owner of it, but perhaps for financial or tax reasons, they don’t want to sell it, so on and so forth.

So there’s all kinds of proposals for managing the allocation and taxation of land like things that we could try on something like Spectrum first. It could be that you have rolling auction or that you do a self-assessed value and get taxed based on that. There’s all kinds of experiments that I think are more palatable there and perhaps once we see their value, where value means like basically you’re unlocking a bunch of economic surplus and distributing it out to the citizens in some way, then there’ll be more eagerness to backport that into the physical cities where it’s higher risk.

00:51:12 - Speaker 1: Totally. Everything you said is very exciting to me.

I think there have been some experiments run on things like land, like you’re talking about, and for the audience, I think the way I would characterize things that are like land are things that you cannot make yourself, like you technically can fill and like create islands and stuff, like, basically you can’t really make that much land.

Or things that when you use them, you exclude other people from using them or you ruin their experience.

So for example, if you use a plot of land, someone cannot build on it until you let them.

And so that combination of those two factors of like, you didn’t. Make it. So anytime the value of it goes up, you’re not responsible for that value, but you’re actually going to capture it yourself. But then also you’re monopolizing it so that the rest of your community cannot use it. Those are things that are like land. So anything that’s like a natural resource basically falls in this category as opposed to something like an idea, which is not like land, an idea that is like infinitely copyable.

00:52:12 - Speaker 3: I think land has this property furthermore, where the pure raw land itself gets almost all of its value from the actions of other people.

So a given acre of land in the United States, the value of that is almost entirely dependent on where it is. Therefore, the value comes from basically the people around it and all the activity that’s happening. So the reason that totally private ownership of land feels kind of weird from economic sense is basically all the value is made by other people, yet all the benefit is accruing to one individual.

Now it’s not the case for like improved structures on the land, right, which should be treated differently. This reminds me of Georgisms, which was the kind of policy prescription to match this worldview about land. Devin just finally, maybe you’re familiar with this.

00:52:51 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I’m a big Henry George nerd. Go on though, I’m very excited about this, go ahead.

00:52:56 - Speaker 3: This was basically his belief about land was that the benefits to the pure raw land were developed by the citizens of a given polity and therefore those benefits were sort of owed to them. So what he advocated was basically you tax the raw value of the land. And use that to fund the government, and you don’t have income taxes or corporate taxes or whatever.

00:53:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, like concretely, what that can look like is, my parents bought a house in Los Altos, about 35, 40 years ago, which is a town in San Francisco Bay Area, which is now a very expensive place to live.

They bought it before, I mean, it was already kind of expensive, but now it’s like really, really expensive, one of the most like expensive places in the country.

And while I love my parents and they’re very hardworking people who certainly contributed to the community, the vast majority of the increase in that piece of land that they bought decades ago is because a lot of awesome things happened around them, and people want to buy that land from them so that they can have access to those awesome things that other people created.

Now, my parents also remodeled the house, which also increased its value, so that’s something they did.

They put a little garden, it’s very nice. They themselves were contributing to the community through the work that they did, the volunteering that they did, you know, they volunteered in my schools, but the reason that property is so darn expensive is because it’s where it is.

And if my parents had done all of that same. and all of that same community activity in like the middle of rural Missouri or something like that, their house would not have gained value much at all. And so that’s a situation where they’ve benefited from the system and, you know, indirectly I’ve benefited too, but it’s actually not really just like that value should actually go back to the community in the form of taxes, in my opinion.

00:54:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to bring it back to our discussion about markets, the intuition here shouldn’t be that like, we should confiscate all the land or something, right? It’s more that we want to bring the dynamism and the distributed information processing and the efficiency, the experimentation that you get from markets and entrepreneurship to things that are more shaped like public goods or things that impact many people, because we have those incredible benefits in the pure private market. It’s, and it’s created an enormous amount of wealth and good in the world, right? We’ve had trouble with the more public domains, which by the way, now constitute most of our economy, you know, healthcare, education, so forth. We’ve had trouble with the dynamism and the efficiency in those spaces.

So if we can find some way to bring those dynamics of the market to these more public spaces that could be really valuable. So thinking about the land thing, if you’ve ever been a homeowner, you know. So the incredible amount of pride and attention and care you place in your own private residence, right? Like you pay a lot of attention to it, you’re willing to invest in it. If we had a mechanism whereby you could get that same sort of care and attention to detail on public goods that were impacting others, perhaps because you got paid out a dividend or something, think of how powerful that could be, you know, how exactly you do it, that’s the social technology question, but I’m optimistic that there’s a way to make that happen.

00:55:53 - Speaker 1: Two ideas I’ve played around with, which might be terrible, I’ve, you know, no one’s ever tried them that I know of. So one, the simpler one is, what if people in San Francisco had shares in the city of San Francisco, like, equity, basically.

And the reason I asked that question is like, right now, if you’re a homeowner in San Francisco and someone builds like a big condo building next to you or an office or something, you just lose out. Like, it’s just bad. It is actually just kind of bad for you for the most part. You know, don’t have as nice of a view, your vegetable garden has shade, like you have more rowdy neighbors or whatever. But if you had equity in the city, like maybe equity in the property taxes or something like that, your incentives would be more aligned with what’s good for the community at large, and what will generate more opportunities for all sorts of people, and not just yourself. And so I’ve always thought that that would be like a really interesting thing for a city to experiment with. And something like UBI universal basic income, might serve something like that, though the way that people have talked about universal basic income in the past doesn’t tie those two concepts together very well, so I don’t think people would emotionally get that connection. So I’m not sure if that actually solves the problem.

00:57:00 - Speaker 3: Adam, stop me for we aren’t too far off track here, but I think it was a tragic mistake to call what we currently call universal basic income, that instead of something like a citizen’s dividend, it’s not like you’re entitled to a living by other people’s work. It’s that the work that we all do to build this enormous amount of cultural wealth in a given polity, uh, you know, that’s wealth that we’re building for each other and so it’s plausible that you get some dividend of that out to you on a per capita basis. I think that would make a lot more sense like this idea of having shares in San Francisco basically, or perhaps you have shares in the properties closest to you on an exponentially decaying basis. So the ones right next to you, you own a big chunk of, and the ones on the other side of the city you own almost none of, you know, you can imagine all kinds of wild stuff, but I think there’s something there.

00:57:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s an interesting change on it. And I think like to put some flavor and like the idea of what are people contributing to society, cause like, you know, some people don’t do any volunteering, some people, you know, there’s some people who don’t work at all or whatever, and you’re like, well, maybe they’re not contributing, but like just by existing, maybe you’re walking around the street and now a woman who’s walking home late at I feel safer because you’re there. Like that’s the kind of thing where being around other people actually has value just purely by itself. And sure, everyone contributes slightly different amounts, but right now, that’s not really recognized at all. Everyone gets like sort of zero in return directly, and I think it would be interesting to like experiment with that. I think it would have to be workshopped heavily, so cities, please don’t take this as described, Please play with it. But I think as a concept, there’s something there.

Another idea is like, you could put more markets into the zoning code, so instead of saying things like, you cannot build buildings higher than this, instead you could have like, have you heard of air rights? Yeah, yeah, yeah, so you could have something more like air rights, which is basically creating property rights for the air above buildings in different cities you can like swap them.

00:58:54 - Speaker 2: When you mentioned charter cities earlier, I was thinking of Astral Codex 10 recently did a kind of review or overview of a charter city, and apparently the way they’re doing it is what they call voxels, which I’m familiar with from my video game days, which are essentially 3D pixels. So there’s 1 m by 1 m by 1 m square voxels and property rights are not just sort of the 2D space that’s on the ground, but actually goes up into the air.

00:59:18 - Speaker 1: Exactly, that’s exactly the concept. Like right now we have a very two dimensional property rights system where people like.

Land and then some chunk of air above it, but like, basically it’s 2D, but that’s actually a very massive simplification, especially in a place like Manhattan or Hong Kong, where buildings are extremely tall. And so if you could swap those in a more fluid market, then I think you would end up with people internalizing more of the externalities that they impose on people when they have a choice.

So in that example of the Pacific Heights residents vegetable garden. They would say, you know what, it’s worth $100,000 to me for my vegetable garden, not to be overshadowed, and I will pay you that money so that you don’t do it.

And now, the person who’s not able to build really high will be compensated for it, or vice versa, you know, maybe the person trying to build the buildings is like, you know, it’s worth $100,000 to you, but it’s worth a million dollars to me. So I’m going to do it and now I’m going to compensate you for the cost that it has imposed on you.

Poor squash. Yeah, yeah, the poor squash, but it’s like very expensive squash. And so I think the key idea that this is all trying to get at is like, how can you make it so that when people affect each other, when they have impacts on each other, that That person is compensated for it, and so that people actually bear the costs of like that they’re imposing on other people.

And if they’re willing to pay it, that’s great, but if they’re not willing to pay it then they shouldn’t do that action. So anyway, those are still very rough ideas, but I think this is why I want to see more cities pop up and exist in the world like Prospera, the charter city, because we’ll be able to run these. Experiments and see if they work and they might be totally crackpot ideas, but they also could be great ideas. Like democracy seemed like a terrible idea that didn’t make any sense for a long time, but then some countries started experimenting with it and it works pretty darn well. And so more places were able to adopt it. And that was only possible because there was a lot of frontier and we don’t have that much frontier anymore, so we have to make our own.

01:01:20 - Speaker 2: So maybe before we go, I’d love to hear from each of you a city that you think really does a good job at being itself perhaps, but in particular, that manages to have a unique character and a high quality of life, and be an attractive place for some certain kind of person or some certain industry through good governance, through whether it’s urban planning, whether it’s general policy making, is there something that stands out to you as a bit of a role model that others could look to.

01:01:50 - Speaker 1: The first one that comes to mind for me is Tokyo. It’s, I believe, the biggest city in the world by population, like 37 million people, something.

Totally wild, and it’s a source of roughly all of Japan’s economic growth.

In fact, like, Japan is a very slow growth country and the population of Japan overall is declining, but there’s still more people moving to Tokyo, which is just an astonishing fact.

Something I really admire about Tokyo is that they are able to, while it’s a very desirable place to live, the housing costs in Tokyo are actually not that high. And it’s not entirely clear to me why this is true.

There’s a number of things that I think contribute to it. One is that people are pretty liberal about tearing things down and building new things, and it seems almost like a cultural love of newness, and people are always excited to like rebuild and create a new thing in the place where an old thing stood.

And so I think they’re able to adjust as things change over time more rapidly than cities that are more afraid to tear things down. I think it is sort of cheating in the sense that like Japan overall is seeing depressed population growth. It is declining, so that does make things cheaper.

But as I mentioned at the top, like Tokyo is growing as a city, the number of people are coming in should balance that out.

So, I think Tokyo is one of the few massive cities in the world that has maintained a relatively low cost of living, and I think that there’s a lot of lessons to be learned there and how they’ve done it, while also being an engine for economic growth.

01:03:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, Tokyo is a great choice, and there’s lots of interesting land use law there. We can add some stuff in the show notes, but I think the short version is it’s one of the few big cities where it’s legal to build housing, therefore it’s relatively affordable.

01:03:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.

01:03:38 - Speaker 2: I just visited there once, a number of years ago, but yeah, I absolutely was impressed by how clean and organized the city was for being the world’s biggest metropolis, and just it’s a small note, but it’s a huge one to me, and feels like something every city should adopt. They don’t have on street parking. So, while there are cars, each individual street you walk down feels very kind of cozy and human scale in a way that I don’t associate with basically any other city or I associate with more of a village vibe, and I think this is just pretty brilliant.

Transit policy and how people get around cities and why it’s so important that they be able to move conveniently and safely is something we didn’t get into at all, and there’s a huge interest of mine, but that’s one small example of a policy choice that just radically changes the feel of a place.

01:04:25 - Speaker 1: And part of why that’s so important is because by not having on street parking, they’re forcing people to internalize externalities that they impose on other people, whereas most American cities have on street parking and it’s free, which is basically sounds fine, right? Like, so many cities have this, but the result is that people don’t have to pay any of the costs of their car taking up space in a city.

And so, like in San Francisco, the square footage of renting out a parking space on the street, it’s like, I don’t know, 50 cents an hour or something.

It is cheaper than the rent of an actual apartment. And so there have been like people joking, like, maybe I should just like camp on a parking space all the time and like live there because it’ll be cheaper than renting an apartment.

And and it’s effectively this like public space that we’ve given up to people and said like, you can have this and do whatever you want with it without realizing that you’re implicitly making a trade off.

And so yeah, I really love that Japan and Tokyo does that.

01:05:18 - Speaker 3: The parking topic is its whole own interesting thing. I very highly recommend the book, the high costs of free parking. It’s an economic and mathematical analysis of what happens when you give away or subsidized parking, and the short version that’s every free spot in a major city is like lighting tens of thousands of dollars on fire. You can read the book for the details.

01:05:38 - Speaker 1: It’s a great book, it’s really good.

01:05:40 - Speaker 2: So I think for me my choice will be Dubai, which we mentioned briefly earlier, and in fact, I’ve never been there, but I’ve read a couple of pretty good books about it, including History of Future Cities, which covers a few very interesting cities such as Saint Petersburg and some others, and then another one, that’s sort of a longer history of the ruling class there and how Dubai came to be. And on one hand, it’s an amazing example of human achievement and what you can do if you decide you want to, and well you have a lot of resources to throw at it. On the other hand, there’s a lot there that’s extremely terrible, so it is this study in contrasts, but I guess I don’t necessarily take it as that it reflects a place I want to live or is how we should build cities, but rather you get this sense that It is possible we can decide as kind of societies that we want to build a city in a particular way, and we want it to be a particular way. And coming back to that kind of let 1000 flowers bloom, we need to experiment more. To me, it’s sort of inspiring in its study in contrasts, and for me it’s sort of opened my eyes to what could we do if we were willing to think a little bit more outside the box about our cities.

01:06:52 - Speaker 3: And the ones I’ll pick are not perfect by any means, but I think they’re very interesting and important, and those are the major cities in Texas, like Austin and Houston.

Texan cities, perhaps more than any other in the western world, embrace the idea of let people do things and see what happens. So if you’ve ever visited one of these cities in Texas, it’s highly chaotic.

You know, there’s incredible amounts of cars and freeways everywhere. There’s like houses next to commercial and next to light industrial, it’s kind of anything goes, and they’re constantly building stuff and tearing stuff down. But the result is that you get this incredible dynamism and indeed people are voting with their feet to move to Texas. So I think it’s at least a very interesting experiment and I’ll be curious to see how it plays out over the next couple of decades.

01:07:34 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write to us on Twitter at museAppHQ or via email. hello at museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Devin, whenever you get around to starting your charter city and implementing all of your unique ideas, please let me know. I can’t promise I’ll move there, but at least I want to visit.

01:07:57 - Speaker 1: I’ll definitely keep you posted. Thanks so much for having me.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Rather than giving someone this hermetically sealed box, can we use an analogy like build a beautiful Lego set for them and hand it to them, where if they like it just as it is, that’s fine. And if they want to add one Lego right there, it’s not a big deal. They sort of see the composition of how this thing was made, they have a little bit of flexibility to tweak it because it’s made out of parts they understand.

00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. I’m joined by Jeffrey Litt.

00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Hello, hello. It’s good to be here.

00:00:41 - Speaker 2: So Jeffrey, one thing I’m thinking about these days in raising my young child is growing up in a multilingual household, since both of her parents are from two different countries and we’re living in a third country. I know you grew up in a multilingual household as an adult, what are your reflections on that experience?

00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so my mom’s Japanese and I grew up sort of half my childhood in the US, half in Japan, and when I was a kid, my mom sort of forced me and my brother to learn Japanese when we were in the US and I was just thinking about how I’m so grateful now that she sort of overrode our preferences as children, and that now I have some proficiency in the language and so raising kids is complicated.

00:01:20 - Speaker 2: There is going to be, I can see this already at this young age, and I think if it gets only more so as children get more agency naturally with age, which is parents do know better. They’re just older and wiser and know how the world works and At the same time, a kid needs to find their own way, and authoritarian upbringing doesn’t sound particularly like a good way to blossom as a person. So finding that balance between what’s prescribed by parents, you’ll thank me when you’re older. In this case, literally so versus let a kid find their own path. I think that’s an ongoing philosophical moral dilemma.

00:01:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, especially for something as difficult as learning a language. You know, I do think with whether it’s sports or music or these skills that take a lot of time to master, I’ve also been grateful that my parents helped me learn to love Japanese and build some of that motivation, whether that’s from visits to Japan to hang out there as a kid. I tend to believe that the goal of education at a young age isn’t primarily to transfer the skill. It’s to, as they say, light that fire that eventually keeps learning going, and to this day. I’m practicing my Japanese trying to keep it up, and so I think that’s an important balance this track too.

00:02:31 - Speaker 2: What’s that saying? If you want to set sail on a boat you’re building, you don’t teach someone to build a boat, you teach them to yearn for the ocean.

00:02:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, I think there’s a lot of that at play.

00:02:43 - Speaker 2: So Jeffrey, I’ve been wanting to get you on the podcast for a while here. We got the chance to work together on the Cambria project at Ik and Switch last year, but I’d love to hear just a little bit about your background, how you came to be doing this work in the tools for Though and independent research space.

00:02:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’m currently doing a PhD at MIT in computer science. I’m in a lab called the Software Design Group, led by my advisor Daniel Jackson.

And at the highest level, the questions I’m trying to explore are how do we empower more people to kind of take full advantage of the medium of computing? I think it’s very ironic that we’ve invented this infinitely flexible thing called software, and most of the way that we use it ends up being a small group of people, make some stuff and throw it over a wall, and everyone else uses it. And I’m just interested in new approaches to building software that changed that dynamic.

But before coming into this academic side of things, a lot of my thinking on this area actually came from working in startups and shipping real software to people.

If you had asked me 5 years ago, are you gonna be doing a PhD, I would have laughed at you and said, you know, no, I’m not that kind of academically minded person. But over my time in startups, I got really interested in these topics and I decided that Rather than go try to start a company or something, the academic environment offers a certain amount of freedom from the need to ship real software immediately, the need to make money immediately, that I thought would be really valuable for kind of thinking more deeply about what the problem actually is here, and maybe bigger picture ways to reorient the way that we build software.

00:04:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. You have both industry background, as they might say, ship stuff fast, solve real customer problems, and kind of academic mindset, longer time horizons, more of a search for basic truths, trying to think bigger and more expansively and more philosophically, and that’s actually, I think, a place. That I and Switch kind of excels or part of its reason for existence is to kind of be in that middle space between those two worlds which I think is not well occupied and certainly for creative tools generally I feel like that at least right now is the space where we need the most minds and the most effort.

00:04:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s part of why I have really enjoyed following and can switch his work over the years and have gotten to collaborate a bit with the lab, and I think it fills this really important middle place between those two worlds.

Too often I think startups are kind of not reflecting on the larger possibilities of what they could be doing if they had more than, you know, 3 months ahead to think about.

And on the other side, you have academics who, I think sometimes It’s not really clear to me how idea transfer really happens from academic human computer interaction research to the real world sometimes. I don’t think it’s a smooth process where, you know, startups are devouring papers that are being written and trying to implement them in the real world. I think it’s a much messier process. If you look at even someone like Doug Engelbart, who I think is a hero for a lot of people in this community, it was really hard for him to get his ideas out into the world, ultimately succeeded, but through a pretty circuitous path. So I think it’s really valuable to have institutions that are thinking about both of those worlds simultaneously, with the ultimate goal of actually deploying in some form, their ideas, as opposed to just sort of just handling the ideas half of things.

00:06:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, that’s why I think I really enjoy following your work so much, is that you do fit in that middle space and hopefully can be a role model for the rest of us on that.

00:06:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m trying to, it’s tricky. There are a lot of tensions to navigate as I’m sure that you guys have experienced.

00:06:23 - Speaker 2: And I also thank you for being one of the very early users of Muse during the beta as well as a customer. I hope you’ll consider renewing your subscription when that comes up again.

You’ve both tweeted lots of screenshots about how you use it, which is, I think, really great for other people seeing how you use things and the every publication even wrote an article. of detailing your work and you talked about a lot of different tools in your flow, include some screenshots of use there so very much appreciate your business, but probably even more than that, the kind of very public moral support makes a big difference, especially in the early days of a product when you know you don’t have so many believers just yet.

00:07:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for building such a great tool. I mean, I bought the big iPad Pro originally when I was starting to dip my toes into the academic waters and being confronted with a lot of 8.5 by 11 PDFs and decided I wanted a nicer way to read them, but something felt like it was missing there in terms of synthesizing across them. And when Muse appeared, I was like, this is it. This is maybe the early versions weren’t the perfect product yet, but I could tell the vision was exactly what I needed, and so it’s been a blast using it.

00:07:29 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is bring your own client, which is something you’ve written about, and of course I’ll link that article in our show notes here, but maybe you can tee up for the listeners a little bit what that’s all about.

00:07:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So bring your own client means having the flexibility to pick what application you want to use when you’re working with some data, and for there to be some independence, especially I think between people who are collaborating on the same project, to pick the software that they want to bring to the table.

So I think like to give a concrete example, right, back in the old days when we used to email each other files to work on a document, let’s say I could email you a Word doc.

And then you might open that Word doc in Apple Pages or OpenOffice, whatever your preferred word processor is, and then you would send that doc back to me, and I don’t care what application you used on your end, as long as I get a file back, we can work together, right? And in fact, if we’re emailing files, I also don’t care what email client you’re using.

There’s sort of this inherent point of flexibility built in where we get to make these individual choices about how we want to work.

And broadly, the topic I’ve been thinking a lot about these days is how I think that we are starting to lose some of that flexibility with the way that computing is headed.

So I’m very interested in this overall ethos of bringing our own clients and perhaps even building or customizing our own clients, um, to gain a little more control over our experience with software.

00:08:56 - Speaker 2: I think email is one of the best examples perhaps because it’s this really one of the oldest standards in some ways, sort of the first internet protocol in some ways, and the plethora of different clients that have existed over time. I don’t know, I used Pine and later mutt, this kind of terminal-based clients. At university in the 1990s and going forward to Gmail was this big revelation in terms of lots of great interface innovations as well as backend innovations, but it could just work right away. You didn’t need the person on the other end to be also a Gmail user, they could be with any email client.

00:09:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think email is one of those domains that really demonstrates how valuable it can be to have this flexibility.

You know, I think sometimes it can be tempting to say, does this really matter? What’s the big deal? Can’t we just all agree on the same software to use? But if you look at something like email, I know a lot of people, some of them not that technical, who have really strong opinions about what email client they want to use because they’ve just found one that works well for them. I’ve had many moments of my favorite email clients sort of going out of business or being acquired and hopping from one to the next and searching for that elusive best client. And I think for anyone who’s sort of an email for like 8 hours a day at their job. You start to see why having this degree of flexibility genuinely matters for people, and it’s not just like a little convenience, it’s actually a big deal.

00:10:23 - Speaker 2: Right, and so you see this not only in the big example of Gmail that really revolutionized a lot of things about how email works, but even nowadays we have a plethora of new clients, superhuman, tempo is another cool up and coming one, or for example on the Muse team for our inbound support where you can just basically email hello at museapp.com that goes into a product called Front and so this is kind of a group inbox email thing that has quite different characteristics from what an individual might want.

But it’s nice because the person on the other end, they don’t care what we’re using, they can just send us an email, maybe they include attachments, maybe they include whatever we reply back within that, so that gives each party in this back and forth can use what suits them and what’s gonna suit a team that’s going through a bunch of support requests is just dramatically different from what might suit an individual doing their own personal inbox.

00:11:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually personally use Tempo, and I think it’s a great example of a niche product.

It’s really perfect for what I’m looking for.

They have a really minimalist design. They have this concept of batching your emails so you don’t get distracted.

And for me, as someone who’s at least trying to not check my email 100 times a day, it’s sort of aligned with what I want.

I don’t think it’s necessarily the perfect product for everyone or even the majority of people, but I think it’s right for me, and it’s just great that because we have this shared protocol, I can make that choice to adopt this niche product that maybe only 1% of email users will ever use.

Without convincing all this other 99% to join me in using this thing, we sort of take this for granted with email, but look at Slack. There’s not really a concept of a third party Slack client, right? And I think it’s easy to forget how monolithic that experience is.

Every team that uses Slack is stuck with the exact same user interface with no ability for individuals or even teams to really meaningfully customize it. And I think that’s a tremendous design challenge to try to make something that works well for so many different people and so many different workforces.

00:12:21 - Speaker 2: Maybe there you illustrate the trade off though Slack because it is an integrated product where they control every part of it, the client, the API, the data storage, all of it, they can work on a very integrated and sleek experience.

Twitter went through something similar in their early days. They were moving in this direction of being a platform. There was this initial explosion of clients that tried interesting things. Like TweetDeck and Tweety and so on, and ultimately they decided it was a product decision within their company.

We don’t want to be a platform. We don’t want to be the next email. We want to provide an end to end curated experience where when we are going to add a new feature, whether it’s images and video in line or something else that we can fully control what that looks like for all the parties in the equation.

And that’s a trade-off that I think you always have to make, an email is a good example.

You do get weird stuff that happens when you email between two clients and they don’t quite agree about how to display the results, and also it’s very difficult to add new things.

I say that speaking as someone who would really like to embed video into email newsletters and you just can’t do it. You got to use animated GIFs which are low quality and slow to download and so on, but it’s just not a standard that can quickly evolve.

00:13:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is indeed one of the core tensions in this idea. How do we balance moving fast with a single decision being made about an ecosystem versus having this more distributed approach.

One idea that I find interesting though is kind of this idea of partial compatibility. Can we find sort of middle points between these extremes of a single rigid standard that hasn’t evolved since the 80s versus a company that just decides whatever it wants and imposes it on everyone.

I think we can potentially at least try to have app ecosystems where you might have two applications that share 80% of their functionality, and there might be parts around the edges that don’t work perfectly together, but that might be something you can manage as a team, especially if you’re working with people and you know what tools they’re using. I’m really interested in finding tools and sort of platform approaches to mediate this kind of fuzzier partial interoperability.

00:14:34 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s a really interesting spectrum here, or maybe even a whole world of different possibilities. I’m reminded, for example, of this idea of aftermarket support that you see in consumer durable goods like cameras, for example, and there through fiat or evolution, you have some standards, some connection points where people can.

Plug in often literally and you might have the core the proprietary, but there’s all these extensions and accessories that you can put on it and because of that, you get an enormous ecosystem of tools and so on that you can build around the core, like a good example of this would be tractor attachments, where there’s the 3 point hitch, and you can basically put whatever you want on a. you know, a plow, a snow blower, whatever. And that’s really interesting because you enable profitable commercial entities and there’s only a few of them to build the extremely complex integrated tractor. And then you have this whole world of mom and pop metal fabrication shops building random implements for 200 bucks. It’s really interesting balance, and I don’t see that very often in software.

00:15:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s also interesting in software to look at domains where you often have a lot of tools that look pretty similar to each other if you squint.

Take to do list software or like team issue tracker software, for example. Every time I see a landing page for a new project management tool, there’s a lot of concepts there that look pretty familiar. You have things to do, you assign them to people, you have some notion of projects.

And yet every tool has a little bit of some unique spin on that problem.

There’s perhaps new ideas that they bring for organizing stuff, and yet I think it’s reasonable to say that maybe 80% of the core ideas are shared.

So something we actually worked on on the Cambria project that I worked on at I can Switch last summer was, let’s say, as one example, you have one to do list app that’s decided that you can assign something to multiple people to work together on.

And another app says that a to do is assigned to a single person. And what if you want those apps to interoperate, you might just say this is impossible, but you could also say, well, if you assign something to multiple people, we’ll just show the first one on the other app that only allows a single assignee, and maybe that’s good enough for your use case to get by with that sort of partial little bit of bridging between those ideas. And I think if we can get creative about bridging between similar but not identical apps more, that opens up a lot more possibilities for how we can have tools work better together.

00:16:54 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Another thing that I’m reminded of here is the metadata that you can put at the top of HTML pages. I’m actually forgetting the name, what’s the right name for this?

00:17:02 - Speaker 1: The meta tags, the meta tags, I guess, yeah.

00:17:04 - Speaker 3: And there’s a whole world of emergent, somewhat adopted, partially adopted, somewhat conflicting standards for preview cards and Twitter preview cards and open network preview cards and, but it kind of works out, right, because there’s this basic platform entry point, which is the meta tags and then different platforms and users adopt different subsets of them, but in practice it tends to work pretty well.

00:17:28 - Speaker 2: I think the web obviously in many ways is a great example of an open and evolving standard that on one hand has innovated a lot and continues to over a pretty long period of time but also is not owned by any one vendor and browsers come and go and so on.

But one principle that’s often used there is this idea of progressive enhancement. which maybe is kind of what you’re pointing to there, Mark, which is you can drop in something like if there’s some fancy new audio thing or some fancy new video thing or some fancy new interaction capability, you can either first of all just handle the degradation case of this browser doesn’t support that, so let me do something.

Simpler, but in many cases just putting in, for example, those meta tags that produce, for example, a certain kind of unfurl card will just be ignored by older browsers that don’t know what that is. They just kind of skip over that and if you’re in that situation or You just don’t see that information and probably something similar happens with, yeah, you use an older browser to load a page that has, I don’t know, some fancy new video thing, you just see an empty box or whatever. That’s not great, but it still works for you, you can still get most of the content.

00:18:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we have a lot to learn from the web in terms of how to promote sort of a more flexible notion of what software can be.

One really cool thing about the web, right, is that people don’t have to build plug-in APIs into their UIs for you to mess with them.

So if you know a little bit of JavaScript hacking, or even, you know, how to open the DOM Inspector on a website, you can go in and delete ads, you can change stuff, you can install browser extensions that modify stuff and none of that is Using some official API, right? It’s just that the nature of the platform is that when you build a website, sort of by default, there’s a lot of hooks built in for people to reverse engineer how it was made and to pretty intrusively modify any part of it.

And I think that’s a really interesting goal to aspire to and more software as opposed to a more traditional plug-in API like in a lot of platforms, if there’s no API for it, you’re stuck, you can’t customize that aspect of the software.

Of course there are trade-offs, you know. The reverse engineering approach is harder, it tends to be less secure, and it’s a lot harder to maintain over time because things change out from under you.

But on the other hand, I think there’s a certain beauty to being able to make changes that not only did the original authors of the software not anticipate and explicitly authorize you to make, but even sometimes ones that they actively don’t want you to make, right? So ad blocker being the prime example of that. And so I’m very excited about the potential for browser extensions as a mechanism for a more customizable kind of software, especially as the web just seems to keep growing and growing as where all software is going to end up living.

00:20:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one of my favorite party tricks is opening the Dev Tools console in someone’s browser and doing something like just changing a background color or some text on any website you want Facebook, CNN.com, whitehouse.gov and you know, it can blow people’s minds, wow, you’re an Uber hacker, but I actually also use that as an entry point for getting people interested in programming, letting them see without needing to install any new tools in their computer. Kind of how the web works a little bit under the hood and that they could do this too.

00:20:42 - Speaker 1: I love doing that too. If I’m trying to teach kids about HTML, I’ll always have them vandalize their school website and the Chrome deaf tools inspector and they just get such a thrill.

I think it’s, you know, If you’re brought up in this world where software seems to be this immutable object that is just presented to you, and then someone shows you this little trick you can play, that all of a sudden makes it yours and something you can mess with, I think that’s just a really powerful ethos to instill in people. I think Alan Kay would call it.

Popping open the hood and seeing something sensible inside and just a little bit of that ability to mess with the internals, I think can go a long way.

Adults too, you know, I’ve shown like sales people how to fake a mockup in the browser, and I’ve seen people, adults scream with delight when they realize they can do this stuff.

I do think there’s also a problem, which is that stepping from a little bit of dom hacking and depth tools to actually making a real browser extension, is this enormous leap.

Like, if you think about it, you know, to publish a browser extension or even to save one for yourself, you go from messing around in depth tools to, OK, I’m going to learn. All these weird APIs and I’m gonna open up a code editor now, and I have to learn some JavaScript, and there’s just this huge chasm, and one of the things I’m interested in is finding ways to, I guess, bridge that gap, or just make it a smoother slope from that first hint of malleability to taking further steps down that path.

I think, for example, spreadsheets do this really well, and this is one of my favorite things about the way spreadsheets are designed.

There’s a lot of things that make spreadsheets magical for me, but one of them is that you can take your first step of just typing in some numbers, right? It’s just a data table, there’s nothing special. And then you want to add together some numbers, so you learn to use the sum function, let’s say. And then you just keep taking these little little steps. There’s not that much learning involved with any one of them. There’s not that many concepts involved.

And fast forward 2 years and you’re like running a whole business on like a bunch of V lookups, right? And I’ve met so many people who don’t consider themselves that technically literate, who are in fact incredibly capable in this medium, and I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that you can sort of accidentally end up becoming an expert, because no one of those steps was too big.

Even though it is the case that, in fact, if you add up all the little steps, you did learn a lot. There was work invested, but it’s a much smoother path to mastery.

00:23:09 - Speaker 2: End user programming is something I think we’re all passionate about here and we’ve written about it in Switch and elsewhere, but this particular element of a gradual step by step rather than having this big jump from user of software to producer of software, I think is a really key part of it.

We haven’t cracked the code on that yet as an industry, let’s say. One great discussion of this. Again, coming back to the web, there’s there’s a YouTube talk I’ll link in the show notes, but essentially someone talks about how they had first were using, I think it was LiveJournal, they quickly learned that you can customize the background color or something by pasting this little magic snippet of CSS and that leads you to doing more customizations, and then you go from there to kind of going to full HTML and CSS.

There are some break points there if you’re gonna, you know, move off to your own home. Hosting or whatever. There’s a similar kind of path also with HTML that are just files that you FTP to a shared server, or shared host of some kind and then you’re just writing HTML but you can actually break out into PHP with these little codes.

So all of these technologies, perhaps not even purposefully, I’m not even sure they were specifically designed to have that gradual ramp, but they do spreadsheets, HTML. PHP all have that kind of ramp, and that ramp is how you can avoid hitting some wall where you have to have some deep intrinsic motivation. I want to learn to be a software engineer or manipulate computers in this way. And instead you’re just on the way to solving your problem. You find some ways to do that by pasting some magic codes into your thing.

Maybe you get a little curious and you follow where that leads, and pretty soon you’re an empowered computer user.

00:24:49 - Speaker 1: For me, this comes back to the bring your own client thing. One of the most frustrating experiences for me in software is when you’re in some sort of monolithic ecosystem, and you hit a wall of something you really want to do, but you can’t do, and depending on how the ecosystem around you is arranged, you might just have no choice. That’s sort of it. You can file a feedback request with the company that makes the software, and they will tell you, you know, we have put it on the backlog. Good luck with that.

00:25:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s on our roadmap. Honestly, I make that answer myself in a new support requests all the time and it’s genuinely true, but I’ve never. Worked on a software project that doesn’t have a roadmap backlog, whatever it is, that is just way longer than what you could ever hope to do in a lifetime.

00:25:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve been on both sides of that too. Actually, a lot of how I got into this whole topic to begin with was from my experience being on the other side of that conversation.

So before starting a PhD and doing research stuff, worked in startups, I spent a while at an education technology company, where we were building software for K through 12 schools and When we started, we were a very small team. I was fortunate enough to join early. We were like 6 people living in a house together. We only had a few customers, and so we had the ability to focus a lot of attention on any individual request that came in.

But as we grew over time, starting to serve thousands of schools across the country, it just became harder and harder to manage all this feedback.

And I think the default answer and what you’re supposed to do, given the way software is currently arranged, is to just get better at saying no. So, you sort of assume, well, we’re a resource constrained team, we are the only ones who can change the software. We don’t have the time to do everything everyone wants, and so we’re just going to do less. And I think that on the one hand, that can reflect sort of a wise style of design where you’re not just building a faster horse, you’re like digging deeper and really building something better than they could have asked for, but often in my experience, it was not that at all. It was just that only 5 people wanted something. And I agreed with them, you know, sure, that makes total sense for you. I can see why you want that. I wish I could build it for you, but there’s only 5 of you. And so I’m sorry, and that just really, I think, was a frustrating experience for me, and I found myself wondering, why does my team, you know, in this office in Boston have to be making these decisions for these teachers in like Idaho or whatever.

One of the bright spots against that sort of philosophy though was coming back to spreadsheets. I remember this feedback call we had with a customer where We wanted to ask them, how did you like our data reports that we’re showing you, cause we were essentially building data dashboards for schools, and they told us, oh yeah, we don’t use your data reports at all. We use spreadsheets. Let me show you. And so they had exported the CSV and made their own thing. And on the one hand, it was sort of annoying for us having spent so much of our time trying to build this beautiful product experience for them. But on the other hand, it was so cool to see how they had built this really weird and ugly, but extremely functional spreadsheet that did exactly what they wanted for their school, and aggregated the data in a completely different way that had to do with how the teams worked within their school. And I thought what was neat about that was that spreadsheets were this flexible tool kit that they could use to build their own thing, even something as tiny as changing a single word of copy that might have been bothering them and causing friction in their whatever political environment in their school. There’s so many tiny things that I think people would change if they could, but it’s just that the way software is built requires everything to funnel through the original team building thing, which is who’s never gonna have the time. And so, I wish we could reorganize software to support more of that style of customization.

00:28:20 - Speaker 2: So we’ve already touched on some of your work here, Jeffrey. I’ll link your articles on bringing your own client as well as one about browser extensions being underrated, but then maybe you can also talk about some of the projects you’ve done that have to do with how you see solving this problem more broadly.

00:28:39 - Speaker 1: So on the topic of interoperability, one idea that I’m excited about is thinking about better ways to synchronize across existing cloud applications. So I think there’s a way in which, you know, if you’re using one app and I’m using a different app, and if we can establish a bridge between them, where let’s say I’m editing a doc in Google Docs and you’re using Dropbox Paper or your preferred editor, and imagine every single keystroke data is being transmitted live between them. That starts to create this more flexible feeling where the data is not locked in any individual app, and it more kind of lives between the apps. And so one new project that I’m sort of embarking on now is trying to create tools that mediate that kind of synchronization across tools.

Some of the hardest part comes back to that partial compatibility issue we talked about earlier, where if there’s changes I’m making that are going to mess up your experience or that aren’t going to propagate to the app you’re using. How can we help users understand the relationship between these apps and feel comfortable with the overall user experience of stitching them together? And I think this gets at some of the toughest challenges in these sort of more flexible software ecosystems is that if we’re all using the same thing, it’s really easy for me to know what you see and what your experience looks like, and the more we diverge. I think it’s really important that I’m at least able to preserve a mental model of maybe there’s some data I’m putting in that you’re not able to see for some reason, and if I’m not aware of that, that’s gonna cause problems, right? And so, a lot of my thinking these days is about building these sorts of sync tools to mediate that gap.

00:30:05 - Speaker 2: I can think of a few examples of that, particularly in the enterprise world, for example, kind of Salesforce to SQL database stuff where your sales team wants to use their CRM because that’s got all these tools and things that suit them, and they’re typing stuff into a web dashboard and getting reminders about who they need to follow up on.

But then your data team or your programmers, you know, they’re not going to go cook around in the Salesforce interface. They need to pull stuff into a proper database like a postres database and so syncing seamlessly between those is valuable.

Do you have other concrete examples you mentioned the project management tool case. What are some other ones that you see as kind of like key use cases?

00:30:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s funny, sales data is one I’ve heard a lot about too from people and it’s sort of a more mundane use case. I’m not sure I would classify it in sort of the creative tool space, but I think it points to how this need just pops up a lot inside of companies.

00:30:57 - Speaker 2: I’ll go ahead and count sales as creative work. I actually have this discussion of fair fair bit, which is sort of I like to use the term creative professional when I talk about sort of the target audience for muse, but also maybe just the kind of person I’m interested in serving generally. And a lot of people do respond to that with, oh, well, I’m an attorney or I’m an accountant, is that really creative work? And I think it is, I think there is creativity that goes into, for example, financial modeling, and absolutely there can be creativity that goes into sales. It’s not traditional artist type stuff, so I would go ahead and count that.

00:31:30 - Speaker 1: That’s totally fair, and in fact, I think it points to why tools matter in any profession. Like, there’s a reason that people want to synchronize HubSpot with MailChimp. There’s something going on there about what individual tools are good at in the entire life cycle of how you want to run your process, and the need for sync emerges from the reality that no one tool can do everything perfectly. And so I think that’s totally valid.

00:31:53 - Speaker 2: I’m reminded of the phrase toolmaker humility, which came up in our podcast withalant from Kraft where he really tries to keep that in his heart as he designs the product of knowing you’re not only, not the only tool that people are using. but you’re probably a large collection of both process and over time your toolkit is changing and that sort of thing, and I just feel it’s so easy for toolmakers to want to make the everything tool.

Don’t worry, we’ll just do everything and you can put everything in here and we’ll be all in one place and then it can all work together seamlessly and that has never been how the world has worked.

It is never going to be how the world works. If you can design your tool to play as well as possible and be aware of that reality, I think everyone’s better off.

00:32:38 - Speaker 1: I think it’s tricky though, because you need not only the willingness of the tool makers to play with other tools, but you need a platform that supports that interoperability in the right way.

So I think Kraft is the perfect specific example of this. I think they’ve done the best possible thing you could expect a writing tool to do today, which is that I think as Balant mentioned on this podcast, they let you save your documents either to their cloud, which gives you real-time collaboration, you can comment and things like that, or you can save it to a file, which gives you more control.

It is sort of locally stored with you.

You have the ability to save it wherever you want.

Other people can potentially open those files in different applications, I think, is the ultimate goal of that teams, but it’s an either or. So if you want to collaborate in real time and have that flexibility to open those files in other applications, there’s no technological solution to that today that exists. There’s no platform that team can build on to support that, and to me that’s the key missing piece.

There’s this ecosystem missing there, that means that even in this dream world where Google decides they want their party editors to exist for Google Docs or something, supporting that technically is very challenging, and so I think we need better platform support for that kind of thing, in addition to thinking about business incentives for people to even want to do in the first place.

00:33:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a great example to bring up. I agree there’s a huge technical challenge here. It’s one that I and many people around me and the Ink & Switch research lab have been working on for some years now.

Yeah, so you would need to have that in place, something like files for the real-time collaborative internet. What is that abstraction. And then on top of that you do have this whole issue of business and incentives and dynamics and path dependence because let’s say conservatively that creating this technology takes 10 engineer years. a million dollars, who’s going to put that up and then how do you actually turn that into a public platform that’s optimized for the benefit of all the individual users and not the creator? It’s a tough problem.

One of the things that I liked about this project that you mentioned, where you’re synchronizing data between cloud services, is that it does grapple with the reality of, here’s our initial condition of there are a bunch of proprietary. cloud services that do have important data and it’d be ideal if they had a perfect JSO API, but that’s not the reality that we live in. So we need to find a way to help our users get data back and forth between them. I feel like a lot of the conversations in this space, that is a space of open systems are of the form, we should X where X is design and build and use a perfect open system. That’s not gonna happen. In fact, it’s unreasonable for you to ask other people dedicate their moral lives to your pet projects, right? So you need to find a way to grapple with these dynamics and get out there in reality.

00:35:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a tension I think a lot about between sort of an incremental approach versus a first principles approach.

I think you could frame it. For example, the solid project, which is led by Tim Berners-Lee and is pretty prominent in this space, is one attempt where their idea is, you know, we’re gonna essentially fundamentally rearchitect how web apps are built. We’re going to give users these little, they call them pods, where the users control their own data, and then web applications can connect to your pod to access and edit your data, but the applications themselves don’t store the data.

And I think that’s a lovely vision. I would love to see something like that succeed, but as you’re saying, Mark, I think the biggest challenge is, how are we possibly going to get from the world we have today to that future? Are we really going to rebuild the web stack from scratch? And is the experience going to be better enough for both developers and users to incentivize such a massive shift? I tend to think that no amount of, you know, legislation or regulation, let’s say, is going to successfully push us to a solution if it’s not better for both developers and users. And so I think we need to think about making it incredibly easy and awesome for both of those groups in order to get from where we are today to that beautiful future.

00:36:34 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to be clear, I do believe it’s possible to get to a future that looks very different from the present, a radically different future, but necessarily you are going to get there in incremental steps, which might be incremental steps from the status quo or incremental steps from zilch, basically where you’re building up a new system in the context of the current ecosystem. I think both of those are viable. I agree. I think what we need here is entrepreneurs in the broadest sense, not just of commercial ventures, but of ideas and nonprofits and politics and all these things to really work towards the future that they want to see.

00:37:04 - Speaker 1: I think another really important thing on the entrepreneurship theme there is being realistic about use cases. I think my favorite startup style thinkers are the people who can really focus on what is this technology actually useful for, and how can we focus in on that one killer app.

And I’m not sure that we’ve necessarily found that killer app yet in this space.

For me, I think collaborative writing might be the one personally, but I worry that you can make all the tech demos you want. But a lot of things take off in a particular niche. And I’m interested in finding where’s the place where people desperately are needing this real-time interoperability to the point that they would actually abandon their familiar tools.

00:37:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like this actually afflicts quite a few projects in the space where, again, they’re thinking in terms of generalities and they don’t have a specific use case in mind. I actually called this the mark rule for product management, which is you need to have a single named human being like an email who specifically wants your projects. And that sounds like a low bar, but in a lot of cases, you ask people that and they’re like, oh, it’s salespeople. Well, do you have a specific one in mind that I can email? Well, not always, right? So it’s a good baseline.

00:38:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think often, especially with this kind of customizable software, it’s tempting to get into wouldn’t it be cool if conversations that where it might be nice, but there’s no real pain.

One use case that I think is really compelling to me is I read a paper recently by some researchers at Northwestern University on accessibility issues and collaborative writing. And they talk about how people with sight impairments have a really hard time using Google Docs with their teammates, because there are certain accessibility issues around how that platform works. And what they often end up doing is they’ll either convince their team to adopt a different workflow, or they’ll just give up and copy paste text out into a Word doc or something, edit it there, and then paste it back. And it’s very, very cumbersome. It’s not just a little inconvenience, it really limits their ability to be a true member of their team. And they have to make this incredibly uncomfortable choice where they talk about the social anxiety around trying to convince all of their coworkers to use a different tool, or just internalizing that friction and deciding to try to live with it.

And I think that if you imagine a world of greater interoperability, could we have a text editor that is much more optimized for this specific group of people who have very different needs and still allow them to collaborate with their peers more effectively? The more that people’s needs differ, especially people with disabilities, I think often have fairly different kinds of needs and a lot of other people. I think that those are use cases I’m thinking a lot about in terms of where we really need better interoperability.

00:39:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s a great motivating factor. It’s easy to think of the what ifs in terms of cool conveniences and emojis and so on, but let’s not forget about that as well.

00:39:51 - Speaker 1: I also think as an antidote to cool conveniences, there’s sort of an interesting paradoxical way that software customization actually promotes very boring stability.

So I think one of the special things about, let’s say, programmers and their text editors, which is a place where we have some of this file-based interoperability, is that if you talk to programmers, often they’ve invested like a decade plus in using a particular editor, right? And they’ve carried it with them from job to job, they’ve really made it their own.

And they have successfully been able to avoid switching tools because of interoperability.

It’s not this kind of tinkering, trying a bunch of new things mindset. It’s exactly the opposite of just getting to invest deeply in one tool and to keep using it. I think that’s an underrated benefit of interoperability is just. Yeah, being able to make that deep investment.

00:40:42 - Speaker 2: The revealed preferences of software engineers is that yeah, very standardized file formats, usually plain text, wide variety of source editors, wide variety of different kinds of plug-ins and liters and things like that.

I guess you do have to agree on your version control system that needs to be at least somewhat standardized on your team.

Terminal, even things like database clients, you know, SQL is pretty standardized, so software engineers seem to prefer software that changes less.

And has more interoperability and it does have the problem of, as we mentioned previously with email or Twitter as a platform versus a product.

Yes, it is hard. Someone says, you know, programming editors or source code would be really great if you could drop in an image. I could put in a little diagram of my Architecture or something like that in a comment that would make perfect sense. I think that would be a big improvement, but that would be very hard to do because the plain text format we’ve all been using a very long time and all the tools are built around that, but essentially software engineers prefer that versus something sort of newer and shinier and with more features.

00:41:50 - Speaker 3: Yeah, in fact, it’s the ecosystem that is extraordinarily susceptible to customization and extension because all the participants are able and in fact inclined to do that.

So kind of competitively, it’s very hard to win without leveraging that.

I think a good example of that is the editor wars which to my mind are now kind of coming to a close and BS code is one to a large extent I think because of the incredible platformization they have with extensions and language servers and so forth, and typically there’s going to be a bunch of editors. I use a different one. But they’ve been able to really pull ahead while accelerating the whole ecosystem for developers because they lean so heavily into the open platform angle.

00:42:28 - Speaker 1: I also think though that the diversity of text editors can teach us something about how to reconcile this partial compatibility thing we were talking about, because if you think about it, yes, the base format of the code being shared between people can be really stripped down into this text format, but some editors like VS code, do a lot with that format.

They’ll run fancy analysis on top of it and do syntax highlighting and all these like autocomplete things, which are not inherently part of the data exchange format. They’re just Bells and whistles that each individual editor gets to add on top to that experience. But I’m not forced to opt into that. I can use a stripped down, I could use Microsoft notepad to edit code if I wanted to, right? There’s nothing stopping me from doing that.

00:43:08 - Speaker 2: Ed is the standard text editor.

00:43:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah. In fact, I think when I was like 12 years old, that’s probably when I started using to write code because I didn’t know any better. And I think That’s an interesting, for me lesson to reflect on is can we get more places where there’s this shared core and then more functionality built up as optional app specific extensions.

00:43:27 - Speaker 2: And then we touched briefly on, I guess, financial incentives, and we look at the interoperability problem writ large.

Certainly it comes from the world of files, kind of classic desktop files, and yeah, there was problems with sort of format openness like Word docs.

Files, for example, but ultimately files did seem to have a lot of that agency and interoperability, and it’s really both mobile and cloud that I think brought us these more closed up hermetically sealed systems, both for their own reasons.

I think mobile is more around kind of safety and security and comprehensibility to end users, particularly very non-technical users. But on the maybe cloud web app side, particularly B2B software, now you get into this thing where data is considered to be where the value is.

James Chen used this terminology data swamp. That that’s kind of like the aggregating a bunch of data together and that’s where the value is and you even see that in what people expect to pay for software.

We run up against that with Muse, we talked to Balant from Kraft about that as well, which is people are in the mindset of, oh, if you’re going to host my data for me, then you need to run a server or whatever, then I can justify paying a subscription.

But if I’m just buying the software, they feel like software isn’t valuable on its own, and of course that’s really restrictive for making truly great software and furthermore, it creates all these incentives around of course you want to lock up the data, of course, something like a two-way sync. Like you described, that’s hurting my business’s value.

So trying to find a way to create financial incentives and paying for the software and the value that provides you versus the data, the data swamp, that’s a tough one.

00:45:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s tough.

One angle that I like circling back to a previous podcast on games is, so to kind of recap the dynamic there is that there are some ecosystems that are so high powered because of their open platformized, scriptable, customizable, whatever nature that no amount of proprietary excellence can compete.

And I don’t think we’ve quite found or charted that path in the world of creative tools. You think about, I don’t know, Photoshop. Could an open Photoshop be so much better such that it displaces Adobe Photoshop? I mean, maybe, right? I don’t yet see the path for that, but perhaps in the world of multi devices or multi users or other use cases, there is. So I think that’s one promising angle. There are other angles, but that to me seems perhaps the most interesting.

00:46:01 - Speaker 2: That’s an interesting one to think of the way that for example the web and its open standards and interoperability displaced and was clearly a huge improvement on the more closed up formats like Flash or maybe Java Servlets that came before. Clearly the web was just so much superior and it In addition to being open, hackable, you can pop open your DOM Inspector and do stuff to any web page. So what would be an equivalent of that that would make Photoshop or even something a beloved current piece of software like Sketch or FIMA? What would make those things feel like a Java servelet by comparison?

00:46:38 - Speaker 1: I think there’s a really tricky balance here to strike because it is very valuable to have someone think through an entire unified product experience and make it all fit together in a coherent way.

I know this is something you’ve thought about a lot with when I use Muse, it feels like someone has taken care to design this whole environment and I don’t have to do much work to sort of put together a bunch of pieces. And 90% of people most of the time, don’t want to like assemble their own software from scratch, right? There’s a reason we pay designers. is to think through these problems for us. And I think that’s totally a good thing, and designers bring a lot of value in that way.

But at the same time, I think that we can think about rather than giving someone this hermetically sealed box, can we use an analogy like build a beautiful Lego set for them and hand it to them, where if they like it just as it is, that’s fine. And if they want to add one Lego right there, it’s not a big deal. They sort of see the composition of how this thing was made. They have a little bit of flexibility to tweak it because it’s made out of parts they understand. I think that’s a design ethos that sometimes I feel like we’re in danger of moving away from. There’s this great story in one of my favorite books about end user programming, which is called Changing Minds by Andy Dessa, who’s sort of an education and computing researcher, and he talks about this nightmare he had where he’s riding a bike, and he looks down at the gears, and they are labeled not with numbers, but with words, like this is gravel mode, this is like uphill mode. And he has no idea how to use the thing, you know, if I’m going downhill on gravel, do I use gravel mode or downhill mode? And he talks about how like, because we’re used to riding bikes with number gears, this sounds sort of ridiculous, but you can imagine the product manager that had that conversation where they said, these numbers make no sense to people. People don’t want to like, see 1234, they want to understand the function. We need to give them an easier way to understand what this tool is for. But what you’re robbing them of is a structural sense of what’s going on underneath to provide that functionality. So that the moment you go off the expected use cases for the thing, you have nothing to lean on. You have no coherent understanding of the system, and so everything just falls apart. And what he contends is that people can actually learn sometimes more than I think we give them credit for. Like, it’s not actually that hard to learn a bike. Everyone learns how to ride a. Like, even though it takes some practice and you have to feel out the gears to understand how they work. Once you’ve put in that little bit of effort, you have this sort of generalizable understanding of the system that can go a long way and is much more generically applicable. And so I think it’d be nice to see a little bit more of that style reflected in how we build software for people.

00:49:09 - Speaker 2: Well said, yeah, I think the design ethos often is kind of polarized towards the edges, which are either making pure consumer stuff. It just has to be as simple as possible, no choices, no customization, just can’t have no chance of going off the rails. And getting confused or we have the full on I’m going to build my own PC from parts and put together my own Linux distribution and assemble my raspberry Pi and you put together all my special VS code plugins and there’s kind of nothing in between sometimes.

00:49:43 - Speaker 3: This reminds me of an important point about these platforms and ecosystems. If you look at the successful spaces, whether it’s software or protocols or hardware, it generally is not, you have some platform and then a bunch of individual users completely customizing their setup.

What tends to happen is you have the platform, you have a small number of secondary market providers, if you will, who provide modules. Sanctions, implements, what have you, and a much bigger group that tries, by the way, but a lot of that stuff just kind of gets filtered out, doesn’t bubble up the top.

But if you create an opportunity for people to have a business or some other sense of fulfillment from providing these things to the community, you only need a few of them. To really enhance the ecosystem. And yes, you’re gonna have some users who want to build their whole tractor from scratch or who want to go in and fiddle with the HTML and CSS that’s fine, but often the real main potatoes of these ecosystems is the secondary market of service module extension providers. And the somewhat sad consequence of that as someone who’s really into end user programming is that often it’s not the end user programming experience that matters the most. If you look at how hard it often is to build a module or extension or an add-on, often it’s frankly a huge pain, but people who are doing that as a small business, as a major hobby, they’re willing to get over that and then they can provide the service for all the other users in the ecosystem. So it often ends up being important is distribution, obviously platform access, and some ability to monetize or get the equivalent personal fulfillment.

00:51:20 - Speaker 1: I’m not sure I totally agree that it’s sad for end user programming. I think you’re totally right that there’s this collaborative dynamic, but for me, that’s sort of just one part of the picture to keep in mind when we’re designing tools for this. So like, for example, and I think there’s a similar dynamic in spreadsheet usage, where there’s been some great studies by Bonnie Nardi, who’s kind of like a hero in the end user programming community of how spreadsheets are used in offices and What it turns out being is that there’s like someone in the office who’s like the spreadsheet person, right? And when you have a really complicated formula, right, you go to them and they help you and they figure it out, and then you go back to your desk and keep working on it. But the key thing there is that there is a large part of that ecosystem that is available to you, even as a novice, and you don’t have to like, again, ask someone to ship you a hermetically sealed thing. Maybe you can sort of read the formula they wrote and start to learn a bit. And so I think Having fuzzier boundaries of expertise and enabling more collaboration is a thing to strive for.

One project I’ve worked on that sort of embodies this goal a bit is this project called Wildcard, which is a tool kit for people to build their own browser extensions without programming. And the rough idea there is, like you were saying, Mark, it’s pretty hard to build a browser extension. Some browser extensions are extremely complicated. And when I install them, I have no idea how they work inside. If I want to tweak the extension, or maybe compose two extensions in a new way, that’s typically really hard to do. And the thesis of the Wildcard Project is that, yes, some extensions need to be really complicated like you said, but also there are some extensions that I think don’t need to be that complicated.

I remember using for a while an extension that added a checkbox next to every transaction on a bank statement, so you could just remember whether you’d already written it down somewhere else. And this had like thousands of installs on the Chrome extension store, you know, that’s not a sophisticated thing. But again, it’s really hard to even build something that simple as a non-programmer. So the goal of Wildcard is, can we take that subset of extensions, which is not that complicated and make it accessible to normal people to build. And actually, as you can tell, you know, I’m sort of a spreadsheets fan. And so the paradigm we went with was, what if you could edit a website in a spreadsheet is the vision.

You know, you open up a little pane, you see some data in a table that sort of represents what’s in the page, like on a news site, it might be a list of articles with their names and authors and whatever. And then, As you mess with the spreadsheet, whether that’s sorting and filtering or adding new columns with little formulas in them, all of that flows back into the page and modifies it. And the goal there is that if you’ve used a spreadsheet, you can maybe learn your way around this environment, you don’t need to like open a code editor, you’re just right there in the website and you can build and share these customizations with other people.

Now, again, it might be the case that 90% of users of this thing eventually will just install pre-made things that others made, but if they’re not written in JavaScript, if they’re in this sort of more user friendly paradigm, maybe more people will end up popping the hood there and making little tweaks of their own. So I think it’s this delicate balance there.

00:54:15 - Speaker 2: Well, before we go, one question I think that can come up sometimes is this question of designing software for other people, and maybe you can imagine that product designers who their whole role in fact is doing that and software as this abstract hard to understand thing you actually need another person with that expertise to design it for you. But you could actually swing back the other way as well and say, how can anyone else know your needs? And in fact, this is why some of the startup advice is solve your own problem, build something for yourself because you know it in an intimate way that no one else can. Where do you stand on this? How can others design software?

00:54:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this may be a slightly extreme way to put it, but I think I’m pretty pessimistic that it’s possible to design truly great software for someone besides yourself. Especially if the person you’re designing for is operating in a complex environment, like, for example, I had experience designing for teachers, and I’ve never been a teacher in a classroom before.

And I felt like no matter how many user interviews I did, there was nothing that could possibly replace a decade of teaching experience in sort of the depth of understanding there. And I’m sure, you know, I could have done better user interviews or whatever, but that’s sort of, I think, an initial hypothesis.

Then the question is, what do we take from that? Well, in some ways, that sounds really disappointing because You might say what that means is that you’re gonna end up with a bunch of 22 year olds in San Francisco building food delivery apps, because those are the people making the software, right? But I think there’s kind of a fun way to flip it, which is to say, well, maybe that just means we need more people to be able to build software. And you might say, well, I don’t know if, let’s say teachers can build software or if they’re interested in that. But I think that if we had more democratized tools, you could imagine that whatever it is, 10% of teachers who have an interest in this stuff, who have Some sensibilities around design. If we had more tools to help them build their own tools and maybe build tools for other teachers, I think you could imagine a world where we have much more sort of insightful software that draws on the experience of being the user, in a larger variety of domains, that’s not just programmers scratching their own itch.

00:56:21 - Speaker 2: That almost brings a moral argument to end user programming that it’s not just this is something that we as technology people think would be cool or fun or exciting, but in fact is something needed to bring this really important medium, this 21st century medium of software to the wider world, and that’s all the For professions that could need it, young people, old people, people in different places and different cultures, the only way that everyone will really get the software and the computer experiences they deserve is to make programming more accessible, not to every single person in the world, but to enough that we can represent all of those different people in the software world.

00:57:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think an important thing there is keeping an open mind about how our culture could change.

You know, people throw around the idea of computational literacy, a fair amount in the tools for thought community, and I think one of the lessons to learn from literacy is that it took a while to get to the point where everyone could read and write, and maybe before mass literacy, it would have sounded reasonable to say, why does this farmer even need that? They don’t care about reading and writing, it’s not important to them, but we ended up creating a new society where that was part of How people operated, and I think that you could make a similar argument for building software, where, you know, just because people genuinely don’t think they need to do this today, or don’t care about it or don’t want to, that’s not a reflection of the way society will always be. I think we can, in an optimistic sense, imagine sort of a feedback loop where if we change our tools, eventually society will catch up.

00:57:55 - Speaker 2: I think that’s the perfect note to wrap it up. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at @museapphq or via email, hello at museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Jeffrey, thanks so much for carrying the torch and inspiring us all on end user programming and data interoperability.

00:58:16 - Speaker 1: Thanks so much. This is a lot of fun.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: That to me was the magic of the iPad, the direct manipulation of the iPad with my hands. It just felt so human in a way that the computers and even the phone never did.

00:00:19 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it.

I’m Adam Wiggins, joined today by my two colleagues, Mark McGranaghan. Hey. And Leonard Sversky. Hi. And I’m very excited to say that we have just booked our lodging and flights for our first in-person team summit in a year and a half, is it? The last time was Arizona in early 2020.

So we’ve been doing all our summits, which is a very important way that we plan our work and just bond as humans get out of the day to day a little bit. We’ve been doing it all virtually, but that just is not the same. So we’re gonna be meeting soon in France for a nice get together and chance to really think some big thoughts. Look forward to seeing you both and our two other colleagues in person.

00:01:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it should be awesome.

00:01:18 - Speaker 3: I’m kind of proud of us for actually making it all this way basically, but yeah, it feels like we really need and would really benefit from seeing each other again.

00:01:27 - Speaker 2: For a team that scaled a lot, we had the benefit that the four of us already knew each other in many cases very well, because we’ve been working together for years, we already have those human connections. It’s easier to translate that to the virtual space. But I think if you had a team that was adding a lot of people swiftly, yeah, seems like a challenge to scale the culture, to keep the creativity and vision, and all the things that just tend to come from being able to not just see each other as moving squares on your screen, but as real full three dimensional human beings.

So our topic today is the future of the iPad. So Muse is, at least at the moment, an iPad only app, so clearly we’ve bet our business on it, and we see big potential in the iPad as a creative tool, not just a consumption device, but something you can use to create, do work, be productive, and of course, for our purposes to think as a rumination space. But we’ve been at this a few years now, it’s interesting to look both at the history of how the iPad has evolved even as we’ve been on it.

Then furthermore, at this moment, iPad OS 15 is in beta. It’s got some enhancements to the multitasking capabilities, which is sort of a power user capability, and all that just, I think, had me at least as I was using the beta, reflecting on how has this platform evolved.

From our perspective as app developers as users that want to see it be a great creative tool.

So I guess the first question that a lot of folks tend to ask. And I think it was last year the iPad had its 10 year anniversary, and there was a lot of articles about what does it mean or where are we at or how has this platform evolved in this time, and I think the tenor there was generally negative. I’ll link a few, but Strateteri, for example, has one called the Tragic iPad, and they basically say it’s a device that never found its purpose or never found its real role. It’s sort of too big to be mobile and fit in your pocket the way a phone does, but it’s not as powerful as a laptop. This thing doesn’t have a clear role in people’s lives, at least that’s the way that was presented then. How do you both see the role and who it’s for question with the iPad.

00:03:35 - Speaker 3: I think the fact that it doesn’t have a clearer role is both the appeal of the iPad for many people that it can be a lot of things and a lot of different things to everyone, but it’s also, especially for us, the developers, it’s also the problem, right? That we don’t really know what Apple has in mind for the iPad, but it wants the iPad to be who it markets the iPad for. And so it’s hard to really think about the future of the iPad and be certain what kind of app you should build for it.

00:04:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, to my mind, the verdict is very mixed here.

So I think the iPad has succeeded as this unique third form factor that’s somewhat mobile and critically has multi-touch input with a pencil and for apps that are designed for that hardware, things like Procreate and of course Muse, I think it’s uniquely good and it’s really special.

The other thing that I think people envisioned for the iPad was this new general purpose computing platform that would basically replace a lot of the things that the Mac desktop has previously done, and I never saw that and I still don’t see it. I think it’s a future we could get to if we all really want to, but I don’t see it happening right now. I know some people kind of use the iPad in that way, but I don’t get that at all. So we could talk more about that, but that’s what I see as the split vers on the iPad right now.

00:04:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, speaking as a user, I’ve done for quite a while the big kind of stationary workstation, big monitor, mouse, I’ve got my big podcasting mic that’s set up on a boom arm. I’ve got various recording equipment, I got a ring light. This thing is not a mobile workstation.

At all, and I like that.

It allows me to have all these multimedia pieces that I need, but it also allows a more powerful computer with a bigger monitor and bigger input devices and so forth, as opposed to a clamshell laptop. And then when I’m traveling or going someplace, even in town for a meeting, I bring my iPad.

And this is just so much more portable, right? It’s not just the size, actually, it’s probably about the same in many ways as a standard MacBook, but in terms of battery life, instant on, I’ve got an LTE SIM card in there, which means it has always on internet, it’s really just truly remarkable as a portable device.

Now you do hit the limits of what it can do, and I run into that when I’m taking a longer trip if I’m traveling for a week, for example, and then I want to do something heavier, certainly anything to do.

With kind of web development, for example, but even editing a really long form essay or video editing, you can do all that, but you do run into limits.

There’s just less software available. The software that’s there is a little less powerful, but for me that bifurcated thing actually works really well, and I feel like the laptop is actually a weird mix in a way because it’s not as portable as the iPad, but it’s not as powerful as the workstation.

So that works for me. The idea of doing 100% of my work on the iPad seems untenable.

00:06:27 - Speaker 1: Adam, it’s so interesting that you and I have arrived at a totally different conclusions than this. I think that that’s been the case since day one. You were like, Mark, you should check out the iPad. It just feels magical. It feels like the future.

And my response was basically no, except for the pencil, which is awesome.

But you seem to really get along with it. I don’t know what to make of that. And I wonder kind of where the median or average user is.

I do think a lot of people get away with the iPad as a sort of laptop light, but I also think a lot of people, it just doesn’t work. And I don’t know, maybe that’s more evidence for the mixed verdict.

00:06:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think for a lot of people, it’s a mix of use cases and they basically find the ones that work for them and to discount all the ones that don’t work for them. And that kind of helps the iPad in that, yeah, it often isn’t great because of the software as a general purpose computing was that really does everything you needed to do. And so as long as you’re fine with that and stick to the things that you know you can get out of it, then it can really fill that specific hole that you want it from.

00:07:25 - Speaker 2: That’s true. It may be in some ways the market, especially more on the consumer side, was trained in that direction from mobile devices generally and the iPhone, which is, I know a lot of people who, especially a younger generation or in some cases older people who they just always struggled with computers. Like desktop computers, the difference between I don’t know, minimizing a window and closing an application was endlessly confusing, file management, all this junk that never made that much sense to them. They don’t find it fun.

And so then along comes a mobile device where they can do 80% of what you can do in terms of sending emails and That kind of stuff and so they just try to do everything on the phone because the phone makes it easy, they understand everything. It’s hard to mess stuff up, you can’t get viruses, you don’t need to manage your files, and they just essentially decide to not do the things you need a computer for because it’s just they would rather be on the phone and then they can make the decision to.

Cut out some of those use cases, whereas maybe a really uncompromising user that has really specific needs, either niche software or just wants a lot of power, a lot of control, something like that is not going to be satisfied with anything but sort of maximum computing capability, and the idea of cutting out a few of those things that they can’t do is just sort of like untenable.

Yeah, that feels like the future point you mentioned there, Mark, is something that actually has come up a lot in our call user research, but basically just talking to people that use Muse or want to use Muse, which is they say something along the lines of the first time you use the iPad or when I open the iPad, it just feels like the future. It’s this magic device, it feels like they’re living in the future, and I certainly feel that as well, but in a way it’s sort of like a future that’s never quite coming true in the sense that you can do.

A lot with it, but again, at least when it comes to those creative tool things, they haven’t really made the jump, and it doesn’t feel like there’s a fast and furious, Adobe porting all their products over and except far superior versions, or what if you want to use Figma or sketch, those seem like really natural things that a person who is also the sort of person that wants to use the iPad as a creative tool would want, but you really can’t use them at all, and it doesn’t really seem like that’s gonna happen anytime soon. So yeah, again, it leaves this conflicted or mixed verdict in some ways.

00:09:42 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m always reminded of that first slide that Steve Jobs showed when he introduced the first iPad and it kind of had the iPhone on the left, the Mac on the right, and then the iPad was introduced as that third device in the middle.

And I think we’re still trying to figure out what exactly the role of that 3rd device is, even though we know, OK, it’s kind of supposed to be in between, but does that mean it takes things from the Mac and makes them simpler? Does it mean it takes what’s good about the iPhone and makes it better? What’s the actual use case that’s being solved by that 3rd device? Is it really only consumption based, which is kind of what a lot of people already use the iPhone for? or is there actually also a place for another productivity device or professional device that can do things that the Mac can’t do?

00:10:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this gets at the heart of the matter because I think once you put these 3 devices on one axis, the iPad’s already in a lot of trouble because the phone is already so pervasive and capable, people use it for a ton of stuff.

It’s great for content consumption, and even some creation now, and the Mac desktop is uniquely powerful, and now, I would say that they’re very portable, almost as portable as an iPad. So you really don’t have a lot of space left for the iPad in that model.

That’s where you get these like kind of marginal and incremental use cases like you have kids who use the iPad inside the desktops, it’s lighter and cheaper, and you have people who watch Netflix on the iPads as a bigger screen and like Adam types who take the iPad around so it’s a little bit lighter and more portable.

Yes, but it’s not fundamentally different in the way that the Mac desktop and the iPhone were.

Now I think there is a future where the iPad, it’s on its own axis, which is things like pencil, multi-touch, these things that are uniquely iPad. I just don’t see Apple really pressing on that front. I see that more from a few specific apps.

00:11:30 - Speaker 2: What might be good to talk about now our perspective as app developers in terms of a question that someone asked me recently that I thought was interesting to think about is what are the capabilities that you need from the platform to make your app better or more powerful or more professional.

And there are some things that could be surfaced as maybe APIs that we as developers can use to make our app behave in a different way, but a lot of it really does come down to the operating system, and so for me at least, I’d be curious to hear how you both see this, but for me, I think the operating system is the weak point.

The hardware is unbelievable, world class. I think it’s just the best computer we’ve ever made.

00:12:12 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the hardware is absolutely the best hardware that’s ever existed. It’s not even close, it’s definitely a software.

00:12:17 - Speaker 2: Right? And then the apps are weak, although I think a lot of that is Ato economics, and we inherited this whole iPhone consumer model and it makes it tricky to basically charge a reasonable prosumer price for your software, so that that’s holding it back as well a little bit.

But I think the operating system itself is one of the biggest weak points. And I was really excited when, what was it 2 years ago, something like that when they forked off iOS into, so now there’s iPad OS as its own thing with its own version number and its own that sort of thing. So I was really hoping that maybe that meant I have no idea what things are like internally at Apple, but there’s a team whose job is To make this operating system, it can diverge a bit from the phone. They did that in the beginning with the dock and drag and drop, which were both things that are only available on the iPad, and then that would allow it to find that unique identity instead of constantly inheriting things from the phone, which I think are at this point more of a liability than an asset. It doesn’t seem like that’s quite happened.

Yeah, and I’m curious, again, from the app developer’s perspective rather than say the user or just kind of market analysis perspective, how do we see our experience as an app developer and trying to make something for sort of professional use on this platform?

00:13:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, let me give a quick list of what I see as the biggest features, and then I’ll build a little theory around that. So I would say it’s powerful multitasking, general purpose file management, payment structures and expectations, the whole payment situation, and more control over the run time in the form of basically downloading and running code things like scripting, extensions, plug-ins, and so forth.

These are kind of the defining features of a desktop operating system. And I think that’s not coincidental. I think the fundamental tension here is pro use cases are almost by definition about taking multiple different pieces and recombining them in novel ways that weren’t anticipated by the original authors of those pieces, because if something was simple enough to do in a fully premeditated and pre-existing package, it kind of almost by definition wouldn’t be a pro use case, right? That’s kind of a casual thing that’s already been done before. So you need this ability to recombine pieces in ways that weren’t anticipated by the platform, but that’s kind of antithetical to how Apple thinks about the iOS ecosystem of they want everything to be curated and controlled and to be on the rails, which they have many good reasons for, but that’s what I see as the fundamental list and perhaps a theory for why they’re not making a ton of progress on it.

One other thing I would add, I mean, I think you get very far with those things. I think if you want to realize the full vision of this third type of computer, you would need a lot of work on input. So an obvious thing is to have a bigger screen, more like a desktop size screen that you can put on your desk, multiple pencils, other physical input devices, and software that really took advantage of the 10 finger capabilities. Right now, most apps. Basically have one finger at a time. You have some apps like Muse where you can use multiple fingers, but you can imagine the muse approach to touch, which is use all 10 fingers being pervasive throughout the operating system in all apps and perhaps finding a way to replace the incredible speed and precision of a keyboard. That’s a hard problem. But I think you would need to tackle some of that if you want to really realize this third type of pro platform.

00:15:30 - Speaker 2: Yes, so from that list, it gets the programmability, the run time element, and that’s both individuals being able to write their own stuff, scripting or write their own little mini apps right on the device, that sort of thing, as well as something like plug-ins that basically are fairly strictly disallowed, and I do really see the tension there with essentially the security, you know, the App Store and the iOS and the mobile model Android has a version of this as well, maybe not as well done, but strict sandboxing, a little bit of a curation review process, and then just really kind of controlling what you can do. That is actually a lot of the reason the platform is good and is able to, yeah, your system isn’t bogged down by some weird ghost.

Process malware is not a problem, which is partially the programmability. It’s also partially things like runaway background processes and stuff like that.

So because the operating system controls all that so strictly, for example, a lot of that has to do with how the battery life can be better because the operating system has very, very strict guardrails for exactly what can run and when.

And so I think a lot of that is good and some of them may need to be changed or relaxed if there is pro use cases, but even before getting into that, I really wonder if there isn’t lower hanging fruits in the form of some of the other stuff on your list, and to me, a huge one there would be multitasking, and I see that two forms. One is just the interface, and happy to say that iPad OS 15 does improve on that a bit, but it’s still could be a lot better. It’s pretty awkward, basically, to like get two documents or two. Apps side by side and copy paste between them, and there’s things with focus on the keyboard and all that sort of stuff that is just not very nice, it’s not very fluid, it’s not very memorable, it’s not very discoverable, either for, let’s say a less sophisticated user or for a pro user that’s really willing to invest, sort of it ends up being maybe a clumsy middle ground, I’m not sure exactly, but I think that can be improved on from the app developer perspective, the harder thing is something like, yeah, for example, this background process thing.

So Muse we run into this a lot when we need to deal with a large data export or import or something like that. And so maybe if you want to export your entire Muse corpus, for example, in flat files, if you have a big one like I do, many, many gigabytes, that can take a few minutes. And I would just leave it running, except, of course, the device goes to sleep. If I switch away from the app, the process gets shut down after 5 seconds. Again, the operating system is very strict about how it controls that, which is part of what makes it good, but it’s also holds you back from these pro cases and we end up having to come up with all kinds of weird workarounds in order to do these things that we need to do.

00:18:13 - Speaker 1: I’m smiling over here cause I’ve long given the team a hard time about multitasking when Adam first said the iPad is the future. I’m like, is the future you can run one program at a time. Now, fortunately they’ve gotten a lot better about it, but yeah, that seems like an obvious one to get to improve.

One related thing that we talked about in the podcast before, and then I’ll bring up again is this idea of kind of a technology frontier. So right now with our current sandboxing technology, you do have these sort of two choices of the wild west and viruses and out of control processes and all your battery and an app store where you can’t have plug-ins and extensions and everything is very controlled.

Now, I think there’s a world where you have better sandboxing technology that allows you to get more.

Of those benefits at the same time. You know, for example, if you had much more granular and accurate accounting of what bits we’re using, what pieces of power, you could finally control that or whatever, right, while still allowing good actors to do some work in the background and shutting off all the bad ones, right? Probably actually the easiest thing there would be on the payments front where all the things that we need to do with payments are well known. And I think people would be fine using Apple if like you could give refunds and stuff, right? And there’s a whole series of things that we could do to make that pretty good. And that’s the kind of work and research that I would like to see Apple doing if they’re serious about turning the iPad into a new pro platform.

00:19:32 - Speaker 2: And what’s your perspective as a designer of the app? Are there places where you’ve found either huge benefits from the platform compared to, say, designing for the web or for desktop computer or weak points in terms of things you can and can’t do?

00:19:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think to me the most interesting part is actually not even iPadres, like it seems to me that, OK, they’re kind of trying to make it more like the Mac and they are borrowing features from the Mac, trying to come up with ways to make them work with touch and this whole iPad system.

And eventually they’ll probably get there, like they’ll probably year after year, figure out more things to add and they’ll have more and more features.

Developers will be able to make more and more powerful apps.

But from a design standpoint, the more interesting question to me is what should these apps actually look like and what kinds of apps does Apple want us to build basically? And today, I really feel like it’s not enough for Apple to improve iPad OS. They kind of need to lead by example and build their own pro iPad apps and really have a shining light of an iPad app that shows everything that the iPad can do and shows the kind of interface that an iPad app should have in the minds of Apple designers.

00:20:47 - Speaker 2: Right, so one thing Apple could do if they really wanted to lead the way on the design front would be to take their first party apps, keynote, numbers, pages and use them to really demonstrate not just hey, here’s a reasonably good port of a Mac app to the iPad and it’s usable, but actually really go above and beyond and make it something where imagine Keynote seems actually like a pretty obvious example of something that’s fairly visual and tactile. Could you make it so that the keynote experience which so much better. People really preferred doing it on the iPad to the Mac or the spreadsheet actually is another interesting example where not only is that such a venerable and useful kind of staple productivity tool, but also to me it feels like pretty natural on the tablet form factor, and I often am poring over spreadsheets with I don’t know business financial models or something like that, and it’s nice to sit back in that more ruminating posture in the reading chair and what have you, but beyond just kind of.

Assuming or very minor changes to a spreadsheet is no fun at all to do anything with a spreadsheet on a tablet.

I feel like I could picture just maybe more emotionally, I can picture what it would be like to have a spreadsheet that’s really amazing and fun to manipulate on a tablet, even if it was not as powerful, but maybe for like the very most basic common operations that you do that it could really showcase that form factor’s capabilities, and yeah, no one’s led the way on that, not Apple.

00:22:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there are a few layers to it, right? So one reason why I actually want Apple to build more of their own pro apps for the iPad is that I think that will make them see sort of the pain points or the gaps in the iOS iPad or interface. So I think a lot of the difficulties that we have with Pro iPad apps are actually because of gaps in the iPad OS.

00:22:39 - Speaker 2: So maybe if Apple was putting more effort into its first party apps less because they want to be successful with those apps and more as a showcase or an example of what this platform could do, then in turn they would be exposed to the weak points in the platform, things that the app developers need like background processes or more powerful gestures or other things they’ll discover those and then in turn the platform would get better. But that sort of begs the question also of What does make a great pro app or what does make a great pro app on the tablet?

00:23:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and one way is certainly to just look at the Mac and see what’s working there, try to bring that to the iPad.

And I think sometimes that works and that’s what Apple has been doing.

So for example, I think in one of the recent versions of iPad where they’ve tried to bring the right click from the Mac to the iPad. And so since the Mac has a mouse with two buttons, you can have a right click. The iPad doesn’t really have that. So instead, you have the long press on the iPad, basically. And then you get the same sort of context menu that you would get on the Mac, which works. It does sort of add another layer of more options that you can add like some hidden complexity that you didn’t have before. It’s basically the same thing as on the Mac, but it’s just a worse version of it.

00:23:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree there’s a lot of stuff that you can transliterate over from the Mac, and I’ve argued earlier that they basically should things like multitasking and a real file system and so on, but to your point, it’s only gonna get you kind of 80 to 90% there because a desktop will always have a bigger screen or will have a keyboard, which is an incredible input device. Again, I think if you want something really interesting here, you need to take advantage of the things that are unique about the iPad, which are the pencil and 10 finger input, and I just don’t see a lot of activity there outside of a few apps right now.

00:24:28 - Speaker 2: Now, since it seems like we’re falling a bit more on the negative side, let me balance that out with a bit of positivity. Also, since I’m the iPad feels like future guy, whether or not that feeling is correct or not.

One example is the pointer stuff they introduced last year. So this is essentially if you have a trackpad or a Bluetooth mouse connected to your iPad, you get this little translucent circle that is your mouse cursor effectively, and it sort of morphs according to what it’s over.

So, for example, if it’s over a button or if it’s over an app, it’ll turn into a rectangle shape that mirrors what it’s over, and this Sounds like a pretty minor thing, but once I used it, now going to a desktop and it’s mouse cursor feels very old fashioned, and it actually kind of boggles my mind a little bit that something so important and basic as your cursor, which you’re looking at all day, you need to spot it on the screen, you use it to do everything, basically hasn’t changed in, I don’t know, 25 years.

And not to say that things need to change all the time, but generally that’s a good indicator in the technology world that we’re improving computers and they change and grow with time.

And just seeing this in some ways kind of minor design tweaks on what the pointer can be, but it feels better, it looks better, it’s more functional, it’s more discoverable, and I just go, wow, this is great. Like, can we take more of these basic sort of. primitives and apply some new thinking to them and things you couldn’t do before, right, these smooth morphing animations, even something like a translucent cursor, was not possible at the time these black and white cursors that Windows and Mac and Linux use. Translucency was like a high powered graphics operation. No way it could be a part of your standard mouse cursor. Today, of course, that’s totally a trivial thing to do.

Now, a counterpoint there might be people are disappointed that they are not applying this sort of innovation to the Mac and are investing it in the iPad and in fact, the Mac is the work and productivity platform. Why not improve something like pointing devices there instead? I find the contrast really interesting, especially for someone like me who goes back and forth between a Mac and an iPad in my daily work.

00:26:43 - Speaker 3: It seems to me like one of the most exciting parts of the whole iPad platform, or at least the iPad system, is that Apple does have teams like that that like they probably spent years just designing and developing this cursor system and getting all the details right and really going back to the start and not trying to just take what’s on the Mac and kind of apply it to the iPad and make it work somehow, but really think deeply about what its place on the iPad should be.

00:27:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I see that as the positive version of transliteration.

I feel like this happens in personal life.

For example, you move to a new house or a new office, or maybe if you’re changing your productivity tools, it sort of forces you to take stock of all the stuff that’s there.

You had weird stuff hiding in your closets or you hadn’t really rethought how your kitchen was arranged because, you know, you just had what you had and it worked fine, but when you’re changing it.

Everything, then you stop and you go, wait a minute.

I’ve actually changed my cooking habits. Let me change my kitchen to match that, and you actually can end up with something much better.

And so I think there is a version of this where we’re translating things like keyboard shortcuts or right click context menus or mouse cursors to this new platform, and they think, OK, well while we’re here, let’s rethink it.

Let’s take the things that are really great about it. And actually even keyboard shortcuts is a good example of this to me, like this kind of system-wide default capability affordance on the iPad, which is when you hold down the command key, you get a nice pop up that shows you all the currently available keyboard shortcuts in the current context in a format that’s really standardized. You know, most Mac apps have some kind of keyboard shortcut help sheet, but it’s hard to find, not everyone has it, and it’s just always right there, and it’s incredibly discoverable because if you hold down the command key and you’re like, hmm, wait, what do I want? And you kind of pause there for a little bit, then it pops up because you’re sort of being indecisive. I think it’s like a really nice example of bringing across keyboard shortcuts are amazing, including modifier key-based shortcuts, but bringing them to this new platform was a chance to improve and enhance. And so I see that as a lot of the ways in which there’s big potential in the iPad, and what we just don’t know is whether that potential will be fulfilled.

00:28:53 - Speaker 3: And notably both of those innovations are about inputs to the iPad and accessories to the iPad, the, the trackpad and the keyboard. And to me, that’s really what’s most interesting about the iPad and when you compare to like the Mac or the iPhone. We say the Mac has a keyboard and it has some sort of mouse, and you can kind of guarantee that every Mac has that, and that’s not really going to change. Windows has some touch stuff, but that’s more added on top like no app really makes that great of a use of it. And the iPhone just has touch and they aren’t showing signs of trying to add a pencil or external BlackBerry like keyboard to it, right? Versus the iPad has really this flexible system of inputs, by default, it is touch and that’s sort of the basis, but then every user adds their own input devices to it. Some add an external keyboard to it, some have a keyboard case where it’s semi permanently attached, and then you have different kinds of pencils.

00:29:51 - Speaker 1: Now I’m realizing as you two describe all the different ways that you use the iPad, it’s kind of alarming because unlike the phone, And the desktop, where there’s basically one way to use them and the phone it’s the thumb or the pointer finger, and the desktop it’s a keyboard and mouse.

It sounds like people are using the iPad in all kinds of different ways.

I could come up with at least 4.

There’s the muse style, 10 fingers, there’s the you’re holding it with one hand and using a 1 pointer finger. There’s the Adam Wiggins style keyboard with the iPad propped up.

And there’s maybe it’s lying on a desk it’s a 4th way, right, with a pointer or a mouse like device, and it’s a benefit because there’s always different ways that you can engage with the device, then as an app designer, you kind of don’t know how they’re approaching the app, and I guess in use cases we’ve kind of had to say we’re gonna embrace this one or two styles of using it where, you know, for example, we kind of assume that you have a pencil, but I don’t know, maybe if the different input modes proliferate that becomes a sort of bigger problem.

00:30:47 - Speaker 2: Multimodal input is, I think, one of the things that makes the iPad, or maybe just the tablet form factor generally, the most exciting to me. I agree it’s a huge design problem as well as just user research problem. You can’t necessarily support every possible combination that people have, but I think that that Reflects how computing is changing for humanity overall. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago when you wanted to use a computer, you would go into the room where the computer was, you would turn it on and wait for it to boot up, which took a couple of minutes, and you sit down and you start your computing session and you do that for some length of time, 20 minutes, an hour, whatever it is. When you’re done, you power the whole thing down, you stand up and you walk away, right? And then mobile brought this thing where it was so integrated to our daily lives. You pull out your phone, you look something up really quick on the map, or answer a text message or something, pocket your phone again, and now comes, I think I read somewhere, some statistics of people look at their phone 100 to 200 times a day, pretty commonly, and some of that maybe is social media engagement loops sending you breaking news, notifications. really need to be looking at your phone and you can talk about all the ways that that’s interrupting, I don’t know, more human conversations and whatever, but putting that whole discussion aside, I think that this thing where computing is woven into our daily lives, where if I just want to Google something quickly or look up the hours in a restaurant or pull up a note on something, I can do that quickly and return to what I’m doing in context. I use that all the time from everything from looking up something with one hand while I’ve got my baby in the other hand, you know, when you’re out in the world, all that sort of thing, and I really like that, and the mobile platforms powered that.

And so I think the iPad and thinking of the iPad in again more of a work productivity setting, it’s less about just whip it out and do something quickly in 5 seconds and put it back in your bag, and more than I’m here in my office, and I’ve got the iPad with the touch capability, but it’s also got this really nice hardware keyboard. I’ve got the trackpad, I’ve got the stylus, I’ve got voice input. I use the dictation. Not hugely, but sometimes I’ve got my AirPods and I can listen to things. So basically there’s all these different ways I can interact with it. I’m moving around the room, I may carry it into another room if I’m in a meeting with someone, and the laptop, I think, kind of for all its mobility, it inherited that desktop. You sit down and you’re in one posture, and that’s sort of the position you’re in, and it’s this integrated to life. And that’s sort of related to or overlapping with the multimodal input.

For me, it’s just a much more creative, comfortable, fun, I don’t know, it’s just like, once you’re there, you can’t go back, but then you have to go back because you can actually do most of the things you wanna do on this platform.

00:33:36 - Speaker 1: No, totally, that to me was the magic of the iPad. It wasn’t the cursors for me, Adam, but it was the direct manipulation of the iPad with my hands. It just felt so human in a way that the computers and even the phone never did. So yeah, plus one on leaning into that for the future of the iPad.

00:33:58 - Speaker 3: I think this is another case where the iPad software lags behind the iPad hard, where you have all these different input devices. You have touched on the iPad, the pencil, the keyboard, draws a trackpad things, and you can really mix and match them. You can use the pencil in one second and switch to the keyboard in another, and it all works great.

But then on the software side, they still kind of feel like different modes. When you use the keyboard, you are probably editing a text field somewhere. When you use the pencil, you’re on some sort of canvas sketching area.

And as soon as you go outside of that, the pencil only emulates touch, basically, like it doesn’t add anything to the experience. So that’s why I would hope that Apple advances iPad OS in a way that you can really combine these and say, press a key on your keyboard while touching something or while doing something with a pencil. And that’s also why I think it’s important that they start building their own pro iPad apps because in the end, that doesn’t only need to be reflected in the system software, but also in every app and you just kind of need to come. To expect how these different devices that you can use with the iPad really interoperate and not just uh stand for different modes.

00:35:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is an incredibly rich area. I really hope we see more work in this, and I would emphasize that it’s a lot of work. Like we have a multi-year research program going through ink and Switch, and now Muse, like, how do you use more than one finger at a time, right? Just that alone is a huge deal and doing it in a way that’s responsive and accurate and so on. And so I could imagine teams working on this for years to really bring that vision to life.

00:35:34 - Speaker 2: The one thing that often comes up when folks are talking about the future of the iPad is whether it will or whether it should merge with Mac OS.

So there’s something that happened a little bit in the Windows world, for example, the Microsoft Surface hardware, which is one of my favorite tablet stylus form factor hardware pieces.

But of course it runs Windows with all the baggage that entails, and they have found ways to merge the touch and the stylus and the mouse cursor that I think are not entirely successful, but you see where they sort of brought together those platforms and those paradigms in their way.

And many have argued that Apple is doing something similar.

They’re on a long, slow progression whereby, for example, adding things like trackpad support to the iPad or you look at something like the control center in Mac OS Big Sur and has these very big kind of touchable chunky things that look like you should touch them with your finger, but In fact, of course you can’t because the Mac doesn’t have a touch screen, but at the same time, I think Apple’s been publicly on record saying no, we’re not planning to merge those together, so I’ll put the question to both of you, do you expect that as a thing that will happen? And then separately from that is the thing you would like to happen or that you think it’s a good idea?

00:36:50 - Speaker 3: So to me, it kind of comes back to the question of what Apple wants the iPad to be and what really is the core of the iPad.

And there are sort of a few possibilities there and it kind of worries me that we still don’t know what it is.

So one possibility is that it’s really about the simplicity of the US as we talked about that it just has more restrictions and it’s just something that is a simpler version of what the Mac does. And in that case, I don’t think it can replace the Mac. Then they are clearly positioning the iPad as something that is more approachable and less complex as the Mac, so the Mac has to stay where it is. Although then I would also argue that Apple could invest into the Mac a lot more and actually go into the opposite direction with the Mac and make it a lot more complex and say if you don’t like that, you can always go to the iPad.

00:37:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I see it similarly, I would break this into two questions, which is, does the iPad grow to support pro use cases, which means things like really powerful multitasking, powerful file system, run your own code, things like that, as well as all the input stuff that we talked about. That’s question one.

And question two is, does Apple want to continue to support pro users? So there’s a world where the iPad continues to not support pro use cases, and then kind of part B of that is Apple could continue to support pro users through the Mac, or it could basically sunset the Mac and say, you know, those folks are cool, but it’s a relatively small piece of the market. We’ll let Windows and Linux deal with the weird like audio editors and stuff and other normal people can use iPads and iPhones.

My bet for the first piece is that I would love to see them turn the iPad into a Pro Tool, as we’ve talked about, that’s a huge amount of work, it’s a long path, so it’s kind of hard to predict that they will do that. It’s kind of hard to imagine them giving up on. The Mac because those users are such a keystone piece of the ecosystem, among other things, it’s all software developers. That would seem to be a mistake to me, but who knows, maybe there’s just so much money in the iPhone, the iPad that they can get away with it. But I don’t think that they will do is they won’t get pro users to use a non-pro tool. Just won’t happen. People use our platform as they have in the past.

To be clear, the future that I want to see for the iPad here is that they make a 24 to 30 inch version that has all of these powerful features and that can replace or appear to the Mac desktop. I think they could do that if they want to. It’s just given how things are going, it’s hard to predict they will do that at this time.

00:39:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s a really important bridge basically that Apple could cost.

Right now, yeah, iPad is the super mobile device and everything about it, including the different inputs you can use with it.

I kind of built towards. OK, you can hold it in your hand, you can have it at your desk, you can have it on your couch, and you can switch between those within seconds.

And I think that’s part of the really big difference that right now iPad is a really mobile first device and I could very well see Apple deciding, OK, that is what iPad is about and we don’t want to make it a 24 inch or even like a 20 inch, 16 inch device because then you can’t really hold it in your hand anymore. And that’s really like the line we draw between the iPad and the Mac.

00:39:50 - Speaker 1: I also think, by the way, if this gets a little bit beyond the iPad, but I think if Apple chooses not to pursue this future of a pro tool for the touch surface class of devices that someone else could do it. So, you know, someone could go buy a 30 inch touch screen. Those are becoming increasingly available and write the software and plug it into Windows or something. I guess we’ve kind of seen Microsoft try that a little bit with their line of what’s that called the Surface hub, surface, yeah. I think it would be a real shame if that future wasn’t pursued somehow, so if Apple chooses not to do it, hopefully we’ll find another way.

00:40:25 - Speaker 3: And certainly I think it would help Apple embrace sort of the general purpose nature of the operating system, because it doesn’t make sense on a 24 inch screen to have a single device, and it doesn’t make sense anymore to use it on the couch. So you want to have it on a desk and you want to do things on it that you do on your desk, which are naturally more complex interactions. So in that way, I think it would be really exciting for Apple to build a larger iPad, even for the people that don’t want a larger iPad, like they would probably still benefit from the development that the iPad gets out of it.

00:40:59 - Speaker 1: There’s an incredible endgame here where what was originally iOS becomes adaptable from the phone to the iPad to a Pro desktop class tool, and if you were able to figure that out, if you were able to succeed in that research project, you could have this incredible fluidity between the devices, maybe even using the devices together, for example, your iPhone is on your desk as a little sidecar with some extra controls while you’re working on your main iPad plus.

00:41:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that. Maybe that’s extending the multimodal input even a little further, as sort of a multi-device world, which I think we already kind of live in, you know, you’ve got your Kindle, you’ve got your fitness watch, you’ve got your computer, there’s other kind of devices that float around in your home or your office. And I always like this kind of Hollywood thing with uh Tony Stark on his lab where he’s got his like robot assistant he talks to, but he usually has multiple screens and this is basically just a Hollywood thing, but in some ways it also is compelling that the room is the computer and the screens and the different devices, whether they’re touch screens or holographic displays or voice interfaces, they’re all just different affordances into that same computing medium.

And I think in a way, we kind of have a version of that now, in the sense that we do have lots of devices floating around on our desks and in our homes and so on, but they don’t coordinate that well with each other, so yeah, you can imagine that there is a version of iOS that flows across all of those different size screens and different form factors, and they work seamlessly together, that could be pretty cool.

00:42:35 - Speaker 1: It’s so rare that when it does happen, it’s such a shock. I remember the first time I experienced the Wi Fi flow where you try to log on on one device and it like another device that has the login, sends it to the other device. Oh my god, that’s so cool, right? But you can imagine that for everything. Yeah.

00:42:52 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I feel like the fact that Apple is putting that many resources and making the devices, the Mac, the iPad, and the iPhone work together really points to me more to the fact that, yeah, they aren’t trying to replace the Mac with the iPad. Like they are seeing the iPad as a 3rd device and they want you to use it even right next to your Mac and like they showed, I think with the iPad OS 15 and the next Mac OS version, you can kind of use your MacBook trackpad and actually move the cursor over to the iPad and then control your iPad with it and also use your MacBook keyboard. And it really, at least from the demo, it really seemed seamless.

And to me, that’s really the exciting part of what Apple is doing, where if the iPad is a 3rd device that I’m supposed to use next to my Mac, then they can actually figure out these specific use cases that the iPad is good for, and they aren’t forced to bring down everything that the Mac does to the iPad, but they can say, OK, you you have the Mac, you also have an iPad. And we can figure out exactly what interface works best for each of those and maybe even more importantly, which use cases are best for each of those.

00:43:53 - Speaker 2: Now obviously here we’ve spent plenty of time speculating about what Apple will do, what they should do, what their opportunities are, and that’s, I think a lot of folks in the industry because they are such a powerful player, and certainly anyone who is an app developer, you’re necessarily very much playing their game, and so what Apple, who never, you know, announces ahead of time their roadmap or their intentions, where they’re going, becomes a source of maybe endless speculation.

But I think it’s useful sometimes to stop and just think, OK, separately from what Apple will or won’t do, what is the computing future that we want? We got to this a little bit with Rasmus Sanderson and that episode talking about some of his vision for Playbit, but notably here at Ink and Switch, Mark, you and I worked together along with a bunch of other great folks on various research projects, and in a way, we saw them circling potentially a larger vision.

I think at the time we called it the programmable personal knowledge manipulator, not that catchy, I suppose, but, you know, you gotta start somewhere.

And we envisioned something that had a form factor similar to an iPad or a surface, where you have the tablet and the stylus and the 10 fingers for touch, but potentially other kinds of input had maybe, you know, local first storage, so you have a powerful file management like you do on the desktop, and more suitable for collaboration in this sort of cloud world, and that furthermore, it’s fully programmable, and then maybe the base device doesn’t. Do a lot. It doesn’t come with a lot of apps, it doesn’t have a lot of features, but you could sort of write your own apps and browse the web and sketch, and that something like that could be a very fun and powerful new kind of pro platform.

Again, not necessarily trying to replace the desktop, but a way to take these computing capabilities that we have with modern hardware and everything that’s been pushed forward by the mobile revolution and bring that to the creative tools space. And we even put some work into trying to bring those pieces together into a prototype, but we actually determined it was just too early, too hard, probably too big for any one company to do.

So that’s part of where we kind of split out the different pieces, and one of those was Muse. We said, look, the best way to explore this kind of multimedia canvas side of things is on an existing platform and that platform was the iPad. But I still have that shining vision floating in the back of my head, and I think it both leads me to, I’m doing the mental diff between where the iPad seems to be going and that vision that I have for that programmable knowledge manipulator that I want. And the ways in which the iPad is changing to be more on that trajectory versus not, makes me happier or less happy with the iPad, but then maybe separately, like you said earlier, Mark, maybe someone else needs to build that, and it’s a huge undertaking, but maybe Apple isn’t the right company. Maybe they’re a consumer company now, not a creative tools company, and maybe something, another company or another team or a set of companies or open source project, I don’t even know, that could really be focused on that audience and that sort of set of use cases could do something pretty special.

00:47:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting because there don’t seem to be a lot of people really working on this. This is problems like the multimodal input problem, including with 10 fingers, the sandboxing and security problem while maintaining power and flexibility. There is not a ton of work on this that I know of. And so the flip side of that is that if you do get a small group together and work on it for a few years, you can pierce the frontier, you know, you can make a contribution to the field. So I’d love to see more people try that.

00:47:28 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it’s kind of where change needs to come from. I think Apple does have like a ton of really good research groups that do this kind of research, but it all stays within Apple and they’re famously secretive. They certainly don’t show it, but a lot of it also either takes like 10 years to develop. I think a lot of stuff like even the MacBook Touchar that nobody really likes took like 10 years to develop from like the first research stuff. But like 90% of what they come up with will never see the light of the world simply because.

Apple with the iPad and especially because it’s based on the iPhone, it’s now at a point where it is such a popular and widely used device that they can’t really change anything fundamental. The only thing they can do even with the iPad is to add stuff on top of it, which might improve things somewhat, but they will never really be able to change the game. And so what I would really hope for is, yeah, we basically need some sort of newcomer that doesn’t have any legacy to worry about. And can really just start fresh, but that gets more difficult with every year basically because there’s so many more things you need to do and the ecosystem that Apple and Microsoft and Google have just grows bigger and you can’t really compete with it.

00:48:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it is tough. It’s why I think this idea of research prototypes was so important out of the lab. You need something that’s higher fidelity and more information than just like theorizing about something and drawing some sketches, but to turn it into a production product that’s integrated with an existing platform is an enormous amount of work we’ve seen with Ms even to do a tiny slice of it, as many years, right? But these research prototypes, they’re real software, they’re working, you can play with them, but they focus on one or two dimensions. And so that’s perhaps a way to tackle that.

00:49:14 - Speaker 2: Well, before we go, coming back to the iPad, if you had a wish list item, a genie that could grant one wish for something that could be added, some major change to the iPad as a platform, say, 3 years out, what would that be? My answer to that would be developer tools. There was a great terminal and the ability to write your own apps directly on the iPad and run your own apps and possibly even give them to your friends.

And finding some way to resolve that problem of you want that sandbox security, and you want the app Store curation that protects against the wild world of difficult malware, but at the same time gives you the freedom and flexibility to program your own computer, and I think that that in turn would kind of solve. A lot of the other problems, because then the developers could start to do more of the innovation and discover more weird interesting use cases. If they could do that and the thing that is not constrained by Apple review because it’s just for yourself and a couple of friends, then I think some very interesting things might emerge from that that could then solve a lot of the other problems.

00:50:21 - Speaker 3: For me, I think it would be text selection. It’s sort of the underlying cause of so many small frustrations that I have when using the iPad. And basically, whenever you work with text, you kind of need to select things and move the curse and it naturally doesn’t really work with touch. And so either Apple needs to figure out a way to just make it work more precisely with Touch, or maybe even leverage all the input devices they have and make better use of the pencil and the keyboard and just let me use those in combination with touch to accurately select text.

00:50:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, probably that area of things might even be bad enough that just declaring bankruptcy just completely remove everything with the current touch base text selection, which is just doesn’t work well, has never worked well, and instead start over from scratch, and maybe that’s, you can’t even select text at all with touch and you need some other input device, or maybe they just have some wild new idea for how to do that. But yeah, what’s there now is not good.

00:51:19 - Speaker 1: Well, it’s tough for me to pick just one, but a very practical item is multitasking, and there’s a very simple test here, which is the multitasking needs to be good enough for me not to be so mad that I agitate for us to write our own in-app multitasking in use. We’re still not there yet, but I believe we can do it and thereby avoid a bunch of work on our part.

00:51:43 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening.

If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at @museapphq. You can reach us on email at [email protected], and you can help us by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.

And while we’ve had our gripes and concerns about what the iPad is today, where it might be going, I think clearly the fact that we’ve all chosen to devote our careers here in the moment to building exclusively for this platform means we see its potential, that it’s one of the most interesting. Fast evolving places in computing right now and certainly for building thinking tools it offers new capabilities that I think are not available anywhere else. So I hope you both still feel positively about the potential for the iPad because well, you’re betting your day job on it.

00:52:32 - Speaker 1: Absolutely we criticized because we care and we love the platform.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: You start with some seeds of an idea. Basically, it might be some sketches or a picture of a whiteboard you took or a voice memo, and what you want to end up with is, say, an essay, and there’s several steps to the creative process. And one of the things that’s exciting about the new text feature plus blocks is you can see it as a trellis for that growth.

00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad.

But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it.

I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Mark, I’m pleased to report that Metause has broken into the top 200 charts on the technology category in Apple Podcasts. It’s a per country breakdown. I’ve been using a little thing called PO status that essentially sort of charts your position over time. Some countries were there pretty consistently, other places like Germany where I live, we kind of pop in and out at the whims of the algorithm essentially. That was quite surprising to me in a lot of ways, cause I just still think of this as, you know, me and you were having a chat sometimes with guests, just people we like to hang out with and seeing our logo alongside these what I consider to be kind of giants of the podcasting world like Cortex and Accidental tech and so on is kind of a thrill actually.

00:01:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I continued to be really pleasantly surprised by the reception we get to the podcast. It’s actually just at a family event about a week ago, and people would come to me and say, Mark, hey, it’s great to see you. By the way, I love the podcast, like, whoa, OK, I didn’t know you were listening to that, but that’s cool. So yeah, it’s been fun.

00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, and I also want to maybe make a little request. First of all, a huge thanks to all the people who have tweet recommendations or a lot of folks tell me that they do more kind of in person. Reminds me a little bit of our episode on social media where we talked about something going viral slowly kind of through word of mouth, sort of the ideal thing, and I think there’s a little bit of that here, which is great.

But actually, if you haven’t had the chance to recommend us, you can actually help by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. They make it a little hard to do, but if you go to the new podcast page and go to the Apple Podcasts, I’ll link that in the show notes. You scroll down to the bottom, I think you can tap write a review if you’re on your iPhone. I’m sure Spotify has a similar thing. We only have a few reviews. In a lot of countries, sometimes none, so even just taking a moment to drop in a star review in one sentence of what you think you like hearing these weird guys talk about, if nothing else, will soothe my vanity.

So our topic today is text. Now that word even is so rich for me and many of the reasons I got into computing and tools for thought, and so on. The impetus here is we’re just now releasing into beta for all our pro members a text blocks feature, so essentially changing our text cards today, which are kind of these Post-it notes things, pretty basic, to something that is a little more inspired by the notion Rome craft world of things. And maybe we’ll describe a little more of that vision later, but of course I always like to start with the absolute fundamentals. So Mark, I have to ask you, what is text, and I mean not the dictionary definition, but what comes to mind for you with that word.

00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Well I’ll give you a very marked philosophical answer, which I’m sure we’ll hear echoes of in the rest of this conversation.

Now, if you think about conveying information, there’s sort of a necessarily most primitive form, which is a string of 0 and 1’s, you know, you can’t reduce the dimensionality beyond a line and you can’t reduce the base beyond two, right, or else you have no information.

And then in the case of human acceptable information, it’s perhaps a string of human readable characters. So in some sense it’s the most basic fundamental primitive way to communicate information. So that’s one of the reasons why I think it comes up so often in Tools for Thought, but we’ll talk more about that throughout the podcast.

00:03:51 - Speaker 2: For me, the word text, I think, makes me think of plain text or files that end in .txt and for a very long time, that was my whole knowledge management system was a folder full of text files.

Maybe at some point I did mark down or something like that, but plain text is just one of the most fundamental formats on a computer. It’s how code is usually represented, it’s a very durable and long-term format, it’s very flexible, you can do Aski art and things like that, yeah.

But I guess going back even before sort of the digital side of things, I really think of writing things down in any way at all as the original tool for thought.

And in fact, it feels like almost all of the things that build upon that are essentially variations of ways to write things down.

Ways to externalize thoughts from your mind. I think we’ve talked before about even something as simple as using a stick to draw on the dirt and I don’t know, cavemen drawing a picture of a horse on the wall of their cave, and certainly you have this whole history of, I guess there’s sort of written language, which of course is an extension of or a mapping of spoken language.

And that leads you into the whole world of alphabets, but actually even before alphabets, you have logograms, things like hieroglyphs, you know, you have a picture of a duck, and that means the word duck, for example, and then you have all these technologies for mediums for writing on, mediums for writing with, for reproducing those things, clay tablets, styluses, papyrus, paper, pens and pencils, printing press, whiteboards, posted notes, etc.

And then language, which we typically represent in modern times with alphabets which stand for sounds roughly, but are actually very abstract, you know, they’re pretty far removed from the pictures or diagrams we once had, and I think that leads us to one of the dualities I wanted to talk about or I’ve been thinking about a lot in terms of this muse product direction, which is the duality or the spectrum of symbolic versus spatial and visual.

00:05:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this could that something really fundamental, which is formats that are optimal for conveyance and translation and reproduction and storage, which I would say plain text, especially for that category versus formats which are optimized for matching how our minds work and think, which is closer, I would say to the music model of it’s multimedia, it’s free form, it’s kind of messy, and so.

Forth.

And so there’s constantly a tension, I think, between having a tool that better represents and better works with how we tend to think versus having a tool that, for example, can persist that data over hundreds of thousands of years, or just a few years in the case of today’s software.

And I think kind of grappling with that, not to mention just the complexity of actually building such a multimedia canvas is a lot of what the tools for Though space is about.

00:06:35 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I would argue that at least the current tools for thought space, which is maybe a little bit overindexed on building sort of Rome clones and variations, and I think there’s probably much wider space to explore.

I’m certain there’s much wider space to explore, but those, of course, yeah, Rome notion, they’re in the same vein of, yeah, plain text files, marked down, Emacs org mode.

Very symbolic oriented and of course symbolic representation, yeah, mathematics, written language, of course, even programming is just an incredibly powerful way to do things, but this spatial and visual side, I mean, we talked about this with Anne Lohr back in the episode on thinking in maps and sort of diagrams and literal maps in some cases, as being a spatial and visual way to represent things. Or there’s something like data visualization.

Of course we can’t go in an episode without mentioning Brett Victor, and I was just rewatching some of the humane representation of thought, where he talks about the invention of the modern chart or data visualization. I think it’s in the, maybe the 1700s, 1800s by William Playfair.

And this idea of creating a chart where you got time on one axis, and some thing that goes up and down, like money or population or some other thing on another axis, turned out to be a really powerful way to tap into our spatial reasoning and a much better way to get overviews and see patterns in data, but that would be invented just like everything. So that’s an amazing tool for thought, I think, an example of in that sort of spatial and visual side that we think is Maybe under explored in the digital realm or right at this moment in the digital realm.

00:08:16 - Speaker 1: Right? And I also think there’s an element of time and process here.

So there are some use cases where you want a very visual and spatial end product. A map is perhaps the canonical example of that, but I think much more common is a case where the process along some of the Steps asks for such a format.

So for example, if you’re eventually going to write an essay, the final artifact is going to be plain text, essentially. But I find at least it’s quite hard to start ideaating and brainstorming and sketching an essay, like basically in a text editor, you know, maybe I’m going for a walk or I want to be giving myself a voice memo or I’m sketching some ideas in my notebook, or I’m drawing some diagrams, right? And so you have this process where often I find in the beginning stages of ideation, brainstorming, sketching, outlining, you can really benefit from this freeform spatial multimedia model. But then you have the issue of if that’s step one, but the final step is plain text, how do you navigate that jump basically? Do you jump tools? Do you have some kind of conversion step? I think often what people do or often what people have done in the past is they just kind of punt on it. And they find a tool that’s like flexible-ish enough to do some of the brainstorming and like presentable enough to do some final publishing. I think notion is actually a really effective example of that where it’s really nice to do the whole process in one tool, even if it’s not ideal for either end. Or sometimes people, I think they jump tools like they do some sketching in the notebook and they have an outline for their essay, and then they go type it up, they basically got to retype up all their notes. So I think there’s an interesting potential for tools that allow a more gradual and continuous process where the shape of the content evolves from a messy sketch to a typed up essay, for example.

00:09:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and there may even be some value to the transcription process.

So in the coming up with what you’re going to write for a long form prose piece, let’s say you’re a journalist or you’re just writing a blog post for your own personal thing, of course, in the end it is going to be this linear one dimensional starts in the top left for left to right language readers and ends at the bottom right and flows very linearly, but when you’re figuring out what to say, maybe you draw on your whiteboard, you’s catching your notebook, you use index cards that you can move around on a table.

And maybe you find what you want to say, but then actually sort of transcribing that fresh into, I don’t know, your writing tool or whatever works.

Maybe that works OK in a lot of cases.

There are some examples in the digital realm.

I think we’ve spoken about them or linked to them before, but this company Literature and Latte makes one of the maybe best known kind of dedicated long form writer’s tool, which is Scrivener, I think it’s really intended, especially for novelists, fiction novelists. But they also have another tool called Skel, I believe it is. I’ll link that in the notes, which is kind of cards on a canvas, Post-it notes, desktop thing, maybe it’s not as sleek and modern as Muse, but I’ve run into people who use Skel in the same way you might use Muse, and notably they’re both from the same company. And they’re intended, but they’re just for those different stages, precisely like you said.

One is this ideation, you’re figuring out the arcs of your character and maybe even want notes that aren’t even going to be sort of in line to the story. There’s backstory about a particular character or a place. You’re not necessarily going to just have a paragraph where you say so.

So it was from here, they’re this old and what have you, but as a writer, having that floating around on the edges as a reminder while you’re near your other kind of plot elements can be useful. So that’s another example of the nonlinear free form, and then eventually you somehow collapse it down to this one dimensional long form prose format.

00:11:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think there’s just a ton of potential in that type of tool, and I feel like we’re only just beginning to explore it as an industry. We kind of take for granted that you’re gonna be starting with like a text buffer and you’re gonna type stuff in and that’s that. And I think it really impacts our ability to develop creative ideas, and I do believe that as we develop more tools that are more aligned with how we’re thinking, they’re more multimedia, they’re spatial, they’re free form, we will in fact have better ideas. That’s one of the big bets of news.

00:12:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, thinking about the linear kind of top to bottom flow of text or symbolic language, I also had me thinking a bit about terminals, or reppel, sometimes they’re called.

You know, when you think of computers, text is like really foundational, and then the terminal, at least for Unix folks like us, that’s a place where we spend a lot of time, it’s a venerable, it’s sort of a way to have a conversation with the computers the way I think of that a little bit, a little bit of the gliders, man, computer symbiosis, but I always find it interesting if you dig into why does the terminal.

Work this particular weird way with a lot of control characters and whatever and then you get into this TTY thing.

What does TTY stand for? Well, that’s short for teletype and these like teletype things date back to the 1800s, their stock tickers, that sort of thing. They were essentially these ways to have again the computer or some automated device produce a linear stream of symbols.

I think later they were adapted to mainframes, maybe in the 1960s or something like that. And then even when you go to word processors, whether it’s like the WordPerfect and whatever in the 1980s or Xerox PARC and there what you see is what you get word processor, and even today Google Docs still has this quality. You start in the top left, you go top to bottom. That’s kind of it. Except, I do think a breakthrough or, and maybe this is less at the symbol level, but it is at the overall corpus level, is linked. Let’s see you had wikis first, I think the web with hypertext, you could argue is clearly the biggest and strongest example of that.

And a lot of the excitement also around tools for thought right now, notion first, you know, sort of a modern wiki in many ways, Rome with its backlinks, lots of others have focused on the linking elements of things, and so now you do get a graph of your knowledge and so.

The individual documents are still these linear streams of text, but you can kind of pop around between them and the web, I think, takes it even further and Notion I think does this reasonably well also, which is letting you put multimedia elements in images, video, that sort of thing. Although in the end I think notion is still very much inherits that sort of top to bottom, typing into a word processor kind of thing, and the web has more free form, but of course if you really decompose it, you know, you hit view source in your browser, in the end there’s a top to bottom linear document made out of characters.

00:14:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s interesting. This is clarifying for me that there’s a couple of dimensions at play here. There’s the dimension of what’s the datum type, and by datum I mean like the atom of information, which could be a text paragraph, it could be an image, and then there’s a dimension of call it like interactivity or freeformness, if that’s a word.

00:14:54 - Speaker 2: Unstructuredness maybe.

00:14:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and the examples that you gave are interesting because when we think of text, we often think of the straight up plain text buffer and sublime or whatever, but you gave the example of a wiki. Reppel, I would include social networks like Twitter in there.

There, the datum is still text, but it’s very rich and interactive in other ways, right? And I think that that’s compelling because there’s all these nice properties of text as a datum, but there are a lot of limitations with plain text as a pure linearization of text datums, right? And again, this kind of gets into what I think we’re trying to do with Muse, where we really like text as a datum, and I think it’s really important, perhaps the foundational one. But you don’t want to be limited to putting just text just in a line.

00:15:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Twitter’s a great example. I hadn’t thought of that one, where of course as text first, it’s even famous for that 140 characters, now 280 originally started with essentially sending SMS messages before they kind of adapted to the mobile client world, but I would argue that its value and richness does come not just from the text, but from the links, from the images, from the video.

And furthermore, that there is this atomic unit that can contain all of the above in a particular container, which is the tweet, which often is represented with this card, you can invent that. And actually that’s a nice note for what we’ll get onto later, which is sort of the block text concept, and that is an atomic unit, and then of course, news has its cards, so I think all of those sort of relate a bit.

So in thinking about the importance of text and what we might like to do for use again, we love text, we believe in it, we just think it’s so well handled or supported, or that’s where a lot of the interest, innovation focus has been on computing tools and we saw the iPad and it’s particularly. The pencil, which as we talked about in the iPad episode here recently, was kind of the thing that starts to make it potentially a different type of computing tool that’s unique and so we wanted to take advantage of those making another kind of text first tool on the iPads it felt not quite right.

But having done that, having invested heavily in the spatial and visual side, now we think, OK, we have these text cards, they’re pretty basic. Text is still really important, what can we do to bring that in? And in some ways I kind of draw the spectrum or something like that on digital products as you have the increasing number of I don’t know, tools for thought or something like that that again I think are very influenced by the notion and Rome side of things but are again lineage going back to Emacs org mode and work flowy and all that sort of kind of stuff tend to be text first. Yeah, you can do some multimedia, but the multimedia is in line with the text. That’s the focus. It’s on desktop computer, you’re using a keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, etc. And then you have the world of, I’ll call them digital whiteboards, which I think people often do want to categorize news as, that’s kind of what it looks like at first glance. I don’t think it’s actually quite right or that’s not at least our long term vision, but you have something like Mirro, for example, or fig jam, or even like these sketchbooks like good notes, I think you and I have both used quite a bit. That essentially allow you to do very free form stuff. It’s spatial. You can drop in images, you can sketch, maybe you can do so collaboratively, but notably I think all of those that latter category, you can put text in, but it’s not fun. It’s basically the same as putting text in photoshop. I mean, imagine trying to write a blog post in Photoshop with a text tool. It’s miserable concept.

00:18:27 - Speaker 1: It kind of reminds me of when you need to annotate PDFs for like legal forms, you gotta go like annotate, insert text, and it gives you the chunky text box, you know, you can do it, yeah.

00:18:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And I actually had the opportunity to speak to product people from both Miro and Fig Jam recently, and they confirmed, yeah, text is not something that’s important to us. We think it’s useful to drop in the equivalent of a Post-it note or a little title or something, but it’s just, that’s not what we’re doing.

So I think or hope that the hypothesis we’re exploring here with this beta is that bringing these two together, richer tech support. And this visual spatial sketchy environment could be something really powerful and maybe a more useful thinking tool than either of those apart.

Although I’m very conscious of the, let’s say the opposite side, which is uncanny valley, right? Sort of like not very good at editing text, but the text gets in the way of the free form stuff, that would be the downside of that, and that’s why I want to explore it through this beta. Now it’s Ben, our colleagues Yuli and Leonard, both of whom have been on the podcast before, they’re really driving the vision on this, doing some incredible work, as always, and I know you’ve been more heads down on the sinking side of things, so I think you got a chance to try the text blocks beta recently. What was your reaction as someone who is coming in a little bit cold or a little bit fresh to the idea?

00:19:52 - Speaker 1: In the most recent beta of the text blocks, I think I got a glimmer of something really special.

It’s this flow where you have a series of blocks of text, sort of like a to do list or a brainstorming list, and you can move the blocks around, and the list automatically reforms, and I really like that because before I used to do this sort of thing with the pencil because then you can do lasso select and you can move stuff around, but it’s always so. to use the pencil for everything, or I could do these lists on a desktop, but then, you know, you’re sitting at your goofy office chair and stuff, and it just doesn’t feel very creative.

But with this latest beta, I think we’re getting close to feeling like the text tools plus the blocks, plus how they are manipulated is a really natural extension of how you’re thinking, where you’re saying, oh, this idea I should move down or move up, and you can basically do that in the app. So I’m pretty excited about it.

00:20:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and you hinted there at um one of the core ideas, which is why we’re calling this text blocks, which is the blocks concept, I think. I don’t know where it started actually.

My first real encounter with it was notion, although I feel like the computational notebooks that I used well prior to that, like IPython and Jupiter had a model like this more for the purpose of kind of almost calls back to the reppel type environment or this top to bottom execution flow, but this idea of stacked cells, it was almost like a spreadsheet that only went in one dimension, worked surprisingly well and of course the thing that makes it a notebook. is that it’s not just code, but you can drop usually mark down cells in there and you can move those around and have the explanations in line. It works out to be a pretty natural way to work to have this structure of the top to bottom blocks, and then within that you can have, in the case of freeform pros, you can basically just type however as you would in a normal text buffer.

And so then I think notion, as again, my first real encounter with that, took that idea of essentially each paragraph is a block, and that by itself, it was just text. There’s some things that are cool about it for like reordering lines and stuff, but I think it wouldn’t be worth the hassle because it can be confusing when you switch between character select mode and block select mode.

There’s still lots of ways that something like notion, roam, or craft behave in a way that’s quite different from the Google Docs word processor, them, whatever lineage of text buffer editing, where I think it starts to excel is when you bring in other things that aren’t text.

So, images, video, links. Tables, convent boards, and I think this is part of the power of modern digital computing. You can do these multimedia documents, you can illustrate things, you can drop in screenshots, etc.

Google Docs, for example, I use this kind of an internal memo thing for a long time. You can put images in there, but it tries to make it kind of a giant character. They’re very weird to work with. It’s just it feels wrong. And having these stacked blocks where most of them are texts, but they can be other things like images and Video and so on, somehow that makes the whole thing, even though it’s still a text first environment, it feels much friendlier and more natural to this multimedia world we live in now.

00:23:02 - Speaker 1: And I think we’re also getting a line of sight on this grow a document use case that we’ve been striving for for a long time.

So this is the idea that you start with some seeds of an idea. Basically it might be some sketches or a picture of a whiteboard you took or a voice memo, and what you want to end up with is, say, an essay, and there’s several steps to the creative process. And one of the things that’s exciting about the new text feature plus blocks is you can see it as a trellis for that growth, right, where you start with Line, which maybe is initially just like one or two word snippets, or maybe it has some pictures thrown in, or maybe it has some handwritten notes thrown in. And then as you go through, you’re rearranging, but also sort of expanding each of these blocks. So your little block that says, you know, to do insert paragraph about food here, that grows into a full paragraph on the essay. And likewise, your little picture of a whiteboard of some diagram gets replaced with a nice diagram that you create, right? And that way the essay sort of organically grows and critically it also Happens in one place. So there’s no point where you need to jump from your notebook to your brainstorming tool to your authoring tool. You can sort of do it all in one place. And I don’t expect that you would do the full creative process in Muse. I think you would probably stop at like the sketch or the outline or the draft phase, you would move to an authoring tool and a publishing tool for the final step, but even the idea of growing the whole meat of the essay in Muse is really exciting to me.

00:24:24 - Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I’ve done this kind of writing workflow myself, and I’ve heard from lots of folks writing in to support or just that I talked to casually that they use Muse in this way for their own writing workflow.

Jeffrey Litt showed something like this for his newsletter, previous podcast guest.

We have a fiction author that described a similar way of working through sort of plots and character development and things.

Now I think in the current kind of text cards thing, they’re basically like Post-it notes.

And what I do like about that, and I do this in the analog world as well, I know I have a lot to say on the subject, but I just don’t know the structure. I don’t know the table of contents. I don’t know where to start. So you can just take a stack of index cards or Post-its and just write down the first thing that comes into your head, you know, the seven word version of it, pull the Post-it off the stack, set it aside, right the next thing comes into your head, and do that until you got 20 of those. Now go arrange them on a wall or something, right? And you might start to see a pattern emerge or a narrative arc or something like that. Right.

I have used Muse for that for years now with the kind of post-it cards, but it’s like you said, you stop pretty early because once I have the rough ideas roughly in the order I want, and maybe a few scribbled arrows and highlights and things like that, I go, OK, I’ve made it this far. I don’t want to do any more substantial writing. I don’t want to do any really amount of big investment in the words. It’s really more just the high level concepts, and I want to go over to my writing tool. Now with the text blocks, potentially, you can do more of the long form writing. Again, it’s not a full-fledged text editor, never intended to be, but you can at least get a lot more of the core ideas written down and then basically use your select tool, just grab everything, hit copy, pop over to a writing. Tool like Kraft Ulysses or your WordPress blog or whatever it is, paste it in and then go and do your more substantial wordsmithing. But at that point you’ve got the flow, the order, the structure of the piece, maybe some of the major phrases and opening sentences of each paragraph and that sort of thing. And now you can go and start really putting the meat on the bone.

00:26:25 - Speaker 1: Now we’ve talked about jumping to a full-fledged authoring and publishing tool for writing, which I do think you’re gonna need to do if you have an external audience, you’re gonna want to create a PDF or something similar.

But I’m saying is that often for internal communications within a company, you can get by with just using the ideation and brainstorming tool as the quote unquote publisher. So we see this a lot internally with both muse and Notion. People create muse boards or notion documents and use those as the final artifact that they’re gonna share with their teammates because yeah, they’re a little bit sketchy, but that’s fine.

We recently had a good planning session where we used a beta of the text blocks and it was really cool to see that and it’s actually nice cause it kind of correctly reflects the state of the ideas.

You know, it’s this notion that you don’t want it to seem too rough nor too polished, because the ideas are sort of in this intermediate state, which I think the muse boards with some text cards and some highlighting and some images and stuff that show which is nice.

00:27:23 - Speaker 2: Fidelity, the representation should hopefully convey the level of polish of the ideas as this uh carefully crafted plan intended to be conveyed to a wide audience versus a thing that we sketched together in an hour of a planning session. Right? It’s a really good point on the publishing side of things. And I think that any idea that you want to express, again coming back to that, writing something down as the original tool for thought, externalizing an idea, and you can start on one end of the spectrum is just you want to express it for yourself. And that’s the sketchbook, that’s what M is focused on today. It’s just, let me get this idea out of my head, explore it on the page, see if there’s legs, develop it.

But I never intend to share it, at least not in this form with anyone else.

The other extreme is I’m a journalist writing a piece for The New York Times or I’m a documentary maker and I’m going to put my thing on Netflix and it’s going to be consumed by potentially millions of people. And so there’s going to be a very high degree of polish and a whole long process going from ideation and sketches to drafts and drafts and revisions to Some maybe post-production process to make it really polished.

So those are the two ends of the spectrum, then you have a lot in the middle, and I think internal memo culture accompanies is a very big, I don’t know if you call it a publishing, it is a type of publishing in a way.

So for example, at Hiroku, I think we typically use GitHub and just. As a way to kind of publish memos, email, of course it’s a classic kind of internal memo. I’ve used Google Docs in the past, as I’ve mentioned, at Muse we use Notion pretty heavily, but more and more we use Muse just depending on what the item is.

But Muse makes it hard to publish. We don’t offer a good or easy way to screenshot or PDF, that sort of thing. Again, that’ll be coming in the future, since our focus really has been on that individual ideation point.

But yeah, if you think about, OK, when I write a memo in notion for my teammates, well, I only have 5 teammates, or there’s only 5 people in the muse team, which means I have 4 colleagues, so there’s a total of 4 people who are going to consume this, and I want it to be comprehensible. I want to respect their time. I want them to be energized by the idea. I want them to just understand what I’m trying to say, so it’s worth a little while. to make sure I’ve got my thoughts together and it’s not just a stream of consciousness that no one can follow, but it’s only for people and people I’m pretty mind melded with and we have a lot of context, so it can be pretty rough. And on that same note, we do share muse boards internally even though there isn’t great mechanisms for that yet, and it works well because again it’s sketchy and it’s It starts as this individual ideation, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to cross that threshold to something that I can give to you or Leonard or all four of you, and you can understand because you have this context and we’ve already talked about these ideas before and this is just another iteration on an overall philosophy of what we’re trying to do with this company and product.

00:30:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, super interesting, and I like that you mentioned spectrums because one of my favorite intellectual tricks is to look at spectrums or grids and interrogate each of the points on it or along it. And now that you’ve talked about spectrums, this kind of connects back to one of the original impetuses from you, which is to speak in terms of spectrum. There’s a lot Software for the extremely populated side of the spectrum. This is like enterprises where you have Lassian wikis and so on, just because there’s such a big amount of money there. And there’s a fair amount of software for the individual side, if for no other reason, that’s kind of the base case and you kind of got to start there before you add collaboration. But we had this hypothesis that a lot of the creative magic happens. In small groups, maybe it’s 3 to 30 people. It’s the whiteboard, it’s the brown bag lunch, it’s talking over dinner at the summit, and what would it look like to have a creative tool that really embraces and supports that. And if you back into the amount of fidelity, it’s probably this intermediate level that not coincidentally, Muse tends to work with. So I think there’s another way to look at how text blocks and the other features around it can support the type of group creative thinking that we want to see more of.

00:31:29 - Speaker 2: And I’ll make a mental bookmark to do an episode some time on our vision for collaboration. I know you and Leonard have been doing some deep sketching on that just recently here and some exciting ideas shaping up, but I think one of the core constraints that makes it interesting is that point in the spectrum where you’re talking about.

I ideation to share with this small group of colleagues and that’s very different from, I don’t know, a presentation you could argue is something that is intended either for a larger audience or maybe you’ve got your keynote deck for your client, you want to press them because everything is super polished.

You don’t need to impress your colleagues or hopefully you don’t need to if you have the right kind of team. Instead, what you want to do is really get those amazing ideas flowing.

As Nicholas Klein would say, get the creative collaboration going, turn my ideas into our ideas. I think there is a big opportunity with digital tools to allow that to happen for these small teams, but on a remote basis. Now, what are the challenges ahead for trying to bring text into this visual and spatial environment?

00:32:35 - Speaker 1: Well, there are some interesting nitty gritty design issues with text.

So one that we’ve been grappling with is text is only sort of spatial.

So think about an image, an image definitely has a two dimensional representation. You can make it bigger or smaller, you can translate it, it basically works, where text, it’s really linear and you need to choose some way to wrap it, and by the way, the wrapping might change depending on your font or even your text engine. So we have a little bit of an impedance mismatch between the very visual spatial original conception of muse, where you just to be concrete, you could basically take a picture of your iPad and that’s how you would expect it to render in all cases, versus text which people expect to kind of reflow basically. And so how do you reconcile those two worlds? I’d say that’s basically an open design question for us. We have some ideas. Another related issue is that text, especially small bits of text, they don’t quite map as neatly to the card block idea that we’ve had throughout Muse, because Again, for something like an image or a PDF or a video, it feels sufficiently substantial that you want a card that has a different background, it has borders and so forth, it feels like a distinct item, whereas if you had a one word item on your to do list, for it to be a whole card, it’s like a bit much, which is one of the reasons that I think our current Text implementation feels a little weird in some cases because you have this like basically huge card for one word, just it’s kind of missized, but then you have these new items, I guess we’re calling blocks which are very related to, but they’re not exactly the same as the cards that we’ve had on boards previously, for example, perhaps they’re transparent or translucent. So figuring out how to evolve the mental model and the design interactions to support that is another tricky design problem.

00:34:29 - Speaker 2: Yeah, those are two very significant and concrete ones, and I think it does reflect going back to this symbolic versus spatial.

The nature of a diagram, the fact that the circle is next to the arrow is very significant information.

That’s important. You can’t put the arrow under the circle and now the same thing will be conveyed, but one value of this one dimensional string of characters is that you can display lots of different ways. The web is very good at this with responsive design. If I open something on the phone, it reflows everything. So that I can read it comfortably in that format, but if I open it on a big wide screen monitor, things look different there. But the text content, if I was to take a screen reader or just read aloud, a particular piece of text content there should come out the same, no matter where it wraps the words, no matter if I have the font size cranked up to make it more legible or something like that. And so now we have this mismatch.

00:35:23 - Speaker 1: And Adam, you also alluded to another big set of challenges with text, which is editing. So there’s two pieces to this. One is, as we introduce these text blocks, you have the issue of text at the block level versus text at the character level. And with a traditional text editor, all the manipulations are done at the character level or they’re basically macros for doing character level manipulations, you know, you double or triple click or whatever it is to select the whole paragraph, but that paragraph is two indices essentially at the character level, right? Whereas we want and use to be able to support manipulations at the block level to be able to reorder whole items.

But then sometimes you’re kind of crossing that boundary, like, what if you want to select one whole block and half of the next block and delete it? Does that actually do that or is it like both blocks or just disallow it, you know, that’s the kind of design stuff that we’re grappling with on the text front. And then there’s the whole like actual editing in the sense of adding and removing.

Characters, which, as we’ve talked about on the podcast before, is quite difficult on the iPad because people have different input modalities, they might have voice, pencil, touch, or keyboard, and even the keyboard is potentially not as high like throughput as a desktop keyboard for various reasons. So figuring out how to allow effective editing that also embraces the different input modalities that you have with the iPad.

00:36:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, as we talked about in our iPad episode recently, the multimodal aspect, you’ve got a keyboard, a trackpad, a pencil, your finger, voice input, potentially, or some combination of those, probably you don’t have all of them. You have some subset of those.

On one hand is part of what’s exciting about the platform and opens up a lot of new possibilities, but it also makes it trickier in some ways compared to the more known form factor and even posture of the user when you talk about desktop systems. Right.

Yeah, I’ve used a folio keyboard for a long time, but I recently picked up the magic keyboard, which is kind of this thing that the tablet sticks to magnetically and has a little trackpad, and then you can pull the tablet off when you want to do tablet mode stuff.

It’s really great. I see now why I got good reviews. The price feels disproportionate to me. It costs significantly more than one of the smaller test iPads that I have that I use for QA on Muse, so I’m not sure. that’s really something I’d recommend broadly or even we can expect users to have, but some kind of hardware keyboard is fairly commonplace, whether it’s a simple little Bluetooth keyboard or using a folio keyboard or something more like the magic keyboard, but it does mean you’re in typing mode versus reading, sketching and rumination mode.

And maybe that’s OK, but what I found in my own testing of text blocks is that I tend to go into typing mode and I type a whole bunch of stuff, I’m moving them all around the board with my finger, but essentially it’s a bunch of texts, and then I pull the tablet off, grab the pencil, now I’m highlighting, now I’m Rearranging, and I think that works OK, but I would love something a little more fluid moving back and forth, but I think that’s probably out of scope for us.

I think that remains an unsolved research problem to be tackled if the tablet’s truly going to become a new kind of creative tool.

00:38:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, a super important open research problem.

It’s not gonna be in scope for us for this iteration, but I do think it’s very important for us to solve it for the iPad if the iPad’s going to realize its full potential, which we know again alluded to in our last episode.

I mean, just to give you a couple concrete ideas. I don’t know I’ve even told you about these before. I mean, so maybe this is your first time hearing them, but one thing I would like to see is a tool for much faster and slicker input of voice.

So I always has like this voice thing, but it’s kind of slow and it’s laggy, and it’s like, OK, you’re entering voice mode and then you’re exiting, it’s like a whole thing, right? And what I would like is a tool in our toolbar that’s like the red ink or the eraser, where you press your finger down on the iPad, you say two words, take it off, and then you get a text card where your finger was, where you just said, I think of how good that would be for like building a to do list or doing some brainstorming.

And another thing I would like to see is, I think the pencil is actually potentially very good for editing text in the sense of cutting it and manipulating around. So you can imagine a sort of exacto knife type tool where you can basically cut the paper, and then you can imagine a finger tool where you can move the cut pieces around, right? And the pencil is actually very good and precise for that, maybe even better than the keyboard.

Again, both those, there’s just very little exploration of such input modes on the iPad to date, and it’s kind of a shame, but I do believe we will get there eventually. Maybe it’ll be us, maybe it will be someone else, but I think we need to see that to realize the full potential of text on the iPad.

00:39:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve heard you mention those ideas before, but I do find both of those exciting partially because there is sort of incomplete or let’s say implementations that exist on the iPad today that hint how those could be good. So in the case of the sort of voice quick input, I do use create a new text card, tap the voice thing, say three words. You wouldn’t want to do anything long form but for more the Post-it style thing, particularly when you don’t even care what the capitalization or punctuation is, and I like it quite a lot. There’s probably a little psychological hump to get over with talking to your computer, but that’s totally a thing you can adapt to, I found. Yeah.

But yeah, you’re right, it takes enough tapping and special things to get in there that sort of nullifies the convenience probably. And then similarly with the pencil scribble, which is a feature in iPad OS that essentially allows you to do handwritten input, and we do have a pencil tool for that in Muse that some folks use, but it does have some downsides and challenges, but one thing it does have is the ability to essentially, well, scribble out words to delete them, and that feels great. I really love that.

Now in practice, I don’t use that mode. Enough to kind of really that be part of my life, but again, you could imagine seizing on some of those sparks of something that feel good and this fast and precise and expanding on that either in a research context or in product development.

Well, I guess that’s how we’re thinking about text overall, so I’m excited to see how this beta evolves. Now we’re trying something not completely new but a little new in the sense that this beta is very rough. It works, but there’s a lot of problems, a lot of quirks, a lot of bugs, but we really wanted to get it out as early as possible to our pro members to try it out and give us input not just on does it work, but how do you see this direction as making sense. Again, coming back to this. This is bringing together text and a visual spatial environment. Is that something really powerful, exciting, new, opens new vistas in your own creative work, or is it a weird uncanny valley where it’s sort of not good enough at text to use much? And so what we’d love is to get you to try it out and yeah, give us your thoughts. We did a version of this once before with what was called the Infinite canvas beta, later became flex boards, and it was similar in the sense that And the infinite canvas work was going to be a huge investment in engineering and design work. I think it ended up taking us something like 3 months of wall clock time to get it all done. So we really wanted to feel a strong sense of product validation, or this is valuable to people, you know, we’re a small team, we have limited resources, we want to make sure we invest them in places they’re gonna be useful, and that worked really well because we gave, I think it was just a test flight kind of beta, but we basically gave this pretty janky prototype. to people, but got this instant powerful response of this is great. I have to have this. This is so much better than what’s there today, even in its rough form, and that gave us both the energy to push forward to the bigger project, but also gave us useful context, things about disorientation and getting lost on bigger boards and stuff like that that fed into the final design.

So we’re hoping to do something similar here and actually if this pattern works. Sharing data is pretty early to both validate the direction, but also really get key feedback from people. That’s something I’d like to make a really regular habit of. So yeah, if you’re listening to this in, I guess, summer of 2021, when the beta is still running, yeah, we’d love to have you try it out, try it for your workflows, and give us basically a thumbs up, thumbs down, is this a worthwhile direction.

00:43:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I’ll be looking to see if the text blocks beta passes what I learned as the Wiggins product management test, which is, you suppose the feature is going to be going away and how mad would customers be about that? Would they really fight for it, because it’s easy to say, oh yeah, this is fun, this is nice, but where the rubber hits the road is, we’re thinking about not really adding this to the product and the reaction that you want to see is absolutely not, you know, I’m gonna fight you basically. That’s the level of excitement we’re hoping for, but we’ll see, you know, that’s why we do a beta.

00:44:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. I think it’s important or one of my values product wise is to keep things streamlined, simple, minimal, just what you need, not sprouting a million features, but of course you also have to try a bunch of stuff over time to find the right things, and so having a bit of a willingness to kill your darling. I think is the screenwriting term for this, which is, you might really like the idea, probably you can tell from our voices we’re excited about the direction, but we want to see that it truly adds something worthwhile to the product rather than just, it’s a nice idea, but in practice it doesn’t pan out.

Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at museAppHQ. We’re on email [email protected]. I mentioned at the beginning, reviews on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere are much appreciated, and I’m looking forward to hearing all your feedback on whether text and muse makes sense.

And of course, in general, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the philosophy of text and digital tools and tools for thought and spatial and all those other things. So please tweet at us if you have a reaction. All right, see you next time, Mark.

00:45:09 - Speaker 1: See you, Adam.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Maybe the past generation of programmers were sort of subjected to a really awful version of visual programming, but it would be really sad to let that frustration that other people have felt ruin what visual programming could be in a much better design format or just done in very different ways, done in ways that combine graphics and text.

00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest Maggie Appleton from Egghead. Hello. Thanks for joining us, Maggie. Now, listeners of the podcast will know that Mark and I are fans of computing history. We think sometimes the technology industry is a little unaware of its own history, and I understand you recently visited a museum on that topic in your area.

00:00:58 - Speaker 1: I did. I got last weekend to go up to Cambridge, which is about an hour away from London, and visited the Computer History Museum of Cambridge, which was mostly a warehouse that some people had put an old N64 in and an old Mac and got to play a bit of Pong and Space Invaders, which is terribly educational, but probably not a comprehensive history of computing.

00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Now, depending on what generation you grew up with, you know, so now I’m old enough that I go to a computer history museum or sometimes there’s, I don’t know, like the pinball museum in Alameda there in San Francisco or some of these arcade ones, and I remember this stuff when it was new, maybe. Kid, so in that case, it can be as much a sense of nostalgia or a comparison with your sort of adults perspective on something that loomed large as a child. Were there things there you recognized, or was this all like essentially stuff that predated your time?

00:01:52 - Speaker 1: I was definitely of the N64 generation and definitely the, I don’t know which version of the Mac it was, but I have a very clear memory of going into a friend’s house who had the Mac. Windows 95 was maybe what we had had at home. I mean, I was grew up sort of in the naughties, so I’m that generation.

00:02:08 - Speaker 2: Is that what we’re calling it now? I’ve heard the knots.

00:02:10 - Speaker 1: I know. There’s no good word for it.

00:02:15 - Speaker 2: I mean the century, maybe we could go with. So, before we get into our topic, I’d love to hear a little bit about your background, Maggie, as well as a little bit about what you do at Egghead.

00:02:26 - Speaker 1: Sure, so, yeah, Egghead is where I currently work and it’s a web development education platform, so we kind of will joke it’s Netflix for developers, it’s mostly video tutorials, teaching anything, mostly on JavaScript, lots of React, Angular view, that sort of thing.

And I’m the art director, designer, illustrator there. So essentially I handle most of anything that is visual design, and I also do quite a bit of UX design there.

It’s sort of a small company, so you get to be a bit of an all-rounder. And because it’s a very developer focused company, I also develop, mostly working in React. I like to call myself a mediocre developer, so I’m not intense, you know, I don’t really like dig into, you know, the deep code, but I know my way around, you know, front end database. So yeah, that’s kind of me.

00:03:11 - Speaker 2: And it seems like you came maybe from the, I don’t know, illustration or design side, and then that led you to kind of the development side, or was it the other way around?

00:03:20 - Speaker 1: Yes, it was definitely design and illustration first. So I had grown up in a very technological household.

My parents were both programmers. I had a lot of access to technology quite young. So I learned, you know, HTML and CSS, but I wasn’t really introduced to proper programming young and you know, there wasn’t any like IT education in school.

So I went more into design and illustration in my early twenties and then learned programming, mostly out of employment necessity, you know, I was, I was designing websites and, you know, starting to learn JavaScript a bit and figuring out how to get a model to work.

And then, of course, once I started working at Egghead, got a lot more into programming and development.

So I very much come at it from, I struggle to learn it. I’m maybe not.

I don’t want to get into natural types of people, but of course some people have an affinity for being able to do abstract reasoning and they’re very good programmers because they can hold a ton of cognitive context in their head about what component is connected to our database, you know, where messages are being passed, and I am not strong on a lot of those fronts, so I do development. As someone who needs things visually displayed in front of me, I need a lot of explicit feedback from the machine telling me what’s happening and what things are connected. So my perspective, I kind of bring to programming is, I’m the person that struggles with it. So I really, really want tools that actually help you program if you’re not naturally inclined to abstract reasoning.

00:04:43 - Speaker 2: I think it’s interesting that you saw basic programming through HTML and JavaScript as being almost sounds like a table stakes for your career, and I think that’s the nature of the computing medium.

You can imagine doing visual illustration, design work in print, for example, and there you probably need to learn some things about printers, but for the most part you’re fine just doing everything in pixels on the screen.

You hand that over and There you go, and that’s probably true in other realms as well, but once you’re on the computer, now you’re working in a dynamic medium, and your ability to express things is very limited if you’re stuck with what’s static.

I think that’s going to become more and more true here in the future.

00:05:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was good. I was ignorant of the fact at the time that I was in the generation where people were designing websites in Photoshop, and I didn’t know that was an option. So I went and learned CSS and JavaScript because I couldn’t figure out any other way to build a website. I didn’t know I could just mock up pixels and hand it to a developer. So I’m very glad I was ignorant of that.

00:05:41 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is visual programming and also to some degree, its relationship to the learnability of programming. And since you suggested this one, Maggie, maybe you can explain a little bit for the audience what the basics is. What is visual programming, why is it interesting area?

00:05:59 - Speaker 1: Sure. So visual programming is sort of a catch-all name for a whole bunch of approaches to trying to do programming differently. I want to say I think the name itself is problematic, which we can get into a bit, but it’s essentially trying to explore graphical interfaces for programming in various ways and then There’s been a long history of people trying to do this, and a fair amount of pushback to versions of it that have gone quite badly, which we can also get into. But yes, it’s essentially trying to explore ways of doing programming that is not just based in text, you know, linear text in a text editor, which is kind of the default nowadays.

00:06:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly when people think of programming, they think of it as being synonymous with coding. Think of that Hollywood hacker view where they’re sitting in front of the terminal, the text is probably green on black, and it’s a bunch of text in this computer language. Now, is there a well-known example of what would count as visual programming?

00:06:58 - Speaker 1: The two that jumped to my mind. I’d say most famous is probably MIT has a programming language called Scratch that is technically designed for children in order to teach kids programming sort of as a first programming language.

And I think this gets referenced a lot in visual programming, um, circles because it gets rid of needing to use sort of arbitrary syntax symbols to define things like objects and functions.

Instead, it uses drag and drop blocks with colors that correlate to the type of each element. So it’s a very interesting example of how you can kind of lower the bar to people coming in and doing programming since it is designed for children.

So that’s one that gets famous, but others that I would count as being some form of visual programming that will be very familiar to the audience are tools like Zappia, if this then that, Integrama now, the sort of the whole low code, no code movement where people are essentially building node-based logic flows where they’re saying, you know, if this happens, then do this, else. Do that, they’re doing, you know, programmatic logic, but they’re doing it in a very graphical interface. And I count that as visual programming, but I think there’s also a wide diversity of, we can talk about, you know, the amount of power each of these platforms might have, the amount of flexibility and control they give to the user. But yeah, those would count, I would say, as visual programming.

00:08:21 - Speaker 2: One that comes from my childhood, thinking of kids learning programming is there’s a game called Rocky’s Boots. It was like a 1980s, ran on the Apple II or something, and it showed you how to put together logic gates, the same kind that you use in electrical engineering, to make circuits and solve problems.

And that was one of the things that maybe introduced me to this sort of form of logic that eventually led to my interest in programming.

But one thing I think is interesting about that is In fact, electrical engineers designing circuits work with a form of visual programming. You make a diagram that shows where the resistors and the capacitors and the LEDs and whatever else go in this form that is very much, I guess it’s less of a flow diagram and more shows where the electricity flows, which may or may not exactly represent sort of the abstract logic, but I think that’s a professional context where there’s kind of a visual programming, at least representation.

00:09:16 - Speaker 3: And we can also talk about examples of visual augmentation. So with Scratch, kind of the whole environment is inherently very visual.

Other examples we could look at the spreadsheets where you have the cells themselves are like text formulas, more like a typical programming language, but it has this visual element of layout and spatial based variable naming.

Another example from when I was learning programming is the I think it was called Doctor Scheme. I think it has a new name now, or maybe it changed to that from something else, I forget, but it was the scheme development environment, which first of all was all in one, which is great. She’s got this like one executable you could run and do everything, but also when you hit errors, which is the dreaded case of a new programmer, it just drew lines to everything you needed to look at, which sounds so basic, but just connecting the dots between this is your call site and this is your function definition, and there’s something wrong, you know, check where these two lines terminate and see what’s up. We could talk about all kinds of examples of visual augmentation as well.

00:10:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I know you guys are also familiar with a few maybe more powerful visual languages like origami, and I think X code is quite visual in the way that it allows people to program. So yeah, there are fully fledged IDs that have visual elements to them and might not be fully fledged visual programming environments, but the hybrid is actually much more interesting than this idea of pure visual programming, but we can get there.

00:10:32 - Speaker 2: Our colleague Leonard uses origami for some design prototyping. We even put some screenshots in one of the beta memos we did.

I’ll link that, but It’s interesting because he’s doing design work and typically he can do that in a tool like BigMA and pretty static mockups and then we go from there working with U interface engineers.

They connect the static screens to behavior, but there are certain things, for example, when we were working on this whole infinite canvas flex boards feature where just how it felt. and how it behaved was the whole design and you just couldn’t evaluate that by looking at a static screen and furthermore, just the standard click prototypes like you get in a lot of modern design tools just won’t cut it. And so he ended up doing some fairly complex programs that you could then in turn run on the iPad and really feel how it worked. It’s quite impressive.

00:11:25 - Speaker 3: You know, it’s gonna be very tempting to market this episode with a D&D style alignment chart for visual programming tools. It’s like lawful good is, you know, scratch and what’s the other corner? Chaotic evil is a meme generator as a programming tool or something like that. We’ll see if we can pull it off.

00:11:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m thinking of other ones I’ve seen. I think there’s a category of them that I think was very popular in the 90s, like I’m specifically thinking of Lab View gets a lot of negative press, I’ll say, as maybe not being chaotic evil, but it’s one of the infamous ones that I think was proprietary, so you kind of got locked into the system.

And then there’s a whole Tumblr. We can put it in the show notes when I find the link to it, but I can’t remember the name now. That is just screenshots of awful literal spaghetti code because it’s a node-based visual programming language. So it would just be thousands of boxes and lines running between all of them, and literal, just a visual spaghetti that you can’t tell down from up.

But yeah, that would be somewhere in the evil dimension.

00:12:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the boxes connected by lines also reminds me of another big category that I’ve come across in my, I guess not my day job would be the way to put it, but music production is something that’s been of great interest to me, particularly earlier in my life.

And so I worked a lot with software like Logic Audio, for example, sequencers or something like Reason, which is a kind of an all in one synthesizer plus sequencer, and these typically have various ways to essentially wire stuff together, but I I think one reason that the visual thing works well there is you have this clear kind of input output flow.

The output is always going to be an audio stream or in some cases there’s video tools as well where there’s a video stream, but it’s a single sort of time-based flow and so like a music track or something like that.

You just got 7 minutes of music output and you can in logic, for example, To the quote unquote environment and there you can just string together, OK, I want to take the source material. I don’t know someone playing a guitar and I’m going to put it through these filters and I want to fork it off this way and then the end output just goes out through you know your master volume and obviously that is very much designed for professional very serious use cases, but these are non-programmers.

00:13:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve had the visual effects industry has a lot of those same sort of interfaces, so the node model box and there I was just connecting different things together and really just showing data transformation over time, which is when a flow diagram actually comes in useful.

00:13:47 - Speaker 2: And then another one I think could be remiss not to mention is iOS has an automation system built in called Shortcuts, which was originally a very cool indie app that Apple acquired called Workflow, and this essentially gives you sort of a scratch style model but probably Even simpler in the sense that you don’t have a lot of nesting and what have you, you just sort of assemble these blocks top to bottom.

You can do it on a phone, which actually is pretty interesting.

It’s possible to do reasonable programming on a phone, and again, I think it does rely on a fairly linear input and output.

You’re going to apply your shortcut to this image. You’re going to do some stuff to it. Something comes out the other side, maybe it’s a transformed image, maybe it’s something else, but that’s a good example of a place where Visual programming maybe is actually the mainstream in a way that a lot of folks don’t even acknowledge.

00:14:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it kind of transitions us into the idea that visual programming ends up being this really large umbrella that I think a lot of the debates around to get into people just not having an agreed definition of what we’re really talking about.

And so I mentioned that we would come back to it being that it’s kind of a terrible name because to call something visual programming suggests that it is something visible with human eyes, which would most certainly include text or a screen. So that would include all programming. So when people say visual programming, I think what it’s really getting at is, this is my sort of opinion on it, I suppose, is it’s trying to take things that would otherwise be implicit in programming, so parts of the program we don’t see, so right, data transforming over time or a variable being passed through a function.

And making it visible in some way.

And this is kind of where it gets into the balance that visual programming platforms or languages have to kind of grapple with is how much do you make visible and in what context, because you can’t make everything visible because the point of programming is abstraction and working with higher level primitives and sort of taking away things we don’t want to always deal with, right? Like where memory is allocated, you don’t want that visible in a higher level programming language.

So I always see it as how we take programming and we make different aspects of it visible in different contexts depending on what we’re trying to do.

00:16:03 - Speaker 2: Is there a better name, or if you were in charge of the rebrand on this somehow, what would you go for?

00:16:10 - Speaker 1: I feel like graphical programming would at least more accurately describe what a lot of these platforms are trying to do. I mean, a lot of them are simply just trying to apply better UX and interaction design to programming, right? They’re just trying to make it a more enjoyable experience that gives the user or in this case, you know, the developer what they need at the right time without overloading them with information, you know, really just being a good cognitive tool.

For them to get their work done.

So yeah, but graphical programming, I think would more accurately describe node-based interfaces or drag and drop, you know, ones like scratch, or even debuggers really, I think are a form of visual programming in a way, ones that really walk you through how the program is executing over time, although I think it’s kind of wild that you wait till something goes wrong until those tools come into the picture. Like, why isn’t there an inline debugger in every IDE, but you know.

00:17:06 - Speaker 2: Actually one of the first, sort of one of my mentors when I was getting started with the professional programming, he strongly felt that you would go and put break points at every interesting point in the code the first time you ran it, and you wouldn’t run it and just see what happens.

You’re gonna step through, inspect the variables. Watch every single point, and only once you’ve been through it all and watched it all execute from the inside, and everything’s what you expect, then you can look and see what lands on the screen, if that’s what you expected or not, but that’s kind of the final step.

That’s more your victory lap, not your first test of whether what you did worked.

00:17:40 - Speaker 1: I think you mentioned that console logs, right, are one method of sort of putting out or making the program more visible at certain points in time. I was trying to think of a good metaphor for what console logs are, right? It’s like the stream of the program and it’s like you’re shooting up a small bit of information at a point in time.

00:17:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s sort of like if you have a map of a territory and you take a journey along the territory that we go on loops and you cross back over your own path and you make jumps and stuff, kind of captures all of that in a linearized form, and I see it as a compliment to the map, you know, the map gives you the nature of the ter not people gonna get mad at me on the internet for saying that, but you know, that the map has some correlation to the territory hopefully, but also the linear view of everything that you encountered is also very useful.

00:18:26 - Speaker 2: One idea I would raise for the rebrand question I asked earlier was on the Ink & Switch piece we did on end user computing, and we can talk about the relationship of visual programming to end user computing, but we talked about this property of embodiment and it’s exactly what you said, the idea of taking something implicit and potentially very abstract and making it visible. And I think a lot of times in discussions I’ve seen about this, which are often among people who are already professional software engineers, and that includes both people who are very enthusiastic about end user programming or just increasing the accessibility of programming, but they themselves are still.

Professional programmers, I have that background mark does as well, and whether or not they’re pro or con, they’re coming from that perspective of someone who, for whatever reason found it was drawn to or was good at holding all of that abstraction in their minds. And so in some ways, I wonder when I see the objection of, I don’t know, there’s so much visual spaghetti here, but that spaghetti all exists in symbolic code as well. You just can’t see it, and you have to mentally model it, and some people are unbelievably good at that, and a lot of those people are people who go on to be really great programmers.

I’m probably kind of in the middle on that, my complexity threshold is Not that great, and I tend to always want to like factor my code in a way to make it more comprehensible and give myself more visibility and that sort of thing. So I wonder how much the needs of visual programming or this umbrella we’re calling visual programming, those serve sort of hypothetical people that today are not programmers but maybe would have that capability. Which I think is the other dimension of this, which is the learnability side of it.

00:20:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I definitely agree with that, that I do like to be the representative for, yeah, mediocre programmers or people who aren’t naturally inclined to it. And that I have heard a lot of the debates around it of people saying, Well, I love them, don’t take them away from me. You know, if you try to make it visual, I won’t be able to work in my crazy text editor with all my customized hot keys and I’ll say like, textual programming’s not going anywhere, you know, it’s like, this is all gonna be. Additional affordances built on top of a textual paradigm, you know, text is not leaving.

But people say they can’t understand why we would ever need it. Whereas my perspective coming into programming, you know, starting when I was 20 or so, when I was first shown VS code and the JavaScript tool chain that I was supposed to work in an NPM and the command line, I just went, you can’t possibly be serious. Like this can’t possibly be the way that I’m going to do this. Pranking you. Yeah, what? My computer looks like it’s just stepped back into the 80s. Like, I don’t understand. You know, I’ve grown up in the rich graphical user interface that gives me what I need visually and it was just shocking. So I do think that people who are programmers or professional programmers are maybe ones that, I don’t know if they want to say they’re more willing to step into that world of invisible connections and implicit logic. And then it is everyone that maybe would shy away from that or would find that more stressful or just less intuitive, they end up being like oh OK well programming’s not for me.

00:21:36 - Speaker 3: That really resonates with my experience, and I think there’s a few things going on here.

One is this issue of accidental complexity, where you have aspects of the experience that are just not really essential to doing the actual programming work. Basically, the tools are designed poorly and unnecessarily so. There’s too many things going on, some of them don’t work, they’re unnecessarily confusing.

I had a similar experience when I first wanted to do. Web app at a time, the state of the art was like these Java serflet things. This is like full on enterprise Java wildness. And when I encountered that, I was like, there’s no way I’m gonna do this. Sorry. And so I went back to, you know, my doctor scheme where everything is in a nice little bubble.

Eventually you got Ruby on rails and everything was fine and so forth.

But there’s this other issue of communication and information theory. So by that I mean, A lesson that I learned from management is whenever you’re communicating something, something is said, and then something else is received on the other end. It’s like a lossy process, and I think the reason a lot of programmers like text based interfaces is that they have very low loss there. They kind of understand what all those symbols mean, and furthermore, they’re very dense, whereas a new programmer, and I was once one of these, basically it all gets lost. It just looks like a garble of like alien symbols. So one of the reasons that visual programming environments could be so appealing is they have lower underlying information density, but they’re constructed in a way such the optical clarity is higher, right? More information gets through to the other side, and I think ultimately that suggests that there’s this end game of you get both the very high bandwidth potential of textile interfaces with the augmentation that you can get from other visual aids. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, right, but I think there’s something there.

00:23:12 - Speaker 1: I definitely, I think, discovered that when, as part of my work for Egghead, a lot of my work is illustrating programming concepts, right? So it’s very much just educational material. We’re talking like articles or animations that kind of go along with video lessons, where, you know, I’m visually explaining things like, you know, how graphQL works or how React’s hooks work. So it’s just taking concepts. And what I believe I’m doing is making visible the mental models. I tend to use the word me.

Metaphors, because I’m from more of a cultural anthropology background, and I’ve read a lot of thinkers like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who talk about embodied metaphors and sort of the fact that almost everything that we talk about in the abstract realm is based in our embodied experience of the world. So we have this inherent understanding that like, up is good and is more and is happy, we’ll see the stock market went up and the stock market didn’t physically move upwards, right? It, like, had more money, move into it. But we use the term up to think more, good, better, right? And we’ll say like, you know, I’m feeling down today, means I’m feeling sad. You’re not physically moving downwards. But the point is that we have these metaphors that are based in being humans with bodies that have like fronts and backs and ups and downs, and we map all our abstract reasoning on top of that.

And when you have to draw like a programming function. You really have to look at the language we use around programming functions and really figure out like, OK, there is a physical metaphor baked in here because all things are based off physical understanding, um, and then drawing it, you know, you draw, OK, there’s a component that’s a higher order component in terms of a lower order component it’s passing data, so it’s, you know, mimicking this idea of physical objects moving through space.

So it was very obvious to me in trying to draw programming concepts that it’s based in physical knowledge. And visual programming languages or visual interfaces, just make that explicit, right? They like actually draw a box that is above another box or it is to the right of another box, which suggests it’s in the future because we think the future is to the right and the past is to the left, at least in English, Western speaking countries.

That’s how we map time. So I’ve always just been kind of fascinated by how We can sort of use these embodied metaphors to help people understand programming concepts because everyone has a body, so you get these things for free. Like we all get the concept of front and back, and we can use those in interfaces to communicate to people, you know, the relationship of these otherwise very abstract lines of code that are just encoded things on a hard drive that would otherwise be incomprehensible.

00:25:41 - Speaker 2: That’s super interesting and also it actually connects to our design ethos for Muse. A lot of our concept there is we want to tap more into, for example, your spatial reasoning, which is very strong for most humans, as well as things like the direct manipulation and touch and so on, basically taking advantage more of our bodies and our minds, natural, you might call them talents or just built in capabilities because of course so much of what we do with computers we are really Bringing ourselves into an abstract intellectual realm, and we can learn to do it, but it is very much a learned and a learned over a long period of time skill.

00:26:20 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this idea of understanding, whether that’s through metaphors or physical embodiment or mental models is really important because ultimately most programming errors or failures are ones of understanding and not ones of like mistyping, and I think a lot of our tools, they focus on The mistyping issues, and it’s much harder, yet more important to get the ones of understanding.

Like if you think about the most gnarly bugs you’ve dealt with, it’s usually because you misunderstood something about the world you’re modeling or how your program worked, not because you type out something. If you did something that kind of gets fixed quickly.

So anything that can help us understand what actually is, is very powerful, which, by the way, is another reason why I’m a huge fan of logs because they are a sort of ground truth with very high information density of what actually happened in your program.

00:27:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve actually recently been working on a project that really sort of emphasized to me how important this is, right, of the mismatch between the program creator’s mental model and the person trying to write the programming language.

So, of course, I’ve mentioned JavaScript because that’s just kind of the world I work in. So this is a collaboration project that I worked on with a programmer named Dan Abramoff, who’s a really wonderful kind of well-known JavaScript developer who’s on the React core team. And so we’ve been collaborating to help create a course that visually, diagrams and a. Mas the underlying mental models of JavaScript, the way that it actually executes, which helps people get over a lot of the bugs that are written into JavaScript code simply because they don’t understand what happens when you say, let banana equals fruit or whatever. And then you reference that later, but if it’s been reassigned or it’s inside an object and it’s been passed through a function, they aren’t tracking in their head exactly where the variables gone and how it’s changed over time because it’s not visible in the program. So anyway, this project is all about showing people literal, explicit diagrams, showing them what happens when certain types of code executes in JavaScript and it corrects a lot of the mental models that are incorrectly taught in a lot of JavaScript textbooks. And this is where working with Dan and being able to help visualize this course, I completely reformed my understanding of how JavaScript code executes. But there’s no IDE that was going to show me that. So it was just one where I went, it’s great to make educational materials for this stuff, but it’s not built into the tool. Exactly.

00:28:35 - Speaker 3: It reminds me one of the earlier programming courses I took was in C and it was kind of notorious because there was this one point in the course where a lot of people hit a wall, which was when you introduce pointers. You know, it’s this incredibly important and fundamental thing that totally changes how the variable behaves, but just a little star, you know, in front of the variable name or whatever. And it kind of resonates with what you were saying about the mismatch between how people are thinking about what’s happening versus what is actually happening, the importance of correcting that.

00:29:04 - Speaker 2: How do you go about coming up with a metaphor when you’re working on something like the just JavaScript course or any of these egghead pieces? Presumably you need to develop your own understanding of it either from your own experience or from the course materials, but then you want to go to translate that to some kind of visual thinking or create a metaphor, hopefully when that’s correct and useful. How do you do that? Can you give us an example?

00:29:29 - Speaker 1: Sure. I’ll say there’s sort of a spectrum. I mean, I like spectrums anyway. There’s a spectrum of visual programming, and there’s a spectrum of metaphors, I’ll say.

So the just JavaScript project with Dan probably leaned a lot more on very direct spatial metaphors. It was very much like what is connected to what, what is above what. So it’s sort of circles and our. in a very classic diagrammatic way.

But a lot of the other work I’ve done for Egghead is illustrating programming concepts and what I would say is on more towards the poetic spectrum of metaphor, where it’s not technically, like, you know, the most accurate, it doesn’t exactly match to syntax showing what happens at each point. But I’ll make a lot of illustrations that will be metaphors that give you an understanding of like, oh, OK, if it’s a waterfall image, it’s like, OK, this is something about data flow, that sort of level of poetic metaphor that gives you more of the gist of an idea more than the literal syntax interpretation.

I’m thinking of one of like, I did one for Redux, which is a state management system for React. And I use like a little joystick with space aliens, like shooting, cause it has actions, so it’s like you can like shoot out actions from redux from like a single state source. So that’s one way, it’s a bit more fun. Obviously, it’s a lot more visually interesting than just doing a box and arrow diagram, but it gets the concept across to people that you have a central place and it’s shooting actions out from it. And the the process I kind of do for that is whenever I’m given something to design a metaphor for, I will read docs, you know, I’ll read programming articles, I’ll go see what people are talking about on Twitter related to the thing, stack overflow questions, and sometimes if the community is already speaking about it in certain metaphors, I just use that because they clearly already understand it. If they’re trying to explain it to each other on Stack Overflow and they’re using these metaphors, that’s usually what I’ll base them on. But a lot of the time, I’m just kind of doing basic reasoning of going, OK, what are the functions of this thing, what are its qualities, and then you do a bit more creative lateral thinking to say, OK, what else in the world has those functions and those qualities.

00:31:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that that points to another reason to have this kind of illustration in learning materials, which is just to make it fun and break things up, and yeah, visuals to break up, for example, long streams of text, or, you know, if it’s more of a video format, long strings of speaking, or you’re just looking at a screen, that kind of looks the same the whole time, you know, it’s just a code editor window or something. I’m reminded a bit of Wi Poignant Guide to Ruby, which was a beloved introduction to programming for the Ruby language and had these adorable cartoon characters and kind of a web comic style, and, you know, a lot of it was not specifically helpful for helping you learn it. It just made the thing just more fun to consume and more memorable because you connect chunky bacon with, you know, some of these more practical concepts that are being taught to you.

00:32:17 - Speaker 3: Chunky bacon, that’s a throwback, man, wow.

00:32:21 - Speaker 2: Now, I can’t believe we got this far without mentioning Brett Victor’s seminal piece, Learnable programming, and maybe somewhat to the point you’ve both made in various ways, which is, it doesn’t have to be either or. The idea of creating embodiment or visualization or showing more of what’s happening, the abstract pieces, how things are connected, how things flow in time can also go. With symbolic code and this piece from some years back now, but I think has been influential in terms of, well, people lamenting we don’t have programming environments that are a bit more like this, but demonstrates lots of interesting and inspiring ways to potentially make, for example, control flow more visible.

00:33:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the Brett Victor piece has kind of been a seminal launching point for this whole visual programming industry.

Of course, it was alive and thriving well before. I mean, you can kind of trace it back to, of course, Alan Kay and Xerox Park and Small Talk, and there’s a lot of precedents for this, but the learnable programming piece, I think, is the one I’ve seen referenced the most and has gotten the most people, you know, maybe in the last 5 to 10 years, more interested in it and to get them to go exploring and to go, OK, maybe the way we program now doesn’t have to be the way we’re always going to program. And the thing I really loved about Victor’s piece, I mean, of course, it’s a long article and there’s many aspects to it that we could kind of dive into.

But this idea of just that because code when it comes down to it, it’s something being executed in full on machine code and bytecode, and with so many layers of abstraction up from there, it’s not like we only have to represent it in one way. When you get into the higher level programming languages, syntax is one way of displaying what that machine code is actually running. And right in the rendered UI is another way of displaying what that machine code is running. And I don’t know why there’s not a reason why we can’t flexibly display the same set of machine code in different ways and turn it on and off and, you know, say, OK, I want to look at it in visual data flow, set. Or I want to look at it in a way that shows me the component architecture, if it’s like a component tree kind of context. So just flexibly displaying it in different visual formats, rather than saying, OK, syntax is the only way I’m ever going to interact with this code until it becomes the final output.

00:34:39 - Speaker 3: Yeah, interesting. And now that you mentioned that, I feel like, as is often the case, the gamers are ahead of us, particularly the game designers, like I’m not an expert in this, but my understanding is that the game engine environments, like they’re very sophisticated. There’s like the code view, then there’s like the object graph view and you can like, you know, turn on different pieces of the visual environment and there’s all kinds of performance based views for looking at memory and CPU and GPU usage and so on. So there’s perhaps something to learn from that industry.

00:35:07 - Speaker 1: I also think the data visualization industry is one we could really draw a lot from, like I know Brett Victor had mentioned he had researched a lot in Edward Tufty’s work, who’s a information designer I suppose is the best term for him, but he’s written a number of books like visual explanations and beautiful Evidence that cover.

Kind of the best practices for how you can represent data as visual charts in a way that it actually respects the original data and presents it in an accurate way that isn’t bending it or being too manipulative about the way that you’re presenting it.

But he has, yeah, a wonderful set of sort of principles for how to do it well.

And Victor had talked about how he read him before writing learnable programming. But the data this community in general has done a ton of work on thinking of different ways to visualize numbers, and they are fairly well known for it.

Do you guys know on dashboards you can sort of turn on line chart or you can turn on bar chart, you can sort of jump through different modes of being able to look at the same numbers and that’s sort of in my head, what.

We might be able to do with syntax in sort of maybe IDE plug-ins in the future.

Of course, there’s plenty of IDE plugins that do help you look at your code in different ways. But more of that is kind of what I would love to see is like more plugins that just are like, I’m just gonna show you the architecture side of your code. I’m just gonna show you how this variable changes over time in your code. I’m like one of those where you’re kind of like, am I missing something? Like, why isn’t this happening?

00:36:32 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I totally love to see more of it, and I think it can come both from the IDE language plug-in layer, but also bottoms up from individual projects. I feel like I must have at some point done one of these things where you write a little script that like takes your code or your system and compiles a dot graph so you can visualize nodes and edges with one of these standard dot visualization tools. And I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to do that in individual projects like you feel the need to have a different, more graphical view into your project. Well, you’re a programmer, you can make it so.

00:37:01 - Speaker 1: And it kind of to bring us back to what end user programming. I mean the the strange thing about programmers, right, is they are end user programming, like of all the industries, they’re the only ones where they are both the users who have the ability to actually build their own tools and to actually get in and change their own applications and no other, I guess, community that uses computational tools is able to do that.

00:37:22 - Speaker 2: Here you’re talking about a programmer writing their own VS code plugin, something like that.

00:37:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Or even if you use a certain language or a framework, you can build a library that adds on to that, right? Even if you’re not on the core team and you aren’t going to PR into the main repo of that framework or tool, you can build extensions off it, you know, it’s the beauty of being able to fork and change and collaborate on these things means that there’s so much flexibility in in developers having their own authorship power.

00:37:49 - Speaker 3: Maybe we need more culture of jig making and software as there is in woodworking. Woodworking is interesting, it’s one of the rare fields where maybe the only one I can think of where they have that ability to kind of build their own tools in wood, and there there’s this whole culture of making jigs to help you build the furniture. In fact, you might spend most of your time making the jigs and the furniture is kind of this final, you know, culminating step. Perhaps we need more of that in the software world.

00:38:12 - Speaker 2: Some of the ways to visualize your code or your program differently that you both have mentioned like in the game world maybe something like Unity where you tend to build stuff into the game that lets you look at the scene graph in different ways and I think we have that a little bit in the web world. Dev Tools is one that we tend to give a lot of love to. I think we talked about that a good bit with Jeffrey recently here on the podcast, but there it is an example of what you said. You see the output.

But there’s also the kind of hover over elements and highlight which is where and what the extents are, and then there’s also the margins and padding stuff that kind of goes down in the lower right corner, but then you’ve also got an expanding hierarchical graph and you can see those all at the same time and even as you’re musing over its highlighting, you’re looking at exactly the same thing in three different ways, and you can spot different problems or understand by visualizing it in these different ways.

And I would further argue that we see that a little bit in more the native development world with toolkits like Flutter and SwiftUI where there often is even a live side by side. Here’s your interface output, here’s the code, and often you can change things on both sides and it flows. Bidirectionally, but I think in all of those cases it’s already something where it’s a visual output and so you’re interacting with some of the under the hood stuff around that visual output. It feels very natural to visualize that. When you come back to the more abstract things like program flow over time, that’s where maybe it’s less obvious to do that, or maybe it’s just less clear how you would do it in the first place. But yeah, I think that visual debugging or visual understanding of something that is already a visual output to begin with, is actually a pretty rich place for the stuff.

00:39:55 - Speaker 1: And especially, I mean, you’d mentioned the two way or bidirectional aspect of it is super important. I mean, one thing I’m really liking is there’s kind of a new rise in state charts and state machines, but visual ones that are flow both ways.

I’m specifically thinking of there’s a tool called X state that works for React where you can change either the diagram or the code and they’re side by side and they mirror each other.

Whereas if I want to debug some CSS thing in the browser, it’s like, I’ll go test it out in the browser. But then I still need to go back to my ID and like actually change the actual code. And it’s just that like slight friction of you’re not actually changing the thing itself. You’re like mocking it up in one, and then you go back to the actual source. We’ll know and, you know, interaction design, any amount of friction you put into a tool or an interface is just causing that much more cognitive load on the user.

00:40:42 - Speaker 2: I’m looking at Xtate right now. I hadn’t seen this before. It is very cool, like, uh, code and flow chart diagram side by side.

We’ve done a bit of research on the bidirectional editing capability as part of Incanwitch, and it can be very, very hard to do that well if you have something like maybe a tool like Apparatus would be a good example. I can link that in the show notes, but something where you have the ability to do direct manipulation with dragging something with the mouse or your finger in one kind of pain, and the other you have code that you can update.

But having not one be the end state, the output, I don’t know the bad version of this is Dreamweaver, right? What the output it writes is just completely incomprehensible and you can’t kind of go back from there. So that bi-directional thing I think is sort of a holy grail in one way, but also it’s very hard to do technically, and I think it also depends a lot on the nature of the programming language itself and the tools you use to edit kind of the symbolic representation.

00:41:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I usually take the long stream of, maybe, I don’t want to say failures, but disappointments in the wuzzy wig world. You know, everyone that’s ever dreamed of, yeah, dream era, you draw the website and you can change the size of the div and the code, you know, reacts appropriately. The fact that no one solved it after this long and that many, probably billions of dollars, I’m not quite sure. It shows that it must be an incredibly hard problem, you know.

00:42:05 - Speaker 2: Yeah, indeed, and I know in the X code world where it ships with this interface builder, which is essentially a drag and drop GUI system for setting up your interface, but very often I’ve seen iOS developers, they prefer to say just don’t use InterfaceBuilder, write everything in code because Or or later you’re going to be basically working in code anyways and if you have some of your program is represented in this visual thing that’s edited one way, some of your program is represented in code, the two interact with each other in a bunch of complex ways, you’d rather have just the one medium that’s actually better long term.

Now another great article that I came across by total coincidence, just as you and I, Maggie were talking about, possibly doing a podcast on this topic, is an article that is called Hackeroo’s Folk Wisdom on Visual Programming. And it essentially is a pretty large scale analysis of every single time something visual programming related has come up on Hacker News and sort of like distilling out the common themes and then starts with the really common and fairly shallow reactions and then goes into some much more nuanced and interesting discussion. So there’s lots of here including some we’ve already talked about, but is there any pieces of this article that are especially interesting to you, Maggie?

00:43:20 - Speaker 1: It’s funny, I had been following a lot of those same threads, and there’s a fair number of them, and they’re the sort of hack and news topics that go for hundreds of comments, right? People who just go deep on this stuff. I had been reading a lot of those same ones and passing through them right when that article was published, and I tweeted the author, I said, you know, thank you so much for doing the hard work of distilling that all for us.

But I think the thing I found most interesting about it, and just from reading the threads is, I mean, the strong opinions people have on it, or you really get into people have very Emotional, I want to say, like reactions to visual programming and sort of the cultural anthropologist side of me just finds that quite an intriguing thing to look at, where many of them, I want to say, have almost been like emotionally scarred by past visual programming languages, like the stories they’re telling in the comments of the time they had to work on the most horrendous proprietary visual programming platform, and no one could find anything and the literal spaghetti code is just all over the Place and they just wanted to go back to text.

So I think there’s some very legitimate critiques that should be acknowledged that maybe the past generation of programmers were sort of subjected to a really awful version of visual programming, but it would be really sad to let that frustration that other people have felt ruin what visual programming could be in a much better design format or just done in very different ways, done in ways that combine graphics and text. Yeah, so that was my main takeaway from it.

It’s almost like you have to do some historical healing before you can kind of move forward with this concept.

00:44:47 - Speaker 2: It is interesting that it can be such an emotional topic because I think if we were to boil it down to a bit of a duality, you have both people like I think those of us here talking right now who really believe in some kind of end user programming future or programming being more accessible or just computing as a medium is so. Important for humanity’s future, and we need just more humans and a broader array of types of humans, different perspectives and different backgrounds to be able to access this medium.

And so that’s maybe something we feel strongly about.

Certainly I feel very passionately about.

On the flip side is maybe as you said, first of all, the bad experiences that have scarred people, but also you do come back to this again, the hacker news comments are people who many and most are probably professional software engineers. There are people for whom the pure text model and classic text editors and IDEs and so on serve well, or maybe it’s less about being served well and more than they’ve had to go through the pain and suffering to get over that hump, to learn all those abstractions and manage a whole. All that stuff in their head, and then in a way, maybe they would feel robbed if someone else can just kind of skip over that.

I actually had that feeling. I learned a little bit of electrical engineering many, many years ago doing Burning Man art projects. So I wanted to make stuff that lit up in cool patterns with LEDs and so on. And I had to go through the whole kind of classic electrical engineering process, and I found it very challenging. It didn’t really fit with how my brain worked. I thought it would be relatively easy because I’m a computer programmer, but circuits are a whole other thing.

And just a few years later we had the raspberry Pi and the Arduino, an increasing number of these kits and Ada fruit and all these much more accessible things. I remember talking to a friend who said, Oh, you know, I’m going to set up my project that will have, you know, these LEDs or whatever. It’ll color cycle like this, and I’m like everything you’re describing there, that’s going to be a lot of work. I hope you’ve really budgeted some time. And he bought these kits. You know, I ate a fruit, and a week later he had this amazing thing working and I went in and asked him about it and I realized that he just didn’t need to learn all this stuff about debouncing with capacitors or whatever that I had to fight through because there are these just more accessible platforms. And there’s a knee jerk, I think I had that then, a knee jerk kind of like, wait, I had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to learn to do this. Other people should have to too, or I wasted my time or something like that. But of course, I think it’s much better that there are much more people that can now do things like make cool light up projects because these technologies are more accessible. I feel like there’s probably a version of that for today’s programmers versus people that might access it in the future if it was a little bit more learnable.

00:47:32 - Speaker 1: Definitely, there’s also another I suppose trend in people that are a bit anti-visual programming or I’ll say resistant to it or have some, you know, skepticism and reservation around it. Is this, I have found this sort of a duality where people lump themselves into going, OK, I’m a math logic person and art people are on the other side of campus, and I am not an art person, and everything visual is art.

And this idea that they’re not visual thinkers, I hear that all the time from people who are in programming, and I can’t really fathom what that means in a lot of cases because I go, Well, visuals are about embodied when you have a body, and I think, you know, you could probably draw a box and an arrow and communicate some visual stuff if you And trying to draw some detailed drawing.

But yeah, I think the, the, I’ll say yeah historical divide of art from science and visual from logic and this idea that math happens in textual syntax is a bit of a hangover that people just think, well, visuals don’t belong in math and programming.

But I mean this is why I think cultural anthropology, one of the sort of points of it is to sort of show people the vast diversity of expressions that human. Life and culture can take and that everything we have was invented at one point in history, and we are one very specific narrow manifestation of possible human culture, and there are many others, and we could switch to them or move towards them and we don’t have to live in some world where math and art live on alternate sides of the dichotomy.

00:48:54 - Speaker 2: That’s a really powerful point, Maggie. I feel like we should wrap it up there, but for people who are wondering about examples, they want to see what this looks like because indeed it is a visual topic beyond the ones we’ve already mentioned. Are there some good resources you can name that allow someone to flip through and see the variety of different experiments folks have tried for visual programming?

00:49:15 - Speaker 1: Definitely, there’s some people who have done a lot of wonderful labor compiling screenshots of I think every possible visual programming language or platform that’s ever existed. And what I want to point to that we’ll put in the show notes is a visual programming codex that Ivan Rees put together. Which is a GitHub repo with just a wonderful array of examples. And there’s another one called Whole Code Catalog. So a nice play on the Whole Earth Catalog that has, again, a nice sort of categorized collection of different programming platforms and alternatives and the sort of the different qualities each of them has all nicely organized in a beautiful website.

00:49:52 - Speaker 2: Well, thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, you can write us on Twitter at museAppHQ or on email, hello at museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Maggie, I’m really glad you’re advocating for making programming more visual, more embodied, more learnable, and I’m especially inspired by the idea of having a less bifurcated world between the art thinkers and the math thinkers. I think we need that. That’s a beautiful vision for me.

00:50:21 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciated getting to come on the show, and I’ve mentioned to you I I adore the podcast, I think I’ve listened to every episode up until now, so it was really wonderful to get to finally come be a guest.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I view my job here is to essentially aggregate this group of entrepreneurs that a lot of the world is overlooking, aggregate them in some way, listen to them, and then build what they want.

00:00:19 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and our guest Tyler Trius of the Calm Fund. Hey guys. And one thing we talk about on this podcast with surprising frequency is cities and in particular that remote work and all these lovely cloud tools make it possible for knowledge workers such as ourselves to choose where we want to live based on quality of life rather than where your employer happens to be. And Tyler, I know you live in Mexico City. Tell me about that decision.

00:01:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, Mexico City is great. The decision is not that interesting.

I’ve been working remotely and building remote companies for probably the last 10 years. I spent a lot of time as a digital nomad and then kind of like a slow mad, sort of, you know, slowly traveling to different places.

But Mexico City, we’re here because my wife works for the State Department and she’s got a job at the embassy. So since I’ve been running what we used to call Earnest Capital, and now the call company fund. I’ve been sort of just tagging along with my wife. We were in Brazil and Rio de Janeiro. We launched it. We’re there for about 2 years and now we’re here in Mexico City. So the decision wasn’t really mine to come here, but I will say I’m very, very pleased to be here. It’s an awesome city. It’s really becoming like the hub of pretty much everything to do with startups up and down Latin America, amazing food, awesome weather, pretty unbeatable quality of life. I’m not gonna lie. So folks should definitely come down and visit us. We throw a conference here and hoping to see a bunch more entrepreneurs down here. So, yeah, it’s good.

00:02:04 - Speaker 2: Interesting, I guess I just assumed because I’ve just visited Mexico City once, we did an I can switch summit there, but I found it such a lovely place.

I could very much imagine a person who was working remotely and has any choice they want might well choose it. But you actually highlight another good benefit of remote work, which is then you can go where your partner needs to go for their employment. So I know that it can be a source of great contention in relationships, long term relationships, when it turns out that one person’s school or work needs take them one place and another person needs to go to the other place and someone has to decide who’s gonna make the sacrifice.

So here you’re not faced with that decision.

00:02:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we see that all the time. Obviously now knowing a bunch of people living the foreign service life and it is a big source of tension. Yeah, I mean it’s phenomenal to have sort of built this company in a way that’s fully distributed from day one. So it’s like I tell people when we moved from Brazil to Mexico, if I didn’t tell my team, they wouldn’t have noticed basically, which is, you know, super helpful. The one thing I think remote work hasn’t quite solved it is time zones.

00:03:09 - Speaker 2: That’s the last frontier, you know, that’s definitely a challenge for us between Europe and West Coast US although again, you have kind of a nice benefit of being fairly central, at least among those western places.

00:03:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Mexico City is hard to beat. I mean, I think if you’re able to work remotely, you should seriously come and check it out and give it a shot. It’s really a world class city, just as easy to get anywhere, like if you’re sort of US centric, it’s as easy to get to New York or LA as it is from anywhere else in the country inside the US. Yeah, super good amenities, everything just works hard to beat.

00:03:41 - Speaker 2: Nice. Well, before this turns into a veiled advertisement from the Mexico City Tourism Board, we can transition to hearing a bit about your background and especially what is the alm fund.

00:03:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the Cound some folks may have heard of us as Earnest Capital, who recently rebranded this year or so, same exact company, same people, same idea.

Really, it’s one of those scratch your own itch companies, essentially my kind of personal history involved.

Experiencing kind of both sides of the venture capital and bootstrapped world kind of communities, at one point in my life, you know, had a business that I was working on. It was sort of a clean tech software business in a time when VCs were really, really not funding clean tech businesses. It’s like a little over a decade ago. And so I kind of deeply experienced the possibility of having like a really good business idea that just isn’t a fit for the comparatively small universe, you know, hundreds of people that do early stage venture financing and realizing that there wasn’t a sort of 1 to 1 overlap there that you could have a good idea that probably should use some early stage capital. But just as for one reason or another, not a fit for venture and that if you’re building a software company, there’s really no plan B, right? You basically have to either fund it with rich friends, credit cards, or VCs and kind of really explore that, hey, there’s a big gap in the market here in terms of early stage support for a lot of entrepreneurs. Then I went the other direction and said, OK, I’m not gonna ask anyone’s permission to get started on my next business and completely bootstrapped it, which worked out really well. I was just a straightforward kind of niche B2B sass business, ran it for about 5 years, built a remote team and sold it to a private equity shop, which was a great outcome, super fun, but when I was launching that, I had to launch it with credit card debt. It worked out in the end, you know, that was a positive experience, but those first two years with mounting amounts of debt on my personal credit cards was Really not the ideal way to launch a business, both from this capital perspective and also just a complete lack of any other kind of support. And so those two things kind of combined when I sold the company, I said, look, you know, I would like to sort of build the fund or the partner that I would have liked to have worked with on frankly, both of these businesses. So that’s what we do. We’re. Early stage funding, community and mentorship for entrepreneurs building what we call calm companies. And I think there’s a lot of ambiguity over exactly what that means and things like that. But if you think of yourself as like a bootstrapper or an indie hacker or those kinds of things, you know, we’re trying to build the kind of partner for those kinds of entrepreneurs either who have like Different ways of wanting to run their company that aren’t aligned with the traditional venture model or that are building products that just wouldn’t be a fit, right in the sense of, you know, they have perfectly good market and they can build a company that does millions, tens of millions, maybe $100 million in revenue, but it’s really never going to be like a $10 billion dollar company, you know, we’re trying to build the partner from the earliest stages for that whole swath of companies basically.

00:06:54 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and Tyler, I’ve been watching your journey with Ernest and then calm for some time now. I forget when exactly I found you online, but you’ve been doing this thing where you’re building in public, and I saw your work quite early, and I was really intrigued by it. It did feel like a closer fit for what we’re trying to do at Muse and what I’m trying to do with my career and some of the other options out there, and I’m encouraged to see that it’s doing quite well.

00:07:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks.

00:07:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’ve also been, I guess, following slash part of the earnest community for a little while, but part of why I thought this rebrand would be a great time to invite you on the podcast is that calm companies, I think, match up a lot with something we talk about in the type of business we’re trying to build with Muse.

We talked about this. In our Small giants episode, I’ll like that in the show notes, but is a little bit of a reaction, I guess, to, again, startups and venture capital, which Mark and I have been both down that road, and we think there’s huge value to a lot of that, most notably not bootstrapping, yeah, getting investors who help you share the risk.

And then Also ties in well with what we talk about on this podcast, also because in general funding models for different kinds of things that could or should exist in the world, things that could improve humanity, make us all more prosperous collectively, there’s kind of a narrow number of ways we get stuff funded. There’s government funding, there’s nonprofits, there’s bootstrapping, there’s venture capital is kind of a relatively recent, but obviously now increasingly high profile way to do it. But if you draw the map of all the things that we might want to build and what the right funding is for them, you find that there’s really a lot of gaps in that map, it feels like, and part of what I liked about what I discovered when you were doing that is it fills in one of those gaps potentially.

00:08:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s gaps all over the place. It feels like we’re not anywhere near having sort of comprehensive coverage, especially at the early stage. I think once you have a mature anything, usually your options do start to multiply, but We’ve sort of found ourselves in this strange moment where I think the internet and software and stuff has just started to dominate everything. I think that the software is eating the world, you know, thesis is largely correct and it’s playing out before us.

And what’s happened is just through kind of process of elimination, if you go back like maybe 15 to 20. years, venture capital, which traditionally was this thing designed to fund like really high risk, high capital intensive R&D intensive ventures in building CPUs and aerospace and stuff like that, was also just the only people who would take bets on software companies when you had to spend $10 million to rack servers before you could even launch your website. And so there’s become this sort of 1 to 1 convergence with this like very narrowly defined asset class and all of this exploding universe of opportunities from everything from indie game developers to online communities and all that sort of stuff. It’s basically like, oh, well, if you’re going to fund them, you have to use this really narrowly defined form of funding, which is venture capital, which has all these like. Constraints and expectations from the people who invest in venture capital funds and all that sort of stuff. And we’ve just sort of backed our way into this world where everybody thinks that they need to raise venture capital or nothing, and there’s sort of no other option and I don’t think we’re going to be the only addition to this space. I think there needs to be dozens of different permutations of ways to solve this because we’re essentially refilling the entire economy. With software and software enabled new variations, and the main driver of this is that most of the world of funding businesses is based around credit models, right, where you’re underwriting against assets and things like that. And all of this stuff has this one thing in common, which is there’s no tangible assets, right? We’re all just a bunch of people with laptops, essentially remote working with no offices and no equipment and all that sort of stuff and so. There needs to be this really broad-based rethink of, OK, how do we support these kinds of companies, organizations, nonprofits, co-ops, etc. from the early stage in a way that can leverage the benefits of capitalism, right? You can access large pools of capital and convince people to sort of continue giving you that money. So, yeah, I think it’s still very, very early days and there’s a lot of work to do for sure.

00:11:24 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is calm companies, and part of why I thought the earnest to calm rebrand was a perfect chance to talk with you about this and connect it to small giants and how we think about news and others that might like to build companies in this way, is there’s the mechanical. of how your fund works, and what kind of companies you invest in, and at what stage. We talk about those potentially, but I’m more interested maybe in the philosophical elements. Even the name gives you a sense right off the bat, which implies it’s a good brand. I’ll also like our episode on brand. At this point we’ve got enough back catalog, I guess, we’ve sort of always have something to reference. But yeah, can you define for me separately from what you invest in, what is a calm company just philosophically speaking?

00:12:10 - Speaker 1: It’s actually like a really tough question, in part I think because it’s kind of a call back to just historical normalcy or historical equilibrium of how people build businesses. Like I was at kind of a family reunion thing, bunch of family members, mostly from my wife’s side where I either hadn’t met them or hadn’t had the opportunity to like explain what do you do. So I was explaining what we do, and when you explain it to someone who’s outside of tech, it just sounds incredibly boring and straightforward.

They’re like, oh, OK, you invest in these entrepreneurs and They build businesses and they become profitable and they give you some of those profits, or they sell their company and you get a piece of that and then you do it again. It’s like, well, yeah, but it’s actually kind of weird in this day and age, and it kind of harkens back to the idea that like we’ve actually ended up in this weird spot where the kind of default assumption in tech is that you’re going to build this ultra high growth sort of thing that’s gonna raise a ton of capital and move as quickly as you can and then either IPO or kind of flame out trying. So cal companies are kind of a way to position ourselves first as not that.

So what that means is basically growing more sustainably, raising capitals sort of a byproduct, not the actual goal, you’re really optimizing for the long term in terms of team retention, in terms of making sure that folks can work on a sustainable schedule and continue to have high quality output. For decades, not just years or quarters, all that sort of stuff. And the reason why we’ve sort of settled on calm is to sort of affirmatively stand for something, rather than kind of just only positioning ourselves as not this, not that, not that other thing, right? Because that was never the right way to think about it. And so as we kind of Aggregated more and more entrepreneurs that we’re all just kind of picking up the same vibe, right? Everything from folks who are investors and mentors to the portfolio companies that we’ve invested in to the many other folks that are all kind of picking up the same wavelength that for various reasons we haven’t been able to invest in, they’re too far along, too early or whatever. And we sort of said, well, OK, what’s the affirmative version of this that says like, this is actually what we stand for and calm was far and away the winner of what resonated with folks there. So it’s basically about being patient and long-term focused and sustainable and operating and Way where you can be what I call long term ambitious, basically. It’s not like the lifestyle business of kickback and passive income and then sit on the beach in Thailand. It’s about, we want to do something important, we want to do it in a way that allows us to stay in the game for the long run. So, yeah, that’s a calm company. I’m still working on the really pithy answer, but that’s the explanation.

00:15:02 - Speaker 3: I think that makes sense.

To me, these companies also have this element of more degrees of freedom, and Tyler, I’m curious if this resonates with you.

I think it was you who originally pointed out that when you enter onto the VC track, you’re basically going on this very narrow path that has 5 or 6 steps in the last 10 years, and you basically have to take each of those steps, which by the way, is going to be with a different actor or firm potentially, and they’re all different shapes.

And so you really crunch down your degrees of freedom, whereas with a com company I see because you’re profitable and thinking in the long term in other ways, you have the option to do stuff kind of your own way on your own terms in your own time.

So if you want to go all remote, you can do that. If you want to stop growing for a year, you can do that. If you want to, I don’t know, pay out dividends or something, you can do that, but you just have more degrees of freedom and flexibility, and to me that’s an important aspect to these companies.

00:15:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I wrote a blog post a while ago, I think it was called like the Founder’s path of maximum Optionality, which essentially just talks about how you can sort of move through some of these phases of reducing uncertainty, de-risking, running experiments, learning about the market, learning about your customers, learning about what’s technologically possible, that sort of thing, without kind of fully opting into the one-way ratchet that can be really getting on the venture roller coaster and I think More and more opportunities right now merit that, right? In the sense of there’s a lot of talk around like pivots and things like that, but I just think that there’s a lot of stuff right now where, as we’re starting to see less just true green field opportunities in the world of software and software enabled stuff where it’s like, OK. Nobody is doing anything remotely like this, right? There’s various things that are adjacent or solving the problem in a different way, but we still see a big opportunity here. You kind of need to keep that optionality open to sort of figure out, OK, what is the scope of the opportunity here, how are we going to fill this, how we’re going to build the company that serves this opportunity. And building stuff that has that optionality baked in, I think is probably the right strategy for most entrepreneurs is to really kind of keep your options open.

00:17:17 - Speaker 2: And there’s two parts of that, both of which connect really well to the Muse story.

One is just niche software, so part of the venture box is you need to be able to get to a certain size, but not everything that could or should exist in the world necessarily can get to that size, and we don’t know how big the opportunity is for Muse, but we do know or we expect it to be a niche thing. And we want that. We don’t want to have to switch gears into thinking, how do we make this more mainstream, because we think that would cause us to lose a lot of the soul in what we set out to do.

And then the other part of it is, call it the experience for the entrepreneur, which is if you are a person that is a tech person, particularly once you have a solid CV as Mark and I and a lot of our colleagues here do, we have a lot of options, and that’s really lovely, that’s a wonderful thing, it’s a wonderful privilege. Then you think, OK, how do I wanna use that and what kind of lifestyle do I want to live, what kind of products do I want to make, what kind of team do I want to be on. And so in thinking through that, we realized, yeah, that intense one-way ratchet adventure is not quite the right fit, at least for what I want out of my life right now. But then to kind of position against some other things as well, you mentioned lifestyle businesses, you mentioned bootstrapping, you mentioned indie hackers.

Something we see a lot of in the iOS haps world is, yeah, I would call it in the IOS. Developers where they make a single app or maybe they have a small portfolio of apps, but they’re sort of solo developers or maybe two, something like that. I think of someone like the maker of Agenda, who we had on the podcast a little while back, and that works really well, but you really have to start from nothing. You often are funding on credit cards, or maybe you have a little money in the bank from past success or maybe you have a family member that’s lending you some money. It seems really silly to have to scrape into doing it.

And of course, not even everyone can do that when there’s so much investment money out there, but all the investment money is flowing into this one very kind of narrow box.

And so you end up with, I think the two sides of the spectrum is ambitious to the point of absurdity sometimes, huge amount of money, narrow constraints, you’re really locking yourself into a certain kind of lifestyle, getting on that roller coaster, adrenaline fueled, whatever. And then the other side is slow and sleepy, small, one person, two people, you just can’t be very ambitious, at least not on the time scale of some decades, and it just feels weird that there isn’t either a middle choice or just other choices. Yeah.

00:19:47 - Speaker 1: And it’s not just that there’s a middle choice and there’s a distribution of, you know, 13, 3, 1/3 between those options. It’s like the middle choice is 99% of every entrepreneur and every opportunity out there.

I think what you see is two different ways that people sort of arrive at wanting to build a calm company and both are sort of valid.

Often it’s a mix of the two, but it’s kind of a blend of what you were just talking about, which is One is just thinking through the lifestyle that they want to live as founders, the kind of team that they want to build. They want to be able to bring like really top talent who maybe now they have kids and a family and they’re still equally as talented or more so because they’re more experienced than they were when they were willing to like hard charge into a venture back thing in their twenties. But now if you want that person, you got to bring them into a different environment. So there’s that one element of just kind of like, I don’t want to create a company and a life around that kind of approach. And the second thing is just like matching to the opportunity, right? We’re in a moment now where there are just so many opportunities like you talked about that are just not perfectly reasonable, maybe sometimes incredibly sized businesses, especially if you just don’t raise too much money to begin with. So you still own the majority of the company, but they’re not going to reach the kind of billion, 10 billion kind of scale that venture capital kind of narrowly needs. So it’s a bit silly. And one thing I see a lot, there’s like two failure modes that you avoid. One is that I think burnout kills a ton of companies, right? And so that’s where the lifestyle aspects comes into, of like, hey, we’re actually being long term ambitious here. We’re going to try and bring this incredible team together that we know can go the distance, rather than burning out, which I think kills a lot of really good companies. And the second one is trying to continuously expand the idea to the point that it sort of collapses on itself. And I see this all the time from really early stage founders who have clearly been on the sort of pitch train where they’ve been speaking to 50 or 100 VCs recently. And then we started with this idea, and the idea they describe is like great. It’s like the software for this particular industry sucks. There’s still hundreds of thousands of these businesses and we could charge them $400 a month each. We could build this incredible $90 million a year business that we own most of. We started with that idea. But now what we’re going to do is build a platform for like all the adjacent industries that are related. And of course, we’re not going to sell the software because that would limit how fast we grow, you know, it’s like, OK, wow, you’ve just expanded into the realm of, now you’re competing with Amazon and you have no customers yet. It’s like, just go with the good idea. You have this background in this industry, you can build great software for them. You know, they want to pay for it. Just do. that idea. And I think that kills a ton of companies now where you actually have a really good insight into a market need and there is the opportunity there. And nowadays, you have this thing I call the peace dividend of the Sass Wars, which is it’s so much cheaper, easier, faster to start a software company than it was even 10 years ago, that you can bring together a small team with relatively small amounts of capital, like hundreds of thousands, not 10s of millions, and you can launch a product for This market and it can be the best product they’ve ever seen. You can build an incredible company and you don’t have to just like continuously expand the scope to where, you know, you’re explaining how you’re basically going to take over the world. You can just build a great company. And I think that’s another appeal of com companies is you can sometimes just do the straightforward thing. You don’t have to be the all in one fintech omni platform for a particular industry. You can just build good products and sell them to customers. Can still do that these days.

00:23:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, which again comes back to why explaining it to your family members, where you say, well, we invest in businesses that make good products, sell them to customers, hopefully at a profit.

It’s good business, but the software world has these unusual dynamics because of its history, and so it’s in some ways, getting back to the basics of business fundamentals and how capitalism could and should work, but within the new framing of this software and internet world we live in.

You mentioned briefly there one thing that was, I don’t know how much it was, probably was reading some of your earlier writings and be exposed to folks in your community, but also it was just something I think was already in my mind, which as I had experienced that don’t charge money too early, you’ll get locked into the wrong revenue, or you’ll actually hurt your fundraiser.

Valuations because once there’s an actual number, instead of the investor being able to sort of imagine how much money you’re going to make, they can look at your profit and loss statement and the reality is all companies, no matter how amazing they seem at the start or how much hype they build, the numbers always start small, or I shouldn’t say always, they very frequently start small and they just take time.

It takes years to build your revenue, and I’ve been part of startups that do kind of delay charging money and I think there is a discipline of the market, or perhaps it’s just that the product validation you get when someone is willing to pay versus you’re giving them free stuff, you know, here you go, here’s a piece of software that costs millions to develop and we’ve poured our hearts and souls into it and it’s got design and brand and engineering and all these other things, and it’s free.

Yeah, you say you like it and yeah, you’re using it, but how do you really know for sure the value of that in someone’s life.

We went through this a little bit at Hiroki where we were giving away a lot of free stuff effectively through the way the premium product was set up because we didn’t get the pricing right early on or perhaps. Ever, and what that meant is it was hard to separate people who were getting a huge amount of value over other competing things versus people that just were getting something cheap or free, and they liked that, and that hides the signal of what the value of what you’re creating in the world is.

And so that idea of charge as early as you can before you’re really comfortable with it, is something we brought into Muse, and I think we’ve talked about this in past episodes, but basically, when I started pushing for this, when we were 9 months out of the research lab or something like that, at that point we had a pretty solid product in some ways, but when I said we should start charging money for this, Folks on the team, kind of like, wow, I don’t know, you know, I’m used to working on these products for years and you polish, polish, polish, and need to have every feature in the world. Partially, this is a sense of craftspersonship, but frankly, it was kind of a shocking idea if you do come from the tech and software world, but I’m glad we did that because it changed our relationship with our now customers as soon as we did that.

You know, if you screw up and there’s a bug and you mess up someone’s data, When it’s free, yeah, people are more forgiving in a certain way, but when they’re paying, they get really angry, and that’s as it should be, I think. So it creates this filter for people that really find value in what you’re doing and force you to sort of get real about the cold hard numbers.

00:26:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s interesting, in part, I feel like the building blocks of our overall worldview are just kind of The non galaxy brain take on all of these things, right? What if we just ask the dumb questions and have simple answers to them, essentially it’s kind of the basic components of this, which is, yeah, like what should we do with these products? We should charge money for them. Yeah, that’s probably it, you know, but I’m curious, how do you think about that now in retrospect? Because I think we’re right to be kind of asking the dumb questions and sometimes proposing straightforward answer, you know, what should evaluations be? Well, they should matter. We should think about like, will we ever make money on this, you know, that sort of thing.

But I’m not sure we’re always right. I do think it’s worth actually comparing them rather than what you often see as folks just sort of dogmatically assuming like, wow, no, we don’t charge for our products, sort of thing. Where have you landed right now with Muse in terms of What would be different if you were polishing and polishing polishing for several years, potentially in a positive way, like, what’s the case for not charging right now?

00:27:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if I’m to play devil’s advocate to my own position, maybe play debate team, right? Take the position you don’t necessarily agree with.

Charging money brings you into this realm of commerce and transactions. People expect certain things that really brings it down to earth.

But maybe in a way, particularly when you’re doing, and for music I make this argument, it’s a really new kind of product.

A lot of people aren’t even really heavy iPad users, and even for people that are, we actually use the iPad and super weird.

In unusual ways, it’s a really big mental shift to even understand the vision of what we’re doing and then potentially fit that into your workflow.

And so the more you can keep that in the realm of mystery and excitement and less in the realm of just base commerce, I think we could potentially have more time to build excitement, build a community.

And then of course make a thing that is when it’s more polished and then if it comes out more to a mainstream audience published on the App Store or whatever, it’s further along, and so you’re more able to understand the ways it’s weird and see why the weird things are what make it good and special, as opposed to just this is weird and seems bad. That would probably be my best argument for something like that.

00:29:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, I think it’s a no brainer to charge for stuff when the pain point is just very obvious, right? Basically, if your target customers not using software to solve this problem, or they’re using really, really terrible outdated software and things like that, that’s where it’s just smashed. Button right away, of course, you should charge for this, no brainer.

I do think it starts to get into an interesting gray area where you guys are, right, where it’s like, OK, you’re kind of trying to get into people’s habits with things, right? And maybe change their habits, like, even if it’s just they have a go to thing that they pick up.

To do that kind of process of brain dumping, mind mapping, strategizing, whatever it is, whichever one of those hooks, if there’s bugs, right? Or if there’s one feature that’s kind of lacking that actually would make that hook work, you can make the case maybe that you only get one or two tries at that depending on how intense the pain point is.

So I feel like you guys are actually really close in the middle and I think probably makes sense to charge to get that feedback from power users to make sure you’re actually solving something for them. And I feel like you have put together like the team you need to make sure that it’s not shipped completely terribly.

I mean, one thing you’ll see in our world, right, is we talked about like we do a lot of investing in vertically focused B2BA, right? So for industries you’ve never even heard of where like they’re using mostly Excel or something like that, literally emailing Excel files back and forth to each other, we’re like, oh we could build some software for that. You can ship something like that with one developer that takes 3 weeks, and it’s gonna be such a massive improvement for their lives that you should charge for it right away. You can pre-sell that thing with a demo. So it’s interesting to sort of identify what exact kind of opportunity is a match for some of these strategies. And the good part is, at least we’re actually thinking them through at this point rather than kind of picking like one playbook and immediately jumping on it.

00:31:06 - Speaker 3: One other potential wrinkle with Muse, and I’m curious if you’ve encountered any examples like this Tyler is individual versus enterprise. So an argument for not charging with Muse could have been give it for free to individuals, get as much distribution as possible, and expect to eventually only charge enterprises, that is businesses because they have all the money basically. And so I’m curious if you’ve encountered a case like that in your world, probably not, but maybe.

00:31:33 - Speaker 2: That is pretty close to the, what’s usually called the B2D playbook, which Hiroku used in GitHub and Tuo and now countless others, which is the idea that you get developers to use and love something, maybe it’s an open source library, maybe it’s a service, and they use it for their hobby projects for free or nearly free, and then they will bring it to the.

Their work, but that does require a long game, particularly if you’re doing something open source, you know, you look at something like an open source database or something like that. There’s a very long period of getting entrenched and winning those developer hearts and minds, and then only much, much later then you start getting that pull of like, hey, I’d like to use this at work by my bosses, we need this or that.

Access control thing, do you have this SLA for blah blah blah, and that’s when you slap a big price tag on it and start breaking in the box, but it’s a very long game, and the up front of that it’s a big investment, and that is a place where it is an argument for venture money because you need those pretty large investments of capital for many years before you really start to charge money.

00:32:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I was thinking of the same thing with mostly being developer focused. I was not really sure if there was a sort of like tool for thought, project management, like that general space of collaboration with an example of it.

00:32:51 - Speaker 2: The best example there would actually be something like Gmail. Gmail spread far and wide with this incredibly generous free plan.

And then they added the Gmail for business thing, and that kind of connected to Google Docs, which again, similar thing, people are using it for free, and then they were able to kind of transition that into the enterprise product.

But again, same thing, there it was just backed by a corporate parent, they could just say, Yeah, let’s develop this mind blowingly good piece of software and all this infrastructure that runs it and do that for years and years and years and get this really wide distribution, and then we can go ahead and monetize that. But that would be, I think, impossible to do as an indie hacker, bootstrapper, whatever. Yeah.

00:33:30 - Speaker 3: I also think this playbook could be appropriate for certain two-sided marketplaces. So one that I’ve thought a lot about is recruiting. I almost did a recruiting startup, ended up choosing to do music instead, but there you could imagine offering some sort of services to the candidate side to get them in and get some liquidity in the marketplace and then to charge the hiring firms. Yeah.

00:33:50 - Speaker 1: I think one of the core pieces of our thesis is that a lot of spaces are a lot more saturated than they were, you know, 1015 years ago. So if I was to think about this playbook running it from use, it seems to me like the thing that you would want to test, right? I don’t actually know what the answer is I don’t have an opinion, but one thing I we’re seeing is now when you’re talking about, OK, we’re only going to charge when the whole company starts to use this product to collaborate.

The friction point there is going to be probably you’re gonna have like one or two power user advocates trying to convince a large number of people in their organization to switch from something and that’s something might be a little bit more orthogonal, like, you know, we get on Zoom and we whiteboard on a literal whiteboard or something, but you need kind of buy in. Whereas like 10, 150 years ago, it’s just like an open field. It’s like, OK, yeah, we’re gonna roll this out as fast as possible and then they’re going to pick this because they’re not using anything and that’s when we’ll start charging.

Now, a lot of times what you find is that you are displacing something or you’re asking your customers to switch from something, and I think that increased level of friction would be the key variable, right, whether you should be just straightforwardly charging the power users and not Being reliant on them, convincing everyone in their organization to switch, just like it can be just them as power users or it can be a small subset of their team that really finds it valuable or the whole company loves it. And regardless, you’re sort of gonna have a linear kind of revenue from them versus like, OK, we only really survive as a company if we’re consistently convincing like whole teams or organizations to sort of switch. That would be the big question.

For me, that’s something we think about a lot is basically avoiding that dynamic because a lot of the playbooks that were sort of ran a decade ago, sometimes don’t work as well because now you’re going into a saturated market where they at least have some cobbled together thing on Salesforce add-ons or they have some no code solution or they have something that you’re competing against for their time in dollars.

00:36:00 - Speaker 2: It’s an interesting picture you’re painting here, if you can allow me to rephrase or summarize in my own way. It sort of seems like you’re saying on one hand, the software world is way more saturated in certain areas.

People are using when it comes to project management tools and other kinds of general purpose software, even just like, you know, Excel spreadsheets that get the job done for them.

Most of the productive world is computerized and has their tools and so on.

And so if you go in to do something really general. Purpose, like email or a word processor or these businesses of the past that managed to blow up and fill this just totally wide open frontier, you’re actually in a red ocean there.

But in fact, there is still a huge amount of uncovered territory that is just in smaller niches, like you said, verticals, some kind of insurance software that you wouldn’t have even specifically thought of unless you’re in that industry. And so on one hand, there’s maybe more opportunity than ever in all of those spaces. But then on the other hand, the classic places that you go, or if you look at the businesses that were successful in the software and internet world in the last decade or two, those are now in spaces that are very hard to compete in.

00:37:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, basically, I think there’s fewer and fewer wide open winner take all markets, basically, I think that we’ve started to fill a lot of the big pillars of software productivity world, and if it still cost as much to launch a software startup as it did 10 to 20 years ago, we would be in real trouble, right? Because you really did have to find those really huge winner take all markets to be able to build a software business.

But we’re very lucky through this entire stack of products and services and stuff that’s become much more scalable, that you can now launch these businesses and get them to, you know, not just MVP, you can get them to like very, very high quality software solutions with a lot less capital and time and people. So it starts to make sense to fill in all of these smaller pockets, which can still be enormous, and at the same time, As entire industries have become more kind of aware of software or just open to the idea of software finding some of their processes, those number of pockets are multiplying and expanding all over the place.

Little sub thesis of ours is that There’s a whole ton of mom and pop industries that have gotten used to the idea of using computers, the internet, not their phone, not paper invoices, etc. by these venture funded vertical marketplaces, right? So you can imagine lawn mowing businesses. 30 years ago, right, they’re not using computers at all. They’re just literally I mean pen and paper and you know, checks mailed and all that sort of stuff.

The thing that got them over the hump of just using technology into their business were things like Craigslist and then some of the more omni channel like thumbtack and things like that, like these marketplaces that were aggregating up demand.

But now what you have are these folks who are used to getting down to a computer, and that’s how they generate quotes and that’s how they close business and send their invoices. So now they’re starting to think, well, wait a minute, why am I paying this huge 30%, 60% cut to this marketplace? Like maybe I should get my own software and do that process ourselves.

And so that’s creating this new demand for B2BAS for lawn care companies, essentially, and you can basically multiply that across just like every small industry that you can think of. And now we’re very lucky that it’s essentially cheap enough and easy enough to build software to serve that solution that you can’t do it and literally just serve lawn care companies and you don’t have to. Expand to every single home care product that exists. Maybe you can, if you’re good enough. The upside is still there, but that’s not the hurdle. You can just build a really good software business that only serves, you know, lawn care companies in the state of Georgia, and that could be like a pretty awesome business.

00:40:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think an important point here is the enormous size and fractal nature of the economy, especially in the US, and so you can go down several branches of the classification tree and still end up in a huge node. So lawn service, organic lawn service in Austin, Texas, I bet that’s still a huge market, right? And you can imagine all the other variants of this, and so there’s corresponding software business to be built at many of those junctures.

00:40:28 - Speaker 2: Fun, relevant anecdote there is many years back when I was doing consulting to pay my bills in between ventures, had a really good client that I worked with for a number of years that is windows and doors.

Which is a whole huge branch of the construction industry, and they needed very specific things in their software.

Windows not only have their size and the type of glass, but they just break a lot. They break in transit, and there’s a whole service process related to that, and there’s the way you manage the breakage, the little breakage in your inventory, and you kind of account for that.

I don’t know, maybe there’s some firm now, perhaps funded by Calm, I don’t know, that makes Turkey software for that, but yeah, we built really comprehensive, complex software for managing all that, and it was a real, at least the owner of their business felt it gave them a real competitive advantage to have all of this computerized in this way.

00:41:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, there’s just endless examples. Sometimes I get a little nervous because a lot of these are businesses that don’t really want to shout from the rooftops, what a great business they are, but. Yeah, there’s just more than you can think of examples like this that are just comically one little industry only serving Belgium, right? And they’ve built a phenomenal business with like 7 people just raking in cash, you know, and yeah, you can just sort of copy paste that everywhere, yeah, countertop installers and window washing services and all this sort of stuff. It’s amazing. The economy is big.

00:42:01 - Speaker 3: I’ve always enjoyed speaking with these small business owners because they have a certain down to earth and grounded quality, you know, cause the way you’re successful in that realm, it’s like you just kind of sweat it out and you provide good customer service, you make a high quality product, and you get referrals and do that for 10 years.

And one of the things I love about the commund is it’s bringing more of that sensibility into the software world. You know, there’s a place for the Galaxy brain stuff, and I’m glad we have all that, but I’m also glad we have some of this so-called small business mentality in the software world. And by the way, these are small businesses that are worth like 10 to $100 million right? So it’s, yeah, still a very good business. Yeah. So one of the things that I mentioned earlier was that you were building Earnest and then calm out in the open, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, like, was that a deliberate decision, how has it worked out for you, so forth.

00:42:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it definitely was a deliberate decision. One of the early risks that I kind of identified in the plan was that the target entrepreneur that we were gonna try to Build for historically has a really strong distrust of any kind of investor, right? Either they’ve had first or secondhand experience with somebody who had a great business and then raised money from investors that came with board control and then they got kicked out of their own company. There’s a whole laundry list of reasons, but the idea was that one of the first things we had to do was build trust to say, hey, look, we’re legitimately trying to do this in a different way.

We’re not just trying to trick a bunch of bootstrappers into taking our money. And I sort of tell people that I’m kind of a one trick pony when it comes to marketing, but it just turned out to be the right trick for this market, which is just really authentically building in public, talking about our thinking, soliciting feedback. And engaging the community has the benefit of being really good marketing and also a way to sort of build trust with that group. So that was why it’s been that way from day one for us. So literally the very first hello world of Earnest Capital at the time was we had designed a new funding structure, basically a substitute for convertible notes and safes and this general toolkit of early stage investing called the Shared Earnings Agreement and Basically just published it and said, hey, you know, we’re about to launch this fund in a couple of months. This is the term sheet that we are thinking of offering. What do you guys think? And literally just wrote up a blog post explaining our thinking, put the term sheet in an open Google Doc with comments turned on, like open comments. Yeah, and just blasted it out to every like community of entrepreneurs that we could find on Twitter. Etc. and we got like several 1000 comments. It turned out to be like really difficult to start to work through, but it was really fascinating to see the way that the folks would engage and they would say, oh, I wouldn’t like this as an entrepreneur and somebody else would pipe in and say, I think you’re not thinking about it the right way. Here’s what this means and all that sort of stuff and just that level of saying like, here’s what we’re doing and we’ve got nothing to hide from day one was pretty valuable. And then from there, I think it’s sort of continued to be a conscious strategy for building trust and engaging with folks, but it really has turned into a full-on kind of community driven strategy where we kind of view or I view my job here is to essentially like. Aggregate this group of entrepreneurs that a lot of the world is sort of overlooking, despite the fact that in aggregate it’s a huge, huge group of of entrepreneurs, aggregate them in some way, listen to them, and then build what they want. So we do that in small ways. With our portfolio, at first we took this very hands-off approach and then we started to get feedback from them that said, hey, we want a little more structure in terms of how we engage with folks in our mentor group and with you guys. So we said, OK, well, what if we took the idea of quarterly board meetings and we made them calm, we like did it our way and so here’s how we’re gonna. And do that and the folks like that. And as we think about the future, it’s like maybe there’s going to be different financial products and everything just kind of comes from building this community of folks, explaining our strategy, explaining our challenges, explaining what we’re trying to do, listening to what comes back, and then trying to make it happen for them.

00:46:23 - Speaker 3: Nice, yeah, I think there are a ton of benefits to building out in the open like this and building a real community, not just of loosely affiliated fans who are really invested and active and providing a lot of feedback and support.

One of the things that we talk about with building in the open for a traditional commercial venture is that when you go to bring in new customers or new hires, they kind of already know what’s up, you know, they’ve read your blog and they’ve self filtered in, and they might even be familiar with your lingo and so forth, and we experienced this both as Potential I guess customers of your firm as well as LPs, where I had been following stuff on Twitter and I’d read the school doc and I had seen your spreadsheets of how the seal works, and I’d run all my own simulations.

So when we were talking about does it make sense for com to invest in Muse, and when I was deciding should I invest in the fund, I basically knew all the parameters already. I knew you, I know your work, I knew the fund versus having to start from scratch. That was awesome.

00:47:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’re in an interesting market position where there’s a large but dispersed group of folks who 100% get it and then the vast majority of the kind of centralized gatekeepers completely don’t.

So for example, like on the fundraising. I mean, we’ve taken like a completely decentralized approach to raising capital for the fund, and we basically have raised from our next fund, we’ll have 249 individuals in it, and that’s almost all entrepreneurs and folks like you guys and basically just people who Read what we’re about and get it and want to support it.

We just closed a crowdfunding campaign. We had over 1000 investors join that from the unaccredited space and we’ve basically just built a whole process. Like if you go to our website and you’re interested in investing, you can fill out an email and you get this like 10 part essay series that just lays out with. Really nothing held back, like exactly what our strategy is, exactly what we’re trying to do. You could absolutely just like copy paste a clone of our fund, at least in terms of from the strategy perspective, because we just put it all out there.

And what that does is it creates these flywheels of folks who show up, they get it, they want to support it, and we have, I mean, I would say probably. Even before the 1000 crowdfunding campaign, probably 60 to 70% of people commit to investing in the fund before I’ve ever met them, you know, and usually later at least try to have a meeting at some point, but there’s enough out there that they can put the pieces together to join and support it.

And now, I mean, with the crowdfunding campaign, I don’t even know, probably 90% of those folks I’ve never met either.

It’s a different way to sort of bypass the gatekeepers, which would be like large institutional investors that normally back funds like this, you know, we didn’t want to kind of run into the same issue that I was talking about, where like you have a good idea and you pitch VCs and then you change your idea to try and get money from them. Like I felt like we were setting ourselves up for the same dynamic, basically because we’d be pitching the people who fund the venture funds.

So we kind of knew we had. go a different way and that community driven approach was essential for raising the fund.

And then we also see the same effect on the portfolio side where we have a lot of folks who show up and say, look, I’m interested to raise money from you guys, or I’m just gonna bootstrap. This is not a process. I’m not pitching 30, 40 funds, like I know what you’re about. It resonates. I want to either raise money and work with y’all or I’m just gonna do my own thing, so. Again, like the one thing I know how to do reasonably well is just like explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it from just kind of like the only way to get it off the ground to like a real flywheel, I would say of competitive advantage or just making it sort of self-sustaining if that makes sense. So yeah, it’s been cool.

00:49:57 - Speaker 2: As you explain all that, it reminds me a lot of, I guess most of the business ventures I ever do, I usually feel like there is much about, I have something I want to say about the world or I want a product to exist that is weird and different in some way that I think will be good and special, that’s up for the market to decide.

But it’s essentially breaks convention or breaks status quo in a number of ways, and two elements of what you’re describing for calm very much strike me as similar to what I went through with Hiroku, what we did with Think Twitch and what we are now with Muse, which is, first of all, once you start questioning some of these base assumptions that Cascades and you kind of end up reinventing everything in a way, like you were mentioning like your board meeting style is going to be different because once you change those base assumptions, everything else kind of has to change.

But then you end up with something worse, this whole kind of weird universe into itself, where everything you do is different from what people are used to. And so then the explaining is so critical, right? And so, in Hiroki’s case, I ended up writing tons of blog posts, but also ultimately this manifesto called the 12 Factor, and that’s when things really started to click for people.

For years, I’d basically heard people come in and why is this Things so weird, it doesn’t work like how I expect with other hosting it’s like this. Why can’t I write to the file system? Yeah, exactly. Why can’t I ask to say, etc. and we would kind of one off try to explain, well, actually, if you start from those first principles of what we’re doing differently, that is a consequence or a detailed downstream consequence. You know, it takes time to be able to fully articulate that philosophy, but once we did manage to articulate that philosophy, it’s much easier for someone to come in, download all your thinking, and then they come in and see that the product works in a weird way, and it may or may not fit with what they want, but instead of just comparing it to the status quo and being confused, surprised, or even angry that it’s different, they see why it is different, and then they can decide whether that’s right for them or not.

00:51:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a really good insight.

I mean, there’s this magical thing right about building software is that essentially you just have to write like clear directions and you build a product, essentially, like if you really distill it down, you’re writing this code and explaining very clearly how you want this thing to work and that’s your product, and I never really set out to be in finance or to be an investor per se. It wasn’t like, oh if it wasn’t this, it would be something else.

This is the one idea I have for how to build a fund, but I really like it now because it even is like reduced down to just zero steps like clarity of thought is like the whole product basically, essentially just explaining the thesis to both sides of the marketplace, essentially people who want to invest and then people that you want to invest in.

That’s basically the entire product. I mean, there’s some ancillary things around controls and processes and stuff like that, but you really do just have to produce clear thinking in a way that’s consumable, and that’s the product, which is kind of a cool business to be in.

00:53:02 - Speaker 2: I’m not gonna lie, so clarity of thought could not possibly be more on brand for Muse.

00:53:08 - Speaker 1: So I’ve got a question for you guys, which is around the idea of how you align and incentivize folks who are on the team, basically employees. I think that for founders, everything about calm companies and a general approach makes a ton of sense. You own the company, you want to build a profitable, sustainable company that lasts. Forever and has great lifestyle for you and your team and as long as you have this nice ownership and maybe you have some nice dividends, you’re not super concerned, but one thing I think is sort of an unsolved problem, both for companies that we’re investing in and a lot of folks in this space is employees. How do you Incentivize them, how do you think about the spectrum of options, profit sharing, sharing in the proceeds if you ever sold, you know, all that sort of stuff, and how do you do it at the early stage when it’s very risky to make sure they have some upside and then how do you do it over the long haul when maybe liquidity events, selling the company is not on the near term road map. Yeah, I’m just curious how you’re approaching that or thinking about that with Muse.

00:54:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a great question, and we’ve thought about this a lot. I would say first that I think a lot of the benefits or the appeal of being a staff member at a com company come from these degrees of freedom. It’s like you’re basically able to offer an employment experience that is at least different and we believe for many people better because you have this flexibility. So one thing is remote work, which even a few years ago was not super common, obviously, it’s.

Much more common now. But another thing is just like general flexibility in terms of how you work.

So we have a partner who really likes to travel the world and work all over the place. So sure you can do that. We had someone who wanted to go to 4 days a week instead of 5, which if you were at a thing would be like a whole thing with HR, right? Or maybe probably not even possible. But here it’s like, yeah, sure, basically, seems good to us. And you have more degrees of freedom to shape the work environment to be however you want.

Now more on like the financial and compensation side. That is tough. Our approach has been to try to make all full-time staff members partners in the business.

That’s the title that you have title Adam and I have and all the other partners have. And by that, it’s someone who wants to act like an owner, we expect to act like an owner and is in fact a very substantial owner in the business, much more than you would be in a typical venture backed startup.

Now, the mechanics. How you actually convey the ownership are very tricky. And we could do a whole podcast. I was actually going to do a workshop at the original Thunder summit on this, like basically the legal and tax mechanics of partner compensation. It’s a huge mess basically because of US tax law. But the kind of spirit of it is that we’ve tried to make the partners substantial equity owners in the business, so that if we do issue dividends, they participate in that. And if we do sell the business, they participate in that, and so forth.

00:55:54 - Speaker 2: And maybe part of where that works for us, certainly because we have a small team, you know, 5 or even if we were to add a 6 or a 7th, I could see that scaling. It wouldn’t go to 25 partners probably wouldn’t make sense.

Then you do probably need sort of two different classes, that’s similar to those kind of professional partnerships, like an attorney’s firm or something where there’s partners, and there’s kind of everyone else who are employees.

And maybe going back to business fundamentals. It’s OK that we don’t need to waive this lottery ticket of some options that might be worth something. It’s like your salary, that’s your compensation, and it’s not a crazy work environment, that’s all about we’re inventing a platform to change the world, we just, we make a great product, we sell it, and then, you know, employees get paid a fair market share.

I feel like there’s precedent from the non-software world for profit sharing plans and things of that nature potentially as a chance to again create a little bit of that upside without the complications of having absolutely everyone be an owner, or I don’t know, maybe there’s stuff we can draw. From co op models, maybe everyone should be an owner of a small amount, but it’s not the startup options. OK, we’re going to pay you less because you have this lottery ticket that might be worth something if we exit someday. It’s like almost the internal worth is very clear because you’re paying dividends.

Which is something certainly we will be excited to do if we get to that point where, and I’ve done this for past businesses in my pre-startup life, it was just, yeah, at some point when the business is profitable, you pay dividends, and it’s great, you know, you look at the bank account, you go, hey, cool, we’ve got like 10,000 left over this quarter. Let’s take half of that and divide it up according to ownership among the owners of the business, and it feels very pure and honest somehow. It’s like our business earned more money than we spent, so we get to keep some of it.

00:57:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, I do think this is a big white space that needs to have some more just kind of go to off the shelf options because you’ve got the traditional like startup RSUs and stuff like that. I agree that while they overdeliver on knowing exactly what you’ve signed up for structurally and tax wise, they definitely underdeliver in terms of knowing how much they’re actually going to be worth someday, but it is something, right? It’s something where People can feel like they have some upside in the company and they know exactly how it works and how the tax consequences are, maybe not exactly, but they have a general sense of how it’s going to work.

And then in, you know, the world right now, we’re starting to see, I think, a pretty decent sized wave of basically bootstraps software companies start to hit, you know, very serious, mature profitability, and they’re all kind of starting to grapple with this idea of, OK, well, how do we incentivize our employees now and You’re right that basically there’s some really straightforward stuff you can do around like profit sharing and things like that.

The big challenge is that it’s very much at the employer’s whim, right, like profit sharing agreements are very hard to enforce and if you somehow don’t get what you think you’re owed, yeah, even just bonuses, right, the classic end of year bonus is basically your boss gets to decide who they like the best and give them money.

00:59:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and sometimes we’re starting to deal with software companies that are very large and very profitable and completely founder owned and these They’re honest folks, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with them, but as an employee, if you’re starting to put in, you know, 67, 10 years into a place, you kind of maybe want a little more solidity to it. But then you start to get into the tax and legal consequences where there’s just not a lot of paved things to follow. We were super lucky with Cofund where the main concept of profits are carried interest from the funds, right? When our funds do really well, we get this. stream of profits called carry or carried interest, and the rules around that and the taxes are super generous. Thank you. Big private equity firms or whatever. But essentially, like, I can do whatever I want with the carry. It’s totally at my discretion and also everything is taxed very nicely. So we just carved out 20% of all future carry of all future funds. So essentially equity your options and created a system of Distributing that to employees and also to our like very, very earliest investors. So that was super nice that I just literally updated our operating agreement and boom, it’s done. But it still does fall into that gray area where if 10 years from now we’re deploying billions of dollars a year, and that’s like really extremely valuable, our early employees are going to have this huge stream of revenue for them personally that’s completely Dependent on essentially like, there wouldn’t be a lot of obvious protections for me just changing them, which is not good. I would like them to have, you know, more firmness in how they’re going to deal with that. So yeah, I don’t know, it’s an interesting space. I’m curious to sort of see how different experiments play out on it. I think this is something we will probably double down on ourselves and have like a recommended approach. Nice, but honestly, it’s a challenging space right now, a lot of opportunity, I think, you know, so yeah.

01:00:55 - Speaker 2: It occurs to me hearing you describe that set up as well as obviously all the things like seal and so forth that you’ve done, you must have an attorney firm that is willing to like do weird stuff, which is always interesting to me, like, finding something like an attorney who’s really great at what they do, but willing to think outside the box in a way that those two things often don’t go together. The whole purpose of someone in the legal profession is to play it really safe. Yeah. Have you found someone that somehow plays ball with all your weirdness?

01:01:26 - Speaker 1: Huge shout out to Joe Wallen, who has been our attorney from day one. He was the one that first worked with me on the share earnings agreement.

I do think, yes, like one of the Things that we’ve had to do is a fairly like grinding process of finding the different vendors and service providers that want to work with us and are good at what they do, because, yes, there’s tons of times where the de facto top 5 people for this kind of thing, we would go to them and they would essentially.

They blow us off, right? Because it’s just they have no incentive to want to do it.

And economically, it’s like, yeah, we pay well, but you really have to just be intellectually curious and interested in what we’re doing for some reason to want to take us on as a client.

I mean, also, we work with an amazing fund administrator called Aurro Advisors, and they also very rightly should have just told us to look somewhere else, you know, but essentially they were just excited about what we were trying to do and So accumulating those folks who are on board a little bit mission driven, or maybe a lot mission driven, has been a big part of the process, to be honest, because yeah, I think we got super lucky finding Joe very early on, but with other things, it’s been like, OK, we’ve iterated through 15 conversations with folks and they’re just not gonna be a fit for that very reason that they’re not heavily incentivized to do experimental interesting things and. Yeah, it’s probably one of the toughest parts of doing this, but now we’ve kind of got like the dream team in place, so we can start to roll out new things like along the topic of how do you help early employees, one of the things we’re in the process of launching is a product we’re calling it like Express right now, it might change, but Cofund Express is for later stage mature companies.

That are in that position. They’re profitable. They have early employees or early investors that have been there for, you know, 5 to 10 years. In theory, they own some slice of the company that’s now worth like a house or two, and they would like to get some money, but the company doesn’t want to sell, so we’re building a product to like really quickly and easily be able to.

Buy small chunks, 3, 5%, 10% of the company to give liquidity to basically anybody who wants like to be able to run an opt-in process, which you see this in like the venture back worlds is something they have figured out when they do a big round, they will often let employees or founders sell off a slice of that round.

There’s no equivalent in our world for that. And so we’re building that and it’s great cause now we have all the people in place, so we just, you know, go to our tax folks and go to our fund administra folks and go to our legal folks and we just say, OK, here’s our in crazy idea, let’s spin it up.

So yeah, it’s good.

01:04:06 - Speaker 3: Yeah, nice, and Tyler, I appreciate that throughout your process of working through all these things, again, you’re working in public because that does help pave these paths that hopefully other funds and entrepreneurs will be able to walk down in the future. So thanks for that.

01:04:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks guys. This is a great conversation.

01:04:23 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, you can write us on Twitter at UAHQ on email, hello at museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. And Tyler, thank you so much for helping fill out that map of possible funding options and helping entrepreneurs like ourselves feel good about getting to do this work we love to do, but do it in a way that’s calm and allows us to live our best lives while also hopefully making useful software products that the world needs and wants.

01:04:56 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, thanks guys.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I really wish there are more ways in which we can let our personality and just the little bits of life that we’ve experienced ourselves come through online. It seems like nowadays a lot of the larger sites that we spend time on have all taken an approach for good reasons to in some way flatten our voices to make everything look the same.

00:00:27 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. Hey Adam. I’m joined today by Wei Wei Xu of Sprout. Hello. And one thing we talk about a lot on this podcast for some reason is cities. Weiwei, you’re in Shanghai right now, and what’s the transit situation like? How do you get around town?

00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I live a little bit outside of the downtown area, so it takes about 30 minutes by walking to get to the metro station and. Shared bikes are really common over here, so it’s super convenient to get around with shared bikes, but I also got my hands on to one of these one wheel electric scooter lately and I’ve been a big fan of skateboarding since I was a kid. I’ve tried all kinds of boards, so I thought it’s just super slick to try scooting around on one of these electric scooters and That’s what I’ve been doing lately.

00:01:34 - Speaker 2: And in practice, do you end up in the bike lane? Do you go on the sidewalks? I feel like one of the challenges with the scooter micro mobility thing is that you sort of don’t have a great place to go. You’re sort of a little slow for the bike lane, but certainly probably too fast for the sidewalk.

00:01:50 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely something that everybody’s still trying to figure out, especially here, the policy here is a lot more strict and electric scooters are meant to be a toy, something that you play with in parks and in closed communities rather than on the street, so. It’s kind of like softly allowed on pedestrian walkways and not really on the bike lanes, but bike lanes over here are super protected and they are not right next to cars like in a lot of the cities I’ve been to in America, so either way, I feel pretty safe, but whether it is legal or not is kind of a different question.

00:02:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, protected bike lanes or something I I’m a big fan of as a person who gets around mainly by bike, although even there when you talk about legal gray areas and new technologies that sit sort of in between the e-bike thing, which has gotten pretty huge, but then that also seems to challenge, OK, now you can go really fast and with not a lot of effort with this motorized thing that at this point is almost like a low powered motorcycle or something like that, but you get to ride in the bike lane, that feels a little weird, yeah, so.

Technology that sits on these in between spaces then ends up forcing a change in not only policy but also just social norms and expectations.

00:03:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I find these in between spaces really fascinating and that could be in the transportation world. I grew up with a mixed cultural background and so, Dwelling in the in between spaces of that has also been something that I grew up struggling with and have now sort of surrendered to in some way, but those in between spaces are something that’s really beautiful and also sometimes really confusing.

00:03:38 - Speaker 2: Makes sense, but also presents opportunity because you have perspective that no one else has, right? Yeah. And once you tell us a little bit about your background. You’ve done some very interesting academic work as well as all sorts of, I feel you’re all over in the kind of tools for thought, independent research, next generation computing space.

00:03:57 - Speaker 1: I would say that I’ve been on this journey of learning more about myself and I’m still trying to figure out who I am and what I’m trying to do.

Perhaps this is what most people do, but I was lucky enough to study interaction design, that was a fairly new program in the school I attended and through that process, I was introduced to the history of personal computing and That whole genre, that whole world and being layered into that got me really, really curious about what it took to get us to where we are nowadays and also where are we headed and I started looking for places where they’re thinking about the future and thinking about alternative paths that haven’t really been explored or illuminated in different ways and That led to working at and also spending a lot of time at this research group called Dynamicland and I’ve also been sort of being in a part of the creative design school environment has also gotten me really interested in the creative process and also this idea of creative expression.

So being immersed in a group of designers, creatives and also researchers has led me to where I am nowadays and What I’m trying to do nowadays is exploring what ways can we take ideas into people’s hands and into reality rather than having them sitting or like brewing in research spaces which is also really fascinating but I think I’m just going through this journey of exploring where I am and who I am and also what’s my relationship with the world.

00:05:40 - Speaker 2: Hopefully that’s all the journey we’re all perpetually on, but it’s good you have the self-awareness of it. Maybe there’s an arrogance of youth that sometimes comes with young people early in their adult life where they feel they’ve got it all figured out or they know their path or something when, honestly, it’s just forever a journey of discovery.

00:05:56 - Speaker 1: I think whenever I feel like I’ve gotten it or I understand what’s going on, life hits me in a hard way and it’s like, nope, you don’t have it, you don’t know what you’re doing and then you go into this other cycle of like learning more about yourself and understanding that there’s just so much more possibilities and so much more unknowns.

00:06:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’m pretty sure that’s not something, at least for a person that has a growth mindset or is forever seeking to learn the lessons life has to teach. I’m going through that still in my 40s here, I’ve seen my mom who’s in her 70s, also going through that. There’s just always more, the world always has more to teach, and there’s more to learn about yourself and about other humans, about our society and how to live best in it.

So hopefully that never ends. That’s a good thing. Totally.

And you hinted at something we’ve talked about privately a few times, which is sort of taking ideas from the research space or the big thinking space or the ivory tower space and trying to bring it to a practical reality and for sure that’s part of why muse exists, you know, Mark and I were in this research lab working on this stuff and saw an opportunity for something that we said, you know, this could be a product people could really use.

We could bring these weird HCI ideas and see if we can bring them into, well, a regular app in the app store and see if that would work or be possible. And I think we talked about it with, I believe it was a former colleague of yours, Jason Yuan, and the episode he was in, great Meta Muse episode if you’re interested in design things, I’ll link that in the show notes.

But he’s talked about that as well, which is, yeah, I think he may have also done a stint at Dynamicland.

They both worked together at MSpace, and the best thinking big picture thinking and forward thinking comes from places that are a little bit disconnected from commercial realities. You’re not about shipping a product that’s going to make a bunch of money tomorrow, but you’re thinking longer term. But that in turn can lead to a kind of disconnection from the world and not really bringing what you’re making to the world. So I know that’s something you’re thinking about how to best bridge those worlds, which is one of many reasons I wanted to bring you on the podcast.

00:08:01 - Speaker 1: I think the phrase thinking about it is a really nice way to put it in another way to put it is struggling with this spectrum.

00:08:10 - Speaker 2: Oh, I think those are two sides of the same coin. Genuinely interesting or hard intellectual or emotional challenge, you wrestle with it, you struggle with it, you fight with it. It’s not a civilized activity at all in some ways.

00:08:25 - Speaker 1: No, it’s not.

00:08:27 - Speaker 2: And tell us a bit about Sprout.

00:08:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so Sprout is a product that came out of MakeSpace and MakeSpace was started with Jason Yuan, Aza Raskin and Mei Li Ku and it’s a project and also um really us trying to answer a question of how do we collaborate and communicate. With each other online and also through computers in a way where we can actually feel more of each other’s presence where all kinds of media formats and all kinds of files can coexist with each other rather than being confined by different apps and different windows that only support its own unique kind of media files.

So, In a way, Sprout is a canvas-based collaboration tool that value and also respect video presence and telepresence and we spend quite a bit of time thinking about this gradient of synchronous communication, collaboration. Versus asynchronous communication and collaboration because collaboration doesn’t happen on one end of the spectrum, it’s continuous and so how do we create space, how do we communicate and collaborate in a way where it helps us grow and learn together.

00:09:46 - Speaker 2: One of the things that was striking to me about the initial MakeSpace landing page is, on one hand, it did kind of have a look of, I guess video and specifically, you know, webcam videos of people’s faces who are participating in the meeting, let’s call it virtual meeting. That’s a very front and center idea, so immediately you think, OK, it’s video chat like Google Hangout or Zoom or FaceTime, but the reality is the main or if you use the early version, which you’ve given me a peek at. It is this media canvas in many ways that shares some of the same heritage that Muse does, which is you can put images, you can draw, you can put text, you can put links, and one of the things you can put is your own real-time face, and that’s like a useful addition to the meeting, but it’s not really the center point. It almost inverts the video chat thing and then so I’m not sure whether to think of it maybe coming back to your point of living in those in between spaces, you could think of it as Zoom, but with kind of a working canvas, but it really inverts that because I feel the video chat side of it is just sort of a subset of this larger open canvas or you could think of it as open canvas kind of collaborative whiteboard space, a mirror type thing, but it integrates video chat, real-time video and audio chat in a big way, but I think either. Those descriptions sort of does deserve us to at least what I imagine your vision to be that is finding a middle space there that takes elements from both of those but leaves behind many elements of them could potentially be a more interesting or future facing or next generation way for us to have online meetings, discussions, brainstormings, and so on.

00:11:24 - Speaker 1: I’m constantly working on describing Sprout in better ways because video is the channel or the medium that it sort of like communicate and share our presence and intention with each other.

So when we’re using tools like Zoom to meet each other. We are primarily communicating with each other through video and audio, but when it comes to Sprout, your video is attached to your cursor and so it’s not really about the video, it’s more about where your attentions are and it’s more about where your presence is and how you’re sharing it with each other.

So for example, On the canvas when you’re in Sprout, you could be going into the opposite corner of another person and that other person could feel that you’re feeling shy or you’re trying to run away from a topic, you’re trying to run away from this discussion and that’s perhaps body language, that’s also attention that’s just the entire dynamic of collaborating and communicating with each other.

00:12:23 - Speaker 3: That’s interesting. So does this mean if you’re on a video call and sprout, and someone goes to check Twitter with their mouse, their face actually like flies off the screen, in the same way that if you would see someone’s eyes, you know, leaving the room.

00:12:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so you see their cursor going to the corner and then once they’re in a different tab, their cursor will move around and so when they switch back to the tab, their cursor will be in a different XY position and so it would jump over to that new location and so those are the different ways that you would sense and feel each other’s presence or lack of presence.

00:12:57 - Speaker 3: That’s funny, nice.

00:12:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, they get tension. We wrote about this a little bit in our pointing and virtual spaces memo, but I feel like the body language in group settings or meetings, presentations, that sort of thing, or even like classroom situations, attention and where people’s attention are and how focused they are is really important.

And I suppose one version of that is a teacher that is going to wrap you over the knuckles with the ruler because you’re not paying sufficient attention to the lesson.

But another one would be if I’m giving a talk somewhere, it’s really useful to me to see when people are engaged, leaning forward, really curious about what I’m saying versus their kind of eyes are wandering a little bit and looking at their other screen and what have you, and that helps me know where the audience is at and how I can sort of tune what I’m saying or presenting to better meet them where they’re at.

00:13:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when meeting and collaborating in person, there’s so much little cues and little signals that you can pick up and when doing so online, a lot of that are being stripped away. So what we spend thinking a lot about is in what ways can we bring some of those. Back and in a way that respect each other’s real presence and just the fact that we’re not just our eyes and our mouth and we have feelings, we have our fingers, we have our body and how do we communicate or try to channel a little bit of that to each other.

00:14:27 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is expressive tools, and I kind of pose this idea to you Weiwei based on what’s on your personal site. I’ll just take a moment to quote directly from there, if you don’t mind, which is, you say, currently I’m gardening at Maspace now Sprout, because computing environments can and should be more fluid, playful, equitable, fun, humane, and expressive. Obviously that. Really speaks to me and Mark and the whole Muse team. We’ve spoken about fluid and playful, for example, in depth on this podcast, but expressive was one that jumped out at me a little bit because first I was thinking, OK, what evokes a strong feeling, but I’m trying to think about what that means in practice, particularly for me as a toolmaker.

Is it desirable to make my tools expressive? And if so, how do you do that? So I was curious to zoom in on that. Can you tell us more about what an expressive tool is for you or what that phrase means?

00:15:22 - Speaker 1: When I think about expressive tools. Perhaps we can step back a little bit and think about why do we create as tool makers and when we are trying to create in some way, we’re trying to express and it’s a different kind of way of expressing, but it’s still a form of expression. So when we create tools, can we enable others to express. A lot of the productivity tools that we are familiar with today, they help us in becoming more productive and they help us in getting work done, but some of the times they may not enable us in communicating the feelings or the other little bits and things here and there that’s beyond the factual part of what we are trying to accomplish here. So, I’m curious for both of you, are there tools that you feel like are more expressive than others or less expressive than others and why do they come to mind?

00:16:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, in the digital world, I’ve been a huge fan of emojis and all of their offshoots, you know, they have emojis and texting obviously, but also like ReactGs and Slack and Vote Gs and Discord or whatever, and they’re great because they’re very compact, but they, unlike text, they express more of the range of human emotions, which is so important when you’re working collaboratively. Relatedly, I also think a lot of gifts and memes are very expressive and it’s a little bit goofy sometimes, but that’s another fun digital expressive medium.

00:16:59 - Speaker 2: For me, I think the first place my mind went was a lot of analog world, I guess crafting type things. I really like Sharpies and butcher paper, for example, for kind of reform ideation. I also like calligraphy pens. I took a calligraphy class once a really long time ago. I’m not particularly good at it, but just this tip where it’s even the markers which are pretty easy to work with, but they have this. Angled tip that allows you to, or almost demands that when you write, your line is gonna be a lot more interesting because it’s gonna have thick and thin parts.

Highlighters are another one I’ve always, and in a way, actually, a lot of these analog kind of ideation tools like Sharpies and butcher paper and highlighters, they’ve been collecting dust since I have used, but in some cases I pulled them out cause I still like the feel of that in the same way that I really like the feel of paper books, but in the end, I haven’t really read paper books since I’ve had a Kindle for 10 years, but there is, of course, something very evocative about the analog world, and also certain kinds of kitchen tools or like sushi knives. I really like something like fabric as a material, a creation material, maybe cause it’s got texture and color and it moves in interesting ways, those kinds of things.

I guess they’re all roughly grouped under like a crafty kind of artistic space.

So yeah, then when you come to the digital world, It’s a lot harder to think of them in a way because yeah, computers are traditionally, at least there are these pragmatic, mathematical computing machines use it to compute your quarter to projected earnings, spreadsheet thingy thing, but of course, certainly in the last decade or so, we’ve seen a lot more playfulness and fun through social media and memes and emojis and so on.

There’s a few from my childhood as well, that kind of I thought of when you offered this prompt, which includes things like deluxe paint or mod trackers, but I don’t know how much those are.

You know, is it that when you are a child, everything is a more expressive tool because you’re more expressive as a person and so therefore I have that nostalgia attached, or is it actually for me there was something really kind of special and unique about the Pixel art in the kind of Amiga Atari ST age when you had computers were getting like just good enough for their graphics and sound. really impressive video and audio art, but it still was this very constrained format that this medium had a very unique look to it that you wouldn’t mistake for any other. So I’m not sure how much that is sort of childhood memories attached and how much that was a truly special and therefore an expressive time for sort of computing or medium things. That’s yeah, a little bit on my list.

00:19:41 - Speaker 3: Adam, I do think there’s something there to our childhood tools because when you become an adult and you’re working with serious productivity tools designed by proper professionals, they tend to really focus on the business process like the goal of the software is to produce a sales chart or the goal of the software is to document a flow in a factory.

And I feel like often we like lose the plot in terms of how important the emotions and feelings and human side of digital communication is. And we often have to go back to the kids stuff because that’s all they have, you know, they don’t have any real job, right? We have to go back to their texting and their Discord emojis, right, to actually bring the humanity back into our tools. So I think there’s something to that.

00:20:22 - Speaker 1: I find that really fascinating when this past year I’ve been able to spend more time in Taipei and Shanghai and as a part of that, I got to be surrounded by more kids than when I was living in San Francisco and I’m just fascinated by how kids would Dream and just run around and do whatever they want without caring about what others are thinking and that’s something really interesting because I almost feel like I’m forgetting how to do that unfortunately and I’m still trying to understand and figure that out and As a part of being around kids, I’m thinking more about in what ways can we bring some of those back and why do we express or maybe the emotion of expressing is a result and where it’s originating is Just being ourselves.

We consider kids as they’re expressing or they’re doing things on their own, they’re being kids, but what they’re really doing is they’re being themselves and we’re classifying that as expressing and That’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about and trying to understand, are we expressing or maybe we expressing is the result of being ourselves. So when it comes to building tools and also working, trying to do work through digital tools or analog tools, can we be ourselves or in what ways can we enable more of us being ourselves?

00:21:50 - Speaker 3: Yeah, interesting. And your comment about there not being a lot of kids in San Francisco is reminding me of this idea of multi-generational households and communities, and it’s so nice there because you get the mix of the incredible energy and carefreeness of the kids and the wisdom and experience of the older generation and maybe the Engagement in the productive economy of the middle aged folks, and they’re all kind of learning from each other. And that’s one of the things that I like when you can see in software. I go back to the example of Discord, if you’re actually doing productive work, like give a serious job that uses Discord. Kind of get some of those young kid, you know, vibes basically coming through and that’s really cool. So now I’m thinking, what’s the equivalent of a multi-generational community in the software world? Can we have a tool that pulls from all of those different life stages to bring those different energies in?

00:22:40 - Speaker 2: Discord is one of the ones that I had thought of as well in terms of that it does bring a lot of vibe or style to particularly this gamer style, even though they’ve expanded beyond that, and you’ve got Slack, which in many ways is a pretty directly comparable product, but has a completely different vibe. It’s a playful, lighthearted thing, but maybe in their own way, they’re each playful or they each have like a youthful quality, but they just feel like completely different culturally.

00:23:07 - Speaker 1: And I think that comes back to the culture or the personality of a team that’s creating those tools or the intent of creating the tools. So in some way it comes back to what are the creator’s goal and inevitably we project our own intentions or our own wishes into the tools that we’re building. Sometimes those are intentional, sometimes they’re not, but, The ability in which we can express through a tool is also shaped by the tool makers.

00:23:40 - Speaker 2: And I think that’s for me as a toolmaker, it’s a very desirable thing that I get to. This is a form of art for me, this is a form of self-expression, and hopefully the things that I want to put into whatever tool I’m working on at the time, match up with a market need, right? When we were working on Pirou, for example, and we had a particular vibe that came through in that, and maybe that matched with what developers needed or didn’t need at the time, similarly with Muse, and we have kind of this, I don’t know what the word is for it, philosophical, serene, thoughtfulness. Hopefully that connects to a tool for deep thinking.

So I think you can be a little thoughtful about that is, do the things that I have to express as a person or the vibe that I and my team want to put off to those match with the thing that we’re trying to create or the need that we’re trying to fill.

There is a practical side, of course, but if you can match those up well, it’s really nice.

And I also like on the flip side, or when I’m on the other side of that equation, a user or a customer, I really like it when a lot of persons. of the team comes through, whether or not their exact vibe or artistic style matches what I personally would do, just the fact that it’s showing something about who they are as people, and that tends to happen, especially on smaller teams because each individual can have more of a contribution, and the bigger it gets, the more it all blurs together into a homogeneous kind of corporate.

Nothing, which also is fine for many kinds of products that are needed in the marketplace, but I have this interest in kind of niche, weird, independently created software. So I like that you immediately went to the thing underlying expression and expressive tools, which is why we want to create or in some cases need to create or driven to create as creative people.

How do you answer that question for yourself? What do you see in others ultimately, why do we want to expressive tools and why do we want to create things?

00:25:35 - Speaker 1: I’ve been trying to understand this for myself and also for collaborators that I’ve been lucky enough to work with.

For me, right now, there is this desire to fill some kind of hole that I think I have within me and I’m not sure what that hole might be, but, It may not be related to technology itself or the medium itself, but I think it may go beyond that a little bit.

I think it has to do with this intrinsic curiosity and probably intertwined with ego that I have and I think there is also to put it in a perhaps cheesy way, I think there is also this desire to care about others and also to be cared by others and Expressing is a way to feel that.

I think in some way, our desire or my desire to express and to create comes back to learning more about myself, learning more about others and also learning more about the surroundings that I’m in right now.

00:26:35 - Speaker 2: That resonates with me partially because I don’t know if you consider yourself an introvert, but I consider myself a very extreme introvert, that is to say, many kinds of social interactions are challenging for me, and I actually find it much easier to connect with others over creation.

Something they have made that I appreciate, something I have made that they appreciate, and that becomes the starting point for connection.

A lot of my very great friendships.

I never know entirely what to call them, it sounds too crass to call it like my network and networking, but there are many folks that I’ve either worked with as former colleagues, or even maybe I’ve never worked with him at them at a conference or I know they’re worked some other way, or we had them on the podcast or something, and then we go on to just have more of a Friendship, but it’s a friendship that is based around a mutual passion for some element of product creation or some artistic endeavor and maybe an encouragement for each other, you know, sort of like cheering each other on and whatever you know early raw product or other kinds of creations we are pursuing.

But yeah, that for me ends up being a cornerstone for a lot, not all but many very great relationships in my life. So, I don’t know if I think of that as like a hole to fill or a deficiency, it’s just a different way to relate to others. I hope no better or worse that other ways one might be able to relate to others.

00:27:57 - Speaker 1: And in some way, I think that’s really beautiful because when we connect and when we get to know each other, it’s often through a topic or through a shared. Experience that we’re having across time or across space. So with both Sprout and Muse, I feel like we’re trying to create spaces digitally for us to be connecting with ourselves or connecting with others through objects, through topics. Rather than just by talking or hand waving about something and that’s the beauty of being able to create spaces that enable and respect the variety of objects and topics for us to be talking about and co-creating together.

00:28:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that speaks to me because I just find that, especially when I’m connecting with someone new that I don’t know very well, having a visual aid of some kind, even just a simple napkin sketch, just makes it easier to make that connection.

As a toolmaker creating the space, you want it to be artistic, you want it to be expressive, but there does also need to be a practical element.

This is a product that people will pay for or have some way of sustaining itself. It exists in the economy. How do you balance or trade off very pragmatic technology needs or just solving a problem people have and are willing to pay for kind of needs against your desires as a creator, to express yourself, to make the kind of thing that You feel as an artistic expression of the things you value.

00:29:31 - Speaker 1: Earlier we touched on this idea of thinking about topics and thinking about the dynamic between research and also commercial work or struggling with these bridges, these gaps.

I think when it comes to building products and also building features, there’s also this. Process of struggling and understanding what do people need and what do I need as a toolmaker and who am I creating for a lot of the times we are creating things by following inklings or by following ideas that we’ve accumulated from different experiences through life when it comes to Understanding whether those inklings are useful or are practical or not, a lot of it I feel comes back to iterating and it also comes back to being open to what might be there for you.

So it again comes back to this idea of like letting go of ego and being open to what the world has to offer and also what people who are using the tool who are also spending time with the tool has to say about the tool itself.

00:30:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there’s almost an element of play here. I’ve heard a definition of play, which is like, you’re undertaking an activity without so much of a focus on the end goal and like as much of a commitment to that. And so here the idea is you just try some stuff. And you’re OK with that thing not working or working in a way that you didn’t anticipate.

And I think you need to have an element of that, especially as we’re exploring these new areas of the map, like what does digital mean for group communication and expressivity and belonging. So yeah, that’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about the work that you’re doing cause I feel like it is very playful and is exploring more areas of the map.

00:31:23 - Speaker 1: It always comes back to these motions that we make with each other, so it’s playing, it’s interacting, it’s learning, it’s dancing and through that process, also through different stakeholders, so we’re playing and we’re also communicating and learning with our teammates, but we’re also learning from our customers or folks that are using the tool. Whether it’s recurring or just one time, all of that are processes that we go through to really understand what we’re trying to do and also what we’re trying to offer.

00:31:59 - Speaker 2: Now one thing I’d be interested to dig in on a little bit is expressiveness of the tool, that is its ability to help you express yourself versus the tool being something you as in you Weiwei or you mark, are expressing about the world.

This came up recently on the Muse team a little bit, which is we’ve always come down on the side of making. Our tool kind of as neutral and minimalist as possible, really try to get out of the way and make it so that you make your own canvas and space, and if you like a dark heavy metal aesthetic, you can do that, and if you like a light and airy gardening aesthetic, you can do that.

As much as possible, we’re not conveying a huge amount of personality through the product, and the reason it came up recently is we added this backstage pass feature, which is basically kind of has a little bit of a rock and roll style vibe, and we did a little bit more stylization, kemorphic stuff on the menu, not too heavy, but it was intended to just be a little more fun and playful and express a bit more of this character.

And yeah, I’m curious, particularly because at least Sprout as I’ve seen it so far, definitely has a lot of I think character even just in the mouse cursors and the way the names are rendered and some of the default elements you can put down before the user puts in their own content. So I’m curious how you see the difference between a tool that helps you express versus a tool you’re creating that expresses something you see or feel about the world.

00:33:30 - Speaker 1: I think it essentially comes back down to what opinions we have and are trying to put forth and the current visual iteration of Sprout is just one iteration that we have and one opinion we have, we may move on from it or we may stick with it depending on how people are reacting to it, but currently with Sprout, There’s this stationary vibe that we’ve added to it, so we’ve been referencing, we’ve been referencing stickers, different pens and also pencil boxes, washing tape, all of those tools and also little things that help us decorate our journals or even just our workspace in real life and What we hope to do is create further interface for people to customize that because that’s one opinion. The stationary vibe is one opinion that we have, but imposing it on everyone may not be the right thing to do, so. A plan we have is to create toolbars where you can change that for yourself and also create themes and also create skins or stickers for yourself to create the kind of vibe you want to set for the room.

00:34:44 - Speaker 3: That’s awesome. Regular listeners of the podcast will have heard this rant already, but I’m such a big fan of giving users agency over their creative environment, you know, they’re pouring their whole heart into this digital canvas. It’s nice if you let them choose the colors of the walls and the shape of the pens they’re using and stuff. That’s cool.

00:35:03 - Speaker 2: I feel theming and skins, maybe they fell out of fashion, maybe like WAmp was the peak sort of theming age for computing, and I don’t know if that’s maybe because as design and designers got more clout, let’s say, and then it becomes a platform for them to express a unique personality.

And I think again people do like that, like coming back to the slack and Discord examples.

That something that has a lot of personality and expresses itself through the copy, through the colors, through little animations inside the UI, but then once you’ve designed that whole thing, adding kind of skinning capability and letting other people mess with your beautifully chosen color palette or whatever is something that maybe is a little bit antithetical to, I think, kind of the current status quo and I don’t know, software design.

00:35:56 - Speaker 3: I don’t know. I feel like this skinnable future is already here, it’s back, it’s just not evenly distributed. Look at things like Minecraft, there’s a big mod and skinning culture there, even Twitch and Discord, there’s a lot that you can do, and even Apple has caught up recently and they had this, I’m not a user, so I’m gonna describe it poorly, but like the customizable home screen.

00:36:17 - Speaker 3: The widgets, yeah, yeah, it seems so basic, but it was this enormous hit because people like.

00:36:21 - Speaker 2: Control their creative environments, especially something like your phone, I think that’s not specifically a creative tool, but it is something that you have with you all the time. It’s very personal.

You look at it continuously. I think this is a reason why phone covers are also sort of a popular personalization item, so it’s a very obvious one maybe to project a little bit in the same way that clothes or jewelry or makeup or You know, the kind of art you hang on the wall in your home, these are all things that you’re making an environment that makes you feel good, but also expressing to others, here’s the kind of person I am, the things I find beautiful, the things I value.

00:36:58 - Speaker 1: In some way, I also feel like creating and also setting the tone of my own space, whether it’s digitally or physically is also a way to slow down.

Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been immersed with a lot more of the digital spaces that have always been around, but I think the pandemic has given me a lot more time to spend time on or with the screens and so much of The internet world is moving at a pace that’s not necessarily human or that’s not necessarily matching our own human pacing.

I think with us, we are thinking about time at so many different time frames, so there’s our own heartbeat. But then computers are able to process things at milliseconds, so we are able to refresh news feeds and social media feeds at that speed, but being able to customize our own space and also being able to take the time. To let our own personality, let our own voice come through a tool or a space that we are a part of, is also a way to slow down a little bit to perhaps move and stroll around rather than being on a treadmill and pushed forward all the time.

00:38:17 - Speaker 2: In a way it does seem like we were rushing towards a world of extremes or perhaps we’re trying to rather than find a middle balanced place end up with both the hyper fast, exactly as you said, the 24 hour news cycle and refreshing your feed and everything has this frantic pace to it. But then on the other hand, where meditation has become incredibly popular and people are always seeking these retreats and ways to slow down and disconnect because it becomes too much.

Certainly my hope, and I think some of what we’re channeling through the Muse product a little bit, but also, I guess just in my own life, I feel like it should be less that I’m either hyper adrenalized, jacked into the news feed crazy thing, and that I need to take a 10 day silence retreat just to like recover from that, and then I jack back into that.

That instead I could find kind of a middle thing here, just to give you one small example, Mark, you and I talked about kind of the schedule for which to release these podcast episodes when we got started, and you felt, and I think you’re right, we could easily produce enough content to do, for example, a weekly publication, but I actually like that if you do a little bit more slowly, we do every 2 weeks. I like that it gives you a little more time to invest in the episode itself, to prepare the guests, to make sure the content you have is good, to review afterwards and see if any edits are needed. And maybe that just means it’s less work for me overall, but for me, there’s something about that pacing that is often enough that I feel like it’s fresh and frequent and lively, but slow enough that it feels almost deliberately slowed down compared to, I don’t know, a lot of podcasts I’ve subscribed to that have multiple episodes a week and there’s just no way I can listen to all of them. And that of course leads you to listening at the sped up rate, you know, you got all these features of this, cut out the silence. and skip over the thingy thing and listen to 1.5x or 2X to try to download as much information to your brain as you possibly can and maybe I’m just a purist, but I just like to listen to my podcast at regular like I’m I’m in a conversation and I’m listening to folks talk. You know, I don’t complain when I’m talking to my friends that I wish they’d talk faster so we can get to the end of this conversation, so it’s more efficient, you know.

00:40:32 - Speaker 3: And that’s surprising. I’m a 2.5 xer myself, so we’re very different on this one.

00:40:36 - Speaker 1: I’m a 1.8.

00:40:41 - Speaker 2: Well, do you have ways to sort of attune yourself just in separately from any software you’re building, just ways to make your life and especially your digital life, be at the pace that you feel is natural, is best for your health, is the right one for you?

00:41:00 - Speaker 1: To be honest, I think I’ve been struggling with it, especially because of the pandemic. I think the pandemic has made myself in one way more immersed in the digital world and in another way more aware of how much I’m immersed in the digital world and I think I’ve been doing a little bit of what you just shared which is oscillating between the extremes of being hyper online and being hyper offline and trying to stay away from the screens from the technology. What I found myself doing a lot of the times is comparing myself to others and comparing my own achievements and the work I’ve done with others and that leads to fairly unhealthy places and right now what I’m trying to do is focus on trying to be in the middle, not oscillating into the extremes but just being at my own pacing and being myself, whatever that means and letting go of expectations. I’m curious for you both, are there things that you’re doing to curate or also structure your own digital spaces?

00:42:06 - Speaker 2: For me, one of the biggest ones is notification management and mostly just turning them off a lot.

In some ways that comes in the form of, I don’t have an email address I’ve used for years that’s the one I used to sign up for services because no matter whether they say they’re not going to send you marketing emails, eventually they are, and I just have a separate place I can channel those, for example, but device notifications, I think are a particularly sort of thorny area because on one hand, There, I think the introduction of general purpose notifications first on Android and later on iOS made smartphones vastly more useful.

On the other hand, they lead to, I don’t know, breaking news alerts and you know, someone liked your posts and sucking you back in engagement loops that I find extremely unhealthy.

And so to me they’re right, if I can do for myself a good job with, for example, I turn off 100% notifications on. On the desktop and on the iPad, cause those are workspaces. My phone is my notification device, so I can just silence it and put it face down if I ever don’t wanna hear notifications.

But then I also very kind of aggressively manage those in terms of what apps are allowed me to send me notifications, including a lot of the default system Apple apps I have to turn off notifications for because they send me junk about photo memories or something like that, that’s just not what I want that for.

And that’s an ongoing effort there and in a way I think the right notifications actually can reduce my call stress or increase my ability to be in the moment because I know that I can be raised by a colleague if there’s something important that they need me for, then And that’s good. I can just leave my phone in my pocket and be in the moment doing whatever I’m doing, not being worried about that there’s something I need to check, because I think checking of inboxes and sort of the polling versus the push system of notifications also has its own compulsive, unhealthy loops, but yeah, that’s forever a work in progress, I think.

00:44:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I have a tactical answer here, and then I have a more strategic one. So on a tactics front, I’m just trying to be really mindful of all the, it’s bad on purpose to make you click stuff, which is now incredibly rampant. You just got to be really aware of it because there are so many organizations whose now entire purpose is to generate bad titles to make you click. And then once you realize that’s a dynamic, you can, you know, block and filter all this stuff, but it’s very easy to fall into that hole and that makes you very, you know, mad, which is the entire purpose, right, of this clickbait. So that’s helped me a lot.

But on the more strategic front, I kind of want to turn back to our original topic of expressivity because we’ve been talking mostly in terms of individuals, right? Like us as individual creators, but I think there’s this huge element of group expressivity and belonging.

And especially now we had this double whammy of one, we’ve had the secular trend of atomization, at least in the West, that’s been going on for a long time. People are more by themselves, and then obviously we got hit with COVID, which isolated people more. And I feel like in the last 6 to 12 months, those have really stacked up and people have realized that they don’t have enough social interaction and group belonging, and they’re sort of scrambling to get it. And I think potentially digital tools could help a lot. There’s all kinds of exploration that we need to do in terms of what are the patterns, what are the technologies, what are the institutions that help form this group belonging. There’s all kinds of different stuff we’re gonna need. So that’s one of the reasons I’m excited to see people explore the space of how can we use digital tools to help bridge this gap. So that’s one thing I’ve been exploring personally, like, you know, try to find the right online communities and ways of building community and ways of connecting still early stages, but I think that’s gonna be important.

00:45:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it was in our episode on what we can learn from video games.

You talked in depth about the Discord phenomenon.

Which, you know, to my mind, I saw it as a group chat product that was similar in a lot of ways to Slack, it’s a different aesthetic, but you opened my eyes to there’s a whole huge culture around how these servers are run, and the custom emojis, and the product may be similar on the surface, but there’s a whole huge cultural thing around gamers who unite or find community in games they either enjoy playing or in many cases, players they enjoy watching. And then they have found very effective ways to make new kinds of digital meeting spaces.

00:46:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s one area where I do think people are really onto something, and it does connect back to a classic form of belonging, which is sports teams.

So back in the before times, people would have local sports teams that they were really big fan of, and everyone who was physically around you and you we would spend time with would be a fan of these teams too.

And the game itself wasn’t really a huge deal, and people would say it was obviously, but it’s more about having a locus of conversation and belonging where everyone in your community believes that, you know, in my case it’s like the Packers, you know, the Packers should do really well. That’s something you can talk about and get excited about and discuss, but in many cases we’re losing things like that and so what replaces it.

00:47:05 - Speaker 2: I may have mentioned this when we were discussing that before, but professional sports and in particular the building of, I don’t know, tribal affiliation or community around rooting for a particular team is not something I ever understood. Maybe a classic kind of nerd thing, whatever. Maybe I just didn’t grow up in the right places, but Living in Germany, where football is a very big activity, what you might call soccer, and in particular when there’s these big championships, the World Cup, just a couple of months ago we had the European Cup, and it’s everybody, really everybody’s watching, like if I go to take my dog for a walk when a game is on. The streets are empty, and you just hear time delayed the game playing out of people’s windows and local corner stores have it and everything like that.

And it’s actually as a result of that, I’ve gotten into it a bit. I end up following the matches as they get closer to the thing, and we invite friends over, and you can have that conversation. Like, oh, did you catch that game between, you know, Denmark and whatever last night? Wow, that was quite a, what have you. And I don’t imagine this is the sort of thing I would do on an ongoing basis, but just for this brief moment in time where these championships are happening and sort of everyone seems to be tuned into that a little bit, you know, I kind of get it.

00:48:18 - Speaker 3: Another sort of pattern here is conversation pieces, so that you might in your physical home have a sort of weird object, you know, it was the football used for the touchdown pass on such and such Super Bowl game or whatever.

And ideally it looks a little weird, or has some sort of demarcation, so that when people come in, they’re like, oh, what’s that? Well, let me tell you about it. And then you have a whole conversation and one of the reasons why I like tools like MakeSpace is they have this kind of personalizable. environment so you can create a little bit more of that dynamic, you know, come over to my space on the screen and let me tell you about whatever, you know, my stickers, and you can see and have a little bit of a conversation around it. So I think there’s all these little patterns we need to refigure out in the digital world.

00:49:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the sense of belonging is perhaps one of the main reasons I think I have a desire to express and earlier I mentioned this desire to care and also to be cared by others and I do think the root of that is the sense of belonging that I and perhaps others are trying to feel.

00:49:26 - Speaker 2: Belonging is one of the most basic human needs in many ways.

We are truly social animals, and as Mark said, we’ve atomized or deconstructed a lot of the very traditional structures by which we had belonging, which I think in most respects is probably a win, at least in the sense of many times you were stuck with a default structure that may or may not suit you.

And so now you have more freedom and choice to find the place that feels like home, or a group that feels like a family versus kind of inheriting some from your circumstances where you happen to be born, and if you don’t like it, too bad. But yeah, I think in many ways we’ve blown it away and have yet to fully find good replacements, or even a way offer people a path to finding those replacements.

00:50:17 - Speaker 3: So I’m curious then if you all have particular frontiers of digital expressivity and belonging, they are interested in exploring different things you’re excited about or looking forward to trying or looking forward to continue to try. So it might be this idea of mixing in video with canvases, or it might be customization or it might be gamer style social interactions. In my case it would be like I really want to bring emojis to everything, including new they’re so powerful.

00:50:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one for me that I’m a big fan of is personal homepages. I think I’ve heard this echoed a little bit and people.

Reminiscing on the web kind of late 90s, early 2000s, where it was much more get a shared host and just hack together your HTML and PHP file as best you could, maybe GeoCities, for example, as one kind of maybe often maligned example, but the idea that creating a personal home page and a weird space on the web that expressed what you had to say was commonplace.

And nowadays, of course you can still do that, but typically people rely more on their social media profiles, but those are very prescribed. You can kind of upload the avatar image and maybe you get a banner and you can change a couple of colors, but it just does not have anywhere near that well expressiveness. And I semi recently redid my personal homepage and that felt really good even keeping it really simple because it’s a chance to stop and reflect on.

At least career wise, who am I, what do I value, what am I trying to accomplish, what are the things I’ve done already that I’m proud of, what do I want people to get in touch with me about for more future facing things, and I often find myself encouraging.

Others, I have friends who are artists or musicians, they have a small business or something, and I find myself encouraging them to just make a small, simple personal homepage, because I think it’s as much about, yeah, it’s nice to have this calling card basically that you can give to someone before you meet them and they can add a little something about you, but I think it’s also really that chance for reflection. is who do I want to be, and it’s not just who am I now, which is obviously part of it, but that aspirational element.

And if you really need to boil it down to a web page, so yeah, maybe it has some animations and maybe it has some images and it has some colors and has some type and it has some copy, you have a lot of freedom in one way, but in another way it needs to just sort of briefly state who you are and maybe have your picture and something like that.

I don’t know, I’m just a big, big fan of personal home pages. It always makes me smile when there’s someone new I’m going to meet, or what have you, and they can, you know, make me their homepage or have it in their signature or something, and great, I can go read about this person and we can get past that initial, maybe this comes back to being an introvert and get past that initial small talk phase, and we go straight to what are they about, what do they value, what’s the core of who they, at least that they want to show publicly to the world. So, I don’t know if that’s a frontier exactly, it almost seems backward looking, but more personal home pages, especially for creators and creative types, is something that I hope the future holds.

00:53:27 - Speaker 1: I really wish there are more ways in which we can let our personality and our just like the little bits of life that we’ve experienced ourselves come through online. It seems like nowadays a lot of the larger sites that we spend time on have all taken an approach for good reasons to in some way flatten our voices to make everything look the same and one of my good friend Kicks Condor and I joke about how a lot of the web has adopted this color of guab, which is gray with a little blue and nothing else. And so I agree with you and what you said resonated a lot in terms of are there internet corners that we can carve out and can we make places online that feel more like our living room or our bedroom rather than this giant lobby or this giant stadium that nobody really belong to but it’s big enough for anyone and everyone to come through.

00:54:27 - Speaker 2: So I guess what I’m saying is bring back my space. At least the MySpace vision, right? That’s kind of what it was. Maybe it wasn’t a good implementation, but that was the idea.

00:54:37 - Speaker 1: My hope is that we’re just constantly going through these different phases, we get tired of simplicity or just the sameness and then we go back into all kinds of crazy ways to colorize, to stylize everything and then perhaps that then becomes too much for our eyes and for our brain and then we sort of like go back to things in a quote unquote simpler times, but yeah.

00:55:06 - Speaker 2: So maybe a cultural pendulum between weirdness and explosive diversity versus homogeneity and understatedness.

00:55:17 - Speaker 1: And to go back to your question mark, I think something that I’ve been thinking a lot about as a part of this journey of building sprout is Are there more ways for us to create secret handshake or to show each other our body language in the spaces that we spend time in and as we collaborate through the internet. Something that we’ve done by spending time on spatial canvases of different kinds is we found we’re able to make gestures and also hand wave at each other. They’re in different ways, so we call it cursor waves where you can make very small wiggles and very fast wiggles or you can make big waves where it feels like you’re trying to shout or like get someone’s attention from far away, but those are moments where it feels like we can communicate a little bit more or connect a little bit more beyond just looking at each other or saying hi to each other.

00:56:14 - Speaker 2: It also points to maybe how much this is a frontier that you’re operating in where the status quo that we’re starting from, which is the video chat, static squares, you know, if it’s pretty advanced, maybe you have a menu somewhere where you can put one of three emojis briefly overlaying your video as an option. But the room for expressions of different kinds, even the one you described that as you describe it sounds pretty simple and straightforward, but it actually ends up being fresh and novel. It just shows how much unexplored frontier there really is here.

00:56:49 - Speaker 1: The other day I was talking to a friend and thinking about how the film industry in the 1st 40 years of the film industry, there wasn’t really sound and there wasn’t really the idea of montage and we’re only at the early phase of internet and computing, so it’s always really exciting to think about what might be ahead of us and what kind of path we can pay for ourselves and also for each other.

00:57:15 - Speaker 2: I love the film industry comparison because clearly the technology got better over the years, color film, audio, higher quality images and sound.

But fundamentally going back even 50, 80 years, you have the video format taking a camera and pointing it at some humans that are doing some kind of action or telling some kind of story.

You could do most of what you can do now in modern filmmaking, I think. But most of these techniques had to be discovered, and it’s always interesting to me when you go and watch one of these culturally important or sort of like touchstone films, So reflecting on Citizen Kane recently, just because I watched the Netflix film Mank, which kind of is a reference to that, and then Jaws is another interesting one, where it was kind of one of the first action blockbusters. You go back and watch films like these two, and a lot of things they do just seem obvious or Not that remarkable by modern, but they invented a lot of what came to be the modern filmmaking techniques, modern storytelling techniques. So of course you take it for granted now because it’s this known quality, but at the time it was breakthrough storytelling. In many cases it’s about how the camera is angled or where it’s positioned or how they do the edits or something about how the dialogue fits together with the way the story is being told. All of those things could have. And done 100 years ago, they just weren’t because there were techniques that had to be discovered and learning how to use the medium well took a long, long time, generations, and there’s no reason to think computing would be any different, even if you froze all the technology, things like displays and hard drives and pointing devices and things exactly as it is today, and then you can assume it would take decades, if not generations to really truly get the most out of this unique new medium that’s before us.

00:59:07 - Speaker 1: Mhm. There’s always so much more remixing that we can do and I think that’s the main reason why I find Nintendo as a company really inspiring because they’re always working with what they talk about as withering technology, they’re never using the most advanced technology. The products that they are building and instead through remixing and through understanding the essence of the medium that they are trying to work with, they are able to create really, really delightful experiences for families, for individuals, for gamers.

00:59:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. Nintendo is one of my favorite kind of of sort of big long term corporate entities that are one of the most inspired and reliably inspired over the decades, and yeah, one of the things they do is in their console hardware, including the Switch, which I have right now, it’s the only sort of dedicated game.

The thing I have in my home, and in no way is it the cutting edge of hardware and sort of gamers that care about being the absolute pinnacle of graphics technology or whatever kind of shake their heads.

Why would you want this? But you slice it a different way and you say, how do you give a fun, delightful, and approachable experience, especially maybe for more casual players, and do something innovative, but it’s not about just pushing the most graphics horsepower possible. It’s about finding new ways to have fun and play together.

01:00:34 - Speaker 1: So is it fair to say and to conclude that the reason why we’re expressing and the desire to express is to have fun and laugh and make giggles together?

01:00:45 - Speaker 2: I will take that. I will take that. That sounds a lot better to me than filling some kind of hole in my soul slash an ego thing, but maybe it’s some of both, let’s be honest. Well, on that note, let’s wrap it there.

Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, you can write us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ or on email, [email protected].

You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.

We, I want to thank you for working to make computing and our online gathering spaces more fun, more expressive, and perhaps help us tap that sense of belonging. It sounds like a heavy set of responsibilities when I put it that way, but I also think it’s a wide open frontier and the work you’re doing so far, I think really is promising.

01:01:33 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me, and I hope that we’ll get to have more fun together.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: It was important for us that people be able to reach this level of partnership, which again is a group of peers, even if they weren’t there at the founding of the company.

00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranahan, and Mark, I know that, uh, we have to get creative with our hobbies here in this time of staying home. Uh, what have you been doing in regards to your piano lessons?

00:00:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I usually take lessons at my teacher’s house here in Seattle, but now we’re going all remote.

And we actually did this once, uh, last year during some snowstorms here, which shut Seattle down, and then I just like propped my iPhone up on my desk and we did our best, uh, but now that I have a little bit more experience with this podcast and with other AV stuff, trying to do a better setup, so.

Um, used a, a real mic to record and we set up multiple camera angles with my laptop video and my iPhone camera, and that’s worked pretty well. And then I think the next experiment will be actually plugging the digital output for my, for my digital piano kind of directly into an audio interface.

As well as getting a vocal mic and hopefully that will improve the kind of the piano sound quality that she hears on the other side.

00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Well, excuse to play with.

00:01:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a big factor.

00:01:40 - Speaker 2: We’ve got our summit next week as well, which we’re doing all virtual we meet in person for that, so we’re also going to Try to get a little creative. I guess the whole world is is doing that to some degree.

00:01:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, on the flip side of this, as a company, we have a lot of experience with remote, so this hasn’t been too big of a change for us. I’m talking to, uh, for example, people who are elementary school teachers and I just, I can’t even imagine.

00:02:01 - Speaker 2: So the topic we wanted to talk about today was hiring an engineering partner and maybe the Muse partnership model more generally. So I’ll link in the show notes to the job description we’ve got on the web.

Beautiful design there done by our colleague Leonard.

But, um, I think you wrote most of this, Mark, and, and I wanted to quote from the, the opener a little bit and, and maybe you can expand on this or explain it, uh, further. So the the page says this role is on our partner track, meaning that it has a high level of freedom and responsibility while earning a significant stake in the business. So, can you, uh, can you tell us what does it mean to be an engineering partner as opposed to, say, a soft software engineer as a regular employee.

00:02:45 - Speaker 1: So, our partnership model is, we have a very small team, all of whom are intentionally peers, including the founders, and who are treated more like owners than employees. So, in practice, I would say a partner is In between a typical startup employee and the kind of sole founder of a bootstrapped in the startup, it’s kind of in between.

00:03:08 - Speaker 2: And by typical startup employee here we talk about in the early days when it’s a small team, people have a lot of impact, I guess, on the, on the company because there’s just not that many of them, and option grants are common, which is sort of an option to buy company stock in the future if it does become valuable, uh, but at the same time, they don’t really get a lot of visibility into, say, the financials of the business.

00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the typical model is you have the founders who are there when the company is incorporated and they get the vast majority of the equity and they have very outsized responsibility and decision making ability and and freedom and flexibility, and then you hire employees and starting with employee 1 and definitely on from there, they’re kind of a second and lower tier of staff by design. And what we want with the partnership is more of a model where those Team members are all peers, uh, in terms of the day to day work, in terms of their freedom and responsibility, and also in terms of their equity ownership in the business.

00:04:08 - Speaker 2: And just to make it concrete here, we’ve got 4 partners right now. So there’s Yumi and Yulia, with sort of the 3, that got started last year. Leonard joined us not too long after. So we’re a partnership of 4 right now, and we have maybe some contractors and things we’ve worked with, but for the For the most part, it’s really those 4. We’re all owners in the business and therefore, essentially peers. Uh, now we’re looking to fill in this 5th person, uh, who will come from an engineering background, but we want them to have that same kind of stake in the business or level of ownership or level of responsibility.

00:04:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and it goes both ways like you have this higher level of ownership, you have more freedom, but because this is probably the last partner that will hire for some time. There’s a lot of responsibility. Like these 5 people, they need to make the business successful together. Um, so you really need to have a really high talent density to make that work.

00:05:01 - Speaker 2: So you’ve used this turn of phrase freedom and responsibility, and I don’t know if that’s a call back to the Netflix deck, sort of internal employee hiring and culture deck, but I read this, I’ll link to it in the show notes. I read this many, many years ago and it really had a big impact on me and how I think about teams and hiring and and management.

00:05:20 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, very familiar, a classic. And interestingly, I think it’s been both very influential, yet it’s still quite contrarian.

00:05:28 - Speaker 2: Having a lot of latitude, having a lot of ability to make choices in your daily work, also comes with it, yeah, responsibility to do the best thing for the business, and you don’t have someone sitting there telling you what the right thing to do is. And maybe this comes to the conventional relationship you often happen have between employers and employees, which is one of the boss tells you what to do and the employee knows they’re successful in their job when the boss is happy, so it’s really largely about pleasing what whoever has the authority says they want. Uh, which produces some, some strange dynamics, uh, sometimes and some power. Obviously there’s a huge power asymmetry there as well.

00:06:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and that was a big motivation for me in designing our partnership model. I wanted individual success to be measured by the market as much as possible, so it’s not about pleasing your boss or getting some committee to give you a certain rating. Um, there’s one or two people who are working in each discipline, so it’s very clear if your work is having the right impact for the business.

00:06:30 - Speaker 2: And maybe we can talk about the terminology of calling it partners or partnership, and in particular, in contrast to the term that you often hear in Silicon Valley, which is founder. So what, what’s the difference there? Why do we use this term partner?

00:06:45 - Speaker 1: It was important for us that people be able to reach this level of partnership, which again is a group of peers, even if they weren’t there at the founding of the company. There’s certain things like you’ll always be able to call yourself, you know, a member of the founding team or a founding partner, but we think it’s important that people can come in, uh, demonstrate their skills, prove their value to the business and join this group of peers as a full partner.

00:07:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, founder is a funny piece of terminology, right? It’s not a job title. It’s not like VP of engineering or something. Uh, it’s a statement of where you were at a particular time.

And I’ve certainly used that title for myself quite a bit on, you know, CVs or whatever, just because, yeah, I do start companies, that’s sort of my, um, my career. And, and so when you’re doing a jack of all trades, just getting things off the ground, uh, type of a role, well, founder does seem like the right description for that.

But it does rule out people coming in later and having a really big, or even a foundational, you might say, impact. Uh, and I think of some famous examples of this. For example, uh, Howard Schultz, I think it’s the fellow’s name from Starbucks. He wasn’t one of the founders of Starbucks, but he, in the sense of being this pivotal person that helped make it what it is today. He was, or that we just don’t have a word to talk about that, basically.

00:08:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and typically there’s a very narrow and rare path for people to say become a CEO externally, and that happens sometimes, of course, um, but the default path is you read the job description and it says like employee of X division, you know, doing this subset of that thing and even before you’ve talked to the first person at the company, it’s clear you’re going to have a very prescribed and small impact, whereas if you come in and say with the job description. You’re going to be a partner in this business, you’re going to own a big chunk of it, and we’re going to expect and hope that you step up to that with your contributions. Um, you’re setting a much higher ceiling for people to reach up to.

00:08:49 - Speaker 2: The one thing I was concerned about when we got this off the ground and 3 of us, the 3 initial partners had this idea to have this small talent dense team was that it would really restrict our, certainly our ability to grow quickly, although that wasn’t, uh, specifically a goal for us to grow the team quickly. But actually that we would rule out the ability to hire a potentially really great people, really great people in that particular craft who don’t have that other dimension of either their skill set or maybe just their interest. Being an owner of a business and feeling that responsibility for the whole thing being successful, versus kind of focusing on your craft and your specialty. It is not something everyone can or or wants to do. And so we rule out being able to hire some a really great software engineer who doesn’t want to be a business owner and be worrying about the fundamentals of the business. Um, and so I was, I saw that as a risk. I felt like when Leonard joined us, uh, that was a great validation of this model because he wanted that. He wanted to. You know, this is a very talented guy. He had the option to go lots of, uh, very prestigious big tech companies. And one of the reasons he told me that he, he wanted to work with us is that chance to have a high impact and be an owner in. Uh, in a business. And so he’s both really great at his craft, which is design, but he also has the mindset to care about, pay attention to, and contribute to all the other aspects of the business.

00:10:22 - Speaker 1: There’s only a subset of people who are interested in this model, and that’s fine because within that universe, they seem especially interested in what we’re doing and kind of more inclined to join our venture versus a typical startup where they’d be, you know, employee number 76 and earn 0.01% or whatever. Um, so I think it’s kind of concentrating and focusing our recruiting ability into uh the type of people who we most want to work with.

00:10:50 - Speaker 2: Now, this works for a 5 person team, maybe you could even imagine 67. I don’t necessarily imagine it would scale to, I don’t know, 1520, 25 people, um, but how do you, how do you think about that if we did at some later time feel like we did want to grow the, grow the team because the opportunity in front of us or the, the, um, money we’re earning from customers makes it possible to do that.

00:11:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think maybe there’s separable axes there. So I think it would be harder to have partners as you go beyond 67 people, although there is precedent for that, of course, and professional services firms that have big partnerships, uh, but you, you might be able to separate kind of how many employees, how many staff total you have versus what percentage of them are are partners, even if there’s some coupling there. I would also say that we did.

Design the partner model, kind of the current iteration of it, specifically for 4 to 7 people, because that’s the size of one team, or maybe 3 to 7. And when you go beyond 6, maybe 7 people, you don’t really have one team anymore. You have 2 teams that you like, you know, team divisions and like extra communication and coordination and decoupling and stuff like that. And it’s kind of a different way of operating.

You can, you can’t do it totally as modically mind melting like we do now. So I think it would also change in that respect if we move beyond 7 people, but I’m hopeful that we can um get quite far with this small team again, because of the talent density and because of the leverage you can get these days with SAS.

00:12:20 - Speaker 2: And it’s interesting change for both of us maybe because we do come from that startup background where hiring and growing the team quickly is seen as an absolute requirement. And uh you were an engineering manager, ran a team at Stripe. How big was that or how many people were sort of under your um authority there?

00:12:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I managed teams from like 3 to about 50 at Stripe, so I saw a gamut and indeed a huge part of your time as an engineering manager at a company like Stripe, we are growing very quickly, is actually the mechanics of growing a team.

So it’s like, you know, recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, training, team, cell division, off boarding. I probably spent like half my time doing that. And so part of the idea with a deliberately smaller partnership is you can spend more of your time focusing on the actual products in the business.

Now there’s anything wrong with doing those other things. I quite enjoy them. Um, but if you, if you want to grow very fast, you have to invest a lot in it and it necessarily detracts from your work on the product.

00:13:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly for me, there was an appeal to being in more of a maker mode, be able to spend more of my time doing writing, product development, design, and so on.

Uh, at Hiroku, I was my sort of my largest management experience and at one point had a, yeah, quite large, uh, team under me there and you can do a lot with a big team of expert people.

It’s, it, it, it can be a really amazing thing and there are super, uh, opportunities very worth going after that that basically require that.

Uh, but then on the other side of things, yeah, being able to make stuff and be really close to, I don’t know, I like a pretty close personal relationship with quite a lot of our, um, our early users and now customers, and that’s a lot harder to do if you also need to be, uh, making your team and all of the, the care and feeding of that, uh, your priority.

00:14:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and to circle back to something we mentioned earlier, I think you have that. That much more direct relationship with the customers and the product and and again the evaluation loop is much cleaner, with a large company, you have like, you know, various management chains that are quite deep, you have the different functional areas, you know, you have multiple phases of roadmap planning, the evaluation process is very complex, and so you end up spending a lot of your brain cycles like managing that social dynamic, uh, whereas here I think we have much more focus on our product and our customers.

00:14:51 - Speaker 2: The time that you need to put into getting everyone on the same page, even if it theoretically we all agree roughly where we’re going and what the pressing problems are, there’s these huge sophisticated systems that, um, larger companies use. Google’s, I think, known for the OKR system. Uh, when I was at Salesforce for a little while, I got exposed to this thing called V2O. Uh, and these terrible acronyms are very necessary systems that allow you to take a large group of people and get everyone on the same page about what you’re doing and focused around a particular business priority and have everyone understand how their work can fit into that. And by comparison, I think you mentioned this, uh, earlier. By comparison with a small team, we basically have a team summit once every 2 months. We spend a week going really deep on big picture questions and spending a lot of time with each other and having casual conversations, and that basically works great for getting everyone on the same page and aligned to use the manager speak there. Um, and that’s kind of all you need, plus uh like a weekly, uh, planning meeting and, and, you know, with a con on board, kind of, you, you’re all set. The, the meta elements there are much easier and much more, uh, much simpler.

00:16:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, now I think the flip side of all of this, uh, freedom and responsibility and minimal management infrastructure is you really need the partners to take a lot of initiative and to have good judgment and to have good taste.

And I think that’s reflected in the type of people who uh we tend to find applying for these partner roles.

They tend to be people like perhaps former entrepreneurs, uh, serial independent contractors, um, people who have a lot of experience doing uh open source projects or running things like that. Um, people who have worked at very small startups, it’s people who kind of just tend to take initiative and take responsibility for their own career success that I think finds, um, the most traction with our model.

00:16:50 - Speaker 2: Good judgment and making good decisions, making wise decisions, I think it’s a huge part of this, and you want to be able to trust in everyone’s judgment.

When you talk about the split a little bit between.

Maybe founders, employees in the startup world or maybe more classic business. There’s, let’s let’s call it management and labor, uh, or boss and employee, that that sort of thing.

Another really influential source of kind of business know-how for me was, uh, Peter Drucker’s book Management to this giant collection of business essays from I don’t know, the 1980s or something like that, which still are remarkably applicable to uh the modern world of tech companies.

And in management, he talks about sort of the, what makes a manager, a manager is not. managing a team or the people side of it, it’s feeling responsibility for and having the suitable authority to make the business be successful, the whole business, whereas an individual contributor, a crafts person, what have you, their job is to make a particular thing.

So if your job is to build a website for the company. You’re gonna build the website, make it as successful as possible by whatever uh criteria you’re given. But beyond that, you, you probably have a vague, certainly strong but vague interest in the overall health of the business and that you want to make something you’re proud of, and of course you want your job to continue to exist, and you want all your colleagues to continue to be employed there, but you don’t really have any levers for making the business be successful or not outside of your specific domain.

00:18:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and there are a lot of good reasons why um companies have this, this management and labor dynamic and it can work very well and indeed I had spent a lot of my career working in that model, but I, I wanted with Muse to not be spending so many brain cycles on like, you know, convincing people they should be doing stuff and like motivating them to do stuff that wasn’t necessarily stuff they were interested in and like judging their work constantly. I just want people to more like do the thing that was right for the business out of their own initiative, and I think we’ve been able to get that here.

One other thing that this reminds me of is uh dealing with miscellaneous business stuff.

So for example, expenses. This, this can become a huge mess in big corporations, kind of, uh, classically, you know, you have the programmer who can’t get a decent computer or they have to do like a multi-week uh procurement process to get a hotel, we have to use some terrible, you know, flight booking software. And here the model is much simpler. It’s you’re a partner in the business, you essentially own a piece of this bank account, and you need to make good decisions about how we use it, and we mostly trust you to do that. And so if, you know, you think you should buy, you know, I don’t know, a new mic for a podcast, you know, do that or if We’re deciding where to have the summit. It’s not like an us versus them dynamic on the expense. It’s, we can go somewhere more expensive and that’s less runway for for all of us in the business.

00:19:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that element of looking at the money in the bank account and seeing, you know, what’s possible or what is wise to spend money on for equipment is one thing, but a, a very challenging topic in any model is individual compensation.

That is how much money do you get paid.

I remember talking to Yuli about this early in the The business, which is, you know, transitioning from the employee mindset, which is one of, OK, I’m going to negotiate with my employer. Not exactly in an adversarial way, but you could say you have different incentives, you have different interests. The employee wants to negotiate to get as much money as they can, and the employer wants to get the, uh, the employee to work for as cheaply as they can. And then they hopefully through that tension, negotiate to some fair middle ground.

By contrast, when everyone’s a partner, you basically look at the Money in the bank account, you look at the spreadsheet of growth and customers, and you look at financing possibilities, and you go, OK, well, if we game this out, like what can we afford to pay ourselves?

00:20:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And related to that, I like that we have a relatively simple compensation model that also, I think mostly pays people for the responsibility that we’re asking them to take versus for their negotiation negotiating leverage. Um, so our model is essentially there’s some dollar amount that we want all the partners to be earning roughly and then depending on their situations, the cash versus equity balance might be a little bit different.

00:21:17 - Speaker 2: So when it comes to the stock compensation, Uh, you had a, a, a bunch of strong feelings about that, and in particular the way that maybe option grants for startup employees are a little bit of a raw deal. You got people get stuck with tax burdens and exercise windows and things like that.

00:21:33 - Speaker 1: Thought about a bunch of different things, but we ended up mostly on um options, mostly for legal and tax reasons, um, but we try to give way, way more than is standard for an employee again to reflect this, this kind of being in between an employee and a founder. Um, and also we have this no cliff and uh the exercise window is very long. So basically the idea is once you’ve Worked at the company for a quarter, you’ve contributed a lot of effort, you’ve earned this equity compensation and it’s yours to keep, uh, basically for as long as the US government will allow us to let you keep it. Um, and the, the terms are as simple and as favorable to the employee as the staff as possible.

00:22:13 - Speaker 2: And that that was something I was pretty passionate about as well, because having done a lot of businesses over the years and divvied up ownership in different ways and that sort of thing, you often see this thing where you have these typically 4 year grants, uh, for founders, it’s often even more dramatic where essentially in the beginning, you just divide the company three ways, uh, and then you get diluted over time. But the Sort of the ownership that you have reflects what you happen to negotiate for, what the circumstance of the company happened to be at the time when you came in the door. And what I really prefer is that there’s something that is based on both the contributions you’ve made to date, but also reflects the commitment that you have made in the, you know, in the near term in the next couple of years. I think 2 years is kind of a nice time window on that. And furthermore, that if your life circumstances change, or if you decide that you no longer have good contributions to make to this business, you’re not in the what they sometimes call the investing in peace um situation, which is you’re kind of sitting around keeping your chair warm because you have this great option grant or this great stock grant that you want to see out to the end, but you’re not really actually in a position. You have these weird cliffs and things, you’re motivated to, OK, I want to stick around till next February because that will make a big difference for me. Uh, but it’s something that is a little bit closer to, uh, your, your salary, which is, as long as you’re contributing, you’re earning, and then at some point, if your circumstances change and you want to be elsewhere. I guess I don’t like people being chained to a thing. It seems bad for both parties. It’s certainly bad for a person to not be moving on from a role that they’re no longer, no longer want to be in. But similarly, I think it’s bad for the company that becomes a person who’s not contributing with the same passion and the same vigor and maybe that is space in the cap table or space in the sort of the team seats, uh, that could be given to someone else that’s in a better position to contribute.

00:24:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think the typical 4 year stock grants plus 1 year cliff plus 30 day exercise windows can really contribute to that feeling of people feeling locked to the company or compelled to sit and wait it out and I think both of those are not healthy.

And indeed we’ve tried to do other things to make it feel like People have their own independent free lives and they’re not like chaining themselves to this company for 4 to 6 years when they join.

It’s more like you come in and you do this like rotation of this tour and after 2 years, you can choose to re up or you can choose to go in a different direction with your career and both of those are totally fine uh with the company and totally reasonable things to want to do with your own life.

And you know, another example of this would be, um, we try not to have Which basically prefer cash compensation to benefits so that if you don’t have all these like weird tentacles into your personal life in the form of benefits like you’re earning this compensation and then if you want to um move in the future, you don’t have to like unwind all these benefit entanglements with the company that you just have more cash that you can use to spend on those things as you will.

00:25:28 - Speaker 2: You mentioned earlier the Agency partnership and this was uh was also something that I think you brought into our discussion when we were formulating this model that, um, I had never really thought about before. But there is the case of, yeah, maybe something like a designer brand agency, uh, maybe something like an attorney’s office, sometimes maybe medical practices are this way. Uh, maybe, probably my best exposure to it, although I don’t know how accurate it is, is, uh, the TV show Mad Men, where they have these basically ad agencies that that have this small set of people who are the partners, and then of course, there’s a larger group who are the, uh, let’s say the standard employees. What exposure did you have to the partnership model via Uh, this kind of, this kind of business and, and how did that play into the, the idea here?

00:26:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, mostly via the professional services world, you know, accountants and lawyers and so on and Uh, we, we drew from that two of the key aspects for our current design.

One is this idea that anyone can make partner over time. So, when you form like a law firm, the people who founded the company, they have their names on the sign, sure, but over time as other people make partners, they take on that sign and then make a new one with the new partner’s name on it, right? And I really like that dynamic. Again, I think it allows people to step in and and for the talent and the company to rotate um.

The other was this idea that in these professional services firms that are structured as partnerships, the partners are not just for example, really good lawyers, they’re also responsible for the health of the business. So that’s things like bringing in business, doing recruiting for the firm, taking care of all the miscellaneous business things that one needs to do, making decisions about, you know, the office or whatever, and um again I isolate that model of these people who feel more responsibility than just their narrow functional expertise.

00:27:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that style of, I guess call it rotating partnership also fits in with the the tour of duty idea that you mentioned, which is Someone can be a partner and a prime driver at the business for 20 years, but then maybe they want to retire, maybe they want to move on to new things, maybe they want to focus on their family.

And I feel like sometimes the cult of personality stuff that we get in the tech world a little bit produces something where key people moving on to their next thing or in some cases dying, right? Like that happened with um the Walt Disney Company.

You know, the, the Disney Company basically lost its soul and was totally lost in the weeds for a pretty long time when Walt Disney passed, unfortunately quite young, relatively speaking, and it took a really long time to reform itself because it was so built around this one visionary genius individual.

And while granted, Disney was a a a unique genius uh and um.

I think it is the case sometimes that if we build companies in a way that kind of assumes these these founding people who were there at the beginning, the only people that can ever drive it forward, uh, that actually doesn’t create a long term healthy business.

And if people can do their tour of duty and then rotate out and others can take it to the next, uh, take it to the next level and you have something where that’s a, a normal, um, Normal way that you do business as opposed to an exceptional event, it seems to me that actually makes a healthier business over the long term.

00:28:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so, and I hope so. Of course, we’ll have to see over the next 248 years, how that actually works out, you know, the mechanics of it, but I’m optimistic. Should we talk a little bit about how we bring these partners on, you kind of alluded to it with like the ramp or the process, uh, but there’s actually a quite deliberate thing that we do there.

00:29:07 - Speaker 2: As someone who’s done a ton of hiring in my life, uh, I’m pretty passionate about pilot projects. And so just putting aside the the partner topic for a moment, I think the way that hiring often happens, which is based on a series of intensive interviews and then going to a full-time offer that’s contractually or at least implied to be something that lasts for many years, seems like a very strange step function that you go from, let’s have some conversations to now we’re gonna like commit to this huge event. Often coupled, I think there’s some connection there to the um.

Kind of the um the uh in-office type teams where someone maybe actually needs to move to a new city.

But yeah, that, that huge commitment based on essentially just some conversations doesn’t produce great results from what I’ve seen, and I really love pilot projects, uh, where you basically hire someone on a contract basis for a week or 2 weeks or a day or whatever, whatever can fit into their.

Their life effectively and you really try to work with them as if they were on the team, uh, for a real project and then at the end of that both sides, you know, the, the potential person being hired onto the team, they see inside what the team is really like maybe they see some of the, the dirty laundry that isn’t so visible just from the outside and they can get a real sense of what it’s like.

And then of course on the employer side you, you see what this person can really contribute. Be it not just how they represent themselves in an interview. Uh, but the partner thing adds a whole other dimension.

00:30:39 - Speaker 1: Well, it’s basically extending the ramp.

So, again, in a typical startup model, you basically have this, this terminal level which is employee, and once you’re hired, you take this step function and you’re an employee and that’s it.

And our model has uh a couple more steps. So we do this initial. Um, do initial, you know, phone conversations or, you know, reviewing open source work on the basis of that, we’ll do a 1 to 2 week trial project and if that goes well, then we move into a longer contract where we’re evaluating the person for the partnership and that’s typically 2 months, maybe 10 weeks. And then at the end of that trial period, we will make a decision together about uh making them an offer for a partner, and that we found is enough time uh this this two month period is enough time for them to step into the level of partner. You can really understand the the code base and the product and the business and really, you know, get into this mind meld with the rest of the partnership.

00:31:40 - Speaker 2: Mind meld is a great way to put it. One thing I’ve found through this process that is really different.

From the kind of hiring I’ve done elsewhere, is I need to basically emotionally open myself to this person as if they were.

A partner in the business. And for me, that’s actually for me it’s very personal like my.

My work life and and the things I’m trying to accomplish in my venture and the feeling of ownership, you know, it’s it’s sort of people jokingly say things like it’s my baby when they talk about a business that they own, uh, but that’s, that’s how I feel. It’s, it’s, um, it’s a very personal thing for me and so to talk about the most.

Difficult challenges or the open questions, uh, within the business is a kind of vulnerability. Take that leap a little bit and present them with the unfinished thinking and the open problems that we’re grappling with and then you see if those conversations. Have a spark or or allow you to come up to come up with new ideas or better decisions, or go in new directions that are uh that are maybe better than what they would have been without this contribution of this this person and that’s a good sign that uh that they are someone that’s will add something new to the partnership.

00:33:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that process is really important and again, you need the time for that to unfold properly. If you just like surprise the person with their initial interview, like here’s this weird company, we’re building this wild product, we have this different organizational model, here’s all the challenges we’re facing. Do you want to sign up, you know, for the next two years of your life to do this? They’d be like, uh, I don’t know, how can I tell? Um, you really need some time for that to, uh, you know, get folded in with the partnership over the course of a couple of months.

This relates to one other thing that I think is really important, which is this is a genuinely two-way process. I think companies often think of interviewing as like we’re assessing this candidate for a fit at the company, which is true, but I think if you’re doing it right, you’re also giving the candidate uh the opportunity and the chance to evaluate, you know, their fit for their life with what this company is up to.

And uh again these conversations help with that and we encourage it. You know, we say we’re gonna come up with, with our, you know, opinion about this. We also want you to take an honest look at if this honestly somewhat unusual company is right for you and it’s not right for everyone, which is fine. And again, we have because we have some time, uh, they have a chance to decide before they make a bigger commitment.

00:34:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly so that it’s, it’s, it is really this intimate relationship you’re entering into.

And you can like what a company does from the outside, you can like its product, that may or may not mean that you fit in with the team, uh, or that you have something to contribute or that your unique energy is going to take the team in new directions that are are net positive.

I like to talk sometimes about working chemistry. It’s this really ineffable thing and it’s hard to guess from from interviews for sure because it it doesn’t specifically have to do with liking someone, but I like to measure working chemistry by when you sit down and collaborate on a thing together. What comes out? Does magic happen? Does something amazing that you could not have made individually, um, does the result of that collaboration have something really special to it?

00:35:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m really happy that we’ve been able to find great working chemistry with the partnership so far. It gives me, you know, so much energy and it’s very rewarding professionally to have that.

00:35:15 - Speaker 2: Well, Mark, would you recommend this model to other companies? We’re pretty early in the experiment here and maybe we’ll have to report back a couple of years in, uh, but is this something broadly applicable or is it just something pretty specific to Muse, this little indie software development firm doing a pretty nichey product?

00:35:34 - Speaker 1: So there are things that are specific to our unique company, but I think this underlying idea of uh trying to increase the talent density, trying to give your staff much more responsibility, basically, uh, giving them the freedom and responsibility to step up. I think you could find that a lot of people actually do. And conversely, if you treat people as like, uh, you know, employees with very narrowed roles and very little ability to make decisions on their own, indeed that’s what they’ll do. Um, so I would encourage people to see if they can set a higher, higher ceiling and higher expectations for their staff.

00:36:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, speaking for myself, you know, the, the proof will be in the output in the product that we deliver and whether it’s something customers like and whether the business can be viable, but I’m really, really enjoying working on a small partnership with people I can really trust where I can.

Be spending a lot of my time making things, but also, uh, we make decisions largely by consensus, uh, and that I can really trust in the judgment and decisions that we all make together and I think the decisions we make are are better than what we would make individually.

That’s been really personally very satisfying for me and that that matters a lot uh to me is that I have a workplace that is, um, I’m excited to get up and be a part of every day.

Absolutely. If any of our listeners out there have feedback, please feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at museApp.com by email. I’d love to hear your comments or ideas for future episodes. Really enjoyed the chat, Mark. Likewise, Adam, see you next time.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Also, in your field that you say, OK, I need this programmer with this designer and together with them and the right vision, we can build something. I think it’s very similar with film production. We all work at the end of what’s possible, and we want to go beyond.

00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Maximilian Becht of Cosmovision.

00:00:41 - Speaker 1: Hi Adam. Nice to meet you.

00:00:43 - Speaker 2: And Max, I know you just got back from a pretty intense film shoot. Tell me about that.

00:00:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m just back in Berlin. I was shooting for 30 shooting days. That’s like a little bit more days all around it because we had 6 weeks of prep and 6 weeks of shooting and now 2 weeks of. Post production for my production team. I was a production manager, shooting theatrical movie in southern Germany and this was my rough summer and yeah, I’m looking forward to be back in Berlin and have a good conversation with you today.

00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the intensity of these shooting schedules. I used to live in Los Angeles, and had a lot of friends that were in Hollywood, and I think sometimes it’s nice to have sort of an intense work period, but then maybe a longer break in between, but it often was quite surprising to me. Puts even the intense work schedules of Silicon Valley, gives it a run for its money, you might say.

00:01:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah. I think for the last weeks, my workdays had around 12 to 15 hours and the weekends were not really weekends. So it’s like a vacation camp. This filming feels sometimes like this sprint. Maybe you can compare it to the tech industry when you really have this one project, this one program you want to finish and you really give every effort and After it, you feel it drops sometimes in like an emotional hole because you’re way, there’s something missing. I have to be working right now, not, so you were always wondering, oh yeah, what’s happening.

00:02:20 - Speaker 2: Actually I have very strong memories of my first experience of exactly that drop, which was in the video game industry at the beginning of my career.

And we were just working these, yeah, basically every waking moment for weeks on an E3 demo, so E3 was the big conference, you gotta have a great demo, and I remember when we finally, well, we shipped it because E3 happened, so there was no more time.

After that, I just didn’t know what to do with myself for a day. I couldn’t remember what my life was like when it wasn’t just nonstop working, not a great place to be. But in a way, it had its moments, maybe because I was sort of young and had no other responsibilities in my life.

00:02:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m always reflecting on that part, whether how much energy and, yeah, you put into your work. And with film, it’s always because it’s a passion thing for most of the people I know, that way it’s hard to divide it strictly between your personal life and your professional life because you always do it out of a passion, out of the lust to really create awesome images, awesome films.

00:03:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely a problem we have in the software world as well. So Max, you’re a video producer or a film producer, I don’t know exactly how you title yourself, but tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into this field.

00:03:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m a film producer. I would specify it more as a creative producer because I like to create a content and develop content together with someone, but also have the production side in my head to know how to finance a product, how to organize the product, and how to really finish it in the end.

But the part at the beginning where you develop a story where you imagine ideas, where you Look for a concept that’s the part I like most about filmmaking.

I, after my A Levels, I had some years of internships with production companies and working on sets as a runner, set runner, you are on a film set and see that all the infrastructure is working well. You run from the set to the base to get a cable or something or to grab a coffee for some important person. But that way you learn the infrastructure, the how film work, how every department has its purpose on the set. And then I applied for film university in southern Germany at Film Academy, uh, Baden Wittenberg. It’s a very renowned film school and yeah, I studied 5 years of film there. I produced several short films, mid-length films. With different formats like starting with uh fiction, also documentary, but also I got glimpses into animation, visual effects, and interactive storytelling. And now I’m back in Berlin and I have my own company, my own office, and I work as a freelance producer for other companies, but also try to develop my own stories together with writers, directors, and I offer my services to companies who needs a sparing partner to produce and develop content.

00:05:40 - Speaker 2: And I’ll link folks to your portfolio, there’s quite a diversity, as you said, there’s, including these short fiction films, you could say maybe high concept or things that maybe submit to film festivals, that sort of thing, very artistic, maybe those are more labors of love, and then you also have things that are maybe more commercial in nature, so there’s quite a variety, although my feeling and maybe part of why I was drawn to it and we’ll talk soon about how it is that we came to work together, but it seemed like a lot of your work, whether it’s maybe fiction isn’t quite the right word, but a story versus documentary, it seemed like you really focused on the people, the characters, showing their lives, their environments. It feels like that’s a, it’s quite a theme, but at least I saw that across your portfolio, but.

00:06:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, always people ask what kind of films you like to do, but this question is hard for me to answer because there’s no genre I would like to be in or just one field, like I’m just a commercial producer or I just do documentaries or nature films.

My engine for motivation for filmmaking is always the story and what is behind it.

Like, for me, a story has to make sense, has to have an impact and has to be of a topic I find of relevance. So there has to be some kind of political or I would say, the value which a film contributes or puts to the screen that has something I share.

And at the same time, film can be an experimental way of pushing boundaries in fields you also find interesting or getting into topics you don’t know anything about, but you want to learn more about.

So I give one example. For example, I am producing a documentary about prison television station in a German high security prison. So I don’t know anything about prison. I’m lucky to not have been in one yet, but I was really curious how criminals Live in German high security prisons and how is their view on media and how do they consume media and what it would be if they produce an on television channel.

So, this changed my perspective. on how we in a society want to handle people who don’t follow the laws. And if you have been in a prison, you know what it’s like to be in there. So that’s a reflection I find very valuable for me.

00:08:19 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is filmmaking, perhaps obviously, and there’s two reasons for this. It might seem like a bit of a non sequitur compared to our usual world of product design and having ideas and so on, but There’s 2 layers here, 2 reasons to talk about this today. One is I’m really interested in the creative process.

Generally, I read a book some years back called Making Movies. I’ll link that in the show notes. I’ve even mentioned here before maybe, and I was really struck by how much similarity there is, not on the practical level of what you do in terms of how films are made. Shooting and getting actors together and things versus writing code, but that there’s a lot of similarities between making great software products and making films, where they have this pragmatic aspect as well as this artistic aspect as well as this team aspect. And so I thought it would be really interesting to dig into the creative process there and find those parallels. But the other reason is that we are doing a little experimental, let’s say a little launch of a small film project. That you and I worked together on Max along with a couple other folks on our film crew, to create a sort of mini documentary series about the creative process. So, just to briefly speak to that, that’s called Create. And I’ll link the launch memo, as well as the pilot episode here, and you can read all about why we wanted to do that, why we think that’s really relevant to Muse and our mission, but I thought it would be great to talk a little bit about the experience of working together on that and how we ended up at this final result.

00:09:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I was kind of surprised to be contacted by you because you’re an American company and I’m here.

Upcoming film producer, I just finished my study two years ago and building up my portfolio and I was not actively reaching out to people, but I’m open for, because I’m always also busy with other projects, but I find your reaching out to me very interesting because your product was something very cool because I use productivity apps myself as well and I’m not an iPad user, so I didn’t know Muse, but as I think I got a, a fast idea what it was about, and I was thinking to myself, OK, what kind of content would you want or need? Did you want something animated to like show what your app can do best? And I was Very happy to see that you wanted something bigger or wider than that. So that stands more for the core values or ask the question about what Muse stands for and how does branded content work? Because I share the idea that a good commercial is not always showing all the benefit of a specific product, but to Show what it stands for or what the idea is behind it. And I thought it was very powerful to search for creatives and people who have very unique ways of working and their own way of productivity and where do they have their source of, yeah, structure of energy, of creativity.

00:11:47 - Speaker 2: So it’s just a tad more context. I think what we wanted to do here, you mentioned the term branded content, which I think is kind of a film concept that I guess there’s what you would call traditional commercials, and so those are usually sleekly made, they’re usually 30 seconds, and they show, maybe there’s something clever or funny, but they show really directly.

Here’s this product, it exists, here’s why you might want it, you know, linked to a place you can download it or buy it or whatever, and those are fine. Certainly for the Muse brand generally, but also for me personally, I saw a more interesting opportunity, or at least for me more compelling than a classic advertisement was instead to take what we had learned through interviewing with really hundreds of creative professionals in our research lab days and now thousands that we’ve interacted with, maybe tens of thousands through our support channels and try to tell their stories. Cause it really struck me that, I mean, use exists because of this research that we did, of going to people who make things, create, call them knowledge workers, I usually go with creative professionals, but think people who make things and inspiring things to me, and try to understand how they work, and in particular, we, we narrowed in on the ideation process, that early stage is something that’s not really well supported by computers, and this is why Muse exists. And so the contents of those interviews, those early interviews are things that are all now essentially baked into the product, all the insights we got from those interviews. But as I speak to people individually and feel inspired by that, again, now just kind of through supporting our product naturally, but even if I flip back through the old interviews and review them, and I think there’s some amazing stories here and some amazing creators, what’s another way that we can share that stuff and film seemed like the right media for that.

00:13:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we are also still on the journey with the product because at the beginning, we said, OK, let’s talk to one or two people and we find the right one and we’ll do one shooting day and then we have our product.

Then on the way, we saw that we have to meet so much more people, have to prepare, like we have to get to know them a lot better before really deciding on.

They are the protagonists for our shooting day because we have just one shooting day. That’s a budget wise restriction or also, I think for this format, 5 minutes, 1 shooting day should be enough. And we have to kind of know the script before we shoot. So the script and a documentary portrait may seem kind of OK. This does not make sense, but It makes sense in a way that we need to know before what kind of facets of a specific person we want to show, because I think everyone has so much interesting stuff to tell, but for us and for this product, we need to condense it and also we need to find visually compelling situations that are not just someone sitting in his flat and talking to the camera, but also doing something and That with, I think a lot of your users are not people who build something with their hands, but also are programmers and people who have very static work environments, but they have also sites in their lives which are visually interesting if they do sports to clean out their head or something like that. So we had to find that with the protagonists.

00:15:26 - Speaker 2: Yes, so for me it was surprising that how much of your time, and particularly how much of the director, that’s Marcus Hannaish, how much of his time, and the cameraman, how much of their time was this, I guess, scoping locations to shoot, they would have things that were visually interesting, so that we can better relevant to the story that we want to tell.

So, clearly you got these protagonists, as we’re calling the subject of the film, they do inspiring work and you see that in the end result, but how they do that work doesn’t, I don’t know, if you’re filming athletes, for example, that’s a naturally very dynamic thing, or they’re out in nature or whatever, so how do we make visually interesting film out of this, and that was a big part of the film based or the visual storytelling that for me was totally new.

00:16:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is a good bridge to tell something about, because I’m the producer of this product, but this film was made with a lot of effort of Marcus, the director, and Jasper, the cameraman. And we also had more with our sound designer and music composer. So I wanted maybe to share something about how this team came together because my process from starting at the beginning was to propose several directors to you because I thought it would be interesting to get Different ways of thinking how this format could work. So I looked in my bubble kind of what are the directors I know or I heard of which are interesting.

00:16:59 - Speaker 2: In the tech world we’d say your network.

00:17:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in my network.

I just didn’t find the word but yeah network bubble, yeah, and I contacted them and I pitched the idea and then I wanted them to not know everything about our product, but to come up with something, a visual world, storytelling, a kind of a style. Even if it’s kind of similar, every director has its style and he has work he can show which reflects the style, but he also can look for skills for images which could go in the direction of what we want to produce and You liked what Marcus was doing and that was a very good coincidence for me because I worked with him before on a short film and also with the cameraman. So we were a good team already because that’s also a very big thing in film industry is the creative trust. That we know how the other works and what the other needs for his work, how much time and how much feedback and how much input a director and a cameraman need and how a producer can work with them. It’s always new to find out and every relationship is so different, but this was very good for me and I think for the product that we already knew each other and knew how to Work together.

00:18:25 - Speaker 2: Creative trust is absolutely something that’s necessary in making great software products as well. I mean, I think part of why certainly Mark and I are working together on this venture as well as Julia. We had all worked together before, we know we work well together and when we had a new product we wanted to pursue through a new venture, you could say we de-risked, but you’re just excited to work again with someone that you know you have that working chemistry with.

One interesting piece of the story here as well is it should be noted that of course we’re not a venture funded startup with a lot of money to spend on some kind of slick production, so we were looking for something we could really do on a shoestring budget, and I had kind of assumed we’d be able to, or what I was looking for actually when I went searching was someone who was kind of all in one, right? Someone who could film and produce and do the software editing and I don’t know, we could talk about some of the software tools after effects and That sort of thing if we want, but that exists now, particularly with the YouTube world of things. There are people who are all in one, and of course, if you’re a generalist, you can’t be great at each individual thing, but you can make something pretty solid. And you, when I approached you and said, I like your work, and you pitched me on, look, we can get a crew, probably helps a lot that we’re here in Berlin, which increasingly does have a pretty impressive film scene, I think a lot of things like Queen’s Gambit was shot here, a lot of other Netflix films, some of the Apple stuff like the foundation series. was shot here, but also probably in general, just wages overall are sort of a bit lower than they would be in, I don’t know, let’s say California. And so all of that means that probably we can shoot. More cheaply than we would in other places.

But you convinced me, look, I think you’ll be better off with the crew. I can get a crew together, we shoot it in one day, we can do it on a budget that’s within reach for us, and the quality and the professionalism and just the power of the story you can tell will be much better, and I was compelled by that, which is why we went forward with that.

00:20:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a big strength of mine is when I can tell it like that, that I have worked in so many different fields of work from a documentary style, really a one or two film team to a big set of up to 100 people.

And each product in the end was good, but you have to find out what is necessary and what it means. And I think there’s a difference between the One guy who films, does the concept, edits, of course, he can do with a budget of something.

For him, it’s so much more, but he does not have the reflection with someone else to really come up with a high concept and a high visual concept.

And if you put together director and cameraman, even those two people, they work and discuss a visual style for this product. And if you put in A sound designer and music composer, you have someone really taking care of the sound level, which often is falling under the table.

But for me, it was pretty clear, OK, we need someone like that to, because we have a small production crew, the sound will be kind of rough, recorded. We need someone who cleans it at the end and to just a little bit of sound design, mixing and composing. So we have audio that you really Like and which has a production value in the end.

Film is doing art. Also, if it’s for a company or like for a brand, it still is an artistic way of working and of course, you could have find someone who really sees it as just the product, but for me, even so, it’s always searching for an artistic, unique piece and not something. Which repeats something already, which already exists. I like to really create and that’s also the title of this, create something new, which each piece I do produce and collaborate with others.

00:22:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this idea of creative energy is really important, and it’s one of the reasons I was so excited about this series.

We’ve talked on this podcast before about how creative or entrepreneurial act is so unnatural, and you really need some impetus and reason to do it. And obviously, you’re discussing how that’s the case for you, even for a project like this.

But also with the series, my hope is that it causes a sort of creative contagion, where when you see someone Doing beautiful, inspirational work, you are more inclined to do it yourself.

And I think we are sometimes reluctant to admit how big of a factor that is. And you can see this in practice because there are these huge creative clusters like San Francisco and Berlin, where if you are there, or increasingly the equivalent virtual ones, you’re just much more likely to be doing that sort of creative work. So I’m hoping we can get some of that contagion going with the series.

00:23:17 - Speaker 1: What really was a discovery for me, producing or researching the protagonist, we were sometimes going in the direction, OK, let’s search for the most renowned or most famous artist or programmer or whatever person we know, which could be an interesting protagonist.

But on the way, we also thought, OK, let’s search for the more regular guy or regular women and We talked to so many different people and everyone seemed like kind of a small superhero when we got to know them.

Even if they are not well known, they are at the beginning of their professional career, they are a freelancer, just earning their money by doing their job, but also they have such unique And interesting styles and way of working and how to re-energize themselves in their private life and how to balance themselves.

These are also important questions for my own life because work-life balance always problematic in the film industry, but Besides that, I was just so compelled by what these people said, so that I thought, this is kind of the gold piece.

If we can, in the series, get something to really get to know the guy or the women around the corner and search for their unique magic in their work. What’s so unique about their work and how they do it. And each episode shows a little different side, a little different angle of someone’s work. And that adds something to your own view on your own work and on your collaboration with your colleagues. And that would be something I would really love to achieve with a series like that.

00:25:12 - Speaker 3: This is one of the reasons why I love the maker biography genre, which is a term that at least Adam and I have given to these studies of individual creative lives, because when you look at an individual life, and you look not just at their eventual accomplishments and triumphs, but the whole process, it’s this incredible fractal, detailed, ultimately beautiful thing where there’s all these, you know, struggles and you know syncrasies and weird ups and downs and weird habits and stuff and That’s something you can only get if you look at an individual life. If you zoom out to all people who, you know, paint stuff, what are you gonna say, oh, you know, they study colors and they put stuff on a canvas and some of it’s good, you know, but if you look at the individual, you learn about their studio and their upbringing and how they got inspired and their individual subjects, it’s so rich. So I’m a big fan of this genre.

00:25:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Mark, I think you coined the term, or at least as far as I know, the Maker biography, but maybe it was when we were speaking about that I kind of had discovered this what felt like a genre of book, but I guess it’s just biographies about people who start companies or do science or make art, and it’s really not just about seeing that final piece that final result of their work, which you may already know if they are someone famous, but actually the process how they get there.

So for example, I read a biography of Charles Darwin. Recently that kind of talked about his, you know, life journey. I’ve read a lot of famous scientists biographies, but there’s also entrepreneurs and product creators, so there’s something like there’s an autobiography by the Pixar founder and CEO, super interesting story there, or there’s a biography of Ruth Handler, who started Mattel, and basically invented the Barbie, has a really interesting entrepreneurial life and journey.

So there’s a number of these, but to me it’s the behind the scenes. It’s the struggles they went through, the false starts, the uncertainty that they experienced along the way.

It’s that journey, and that is so inspiring to me because I’ve been through that journey, obviously not on the scale of success of those folks I just mentioned, but they’re similar, right? And that’s part of what we’re hoping to get in this series is. You watch each of these individual ones and even if these folks do very different work from whatever your particular discipline is, you see something similar in their journey or as much of it as we can show in the 4 minutes or so we have budget to film.

00:27:33 - Speaker 1: What I would be curious because we kind of also want to find the similarities or differences between filmmaking and the tech industry and your software programming.

I think a lot of your work is also to reflect the product and ask the people how do they find it, how you can make it better and You really always updated your product and with the film, it’s always or mostly a finished product and then you get the feedback.

Sometimes you have the money and the effort to get a test screening and of course you have feedback loops before, but if we would proceed this series, I would very much be interested in what the viewers say about it and what would be protagonists or Jobs or what kind of fields of work people would like to dive into or what kind of facet they really love and what not to really like put these way of work from your field a little bit more into the filmmaking world and because that was really interesting in the The way you worked with me, it was so different with how I worked with clients or with, like, sometimes the client is more the director or other producer and you are the production team. And I really love to experience a different style of collaboration, always so easily technical, organized and very much on point and very structured. It’s something I really sometimes miss in my everyday work and talks and discussions, which sometimes get out of hand and never ends, you know.

00:29:20 - Speaker 3: It’s interesting that you have this inspiration from how software is built and technology firms operated. I think Adam and I have drawn a lot of inspiration from how film is produced.

So typically with software, you would have a big standing firm that has a bunch of full-time staff who are hired for 2 to 4 years or whatever, and those people would build a series of products, and that’s one way you can do things, but I’ve always been fascinated by what Adam is termed the Hollywood model, which is you have these loose networks of people who each other to varying degrees because they’ve worked on projects together in the past. And then when you have a new project to work on, you bring together a team just in time around that particular product, and you work on it for some weeks or months, and then the team disbands, and you have some stronger or weaker connections based on that, but you will reform with different people for subsequent projects.

And I’ve always thought that that’s a very interesting model to play with in the software world, and Adam in fact did some of that with the lab, but you can think of it more generally as a sort of continuum where on the one hand you have the fully salaried standing firm where people are there forever, and the other hand you have like whatever these gig sites are, where you hire people to do one hour of work, and playing with that continuum, you get different trade-offs, and I think it’d be worth people on software learning more from how the film industry operates more dynamically in terms of staffing. And also, by the way, in terms of hiring, the way you hire in film, as I understand it, is it’s based on your portfolio and then an audition or equivalent, right? Whereas the way typically you’re hired in tech is based on your resume. Can you imagine hiring someone for your film project based on like, I don’t know, where they went to school or something, it doesn’t make any sense. You would look at their portfolio and then you have them do an audition. And again, I think that’s something that we can and should learn from in software.

00:31:09 - Speaker 2: I’ll just add on to that that, you know, we mentioned the networks earlier and you see this often if you look at the film credits or even more dramatically famous directors like ah Christopher Nolan or something, you know, they often have many of the same actors will show up in subsequent films, even though those films don’t have anything to do with each other in the sense that they’re not sequels or part of the same.

Cinematic universe, but that director likes to work with this actor, and you see that also if you go and look at the credits, you see they’ll often have the same camera people and producers and costume and lighting people because again they have that network, those people they’ve worked with in the past that they know they have a good relationship with, or they think this person would be great, you know, I know this camera person is really good at the kind of wide angle shots that I need for this film, so I’m going to call them in on this. And so you get these loose networks, but it’s not the, I’m signing a contract to be full time and work nowhere else at this one firm for the next 4 years, 10 years longer. It’s a very different model.

00:32:11 - Speaker 3: And by the way, I think it’s not just different or interesting cause it’s unique. I think you could argue it’s empirically more successful.

So let’s go back to the world of software engineering management. You see people say, oh, you know, it’s a super creative project, it’s very risky, it involves all these different functions and by the way, a bunch of these people are total personalities, you can’t manage them. There’s no way you could bring together 5 or 10 people to build such a thing with any amount of certainty or predictability.

But then you look at movies and they have these $100 million dollar things involving thousands of people, hundreds of different disciplines all the time. There’s something that they figured out there about how to bring together these incredibly complex and creative endeavors with some amount of predictable success, not obviously not all movies work out, but they mostly all ship at least, and then a lot of them do work out, and that’s much more than we can say for even much more moderately scoped software projects. So again, I think there’s something to be learned there.

00:33:03 - Speaker 1: It’s really awesome to listen to you because it’s so much reflects on what I’ve been through the last month with my future project because there were a lot of individuals and amazing film will come out of it, but it’s always a struggle and it’s always a risk and you need someone or more people than one. To bundle them together because a lot of creative potential is also everyone goes in their direction. Everyone wants to get out everything they see and want, but you all have to put it in one pro, come back to product, but into one film.

And usually it’s the director who makes that creative choice and the producer who makes the choice financially, organizationally with that, but also on a creative level and For me, I’m kind of the manager of a lot of creative and disruptive people and I have to keep them together so that a film will come out which works and that’s such a complex.

Thing to do, but I think if you find out what are the people, the players I need to put together to really get a dynamic here with the product, also in your field that you say, OK, I need this programmer with this designer and Together with them and the right vision, we can build something.

I think it’s very similar with film production.

We all work at the end of what’s possible, and we want to go beyond, and you have to have a big understanding. Of the creative vision of everyone in your team to really know how I can handle those people and if you can, then you can really do an awesome film. Otherwise, it’s just a mediocre product and it will maybe work. And I would not say I’ve accomplished that fully, but I think that’s something if you really can do that, put the right people together with the right vision and know how to put them together and when to say something and when to go to script development, the very beginning of like a, a feature film, for example, or a pitch paper with a commercial project. It’s always the question, how much more rounds you need to go, how much further you can push it. And then you need to know the other person of how far I can push him or he can push me back with what he wants for his realization of something.

00:35:39 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I don’t want to pull too much into the industrial organization of film versus software, but one other point I’ll make here is that I do think another thing software can learn from this multidisciplinary person who’s responsible for pulling together and synthesizing and software you obviously have that with founders at new companies, that’s their job by default, but it’s often missing in larger firms where you have The product person and the engineering person, the design person, but there’s really no one who’s necessarily responsible for pulling it all together, and I think that ends up typically being a mistake. And one thing I like about the world of film is that there is that director and producer role, obviously in the biggest films, but even in the smallest 234 person operations, you still expect such a person to be that synthesizer, and I just think it’s really important.

00:36:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so that’s to compare to our little kind of miniature crew here, that’s the role you have Max. You’re the producer, your job is to make sure everything fits together, it works. There’s obviously nuts and bolts elements like can we do this on time and on budget and does everyone show up at the right time and all that sort of thing, the herding of cats, sometimes we call it in the software industry.

Whereas Marcus, the director, he’s more about the visual style and maybe some of the creative elements, the camera person is focused on maybe some of the particular shots and particular visuals, but I certainly would say, I mean, you talked before about describing yourself as a creative producer. It is a very creative role because I think making all those pieces fit together holistically.

The trains run on time, hurting the cat stuff is how you get there, but the end result, like you said, if it’s something magical that fits together really well, that conveys a strong story versus being a grab bag of everyone’s weird ideas that don’t. Fit together well, which is very easy to happen when you get together a bunch of creative, opinionated people that all have their own agenda, their own ideas, maybe very good ideas, but if those ideas don’t fit together in a way that makes sense or in a way that’s practical, you don’t get a good end result.

00:37:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we should not talk small the organizational part because I just experienced it with my last project where I was working a lot in the organizational side as a production manager. To be detailed and to really have everything there you need for the film set, sometimes 40 people wait because you don’t have a shovel and you are in the forest and you need the shovel to dig a hole and everyone is there, everyone is on time.

The creative vision is there and everyone functions, but the shovel is not there and you are in the remote location in the forest and Everyone gets crazy.

People drive from the set to the next store to buy it. People from the office drive to the next store to buy it at the end, they shot something without a shovel because they came up with a new idea.

You know what I mean? To be detailed, to be on point is. Also very important in film production. You can’t be lazy or forget something because if you forget to record something, to do it in post is not the easy sentence to say.

Some people joke about it and say, oh, let’s do it in post. We didn’t manage to do it here, but the people who have to do it in post, it’s crazy, much effort to do something in the post-production. You really missed by an easy thing on set, on shoot. So, I think it’s really also important for film industry to be very detailed and the groundwork needs to function.

00:39:10 - Speaker 2: Let me return to a point you were making earlier there, Max, about learning from kind of how the software world works and how we brought a little bit into the Create series, and this is actually a bit of a call to action for the listeners here.

So in the software world, we typically do betas. And certainly the way the muse does it, I try to do it on every product I work on, which is whenever you make a new thing, a new feature, a new capability that you treat it as an experiment with kind of the default is the null hypothesis. People won’t want or need this feature, and you should just remove it.

And the best way to do that. If it’s kind of a beta that is not part of the shipped product that people can opt into, they can try it and then you find out pretty quickly, is this something really useful that becomes a key part of someone’s workflow and then you can and should roll it into the finished product, or sometimes it turns out it falls a little flat and you decide to change it, or maybe even just cut it out in the beta, for example. So that’s a little bit what we’re trying to do with create.

So you can think of this pilot episode here as kind of a beta. And we wanna put it out to our audience here. I hope everyone listening will go watch it, as well as read the memo about some of the motivations, and tell us, is this something you’d like to see more episodes of. And I certainly hope the answer is yes, because not only because it was enjoyable to make, but also I think the power of the series actually would come from seeing multiple types of creators and seeing the similarities, seeing the patterns across them. That’s what we get through our user research, we’ve spoken to so many of these folks, and so seeing that even if there’s a brand designer and an architect and a writer, that they share a lot in terms of how they at least come up with their ideas. So I’m hoping that we will be able to continue, but we want to get folks feedback so you can think of this first pilot as kind of an early beta, and basically you should watch it and send us your feedback, as well as help us find new protagonists.

So, the way that we looked for subjects for the film was largely through our own networks a little bit, as well as trying to keep it local here, just so we could not need to send the film crew anywhere far away.

But now that we have this first episode out and you can kind of see what we’re trying to do here, we’d like to put the call out to our audience to say, who do you know that would be awesome to profile here? And they could be a muse user, we’d like some of them to be, they don’t necessarily have to be, and maybe we’ll do a mix, but whatever it is, they should do something inspiring and interesting.

Maybe there’s something interesting about their personal story, and as you said, you know, we spoke to a number of folks to be protagonists for this first pilot, and every one of them, as you said, in their own way, they’re the hero of their own story, and they were inspiring to speak to and see not only the work they create, but how they create it. So we’re looking forward to finding more folks like that and so the calls to action for the audience here is not just, should we continue this series, but who else should we feature. Well, before we wrap up, I always like to be a little future facing. So Max, if we do get the chance to work on more episodes of this series together, what did you learn, what did we learn together on the pilot that you think we would do a little differently for future episodes?

00:42:22 - Speaker 1: Thanks for asking and I really hope that we have the opportunity to do more episodes.

In the beginning, when you come up with the idea or you come with the idea to me, I calculate it, I try to schedule it, I try to schedule the time of everyone and how we produce it and now I would do it in a different way to have more time with the research, maybe to even have a person or someone who dedicates itself if we do 5 or 10 more episodes, so we can meet 20 to 40 people which are already pre-selected. And to do the interviews we did, I think this is very important to have the preparation time and to have enough time and space to plan and produce the script for it. I think.

Also, I would like to work more on a unique theme for like a musical sound design theme for this kind of series which you can recognize it too, but this also needs more time and, yeah, more energy to work on. And that would be two things I would say spontaneously that we would do differently. What about you?

00:43:41 - Speaker 2: For me, a big surprise was definitely how much the protagonist search, not just the initial kind of coming up with people we could speak to and having those initial conversations, but really the process of explaining to them what we wanted to do, trying to suss out what their story was, which of course is, you know, for a stranger, near stranger to them.

Then they’re exposing things about their personal life and how they work and so forth, so that we can then evaluate what sort of narrative arc would come out of that, and so there was sort of a trust building process that we were going to make something interesting and worthwhile to spend their time, and so, yeah, all of that ended up taking quite a lot of time.

We spoke to some really great people and got pretty far in the process with many of them, but yeah, surprising amount of the time and energy was spent on that, but in a way, you see how it pays off, right, with a documentary piece, you know, we’re well literally documenting the life and the work of someone, and so they’re finding the right subject, finding the right protagonist is huge, right? That’s the center of it. If you have someone great, that’s your Source material and from there you can build a good narrative and you can make it visually interesting and so on. And so really giving some good time to that.

But I feel like we learned better how to do it through this process. If we were doing more episodes, we could do them in parallel. I think we just learned a lot of the process of how you build that relationship, find the story, and then build up to that filming day, which is really asking quite a lot of the person who’s being featured.

00:45:17 - Speaker 1: What I just thought of while you were talking is that the core strength of it is that it’s authentic, that, that’s real people, even if we try to condense what we want to tell about their life, about their work, it’s real and they didn’t rehearse it with us.

So the time we spend with getting to know them is also a key element to the success of it later. So they trust us.

They trust us coming in their life, showing their children, showing their workspace, showing their raw, unfinished work.

I think to build that kind of trust with the protagonists is very important and I think with Katherine, our first protagonist, we got that far. She really opened up to us. She told about her past, she showed her kids, she really opened up and I think that’s important to keep for future episodes.

00:46:14 - Speaker 2: Yeah, very well said, and of course a huge thanks to Katherine for going out a limb on us a little bit, especially now at least we have a pilot episode, we could show future protagonists and they know sort of what they’re getting into, but she showed a lot of trust and spent a lot of time with us for something quite unknown, and yeah, absolutely, building that relationship, it’s a partnership between the protagonist, you and your film crew, and the Muse team and me who, you know, have something we want to express through this medium.

00:46:43 - Speaker 1: And I think the best case would be that the protagonist as an, I don’t know, artist and a programmer, I don’t know what kind of work he does, but gets something out of this video production as well, that he thinks he is portrayed well and he’s respected well and that he’s eager to show it to his friends or even put it on his website as, hey, that’s how I work and That would be the best case scenario. I don’t think we will achieve it with all protagonists, but that’s something I would really like that they are proud to share it and feel respected with it and their work is respectfully shown.

00:47:25 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, you can write us on Twitter at UAHQ or via email hello and Musapp.com. Help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Max, it was a real pleasure to work with you, get an inside view on how film was made, particularly for a person with prodigious talents such as yourself, and I very much hope we get the opportunity to continue the series and continue to document the lives of inspiring makers.

00:47:56 - Speaker 1: Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Mark.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: And I feel like this idea of really changes the abstractions that operating systems should provide because maybe OSs should not just be providing this model of files as a sequence of bytes, but this higher level CRDT like model and how does that impact the entire way how software is developed.

00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and joined today by Martin Klutman from the University of Cambridge. Hello. And we talked before about Mark’s dabbling in playing the piano. I understand this is a hobby you’re starting to look into as well, Martin.

00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Oh yes, I’ve been playing the piano, like trying to do it a bit more consistently for the last year and a half or so. My lockdown projects.

00:00:57 - Speaker 2: And do you have a technique for not annoying your neighbors, or is this an electronic piano, or how do you do that?

00:01:03 - Speaker 1: It’s an electric piano, although I don’t think it’s too bad for the neighbors. Lately I’ve been trying to learn a WBC 400 piece that I can play together with my wife, so she’ll play two hands and I’ll play the other two.

00:01:15 - Speaker 2: Nice. I suspect a lot of our listeners know you already, Martin. I think you’re within your small, narrow niche, you’re a pretty high profile guy, but for those that don’t, it’d be great to hear a little bit about your background. What brought you on the journey to the topic we’re gonna talk about today?

00:01:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I’m a computer scientist, I guess. I started out as an entrepreneur and started two startups some years ago. I ended up at LinkedIn through the acquisition of the 2nd startup. And they worked on large scale stream processing with Apache Kafka and was part of that sort of stream processing world for a while. And then I wanted to share what I had learned about building large scale distributed data systems. And so I then took some time out to write a book which is called Designing Data Intensive Applications, which has turned out to be surprisingly popular.

00:02:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you wrote a nice kind of tell-all, you showed the numbers on it, which it’s been financially successful for you, but also one of the more popular O’Reilly books just by kind of copy sold in recent times. I like that post, like the candor there, but yeah, it makes you a pretty successful author, right?

00:02:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s sold over 100,000 copies, which is, wow, way more than what I was expecting for something that it’s a pretty technical, pretty niche book, really.

But the goal of the book really is to help people figure out what sort of storage technologies and data processing technologies are appropriate for their particular use case. So it’s a lot about the trade-offs and the pros and cons of different types of systems. And there’s not a whole lot on that sort of thing out there, you know, there’s a lot of sort of vendor talk hyping the capabilities of their particular database or whatever it might be, but not so much on this comparison between different approaches. So that’s what my book tries to provide.

Yeah, and then after writing that book, I sort of slipped into academia, sort of half by accident, half by design. So I then found a job at the University of Cambridge where I could do research full time. And since then I’ve been working on what we have come to call the first software, which we’re going to talk about today. The nice thing there is that now then academia compared to the startup world, I have the freedom to work on really long term ideas, big ideas which might take 5 or 10 years until they turn into like viable technologies that might be used in everyday software development. But if they do work, they’ll be really impactful and really important and so I’m enjoying that freedom to work on really long term things now as an academic.

00:03:53 - Speaker 2: And certainly it struck me when we got the chance to work together through these Ink & Switch projects that because you have both the commercial world, including startup founder, but obviously you’re very immersed in the academic kind of machinery now and again just that long-term mindset and thinking about creating public goods and all that sort of thing. And I found that I actually really like now working with people that have both of those. Another great example there would be another former podcast guest Jeffrey Litt. He was also in the startup world, now he’s doing academic work at MIT.

00:04:26 - Speaker 1: Yes, and I’m actually doing a project with him right now, right, I forgot about that.

00:04:29 - Speaker 2: There’s a current Ink & Switch project there.

So I find that maybe if you live your whole life in one of those two kind of commercial slash industry or academia, you get like a fish doesn’t know what water is kind of thing, but if you have experienced both models, then it’s easier to know the pros and cons and understand the shape of the venue you’re doing your work in in the end.

The point is to have some meaningful impact on humanity through your work, whatever small piece of the world you hope you’re making better. In our case, it’s computer things, but that the venue you’re in is not the point, that’s just a vehicle for getting to where you want to go, and each of these styles of venue have different trade-offs, and being aware of those maybe makes it easier to have your work have an impact.

00:05:19 - Speaker 1: Yes, I think it is really helpful to have seen both sides and I find it allows me to be a little bit more detached from the common mindset that you get like in every domain you get, you know, there are certain things that everyone believes, but you know, they’re kind of unspoken, maybe not really written down either. And so like in academia, that’s like the publishing culture and the competitiveness of publication venues and that sort of stuff, which seems ridiculous to outsiders. But if you’re in it, you kind of get accustomed to it.

And likewise in startups, it’s like the hype to be constantly selling and marketing and promoting what you’re doing to the max crushing it, always crushing it, exactly, and to an outsider that seems really. it’s kind of a ridiculous show that people put on frankly.

But to an insider, you know, you just get used to it and that’s just your everyday life. I find that having seen both makes me a bit more detached from both of them and I don’t know, maybe I see a little bit more through the bullshit.

00:06:21 - Speaker 2: So as you hinted, our topic today is local first software.

So this is an essay that I’ll link to in the show notes. It’s about 2 years old, and notably there’s 4 authors on this paper, 3 of them are here, kind of almost a little reunion, and actually the 4th author, Peter van Hardenberg, we hope to have on as a future guest.

But I thought it would be really fun to not only kind of summarize what that philosophy is, particularly because we’re actively pursuing that for the Muse sinking persistence model, but also to look at sort of what we’ve learned since we published that essay and revisiting a little bit. What do we wish we’d put in, how’s the movement, if that’s the right word for it, how’s that evolved, what have we learned in that time? But I guess before getting into all that, maybe Martin, you can give us the elevator pitch, if I’m to reference the startup terminology, the brief summary of what is local first software.

00:07:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, local first software is a reaction to cloud software and so with cloud software, I mean things like Google Docs, where you have a browser window and you type into it and you can share it really easily. You can have several people contributing to a document really easily, you can send it for comments. Very easily and so on. So, it has made collaboration a ton easier, but it’s come at a great cost to our control and our ownership of the data, because whenever you’re using some cloud software, the data is stored on the cloud provider servers, like Google servers, for example. And you know, as users, we are given access to that data temporarily.

Until that day where Google suddenly decides to lock your account and you are locked out of all of the documents that you ever created with Google Docs, or until the startup software as a service product you’re using, suddenly goes bust and decides to shut down their product with 2 weeks' notice and maybe allows you to download a zip file full of JSON files as your data export. And I find that tragic because as creative people, we put a ton of effort, time and our souls and really our personalities into the things that we create. And so much now the things that we create are computer-based things, you know, whether you’re writing the script for a play or whether you’re negotiating a contract or whether you’re doing any sort of endeavor, it’s probably a file on a computer somewhere. And if that file is in some cloud software, then there’s always this risk that it might disappear and that you might lose access to it. And so what we try to do with local first software is to articulate a vision for the future where that does not happen, where We have the same convenience that we have with cloud software that is we have the same ability to do real-time collaboration. It’s not back to the old world of sending files back and forth by email. We still want the same real-time collaboration that we get with Google Docs, but at the same time we also want the files stored. On our own computers. Because if there are files on our own computers, then nobody can take them away. They are there, we can back them up ourselves. We can optionally back them up to a cloud service if we want to. There’s nothing wrong with using a cloud service as long as the software still continues working without the cloud service. Moreover, we want the software to continue working offline so that if you’re working on a plane or working on a train that’s going through a tunnel or whatever, the software should just continue to work. And we want better security and privacy because we don’t want cloud services scanning through the content of all of our files. I think for creativity, it’s important to have that sense of privacy and ownership over your workspace. And so those are some of the ideas that we try to encapsulate in this idea of local first software. So how can we try to have the best of both worlds of the convenience of cloud software. But the data ownership of having the files locally on your own device.

00:10:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, the core of it is really agency and much of the value of cloud, and I think there’s a version of this also for mobile apps, let’s say and app stores and that sort of thing, which is not what we’re addressing in the paper, but maybe there’s a theme in computing that we’ve made computers vastly more accessible by In many cases, taking agency from people, and that’s actually a good thing in many cases, right? You don’t need to defrag your hard drive anymore. You lose your device, your email, and your photos and all those things are still in this cloud that’s managed by experiencedmins and product managers and so forth at companies like Google and So forth, and they can often do a better job of it in a lot of cases than an individual can. I mean, I think of managing my own email servers, SMTP servers, years back and needing to deal with data backup and spam filtering and all that kind of thing, and Gmail came along and I was just super happy to outsource the problem to them.

Absolutely. They did a better job managing it.

So I think that’s basically in many ways a good trend or as a net good in the world, and I don’t think we feel like we necessarily want to go back to everyone needs to do more of those data management tasks, but I think for the area of creative tools or more, I guess you call them power users, but it’s like you said, if you’re writing a play, that’s just a very different kind of interaction with a computer than the average person doing some calendar and email and messaging.

Yeah, maybe they want different trade-offs. It’s worth doing a little bit more management and taking a little more ownership to get that greater agency over something like, yeah, my work product, the script of my play or my master thesis or whatever it is that I’m working on is something that really belongs to me and I want to put a little extra effort to have that ownership.

00:12:08 - Speaker 1: Right, exactly. And I feel like it’s not reasonable to expect everyone to be a sys admin and to set up their own services, you know, you get this self-hosted cloud software, but most of it is far too technical for the vast majority of users, and that’s not where we want to go with this.

I think you still want exactly the same kind of convenience of clouds software that, you know, it just works out of the box and you don’t have to worry about the technicalities of how it’s set up.

But one part of local first software is that because all of the interesting app specific work happens client side on your own device, it now means that the cloud services that you do use for syncing your data, for backing up your data, and so the cloud services become generic. And so you could imagine Dropbox or Google Drive or AWS or some other big cloud provider just giving you a syncing service for local first apps.

And the way we’re thinking about this, you could have one generic service that could be used as the syncing infrastructure for many different pieces of software.

So regardless of whether the software is a text editor or a spreadsheet or a CAD application for designing industrial products or music software or whatever it might be, all of those different apps. Could potentially use the same backup and syncing infrastructure in the cloud, and you can have multiple cloud providers that are compatible with each other and you could just switch from one to the other.

So at that point, then it just becomes like, OK, who do you pay 6 cents a month to in order for them to store your data, it becomes just a very generic and fungible service. And so that’s what I see makes actually the cloud almost more powerful. Because it removes the lock-in that you have from, you have to use a single, the, the cloud service provided by the software offer. Instead, you could switch from one cloud provider to another very easily and you still retain the property that you’re using all of the cloud providers' expertise in providing a highly available service and you don’t have to do any admin yourself. It’s not like running your own SMTP server. So I feel like this is a really promising direction that local first software enables.

00:14:24 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, indeed, and you could even describe local first software, I think, as sort of generalizing and distributing the capabilities of the different nodes.

So in the classic cloud model, you have these thin clients, they can dial into the server and render whatever the server tells them. And then you have the servers and they can store data and process it and return to clients and when you have both of those at the same time, you know, it works great, but then if you’re a client like you said, who’s in a tunnel, well too bad you can’t do anything, and the local first model is more that any node in that system can do anything, it can. Process the data, I can validate it, it can store it, it can communicate it, it can sync it, and then you can choose what kind of typologies you want. So it might be that you just want to work alone in your tunnel, or it might be that you want to subscribe to a cloud backup service that does the synchronization storage part for you while you still maintain the ability to process and render data locally. This actually gets to how I first got into what we’re now calling local first software. I was in a coffee shop with Peter Ben Hartenberg, who’s one of the other authors that Adam mentioned. And we’re talking about working together at the lab when he was a principal there, he’s now the director, and he showed me the pixel pusher prototype. So Pixel Pusher was this Pixel art app where you color individual pictures to make a kind of retrographic thing, and it was real time collaborative, but the huge thing was that there was no server, so that you had this one code base and this one app, and you got real time collaboration. Across devices, and that was the moment that I realized, you know, I was a fish in the cloud infrastructure water and I didn’t realize it. Just assumed, oh, you need servers and AWS need a whole ops team, you’re gonna be running that for the rest of your life, it’s the whole thing. Well, actually, no, you could just write the app and point at the other laptop and there you go. And we eventually kind of realized all these other benefits that we would eventually articulate as the desiderao property to the local for software article, but that was the thing that really actually kicked it off for me.

00:16:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and that’s aspect that the apps become really self-contained and that you just don’t have a server anymore, or if you have a server, it’s like a really simple and generic thing. You don’t write a specific server just for your app anymore. That’s something that I’m not sure we really explored very well in the local first asset as it was published, but I’ve been continuing to think about that since, you know, this has really profound implications for the economics of software development.

Because right now, as you said, like if you’re a startup and you want to provide some SAS product, you need your own ops team that is available 24/7 with one pager duty so that when the database starts running slow or a node falls over and you need to reboot something or whatever, you know, there’s just all this crap that you have to deal with, which makes it really. to provide cloud software because you need all of these people on call and you need all of these people to write these scalable cloud services and it’s really complicated, as evidenced by my book, a lot of which is basically like, oh crap, how do I build a scalable cloud service.

And with local first software, potentially that problem simply goes away because you’ve just got each local client which just rights to storage on its own local hard disk. You know, there are no distributed systems problems to deal with, no network time outs and so on. You just write some data locally and then you have this syncing code which you just use an open source library like automerge, which will do the data syncing between your device and maybe a cloud service and maybe the other services. And the server side is just non-existent. And you’ve just like removed the entire backend team from the cost of developing a product and you don’t have the ops team problem anymore because you’re using some generic service provided by some other cloud provider. And you know, that has the potential to make the development of collaborative software so much cheaper. Which then in turn will mean that we get more software developed by smaller teams, faster, it’ll improve the competitiveness of software development in general, like it seems to have so many positive effects once you start thinking it through.

00:18:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. For me, yeah, maybe similar to both of you, my motivations were, well, both as a user and as a, let’s say a software creator or provider on the user side, we have these 7 different points we articulate and I think you can, in fact, we even set it.

Up this way is you can give yourself a little scorecard and see which of the boxes you tick. It’ll be fun to do that for the muse syncing service when that’s up and running, but the offline capability is a huge one to me, and it’s not just the convenience. I mean, yeah, it’s.

Every time I’m working on the train and my train goes through a tunnel, and suddenly I can’t type into my documents anymore, for example, or I don’t know, I like to go more remote places to work and have solitude, but then I can’t load up Figma or whatever else, and Yeah, that for me as a user is just this feeling of it comes back to the loss of agency, but also just practically it’s just annoying and you know we assume always on internet connections, but I wonder how much that is because the software engineers are people sitting in office. Or maybe now at home in San Francisco on fast internet connections with always connected devices versus kind of the more realities of life walking around in this well connected but not perfectly so world we all live in. That’s on the user side.

00:19:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like there’s a huge bias there towards like, oh, it’s fine, we can assume everyone always has an internet connection because yes, we happen to be that small segment of the population that does have a reliable internet connection most of the time. There’s so many situations in which you simply can’t assume that and that might be anything from a farmer working on their fields using an app to manage what they’re doing to their crops and something like that and you know, they won’t necessarily have reliable cellular data coverage even in industrialized countries, let alone in other parts of the world where you just can’t assume that sort of level of network infrastructure at all.

00:20:17 - Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it’s funny you mention this because we often run into this on the summits that we have for Muse. So we were recently in rural France and we had pretty slow internet, especially on upload. I think it was a satellite connection, and we always had this experience where there are 4 of us sitting around a table and you’re looking at each other, but you can’t, you know, send files around cause it needs to go to, you know, whatever, Virginia and come all the way back.

00:20:43 - Speaker 1: It’s crazy if you think about it, it’s ridiculous.

00:20:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I don’t think you even need to reach as far as a farmer or a team summit at a remote location.

I had a kitchen table in the house I lived in right before this one that was like a perfect place to sit and work with my laptop, but the location of the refrigerator, which it really couldn’t be any other place, just exactly blocked path to my router, and the router couldn’t really be any other place.

I guess I could run a wire or something, but I really wanted to sit right there and work. But again, it’s this ridiculous thing where you can’t even put a character into a document and I could pick up the laptop and walk a meter to the left, and now suddenly I can type again and you can be that to something like. G, which does have more of a local is probably one of the closest thing the true local first software where you can work and yes, you need an internet connection to share that work with others, but you’re not stopped from that moment to moment typing things into your computer.

00:21:38 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and furthermore, from the implementation perspective, even when you have a very fast internet connection, you’re still dealing with this problem.

So if I’m using an app and I type in a letter on my keyboard, between the time when I do that and when the round trip happens with the AWS server, which might be 50 or 100 milliseconds, the app needs to do something useful. I can’t wait for that full round trip. It needs to immediately show. Me what’s happening. So you inevitably have this little distributed system where you have your local process and app trying to display something immediately, and you have the remote server.

And the great elegance, I think, of the local first approach is that that’s just like another instance of the general problem of synchronizing across nodes, whereas often in other apps, that’s sort of like an ad hoc kind of second special case thing, like, oh, It’s only going to be like this for 100 milliseconds. So just kind of do a hacky solution and make it so that most of the time the right letter shows up. And that’s why you have this behavior where apps will have like an offline mode, but it like never works, because I think we mentioned this on the podcast before, there’s systems that you use all the time and systems that don’t work. This is a maximum we can link to. But again, with local first, you’re kind of exercising that core synchronization approach all the time, including when it’s just you and another server on a good connection.

00:22:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and from a sort of fundamentals of distributed systems point of view, I find that very satisfying because I just see this as different amounts of network latency. Like if you’re online you have network latency of 50 or 100 milliseconds. If you’re offline, you have network latency of 3 hours or however long it’s going to be until you next come back online again. To me those are exactly the same, you know, I don’t care if it’s a few orders of magnitude apart. Both the network latency both need to be dealt with and if we can use the same techniques for dealing with both standard online latency and being offline, that just simplifies the software dramatically.

00:23:25 - Speaker 2: Going back to sort of the infrastructure, fewer moving parts thing and speaking to our personal motivations, for me, the experience of running Hiroku was a big part of my motivation or fed into my interest in this because Hiokku was an infrastructure business. I didn’t quite grasp what that meant when we went into it. I just wanted a better way to deploy apps, and in the end, I enjoy writing software, I enjoy creating products that solve problems for people, but infrastructure is a whole other game. And you know, it became the point where once you’re, I don’t know if mission critical is the right word, but just something people really care about working well and you’re in the critical path.

So for example, our routing infrastructure, if it was down for 3 seconds, people would complain. So the slightest hiccup, and as they should, that was part of the service that that company is providing, and so that’s fair enough.

But then when I go, OK, well, I’m building software, when I think of, for example, Muse, where I’m providing this productivity tool to help people think and that sort of thing. I don’t want to be paged because someone went to move a card 5 centimeters to the right and our server was down or overloaded or something, so then they can’t move the card and so then they’re writing into support angrily. I’m pretty comfortable with there’s some kind of cloud syncing problem and OK, I can’t easily like push my changes to someone else, and that is still a problem, but it feels like it’s on this slightly different timeline. You’re not just blocking the very most basic fundamental operation of the software.

And so the idea that exactly as you said, it changes the economics, for me personally, I want to spend more of my time writing software and building products and less of my time setting up, maintaining and running infrastructure. So I guess looking back on the two years that have elapsed, I would say that this is probably, it’s hard to know for sure, but the Inkot switch essays, there’s a number of them that I think had a really good impact, but I think this one probably just my anecdotal feeling of seeing people cite it by. it in Twitter comments and things like that. It feels like one of the bigger impact pieces that we published, and I do really see quite a lot of people referencing that term, you know, we’ve sort of injected that term into discussion again, at least among a certain very niche narrow world of things. So, yeah, I’d be curious to hear from both of you, first, whether there’s things that looking back you wish we’d put in or you would add now, and then how that interacts with what you make of local first movement or other work that people are doing on that now.

00:25:59 - Speaker 1: I’m very happy that we gave the thing a name.

There’s something we didn’t have initially when we started writing this and we’re just writing this like manifesto for software that works better basically.

And then at some point we thought like it would be really good to have some way of referring to it and you know, people talk about offline first or mobile first, and these were all kind of established things and terms that people would throw around. And we also wanted some term X where we could say like I’m building an X type app. And so I’m very glad that we came up with this term they first because I’ve also seen people even outside of our direct community starting to use it. And just, you know, put it in an article casually without even necessarily explaining what it means and just assuming that people know what it is. And I think that’s a great form of impact if we can give people a term to articulate what it is they’re thinking about.

00:26:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, language, a shared vocabulary to describe something as a very powerful way to, one, just sort of advance our ability to communicate clearly with each other, but also, yeah, there’s so many ideas. I mean, it’s a 20 something page paper and there’s so many ideas, but you wrap this up in this one term and for someone who has downloaded some or most of these ideas, that one term can carry all the weight and then you can build on that. You can take all that as a given and then build forward from there.

00:27:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah. One thing I wish we had done more on is I think trying to get a bit more into the economic implications of it.

I guess that would have made the essay another 5 pages longer and so at some point we just have to stop. But I feel like it’s quite an important aspect like what we talked about earlier of not having to worry about back ends or even just like not having to worry generally about the distributed systems problem of like you make a request to a server, the request times out. You have no idea whether the server got the request or not. Like, do you retry it? If so, how do you make the retry? Is that potent so that it’s safe to retry and so on. Like all of those problems just go away if you’re using a general purpose syncing infrastructure that somebody else has written for you. And there are other implications as well that are less clear of what about the business model of software as a service. Because there a lot of companies' business model right now is basically pay us, otherwise you’re going to get locked out of your data. So it’s using this idea of holding data hostage almost as the reason why you should pay for a product. And you know, it’s like that with Slack. Like you put all of your messages in Slack those messages were written by you and your colleagues. There’s nothing really Slack did to own those, they just facilitated the exchange of those messages between you and your colleagues. But then once you go over the, whatever it is, 10,000 messages limit, then suddenly you have to pay slack to see the messages that you wrote yourself. And generally that’s the business model with a lot of software as a service. And with local first, it’s not clear that that business model will still work so clearly. But of course, software developers still have to be paid for their time somehow. So how do we find a way of building sustainable software businesses for collaboration software but without holding data hostage? I think that’s a really deep and interesting question.

00:29:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think as an aside that uh you might call it the political economy of software is understudied and underconsidered, and I would put in here like the economics of software business, but also the interaction with things like regulation and governments and the huge amount of path dependence that’s involved.

I think that’s just a huge deal.

I think we’re starting to realize it, but yeah, there’s a ton of stuff we could do and think about just for local first. Like just one kind of branch that I hope we get to explore is we mentioned how local first enables you to do totally different topologies. So with cloud software almost by definition, you have this hub and spoke model where everything goes through. The central server and the central corporation. Well with local first, you can very easily, for example, have a federated system where you dial into one of many synchronization nodes and you could even have more like a mesh system where you request and incentivize packets to be forwarded through a mesh to their destination, sort of like TCPIP networking, but for like the application layer, and it may be, you know, it’s still kind of TBD but it may be that a mesh or a distributed approach has totally different political implications from a centralized node and that might become important, so. I just think there’s a lot to think about and do here.

00:30:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so too.

And like, I would take email as an analogy maybe, which is a federated system just like what you described, like you send your email to your local SMTP server and it forwards it to the recipient’s SMTP server and the system works really well.

Certainly as criticisms like spam filtering is difficult in a really decentralized way.

Maybe spam is not a problem that local first software will have as much because it’s intended more like for collaboration between people who know each other rather than as a way of contacting people you don’t know yet.

But certainly like I think taking some inspiration from that federation and seeing how that can be applied to other domains, I think would be very interesting.

00:30:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and this brings us to the topic of like industrialization and commercialization, and I feel like there’s more promise than ever around local First and more people are excited about it, but I still feel like we’re just in the beginning phases of getting the ball rolling on industrial and commercial applications. And if I’m being really honest, I feel like it might have been slower than I had initially hoped over the past few years, so I’m just curious if Adam and Martin, you would reflect on that.

00:31:21 - Speaker 2: It’s always hard to say, right? The thing with any technology, but certainly my career in computing, this has always proven to be the case, is that something seems right around the corner and it stays so for 20 years. I don’t know, maybe VRs in that category, but then there’ll be a moment, suddenly it’ll just be everywhere, broadband internet or something like that.

So as a people who are both trying to advance the state of the art but also making Business decisions, you know, should I start a company? Should I invest in a company? Should I keep working on the company I’m working on based on what technologies exist or where you see things going? Yeah, you’re always trying to make accurate predictions. So yeah, I agree on one hand it felt very close to me on the basis of the prototypes we’d built, the automerged library, the reference, Martin I’ll link that in the notes here, but basically that’s a JavaScript implementation of something called CRDTs which Just I guess as a sidebar, it could be easy to think that CRDTs and local first software are kind of one and the same because they are often mentioned together and in fact our paper talks about them together, but CRDTs are a technology we find incredibly promising for helping to deliver local first software, but local first is a set of principles. It doesn’t require any particular technological solution.

Yeah, based on the strength of those prototypes, many of which worked really well, there’s the networking side of it and whether you can have that be fully kind of decentralized versus needing more of a central coordination server. But once you get past that hump, it does work really, really well.

But I think that comes back to the point you both made there about the economic model side of things, which is we have a whole software industry that’s built around people will pay for software when there’s a service connected to it.

Right, so Sass, in particular B2BASS is just a fantastic business to be in, and as a result, we’ve seen a huge explosion of software around that, but connected to that is, for example, the Fremium model, exactly like what you mentioned with Slack, the docs is one of those. Notion is one of those. They do this kind of free for individuals, but then you pay when you’re a business and then you need to come up with the feature stuff, the kinds of features that seem to be selecting for you being a business with more serious needs and something like retaining your message history is there.

I wrote a whole other shorter essay about paying for software. I’ll link that in the notes, but I think we got into a weird corner. The industry got itself into a weird painted itself into a corner because Things like Google giving you so much incredibly high quality software, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, etc. for quote unquote free, but then how you’re really paying for it is your attention and your data, right? And that being kind of montizable through being able to essentially serve you ads.

And I think that’s fine and I’m very glad for Google’s existence and they found that model, but it almost feels like then it taught people that good software should be free and that you shouldn’t pay for, maybe that’s a little bit connected to the concept that software R&D basically costs nothing to make additional copies of it. So therefore, if you make this big upfront investment and then the software exists and you can duplicate it endlessly, but I think there’s a lot of things flawed about all of that. But the end place that gets you to is, OK, if someone has my data and I’m paying them to maintain it and run the servers that it’s on, I can stomach that. OK, now I’ll pay $5 a month, $10 a month for my Dropbox account or something like that. But other than that, we’ve become accustomed to, oh, if it’s an app on the App Store, the App Store is a good example of these kind of consumer economics, we just expect it to be vastly lower cost or free and good software costs money to make, and as we kind of talked about earlier, I would rather be building the software, not maintaining the infrastructure, but when you set it up so that The only way you can make money is to build software that has infrastructure, you’re actually incentivized, build that back end as soon as you can and get the user’s data in there and not necessarily hold it hostage, but just take ownership of it, because that’s what people will pay for. They won’t pay for software where they own the data themselves.

00:35:34 - Speaker 1: Yes, one thing that a friend has suggested is that when talking about the business model of local first software, we should just call it SA, like label it as SAS, market it in exactly the same way as SAS. Don’t even tell people that it’s local first software and just use the fact that it’s a lot cheaper and easier to implement local first software and use that for your own benefit in order to build the software more cheaply. But don’t actually market the local first aspect.

And I thought that’s quite an interesting idea because, you know, it is an idea that people are accustomed to and to be honest, I think the amount of piracy that you would get from people like ripping out the sinking infrastructure and putting it for something else and then continuing to use the app without paying for it, it’s probably pretty limited. So you probably only need to put in a very modest hurdle there of say, OK, like this is the point at which you pay.

Regardless of whether that point for payment is, you know, necessarily enforced in the infrastructure, it might just be an if statement in your client side up and maybe that’s fine.

00:36:38 - Speaker 2: Muse is basically an example of that. We have this membership model that is, you know, subscription is your only option and there are a lot of folks that complain about that or take issue with it, and I think there are many valid complaints you can make, but I think in many cases it is just a matter of what.

Folks are accustomed to and we want to be building and delivering great software that improves and changes over time and maps to the changing world around it, and that’s something where as long as you’re getting value, you pay for it and you’re not getting value anymore, you don’t have to pay anymore. And then a model like that basically works best for everyone, we think, again, not everyone agrees.

But then again, you do get this pushback of we are running a small service, but it’s not super critical to the application, but maybe that would be a good moment to speak briefly about the explorations we’re doing on the local first sync side, Mark.

00:37:32 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so right now Muse is basically a local only app, like it’s a traditional desktop app where files are just saved to the local device and that’s about it, and you can manually move bundles across devices, but otherwise it just runs locally and the idea is to extend be used with first syncing across your devices and then eventually collaboration across users using a local first approach.

Now we don’t plan to do, at least initially the kind of fully distributed mesh networking peer to peer thing. It will be a sync service provided by Muse and kind of baked in to the app, but it will have all those nice local first properties of it works offline, it’s very fast, all the different nodes are first class and so forth while eventually supporting syncing and and collaboration.

So, yeah, we’re going through this journey of, we had a lot of experience with um basic prototypes in a lab, but there’s a big jump to have a commercialized and industrialized product, not just in terms of charging for the business model and stuff, but in terms of the performance and it’s like all the weird things that you deal with in the real world, like versioning and schemas and the idiosyncrasies of networking and All the things that go around the core functionality, like one thing we’re thinking a lot about is visibility into the sync status and how it’s different in a local first world. Yeah, so I’m excited that we are now investing a lot in bringing local first into the real world with MS.

00:38:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I feel like more generally, if we want the local first ideas to be adopted, we need to make it easy in a way that people can just take an open source library off the shelf, not have to think too much about it, plug it into their app, have a server that’s ready to go, that’s either it’s already hosted for them or they can spin up their own server and make that path. Super easy and straightforward and that’s kind of where my research is focusing of trying to get the technologies to that point.

So right now, we have some basic implementations of this stuff. So automerge is a library that does this kind of data synchronization. It includes a JSON like data model that you can use to store the state of your application. It has a sort of basic network protocol that can be used to sync up two nodes. But there’s so much more work to be done on making the performance really good, like at the moment it’s definitely not very good. We’re making progress with that, but it’s still a long way to go.

Making the data sync protocol efficient over all sorts of different types of network link in different scenarios, making it work well if you have large numbers of files, for example, not just single file and so on. And so there’s a ton of work still to be done there on the technical side. I think before this is really in a state where people can just pick up the open source library and run with it. Part of it is also like just uh getting the APIs right, making sure it has support across all the platforms, just having a JavaScript implementation is fine for initial prototypes, but Obviously, iOS apps are written in SWIFT and Android apps will be written in coin or whatever people use and so you need to have support across all of the commonly used platforms and we’re gradually getting there, but it’s a ton of work.

00:40:43 - Speaker 2: And conceptually seeing how autoerge is evolving.

And how people are trying to use it sometimes very successfully, sometimes less so, but I see this as a case of technology transfer, which is an area I’m incredibly interested in because I think it’s kind of a big unsolved problem in HCI research, computer science, honestly, maybe all research, but I’ll stick to my lane in terms of what I know, which is there is often this very excellent cutting edge research that does sit in the labs.

So to speak, and never graduates or it’s very hard or there isn’t a good path often for it to jump over that hump into what’s needed in the production world and of course in the research world you’re trying to do something new and different and push the boundaries of what was possible before and in the production commercial side you want to choose boring technologies and do things that are really reliable and known and stable, and those two, there’s often a bridge that’s hard to divide there.

Sitting in your seat as again someone who’s enmeshed in the academic world right now and you’re creating this library, you know, started as a called a proof of concept for lack of a better term, and then you have customers if that’s the right way to put it, but as an academic you would Shouldn’t have customers, but you sort of do because people want to use this library and in fact are for their startups and things like that.

How do you see that transition happening or is there a good role model you’ve seen elsewhere or just kind of figure it out as you go?

00:42:16 - Speaker 1: Well, I think where we’re trying to go with this is it’s great for automerge to have users. I don’t think of them as customers. I don’t care about getting any money from them.

But I do care about getting bug reports from them and experienced reports of how they’re getting on with the APIs and reports of performance problems and so on.

And those things are all tremendously valuable because they actually feed back into the research process and so I’m essentially using the open source users and the contributors as a source of research problems.

So with my research hat on, this is great because I have essentially here right in front of me a goldmine of interesting research problems to work on.

I just take like the top issue that people are complaining about on GitHub, have a think about how we might solve that. And often there’s enough of a nugget of research problem in there that when we solve the problem, we can write a paper about it.

It can be an academic contribution as well as moving the open source ecosystem gradually towards a point where we’ve ironed out all of those major technical problems and hopefully made something that is more usable in production.

So, I actually feel those worlds are pretty compatible at the moment. There are some things which are a bit harder to make compatible like sort of the basic work of porting stuff to new languages on new platforms, that’s necessary for real life software engineering, but there’s no interesting research to be done there, to be honest. But so far I’ve found that quite a lot of the problems that we have run into actually do have interesting research that needs to be done in order to solve them. And as, as such, I think they’re quite well compatible at the moment.

00:43:56 - Speaker 2: And like imagining or the mental picture of someone submits a bug report and one year later you come back and say, here’s the fix and also the paper we published about it.

00:44:08 - Speaker 1: I’ve literally had cases where somebody turns up on Slack and says, I found this problem here. What about it? And I said, oh yeah, I wrote a paper about it. And the paper has a potential algorithm for fixing it, but I haven’t implemented it yet, sorry.

And they go like, WTF what you put all of this thought into it. You’ve written the paper. And you haven’t implemented. And I go, well, actually sorry for me, that’s easier because if I want to implement it, I have to put in all of the thoughts and convince myself that it’s correct. And then I also have to implement it and then I also have to write all the tests for it and then I have to make sure that it doesn’t break other features and it doesn’t break the APIs and need to come up with good APIs for it and so on.

So for me actually like implementing it is a lot more work than just doing the research in a sense, but actually, Doing the research and implementing it can be a really useful part of making sure that we’ve understood it properly from a research point of view. So that at the end what we write in the paper is ends up being correct.

In this particular case, actually, it turned out that the algorithm I had written down in the paper was wrong because I just haven’t thought about it deeply enough and a student in India emailed me to say, hey, there’s a bug in your algorithm, and I said, yeah, you’re right, there’s a bug in our algorithm. We better fix it.

And so probably through implementing that maybe I would have found the bug, maybe not, but I think this just shows that it is hard getting this stuff right, but the engagement with the open source community, I found a very valuable way of Both working towards a good product but also doing interesting research.

00:45:39 - Speaker 3: I think it’s also useful to think of this in terms of the research and development frame.

So research is coming up with the core insights, the basic ideas, those universal truths to unlock new potential in the world, and it’s my opinion that with local first, there’s a huge amount of development that is needed, and that’s a lot of what we’re doing with Muse. So analogy I might use is Like a car and an internal combustion engine. If you came up with the idea of an internal combustion engine, that’s amazing. It’s pretty obvious that that should be world changing. You can spin this shaft at 5000 RPM with 300 horsepower, you know, it’s amazing, but you’re really not there yet. Like you need to invent suspension and transmission and cooling and It’s kind of not obvious how much work that’s gonna be until you go to actually build the car and run at 100 miles an hour.

So I think there’s a lot of work that is still yet to be done on that front. And eventually, that kind of does boil down or emit research ideas and bug reports and things like that, but there’s also kind of its own whole thing, and there’s a lot to do there.

There’s also a continuous analogy. I think once the research and the initial most obvious development examples get far enough along, you should have some. Unanticipated applications of the original technology. So this should be someone saying like, what if we made an airplane with an internal combustion engine, right? I don’t think we’ve quite seen that with local first, but I think we will once it’s more accessible, cause right now to use local first, you gotta be basically a world expert on local first stuff to even have a shot. But once it’s packaged enough and people see enough examples in real life, they should be able to more easily come up with their own new wild stuff.

00:47:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we have seen some interesting examples of people using our software in unexpected ways.

One that I quite like is the Washington Post, as in the newspaper, everyone knows. They have an internal system for allowing several editors to update the layout of the home page. So the placement of which article goes where, with which headline, with which image, in which font size, in which column. All of that is set manually, of course, by editors.

And they adopted automerge as a way of building the collaboration tool that helps them manage this homepage. Now, this is not really a case that needs local first, particularly because it’s not like one editor is going to spend a huge amount of time editing offline and then sharing their edits to the homepage.

But what I did want is a process whereby multiple editors can each be responsible for a section of the homepage and they can propose changes to their section. And then hand those changes over to somebody else who’s going to review them and maybe approve them or maybe decline them. And so what they need essentially is this process of version control, Git style version control almost, but for the structure of representing the homepage.

And they want the ability for several people to update that independently. And that’s not because people are working offline, but because people are using essentially branches using the Git metaphor.

So different editors will be working on their own local branch until they’ve got it right and then they’ll hit a button where they say, OK, send this to another editor for approval. And that I found really interesting. It’s sort of using the same basic technologies that we’ve developed with CRTTs, tracking the changes to these data structures, being able to automatically merge changes made by different users, but applying it in sort of this interesting unexpected context. And I hope like as these tools mature, we will expand the set of applications for which they can be sensibly used and In that expansion, we will then also see more interesting unexpected applications where people start doing things that we haven’t anticipated.

00:49:19 - Speaker 2: Maybe this reflects my commercial world bias or maybe I’m just a simple man, but I like to see something working more than I like to read a proof that it works.

And both are extremely important, right? So the engineering approach to seeing if something works is you write a script, you know, fuzz testing, right, you try a million different permutations and if it all seemed to work, kind of the Monte Carlo simulation test of something, and it seems to work in all the cases you can find, so it seems like it’s working.

And then there’s, I think, the more proof style in the sense of mathematical proof of here is an airtight logical deductive reasoning case or mathematical case that shows that it works in all scenarios that it’s not a Monte Carlo calculation of the area under the curve, it’s calculus to determine precisely to infinite resolution area to the curve.

And I think they both have their place kind of to Mark’s point, you need to both kind of conceptually come up with the combustion engine and then build one, and then all the things that are gonna go with that.

And I think we all have our contributions to make.

I think I probably, much as I like the research world at some point when there’s an idea that truly excites me enough, and local first broadly and CRDT. in this category, and I wanna see it, I want to try it, I want to see how it feels.

In fact, that was our first project together. Martin was, we did this sort of trello clone essentially that was local first software and could basically merge together of two people worked offline, and they had a little bit of a version history. I did a little demo video, I’ll link that in the show notes.

But for me it was really exciting to see that working, and I think maybe your reaction was a bit of a like, well, of course, you know, we have 5 years of research. Look at all these papers that prove that it would work, but I want to see it working and moreover feel what it will be like because I had this hunch that it would feel really great for the end user to have that agency. But seeing it slash experiencing it, for me that drives it home and creates internal motivation far more than the thought experiment is the right word, the conceptual realm work, even though I know that there’s no way we could have built that prototype without all that deep thinking and hard work that went into the science that led up to it.

00:51:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s totally amazing to see something like working for the first time and it’s very hard to anticipate how something is going to feel, as you said, like you can sort of rationalize about its pros and cons and things like that, but that’s still not quite the same thing as the actual firsthand experience of really using the software.

00:52:01 - Speaker 2: All right, so local first, the paper and the concept, I think we are pretty happy with the impact that it made, how it’s changed a lot of industry discussion, and furthermore, that while the technology maybe is not as far along as we’d like, it has come a long way, and we’re starting to see it make its way into more real world applications, including news in the very near future. But I guess looking forward to the future for either that kind of general movement or the technology. What do you both hope to see in the coming, say, next 2 years, or even further out?

00:52:38 - Speaker 3: Well, the basic thing that I’d like to see is this development of the core idea and see it successfully applied in commercial and industrial settings. Like I said, I think there’s a lot of work to do there and some people have started, but I’d like to see that really land. And then assuming we’re able to get the basic development landed, a particular direction I’m really excited about is non-centralized topologies. I just think that’s going to become very important and it’s a unique potential of local first software. So things like federated syncing services, mesh topologies, end to end encryption, generalized sync services like we talked about, really excited to see those get developed and explored.

00:53:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, those are all exciting topics. For me, one thing that I don’t really have a good answer to but which seems very interesting is what does the relationship between apps and the operating system look like in the future? Because like right now, we’re still essentially using the same 1970 Unix abstraction of we have a hierarchical file system. A file is a sequence of bytes. That’s it. A file has a name and the content has no further structure other than being a sequence of bytes.

But if you want to allow several users to edit a file at the same time and then merge those things together again, you need more knowledge about the structure of what’s inside the file. You can’t just do that with an opaque sequence of bytes. And ICRDTs is essentially providing a sort of general purpose higher level file format that apps can use to express and represent the data that they want to have just like Jason and XML are general purpose data representations and CRDTs further refined this by not just capturing the current state, but also capturing all the changes that were made to the state and thereby they much better encapsulate the what was the intent of the user when they made a certain change and then capturing those intents of the user through the operations they perform that then allows different users changes to be merged in a sensible way.

And I feel like this idea of really changes the abstractions that operating systems should provide because maybe OSs should not just be providing this model of files as a sequence of bytes, but this higher level CRDT like model and how does that impact the entire way how software is developed.

I think there’s a potential for just rethinking a lot of the stack that has built up a huge amount of craft over the past decades. And potential to like really simplify and make things more powerful at the same time.

00:55:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, local first file system to me is kind of the end state, and maybe that’s not quite a file system in the sense of how we think about it today, but a persistence layer that has certainly these concepts baked into it, but I think also just reflects the changing user expectations.

People want Google Docs and notion and Figma. And they expect that their email and calendar will seamlessly sync across all their devices and then you have other collaborators in the mix, so your files go from being these pretty static things on the disk, you know, you press command S or ControlS and every once in a while it does a binary dump of your work that you can load later and instead it becomes a continuous stream of changes coming from a lot of different sources.

They come from, I’ve got my phone and my computer and Mark’s got his tablet and his phone, and Martin, you’ve got your computer and we’re all contributing to a document and those changes are all streaming together and need to be coalesced and made sense of.

And I think that’s the place where, for example, Dropbox, much as I love it, or iCloud, which I think in a lot of ways is a really good direction, but both of those are essentially dead ends, because they just take the classic static binary file and put it on the network, which is good, but it only takes you so far, cause again, people want Google Docs, that’s just the end of it.

And that puts every single company that’s going to build an application of this sort. They have to build the kind of infrastructure necessary to do that. And we’ve seen where I think FIMA is the most dramatic example, they just took sketch and ported it to a kind of a real-time collaborative web first environment, and the word just there is carrying a lot of weight. Because in fact, it’s this huge engineering project and they need to raise a bunch of venture capital, but then once you had it, it was so incredibly valuable to have that collaboration, and then, of course, they built far beyond the initial, let’s just do sketch on the web. But any company that wants to do something like that, and increasingly that’s not table stakes from user expectation standpoint, they want to be able to do that, but you have to do that same thing. You’ve gotta drop, you know, tens of millions of dollars on big teams to do that. It seems strange when I think many and most at least productivity applications want something similar to that. So, if that were built into the operating system the same way that a file system is, or, you know, we proposed this idea of like a firebase style thing for local first and CRDTs which could be maybe more developer infrastructure, maybe that’s also what you guys were speaking about. Earlier with kind of like AWBS could run a generic sync service. I don’t know exactly what the interface looks like, it’s more of a developer thing or an end user thing, but basically every single application needs this, and the fact that it is a huge endeavor that costs so much money and requires really top talent to do at all, let alone continue running over time and scale up, just seems like a mismatch with what the world needs and wants right now.

00:58:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and now I want to riff on this, Adam, because the strongest version of that vision is not only are all these apps using a local first file system, they’re all using the same one in the same way that now for our legacy apps, all your files from different applications are written to the same disk in the same way.

And furthermore, any application can access and read and write any other data, so you sort of disconnect the data from the application. And you can end to end them on top of each other.

And then this gets to the final thing here, which is one of those programs could be programs that users right.

So you sort of end user programming against real-time synced and collaborative data.

And not only is that cool because end user programming is interesting, but programming against data doesn’t really work when it’s halfway around the world, like it just kind of physically, if you need to navigate the data or follow links, it’s just too slow. You need all the data locally, which is indeed the whole promise of what we’re talking about here.

00:59:23 - Speaker 2: Well, not to mention maybe the off token dance and whatever, and you’ve got to register your application. It just comes back to this, yeah, end user programming is 100% about agency, which, as we said in the start is kind of at the core of local first, and yeah, it’s gotten increasingly harder to program your own stuff for a bunch of reasons, but one is, yeah, the data is way over there and in the care of this company and they give you their one front end to it.

If you’re very lucky, they’ll build an API and if you’re even luckier, they’ll.

You allocate an API token as an individual, not a company, to just write a little script to do something, whereas I did a lot more automation in my personal life back when so much was just a Unix shell and a file system on my local computer and a world where you can write, not so much scripts, but I think of them more as bots.

I think we even Prototype this at the very tail end of that Trello clone project which as we said, now that you’ve got this stream of changes that you are consuming from different places, the bot could be just one more of these.

And if you want to do something like automatically moving a card to a new location when something is triggered, that should be straightforward to do.

And some world like that, where you have now these streams of events, streams of data that they are being coalesced, that includes not just the devices of all the people, but also the individual programs that you may choose to write that sort of contribute to this whole evolving document. That’s a very exciting future for me.

01:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yes, and if we can get to that point where it’s so easy to write the collaborative software that you can just have software be collaborative by default. And so easy to have this streaming integration with bots that you just do it by default. Then we’re in a situation where like this can actually be used in practical reality.

01:01:15 - Speaker 2: Well, I think we should wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening.

If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at @museapphq, and we’re on email, hello at museApp.com.

You can help us out with a review on Apple Podcasts, and Martin, I’m so glad that you’re pushing this vision of the world forward, even though we’re not working together as directly right at the moment.

We hope that our efforts over here to try to prove local first in a commercial context, both that it can be viable for a small team. but also produces a great user experience that’s at least for now our contribution, and you’re continuing to push the state of the art in the science world.

Hopefully we can together and along with all the other folks who are doing great work in this field, see it reconvene maybe in 2 years and have some good news to report.

01:02:04 - Speaker 1: Definitely. Thanks for having me.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Building my own tools, when I type a character in or hit save, I know exactly where the bits are going, and I think that changes the relationship that you have with your software. There’s kind of a power dynamic where if you don’t know what the company that’s providing you some software products is doing with your data, they have the power, whereas if you build your own thing, you understand exactly what’s going on, you’re in control.

00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company, the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, joined today by Linus Lee. Hello, hello. And Linus, before the call you were showing me on video chat here, you have a fun new gadget in the audience would like to hear about that one.

00:00:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is always good audio podcast materials when you have to show something off visually, but I semi recently got this thing called the Surface Duo, which is an Android phone from Microsoft, but the Android part’s not super interesting. What’s interesting is it folds out like a book. It’s about the size of a passport, and if you imagine. Passport, but it folds out and there’s screens on both sides of the book, and there’s like a stylus you can use on it and it’s meant to be sort of like a multitasking, multi-screen, note taking on the go productivity kind of phone, and the screen there is continuous, it’s using the folding screen technology is there a scene there.

00:01:24 - Speaker 1: There’s a solid theme there, it’s two separate screens, but it’s like if you imagine like a Nintendo DS from way back when, tilted on side.

00:01:33 - Speaker 2: Or yeah, maybe a shrunk down multi-monitor set up.

00:01:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and it’s great for reading, great for like general kind of content consumption, taking notes, things like that, not so. For like watching videos or like Instagram’s really struggles to fit on that screen because it’s basically square. But yeah, I’ve been enjoying using actually, one of the perks of living in New York, where I live is that all the tech stores are just lined up right down 5th Avenue so I can go visit them when I go running. Microsoft came up with a new one, I think just last week or something like that, and I went down yesterday to visit it and they didn’t quite have it on the shelf yet, but maybe soon, maybe I’ll upgrade.

00:02:08 - Speaker 2: Microsoft’s Surface line has continued to impress me. We did a quite a bit of prototyping on one of the Surface tablets from a few years back, and just in general, what they’ve done there, kind of going into hardware and doing such a good job at it, is really quite impressive for, especially such an established, you know, company which are not known for that kind of innovation or moving into brand new markets and doing a good job.

00:02:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, it seems like they sort of see their responsibilities of doing things that are weird. They’re very reluctantly did like a classic laptop form factor. So yeah, I like it.

00:02:42 - Speaker 2: And could you tell the audience a little bit about your background and interests?

00:02:47 - Speaker 1: Yes, so my name is Linus. I say I grew up in Indiana, which is where I spent most of my childhood, before that, I spent the first half of my childhood in Korea, just where my family is from, but I grew up in Indiana, like normal kind of public high school towards the end of that high school experience, I kind of self taught myself how to code JavaScript backbone, react kind of stuff.

And then got a little job over the summer at a software startup in the area called Spencer. We did agriculture, precision agricultural software, so basically using some hardware in the field.

Indiana is a farming state, so hardware in the field plus some weather data and satellite imagery and other things like that to try to Improve efficiency and ease of producing food for humans or for cattle and and so forth.

And so I was there for about that summer and then ended up taking a year off after high school to work there, learning Django and JavaScript and all that good stuff, and that was my first kind of real programming gig.

I learned a lot there for about 2 years and then after that, the company itself ended up getting bought, then I had a few extra months to travel and things like that, and then went to UC Berkeley, where I studied computer science for a few years just in California, so went to Silicon Valley, did some other startup stuff, was briefly part of things like relate, which is online IDE. Oh yeah, they’re doing some pretty cool stuff, and a couple other projects, and then recently I moved to New York, just where I am now working at uh another software startup doing sort of tools for thought space things called idea flow, and then all through that time sort of off on the side I’ve also been doing random other. Experiments, building my own various side projects and writing a little bit and things like that, which I’m sure we’ll get more into.

00:04:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I would think looking over your homepage and your Twitter account and your blog posts that these what you call side projects appear to me like they could easily be a full-time worth of output. So doing that on the side from your regular work as opposed to, I don’t know, a retired gentleman who can spend his full day building interesting tools that certainly speaks impressively to your output or maybe passion for building these tools.

00:04:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a misconception that I’ve gotten a couple other times. I think it’s actually interesting to think about, like, having to work a normal job, like not being completely free on your own to follow all your whimsical ideas and having a bit of constraint on not only your time but also like having to use normal note taking tools and having to like use notion and talk to people and slack and things like that I think is a good kind of way to ground yourself.

00:05:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we actually see this dichotomy in the we call it the research world, or even in like a classic software company that has maybe like an R&D arm with sort of mad scientists thinking big ivory tower thoughts versus the more kind of production like please our customers, keep our systems running thing and you typically have If you’re too much in the research, free floating, just have big ideas, you’re not constrained by the realities of the market, or customers or anything else, you’re just out of touch, and it’s hard to like, make things that are meaningful.

But of course, on the other side of the equation, if you’re really deep in the trenches of doing an atlas holding up the world kind of thing with production systems, and you’re thinking about tomorrow and next week, and you just can’t have big open, out of the box thoughts or, like you said, explore weird whims or unusual directions. So it’s a difficult dichotomy, seems like you’re walking that line though.

Yes, yes, definitely. So our topic today is self-made tools, and of course, Linus, your work is a stellar example that I’ll link to some posts here, maybe Moocle is an interesting one here. You have a post explaining your motivation for that, and there’s a few other posts we can reference here, or other folks I know who are really prolific self-made tool makers. But yeah, what does that mean for you? What are self-made tools? Why do you do it? And is it something you recommend others explore, or is it only for a certain kind of person, maybe?

00:06:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the way that I look at my tools is a lot of the software that I rely on to function as a working human day to day are things that I built myself to varying degrees.

I have notes apps that I built that I used to keep sort of my personal information in, in general, a little bit. I have obviously things like my website and other kinds of public presence things, but also like a contacts app, CRM.

Your typical productivity suite kind of stuff, and then because these are just sort of like things that I imagine and then I go build, there’s also things that sort of don’t exist as general purpose things in the market that I’ve built out, like a personal search engine, which is the monocle that you referenced earlier, where I have all my data sort of shoveled into a search index and then I can search for anything across any of my sort of bank of data from people that I’ve met to conversations that I’ve had to websites that I’ve bookmarked and things like that.

So some of them are sort of what you would normally imagine as side projects, so like off the shelf libraries and frameworks and things combined into things that I put on the cloud, and other ones are more involved.

Monacle, I think is a good example where the search index that I use for that is one that I built myself. It was originally a project to learn how kind of full text search worked and then that is then written in a programming language that I wrote called Inc and this that kind of goes very deep into that.

Yeah, things that I built myself to fix my own problems or solve my own solutions, or solve my own problems, I guess, and really for myself only, nobody else, I mean I guess if you wanted to, you could go to get up and clone those down and deploy yourself, but a vanishingly small number of people do that and so it’s mostly just for me to use.

00:08:29 - Speaker 2: As you sit there and describe, writing your own full text search engine, writing your own programming language, sort of not just the end application, but really going down the stack.

I’m reminded of this, it’s basically a meme now, but I think it’s like an excerpt from a movie where there’s a guy that wants to change a light bulb, so then he goes to get the light bulb out of the cabinet, but then it turns out that the cabinet’s got a Loose things that he’s going to get the screwdriver, but then the screwdriver turns out that it’s in the squeaky drawer. And at the end, I think like his wife comes home, what are you doing? He’s like, I’m changing the light bulb, obviously.

So it feels like with technology and software systems today, I mean, the stack goes very, very deep. How do you decide when to like stop diving down. I guess another way to put it was, how much is the decision to say, for example, write your own full text search is that a pragmatic decision versus following your curiosity. You want to learn how this works.

00:09:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, to the question of when do I stop, it’s really when my curiosity stops being strong enough to get me through learning whatever I have to learn.

Back months and months ago when I was more naive, I mean this is all endless yak shaving, right? Like I needed note taking app and then I realized I need a front end library and then I realized I need a language.

And there was a point in time when I was sort of made to myself the argument that ultimately this is sort of a more productive way to work because in the end, the little time that I take to build my own tools is gonna kind of come back because it’s sort of so fit to the way that I think and things like that. And I think to some degree that’s still true in that.

When I’m really in the flow, I’m more productive with the tools that I built, but I think really the argument that building your own kind of software ecosystem is more productive may be a little flawed, but I think the change of mindset that I’ve had is, I mean, I still do it and so there still has to be a good reason that I do it, and I think for me that reason is that it just changes the relationship that I have to the software that I use.

And that if it’s my own tools that I built on top of my own stack, running on it runs on the cloud, I use digital lotion, so I don’t want to control everything, but to a large extent running on sort of things that I understand, I can trust it more. It feels more personal. I mean, I made it sort of handmade it obviously and so.

I think it changes the relationship that I have with the software that I use, and the data that I get to keep on it and trust it a little more and makes it feel more little more personal and durable.

And so I think that’s the benefit and along the side, I get to kind of learn a lot, right? A lot of my side projects are motivated by just encountering some new piece of technology that I don’t understand, and then I use. Building a kind of prototype clone of whatever I’m trying to learn how something works. I use that as the excuse to build another tool like the search engine or I have like a toy assembler that I made which I don’t need to assemble X86 code very often, so I don’t use that as much, but it was a cool learning project.

00:11:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I really like the personalization angle. I think there’s also this element of agency or self-actualization or something like that, that fits into the same theme.

You know, we had Wei Wei Xu on the podcast, for example, we talked about the fact that you have this homogenizing effect of now that most technology is made by these absolutely massive companies that are practically nation states, and of course, they’re appealing to the widest possible audience, and that fits into the kind of software.

Yeah, basically, the wider an audience you can reach with your software, you know, the more you can become one of these huge empires, but then very much lost in that is not just sort of niche software, but also just things that are weird, different, appealing to a smaller audience, and in a way, the personalization side is, you know, when you’re making something just for yourself or just for yourself in a small group, that’s about as personal as it gets. It’s a nice antithesis or palate cleanser or something from Let’s say the mass produced software that honestly is what rules our lives now.

00:12:23 - Speaker 1: Right, definitely the phenomenon of like every fast website looking like Stripe, but a little bit worse.

We were talking about something related right before the show about how there’s sort of two bifurcating kind of classes of software, the one that you just referenced the kind of big company one. is things that are meant to be sort of lines of business, things that companies sell to other companies or other people, and they sort of have a tendency to grow indefinitely, like you build a prototype, you start selling it, people need more things and so kind of grows unboundedly both in terms of like feature setting complexity. Technical debt, but also in terms of just codeba complexity.

It’s just easier to add things when you need the product to do newer things and more things, whereas the idea of situated software where you have a very finite group of people you’re building for and a very finite use case you’re building for, which is frequently what I think my tools are, I just needed to do these three things. Take my notes, save them, I want to be able to read them, I want to be able to send it to these places or receive some notes from these places. And I know exactly what I want, maybe I’ll want to add one or two things there, but it’s definitely not going to grow unboundedly. It’s definitely meant for only me or only the small group of people, and I don’t really care if that many people use it. It’s sort of an underrated group of software, but I think there’s places where it’s the right thing.

00:13:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and just to riff on this piece a little bit, so I agree with all of the sort of first order reasons we gave around, it can be more fun, you get to learn, you have the potential for it to be more fit for purpose for you personally, but there’s also interesting second order effects with this focusing.

So you talked about how the general purpose tools they have all these. Layers that are built up over time, because they need to serve a lot of use cases, right? And with all those layers, even if you have a very focused use case for the software, you’re kind of stuck with those because the layers, they end up coupled with each other and you have all these weird linkages, so you can’t just boot out some piece of it.

So for example, if you want to make a very basic static site, well, OK, now you need the static site generator, and now you need a library system, you need a package manager, you need a way to install the package manager. Need a way to check for security vulnerabilities and all the packages, need a web server, you need a place to run the app, it’s the whole thing, right? And even if you have a very basic site, you’re kind of stuck with all that. And so what I like about these very simple projects is you have a possibility to do what I call stack fusion, based on the similar idea from algorithms of stream fusion, which is kind of looking at the whole thing and what you’re actually trying to do and like compacting it down to the minimal possible stack.

The example that I like to give is these web pages I’ve done. Where my stock is like, I open up index. HTML type, type, type, save, that’s the website, and that’s a very basic and almost contrived example, right? But it just shows how much stuff you could potentially get rid of if you are able to do this sort of stack fusion.

00:15:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that a lot.

I think one of the questions that I get about, I guess at this point, my personal infrastructure is what you call it, is, for example, authentication, you’ll ask how I do authentication because there’s no kind of authentication related code in any of the open source code that I’ve released.

And the reason is because at the app level I don’t do any authentication because all my stuff lives on a single Linux server and I just have one giant authentication layer at the top, um, at the kind of reverse proxy layer and then once any request goes through that layer for anything that needs to be authenticated, I can assume that it’s me and then I have all the permissions that I want and I like the idea of what you call fusion of just if you know. A lot about the environment that you’re deploying on who’s going to be using it and things like that. You can make a lot of assumptions that let you not need a bunch of those abstractions instead of when you kind of collect samples when you need to deploy a search engine, you don’t have to start with I’m going to start up a web crawler, I’m going to start up a database. I statically regenerate my search index every once in a while. It goes into a file, the file is loaded to the browser and then the browser does a search. I don’t need any kind of sophisticated database or ingestion algorithm or anything like that.

00:16:19 - Speaker 3: And this leads to further 3 order benefits because if you successfully do this stack fusion, you have much more ability to understand all the pieces work and you potentially have more durability, because a lot of the complexity is often to support like dynamism and change, which is a direct liability in terms of erosion of the stack. But if you have files on a Linux server, there’s fewer ways that can go wrong then a whole dynamic database is doing authentication and so on. Adam, you might be able to speak to this because I know this was a motivation for you with Broku.

00:16:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, and the bit rot or software erosion, the idea that a piece of software that worked at one time doesn’t work anymore even though nothing changed with it, which always seems weird because a software is digital, why should it not work the same every time? And the answer is that the world changes around it.

Sometimes in small ways, you have an operating system upgrade, some things were changed and I don’t know how paths are parsed or something like that, but often in big ways, for me, one of the biggest disruptions in my personal tooling was I used to write a lot of things with little Ruby scripts that ran at the command line, that worked great when the only kind of computer I used was what we call a desktop class computer. Once the phone became a huge part of my computing life, now that doesn’t fit in, or the world has changed in a way that those pieces of software don’t fit into it as well as they once did.

But one of my motivations at Hiroku, yeah, for sure was I felt like hobby projects and interesting side projects, and even at a company, what you might call, yeah, we should talk more about the situated software label, but you often have this case where I did this at companies I worked for companies I consulted for, and you also see it often as spreadsheets or filemerro things, or whatever, but sometimes also web apps, would be something where one person would build a custom tool for just that team, whether it’s 5 people or 10 people or 20 people, and they would set it up and it would be running over time. As a web app, so often it would stop working database goes down, server needs a reboot, the file system is full, because the log rotation thing wasn’t set properly. And so one of the things we strive for with Roy was to make these more explicit contracts with the underlying system, so that you could more easily upgrade things and have the platform do a lot more of that maintenance kind of automatically, and then hopefully the app could keep running over the long term. I think there’s no perfect way to ever do that. I think we did make some good strides there in terms of reducing the likelihood of that software erosion. I’ll link out to the article we did about that.

00:18:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to also dig a little more into the kind of dynamism, ease of making changes thing because I think there’s actually two ways to look at the ease of making changes when you solve a problem with software. One way is to make the software sufficiently sophisticated, so that you can swap any arbitrary part out and you can keep making changes. The other is to make the software so simple that it’s easy to rewrite, and you can just rewrite it when the constraints change.

Yeah. And the way you do that is you make your data layer more portable, use a lot of my data is stored in.

New line to JSON, just lines of JSON packed into a single file or text files are marked on files or something like that where like basically any tool that I pull in is going to be able to talk to it or if I really need to structure something like SQL, you know, you can plug that into basically any language and it makes things like backup really easy because you just copy the file.

And things like flat dependency trees. So if you don’t depend on a lot of things, it’s easy to rebuild things and you make sure that the earth doesn’t shift under you quite as much.

If you write relatively small things that do one or two jobs only, then if the constraints change a little bit, maybe you can just modify the software a little bit, but if the world changes a lot, it’s not the end of the world and you can scrap it and rewrite it or something like that.

I try not to rewrite things too much. I try to make most of my things last a while, but I’ve rewritten some of the older pieces of the things I’ve been using the note tap and things like that, which I wrote at this 0.56 years ago. I’ve rewritten those a couple times just because the world changed and some of the packages that I used to use aged out and so it didn’t take too long.

00:20:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, some other stuff on the durability that I think we talked about a bit before. I know, Mark, you were maybe one of the ones who opened my eyes to the value of the go and static linking, so the sort of dynamically linked libraries, whether it’s DLLs on Windows or the dotSO files on Linux. You think of it as being sort of a necessity for modern software, but go just as screw all that, it’s too complicated, it’s likely to break, now you’re like tying things together, let’s just package it all together and, you know, computers are fast and we have storage, so it’s fine.

00:20:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, I like that aesthetic.

00:21:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I like go and some kind of philosophies and the tools that I used for the same reason where it’s as someone who maintains a few dozen different things that are sort of concurrently running online, it’s very difficult to think about doing that while running on an ecosystem like node. I love node, JavaScript fee, it’s great, but one of the faults it has is like every project has a million dependencies and by the time you’re done with the next project, the old projects so about a date.

And so it’s difficult to think about operating in the style of like many, many different small projects with an ecosystem like that, whereas with Go or, you know, one of the benefits of writing your own language is that the language only makes breaking changes when you decide to make breaking changes on your own terms and so using languages that prioritize long term durability of software I think helps a lot and things like static thinking, I think is a reflection of that value.

00:21:49 - Speaker 3: Yeah. And by the way, this Go discussion reminds me of a generalization of the personally built software question, which is, if you are a company or organization, should you use something off the shelf or should you build it yourself? I don’t think we want to go into that whole discussion, but I’ll just know that there are a lot of echoes in that analysis and that calculus between an individual and Corporate. And I was thinking about with Go because in the same way that people will often tell you, you should always just use a library off the shelf. I’m sure at one point everyone said, why would you ever write a programming language? Well, it turns out it was the correct thing to do. It does important things that no language had correctly brought altogether. And so I think there’s a similar dynamic playing out with personal software and with corporate choice to use libraries versus build.

00:22:34 - Speaker 1: Definitely one thing that you touched on there is the idea of like leverage and building your own tools, the various levels in the stack where at some level of like operational scale or software development scale, if in your own programming language makes sense because it gives a greater leverage over the things that make your shop easy or hard, yeah, and I think.

That doesn’t just apply at the programming language level, it also applies to your life at the tool level. So, let’s say like a lot of your work is about remembering people and keeping relationships with people, maybe designing your own CRM or context app gives you that extra leverage, or maybe if your job is about taking a lot of notes and learning a lot, building notes app for yourself actually does give you that leverage and so.

There’s a whole thing with not a hair syndrome which we don’t have to get into, but I think that’s one way to think about it is in the long term will it pay off for me to have this sort of deep understanding and control over what I use and depend on, yeah.

00:23:23 - Speaker 3: I do also think there’s another side to this, which is our now of the calculus has been very focused on the I, you know, the durability, the flexibility, the understandability, and that’s all important that goes into the calculus.

But I also think there’s an artistic element of sometimes to make a statement about how you think the world should work, the only way to do it is you just Do it all yourself top to bottom.

And I do think that comes through sometimes with these personal software projects and even some of these libraries and other software endeavors that initially seemed like a weird thing to try to go out and do. But ultimately, you see that not only are they providing ilities, but they end up making a statement about the world, which I think is cool. And I think people underestimate how important that is.

00:24:02 - Speaker 1: Yes, definitely, that reminds me of one of my favorite others sort of self-made software people is this couple of people called 100 Rabbits. I don’t know if you’ve come across them, but, oh yeah, yeah, they have a little boat, I think called the Pino, and they sail down from Vancouver down to Australia up to Japan, and they’re just open source hackers. On a boat and they also have their own sort of homebrew software stack basically from the like language virtual machine up for various things, a lot of C99 old school software things, things that don’t break things that don’t consume a lot of energy, certainly no electron apps. I think actually they’ve publicly said that running instances of Chrome is untenable for them because they only have a limited amount of energy from those solar powered things on their bone and they have to be really efficient with it. But I think that’s a great example of building your own tools or building your own software stack, not purely for the utility that it provides in your life, but as a demonstration of this is possible, or these are the values that I believe in, which I think is, as you said, also important.

00:25:04 - Speaker 2: Uh, the one that comes to mind for me on that, and these are publicly available, but a fellow named Jordan Singer has little apps. It’s just a calculator, a draw tool, browser, and these are all things that come by default on modern smartphones or whatever, but he has a particular aesthetic and a particular just kind of minimalist. Just does the littlest thing possible, hence little, and yeah, it just has a particular style to express. It’s not that those tools provide utility you can’t get elsewhere, it’s more like they express something about how their creator sees the world.

00:25:37 - Speaker 1: Speaking of little, one of the nice things about building your own thing is computers are very fast these days.

I don’t think most people realize how fast computers are these days, and the reason that software is slow is because it turns out we write a lot of code and we make computers execute a lot of code.

A modern desktop computer can run 2 to 4 billion instructions per second on a single core, and if you’re slack or if you’re whatever app takes up a second to start up, what is it doing with all those billing instructions? Like you just have to show a rectangle on the screen. It’s wild. And fortunately if you write your own thing, there’s only so many lines of code that I can pack into my little project as a single person hacking on it over a weekend, and so. By virtue of that and very little else, all my things are really fast, like my notes have loads faster than it takes for notion to start showing its spinner to load the rest of the page, and those things about building little things are also nice things like performance and sort of consistent design aesthetics and things like that you get for free.

00:26:39 - Speaker 2: Now, we’ve talked about these are sort of personal tools, personalization, you’re building for yourself, sort of your target audience of one, and that person is the same person making it.

And that also makes me think of a fellow I’ve worked with closely named Simon Kalinsky, who does a lot of personal tracking tools and things like that. He’s also a musician, and he makes a lot of music tools. I’ll link out to his portfolio, so he’s maybe in the same category as you in terms of making for himself, and that’s it.

Most of the time. But then you have something like, in a lot of my experiences with this more like situated software is often creating for a small group. It’s either a group of friends, or family, can also be obviously very much in the corporate, call it enterprise environments, you know, just a small team that has a need, and I’m thinking there of Robin Sloan’s concept of home cooked. An app can be like a home cooked meal. He’s got a little kind of messaging app for his family that he wrote about, I’ll like that in the show notes as well. So how often do you find either of you are writing when you’re doing this sort of work? Are you writing for just yourself versus a very small group?

00:27:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I think in my experience, most of the things that I end up building are for just myself. Almost all my work is online just because, you know, there’s no reason to keep it to myself if other people want to look at it, yeah, and you can look at it and I like writing a little. and things like that.

00:28:02 - Speaker 2: Well, out of curiosity, what happens in that case when someone submits a bug report, a pull request, a feature request, you say, no, you got the wrong idea. This is for me, not you.

00:28:12 - Speaker 1: Or yeah, I mean, sometimes it depends.

A good example is my programming language. A lot of the reasons that I have it is, well, it’s not at all because I have this grand vision of like, I think this is how programming should work and these are the features that it shouldn’t it’s just, I did a university project once where I built like a Lip interpreter, which I think is like a common college project and I was like, oh this is cool. Maybe I should be able to build a whole language like this, and I can decide what all The keywords are, and that will be the thing or instead of saying function, because I like to keep it short. And so it’s a reflection of just my tastes for those things, if other people want to come in and kind of speak their opinions, I say things for your opinions, but this is my language you can fork it and I’ll help you fork and understand the code base, but for my thing, I want to keep it to my tastes and it’s totally fine. But for some other things, for example, I have a little Twitter client that I use, like a Twitter reader that just talks to the Twitter API but gives me my own kind of chronological timeline and a few other kind of search niceties and for things like that, other people have come along and they’ve contributed things like a Docker file for people to more easily clone it and use it on their own setting and things like that.

And sometimes, actually the. Twitter thing is really interesting because it’s designed to be sort of in one very specific way and user customizable, which is that you can add these tabs that correspond to searches instead of just having your own timeline, your home timeline is just one of the many tweet deck style, one of the many tabs that you can have open and you can have another tab that’s like people talking about tools for thought or you can have another tab that’s like Taylor Swift content or whatever because I’m a big fan. And maybe that means that other people don’t have to contribute patches or get put in pull requests because it’s like end user programmable, throwing a buzzword there, but it’s end user programmable and so in that way maybe people don’t have to modify the software itself for the thing to suit their needs. But yeah, pull requests come in if it doesn’t really change the way that I use it, I’m open to it a lot of times because it is an improvement, but if it impacts the way that I use it, then, you know. Yeah, I built it for myself, and so you can fork it, fork it, yeah.

00:30:20 - Speaker 1: Build your own version that matches your own taste, yeah, definitely, and I’m actually a huge fan of that. You can fork it and the winner will get the masses kind of approach to open source.

00:30:28 - Speaker 3: And I think by the way, that aligns well with having artistic goals because in that world, the actual code repository is not so much the output as the instigation that you’ve admitted into the world. This I think was a success of go by example, where I don’t think anyone has used the actual code base, but people have used the X by example idea and layout a lot and that’s propagated, which is great.

00:30:52 - Speaker 1: Certainly, I think this is true of Monaco as well the search engine thing where just building that, I think it’s one of those ideas where you tweet it out and then the thread is a bunch of people who are like I’ve been thinking about building a personal searching for and for the last 5 years and why haven’t you done it? It’s because there isn’t that instigator. To say this is doable and these are the ways that you could do it.

And one of the pure joy moments of building my own tools and then putting it out in the world like this is seeing other people take those ideas and either take the codebase or just take the idea and go and build their own tools because it’s really lovely to see against the kind of tsunami of these like corporate mass market tools, these little small islands of personal tools that are reflections of the maker’s values and tastes kind of come into play.

00:31:38 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think as an empirical observation, there’s a very big step function and like difficulty and effort when you go from one person to end users, especially in our classic SAS model of client server where the server is multi-tenanted. There’s all kinds of complications. You have two code base, you have multi-tenancy, you have security, you have upgrades, you have different versions across the client, the server. It’s a whole idea.

So I think in practice that stops a lot of people and and equals one, they say, you know, just basically go fork it and do whatever you want. I do think there’s a world where this step function is decreased a lot, and this goes back to our discussion of local first software. If you can have something more like spreadsheets where you can just send someone one file, and that’s basically all they need to be able to participate in this home cooked meal, I think it could be much more successful.

In fact, we see this with spreadsheets often there’s groups of friends or groups of colleagues at a company where they’re sort of sending around or linking around or forking a spreadsheet and it sort of spreads as a meme within a company. I could see the same thing with local for software if you didn’t need a server and if all the data was either stored directly on the clients or you could bring your own server and so the originator of the software didn’t need to worry about multi-tenant hosting your data.

00:32:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the authentication, the identity generally, of course, is just kind of this huge unsolved problem. Throw in the multi-tenancy, you throw in the Partitioning by users, even if you leave out the security thing, assume that all your users are, yeah, friends or family members are in the same company or something like that. It just quickly gets very, very complicated compared to the, maybe the world of software that I sort of grew up in, which is something where when you write a program, maybe it saves data persists data to disk by writing a file, which is incredibly simple, as you said earlier, there, like, you can copy it, you can delete it, you have a lot of agency over it without needing to build that into the tool, the app.

And yeah, the concept of user just doesn’t really exist or it’s implicit in, for example, your local Unix user or something like that. The permissions are all handled by the operating system, the location and the file system is handled by the operating system. You just write the program, and all the rest can go around it.

That’s kind of not where we’re at.

In a way, modern operating systems, whether they be on the desktop or mobile, do way, way more, or even the web has way more APIs, way more capabilities, accessing hardware, all these different things you can do, but in a way, some of these simpler things like Just knowing who the user is, you could do that in a Unix program. There’s a who am I, you know, function, and you can kind of inherit that from the operating system or file permissions you can inherit from the operating system.

Basically, every app is reimplementing all of that from scratch in the modern world.

00:34:21 - Speaker 3: Now that we’re talking about it, I have another example.

So longtime listeners of the podcast will know that there’s often two examples we drawn. One is spreadsheets and one is games as areas that have in many ways at the frontier of computing.

So now I’m thinking about sort of situated or home cooked software in a context of games. And there I do think you see it with the like scripting and modeling community. So you have these games where there’s an existing infrastructure for players and accounts and identities and server hosting and everything, and People can contribute their own programs in the form of different skins or different map scripts. And that is very successful. So again, you just need to basically put your code, if you will, out there. People can share it around and copy it around and link it around, and that’s all you need. You don’t need to run your own map hosting server or whatever. That’s been very successful. It makes me think even more that if you could have a similar substrate in the world of personal knowledge management or more traditional SAS apps, you could see the same success.

00:35:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, I think, Mark, what you’ve been talking about sort of made me go on a train of thought about software packaging, because a lot of this is about how do you take something that works on my computer and make it so that other people can just take it and run it and it works the same on their computer and In a similar way to what we’re kind of talking about, I think the advent of GitHub as the de facto way that people share code, I think is kind of one of those step function changes right about, yeah, instead of sending me a zip archive or sending me patches, you can just send me a link and then I can download it and include and oftentimes there’s instructions in the repo of how to run it and presumably there’s more that we can go. Down that road about instead of having to copy a whole bunch of files down and then set all these things up and things like deploy AWBS with all the scripts and stuff, maybe you can just give me a file and I can run it and it’ll just work.

And I think that, yeah, there’s a lot that we can still improve on on the packaging side, I think, for just being able to share sort of single user single instance piece of software.

00:36:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah. In a way I’m nostalgic for the Windows era of download an EXC. And run it, and I know why in the world of malware and so on, that maybe doesn’t work anymore, but there was something quite simple and elegant about it, and because Microsoft did work so hard at kind of keeping backwards compatibility in the operating system, you typically knew that, yeah, someone wrote compiled an EXC 10 years ago, and you could still run it on a Windows computer today.

And the closest thing we have to that now, or the best thing I would say, is the web, where typing a URL into your URL bar is essentially downloading and running a program on the fly in a safe sandbox, which is frankly, a miracle when I start to think about how that works, but it has these limitations of things you can’t do, it’s not personal.

If you want to do anything with, you know, it’s gonna have some kind of persistence that really needs to have a back end, and now you’re into this whole crazy world of different tools, and you need to know 5 different programming languages, just to make the most basic thing, you know, shared to do list or something work, and yeah, a world of local first apps or something where you could download a piece of software, expect to run, have it be in a security sandbox so it’s safe, but not necessarily to go through some kind of Gatekeeping review system, and then be able to do persistence and other things that you would do in the local environment, or even add in some of the collaboration side of things.

I would be very disappointed if we don’t end up in a world there sometime in the coming years, but I also don’t know the path that gets us from there because the companies with the most resources and software engineers to throw at the problem, are pretty motivated to keep their walled gardens and keep you logging into their system and keep you on their servers rather than empower local, more powerful local apps.

00:38:04 - Speaker 1: Speaking of being able to download an EXC and run it through, I think there is momentum in that direction.

I think one example that has been quite a big source of inspiration as I work on my own program language kind of tooling and ecosystem is Dano. Do you know? There’s no JS and then Dano is sort of the typescript run time, I think is the way they talk about it, but it’s all of the same underlying technology as node, but it runs.

Sort of TypeScript natively has built in Tyscript compiler and some other nice things in the language and that’s all fine, but the really interesting thing is Dano inherits kind of big focus on developer experience and toling quality from other languages like go and rust and so I think in the kind of intervening 15 years, they’ve learned a lot about how to distribute andacket software, like, a lot of the big focus of Noja was just like, let’s get a synchronous eventsa. Yeah, it’s really good. Like they got that, but everything else is kind of a mess.

And then you know, I think a lot of the right choices have been made for kind of software your ability.

So you can do things like deno compile, which gets you an executable binary, so you can write things with typescript and build it with Deno and package it up so that I can give you an EXE and you can run it on any Linux thing, right? And I think things like that sort of being built into the language tool chain are pushing us. I think in the right direction.

The other thing that Dano does that’s really interesting is instead of having a package registry, the packages that you can import are just kind of URLs and so you say import X from this URL string and it’ll download and cache that thing at that URL, but then there’s no intermediator that has to be up all the time or that has to be correct all the time, you’re just downloading things from the web, which I think is about as futureproof as you could get.

00:39:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, another interesting thing about Teno, and that’s a smaller point, but I think it’s an important one, which is this sandboxing thing is so important for making it possible to, I can give my friend a piece of software that I’ve written, and they can just run it, and we don’t need to go through some onerous review process, but we obviously also need to protect from the now huge world of malware, and so sandboxing, and good sandboxing is a potential technical solution to at least some elements of that.

And the browser obviously does an incredible job at that, but if you want to run a command line program, no, the demo actually does a lot of that, where by default, any demo program you run at the command line has no permissions essentially to the core operating system, but you can pass.

It switches to say, I wanted to be able to, for example, make an outbound HTTP request to this host, or I want to give it full network access or something like that.

So you have a lot of that kind of control that I associate with, for example, cueSOS. So that sandboxing gives you a lot of control over the individual programs, how they’re accessing the network or the file system, that sort of thing, while at the same time just giving you the incredible simplicity, which I still love that you had from Ruby and Python, and of course, Go and Rust nowadays, and leading back to the C days, which is, you just have the file and you type, run this file at the command line or you double click it, or whatever it is. The thing just runs, and you compare that to, you know, what it takes to sort of run a web app, particularly a database back web app, that’s just incredible simplicity that I think can do the job in a lot of cases, especially for these kind of self-made or situated apps.

00:41:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, one thing that people say around software packaging is that the modern analog of the EXC is like the Docker container, and I think sort of aspirationally that’s in the right direction where instead of having a single battery that you can run a Docker is sort of the representation of a thing that you can put in a machine and it’ll run and if you need an entire system set up then you can have. Whatever confirmation YAL or whatever, you can just throw it to a cloud provider and it’ll spin up the whole thing. And I think that’s aspirational in the right direction, like that’s where we want to get to and I think if the dreams are fulfilled, that’s that’s a really interesting world where you can, you know, give your friend a confirmation YAL and they’ll just spin up their own little thing. But in practice, just quality of experience wise, it’s much easier to execute an EC than to throw it up on a web service. Maybe there’s a gap that we can fill there. But yeah, it’s interesting to think about sort of in this world of having a backend service and databases and then users and things like that in a web app, what that equivalent to executing the binary experience looks like.

00:42:16 - Speaker 2: I think in my ideal world you would somehow put together, I guess the client side version of the Docker cubeSOS virtualization sandbox thing would be, imagine a launch an application launch screen that’s like the iPad home screen.

Basically, I could drop a Docker file essentially on there and become an app icon, and when I tap the app icon, it fetches whatever it needs to fetch to run it, spins up a virtual machine and runs it, and gives it to the computer full screen until I exit.

Something like that that just makes it very, very easy, in fact, standard, totally standardized to just spin it a virtual machine and run it. And maybe there’s a server side. version of that as well and certainly some I think platform services have attempted this, certainly some we have services have stats at this, something where you really do just have maybe Hiokku, the Hioku button was the equivalent of that drop a little link onto your GitHub read me and you click this button and it kind of spins you up a virtual instance of whatever this application is. So we’ve had some good stabs at it to try to at least package up the complexity, if not remove it or simplify it. We haven’t quite maybe got that perfect. There’s still no .exe equivalent basically. Yeah.

00:43:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there’s a couple of things missing here. I think on the one hand, there’s additional platform primitives that are needed for things like identity and data if you’re really gonna do this without having your whole full blown client server thing, which is necessarily a lot of hassle.

But also these things like Docker and virtualization and so forth, they are sort of the opposite of Stack fusion. It’s like we’re gonna run any stack you want, you know, any language, you know, 10,000 files in your node modules or whatever, you know, go for it. And that’s awesome because it gives you a way to better manage all its existing complexity that’s out in the world.

A lot people needn’t want that, but it might be that if You want a really nice double click experience that you need to do a bunch of stack fusion and say, OK, these are the APIs. They’re much, much narrower than all our stuff.

Maybe it’s only one programming language. Maybe you don’t have your full suite of wild just calls or whatever. Maybe you can’t contact any address in the network, you know, you figure out what’s a very narrow interface, but by accepting that narrowness, accepting that fusion, you can give a much more powerful experience to the Home Cook app developer.

00:44:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, one thing that’s come to mind is we have this conversation is the metaphor of the app as a thing that you can hold and move around as opposed to a thing that you install on a system.

I used to be a Windows user and then these days I kind of use Mac and Linux and one of the really interesting things with the Macs, like, not the underlying software model of applications installed the system, but just the end user model of how the Mac works with applications is that there’s like a dot app file.

And there’s like the safari. app and that’s the safari app and if you want to get rid of it, you just take that file and you move it to the trash. And if you want to open it, you just open it, you can move it to a different part of the folder or something like that, compared to in Windows, for example, where you have an installer.

00:45:09 - Speaker 1: I mean you can have an EXC too, but and it’s just spraying files everywhere like messes with the registry and like put some weird stuff in weird places that can do a bunch of stuff to your computer and yeah, I’m just realizing how clean and that’s just so much more and user friendly the Mac model is of here’s a thing you can click on it to run it and it’ll do the thing that you expect and if you don’t like it, you can get rid of it as opposed to like, it’s now fused with the operating system, you can never remove it completely.

00:45:32 - Speaker 2: And I do think that, you know, mobile operating systems do that even better, and they even package the data with it, so it sort of all goes together. When I delete it, it’s deleted, that’s it, it’s gone.

Now, of course, mobile restricts you and limits you in so many other ways.

That basic idea of, first of all, the user’s mental model, I think of, OK, an application, I’ve installed it, or I have it now, and it’s a tile on my home screen until I decide I don’t want it anymore, and then I press it and tap delete and the tile goes away, and there’s this 1 to 1 association between the icon that lives in a particular place in this mildly spatial interface.

The application code and data, and then I can basically manipulate it as one unit. And that’s where I certainly feel like there’s a very big lost opportunity for end user programming system customizability, whatever, particularly on the iPad, where I guess you can make shortcuts and stuff like that, but again, because of the review process, because of the heavyweight tooling doesn’t even run on that same platform. The idea of, yeah, you know, I’d love everyone to do a little apps style thing on their iPad, you know, they’re making it themselves in place, and they type up their little program and they turn it into a tile that’s on their home screen, and data gets stored there, and if they wanna send it to someone else, they can, if they wanna move it to another device, they can, if they want to delete it, they can. I think there’s something very powerful about the simplicity of that model, but then we haven’t quite connected that together with the more programmability side of the equation.

00:47:03 - Speaker 1: Right? I mean, it goes back to what Mark was saying about to have that quality of experience of stack fusion, you need some constraints, and I guess I’s platform is providing some of those constraints so that you can have that simplicity, just better API contracts for the era.

Another example more on the website that comes to mind is Relate. Which I’m a little biased because I worked there for a little bit, but one of the things that you can do with a rep, a repel is a running environment, right? It’s like code plus an execution environment, and you can click a button and the software and it’s not perfect. There’s some bit rod for like old things won’t run because like some MPM package has gone out of date or something, but by and large, the promise of it is a repel is like that, that packaged up thing. With all the configuration, there’s a little database that you can talk to inside of Apple and things like that, and you hit run, and if you see someone else that has the thing that you want to run, you can fork it, put it into your own account, and then you can hit run and now you have your own running instance. And maybe the right solution kind of looks like that where you just abstract the whole thing, even at a higher level than like a docker container or a Docker file and you just say, here’s an environment plus some code, and you can look inside if you want, but really it’s just a click run and it runs kind of experience.

00:48:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely put Repole in the same continuum of, I don’t know if they think of themselves as a kind of platform of service or serverless kind of environment, but I think it is in the same continuum with Roku, for example, and the idea of, yeah, wrapping it all up and then putting it on the web, which there’s pros and cons to essentially running it on someone else’s computer, but certainly for the use case of learning and getting started, I think that’s sort of a no-brainer, and of course over time that is becoming more and more.

Powerful. Yeah, that also makes me think of Code pen, which obviously is a much simpler use case because it’s just some CSS and JavaScript, it’s all client side, etc. but it has a lot of that vibe and it creates a lot of that sharing dynamic, which is you search on there for, you know, find me a pen for, I don’t know, doing parallax scrolling with a whatever, whatever, you find a couple of good examples, you find the one you want, you fork it, you make some changes. Maybe that has a little bit of some of the same vibe of the skinning modding gaming community you talked about earlier there, Mark.

00:49:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And then once you have something like replic containers or environments that you can spin up and sort of give to people, then it’s really interesting to think about, well, what does an app store that’s built on that model look like, where instead of downloading things to your machine and running it there, you have sort of web software. Where there’s like a ret store or whatever and instead of downloading a to do app you hit run and it clones that thing to your account and then it spins up a little bit of backing code and a little bit of client code and you have your own web app but it’s running just with your account and just with your data and you can look at your data and you own all of that.

Stuff until you have the cloud provider, but that I think is also really interesting to think about where you have sort of single user web apps and a way to distribute them, and then you can get people to have their little cloud environment with their little web apps, instead of having your own computer, you just have your own little cloud garden of things. That sounds amazing.

The last interesting thing that I wanted to touch on was the idea of transparency in the transparency down the stack and down your tool. One thing that I found that’s really kind of gratifying is my own tools, especially not just at the top but down to the language layer, is just being able to understand what’s happening.

I think if you use a tool like notion, which I think is great, but it’s very opaque. I type something in and it shows up on screen and I load that same page up on a different computer and it shows up on screen, but I have no idea how they’re saving it, how they’re transforming it, where it’s going, who owns it, whether it’s in another continent, and that’s nice in one way that it’s packaged and kind of hidden away, but building my own tools, I think an interesting benefit has been when I type a character in or hit save, I know exactly where the bits are going. I know almost down to the CPU instruction, what’s happening with that data. And I think that going back to the first thing that I mentioned, it changes the relationship that you have with your software where it’s there’s kind of a power dynamic where if you don’t know what the company that’s providing you some software products is doing with your data, or what’s happening behind the scenes, they kind of have the power and you’re paying them so they let you use the thing, whereas if you build your own thing, you understand exactly what’s going on that you’re in control and you can understand. Even just the concept of like, the things that you use to run your day to day life, you have the power to understand fully, I think is kind of a radical idea.

00:51:29 - Speaker 2: It comes back to this agency and this sense of, yeah, as we live in a world where there’s more and more complexity to the technology and it becomes indistinguishable from magic, and that’s good in the sense that magic is great and powers more and more things in our lives, but then it’s bad in the sense that we lose that understanding of it that actually is important in the long run.

I feel there may have been a, it’s a Star Trek The Next Generation episode where they encounter, and if there were some humans or an alien race, I can’t remember where, kind of they had forgotten how to service the technology or how it worked, you know, in generations past, because it works so well and it’s kind of self-maintaining and that sort of thing, but then the whole civilization was in a state of Not decay, but let’s call it stasis or mild decay as a result of this, I kind of explored philosophically that concept which that shows was very good at doing.

00:52:25 - Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe maybe we’re not so far away from that kind of thing where there’s another exec CD of like, you know, all of modern software depends on this one little piece that’s maintained by some lonesome developer in the middle of nowhere Arkansas or something. Yeah, these things are hugely complex and there’s a lot of parts that are sort of under service.

My favorite variation of that joke is in the tools without space. One of the table stakes thing that you have to build when you build like a note taking or knowledge management app is you need a good rich text editing experience to be able to do things like bullet lists and things like that and basically.

Everybody that I know uses this library called Prosemir, which is amazing and excellent and really well designed, and also quite complex just conceptually, and it’s just this one dude, Maran working on the library, and he’s like holding up an entire kind of burgeoning venture backed industry, which is sort of frightening and interesting to think about.

00:53:18 - Speaker 2: was a place to end. I thought it’d be interesting to talk about software as kind of an ever evolving thing versus something that you finish.

We talked about this in the filmmaking podcast with Max Bacht where he basically said films, you finish it, it’s printed, that’s it, it’s done. You don’t get. iterate on it, any feedback you get and you think, oh man, I should have done that differently. Too bad, you know, if it’s a TV series, you could incorporated the next season or whatever.

And I’ve also tweeted about kind of this is part of why the subscription model actually does make sense for software is that it’s sort of never done. The tweet that I quoted there was the curl maintainer speaking a little bit about the 23 years he spent working on that piece of software, and it’s still very active, new features, bug fixes for what’s basically a very simple tool. So, how do you see that, especially in the context of self-made tools where you can’t maintain them full time, particularly if you have a whole suite of them, how much can you build them as something that’s finished versus now you’ve created for yourself a huge open-ended maintenance job?

00:54:22 - Speaker 1: Right, right, I think this goes back to what I spoke on earlier around if you have a software product that is in the line of business for some company or that a lot of people depend on like Curl is a great example where it does nominally does one thing, which is talk to some server on the web, but it’s used like virtually every piece of electronics out there, but like, I’m sure my car, I don’t have a car, but if I had a car, my car would use it in my fridge probably uses it or something like that.

And in those things where these things sort of grow in an unbounded way just because of user needs changing and the world changing.

I think it’s difficult to be done with software and I’m sure most my side projects if I really think about it, if you know something about Linux changed or something about the HTP protocol changed or something like that, I have to rebuild it occasionally and fix some bugs, but by and large I think the benefit of having a single user and a very constrained well defined use case is that you can kind of be done with software, like at least a single piece of software.

Like my notes app, it does a very constrained set of things. I can write some text in it in a markdown format. I can save it. I can load it up and look at another device, and maybe there’s some things that I want to add to it and occasionally I can go back and add to it, but when I initially came up with that, I had a set of things that I wanted to do with it, and it does those things and I’ve mostly been fine with it, and it’s sort of done until something breaks, and I think if you build on stable foundations, as we talked about like go and The Linux user space and things like that, things don’t break as much.

So I think in that way when you constrain those things a lot and kind of build for yourself, I do think it’s possible to finish a piece of software.

00:55:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like in today’s world it needs to be a very deliberate act to create software that you expect to be finished because of the political economy, the software ecosystem, if you kind of write down what Google or Stack Overflow tells you to do, this thing is not gonna last a year before you have some package update advisory or something.

But you can, if you are very deliberate, build it in a way such that it might last 35, even 10 years before it needs serious operations.

Again, it kind of comes back to the idea of artistic software and today even saying I want this thing to be running in 10 years without me being heavily involved with it is a major artistic statement to make.

00:56:31 - Speaker 1: Right. Another thing that plays into this I think is also building many small things versus a single large thing.

At this point, you know, I have a whole suite of these things I’ve no top CRMs and. Twitter clients and whatever, and they’re all quite independent.

Some of them rely on the same kinds of languages and frameworks and things like that.

Like if one goes down, it doesn’t matter for the other ones. And if you structure your sort of software ecosystem like that, then it’s possible to like finish one piece and then if it needs to be improved and you can just replace that piece and that way the whole system is kind of evolving continuously as the world changes.

Maybe I need, you know, but no. or context app that functions differently, but each little atom of that ecosystem is sort of finished, which I think just as a matter of fact like a person working on these things while holding a full-time job is also kind of a necessity because being able to chunk these things up to atoms means that you can fit it into weekends, you can fit it into these little breaks rather than having to work on them continuously. It’s just a good conceptual model to work on these as well, to have.

An ecosystem of these atoms rather than a single sprawling kind of software grid.

00:57:39 - Speaker 2: Let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at EAHQ or on email, hello at newsapp.com, and it helps us if you leave a review on Apple Podcasts. So Linus, thank you so much for being a role model, inspiring us to maybe creating that spark or that sense of it’s doable for the thing we all want to do, whether it’s that personal CRM or personal search tool, and I look forward to continuing to read your posts about whatever you’re making next.

00:58:09 - Speaker 1: Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: One of the characters is a poet that evokes much emotion with his work, and one of his fans asks, how do you do it? How do you come up with these words that are so moving? And he says, well, the key is the poet has to speak the words that are already in the person’s heart.

Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it.

I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague, Leonard Sursky. Hi. And Leonard, it’s one of my favorite times of year now that I live in a place with seasons. When the leaves turn orange and red and fall off the trees, kind of have that smell of the, I guess it’s the decaying leaves in the air, little bit of a chill, but it’s not too cold yet, Halloween and pumpkin carving. How are you enjoying your fall so far?

00:00:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I love it. It’s my favorite season, I think, especially since we both live in a city in Berlin which has a lot of parks and a lot of forest area. It’s just really great to be able to go into a forest and enjoy a long walk in that atmosphere.

00:01:09 - Speaker 1: My dog loves it as well. Basically, the leaves on the ground all over the place, I think, give like plenty of stuff to kind of sniff through, so it makes dog walks more interesting as well.

00:01:19 - Speaker 2: Even for humans, I feel like the smells in the autumn are more exciting than in the summer.

00:01:24 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah. Well, I’ve got exciting news. The Muse team is growing.

I’ll link to our jobs page here. We actually have two positions now. Longtime listeners of the podcast might remember we talked about our partnership model all the way back in episode 4.

That’s when we were hiring the 5th member of our team who ended up being Adam Wulf. That was a good year and a half ago, I think. And it’s certainly nice, the stability, I think, team dynamic compared to the kind of fast hiring growth startup environment that I was previously used to where you just always have new people coming in, you’re constantly on boarding, group dynamics are constantly changing. We’ve had this really stable group for a while, which is nice in a lot of ways, but also it’s really exciting to think of new perspectives and just fresh faces coming in to to join us. And I guess growing from 5 to 6 or 5 to 7 isn’t such a huge jump, but also it’s a pretty big change for us, I think.

00:02:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a really exciting moment for the company. So we’re hiring for two positions. One is a local first engineer and one is actually a design slash storytelling position, and that’s what we want to talk about today.

00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. It felt like something really worth digging in on that we landed in this kind of maybe slightly unusual job description.

Well, I suppose local first engineer is also unique in its own right, but The designer and storyteller versus other ways we could have titled this role led me to really reflect on like what is storytelling and why do we want to call it this for a marketing role or just a designer or brand designer or something like that, and how does Muse tell its story today? And what do we think of the unique qualities of a person like this that could join our team and That’s kind of the whole deal with this podcast, right, as we take a relatively straightforward thing like a job listing and then go very philosophical. So, maybe we start there. Our topic is storytelling, so, Leonard, for you, what does that word mean?

00:03:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s been an interesting process to figure that out internally for us as well. You and I have been kind of filling that role as the storyteller from MS and doing all the marketing and the design on the marketing side for that. And on one hand, we have had really great success. I think with telling our story, I think that’s kind of what we have to do for Muse, since we are a small company and we don’t have that much budget basically to spend on advertising and stuff like that. So we kind of have to tell our story and share our ideas.

And the good thing is for us, for us, we have a lot to say.

We have built the product based on research that you’ve done at I can Switch for many years. And so there’s actually a story to tell here and we just need to be able to really tell that story well.

00:04:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of different layers of it telling our story as a team, telling the story of the product, telling the story of how people think and how technology has helped or hindered that over time. There’s many different dimensions here, but I think it’s pretty important, the software by itself without the explanatory elements would be at a minimum hard to understand and possibly worse, just easy to dismiss if you don’t have that kind of backstory in context.

And so I found myself just kind of researching this fundamental question, what actually is storytelling and of course, I think we all sort of know that stories are fundamental to how humans understand the world.

That’s how we, for example, share culture or instill moral lessons, how we bond with each other, entertain, obviously, and everything from religious and mythological texts, the Bible or fast forward to Something like modern day superhero movies, those are sort of our modern myths and those stories are ways that we not just are entertained, but yeah, we kind of understand the world and what we as society value or don’t value.

You can even look at something a little less that’s sort of like a fictional story and something more directly explanatory.

I think like TED Talks, for example, you can make fun of the format and people do, and maybe they’re sort of annoying sometimes, but in a way, I think they have been so successful and so far reaching because they’ve found. a format that on one hand is addressing big meaty questions about how we improve the world, but they also have kind of a gather around the campfire vibe. Let me tell you a story that will enlighten and entertain, but also instill a lesson or at least some enlightenment. So I think once you start thinking about this, you sort of see it everywhere.

00:05:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think TED Talks are a great example of a format that’s made for storytelling or like built around storytelling.

Yeah, I think the most popular TED Talks are all just really, really great stories and it becomes less about the point that’s being made or that’s something you could also get elsewhere and less time if you want to, basically.

But the reason they’re also so popular is because the story is so well told. And that to me points to the interesting thing about storytelling, which is that it’s really independent of the specific medium that we’re talking about. And I think that’s why it’s so difficult or so unusual to have an actual storytelling job, because most people see themselves more as craftspeople for one specific medium, right? Like maybe a, like a video person or you have a writer, or you have someone that makes music that is a great public speaker. But all of these sort of have the underlying element of storytelling and you kind of need to be great at at storytelling in order to be a great artist in your specific medium.

00:06:49 - Speaker 1: Or in some cases it may even just be a CEO or a leader or an entrepreneur or product person. So Steve Jobs comes to mind as probably one of the greatest storytellers, certainly in the tech industry, but also of our age. Now, folks like to point to that original introduction of the iPhone video, but also many others of his, even here now, more than a decade after his death, we’re still sharing. Videos and other clips that show him, in some cases really specific anecdotes, but in other cases, he’s introducing a product, he’s framing how to see the world, and how this product fits into that, and how it serves user needs. That is storytelling.

00:07:28 - Speaker 2: And I think that’s an often underrated aspect of that sort of role where we say usually, OK, Apple, you know, they have great designs, Steve shops had a great sense of taste.

But yeah, I think a lot of it really comes down to storytelling where, OK, the iPhone can be really nicely crafted and it can be a great product, but the thing that will make it feel right and will make it feel like something that people want is actually the story that’s told around it and the story that the product tells. And I think that’s something that A lot of people don’t like consciously consider and often I think it’s sort of naturally like a story builds around it without the people making it really considering what that is, but I think it’s really valuable if you do actually sit down and figure out what kind of story you want to tell.

00:08:13 - Speaker 1: So then if we bring it to the realm of, yeah, business and yeah, especially tech products, you know, clearly Steve Jobs or anyone else getting up on stage to announce a product that is conventionally you would call that marketing, right? You’re marketing your product. And I think it’s interesting here to kind of compare a little bit how we see. I think actually originally we had had sort of two job descriptions here for this role and you’d call it a marketing designer and I think I’d called it a marketer and storyteller and so notably there we both were using this term marketing to capture part of what the role would do and I kind of think that marketing has a bad name or It’s sort of disrespected, I think compared to all the other disciplines that go into building a company. Certain product development, because people think of annoying or bad marketing, you know, invasive paid media advertisements getting in your way, whatever, shoving information in your face that you don’t want or demanding you to do something.

But I do think marketing is a really important function. You can build a great product, but if no one knows that it exists, or how it fits in their lives or whether it’s for them. Then it kind of doesn’t matter, right? People need to be able to find out about it. And I also think marketing as a discipline has a lot of great tools, which includes, for example, this concept of the marketing funnel, which we do rely on.

Especially in the early days, we looked at stuff like how many people convert from essentially downloading and logging into the app for the first time to kind of making it far enough that maybe they’ve sort of like figured out what the app is for and call that the onboarding stage. And we use that to figure out that our onboarding, we tried a bunch of different things, and basically it wasn’t working. So many people just didn’t even make it through it because they just couldn’t figure out what this weird app was about. It’s kind of how we landed on the onboarding, the you design that we have now that Still plenty of people get confused and don’t know what the hell this weird app is, but enough of them make it through to make it work.

So those concepts like the marketing funnel, I think, are really valuable, and we do use those, and I do think that there’s a misunderstanding of what marketing really is, in the sense of a conversation with the market, understanding the market, figuring out how to explain the product to the right people, all that kind of thing. But at the same time, it does come with a lot of baggage that maybe it’s better to kind of leave off and certainly it implies a pretty transactional or you’d say pragmatic, but sometimes almost crassly pragmatic, just like try to get people in your funnel and get them all the way through. With whatever annoying tricks and dark patterns you can versus the longer term investment and we’re telling a story about the product, about us, about you and about the world and over time, if you like that story, you know, maybe that also means the products fit for you. How do you see marketing that terminology, does it have the same kind of negative implication for you, or how do you see that connecting to what we do at Muse with selling our product?

00:11:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like we both had a similar realization during this process of writing the job description that we were sort of at opposite ends of the spectrum where I was thinking more from a marketing perspective and you were thinking more from a storytelling perspective.

And as you said, I think like the realization is that These both kind of need to come together since they both touch so many different things and it would be wrong to just think of marketing as, OK, we are doing paid advertising, we’re doing a website and we’re doing like a few little banners of local design. And it will also be wrong to just think of storytelling as this purely artistic activity. Instead, we kind of need to bring them both together and really think about how we can use storytelling in our marketing and how we can sell our product in a way that also tells our story.

00:11:57 - Speaker 1: And maybe this question of selling, which is almost is more clarifying than talking about marketing, which is a pretty broad, maybe term or discipline, maybe that helps clarify, which is there’s the very artistic side, which I’d put this podcast in that category, you know, we’re basically here to explore philosophical topics that are of interest to us and our guests. Basically, Mark and I started it essentially for fun and then things got out of hand.

Whereas maybe something like the memos we write where we describe the philosophies behind a particular product feature, maybe that’s in the middle, like, you know, we want to explore why and how we made this thing, but in the end, it’s partially to to that, hey, this feature might be useful if you’re a person that needs whatever it offers, and so in a way that’s sort of selling the product a little bit.

Then you take something like our website or the app store listing page, and that is very explicitly when someone comes to your website, or at least when I go to a website for a product. Tell me, right? Tell me what’s good about your product. Tell me quickly, like, pitch me, impress me, help me figure out right away, is this for me, is this not for me? Do I want it? Can I afford it? Does it fit into my life? Does it solve the problem I have? Does the vibe of the product and the team like, fit with me well, and I want that, that’s appropriate for that setting.

So yeah, there needs to be, or at least for us, what works is this balance between, we do have a product to sell, we have a business to run, and we need to be pragmatic about that, but at the same time, we’re all here because we want to express something artistic, we want to, as Mark would say, make a statement and, you know, our goal is to have an impact on the industry and how people see creative computing, and also we need to be viable as a business.

Now, on the product side, how do you think storytelling does or doesn’t fit in there?

00:13:39 - Speaker 2: So we have already talked about all the different mediums that storytelling is really useful for. And I feel like Adam, you’ve been doing most of the exploration for us there and trying different mediums to tell our story and what’s been your experience so far.

00:13:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I think medium is incredibly important. The medium is the message, I think they sometimes say, but by here, by medium, you know, we talked about the TED Talk is one kind of format or like conference talks or lecture maybe is the medium there, but a different medium would be, for example, long form writing. So this is something I’ve done a ton of in my career, including at Hiroku and these long kind of academic essays that I can switch. And that’s actually quite different from the much shorter, punchier kind of copywriting you do for a website, for example, or an app store listing page, like here’s some bullet points of features, but also a huge one on the internet these days is video. Now that everyone’s got fast enough computers and connections and things and we have everything from YouTube to videos on Twitter to TikTok. Videos are really, really important format, certainly one we’ve used a bit for these like short product demo videos we do on Twitter, but also we embed them in our website. The moment there’s a big hero video on the front page of our website, and so on, and that was something you really couldn’t do on computers generally, but even on the internet up until relatively recently. But in working on this job description, I found myself really reflecting on the web as a medium, and I’ve been working in web for a long time, working with web technologies for a long time, and I feel like a lot of the discussion about technologies there and how the web is advanced is typically about web apps, the notions and Google Docs and so on in the world, but I feel like what gets less, I don’t know, airtime, let’s say, is the web as more of a content medium, and you’re a storytelling medium, so. That certainly includes something like, you’ve got a personal blog, and what do those pages look like, what’s the reading experience like on that, but that also includes something like a marketing website that is more of an exploring, you know, you tend to skim it, you maybe don’t read all the copy carefully, there’s a lot of embedded images, there may be a little animations with CSS transitions. And one of the things that we kind of built into this job description is we really want someone who uses the web as one of their primary mediums for telling stories. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily the world’s greatest web designer, it means that they’re taking advantage of this new and frankly pretty unique medium to tell their stories, even if they’re, say, primarily a long form writer, that how you make that article page for your personal site. What the reading experience is like there, that that’s something you put a lot of craft and thought and design work into. And it occurred to me kind of again in thinking about this and thinking about our own needs and what you and I have done on the website as well as what I’ve done on my personal site for my articles and things like that, that the web is really a pretty unprecedented medium because it combines many together. Obviously there’s texts and typesetting is quite sophisticated, and you also have images, but now you have videos which are very easy to embed whether Using a hosting service or just kind of hosting your own HTML 5 video playback stuff, but then you bring in the dynamic medium element of it, and that is quite the next level, right? So you could say to begin with, it might be something like, OK, you know, a PDF and the web can both have pretty sophisticated rendering, but the web can be totally responsive or you resize the window or you’re on different sized devices and everything reflows. But then you can go a step further from that, right? You get into the CSS transitions, you get into something like changing behavior when you’re scrolling, and, yeah, sometimes scroll hijacking is sort of annoying, but you’ve also seen sites do some pretty interesting and sophisticated things with using your scroll as a way to kind of progress you through this understanding of a product or whatever it is they’re offering. And then, of course, that can ultimately go to totally interactive things you can click on and explorable explanations and things like that. And I feel like it’s really only in the last few years, let’s say the last 5 years, the web has really come in doing its own on that, that all this stuff is very universally supported on every browser, that you can view it on your phone, almost just as well as you can on a desktop device. That it’s fast, that you have these amazing transitions and animations, that you can do video and audio, and almost everything that you could possibly think of can all be put together and integrated and controlled in a way that’s potentially very sleek and very powerful, and there’s really been nothing like that to date. And what I’m most excited about for this position and just also broadly, is telling stories through the web, really taking advantage of All that’s come together with that in the last 5 or 10 years.

00:18:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. I feel like there’s a ton of untapped potential in the web for telling stories in new ways.

And some of that kind of happens on like personal websites. So there’s still like some spark of the experimental web as it was like a few decades ago.

But most of that has been sort of restrained into a Very small corner of the internet.

And if you look at most companies or products or websites, like they are very much the same and don’t really try to tell any kind of special story or tell a story in a different way than the competition, basically.

And I think that is a unique opportunity for companies like us and that our size to kind of have an outsized impact with this sort of goal in the company to, yeah, do something that basically other companies can’t do.

00:19:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, part of that might actually be the reason you see more interesting experimental use of the medium on people’s personal sites with smaller teams is I think it does require a kind of person that puts together a lot of skills into one.

I know one mind and so the same person that designs the site can also be implementing the HTML and the CSS.

They’re maybe not a front end developer, I mean, you do this, certainly, I do a bit of this as well, they’re not necessarily an expert at that, but they know enough to really use the medium to its fullest.

I think that’s pretty important and I think not to beat up on content management systems, the WordPresses and Squarespaces of the world, but I think they do tend to naturally take you into templates and sort of pretty restrictive, just sort of doing what’s been done. Before, which again is totally fine and appropriate for many people’s websites, that’s fine.

But the interesting stuff tends to be when you have someone who can put all that together into one mind or one set of skills, and you don’t tend to have that, I think in bigger companies.

You do have that with an individual’s personal site and with a small team site, and certainly that’s what we are striving for to some degree with our website and hope to really expand on this, especially if we get the right kind of person on the team here.

00:20:28 - Speaker 2: And as you said, the big factor here is that the web really works as a medium that a lot of other mediums can kind of build on top of. And so if you have a basic understanding of how the web works and are interested in getting into that, then you can combine that with another skill you have, whether it’s music or video production or just drawing or writing. And on top of that, you can kind of build a really unique experience on the web that you wouldn’t be able to do with just a single skill.

00:20:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s one of the things that’s great about the web is a multimedia medium is you can basically bring most other types of storytelling mediums into it.

So, for example, photography is a really great format for storytelling. But you can use that potentially together with the web, taking the right photo that tells a story that then gets embedded in a website, whether it’s part of a post, or whether it’s something more of like a hero shot or background image or something like that, as just one really simple example.

Now, I also think another medium worth talking about here is social media. I don’t know if it’s quite right to call that a medium, but at the same time I think it is.

And one of the things that’s always struck me, obviously Twitter is our kind of main social media outlet for various reasons, but whenever I go to try to use some other social media platform, and I think, OK, well, maybe people would like to see new stuff on Instagram, or apparently notion blew up on TikTok for a while there. And the idea of a short video that shows productivity software, well, you know, guess what, that’s a lot of what we do on Twitter, right? We record these short demos that show a particular feature or a little vignette of how you use this product in the real world and show the hands and the stylus in action. It’s not just a screen recording. So clearly that works, but times when I have gone to look at these other social media platforms and think how we might fit in there, and I realized as soon as I’m there that there’s a whole universe of What format is it? What’s the aspect ratio, how long are these videos, you know, what goes in the text, you know, how’s that superimposed, and then on top of that, of course, it’s just the culture and the conventions that come with the platform and people have been using them a long time. So I think that being proficient in a particular social medium platform is sort of a medium in and of itself, and like the web, can incorporate other mediums, which is images and video and text and short form, long form, etc. but each one is almost its own language to speak. You have to be fluent in it to get good use out of it.

00:23:02 - Speaker 2: And social media seems interesting because there are so many different communities within that. Like it’s not a single thing that you post to and then it’s on social media, like you always post to a specific group of people. And ideally it’s full of people that are already telling a similar story and are really familiar already with the context that you’re sort of setting.

00:23:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a great point.

The stories resonate with our own experience or they match to something that we understand or believe to be true about the world. And actually there’s a quote in a fantasy book, it’s probably Guy Gabriel OK, I have to look that up after the show, but essentially it’s a medieval fantasy, I think set in China or something like that, and there’s one of the characters is a poet. And like a famous poet that evokes much emotion with his work, and one of his fans basically asks, how do you do it? How do you come up with these words that are so moving? And he says, well, the key is the poet has to speak the words that are already in the person’s heart. The key is you’re putting words on something you already feel implicitly or believe to be true, or have an underlying sense that is the case, but finally someone has put these really poignant words on it, or somehow described in a way, and you say, yes, that right there.

00:24:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like there are a lot of lessons like this and really the classic storytelling, you know, that hasn’t been invented in the last few years basically, there’s so many great storytellers that we can learn from and so many classic lessons about storytelling.

00:24:36 - Speaker 1: All right, so my next question then is how does design fit in with storytelling or how can one tell stories through design?

00:24:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the important thing to remember is that it doesn’t have to be a visual story that you are telling, but a lot of it is really stuff like world building, setting the context for something, and sort of conjuring up mental images in the user’s head.

So one example I like is when you look at the original iPhone and look at the first apps that Apple built for the iPhone, they all were kind of built, I think, to tell a very specific story both about the iPhone and then also about sort of the features it has, right? So for example, you had the note sap which was very obscure morphic and was sort of built to look like an actual notepad, right? Like you had this leather bound top and the page looked like a natural page with lights on it and it was yellow and the font was some sort of handwritten scribbly thing.

00:25:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and you wanted to touch it. I feel like that’s morphic and the leather. And even that makes me think of something like this slide to unlock, which we sort of take for granted now, or, you know, has actually has gone to the dustbin of history a bit, but it had this kind of shimmering effect, and there was a lot of effort put into the physics when you pull it across or whatever. It’s easy to forget this, but at the time, a screen that you touched was just not a very common thing, and so inviting you to want to touch it, seems like it was part of how you conveyed what was special about this product.

00:26:08 - Speaker 2: Right. And since it was a very new product, like if you just look at it from like a key tech perspective, it doesn’t look like a product that is necessarily interesting to basically the whole world. Like if you just compare the spec sheet, it’s basically still something like a BlackBerry that has all the basic functions of the phones of that time. And so what you really need is to sort of build up a story around it that connects it with something that people are already familiar with and that helps those people kind of understand how the product fits into that.

00:26:43 - Speaker 1: This also reminds me of an ad for the first iPhone, and while we’ve may beat up on paid ads, paid marketing a little bit, you know, part of what Apple is great at is ads, these little vignettes that tell a short story that show more than tell what this product is and how it fits into your life.

So in this ad, which I’ll see if I can find a link to it on YouTube or something, they have the person watching Pirates of the Caribbean, which at the time was a popular movie. They see like a sea monster with these tentacles, and they kind of go, hm, calamari, and they hit the home screen, they pop up in the maps app, they type in a search for seafood in San Francisco, they find a place and then they tap on it to like call and make a dinner reservation.

And obviously they’re showing a lot of different things in this, I don’t know what it is, 20 seconds that you can watch a movie, that you can search on the map, that you can do things very spontaneously, that you can do things very fluidly, these different apps coexist side by side, that you do this all on this screen with no buttons, essentially other than the home button, and it’s just a fun and cute little story as well, little vignette. So yeah, the product tells a great story, the apps tell a story, and the marketing that goes with it also tell a story, and all those things fit together very holistically.

00:27:59 - Speaker 2: Right, and I think each of those kind of multiplies the effect of the story, right? Like if it’s just the marketing that tells the story and then the product is kind of really bland and doesn’t implement the story at all, then that story is not as effective, right? And I think you can also go the other way and look at, OK, we have a great story that the marketing is telling and the product is also telling it. And the whole company is living it like maybe even the support team is trying to incorporate that story into their work, but then you can also go down a few levels deeper and look at, OK, what is actually a specific feature of this product doing as part of that story. And that will kind of help explain not just the product itself and the role the product has in the user’s life. But it will actually make the product much easier to use if you can actually tell a story for every single feature and ideally even for every single UI element and you kind of know its place and know where it comes from.

00:28:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this sort of progression or hierarchy from the company or the team story, and then the product has a story and then each feature within that product has a story and then maybe that even goes down as detailed to each UI element, button, whatever that’s on the screen, or non-UI such as our chromeless UI that’s really interesting. One that comes to mind for me right away with that is the pencil toolkit. Which is, you know, essentially it’s this little thing you swipe in from the edge of the screen with your stylus, and we did the very custom and pretty unique thing there as opposed to using the standard Apple pencil toolkit, for example. And at first glance, and sometimes people do have this question, why did you make this weird custom thing rather than using kind of the operating system default? And of course you could argue that there’s sort of our company and team in general and certainly the product has a bit of a do it our own way, you know, follow our own path, story, or maybe more of a theme throughout. But it was actually the very first episode of this podcast where we talked about tool switching, and at the time it was still just an idea. Mark had this technical pen store idea of you go through and they have 1000 different pens, but you pick out the 10 you want and you put those in your kit for what you need for a particular purpose, so that you’re not overwhelmed with choice each time. And that was kind of, we told that story or discussed that philosophy through this podcast, and later on, we went to build it and you designed it, we incorporated some of those ideas, as well as many other ideas, and came up with something that eventually we did a memo about talking about whiteboards and the choice of pens there, as well as the pen store and just looking at a lot of inspiration from These various kind of real world drawing settings and ultimately described why we built this feature the way that we did, and then that in turn boils down to this very specific detail of why does the tool switches show up the way that it does, why is the choice of pen thickness or color, why do I need to go to the settings menu for that, you know, it’s. Taps to get there as opposed to something that’s sort of right there always present in UI, which is what a lot of drawing apps do, but that connects to this philosophy and this concept and story we have about trying to bring some of these elements that we think are good for creating a flow state from the analog world into a digital tool.

00:31:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the pencil token is a great example because as you said, it really incorporates a lot of these ideas that I think at the very core of news and what we want news to be.

And so it’s not just about like a single element, right? Like it’s not just about the pencil case that you have on your desk and like that’s the story of everything that’s related to pencil music. It kind of draws from all kinds of ideas that matter to us and in turn that sort of creates a really unique angle that wouldn’t be the same if even any of those ideas is taking away.

And so then the product design challenge, I think, is you have this long list of things you wanna incorporate and these values you have, the ideas you have, but it’s not a simple, concise story or a simple concise design yet, right? So that’s sort of the challenge to really figure out the essence of these ideas and turn that interaction that incorporates all of these different ideas.

00:32:16 - Speaker 1: It’s often the case that it does emerge organically from following a hunch. For example, in the pencil tool kit, we did have the sort of pen store idea from the start, but many, many details of how the actual implementation ended.

I think with you following your hunches and instincts as a designer, it was Julia following her hunches and instincts as an interface engineer to eventually land on this thing that felt good, that looked good, that seemed to be a reflection of our values and pragmatic. just serve the purpose that it needed to serve, and all those things come together, and then maybe it’s sort of post hoc, you end up with a story where you look at the finished thing that you iterated towards and followed hunches and followed instinct, and you look at this and you say, you know what this reminds me of is, you know, a set of whiteboard markers and why that kind of setup is good for a freeform thinking environment where you’re not going to get hung up on the exact thickness of your pen. And maybe, you know, we had some of that upfront, maybe that was part of our inspiration, but sometimes you sort of look back and realize why you ended up where you did, or I don’t know, do you agree with that? There’s some elements of that?

00:33:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think certainly at the start, that’s often the case. You know, if you compare to writing, you have this fear of starting with a blank page. And so you aren’t going to just start by writing down the whole story, but you’ll need to start somewhere and then you kind of go through this long editing process and at the end of it, you’ll know what the story is, basically. And I think we are a bit further along now where we already have a lot of the pages filled out and it becomes a lot easier to add new sections to the story basically and new subplots to it.

00:33:54 - Speaker 1: So that’s sort of the role that maybe product design has to play in storytelling or the use of storytelling and product design. What about brand design or visual design? How does that fit this picture?

00:34:06 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think for us, our experience has been that marketing design works best and there’s some underlying truth to it, which in our case is the product. So since we already have a really compelling product, I think a lot of what we do is transform that into different marketing channels and talk about the very same story there. So one example there would be this podcast we are on, which is also a channel for us to talk about the ideas we develop with use the product.

00:34:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for me, one example of where brand design or visual design can be very helpful in telling your story is, obviously, the podcast is super important for us telling our story of the team and the product and that sort of thing.

But for some time we first made the podcast, which as I’ve mentioned before, was just a weird thing that Mark and I were doing for fun on the side, and at some point we realized it was something really worth investing in, but we had basically were just redirecting to the overcast public pages because they were, I don’t know, better than nothing.

We needed like some home on the web, they kind of give you a default one, but it really didn’t convey that we cared much about the podcast. And so you designed the page for us, which was both the MUA.com/podcast page, which included figuring out what is the podcast actually about. We’ve been recording it for a while and we needed that like top headline, and that required me to sit down or we sat down together, but mostly it was on me. What is this podcast actually about if we boil it down to 3 ideas or 3 areas, 3 themes, what are they? And we ended up on tools for thought, product design, and how to have good ideas. There’s lots of other stuff in there about like independent software development or we talk various things about company building and team building, but you know, we felt like those were the three really top level things. And related to that also is self-hosting the pages, and we have the embedded media there, and you did this little illustration for kind of a riff on our app icon, brainy guy, just sort of wearing headphones, and that conveys something sort of calm and serene and fitting in with our brand vibes. And that in turn, in a way, having this home on the web and having had to figure out this headline and what the three themes are that actually clarified my thinking about what this podcast is for or what kind of things we should talk about and what kind of guests we should have. So there’s a nice feedback loop between the, it’s called the product in this case, which is the podcast and the brand design or marketing design or visual design that goes with its home on the web.

00:36:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and those projects are kind of always the most interesting to me where one part of it is, of course, like the visual side and like the purely design side, but then the other part is, OK, we actually still haven’t completely figured out the story or the message yet, and we kind of need to develop both in parallel, because then one can inform the other basically. We can do a bit of work on the design side and then see if that is sort of the vibe you have in mind for the message you want to get out there. And then once you develop that, that will also inform the visuals.

I think we’ve been doing fairly well on that. Like we have a few projects like this that I think tell a story both through the messaging and the design side.

But yeah, I do also feel like there’s still a lot we kind of wanna do and either I don’t have the skills to do it or we don’t have the time to do it. And so that’s the reason we are hiring and looking for a person to fill in those gaps and really help us out, both with storytelling and brand design, visual design.

00:37:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. We have a lot to say at this point and more than we have the sort of bandwidth to get out of the world, whether it’s through our website or other means. So I think that’s part of what they would do is just this potential person to join the team would be to just help us say more, right? Our website is pretty minimalist at the moment and as we expand the product offering and in general, expand our story, I think we would like to add a lot more content there, but it’s just hard to do with the size of the team we have.

That’s one is just kind of more.

And then the other dimension is the one you mentioned, which was skill-wise, you know, someone could come onto the team. I think you’re underselling yourself a little bit there, you managed to do both incredible web design and product design, and you’ve argued before that there’s a lot to be said for having one person that does both, so that you have an integrated look and feel between them, but then at some point that’s just too much, right? It’s too much for one person to carry on going. And that, of course, is always the tension with the smaller teams.

It’s great to be able to, everyone’s kind of jack of all trades, and you span a lot of different realms, which means also the whole thing can feel a lot more holistic because it’s not split up among so many different craftspeople, but then, you know, you’re just both limited in time and just where you can invest in your skills. So, I’m hoping that a great designer and storyteller could come in here and help us both with uh doing more about telling our story and all the unique and interesting things about our company and our amazing users and customers, and the reason to have thinking tools, you know, reason to have our computers help us with thinking, as well as many, many more details within all those realms, that we can do more of that, but also do it better.

00:39:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m really excited for that.

00:39:29 - Speaker 1: Let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ or we’re on email below at museapp.com and you can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Leonard, I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to meeting all the folks who might find it worth their time to apply for this and eventually to add our 6th member to our tiny little band here.

00:39:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m especially excited since I’ve been the only designer on the team so far, so, you know, I get to socialize with designers again. That’s something to look forward to.

00:40:05 - Speaker 1: It’s well and good to have colleagues that have complementary skill sets, but there’s a whole lot to be said for someone you can really talk shop with very directly about your area of craft. I look forward to that too.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: We both really, really like writing and are good at it, and care a lot about the written quality of the product, and we both also have this product DNA where we’ve built software products before, and we know how that works, and we’re trying to figure out if you put those two things together, what can you make?

00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Joined by our guest, Dan Shipper of every.

00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

00:00:41 - Speaker 2: And Dan, I know you like me are quite a reader, reading anything good these days?

00:00:47 - Speaker 1: I am. I’ve been actually reading a lot. I also just have to say, like, the way that you do that intro, it feels so calming. I feel like I’m in good hands. I wanna like slow down and just bask in it a little bit.

Perfect. Yeah, but what am I reading? I just finished this book by John Green, who I love called The Anthropocene Reviewed, and John Green, he typically writes novels. I know him for his novels. He’s written a couple books called like A Fault in Our Stars, another book called Turtles All the Way Down, which have been really impactful for me, and this is the first series of his essays that I’ve read.

It’s basically a collection of essays. And the conceit is that in the Anthropocene, which is the era that we’re in right now, which is the era in which humans are affecting the environment. One of the central things that we do is we give reviews to everything. If you go on Google Maps or Yelp or whatever, everything in our world has like a review that boils everything down to between 1 and 5 stars.

00:01:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I always find it funny when you look up something like, I don’t know, the Atlantic Ocean or like an abandoned power plant or something like that, and there’ll be reviews in there, which are often hilarious to read, but yeah.

00:01:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s really funny. He opens it up by saying that he noticed that someone had given a park bench, like a 5 star review, and it’s like, what is that? What is that about? Why do we do that? And so the conceit of it is every essay in it is a review that boils everything down to between 1 and 5 stars of lots of things like sunsets or sycamore trees or bacteria or every single topic at the end of it, he’s like, I give sunsets 5 stars, and then every time he does it, it’s hilarious, but it says something I think really interesting and I just tore through it in like 2 days. It was really good.

00:02:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. I feel like he’s got quite a personality as a podcaster. I think YouTube was even maybe where he got started, kind of classic blogger, but yeah, great observations on the world, but also, yeah, very poignant observations, but also just really funny, really entertaining, and so that makes it, yeah, easy to read.

I am at the point in my life actually, where there are many great books that have had a big impact on my life that are kind of a slog. But with being a busy parent and business owner and whatever else, I really appreciate something that’s just easy to read. It’s fun, it’s written in a way that it just flows smoothly and you can both get those great insights and widening of perspective, that is the reason why we consume media, especially things like long form books, but in a way that maybe it’s a little less costly in terms of your own personal activation energy.

00:03:22 - Speaker 1: I totally, totally agree. Like, there’s all those books where you’re like, I should really read this and I should really like it, but I’m just feel like I’m kind of out of gas, like, I don’t have the mental energy to do it, and then there are other books where you just kind of tear through it.

I just went through this whole series of books. I basically went through the ouvre of this guy Irv Yum, who’s like a psychiatrist, and he writes, basically what I would term therapy fan fiction.

And it’s so good.

I read like 5 books in like 3 days and I just could not stop reading it, and I just like finding those things sometimes as a refresher to all the heavy stuff that we end up thinking about and reading day to day.

00:04:00 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Well, tell me a little bit about your background. You kind of come from maybe a more classic Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur background, but then you had this journey of being early as a kind of substack paid newsletter, and now you’ve got your business every, which is very interesting, kind of modern internet media business, writers collective has some elements of some of the small giants, the business stuff we talk about here, but yeah, tell us the journey that brought you here.

00:04:28 - Speaker 1: The journey that brought me here, so my background basically started in software, really in technology and software. I started programming when I was in middle school.

I read a Bill Gates biography and decided I wanted to start a Microsoft competitor, so I learned Basic, and I was going to build a Microsoft competitor called Megasoft, and Didn’t actually end up ever writing an operating system, although I really wanted to, but just fell really in love with that whole thing because I was super interested in business, and the only way to really start a business when you’re in middle school, is to be able to program cause that’s the only way that you can start a business where the only cost is your time.

So, built a lot of apps, started with apps for BlackBerry in high school.

And then the iPhone came out and I started building iPhone apps.

That’s kind of how I paid for gas and food in high school, and then in college, finally met people that were also programmers and were also into like starting companies and stuff like that, and started my first company, it’s called Firefly.

And there was an enterprise software company we built co-browsing, which is kind of like screen sharing, but all of that happens in a web browser, and we applied it to customer service, so built that for several years, primarily bootstrapped, so you’ll notice like a thread in my life is kind of this whole bootstrapping type mentality, and then sold it to Pega, which is this big public enterprise software company, right as I was coming out of school, and that was really, really good experience.

I learned a lot about building a business. I ran the firefly business inside of Pega for a little while, and then I spent the next couple of years just like trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

00:06:06 - Speaker 2: And I think this may have been the point where we met and I think what you described to me at the time and you had just started the super organizers newsletter and you were starting to interview people.

Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but what I remember is you’d reached out to me and said, you know, hey, can we chat? I’m working on this kind of interview newsletter and the way you described it was, well, you didn’t exactly know what was next, but you figured talking to lots of really Interesting, accomplished, productive people might lead you to that somehow, and it really resonated with me because I was working on ink and Switch at the time, which in some ways had a similar origin after my sort of big career success in the form of Furoku and that ending and me trying to figure out what was next.

Starting a research lab was a way. To kind of maximize my optionality, stay in divergent mode, not pick a thing to work on, basically, and eventually that did turn into something that was pretty focused around some specific goals, but at least in the beginning, the point was to do a thing that was incredibly exploratory and didn’t like tie me down to one very specific path.

00:07:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. And I definitely did that and the newsletter that I started Super Organizers was part of that.

I think like, I went through this phase where I was writing a novel, which I wrote like 4 drafts of.

I did tons and tons of other like little software projects and worked with a bunch of different people and had a bunch of different ideas that I was excited about.

And eventually, I started this newsletter called Super organizers, cause I realized that I was just super interested in productivity and note taking.

I’d had a bunch of ideas.

In the, I would say like tools for thought space for a long time, kind of stemming from my first company where I just felt like I was this information processing machine, but my tools for processing information were like not great, and I was really interested in building software to like make that better.

So when we talked to you, I basically started super organizers and the conceit for me, the reason for starting it was I wanted to build a productivity software company.

But I didn’t exactly know 100% what I wanted to build, so I decided, hey, I’ll start a newsletter. I’ll interview like really smart, interesting people about how they think about their own productivity systems, and I’ll use that to inform the product I make.

I’ll write the interviews up and get an audience, but like the real idea is it’s a way for me to do customer interviews with smart people.

And so talk to you, published a bunch of interviews with a bunch of really, really smart people, and along the way, I just actually decided or found that people loved the newsletter, and loved the writing, and I could build a business with it, and that was very exciting to me and not something that I’d really considered before. So it kind of put me on this path of like, how would I do this as a business instead of like actually just going and building software cause I love writing, I love business, and this is a way to put them together.

00:08:56 - Speaker 2: Another interesting thing here, I feel like is the timing that sort of email newsletters were on the rise, maybe as kind of a replacement for blogs, RSS. I’m not sure exactly. Substacks obviously a big part of the story. You were early there and sort of the concept of paying a subscription for an email newsletter was something that I feel like kind of came out of nowhere, but then suddenly was getting a lot of traction and you were, I felt like very much in the right place at the right time to take advantage of that.

00:09:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a really, really interesting time. It was that wave about a year and a half ago where this started to really pick up that I was running super organizers and starting to think about this as like a business, and at the time I didn’t really understand that it was becoming this like trend, and it was kind of at that time that I started talking to my co-founder Nathan Behez.

We’ve been friends for a long time, and we just both, at the time he was the first employee at Substack, so he was really feeling it and like, had been on this train for a long time and kind of knew that this was coming, I think in a lot of ways, and we started talking together at the time he was no longer at Substack.

And we started talking about what could we build together, what we do together, and what that turned into is us kind of thinking about what would it look like to build a media company in this kind of environment where solo paid newsletters are becoming a thing, lots of writers are leaving their publications to do it on their own, and there’s a lot of benefits to that, but there’s also a lot of drawbacks, both for writers and for readers, that I think People maybe aren’t as sensitive to right now, but will become more and more important over time.

And so we started thinking about how do we build a publication or a media company under this kind of environment, and we knew we wanted to build something that had a group of writers that was covering topics that we’re most interested in, which is basically topics in tech, topics that are about business, but that, you know, when you read them, you’re both entertained and you kind of feel like you’re getting something out of it. I would put this podcast in that kind of category too, where you feel like you’re getting something that is going to help you think better, make better decisions, be better at your job in some way. So we’re kind of like toying around with what is that kind of a media company look like? How do you build that? and how do you build the supply of writers and create incentives for them to all be in one place when there’s so much incentives to be on your own, especially if you’re someone that can write well enough to do that. And so, that’s where we started to come up with this idea for a writer collective, which I can explain, and start on this journey of like taking all these individual writers who could really write on their own in this environment and figure out how do we actually write together because in a lot of ways that’s better.

00:11:34 - Speaker 2: Well, that brings us really nicely to our topic today, which is, let’s say, building a media empire in the internet age, or just simply creating a media brand, an internet era media brand.

And I think one of the things that was maybe eye-opening for me, watching your journey on this was thinking about what I would call classic media brands, I guess that’s the way to put it. Something like magazines and newspapers like The Economist is one that comes to mind, or The New York Times, maybe if you go more to entertainment, you have something like Disney, there’s one that I’ve read quite a bit about just because, yeah, Walt Disney is a really interesting entrepreneur and everything that’s been created there and how that company has evolved over time, is also really interesting.

But I remember you telling me a bit about some of these what I would now call I guess like internet native media brands, and that’s something like Vox, for example, or Vice. So both of these to me are very evocative of like I know instantly what their voice is and what their kind of view on the world is, but they’re not one single media, right? Like you know, the Economist is a magazine. And so it’s writing, and that’s pretty much it. And then they have, I don’t know, data visualizations and things, but Vox, well, they have articles on their website, but they also have a bunch of podcasts, and then they have some YouTube videos, but they also have like a Netflix series and there’s definitely something that unites all of them, but at the same time they feel different to me in some ways from these more classic brands.

And then you’re on this journey of bringing your perspective as a software entrepreneur, I don’t know, maybe it’s a software is eating the world kind of thing to, OK, how does the internet change media and especially if you’re doing it more at this indie level and yeah, as you said, like, how writers and publications and stuff even gets distributed to people, all of that is changing, which maybe creates confusion. It’s hurting some of these existing classic publications, and people have talked about the death of journalism and that sort of thing, but that it also creates new opportunities.

00:13:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. There’s a lot in there, there’s a lot to unpack.

I think on the kind of like traditional media side, the way it has worked for a long time is, yeah, you have an editor at the top that is kind of assigning stories, is responsible for the voice and the vision of the publication, and writers kind of like slot into that more or less, and the publication is.

Well, for, they pay you a salary, they give you an editor, they give you kind of like support, you kind of know what to expect. And a lot of cases, they don’t even give you a salary now because it’s too expensive, but like they give you some money and the publication’s job is to go figure out how to get distribution.

Sometimes it’s like magazine stands. Now it’s on the internet.

And if they get more distribution and then can sell a lot of ads or can sell more subscriptions, the writer doesn’t get paid more necessarily.

And so they kind of like make the difference there.

And I think for a lot of those non-internet native publications, it’s been a difficult transition to the internet because the style of writing is not really native to what gets shared on the internet, like a headline. In The Economist is usually not something that people are gonna want to like click on on Twitter, but it makes a lot of sense in the context of the Economist, where you’ve already bought this thing and you’re kind of like going through the full piece of content and you kind of like reserve time versus like, you’re just seeing something in the stream of information and you kind of like click it, cause it feels really worth your time like right now, it gives you that little dopamine hit.

00:14:58 - Speaker 2: And I think the bad version of that or the immediate interpretation of this is not a good thing. We might have talked about this a little bit with Tobias back in our social media episode, but sort of in some ways the clickbait headlines of the internet era are all throwback to kind of yellow journalism where because every newspaper was sold on the street corner and there’s just some kids saying.

Extra, extra, read about, you know, war declared and blah blah blah, and they’re just very incentivized to have these flashy headlines that would often just be completely false. And the subscription model where you essentially buy a year’s worth of whatever newspaper it is that’s delivered to your door, they’ve already got your money, they’ve already got your attention. So now it’s more about this long term value building trust and giving you really good and useful information, they don’t need to catch your attention with flashy headlines.

00:15:48 - Speaker 1: Right, totally. I think your history there is really good, and I think that’s what the internet native brands that we know have figured out how to do is they have writers and editors that have grown up with the internet and know what is going to catch people’s eye. And so the way that they have built their brands is to try To amass large audiences, usually by getting them from existing big social platforms like Facebook or Twitter, and then still advertising against those audiences and they’re trying to get as big and serve as many people as possible, and it has worked, it hasn’t worked like as well as I think a lot of investors hoped when they first invested in them in like 2012 or 2013 or 2010 because These brands are still really subject to platforms, and when Facebook changes its algorithm, a lot of them have had a lot of trouble, and they’re still around, like Fox and BuzzFeed and all those companies are still around, and I think they’re probably going public soon, but it’s been a really tough road, basically.

And I think that you’re right, people are feeling like a lot of those brands ended up. Doing things that are more clickbait, and so you end up losing trust in them and you don’t feel like maybe they’re doing as high quality stuff as you want, and I think that has been one of the reasons why we transitioned to subscription media is people feel like they’re developing a relationship with a specific writer that they like, that is not feeding them just kind of garbage that they have to write in order to get them to pay attention and get the algorithms to put it in front of them. And I think that’s a really interesting move. I don’t think it at all solves the problem. I think you can still be kind of outrageous and not fact-based as a subscription writer, but it solves some of the problem for sure. If we write something controversial, it definitely still gets views and we can convert those views into subscribers. You still have to think about top of funnel if you’re a subscription writer, you do.

00:17:39 - Speaker 2: How do you find this as a business owner where you know you need to sort of justify your existence and make sure you can keep the lights on and everything like that? Do you find yourself compelled towards kind of the controversy, clickbait titles just a little bit? I mean, I don’t think you’re very much in that vein, but do you find yourself with the mental debate of we could title this this way, and I think that would get a bunch of like outrage posts, and I know that that’s worth $10 to me because I know how that converts, right?

00:18:09 - Speaker 1: Sometimes, I think for us, I’m pretty probably afraid of controversy.

I don’t really like outrage, so I’m not tempted to. I think some other people that I work with are a little bit less afraid of that and are a little bit more tempted to do it, but I think that there are definitely incentives around what kinds of topics we cover, what we think people will pay for, and those are not necessarily the same as what we think we should cover in every single case, and like a really, really easy example is We know if we cover crypto, people are gonna read it and probably buy it. It’s the most interesting thing that is happening right now to most people, and it’s just hard to find writers, and I think we have them, which is really great, but it is actually kind of hard to find writers that cover crypto in a way that feels actually balanced and responsible.

And if we just found someone who was more of like a crypto, just a pro crypto, like all the way person, like really, really breathless, I think we would get a lot of readers and subscribers. We just would. It would sacrifice our brand and it wouldn’t be the thing that we want or care about, but it would work pretty well.

And so I think that the trap that it’s easy to get sucked into is thinking about what is everybody else covering that’s in the ecosystem at our level of the value chain, what is everyone else covering. And why aren’t we doing more of what’s working for other people? And that’s a really quick way to just kind of court disaster, because you can never do anything actually interesting or that actually moves the conversation to a new place, if you’re just trying to figure out what everyone else at your level of the information value chain is. Chasing trends. So we try not to get sucked into that, but business incentives wise, it can feel like the local incentives are to do more of that. Hm.

00:19:56 - Speaker 2: And maybe we can talk about the writers collective part of things. You entered that a little earlier, so we talked about the sort of the sub stack thing, the paid newsletters. Something I like a lot about this overlaps really well with what we’re doing with the muse business, which is this kind of indie thing, which is if there’s a smaller team, especially.

One person, obviously it’s one writer, but even if it’s just a few, where you feel a very kind of personal relationship to them, you know, their personality and style, and it feels like a much more human transaction somehow you want to support this one person or a small set of people than sort of the big faceless corporate monolith.

And so that’s part of what SubStack potentially offers when you see some of these writers go off and go indie. I know I like this one writer. I like their take on the world, and I want to support them, and therefore it sort of has a farmer’s market vibe a little bit there, but obviously there’s many downsides to kind of being independent like that. How do you see the writers collective as fitting into that equation?

00:21:00 - Speaker 1: So what a writer collective is, or the way that we defined it is we’re trying to be for writers somewhere between having your own sub stack and working at a big media company.

So on the big media company side of things, what we try to provide for writers are things like distribution to an audience, so you’re not just fending for yourself, trying to get views on Twitter, you have an organization that’s going to put your stuff out to readers and find readers for you.

We give you an editor, so you’re not just kind of alone trying to turn out as much content as you possibly can. There’s someone there who can help you think about the sentences and the ideas. You have a group of other writers, so it’s not all on your shoulders, you know, Ben Thompson writes 4 days a week and it’s all him, it’s not all you in this model.

00:21:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, interesting there, Ben Thompson, I think is also sort of a prototype or an archetype in this. He writes tracheri. I know I’ve linked to their articles a number of times in our show notes. He’s been doing this quite a while, but yeah, kind of independent business, charges money directly through his own website, and yeah, apparently it’s just able. To continue producing really good content essentially every day and has done so for I don’t know what, better part of a decade or something like that. That’s obviously a pretty remarkable case, but it has shown, I think he served as a role model for a lot of the modern email or kind of independent writer, independent subscription paid writers.

00:22:18 - Speaker 1: Right, totally. And so what we want to do is give people those benefits that Ben Thompson doesn’t really have access to, and give them a lot of the benefits that they get if they write their own substacks.

So we want to give them more of an ability to write stuff that is their own voice and vision, not something that they have to conform.

Like if you write for the economist, you have to write in the economist style. We want to be less like that.

There’s obviously always a spectrum, but we want to be more allowing people to do the thing that’s most interesting to them in their own voice, cause that’s what we think the best writing is.

And then we want to share upside, so we want to measure who is subscribing to the collective for a particular writer and pay that writer, we pay writers 50% of the profit from each reader that is subscribed for them. So writers don’t have to ask for a raise.

If they’re writing good stuff that’s attracting readers or obtaining readers, they get paid more. And then we also want to give writers the list of emails.

What we believe is because we’re in this world where readers primarily subscribe to publication for the voices of the people that they most like, that when a writer develops a relationship with a reader, they should be able to contact that reader, even if they leave, and we’re not interested in retaining writers by holding their audience hostage.

And we think this kind of a deal where writers get upside and maintain access to their readers is more reflective of the reality of who is driving value for publications in the internet age, and is the kind of deal that we think more publications will do or have to do over time.

So that’s the basics of a writer collective and I think it comes back to this thing that you mentioned earlier, which is this realization that we had that most people 50 years ago were thinking about reading The Economist.

But today they’re more thinking, I really like Matt Levine, or I really like Ben Thompson.

So if you want to create a publication where you have multiple writers together, which is what we want to do because we actually do think that that’s better for a lot of reasons, which I can explain, you have to both market it to readers as being voice first. It’s like, here are the voices that you’re going to get when you subscribe and you’re gonna like those people, but you also have to compensate the writers as if they’re the ones driving the value, which they are. And so that means sharing upside and sharing emails.

00:24:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s really cool to see that you’re actively exploring different approaches here.

We’ve had this incredibly important change with communication and media that’s ultimately gonna have massive impacts in terms of how we organize ourselves as wild as it seems, we’re still in the very early stages of that.

But anyways, when that first hit, of course, the first thing that we tried to do was transliterate the old world onto the digital world.

So we took a magazine and Put like www in front of it and said, oh, we’re an online magazine now, right? And you know, that’s a very common pattern, but now we’re in the more interesting phase of exploring what you can do with the new affordances that you have with digital mediums.

And so things like direct subscriber relationships and smaller writer collectives and different platforms that support those in different ways with substack and Ghost and whatever, and uh just a very interesting time.

00:25:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel really lucky to be a part of it. It’s something that I kind of stumbled into, but it’s such an interesting amalgamation of my own interests and such an interesting time in history to be figuring it out. And obviously we don’t have all the answers, but it’s really fun to get to think about.

00:25:29 - Speaker 3: And I think it’s interesting to think about what are some of the underlying reasons why we’re getting pulled towards these other solutions that are not called the online magazine transliteration, and we’ve talked about some of them here, like one is You can have a much broader variety of voices just because you’re in these long tails and you don’t need to funnel everything through one of a small number of oligopoly media publications, right? But also you can have that long tail effect also applies to like the subject area and even the balance of the opinion, you know, whether that’s political opinion or whatever.

Another thing I think that’s happening and that we’re starting to see with this little bit of tension call up between the legacy platforms and The newer smaller outlets and even individuals is there’s a little bit of kind of escape and routing around institutional dysfunctions in the larger legacy publications. And I don’t have a fully developed theory of what’s happening here, but I think it’s something like these older public like take like the New York Times or The Washington Post, they’ve built up an incredible amount of capital through tens or hundreds of years of in many cases, quite good journalistic work. And now I think there’s a constant temptation if you’re an individual at one of those firm.

Terms to basically draw down the capital for your own benefit or for the benefit of whatever your pet cause might be, that might be you basically take advantage of the masthead to like write some wild opinion piece that doesn’t make any sense, you know, for example. And it feels like it’s become so compelling to do that and people have developed basically better strategies for doing that, that I think basically we’re seeing that happening and indeed, if you look at the Just broad-based opinion polling in the US, these legacy media publications will be at almost the very bottom, right? I think that reflects this capital getting drawn down.

And meanwhile, the individuals, the entrepreneurial publishers, these individuals, they see that they could potentially build. For themselves and write for themselves either as a single individual or as part of a small collective, and you get more of this builder’s mentality of like, you’re basically accruing capital, and you’re getting 50% of the dividends that get paid out because of more readers. And I think that’s just a powerful dynamic that’s happening right now.

00:27:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I haven’t really worked in one of these big publications before, so it’s a little hard for me to like, comment on the internal dynamics of why people do the things that they do or how they maybe kind of draw down the institutional capital or whatever.

It is true that if you’re working at one of these large companies, it’s easier to hide, right? Like you can write an article that’s like, OK, and it doesn’t matter as much cause it’s got the New York Times masthead behind it, whereas if you’re on Substack, if you don’t write something awesome.

Until you are Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson gonna write lots of bad stuff and it doesn’t matter, but until you are Ben Thompson, you have to write good stuff, right? So I think that’s one interesting thing, and then I think the other part of that is that there are a lot of people who can hide at those big publications, and then there’s a lot of people at those big publications that are the ones that are carrying it today, that are increasing the capital, right? And sometimes they feel underpaid or undercompensated.

00:28:29 - Speaker 3: Right, and that’s a big piece of this tension that I was alluding to, right, where basically people are looking, these individuals are looking at both sides of the fence and saying, hey, wait a minute, I’m building up all this capital here. I’m not getting paid and it also seems like it’s getting drawn down by others for nefarious purposes.

What if I just, you know went over here and, you know, paid myself a $250 million a year with really nice news on there, right? That’s the sort of dynamic.

And then The tension is that that reveals a sort of fundamental problem or issue with the larger firms, organizations, so they’re basically scrambling to either fix that or address that somehow in their approach.

00:29:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. I think that. 5 years ago it was not seen by people as a legitimate thing to like go and start your own newsletter like that just seemed crazy. And it’s something that writers over time are learning is something that you can do if you are a certain kind of writer, and I really underscore if you are a certain kind of writer, it’s not for every writer, and if the only option was to start substacks, the world would be like way worse off because the kinds of writing that you can do on substacks successfully are very specific, and the kinds of people who can do sub sub stacks are very specific.

But I think the trade-off for those people that do leave is they’re a losing security, which is really important for a lot of people. Oh yeah, if you’re a writer and you haven’t really been making a lot of money in your career and you have a family, like the security of working at a big company is really important to you. But you’re also really losing the respect and credibility that comes from being able to say I write for the New York Times, I write for The New Yorker, and I think a lot of people in those communities really deeply value that. It’s not something that they want to just throw away.

When you grow up dreaming of writing for The New Yorker, like, and you get to do it, it’s like a big deal, and it’s a big deal for more than just the money.

It’s very similar to growing up wanting to be a movie star, and then being like, well, I could start a YouTube channel.

I think for a long time, starting a YouTube channel was not acceptable to people that grew up wanting to be movie stars. I think kids today, it’s different. I think most kids today are interested in being internet famous, or interested in being TikTok stars, and being a Hollywood star is just, it feels old. or just like less like the thing they want. And I think the same is true of writers. And it’s probably just taking a little bit longer because like just happened and YouTube’s been around for a longer period of time. But I think previous generations of writers wanted to write for big publications. They wanted to have their books published by large publishers, and that’s a huge thing in their psyche. And that’s why you get into writing is not for the money. It’s for this kind of thing. It’s for having a chance to be in a bookstore and win the Pulitzer Prize or whatever. I think now we are starting to see generation people where that stuff is a little bit less valuable to them. They’re more interested in internet native types of respect, credibility and success. So those institutions are a little bit less valuable to those people, and that creates an opportunity for players like us that we feel like we’ve also grown up on the internet and we can give them something that they want, but also give them kind of the experience of being part of a collective, which is something that I think a lot of people value.

00:31:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. By the way, this reminds me of one of my pet peeves, which is you’ve probably seen this like meme or statistic that in the US, the number one job aspiration for young people is to be like a YouTube star.

And in China, it’s like to be an astronaut or something. And people often say that in a way that’s like derogatory to the US or as if it reflects badly on the US.

But the way I always saw that is people in the US. to run their own small businesses and control their own destiny and make their own way in the world. And it’s obviously lots of good things about aspiring to be an astronaut, right? But it does have this element of like, you got to be one of the three people that the government picks every decade, versus having a shot to make it on your own. Right. So, to kind of reflect your point, I think there’s a lot to be said about having the desire and the initiative to strike out on your own, whether that’s to run a traditional small business or the sort of emerging class of small businesses with online media.

00:32:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s so easy to just be the kids these days meme, like kids are so shallow and whatever, and I would rather just be actually interested in what does that mean to people to be YouTube stars and how is that actually probably similar to other things that have happened in the past and what are the good things and the bad things about it and not just like, oh, yeah, everyone’s just terrible and shallow and. Losing so much to China because they want to be astronauts. It doesn’t mean anything to me.

00:32:35 - Speaker 3: We could probably do a whole episode about this, but there’s this fascinating, it’s actually a big and serious business to be a major YouTube personalities. People like they have multi-channel media empires, they have staffs with organizational hierarchies. They have like these huge discords. They have all kinds of payments going in and out. It’s no joke of a business. I think people sometimes forget that.

00:32:54 - Speaker 1: Totally. I mean, It’s really hard when, and this is one of the big things that we try to address for writers is, if your business is about you, then every single moment that you’re not making content is a moment you’re missing out on money, and it’s really easy to burn out that way because you have to be on 24/7.

If you’re a YouTube star, you haven’t got to produce a video a week at least. A lot of them produce more than that.

Casey Neistat, a vlogger, famously vlogged every single day for like 2 years, 7 days a week, while having kids. Like that is crazy.

And these vlogs are like edited. They’re not just like 10 minutes of staring in front of a camera, it’s like highly edited 10 minutes of his day told in the story format.

It’s crazy, but the same thing is true of writers, like, the fact that Ben Thompson every single day, 4 days a week for years, has to have an opinion. That’s hard. It’s really, really, really hard.

And I think that there’s a generation of people who are starting to do that. And in 2 years, a lot of them will be like, fuck, I want to do this once a week, not 4 times a week. How can I do that?

00:33:59 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally, which brings us right back to the importance of experimenting with these new platform technologies, whether that’s, you know, collectives, I think is going to be an important one. Also different recommendation algorithms can kind of address this by basically helping out people who make good content, but like take a month off, the algorithm can bring you right back and not kill your business. So yeah, much more to explore in this space.

00:34:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the weird thing is that the algorithms right now are not built that way for creators. They’re not built with creators like mental health in mind. They actually just penalize you if you go away for a while so that you don’t go away. And a lot of creators just end up feeling terrible. And I hope that that is fixed over time. It is within the power of these platforms to do it. It’s not clear yet that they really care.

00:34:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, or, you know, be the change you want to see in the world and start your own media company where you have different incentives.

00:34:48 - Speaker 1: I mean, that’s what we’re trying. That’s what we’re trying. We’ll let you know how it goes in a couple of years, you’ll have to have us back.

00:34:53 - Speaker 2: And the algorithmic recommendations, and I think that touches also on something you spoke about earlier, Dan, with the audience ownership, the email basically that your writers get the email list, and I think Substack also and maybe newsletters in general, I think part of why they emerged in that moment in time was a sort of Push back to these platforms and their algorithms that decide what you see and people realize that, OK, someone following me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, subscribing to me on YouTube.

I think YouTubers in particular, there was a lot of outcry and concern over algorithmic changes where someone can subscribe to your channel, but they still actually don’t even know that you put out. a new video, because the algorithm doesn’t decide to recommend it.

And they have this bell where you can get notified. And in any case, I saw a lot of YouTubers basically decide, OK, we can’t have our fate be decided totally by this platform.

I need to collect my own email list so that I can let people know when I have a new video, so people that really want to follow me and I can build my own audience and own that separately from this larger organization, this larger company that decides where to take a platform may decide in the future, and I think that’s a lot of where the substack thing came from. OK, here’s still a platform that can help you with, you know, the software and the distribution and the monetization, but in the end, if you’ve got an email address for every person in your audience, that’s extremely portable and you’re trying to do that with as well.

00:36:22 - Speaker 1: Right, totally, and I think that one part of the problem is, even if you are a YouTuber that can ask for emails, your conversion rate from a video to an email is like pretty low.

It’s a pretty leaky funnel.

You have to go type in something into the URL bar and like put an email and that’s not great.

And 2, I think that platforms that are already established and have huge, huge distribution like YouTube, just like. have very little incentive to add the ability to go off platform right now, but I think that younger platforms that understand this dynamic better, so subst is one, I think we are kind of like in between a platform and a publisher in a lot of ways, but we are another where we’re thinking about this from the beginning, are going to be a lot more friendly about that and give creators that option, and I think that these kinds of platforms will end up being dominant over time.

We’ll see, but I think it’s the kind of deal that incentivizes creators to use you in a way that they might not use a legacy platform for fear of not really having any ability to access their audience aside from what you allow them to.

00:37:31 - Speaker 2: The positive side of the algorithms for a person who’s consuming media, whether it’s video, writing something else, finding new stuff that you wouldn’t have come across before.

This is the classic long tail article, I think from the early 2000s where they talked about, OK, the internet is going to allow us because we don’t have this limited number of channels or this limited number of places to discover content.

And therefore, what’s on your television channels when you don’t have that many of them, it has to appeal to a very wide audience. There’s just no space for niche stuff.

Maybe cable helped out a little bit, but with the internet, yeah, you can have infinitely long tail and furthermore, you could find it through algorithmic recommendations through a Spotify recommendation or an Amazon product recommendation.

Or whatever, you start with something pretty mainstream and then based on those likes, you can in pretty small number of hops get something much more niche and in theory, that’s really good for small creators.

00:38:27 - Speaker 1: Totally, I think part of the problem for small creators right now is that if you monetize with ads and you’re writing niche stuff, you don’t make a lot of money, and so a lot of creators are starting to use subscriptions, and that’s kind of what we overall want to be able to do is You have a bunch of creators who are writing on little niche topics that are all bundled together under one subscription price, so those creators can basically make a subscription, be part of a larger collective, and we can be in the middle kind of directing traffic from readers to the writers that they should be reading.

But within a sort of walled garden where not everyone can write on here, it’s like there’s a certain bar for quality and a certain tone that we want to meet, and then within that we are kind of making connections between writers and readers and distributing the subscription to the writer that is driving most of the reader attention.

00:39:17 - Speaker 2: So you’ve curated the writers, the topics, there is a kind of, if not a unifying brand voice, then at least maybe a general vibe that cuts across it, unlike a YouTube or a Facebook or a Twitter, that’s just wild west, anyone can post anything. But at the same time, you could potentially. This is where your background as a software entrepreneur and just the affordance of the new tools, unlike those traditional media, you know, the newspaper that’s delivered to your front door, you can send someone an email that is, here’s things that you will like based on your past interests the same way that Spotify does.

00:39:54 - Speaker 1: Exactly, and this is something that my co-founder Nathan, who first employed Substack, he basically built our entire CMS almost by himself.

We also have a couple developers who are really talented, but it’s really a lot of him, and I think this is one of the things that he is most excited about and pushes deeply is that we have this like, I think one of the things that we have that I will say is rare, which you tell me if it’s rare, is we both really, really like writing and are good at it, and care a lot about the written quality of the product in a way that I think is similar to a lot of the like. I don’t think we’re as good as the New Yorker or Harvard Business Review, but it’s similar to the attitudes that a lot of those people have, the reference that they have for writing, and we both also, and Nathan really primarily leads the way here, but we both also have this like product DNA where we’ve built software products before, and we know how that works, and we’re trying to figure out if you put those two things together, what can you make? And we have a bunch of ideas for what can come out of that, but we think that that’s somewhat unique in the kind of media landscape. Usually you’re one or the other. You’re either like a product person that is like trying to build some sort of aggregator or platform and you don’t really have too many opinions about the writing, or you’re a writing person and you’re just kind of like, I use a WordPress, you know, and if you can be kind of in the middle and have both, like what can you do? And that’s the animating force behind every.

00:41:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s really interesting and I agree that that is part of what makes your team unique. And I do wonder how you balance those, which is, I think curating great writers, providing those editorial services, really caring about the content. is one whole huge job, and then there’s what I would call the software business side of it, a lot of which is just, yeah, you built your own CMS so that means, you know, you got to spend time on, does it work in this browser.

What about this responsive design thing, oh this person’s having trouble logging in because of this, that and the other thing, the payments. You know, all that stuff.

So do you find that you’re sort of pulled in two directions, or do you have a good way that you even think about how to allocate like your own time, but also your team time? Do you think, OK, we got to put 70% into the writing and the curation of the great content because that’s what it’s about 30% of the software, or how do you find the balance there?

00:42:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it can be hard, and I would say most of the burden is on my co-founder Nathan, but I think first of all, at the heart, we know that the business survives or dies based on the writing. It’s not based on the technology. The technology is going to help the writing reach the right audience and it will be a multiplier on the quality of the writing, but like if the writing is a zero, the technology can’t do anything to fix that. So, the heart of it has to be the writing, we have to get that working and get people excited about the things that we’re writing and then on top of that, the technology is the thing that can help us, you know, if we want to, for example, have a bunch of overlapping niche audiences that we’re serving. It can help us figure out, OK, who should see which article. It can help us figure out, OK, who should get paid based on this reader’s behavior or the survey that this reader filled out, like, there’s all these mechanics of the business that the technology can help make smooth and work better and especially scale better as we get bigger, but the heart of it still has to be that really high quality writing.

And I think it gets back to this thing that you mentioned earlier, which is that we’re not totally bootstrapped. We’ve raised some money, but we haven’t raised so much money that we can just like hire a gigantic engineering team and like not have to worry about it. Like, we are constantly thinking about, we have a small team. We have technology to build and writing to produce, and we’re constantly thinking about what should we do and where should we focus our resources, and that can seem painful, but I think it’s more like the kind of pain that you get working out at the gym versus like the kind of pain that’s gonna like really end up holding you back, because When I think of venture money, especially for business like ours, like a media business, it’s a little bit like an anti-gravity machine, and if you’re in the anti-gravity machine for too long, your bones get weak, and it’s much better for us right now while we’re still kind of figuring out the model to have some gravity. We don’t want full gravity, we’re not at like 1G, we’re at like, you know, 0.8gs or whatever, because we have money in the bank and we can run experiments and all that kind of stuff we don’t have to be profitable every single month. But we have enough drag or enough gravity to deal with that we can’t be stupid for too long, and that is, I think, really, really important. So we’re kind of constantly figuring out what’s the balance between these two parts of the business, and we know what the focus is, and we just got to make sure that we’re balancing things correctly.

00:44:28 - Speaker 2: That’s really well said, Mark and I in many episodes and many different forums have talked about venture money and yeah, the Silicon Valley Standard Model and some of our pushback to that, which is why we’re doing something a little different with Muse, but also part of the reason it’s a reference point is that it is this incredible thing to get a bunch of money to work on an interesting problem space, especially in an emerging domain where there’s so many unknowns, you just don’t even know what the opportunity is because all the variables are in play. And so if you’re totally focused on survival and earning money from customers so that you can keep your lights on from day one, that can hold you back from being experimental, seeing all the opportunities, trying weird stuff, but the other extreme which is having so much money that you don’t really Feel the, it’s called the discipline of the market, the real world, kind of like peering over your shoulder and sweating a little bit.

When you see the bank account balance ticking down, then I think you lose touch and become free floating, ivory tower, as you said, you’re more likely to do things that are unwise.

So I think there’s a middle ground there. I’m very much in favor of businesses taking investment. But I also am really in favor of not taking too much investment, even though that seems like a good thing. So I actually find myself in when I’m just like having kind of, let’s call them advisory calls with people, people that come from a really strong bootstrapping mindset of like, I’ll never take investment. I end up trying to convince. them know, you should take a little money, but then people who come from more of a Silicon Valley, or they just see, oh, great, I can raise 10 million bucks for basically me and my two friends and our idea, and I go, wait a minute, I think you’re setting yourself up for failure by doing that, you should take less or try to be more close to the middle, you might say.

00:46:16 - Speaker 1: Totally, yeah. I mean, it’s been a journey for me.

My previous company was bootstrapped and I was never like outright against taking money, but I felt like I wanted to prove a lot before that seemed like a good idea.

My default is for any business, like don’t take money, basically. My co-founder Nathan is the opposite. He took money for his last business and I think his default is to take money for various reasons.

One is just like money and people help you kind of figure out your business, and then another reason is Being able to participate in the venture funded entrepreneur community is like a real benefit as much as bootstrapping is an identity, being a venture backed founder is an identity, and it’s a little scary to like take yourself out of that if you’re in it.

I was a little bit more bootstrapper identity, and he was a little bit more venture funded identity, so we had to kind of like figure out how do we merge these two things, because there are real things that bootstrappers feel that are worth taking into account when you’re thinking about how to build a business and they’re a real thing that venture funded entrepreneurs think about, and they’re real trade-offs to each.

And so how do you figure out the middle ground or figure out, not even a middle ground, but like a smart way to address each of the concerns and each of the benefits of both paths. And so where we came to was, let’s raise some money. We’re going to raise some money from A venture fund and some smart angels who we think are going to be able to help us. So we raised about 600, 700K led by Bedrock, who’s the main investor in the athletic, which is a big consumer subscription media company that is very similar to the kind of business we want to build, so we have and we raised pretty much of.

So we have smart people on board, we have some money where we can experiment, but when we raised it, we said very clearly to everyone, like, this might be the last money that we raise, and we’ll raise it in a way that if we don’t raise more, it’ll convert into equity. So, you know, you’ll have a chunk of the business and all that kind of stuff.

So it’ll give us time to figure out what kind of business this is. And if it is a venture right business, and we do overall believe that this is going to be a big business, and that’s what we want to achieve, it just may take longer than the venture timeline allows for. And if it does end up becoming a venture backed business, we will raise more money. And if it doesn’t, and we find that it’s not exactly that shape of business, we still want to have people on board and want to have the optionality to take that route without it kind of being taken off the table too early.

And I feel really good about it. Like, I feel really good about having taken money.

Had never raised money before, so going through a fundraising process was kind of fun. I’ve been an investor, so I’ve seen it from the other side. It was very interesting to get to do that and actually kind of fun, even though it was stressful. And I don’t think it has materially changed how we think about the business. It has just allowed us to do more, a little bit more quickly and not have to worry as much. And we’re still in some gravity. So we’re still finding a shape of the business that can survive without having to pump more money in every 18 months. And I don’t know what the future holds, but I feel pretty good about this kind of path for us.

00:49:05 - Speaker 2: Well, before we go, Dan, one thing I’d love to get your take on is how the changing media landscape here, for me, there’s these very deep questions about who we trust to help us interpret and understand the world.

For example, when there’s something in the technology world, there’s technology news, some big company goes public and I think I want to understand what this means exactly and who do I go to. Do I go read Divination, which is Nathan’s newsletter? Do I go read Ben Thompson and Strachery? Do I go read The Generalist, for example, and this is also true for political events and every other part of understanding the world around us and how it’s unfolding.

And you’ve talked about the history, we’ve talked a lot about the history of these big institutions, the New York Times and whatever, and where all this kind of trust or what Mark calls capital that accrued to these long term brands and institutions, the writers then were kind of cogs in the machine for maybe now we have this more transition to yeah, individual YouTube personalities, individual writers on substack, people where I follow this one person and I trust them and their voice.

How’s that gonna evolve, do you think in the coming decade, let’s say?

00:50:17 - Speaker 1: I think that there’s obviously there’s a lot of issues of trust at the heart of our society.

I don’t know that I have like a answer for like how we begin to trust, cause it’s not just journalists, as politicians too, it’s like our socio-political establishment more, that feels like definitely outside of my pay grade, but I do know that when it comes to business topics, people feel like They’re less likely to trust Business Week or like Bloomberg or Entrepreneur magazine to like really tell them what’s going on, and they’re more likely to trust certain individual voices that have experience and credibility on a particular topic to help them understand the world.

And you’re seeing that kind of play out as you mentioned with like voices like Ben Thompson or Nathan writing divinations where people go to him because they know his background and experience is relevant to the topic that they want covered.

And I think the problem with that is being someone like Nathan or being someone like Ben Thompson, where you’re one individual voice, and you are the publication in its entirety, is it’s really fucking hard to do that for years on end. You have to be Willing to grind it out for day after day after day and constantly be putting yourself out there in a way that most people are not prepared for, and in a way that like a lot of topics are not well suited to.

If you’re going to be a person like that, you have to have a specific beat, there has to be news a lot that you can comment on really quickly. It’s not particularly good for someone who’s doing a lot of like long detailed reporting or in-depth thinking about a particular topic. You basically do all the thinking and put out a couple of those big Essays like aggregation theory, and then you just continually refer to them every single time a news event comes out. And so what I think we’ll we’ll see over time is writers and readers beginning to realize that there’s a lot of benefits to being attracted to a specific voice, but there’s also a lot of drawbacks to like, subscribing to like one man or woman publications.

And what we’ll find is, I think more collectives people emerge where writers are navigating the trade-offs of being part of a group and also trying to retain a lot of the things that they got used to or would have come to expect from writing on the internet, which is like upside and money and all that kind of stuff, and we’ll we’ll see groups emerge that are voice focused, so when you subscribe to the publication, you’re doing it because it has a writer or two that you really, really like and trust. And the writers are compensated in a way that reflects that reality. I think you’ll see that in writing, you’ll see that in other types of content creation like video and audio and all that kind of stuff is, it is generally better if you can do it to be together rather than alone. It’s better to share the load. And people are going to try to find new models for being together that are more reflective of the new reality of what it means to create stuff on the internet, and that’s what we’re trying to do. We have one way of thinking about it, but there’s going to be lots of other people that are going to try to do it, and I think one will emerge as kind of a new standard over the next 5 to 10 years.

00:53:24 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ or on email, hello at museapp.com. Really helps us out if you leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Dan, thanks so much for letting me follow along with the every journey so far. It’s made me, I think, much more aware or just interested in what’s happening in the media landscape, which I think is not only intellectually interesting, but probably important for our society. So looking forward to seeing the next steps in that story.

00:53:57 - Speaker 1: Thank you, thanks for having me.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: So I do think it’s a really tough sell for classic native apps into the enterprise. Now there is another market which you might call independent creative professionals, and these buyers value different things and say what they want is powerful tools that are shaped to their needs and workflow that they can deploy on their platform of choice, and that give them a lot of abilities and that are kind of unique to them as a creator.

00:00:26 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but 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 colleagues Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and Leonard S Saberski. Hello. And I don’t know if you fellows noticed, but we changed the intro a little bit. I did. So this is a bit more aspirational than actual, but exciting news, Muse 2 is coming early next year, that will be in early 2022. I’ll link to our roadmap memo talking about that, and one of the top features there is a MacA.

00:01:07 - Speaker 1: Very exciting, the pieces are coming together.

00:01:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and certainly this has been part of our vision from the beginning, tying together all the devices where creative people do work.

Clearly, the iPad, while we think it was sort of like an underserved device and has a lot of potential for creative uses, particularly this thinking work that Muse is all about, but having, I think, pretty well explored that, we also need to fill in these other pieces of the puzzle.

And so, desktop is obviously the next step there. And of course, one answer on desktop is you make a web app, either something runs in a browser or something that runs in a, what’s called an electron app, which is basically just kind of a wrapper for a browser or a web technology app.

But we’re opting to do something that is what I would call a native app, and I thought that would be a great opportunity to explore the topic of native apps generally and what those even are and and what they mean for users of the software.

So maybe we can talk a bit about the technical side of that because it is fundamentally a technical thing, but then the design user experience, you know, what does it mean to design a native app and what’s the benefit to users or how should things look or feel different for them.

And I’d also like to speak a little to the business side at the end because we’ve seen a big growth in a lot of interesting productivity tools, both kind of business team, enterprisey stuff, but also personal tools and see how the native app question fits in there. So Mark, you’re the most technical of this group, I think by a fair shot. So maybe you could briefly define for us what is a native app or what’s even the alternative to that and how do they differ.

00:02:48 - Speaker 1: Well, there are a lot of different axes here, but let me give you the classic native app and then the contrast with say the web app.

So classically, a native app is something that you download as a binary artifact like a DMG versus a web app where you would go to a URL. It’s implemented in the native language and stack of the platform. So for an Apple products that would be Objective C or Swift. And it integrates closely with the platform features and libraries for things like UI systems access, input and output, and so forth.

Contrast with web, it’s going to be implemented in the language of the web, you know, HTML and you might have more or less access to the underlying platform features you might not be able to read it and write the disk, for example. And then I think importantly, traditionally native apps store things locally. On the local disk and web app store things in the cloud.

Now, as we’re going to discuss, I’m sure you can mix and match different axis here, but that’s the classic native app as I see it.

00:03:45 - Speaker 2: Right, so I think of the classic native productivity tools would be something like the Microsoft Office Suite. So if you were on a Windows computer in the 90s or early 2000s and you would download or even install it from a CD probably, so you’ve got the, as you said, the binary program, you copy that software onto your computer, you run it there, and then when you want to save something, a XLS. or a doc that goes onto your hard drive somewhere and you can transmit that to someone else, you can email it, put it on a floppy disk or a thumb drive, but everything is very on the local device and the software is there and downloaded and runs right there on your computer.

And nowadays, both with things like Google Docs, actually, I think Microsoft has even transitioned to cloud kind of web apps with their stuff as well. That’s something where you’re really connecting to someone else’s computer or cluster of computers, AKA the cloud through your web browser and everything stored. Basically, most of the sort of software itself is run on their computer and sort of the results just transmitted to you and the data itself is also stored there.

00:04:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and just to give an example of mixing and matching these different aspects, you have electron apps which are distributed as binaries like DMGs on Mac, but under the hood they wrap what is basically a web browser, so you have a web implementation and then the resulting feel and storage characteristics is often in between that of a native app and web app. It feels kind of webby, but also kind of native, depends on the individual developer, but that’s an example of how you can mix and match some of these axes.

00:05:22 - Speaker 2: Electron has become incredibly pervasive. Slack’s desktop app is Electron, so it’s the Spotify app, so there’s the Notion app, so there’s the FIMA app, so this sort of, yeah, wraps up, would otherwise be a web app.

Another piece on the technical side, I think is it’s not just this kind of web and cloud versus local program and local storage duality, but it’s also how you implement that interface.

So there’s typically APIs that are customed to a platform, so Windows. has a set of APIs, Mac has a set of APIs, iOS has a set of APIs, there’s often widget toolkits that go with that, you know, on Linux, you have something like GTK, often there are different widget toolkits, and so the degree to which you use or don’t use those can make it feel native. Now, Leonard, maybe you can give us the user experience or the design side. What does native mean kind of within your discipline?

00:06:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there are a few different ways of looking at it. So one is to just take the technical definition and look at, OK, we have a native app. What does that mean for the design of the interface? And we have a non-native app, what does that mean for the design? And there are sort of implications on both sides that can make the user experience better or worse. But what I actually find more interesting is thinking about what makes an app feel native and look native, even completely separate from the technical implementation of it. So I think there are a lot of different factors to untangle that just from the user experience, make an app feel native.

00:06:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and we can enumerate a few aspects of this. So one that you’ve mentioned already is the look and feel based on the UI toolkit and how the controls look.

Another, I think is how the app interacts with the underlying platform. So for example, different platforms expect applications to write user data in different locations on the disk, you know, like Unix has like the slash user or whatever, and Mac has the till the application support or whatever it is on Mac, right? And sometimes you get these apps that are multi-platform, they start writing data in really random places and it confuses you.

And maybe a third example, the most subtle would be the mental models and metaphors that an application uses. So on Mac kind of uniquely there’s this idea of app that’s separate from Windows, like physical instantiations of the app, and so you can have an app open with no Windows. Or you can have an app open with multiple windows, and that’s quite different from how it works on Windows, where if you click the X, like the application exits, because the window is the app and vice versa.

00:07:50 - Speaker 2: Linux window managers typically work the same ways, and also that you can run the program twice, right? So that was something I has a Linux on the desktop user for many, many years, and I actually really liked that if I ran my Text editor, for example, a second time with my command pallet or from the command line or just by clicking the icon, I would get a second window, a second instance of that, and with Mac, when you click on it in the dock or you all tab to it, it brings whatever was already there to the front. So basically whether the program is running or not gives you different behavior when you go to launch it.

00:08:24 - Speaker 1: And maybe one more thing we could throw in there in terms of platform access is just the power of the features that you have access to. So a lot of audio and video things, for example, are hard to get at if you’re not a more native app on the iPad, for example, you can only get 120 hertz if you can’t do that as a web app and so forth.

00:08:40 - Speaker 3: And I think a lot of that is not just because you don’t have technical access to those features, but even just because these apps are designed for so many different platforms and so many different devices that basically every feature that isn’t available on all of these platforms just isn’t that important and isn’t that easy to build.

00:09:00 - Speaker 1: Yes, and this brings us to what you might call the implied aspects or dimensions of native versus non-native apps. So you mentioned one which is if you’re building a non-native app, it’s often because you’re building for multiple platforms and then you tend to get this least common denominator effect where you only use the features that are available on all platforms. Another one that we found is quite important is performance, where sometimes but not always, if you implement the app in a way that’s less native, you can suffer worse performance or perhaps have a lower performance ceiling.

00:09:30 - Speaker 2: One thing we learned working with web technologies and styluses was, for example, that the data you could get from the APIs was just less.

Yes, you can get input, maybe you can even tell it’s a stylus, but you couldn’t get, for example, the asimuth of the pencil.

And maybe that doesn’t matter for your particular application, but for example, for Muse where we wanted to do weird stuff with you hold the stylus in a different grip, and then you get a different tool, and we thought this would be a cool and interesting and powerful way to take advantage of that unique form factor, but it just wasn’t on the web at the time. And I think the web tends to catch up eventually, but that stuff always comes first to the native platform APIs.

00:10:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a good point that there’s a time dimension here where, as you said, often web or multi-platform umbrellas will catch up over time, but you’re less able to change as the underlying platform makes changes, you need to basically wait for the change to propagate up through the various abstraction layers that you’re using, whereas if you’re native, as soon as the underlying API changes, you can adopt it.

00:10:32 - Speaker 2: Now another slice maybe of the kind of native versus not, again on the technical side here is the web I think of as being the sort of universal runtime that won the wars of the early 2000s, so for those graybeards like me who are around to experience that.

Java and the JBM was a very big push in the industry to create this concept of right once run anywhere, that you have different computing platforms or different kinds of computers, different operating systems, different manufacturers, but in a way they were kind of especially pre-mobile, they were basically all pretty similar in terms of they have screens and keyboards and some kind of pointing device and seems silly that you have to rewrite your app to run it in.

Different places and the JVM had this concept that it could make this universal run time, make it run anywhere and Flash had a version of that as well, but they both were basically pretty terrible experiences for anyone that ever remembered running Java Servlet applications or Flash had its uses, but in the end also it felt like this this very confined box that was just constrained.

From interacting with your computer in all these useful ways, and I think the web eventually won that war where essentially everyone now has a web runtime environment.

It’s called the browser. It’s become extremely powerful. It often can tap a lot of the operating system APIs for hard audio and video access and things like that. And of course we do love the web for a lot of reasons and that has unlocked a lot of things, but in the end it is this essentially kind of translation layer.

Another type of translation layer that isn’t requiring the user to install a runtime, that is a browser or a JVM is something like React Native, or something like Cordova. It’s the right ones run anywhere concept, but rather than trying to give that sort of general bundle to someone on Windows and someone on Mac downloads the same program, the Java jar or the web HTML plus related assets bundle. Instead, you actually compile it, trans. You might even say to each of these platforms.

So React Native, for example, is a mobile application platform. You write your app for a phone, but then it can compile to iOS and it can compile to Android, and these are true native apps in the sense that then you compile them and build them with the normal iOS and Android tool chain, they become a binary artifact that is probably hard to tell from casual inspection. That it wasn’t built kind of directly using Xcode or the Android equivalent workspace.

And yet of course it has the downside that now as you said, lowest common denominator there is this translation layer, but it just kind of happens at a different time. It happens on sort of the developer’s computer when they do the build and through this toolchain rather than the end user’s computer. And so that probably gives you some performance benefits, but there is this thing where you’re kind of homogenizing between the platforms.

00:13:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and with React Native in particular, you seem to get the now you have N +1 problems issue, which we have to some extent with browsers, sort of famously web developers deal with browser quirks and every browser is a little bit different, although that seems to be less of an issue these days with auto updating browser. But with React Native, it seems to be a huge deal. Probably because of the surface area and complexity and dynamism of the underlying APIs, just trying to write something that compiles reasonably and runs reasonably on these two platforms which are very different and have very particular APIs just has proven to be quite hard, but we can talk more about how that’s played out.

00:14:07 - Speaker 2: But where I thought the technical side interleaves pretty well with the designer user experience side is I feel like this. I don’t know if it’s a siren song, or at least it is an appealing idea to developers and to certainly to businesses that don’t want to have to maintain code bases and multiple platforms that you write kind of one single code base and then you can deliver it to different platforms through some kind of minor effort, minor translation layer. And I feel like it’s so compelling to the creators of the software, but then as a user of the software, then there’s this thing where, yeah, it just seems like it’s never as good. It’s gone through this translation layer, it’s lowest common denominator, either it feels like the other platform. So, one example there might be something like, I sometimes use the Audacity audio editor, which I originally used on Linux back when I was in that world, it’s built using the GTK toolkit, so it was native to that environment. And they build what you would call native versions for Windows and Mac, but it looks like Linux, because it uses the GTK toolkit, it does not integrate at all well, and that matters a lot for audio stuff, so it’s a good example there with Audacity, it’s hard to switch between your audio sources, it basically gets really confused, it just doesn’t use the Mac audio APIs very well, so it ends up feeling very, very clunky and feeling like it’s been transplanted from this other place, even though it’s been compiled in this way.

00:15:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is an engineering problem. You’re not fated one way or another to have either a great uniform app or a terrible app that looks bad on all the different platforms. Another example would be Flutter. Flutter. Yeah, so they did the same thing. It’s right once run anywhere for I think primarily targeting mobile platforms, but they did the thing where they reimplemented all the iOS controls, Pixel for Pixel, and it basically looks pretty good, even though you’re not using the AS controls at all, so it can be done, just big engineering problem.

00:16:01 - Speaker 2: So Leonard, what for you is some examples of great native apps that showcase, it’s not necessarily about the technology, but it’s about being designed specifically for a particular form factor, or a particular platform.

00:16:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the most obvious example to look at is just the Apple apps, you know, that’s the sort of gold standard, of course, in terms of native apps that are adapted to each platform. There has been, at least in recent times, like some exceptions to that, where they are also trying to bring the iPhone or the iPad app to the Mac. And that can result in something similar to just bringing a web app to the Mac, where it’s not really optimized for the platform and it doesn’t quite feel right. But yeah, there are some great examples and I think especially for the pro apps, you know, Final Cut or something. This is a very native app that feels great in its design exactly for the platform. I think there are still a few third party apps that do a great job, like Things app. Which is a task manager.

00:17:01 - Speaker 2: Things was gonna come to mind for me, yeah.

00:17:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and things are surprisingly, I don’t think they actually use that many completely native UI elements like a lot of the UI is sort of custom, but all of it feels very native and it is still a native app and they just customize elements to sort of bring in their own brand and do things a little bit differently to fit their needs.

00:17:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, the feeling native thing is not about using system controls. I think it’s good when kind of principle at least surprise or you’re familiar with these controls, and so therefore, you know, if your share sheet just uses that standard share action icon and you tap on it and you get a pop up, whereas I think it’s quite common. I know a couple of apps do this quite annoyingly where you tap that share icon and you get something that is not the iOS default share thing, maybe Twitter does that.

00:17:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think YouTube does that and basically all the Google apps, like they first show a share sheet that highlights all the different Google ways to share and then like at the very bottom of the very right corner, you have to scroll to there’s like a tiny more button and then you get the actual share sheet.

00:18:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, there’s some more thing and that takes you to the system one.

For me, it’s not necessarily about using the system widgets everywhere, it is about performance, it is about using the form factor to its best extent, and I think things is an example I like because they have apps for Mac, for iPad, for the phone, and they’re all very similar visually and they have a lot of the same controls, but they use the different screen size.

And they use the different options that are available in each place. So, for example, they’ve got great keyboard shortcuts, which you can use on the iPad and you can use on the Mac, they’re not relevant on the phone for obvious reasons, and so, making use of what exists in each place, even if it’s just different screen sizes and orientations, is part of what it’s about, that it’s been thought about, how do we make this work well on this. Device and I think that’s where often either the translation layers or back to some of our very first episodes of the podcast, Mark and I spoke quite a bit about what he usually calls the transliteration of apps, rather you take a desktop app and you try to bring it to the iPad, or you bring an iPhone app and you bring it to the iPad, and either way, if you haven’t really thought about iPad’s unique capabilities, unique form factor, it just feels like a port, like a weird port. And sometimes I’ve even seen versions of these where people take iPhone apps and make it available on iPad, but it doesn’t even work in landscape mode. It’s got this weird letterboxing. I almost think, why does this even exist? It is so out of place on this platform that you might as well just not even have it.

00:19:50 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s another reason here why many larger companies prefer a non-native design for the apps.

And I think often it basically comes down to their brand identity and they don’t want to give up their brand for feeling native. So in the end, it becomes a decision between being native to the system and native to the brand that you’ve established and the sort of visual system around that.

And so for example, apps like Spotify, they basically look the same on every platform, on every device and they also behave and feel similar, right? And I think for them, that’s a very conscious decision not only because they don’t want to develop a native app for every single platform, but also because their brand is so important to them.

And I think that’s especially true for industries like music streaming or even like car sharing food ordering where it’s very commoditized and you basically have to rely on your brand for people to use your service. And so if they all switch to like a generally more bland, less branded native experience where they can’t control every single aspect of the app, I think that’s just not worth it to them.

00:20:59 - Speaker 2: I think you also see the war between the tech giant empires play out there a little bit, right? Google wants to bring their material design stuff. It’s actually an interesting thing recently where maybe it’s the Google Maps team or one of the teams that takes some of the Google products and brings them to iOS, and they retired a bunch of their custom widgets, some really interesting Twitter thread there. I’ll see if I can find and link it, but They do have a kind of consistent, I mean, material design is great and it’s consistent across these different platforms they’re on, it’s tied to their brand, but there is also this element of Google and Apple are kind of warring empires in a way, and you probably get a similar thing with Microsoft as well.

And so it’s weird to say that you know Microsoft Office doesn’t feel that native on Mac because they want to like. Use their unique brand identity when Microsoft’s office is pretty bland and vanilla, but there is this element of it’s their, they’re trying to bring some of their empire into this other company’s empire, and so sometimes you see these wars play out, maybe like the YouTube share sheet is an example of that. What you’re seeing is not kind of user-centric design, what you’re seeing is the warring tech giants trying to encroach on each other’s territory.

00:22:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think if you take it to the extreme, there can be cases where basically a third party creates a platform on top of your system that’s just completely takes over the design. Like a lot of people just spend a ton of time on Facebook and use Facebook apps and Facebook services and everything that’s created there will just look like Facebook and not support anything system related. And I think there’s a similar thing in many countries where you know in China you have WeChat and that is like the platform that everything runs on and it doesn’t matter at all if it’s running on an iPhone or an Android. It just becomes the system essentially.

00:22:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s a good example, and I’ll tell you another good example, almost the most impressive one of all time, which was in the 1990s, Microsoft had an absolute lock on the desktop operating system.

To the point that they were, you know, being hauled in front of federal courts for essentially having a monopoly, and the thing that eventually broke that was not legal action, I don’t think, but was the web and the appearance of the web browser was essentially this insertion of a whole other platform, or other almost operating system. That you could run inside this existing platform, and I think ultimately the web was what broke the Microsoft monoculture and Microsoft computing monopoly a little bit. And so rightly so, I think companies are afraid of that.

Apple probably works hard to defend against that, for example, not allowing other browser engines on iOS or letting you do anything that runs code or anything that looks vaguely platform like and for good or for ill, but you can see why from a business perspective and defending your empire perspective, that’s a wise decision.

So Leonard, you’ve been spending a lot of time on the design of Muse for Mac recently, and without giving too much away there, I’d be curious to know how you went into approaching that or if you have this idea in your mind that it’s good to design something to feel native, it’s less about the technology and more about how it feels and what the end user experiences, what principles did you bring to bear, or how are you approaching the design of use for Mac with that in mind?

00:24:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s interesting because Muse is basically a native app both on the iPad and on the Mac, but it does still feel like a bit of a foreign entity when you use it since we are not using that many system components by default and we are doing things a lot differently than many other iOS apps.

00:24:42 - Speaker 2: One of the things I found really interesting reading some of your just internal memos as you were gearing up for this project was pointing out that basically Muse for Mac will use a lot more system widgets and a lot more common conventions around things like menus and shortcuts and Right, click context menus and things, and that’s basically because Mac is the world’s best, it’s just my personal opinion, but I think a lot of people share it, it is the world’s best platform for creativity and productivity. So on iPad, we came into it saying we think this device has huge potential for creative tools, but that potential is not being exercised, and that’s lack of the right kind of software and it’s also lack of the right kind of support from the operating system or the right kind of widgets or the right kind of system APIs.

And so we kind of invented a lot of our own, and we started with a literal blank canvas and brought in a lot of our own controls and interactions and so on, taking advantage of a lot of the things that make iOS very powerful, including the high performance and the programming frameworks and so on, but really the system level widgets were of less use to us.

But it seems like on Mac, that will be less the case because in fact there is a multi-decade history. In fact, I would argue that Mac traces its lineage back to Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs went in there and saw the future of computers in the form of the Alto and brought that to Lisa and then the original Macintosh. And so it’s steadily accumulating all our best practices about how to be productive on computers in that time.

00:26:19 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think iOS and iPads have something very special and unique there where every app really feels like its own world and it sort of lives on its own.

And I think as a result of that, we have seen many native IOS apps looking very different from each other. And that’s not really as much the case on the Mac.

Like the native apps on the Mac all look quite similar and feel quite similar. Like there are some that, you know, maybe trying things differently and either succeeding or failing, but in the end, like they are all trying to follow the same visual language.

And that’s not really the case on iOS and I think that provides an interesting opportunity at least for designers to try new things. And I think you have to be a bit more careful with that on the Mac since yeah, there’s such a long tradition on the Mac and be right next to all kinds of other apps and people kind of have a different expectation of how an app fits into the system. And so I think a general rule for us, even though it doesn’t seem like it at first, is actually we deviate from sort of the native default design for a future, then like that has to be a very deliberate decision and like we have to have a reason for it. We have to understand why the system component or the system design pattern works differently and then we can sort of do our own thing with it. And I think that’s even more true on the Mac and there will also be less reasons basically to do our own thing.

00:27:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, to name one example that comes to mind as a pretty core design idea from Muse dating back to our research prototype days is that you should never have to wait for anything, no controls, no gestures, have some kind of built.

In delay.

So the standard drag and drop on iOS, and that includes iPad OS, is that you hold your finger down for some period of time. It’s usually about half a second and then the item kind of lifts up and then you can carry it someplace else. And the problem with that is if you want to move a bunch of items quickly while you’re constantly waiting. And we wanted to make something where you could not only never have to wait, but in fact, with the larger screen of the iPad, there’s this really neat effect where you can start moving your hand in the direction of where you want to move the card, bring the finger down and sort of catch it just like it’s an index card sliding across your desk, move it to where it’s gonna go and let go. So there’s no delay there, but that, you know, is our own custom gesture system because that’s quite an unusual way to do things as far as I know. I don’t know that I’ve seen any other app on iOS do that, whereas on Mac, yeah, guess what, when you click on an item and start dragging it, it goes right away. That’s, that’s how it works. That’s how basically all programs work. And so, great, so there we just do the standard thing that everyone else does.

00:29:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you can really achieve a lot if you try to play to each system’s strength and not just, you know, try to adapt one element and like make it work.

But really think about the different kinds of inputs and systems surrounding your app.

Like at the very basic level on the iPad, of course, we have touch input and, you know, that feels great. You have like a very direct way to manipulate things, can your gestures and we use that a lot from use on the iPad.

But then on the Mac, like if we just take all of that stuff and let you do the same stuff with the mouse, yeah, theoretically that would work, but it’s just not going to feel great.

And so instead, the mouse has its own benefits, right? Like it’s much more precise. It can be used in tandem with the keyboard that’s also always there. And so I think there will be a lot of opportunities like that where if we really think about what the strength of each platform is, then we can do something that web apps which have to serve the lowest common denominator, can’t even do at all.

00:30:01 - Speaker 2: And I think it’s not just the capabilities of the platform, but the use cases you are going to use them for and even how you were sitting.

So Mark, I think this was part of your kind of original vision for the multi-device use experience.

I’ll see if I can paraphrase here, which is, you know, when you’re at the computer, you’re in this focus posture, you’re probably sitting upright, you’ve got the bigger screen, you’ve got the keyboard and mouse. You’re probably doing something like deep research on the web or maybe production work, like writing a long paper or designing an interface or something, whereas the tablet, maybe you’re sitting in a reading chair, you’re at a cafe, maybe you’re outside somewhere. You’re in this much more relaxed, or you have a lot more variety of positions you can have flat on the desk, sitting in your lap, that sort of thing. You might be holding it in different angles and you’re using it more for this thinking, arranging, pondering, you’re scratching your chin and sipping your coffee and maybe getting up and pacing around the room. You know, that’s more of the setting that you’re in. And so, of course, you have different capabilities on each device, but in many cases you actually have different uses, and so we should be as much as we can designing for those uses, I think, without also being too restrictive about we obviously don’t want to stop you from doing any one particular thing in any one particular environment, but knowing roughly what sort of environment and what sort of use you’re having seems like a thing to take into account with the design work.

00:31:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and then by the way, the phone is going to be, you’re on the go, you have one hand and a few taps, and that’s it to either save something or look something up quickly.

00:31:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a good example on the phone is I think it’s considered best practice, and I think I probably agree with this to try to make everything doable essentially with one finger, basically one thumb, and also a thumb that you can reach, you know, maybe in the bottom half of the screen.

So most of what you want to do when you’re hailing a ride. You’re messaging with a friend, you’re quickly looking something up on the map. You got to imagine that you’re juggling the phone in one hand, maybe you got a coffee or a baby or a dog’s leash or a bag in the other hand, it’s a noisy environment, maybe you’re outside.

And so what the design should prepare for is I’m at my office, it’s quiet. I’m looking at a big screen, I’ve got my hands on a full-sized keyboard, and I can take my time and I have much more precision, and I want more control and power, but it’s also OK if the essentially things are a lot fussier. There’s more on screen at the time, and if I click on the wrong place, it’s OK, I’ll undo that sort of thing.

00:32:29 - Speaker 1: OK, so we’ve been talking a little bit abstractly here about use cases and postures and number of hands available and so forth. Leonard, to kind of bring it back to the concrete visuals, how do you see that being different across these different platforms and native versus non-native?

00:32:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like there’s always a very interesting conflict between native and non-native apps where native apps always seem like sort of the dull ones and the ones that aren’t going to be visually unique or interesting. Like we talked about this earlier with the brand design and presumably if you do a native app, you know, your brand is not really going to shine through. And so I think the instinct is very often to just not follow the native design so that you can sort of do something unique and do something interesting and then your app will actually stand out from the crowd.

00:33:14 - Speaker 1: This is like moral hazard, visual designer edition. It reminds me in the world of engineering where sometimes companies make it a requirement to get promoted, they do something complicated, and then so engineers introduce a whole bunch of unnecessary complicated stuff into production because they want to get promoted. As a similar vibe to me.

00:33:30 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s actually a management part to that where as a designer, if you, if you strictly try to follow the system components, like those are basically constraints, and if someone tells you and says, you know, we want to do a specific thing this way, then you might have to say that’s not compatible with the system way of doing it and we can’t do that since we are following the system guidelines.

And so it’s very appealing in that way to just do your own thing and then you can always say, OK, yeah, let’s do what we want basically.

I do think we kind of have a bit of a lost art idea of being able to get the most out of the native components and being able to bring your own design language into them. Like if you look a few decades back to something like Windows 95. Like there when you download like a media player from the internet, you would actually have skins that you can also download and then the app just looks completely different and completely wacky and basically by now modern interface standards usable, but it introduced a ton of personalization and sort of uniqueness to the whole platform, right? And I think it’s somewhat making a comeback that like some apps have options for themes or skins you can click through and those can still be native apps and they just sort of transform how things look a bit and introduce some personalization to it.

00:34:46 - Speaker 2: One interesting point there, I think we talked about with Weiweiu in our episode about expressive tools is there’s the designer or the company getting to express their unique brand, like you mentioned Spotify, and then there’s the individual getting to customize so that they can express their unique personality through their computing environment.

So I think the Winna skins were great. Yeah, a lot of them were maybe not super usable, but maybe for a media player, that’s pretty simple anyways, it’s just like play pause, volume, jump track, you as a user are choosing, I want this wacky, brightly colored one, because I like what that expresses about myself and brings some customization to my computing environment.

Which something about that feels more wholesome or maybe just comes back to this user-centric thing again compared to my company has a prerogative to use our brand styling system everywhere possible in order to maximize shareholder value or a designer wants to get promoted because they did something cool and unique that stood out to their team or to their boss. I don’t want to be too negative on that. I think there are a lot of good places for bringing unique style and character to an application that reflects your team or your product, but I think those are two really different categories.

00:36:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess what I would like to see more is just people trying to merge the two and trying to use native components and still infuse them with their own brand.

Like one great example of that is a Wikipedia reading app called V for Wikipedia. And that basically uses like 90% system components, but if you just look at it, like it still exudes sort of its own style just by type of. colors, iconography, animations, good image views, and that sort of requires, I think, a pretty high craftsmanship to be able to really merge the two and you have to really know what each component is doing and what you’re trying to do with it.

But yeah, I think if we could see more of that, that would elevate native apps to a level where non-native apps don’t have as much as an advantage at these foreign brands anymore.

00:36:56 - Speaker 2: Another example that comes to mind for me on that when you’re talking about typography is Twitter. I think they do pretty well with something that to me feels like a pretty fundamental app on the iPhone, browsing social media sort of like, for better or for worse, what our pocket communicators have largely become for.

They have a new typeface that I think they had custom designed, but for the most part, they really give over the space to user content. You have avatars, you have the handles, you have the tweet. And you have, you know, an image or video, and you can scroll through that in a feed, and it mostly feels pretty kind of integrated to the operating system, and I think it works pretty well with the share actions and things like that, although they may have their own share button problems. But in general, it feels like there’s a Twitter brand, but it also doesn’t feel too overbearing or feeling like they’re forcing it on you, or either that that’s taking away from sort of the personal brands, you could say a person communicates through their Twitter bio or whatever, or that it feels out of place on the iPhone. I think it feels very good and natural on the phone. Multimemedia kind of audio and video stuff.

There’s also another interesting one coming back to the WA thing, and you also mentioned Final Cut, uh, program I use, which is maybe in between those two is called Screen Flow, which is a really nice kind of classic screen recording software for Mac and been using it for many years, and it’s sort of not nearly as complex or sophisticated asinal Cut. But it does allow you to do quite a lot that’s very specific to screen recordings related to use and other software that I work with, and it feels very native, it’s certainly fast, it uses system widgets and that sort of thing, but it also does bring some of its own style to how the timeline is shown, how you interact with, you kind of slice and slice the video clips, and what happens, you know, they do a little icon of a rabbit when you are doing a sped up clip and a little icon of a turtle and it’s slowed down. So I think that’s kind of a nice example from an indie shop.

00:38:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to do it in general, to sort of infuse the uniqueness and branding into the components that make your app special anyway, like yeah, for a video editor, that’s like the timeline and specific settings for it, but then try to use system components whenever you have more standard options.

00:39:15 - Speaker 2: So two interesting apps I’d love to reflect on here are Sketch and Nova.

So both of them have essentially worked native in the concept of being a native app into their marketing, which is unusual because I think that’s typically seen as more of a technology term or a kind of an insider jargon.

That sketch, for example, has this beautiful article titled Part of Your World, Why We’re proud to have Built a truly native Mac app, and then Nova right on their homepage, they talk about a native Mac code editor and why that’s better, and basically all of their value proposition is around why being native is a better experience for the end user. I think your users of both of those pieces of software, Leonard, I’d be curious your take on those specifically and sort of presenting it as a user benefit in their marketing.

00:40:06 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like for sketch, it’s certainly a unique selling point, especially since they are an app for designers, and I think a lot of designers still do care about that craftsmanship that is in the native app and like prefer using native apps. And so I feel like they specifically sort of have to lean on that.

But then on the other end you have FIMA, which is not native and it’s still doing great, right? Like it’s a very fast app. The first time I heard of it was because Sketch was actually really slow and like crashing a lot with large files while on Figma, the same sort of designed files were just completely smooth. So they still managed to, in terms of performance be similar.

In terms of the design of the interface, they are very similar to sketch, like you don’t have to adapt too much. And at least over the last few years, it feels like Figma just has gotten a lot better than Sketch at developing new features and basically making a better app faster than Sketch can make an app that supports collaboration and the web, basically.

00:41:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that brings us nicely into the business side of this, which is kind of the last piece I wanted to talk about which.

Maybe the sketch figma thing is something we’re seeing play out throughout the industry, which is FIA can start with something that is maybe worse in some perspectives because it’s not native, but they’re able to reach a wider audience, they’re able to offer these sharing and collaboration features that in turn, and those things are both valuable enough, they can essentially earn more money or attract more investment dollars. They can use that to hire an unbelievably good engineering team that have done.

Just really remarkable things with using the web platform through web assembly and other quite impressive tricks, and therefore more or less keep up with and maybe even in some cases beat sketch on some elements like performance, obviously things like integration the system APIs will just never be possible.

But maybe those aren’t quite valuable enough to users, at least not in comparison to being available on every platform by default and the kind of sharing and collaboration features and so then that naturally creates a flywheel where they can earn more, they can get more investment and then they can make the product that much better.

So to me, it comes to a tough question for us, the software makers and all software creators have to consider the same thing, which is we can sit here and say we love the crafts personship and the design work and the performance of native applications, but then if we look at the industry, I wonder, is that kind of a bad bet? Are we sort of picking the losing side?

00:42:38 - Speaker 1: OK, a few thoughts here. I do think that the center of gravity of how software is implemented in terms of the language, the platform, the deployment is going to be determined by the economics and right now the best economics in the industry are an enterprise software. There’s also a consumer software which we can talk about, but let.

Focus on enterprise.

One of the things that enterprise buyers care about, it’s uniformity and ease of distribution, control, security, ability to facilitate collaboration, which is almost a definition of an enterprise, right? And these are things that the web really excels at.

So to my mind, Sigma was better than Sketch for enterprises because the things that enterprises value were just more aligned with how the web works, you know, that Sketch might have had better native API integration. It’s almost like not even wrong. It’s just not what the enterprises, I think we’re looking at when they were looking to buy software to support collaborative design, right? So I do think it’s a really tough sell for classic native apps into the enterprise.

Now there is another market which you might call independent creative professionals, and these buyers value different things. They don’t necessarily care about uniformity of distribution and control by someone else in anti-fe and say what they want is. Powerful tools that are shaped to their needs and workflow that they can deploy on their platform of choice, and that give them a lot of abilities and that are kind of unique to them as a creator.

And so I do think you see these tools succeed with this platform choice with things like sublime text or even something like Final Cut Pro. But there’s this asterisk of success is different because the market is much smaller.

That’s just the way the market is right now. The ability to price these things is significantly lower than enterprise software, so that is what it is. So I think it’s not so much that one is better than the other is that they’re aligned with different markets and the markets are of different size, and I mentioned consumer briefly. Now consumer, I would actually say is better for natives, in particular, it’s better for iOS, which is the main platform in terms of money. And their consumers actually really value performance and integration with their phone with things like contacts and so forth, and so there you do see native apps winning.

One other thing that I’ll say here is I do think that sounds maybe a little bit bleak for native apps. There is the consumer positive and of course there’s this independent creative professional positive that we’re targeting with Muse. I do think that there are a lot of sensibilities from native apps that you can pull into apps that are distributed over the web, because I mentioned that these axes are somewhat independent. So one of my favorite examples and sorry notion, I’m gonna pick on you again, we do it because we love you. Notion search is really slow. You type a sync, which is something that we’re working on now, and it takes like 5 seconds to show you a result. And that’s not because of native versus web, like whether it’s written in JavaScript or objective C. It’s slow because it’s going to a remote server and like scanning notions entire database for stuff.

My sync, where if instead it worked like a local app where just loaded all the data in memory and scanned everything I’ve ever written, they could do that in 10 milliseconds, right? That’s an example where you could have something distributed over the web with something like an electron app, but they had more of this native slash local first sensibility and gave you some of those benefits. So it’s not all bleak.

00:45:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, as you said, that comes back to the data question and so it’s less about, you could have a native app that was mostly doing things through APIs to cloud backend, and yeah, every time you need to do a quick search, it has to go, you know, round trip to the cloud.

But you would also have a web technologies app that has much more local stuff. I think it was something like Kevin Lynasiner is one good example where he wrote the thing in Rust. He had the goal of 60 frames per second. It’s a nice blog post about that, I’ll link, and it’s really all about looking stuff up on your local system, and he used web technologies because that’s what he’s good at using, and you can make them fast if you want to, but it really is about the data locality more than how the software is built, let’s say.

I think another important question on the business side is the platform creator and what their incentives are.

So, we’ve definitely seen this and talked about it a little bit with being a prosumer iPad app, means that you’ve got the App Store with the heavy-handed review. And the pretty limited things that you can do inside the application, and a lot of things you inherit from App Store economics, which are really all about consumer, but makes it harder to do a subscription prosumer piece of software, for example, and probably Apple’s incentives are such that that’s not super likely to change because the iPhone is their big product and the App Store is made to serve that, basically. And then similarly, you might have something like Google, which has platforms like Android or Chrome OS, but you know, when you look at their business empire, those are not primarily moneymakers for them, they’re primarily channels to get you into the places they actually make money, which is, for example, having you do searches and serving you ads.

And even Microsoft famously in many ways the most successful platform maker of all time, as we talked about that 90s computing platform Monopoly, they, as of a few years back, basically deemphasized Windows that when Satya came on as CEO, basically said, look, Windows is Microsoft’s past, it’s still a piece of our business, we need to create it and make it good, but it’s not their big focus and it’s not their big moneymaker.

So then the Individual platforms in terms of what they want to incentivize with developers, in terms of how they, how you distribute apps, how they allow or enable you to make money or not make money through the apps.

Certainly things like app stores, what APIs are provided, all of that plays into dynamics about what kind of software can get created, and it really does feel to me like the web. Ends up being the best, not just for enterprise for the reasons you said, Mark, but even this more prosumer world of things, you know, I think we see this kind of tools for thought, space, you know, that includes the notions and figmas of the world, but also something like Rome or obsidian, for example. Yeah, it’s just the web is I don’t know, superhuman or linear. These apps by being on the web, they get maximum control, they get ease of distribution, and they get to charge money without an intermediary, and that’s just a very powerful thing for business.

00:48:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yet another important idea in this political economy of software that we’ve been talking about a few times on this podcast. I think that’s an important like.

00:48:55 - Speaker 3: And I think even if we assume naively that the goal of every company is just to create the best app possible, even then native apps become less and less a good choice, the more devices you want to support.

And so as Mark said, enterprise companies just need to support many devices.

And so if you try to do native apps for all of these, like that’s not gonna be possible. You won’t be able to really create a good experience across like 10 different platforms and device factors, right? And so I think that’s why we often see native apps more with smaller companies that may be focused on, yeah, either a single user environment where you don’t need to support many different platforms and ideally even an environment like Apple’s platforms where you have the Mac, the iPad, and the iPhone, or even the Apple Watch, all kinds. sharing some APIs and the code base and some design language so that a few people can reasonably keep it all in the head and sort of design and build a good product for all of these platforms, and that sort of approach doesn’t really work anymore for larger enterprise companies where you need to have apps on many different devices.

00:50:04 - Speaker 1: And now that we’re talking about this, I got another riff, so we talked about how perhaps enterprises tend to choose web because there’s all this collaboration amongst the members of the enterprise, which in fact is almost the definition of an enterprise, but increasingly you could say we’re all part of the enterprise of like the software community, and this is a little bit of a joke, but here’s what I mean.

It used to be that you would like go to the software store and you would buy a box with Excel and you would install it and you would try to learn it yourself, and that was kind of that.

But now we’re in a much more networked community.

So for example, If you are doing design, you might want access to a plug-in that was authored by someone else on the internet and to be able to install it.

Well, by the way, it’s a lot easier if you’re using FIMA, or it just might be that you want to look at a YouTube tutorial of how to do something.

I said several times in this podcast that YouTube is very important, and if your product is available on essentially all devices, there’s more likely to be good YouTube content, so there’s this big positive externality that feeds back in.

So this is kind of me partially trying to understand why it is that what Adam just said was true about the web also seems appealing for what looked like in one sense to be individuals, but even there there’s an element of community and participation.

00:51:10 - Speaker 2: One item might be remiss to leave out in the business discussion was there was a bit of a kerfuffle, I might say in the iOS slash Apple developer community when OnePassword, which is one of the more successful password managers, announced that they were switching from their native built password manager on the Mac to one built on what’s basically web technologies, it’s like Rust and Electron, I think.

00:51:34 - Speaker 1: I was going to give them as an example of a good native app earlier.

00:51:37 - Speaker 2: Exactly, so the Twitter discussions that followed were essentially, OK, you got this shining example of an indie software company that has created a lovingly crafted and well designed native app for many years, you know, there’s many password managers, but one password is successful largely on the strength of the look and feel and performance that feels very native and feels very integrated, particularly with Apple stuff.

And then they essentially raised a big round of venture capital and immediately thereafter switched their previously native app to these web technologies and people felt betrayed, or that it was some kind of a harbinger for the future of native apps generally and maybe Mac specifically. And they ended up doing a follow-up blog post that I’ll link in the show notes that was interesting about essentially the engineering management and business decisions they made that led up to that, and some of them are just some specific things related to exactly where the platform APIs are in the moment.

But maybe it does come back to that question of when you’re trying to serve the widest possible audience, and you’ve got an engineering team and it’s just a good business decision, even when you’ve got a pretty big engineering team, you think, can’t you afford folks to build native apps on all these platforms and actually just makes more sense to have this unified code base and less to support. So we’ve talked about the technology side and the cost of building the apps, we’ve talked about the design and user experience, we talked about the business. Are there any other aspects of native versus non-native that are notable to touch on here?

00:53:06 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like one of overlooked aspect is accessibility. That’s kind of a big victim of non-native apps where accessibility really depends on system features, right? Like you wanna be able to set in the system settings what you need and rely on these features that providers like Apple built across the system and not, you can’t fine tune these settings for every single app and you can’t.

Rely on every single developer building like a complete suite of accessibility features. That’s just not going to happen. And so for that system to work, you kind of need native apps that can support these native APIs and build with accessibility in mind and non-native apps just can’t really do that. And there isn’t usually time to build custom implementations for non-native apps for accessibility.

00:53:55 - Speaker 1: That is an interesting one. I’ve been thinking about this in the back of my mind because the type of non-native technology that I’m most excited about is the setup where you have a high performance language that you compile down to a very narrow runtime, like the rust slashwam style, for example, where you write the app in a high performance language, it compiles down to what is basically like a web native binary, and then you can run that wherever you want.

But there’s only a very thin API between what becomes the application and the platform, in contrast to the usual thing where there’s like a whole windowing system and tool kit and widgets and everything that the platform provides. And yeah, in that world in particular, you implement your very high performance text editor, but then what people can’t, you know, highlight the text so they can’t have it spoken to them or whatever. It’s tough.

One thing I wonder though is, can you separate a little bit the platform hooks for accessibility from the implementation.

So to take the example of text size, one way to do that is there is a platform standard text implementation, which I’m sure there is on Mac and iOS, and if you use that, it automatically scales the text up and down according to whatever. The user has set in the universal text size settings, but it could also be that there’s a thing you can call which is like get current text size, and then in your own implementation of text you could scale the text accordingly and yes, it’s gonna be harder and less likely people do it, but it’s still potentially possible, especially if there are various other libraries and other library options for UI widgeting. So yeah, it’s tough.

One other question I have is what do games do because games are typically implemented in this way where you have basically the game takes over the whole screen and does whatever it wants, including different ways of rendering texts and so forth. So I kind of wonder what they do. It’s probably a lot of just don’t support accessibility, but maybe there’s a fire right there.

00:55:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it just ends up being a custom implementation per game, so whether it’s color blind mode, or changing the text size or different kind of input controls, there’s a good game maker’s tool kit video, I’ll link to that.

But yeah, essentially it’s all up to the developer, which often means that smaller indie games just can’t or don’t have the resources to support that, but of course the AAA games have these massive budgets and massive teams, is both possible and really in their business interests, because once you’re going to a wide enough audience, then even a small percentage of people that have a particular type of color blindness to pick one example of an accessibility area, that actually represents a pretty good number of customers for you.

Well, maybe as a closing point, we’ve talked all about the pros and cons. I think it sounds like we come down personally pretty strongly in favor of native, but we also see where business wise that might be a more questionable thing as the world evolves. So I’d love to hear from each of you and maybe I have my own answer. Why are we making news for Mac and why not use for the web?

00:56:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I actually don’t have a very dogmatic answer to that.

It’s that we had a few key desiderata for the Muse, let’s call it desktop app, you know, the thing that you’re going to run on your Mac, and the two main options for implementing that would be a maybe the three options would be a classic native app, an electron app, and a web app.

And there’s things like performance, but a huge thing for us was access to the file system to be able to do a local first work, which basically eliminates the web option, really you’re left with electron and classic native and I do think the performance is quite a bit better for a classic native, and also we have this potential to share a lot of code between the iOS app and the desktop app, so there was a clear path to implementing it. So that’s why I would have thought about it.

00:57:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, the answer is also all about performance and that also connects to the local first or local data storage. Again, you can do that with electronic web technologies, but I feel like it’s more of a reach. The electron app that uses local storage. It’s a translation layer, that’s kind of all there is to it, and so trying to make the performance good and use local storage effectively, not to mention integration with things like drag and drop, which is really important for me is getting stuff in and out. It’s just hard for me to picture providing a really great experience there.

00:58:02 - Speaker 1: I’m not an expert on it by any means, but my sense is that local first data storage and the web in particular is quite hostile. Like someday someone in Mountain View might have a bad day and just kick you out of the Chrome cache because whatever you’re using too much space and then you’re out of luck. I don’t know if that’s exactly what happens, but my sense is that you cannot count on the data in a stored in web browser.

00:58:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so for me it’s all about fast, and it’s about local, and you get those things with native, so therefore, probably make different arguments about the business case, but for what we want to express in bringing news to the desktop, use for Mac is the only thing that makes sense. And by the way, answering my own question there, it’s not that we’re not making use for web. I feel very strongly we should do that, and that’s for the sharing and collaboration case because that is where the web excels, but sequencing that later feels like the right decision to me.

00:58:51 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like that’s the important thing coming back to playing on the strength of each platform. And for the Mac, that’s just the native app ecosystem and the connection we already have with the iPad app. And we’ll be foolish not to use that strength of the Mac, basically. And then in the future, if we want to build something more web-oriented, then we’ll surely also play to the strength of the web.

00:59:15 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at NewAppHQ or via email, hello at museApp.com, and you can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. We still early with the muse for Mac beta, but I’m really enjoying this question of how we bring what makes Muse special and interesting and unique from this other platform onto the Mac, which is a platform beloved by me and many other creative people, and watching your work on that, Leonard, as well as our engineers working on what exactly will be the same and what will be different has been really interesting. So looking forward to continuing to watch that evolve.

00:59:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, me too. I think it’s something we’ve been kind of working towards for a long time, so it’s been sort of in the back of our minds, so you might look on the Mac, but yeah, it’s an entirely different beast to actually like get into the weeds and really figure out the design details of the Mac app.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: And I don’t hold this against Apple or anybody else. There are billions of people on Earth who need great computers, and most of them are not scientists or authors or policymakers, but we believe that this has left a gap where there just simply isn’t a major computing group that’s actually focused on how to use computers in this intelligence amplifying way.

00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark McCrannigan. Hey, Adam, and my frequent collaborator, Peter Van Hardenberg from I and Switch. Hi, it’s good to be here. And Peter, one of the things that I find fascinating to talk to you about is your varied hobbies outside of the world of computing. What’s your latest interest?

00:00:56 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean, when I’m not, you know, brewing beer or getting into some strange creative hobby of one form or another, well, I guess I’m always picking up another one.

So lately I’ve been doing a lot of hydroponic gardening, and I’m not growing anything of legal dubiousness, but with the pandemic, first I was focused on trying to basically have some green space in my home, because I was living in San Francisco and we didn’t have a yard.

And then more recently, I have moved back to my ancestral homeland of Canada, and it gets real dark and cold here in the winter, and I wanted to make sure I could secure a steady supply of Mexican ingredients, particularly herbs and chili peppers and things that you just can’t find. Sort of north of the wall in the offseason.

So that’s been a lot of fun.

I’ve been learning a ton about electrical conductivity and how to take pH measurements and having a lot of fun with automating all the components of this system over time. So these are going to be the most expensive cherry tomatoes in the world by the time I’m done, but it’s just a blast learning about all this stuff and, you know, what kind of absorption wavelengths are better for different kinds of plants and so on and so forth.

00:02:09 - Speaker 2: And correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the term hydroponics typically refers to growing plants without soil or with minimal soil. That’s right, I assume here you also have the artificial light element as well with the northernly climate.

00:02:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and basically what I have is sort of, if you imagine like a 2 m by 2 m bed or maybe a 1.5 garden bed, that’s sort of cut into 3 pieces and then stacked into a bookshelf. And then nutrient and oxygen-rich water circulates sort of around these U-shaped trays and then cascades back down to a reservoir in the bottom, where it gets pumped back up to the top in a loop. And so I routinely come in and I have to top up the water, there’s a lot of water loss due to transpiration, which is where basically the water goes out to the leaves and then evaporates, and then you have to sort of monitor how much water there is, but also regularly top up the nutrients to make sure that all of the vital macro and micro nutrients that the plants need to live are present in the solution. It’s a fun little chemistry project.

00:03:10 - Speaker 2: And I would be disappointed if there wasn’t, I don’t know, a raspberry pie or something connected in this mix somewhere.

00:03:17 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there are 2 computers now involved. There’s one that doses out the nutrients using peristaltic pumps.

And there’s a separate one that came with the unit, which handles notifying me when the water levels are too low, there’s a little ultrasonic sensor that can tell when the reservoir tank gets low on water, and also handles scheduling the lights off and on during the day.

I’m still hopeful about automating the nutrient sensors, but it turns out that monitoring pH over time is actually a surprisingly difficult problem, and that a good hardware solution actually involves a fair amount of like upkeep and maintenance and expense just in sensor probes alone. So so far I haven’t quite taken the plunge there, but I think it’s just a matter of time. We’ll get there, don’t worry. The end state, of course, is to build a robot arm that will like use computer vision to spot when a cherry tomato is ripe, and then pluck it for me and place it on a conveyor belt. But uh, you know, I think we’re still a few years out from that, both in terms of like technological feasibility, but also just in terms of like, I got a lot of other projects on the go these days.

00:04:23 - Speaker 2: And surely plucking the ripe literal fruits of your labor is the funnest part of the whole thing, so save that for last to automate.

00:04:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, my kids really enjoy going into the garden. They get the little step ladders out and climb up and peer into the different tiers and pluck leaves to sample. Honestly, this thing is the only way I’ve ever convinced them to eat green leaves, because they’ve learned now that there’s lots of interesting green leaves they’re allowed to eat in the garden. But if you put a salad on their plate, they won’t eat it, but they’ll go and like forage some mint leaves or basil or things like that. They’re into that.

00:04:57 - Speaker 2: And I mentioned we’re frequent collaborators, so the three of us worked together all the way back in the Hiroki days. Nowadays you are leading, administrating, directing the I and Switch Research Lab, which was a position I had previously held before entering the new spin out, which we can talk about the relationship there, but I’m sure the audience would love to hear about your background. How did you end up connected to this unusual band of misfits and unusual space in computing?

00:05:26 - Speaker 1: I always tell people that I like to move like a knight across the chessboard of the industry. I don’t like to go in a straight line and I don’t like to follow an obvious path, so I move a little bit to one side and a little bit across.

So before Ink and Switch, I had been working at Hiroku with the two of you. But my background is super varied. I have been an Arctic oceanographer and spent time collecting data at sea.

I’ve had waves roll over the side of a flat bottomed research vessel and swamp my boots while I was working on the aft deck. I’ve worked in game development and written physics engines for the Game Boy DS.

You know, it’s really hard to ride a physics engine using only integer math. You really sort of take the ability to like divide numbers for granted in day to day computing, and so that was a really cool challenge.

Yeah, I’ve done computational Shakespeare, which was cool. There’s the Internet Shakespeare editions are like a scholarly Shakespeare, so if you want to be able to ask questions about, like, can we tell who typeset this page of an original edition by analyzing their use of combined letter ligatures. You know, because they think they can tell different typesetters had different habits for where they would draw type out of the frames. But all those kinds of questions about provenance and genuineness of Shakespeare, we were building technology to enable that kind of computationally. So, yeah, I’ve done a lot of weird and wonderful things before I wound up at I and Switch, and if I’m lucky, I hope to do many more in my career, so, so far so good.

00:06:57 - Speaker 2: And then another important piece here is, what actually is Ik and Switch? What does it do?

00:07:01 - Speaker 1: Right, yeah, I and Switch is an independent industrial research group.

We’ll break that down a little bit more, but basically, the way I describe what we do to people who are sort of outside the field is that we think that computers have much more potential to Make us smarter and more capable than we’re really seeing happen with the kind of technology platforms we have today, and we know that that’s true, but we don’t really know how best to pursue it, and we sort of feel like a lot of the fundamental requirements to be able to do that work aren’t in place yet.

And so, I can switch research. It is about trying to light the way to make possible these kinds of breakthroughs in the way people build software and the kinds of software people can build by unblocking and discovering paths forward for people.

00:07:57 - Speaker 2: And if one were to flip through the publications on the I can switch website, I’ll link in the show notes, you’d quickly get a feel for, I think a lot of research areas that are things that Mark and I mention and with our guests here all the time on this podcast. So end user programming, for example.

Yeah, what a coincidence, increasing the accessibility of programming, obviously kind of tablet touch interfaces or next generation interfaces generally.

Local first software is a huge one. We had Mark Klepman on just. Recently to talk about that, and there’s many kind of sub branches of that sort of you think of it as like oh what comes after the cloud or how do we give data agency back to creative people.

So those topics, many, many of the things that we talk about here really do come from or have their roots in the research there, and the research is ongoing, so those ideas are continuing to be developed and pushed forward by you and your team.

00:08:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s an endless amount of work to do, and I think the hard part is really just sort of continuing to find the efficient frontier, right, which is where are the most important unanswered questions, who are the people that can do that work, and how can we convince them to come and spend a bit of time with our ragtag band of adventurers?

00:09:09 - Speaker 2: Could you give us an example of something you’ve published recently on, just to give a taste for the kind of research work that’s undergoing there?

00:09:18 - Speaker 1: I’ll give a little preview of two unreleased papers that are coming up. Maybe that’ll be even more exciting for folk if anyone out there follows us. We have two pieces that are currently in editing and sort of preparation for publication.

One of them is called Inkbase and the other one is Paratext.

Now, Ibase was led by James Lindenbaum with Shimon Kliski, and it was an exploration of how you could program ink. Now, One way of looking at this is to say, well, what should the programming language for Ik be? But in fact, we sort of deliberately cut that out of scope. What we wanted to know was what would an ink programming environment feel like? What would it be capable of? You know, how could you use it if you had it, even though we didn’t have it, right? As a research project, what we wanted to know was kind of like, well, what would happen if you did? This was also in partnership with Josh Horowitz, who came to us from Dynamic land on his way to grad school.

00:10:22 - Speaker 2: So we built an environment that allowed you to program ink drawings to make them interactive, and ink here you mean the digital ink, the same exact kind that is in use, except there you scribble on your board or whatever, and that ink can be moved, it can be deleted, it can respond to To your interactions and create interactions of its own.

00:10:31 - Speaker 1: And so we saw really cool ideas explored there like Shimon built a music sequencer that produced MIDI out of the system and let him drive sound synthesis engines using drawn lines.

James demonstrated how to build like a fitness tracker, you know, sort of like the Seinfeld streak that people often use. What if you could make that a programmable thing or like a to do list? You know, like a Zettel casting or a personal GTD kind of system, but one that you could mold and actually make smarter over time by adding interactions as you develop them the same way that sort of like an Excel spreadsheet grows out of a simple table of numbers into some fully featured and powerful computational environment.

We want to know what happens if a drawing evolves over time to become a computational environment that responds to your needs. And your discovered requirements. So that’s the ink-based paper. It was presented at live very briefly this year, but in classic Ink & Switch style, we have a massive paper going into all kinds of detail and with links to some code coming soon.

And that kind of represents one angle of our work.

Another piece that we’ve been working on, we’ve talked about local first, you mentioned earlier, we’ve been exploring something called CRDTs, that’s a conflict-free replicated data types. A really gratuitously confusing name for what is basically maybe more usefully to think about like Git for data structures, mergeable data maybe mergeable data, yeah, if you have like a JSON file in Git and then you check in changes and then somebody else checks in changes and then you go to merge and you just have like some kind of nightmare of text editing and comma placement and figuring out what really happened. The idea behind automerge is like, well, what if the data structures were smart enough to synchronize themselves and what kind of new capabilities would you get that? And that’s really been sort of foundational research that’s enabled a lot of local first work over the last few years and we’re by no means the only game in town, but one of the problems we keep running into with that is we write a lot of these big essays and we want to have local first tools for it. But today the kind of state of the art is like, OK, well, you can do plain text editing. Or you’ve got nothing, and our essays are these like complex multimedia documents with videos and asides, and we won’t be able to make suggestions and comments all throughout them as we edit. And so, what we needed was a rich text CRDT and that is to say a CRDT that was aware of formatting and spans. And we talked a lot in the Paraex paper, which is coming out soon, I hope, is in concert with Jeffrey Litt, who led that project with Slim.

00:13:12 - Speaker 2: Notion, former guest of the podcast, in fact. Yeah.

00:13:15 - Speaker 1: So we’re looking forward to publishing that because it turns out to be a surprisingly subtle problem. If you’ve ever dealt with non-hierarchical data, like extent data overlapping extents, it just leads to a lot of like really interesting and subtle, quite literal edge cases. So, we’re eager to present that to everybody as soon as we stop finding bugs in the implementation. I think we’re close, we’re close.

00:13:43 - Speaker 2: I think we said before we talked with Lis Lee in a previous podcast about whether software is ever done and certainly research is never done. You have to just kind of draw a line in the sand somewhere and say we’ve advanced the state of the art enough that we think others can build on this. Let’s publish.

00:13:59 - Speaker 1: Oh, I have a great Dune quote for this, it’s right in the zeitgeist now.

I’ve been using this line for years, but the way I think about this is in the words of Frank Herbert, Araki teaches the way of the knife, it is finished because we stopped here. Yeah.

So by that, I mean, you know, you kind of go into a space and you work for a while, and you can spend your whole career bashing away at one problem, but one of the things I think we do really well and actually that we’ve inherited from your time as lab director is like this ruthless discipline about sort of pencils down on a given date and moving on. If you don’t do that, it’s really easy to get caught up in what you’re doing and to continue to pull that thread, you could be at it for the rest of your career. And maybe that’s good, but by stepping back and sort of re-evaluating, it forces you to kind of Both take the time to publish, but also to sort of take the time to think about what’s next and what’s really important now.

00:14:49 - Speaker 2: I think that maybe this is different for other researchers or labs, but Frankenswitch, I think we want to take kind of a breath first search of the adjacent possible for how we can improve creative computing rather than sort of the depth first, follow one fork in the trail and go as deep as we can.

00:15:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the way I talk about this is I often describe us as a lighthouse, you know, we can’t necessarily walk the path for everybody, but we can light the way and hopefully show people how to get to where they need to be and show them opportunities that may not have existed before.

And related to that, one of our core values is to produce actual demonstrations of our ideas, right? Real tangible objects, computational objects that a human can use.

You know, one is this just kind of comes from our background as like hackers and entrepreneurs, you know, you have to go and build it, but it also kind of comes from a DARPA sort of motto. DARPA, of course, is the American Department of Defense Research Group. And they talk about how you really have to show somebody a robot climbing a wall before they’ll believe you. It’s one thing to say, oh yes, robots can climb walls now, and to write papers showing sort of thrust vectors and forces and friction and so on. But if you walk into a room and a robot climbs a wall, then you believe. So we like to show people the robot climbing the wall, that’s what we do. That’s a long way from having robots in every home, but, you know, once you’ve seen it happen once, then you believe.

00:16:18 - Speaker 2: Well, I think we sort of naturally slid into the topic here, which is independent research and actually you previously described I can switch as being an independent industrial research lab, so it seems like it’d be worth breaking those down a little bit. I guess I’d like to start actually really fundamentally what is research and how does it differ from other kinds of work you could do in the computing field, and then what do those modifiers mean for you?

00:16:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so, OK, what is research? In the words of Richard Hamming, who I think is quite an influential figure in this space, his art of doing science and engineering, essay, lectures and book. There’s a really great book from Richard Hamming, published by Stripe Press. If you haven’t got a copy of that, you should definitely pick it up if this stuff interests you.

But he said, if you know what you’re doing, and it’s science, you should not be doing it. And if it’s engineering and you don’t know what you’re doing, you should not be doing it. So science is oriented fundamentally towards the unknown. That’s what research is. If you know how to do it, you shouldn’t be doing it. You should be oriented towards the unknown.

So, as a research group, we are oriented towards how to solve questions, how to answer questions that nobody knows the answer to, or at least that we don’t know the answer to and can’t find, you know.

There’s an old joke that 2 years in the lab could save you 2 hours in the library.

So we do try and find prior art and do some survey of the space before we do research, but, you know, sometimes you miss things and then you find out when you go to publish that somebody else had already written about that.

But that’s OK. We’re learning as much for ourselves as for anything else.

So that’s research, but of course, research comes in a lot of flavors, right? There’s sort of pure research, you know, if you think about the National Science Foundation will fund you. To do things potentially if you have the right connections and proposals that may not bear fruit or may not have any direct industrial application ever, or certainly not for hundreds of years.

And a great example of this would be prime number theory. Prime number theory is at the very heart, the very heart of cryptography.

Now it is extremely important mathematical research.

But most of the core of that research happened like 100 years before anybody found any use for it. So it’s undeniably good for society that this research was done. I mean, depends how you feel about cryptography, but let’s say that it’s good for society that this research was done, but the people who actually did the research, they were dead for centuries or decades at least before any real fruit of this sort of transformational work was known. And that’s not to say that there isn’t value in it, it’s just industrial research. What we’re trying to do is be much closer to what’s happening in the world today, and to sort of connect problems that we see in the real world of humans and software authors and businesses back through this sort of lens of what we care about to doing research. So we want to identify problems or we don’t see solutions. And then we want to develop candidate solutions that could be applied in at least the span of our lives or hopefully over the next few years.

00:19:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think importantly, it’s a two-way relationship with the industrial ecosystem. You’re solving problems that have some potential industrial application, but you’re also drawing from the experience of industry, you’re talking to the customers, you’re understanding the current technology and what’s possible, you’re aware of the trends and things that are happening and it’s that sort of alchemy of not only solutions to problems, but potential that you’re identifying from the industry.

00:19:51 - Speaker 1: That’s right. And so I think you often find industrial research groups inside big companies like Microsoft Research or Xerox PARC, or Bell Labs.

So there have been a number of these very impactful industrial research groups in recent decades, but of course, all of those examples I just listed. are anything but independent.

And this brings us to sort of what is perhaps most strange and most unique about ink and Switch, which is that we are not part of an academic body and we are not part of another corporation.

We are autocephalus, we are our own head, there’s nothing above us, much like the strange Greek monasteries of the Orthodox church that date back their independence thousands of years.

Well, OK, we don’t have thousands of years, but, you know, the independence is a blessing, right? We’re not sort of tied to the Quarterly returns cycle of some business, but it also creates all of these kinds of pressure and constraints. We don’t have this like cozy relationship with the money fountain that will keep trickling us budget year to year. We have to kind of find ways to carve out our existence as we go.

00:21:03 - Speaker 2: And if you’re interested in kind of all the ways that research and labs work in the world, I point the audience to Ben Reinhardt’s work. He’s got a pretty Extensive set of writings on this. He writes quite a bit about DARPA, which you previously mentioned there, Peter, just because they’re one of the more interesting long running government sort of research funding institutions. And he speaks about ink and which specifically as sort of inverting this normal relationship between an innovation organization and it’s money machine, right, which is that the corporate research labs, yeah, Bell Labs certainly is has been a creator of so many incredible things from lasers to GPS. To the transistor, for example, and Xerox PARC, of course, for its short run was legendary. There’s many others like that, say the skunkworks, but typically you have a corporate parent whose job is they’re an industrial company, their job is to commercialize to sell things to make money, and then the money they make from that, they want to put into this research arm. But it does mean that always that that organization, of course, is subservient to that.

So with it could switch the idea here a little bit is to kind of switch that around a bit, or at a minimum, make it kind of standalone.

00:22:15 - Speaker 1: Right, and so for us, you know, there’s sort of two puzzles, one which is, you know, how to get our work out there, how to have an impact, because You know, as an industrial research group doing work but not actually impacting the industry, you know, what was the point, you know, you could have just stayed home and watched Netflix all day, would have had the same end result. So it’s important to us to actually sort of change how things happen, but we also need to find ways to do that sustainably over time.

So we have a number of hypotheses, you know, as with all kinds of like, long term projects, you tend to have long cycles before you see results.

But we believe that there’ll be a combination of strategies that ultimately make this thing self-sustaining, and one of those is to commercialize our technology through producing spin-out companies and then maintaining sort of a share in those companies.

And of course, the flagship example of this is Muse itself, right?

00:23:13 - Speaker 2: I mean, that’s kind of the videos.

00:23:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, spoiler alert. Here’s the big reveal, you know, Muse came out of work we were doing at I can Switch. And the original version of Muse was a prototype built at the lab, and of course, the 3 founding partners, 3 of the 4 founding partners, were there 4 of you in the beginning?

00:23:32 - Speaker 2: We were 3 actually, so they were all 3 lab participants.

00:23:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so, all 3 of the founding partners of Muse were ink and Switch staff, and of course, that was the 2 of you, and then Julia as well.

So the lab helped develop the concepts that led to Muse. It brought the team together and it built the initial prototypes, and then as a spin out from the lab, the lab retains some stake in the company.

So we’re not only delighted to see our ideas put into practice, we’re incredibly excited to see the work that you’re doing and the testing of our values in the world, but we’re also sort of directly incentivized to see you succeed.

And so I really love this kind of like Symbiotic relationship where we have both proof in the market of our ideas being feasible, but we also have this incentive to follow closely and make sure that, you know, we’re doing research that can help and that we’re communicating with you and vice versa. So I think it’s a really great relationship and I’m looking forward to many more of those as the years go on.

00:24:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope at least the flywheel that we’re trying to go for here, but as you said, it’s a very long cycle to prove that out is do research that is driven by real world problems. And of course, basic science and just the pursuit of truth for its own sake is absolutely incredibly valuable, the prime number theory you mentioned or maybe Gregor Mendel sitting there breeding his pea plants just to learn about how the world works or to learn about mathematics or computing’s most basic principles is worthwhile, but in it which really goes after things that are related to real world problems, all the ones that are maybe too far out, for example. Startup or a commercial entity to tackle.

00:25:16 - Speaker 1: What a great segue. Let’s talk about why Ink and Switch exists a little more. What we’ve talked about is the notion of like independent industrial research in the abstract. You could do this kind of independent industrial research in any field, material science, you could build spaceships if you had enough capital, which apparently some people do, you know, you could study journalism, as long as you have this sort of like connective loop.

But in the words of Thoreau, it’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about? And what we’re busy about is sort of this despair that computers have increasingly become mechanisms entirely for consumption, and that so many of the groups and bodies that were building the bicycles for the mine that were pursuing this sort of vision of computers as these intelligence amplifying devices have kind of retreated from that vision towards a more Natural consumer demand. And I don’t hold this against Apple or anybody else, you know, there are billions of people on Earth who need great computers, and most of them are not scientists or authors or policymakers, and so it’s natural that they would sort of follow the pull of their users and go to where the market is. But we believe that this has left a gap where there just simply isn’t a major computing group that’s actually focused on solving problems.

Around how to use computers in this sort of intelligence amplifying way.

And specifically, the reason why a research group exists to solve this problem is that people are, oh, well, startups are these great innovators. That’s only true in a very narrow way.

All three of us on this call here have plenty of background in startups, both working in them, and founding them, advising them, etc. And startups can take certain kinds of risks, but they can’t take every kind of risk, and it’s sort of like the old advice about only break one law at a time, you know, it’s the same thing with startups, which is you should only take one risk at a time, and generally for the startup, there’s like a core hypothesis to the startup that they are trying to test. It’s Some new kind of product or in some new kind of market.

And so the advice people give startups is, well, you should be conservative in all your other choices because you’re already taking a massive risk on this one axis. And so the way we see that play out is lots of people are building startups that would be much more effective from, we think a software and user perspective as local first software, but they build them as cloud sass because that’s what the market expects and that’s what’s easy, that’s what’s known how to do. It’s also what venture capitalists expect.

Right, venture capitalism is, let’s be honest, mostly about pattern matching and comparing with other past successes and trying to into it based on this sort of both guiding and being guided by the structure of what the market is doing right now. And that’s fine too. It’s just, this doesn’t leave much space for the kinds of major transformative direction. That a research group can pursue. We can think a decade out. A startup can only think 2 or 3 years out at most. And so that means that we have the opportunity to do work that simply isn’t possible in the context of a startup. And in so doing, we can bring those time horizons in closer and bring things into sort of striking range for a startup, and then those startups can go and pursue these ideas. And in fact, we’re seeing that all the time these days, not just with Muse, but You know, we’re seeing lots of startups these days who reach out and contact us and say, hey, thanks so much for your essays, they were really inspiring, they’ve been really influential on how we’re thinking about this, and we’re hearing from venture capitalists when there are local first startups in some new domain, we’re seeing tangible results of this work on the industry today.

00:29:10 - Speaker 2: Your point about markets and the fact that sort of even startups or commercial ventures, I think just generally speaking, need to follow market trends.

It would be dumb not to. In fact, that’s almost the definition of a good opportunity is capitalizing on an immediate trend and In fact, what we see that for example, ARPA slash DARPA, what they do is try to change the whole industry. So one famous example of theirs is they decided in the early 2000s, we think self-driving cars should be a thing, and they put their money to work with prizes and other kinds of funding grants to Get a bunch of both researchers but also companies and investors interested in that, and they basically kicked off that whole revolution that has yet to perhaps fully yield fruit, but at least you see they got a bunch of people caring about it, they got a bunch of money into it, they got a bunch of smart people who want to make that future come true.

00:30:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and DARPA refers to this as the challenge-based model.

So they use this trick everywhere. DARPA doesn’t actually do any research in-house. They are fundamentally a funding agency.

And so, with self-driving cars, they said, hey, we’re gonna give you this challenge, which is you have to drive this car across the desert. And the first year, I think none of the contestants made it to the finish line at all, but each year it got closer and closer until they were eventually, there were entrants that were able to traverse this whole landscape and they won some prize money, but they talk about at DARPA how The way they evaluate projects is that they want things that are really ambitious in their outcome, but they also want things that are tangible in their direction. And so they need to be both very hard, they call it DARPA hard as sort of like a discriminator of ambition. They don’t want something that’s just difficult, they want something that’s really difficult, but they also want something that can be articulated in like a real world results that can be measured or evaluated.

00:31:06 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so obviously I can switch doesn’t have that same structure. We do the research in-house. We don’t have government money to spend, etc. but I think just broadly this idea of moving the market rather than going with the trends that exist, we’re saying we actually don’t like some of the trends where the massive consumerization of computers, which has many nice benefits like most people use the computers in their pockets as Messaging devices, right, and stay in touch with friends and family. Great, that’s good, but then who is working on the creative tools? Creative tools are just not sexy, not interesting, not where it’s seen to be the place that smart people or smart investors put their effort.

00:31:45 - Speaker 1: Well, the smart investors is, I think the secret here. This is the core, right, which is that if you’re an investor, you need a Big market and it turns out that a bunch of novelists and like researchers, there aren’t a billion novelists and researchers to buy your product and if there were, they probably don’t have the budget themselves to go after it. So I think it’s perceived as a relatively small market, though we think there’s a lot of opportunity there if you build tools focused for them.

00:32:10 - Speaker 2: I don’t know, Microsoft Office did OK back in the day. Adobe seems to be doing all right.

00:32:14 - Speaker 3: That’s true. Yeah, so here’s my variant on this. I think there are actually 3 big markets that are already very well funded and being effectively pursued.

One is what I would call consumer software, this is ad funded, engagement based software, Facebook, and so forth.

There’s enterprise software, which is perhaps actually the most profitable domain right now. This is now Microsoft. AWS stripe, things like that.

A third one actually that we often don’t mention is like surveillance and weapons related stuff, like kind of government stuff. That’s all very well funded.

So this is an area with individuals that’s perceived to be less economically lucrative. So the entirely predictable and predicted outcome is that there’s just much less investment and therefore, much less progress in it. And we’re trying to jumpstart that flywheel a little bit and get some more progress in this area.

00:33:00 - Speaker 2: But I do think it’s not just on the investor side, we talked to Jason Yuan about this, which is, for example, doing design work for designers, do they want to go to work on the next Excel or do they want to go to work on the next, I don’t know, Snapchat and.

At least in the recent past, I feel like these consumer facing companies because they are so big because they have such big outsized brands, but you’ve heard of them, but also they have so much money to put into it, they can do a lot to build those brands and be perceived as a place that the best talent comes to.

So I might think of one of the goals of use and I can switch and all the other folks who are in our sphere of creative tools and tools for thought and so forth is just making that a cool area that people are drawn to work in.

00:33:47 - Speaker 1: Obviously you got to pay your rent and Nothing says cool like 6000 word essays on esoteric technical subjects, and then we all got our own definition of cool.

00:33:55 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah.

00:33:56 - Speaker 3: I think that’s true. I think that gets to this idea of institutional alchemy, which is it’s not a matter of just going to a space and working on it or even of just providing funding for it. You gotta bring together all these different factors. There’s funding, there’s vision, there’s people. There’s memes, you know, there’s lines of research, you need it all to be there. Communities, yeah, exactly. And one of the things I’m really proud of with ink and Switches I think we’ve managed to do that somewhat for this space. There’s this nexus, this scene that is formed around the work.

00:34:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s true. It’s very exciting to see a growing space, and of course, we’re talking about Ink & Switch and so I’m sort of focused on that, but I want to note that like we’re by no means operating in a vacuum, and there are plenty of other people like Gordon Brander out there who are writing about this, and there’s lots of startups like Rome Research, who are out there building products in addition to Muse, and I like to think that we are. Certainly a significant player in that ecosystem, but I don’t mean to sort of imply ownership over it or take credit for what is by every indication. A rapidly growing and very dynamic space. I think that’s true.

One thing I would like to talk about is why this is important, and why we’re doing this. Now, I think all of us, sort of longtime members of the lab. Believe that the world is kind of in a rough spot right now, like in a big picture sense, right, we have major climate change problems ahead of us, we’ve got this sort of breakdown of the old social order, which is largely driven by new dynamics and communication tools through social media, without getting too much into that, there’s these attentional economy problems, right? You know, you go to unlock your phone and there’s 75 push notifications waiting for you from a mixture of actually useful things and marketers that have somehow managed to slide into your mentions. So you’ve got like all of these kinds of, like, real major issues, and here we are monkeying around with CRDTs and programmable ink. You know, I’ve had friends who are like, if you think these problems that are facing the world are so important, why are you playing with computers? Why aren’t you out there working on the front lines of climate change? I think it’s a good critique and it’s a fair question, but I think, specifically our work. And our motivation behind our work is that we want to empower the people who have those first order skills to be able to attack these problems. We want to support physicists, we want to support journalists, we wanna support writers and authors, and there’s this whole pipeline of knowledge. Pipeline is Gordon Brander, if you’re listening. There’s a systems theory explanation here. It’s not a pipeline, there’s lots of feedback loops at every step along the way, but there’s this system of cultural change that occurs where real knowledge about the universe produces change in the way that we live. And at one end of the pipeline are scientists and social theorists and other people, activists, and then, you know, it goes through a long process that involves a lot of different parties and systems like journalists and writers who bring these ideas to the public and talk about them and communicate them and eventually winding up with policymakers and entrepreneurs and government officials who either change public policies, introduce new laws, or start new businesses and pursue opportunities revealed by this. And so all of that kind of structure. You know, we believe that there’s a lot of unnecessary friction and loss of productivity caused by these bad tools. Every time someone who could be working on climate change loses their data because whatever, the computer reboots to run an update or, you know, they have some great idea and they go to take a note, but they get distracted before they take that note, because their phone is telling them to play whatever Flappy Bird or something. Like anytime those kinds of things happen. That is slowing down and taxing our ability to respond to all of these problems. And so we as a group, the people in the lab, don’t have physics degrees. We’re not social theorists, but we hope that by working with journalists and talking to them, and working with scientists and talking to them, and working with writers and talking to them, that we can learn what the challenges these people have are. And develop a set of values and theories and practices that we can then build infrastructure around that will enable these people to be more effective. But why that, right? The answer is just, this is what we’re good at, this is what we know how to do, right? We’re taking our skills, our unique advantage, and we’re trying to apply them indirectly, perhaps, but sincerely and over a prolonged time scale and intentionally towards enabling those kinds of changes.

00:38:58 - Speaker 2: 80,000 hours has a kind of whole set of essays and theory about how to apply your career in the most effective way as possible to do good in the world, and they reference exactly that point you just mentioned, which is you have to find the overlap between a meaningful problem in the world. What you specifically are great at, drawn to or passionate about, or you have skills or knowledge or experience that very few others have. And the third one actually is an area that not a lot of people are working on. And so I think that’s part of what drew us to this space for for and switch.

00:39:31 - Speaker 1: Not a lot of people were working on this when we started here. Certainly there have been times when people have kind of looked at me and been like, why aren’t you doing AI or ML or blockchain or cloud software or like any of the things that anybody ever raises any money to work on. It’s like, well, doing what everybody else does takes you where everybody else is going. If you want to solve interesting problems, you’ve got to work on things that other people aren’t already doing. That’s part of it.

00:39:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah. Another angle on the why that I would give in addition to this like kind of productivity and effectiveness motivation is one of just aesthetics and beauty and sentiment.

I talk about how we are using these tools 468 hours a day, and it’s incredible. demoralizing if they’re not beautiful, if they don’t feel good.

And I think that is the state of a lot of our tools. And you would feel terrible and in fact, refuse to go to work on a really creative project, 8 hours every day in like some terrible concrete block building, right? It would be demoralizing.

That’s a situation that I feel like we are in with a lot of our tools. And just making people feel better about what they’re working with well I think also enable more good work.

00:40:37 - Speaker 1: Yes, we’re asking all of the artists and scientists of the world to do their best work inside a Walmart full of billboards, while the internet is screaming at them. Yeah. It’s not ideal.

00:40:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, to sort of summarize what both of you said or perhaps my take on it would be that computers and software and the internet have become a really fundamental infrastructure in the world. They’re like roads and bridges, they’re like our agricultural systems and our economy, and those things need to work well and for us to do anything else, solve any other worthwhile problems or do. Things like make great art, create beauty in the world, and computers have gone from being something that is maybe more of a toy or a novelty to being something that is fundamental and everywhere. And so them supporting the humanity’s best aims and noblest pursuits versus being swept up in that Walmart of billboards demanding your attention is something we think will produce returns for all of society.

00:41:41 - Speaker 1: Talking about all of society, I think one of the really valid criticisms of both our work and a lot of the other work in this space is that it is rooted in this kind of technocratic elitist view that there are experts and brilliant people out there in the world, and what we really need to do is enable them to do better work.

You know, I have young kids and I was at sort of some 3 year old’s birthday party in a playground.

And I got to talking to a golf course equipment manager who lives here in this town, super nice guy, sort of opened with, oh, I don’t know too much about those computer things. But he’s interested in what we did, so I was trying to sort of translate my work for him because, you know, it’s nice to hear about what other people do and share what you do.

00:42:23 - Speaker 2: Just as a note, the cocktail party conversation, which is exactly what I described this, trying to bridge, you know, describe your nichey work to someone that’s completely outside the field, was one of the biggest challenges for me working on Incode switches very hard to summarize that. It’s gotten a little easier since I’ve been onus cause I can just say, yeah, we’re making an iPad app.

00:42:43 - Speaker 1: Well, so, funny enough, this gentleman who claimed not to know much about computers was actually more plugged into the problems of our industry than anybody I know in Silicon Valley that you just pick off the street. He starts telling me about how he doesn’t trust the tractor companies. Because they’re taking all their data and putting it in cloud services and it’s not necessarily to the benefit of him or the equipment managers at the golf course, and how he’s been building all his own software and FileMaker Pro to do all of this stuff in-house, because he doesn’t like that all this data is going to these.

Enterprises who are deciding what they pay and how much maintenance is going to cost and all these things, and he’s trying to maintain his independence and he doesn’t trust them not to change the data. I’m like, oh man, you get this work better than almost anybody I talked to. You understand the problems cause you’re out there on the edge. You’re the guy who is suffering because of all these venture capital backed startups and this big push to cloud sass, like, yeah, there’s a lot of benefit, but there’s a lot of cost. And this guy sees it in a way that most Silicon Valley software people don’t, because he’s feeling the pain. And so one of the things that I think we need all to do as a group is do a better job of like.

Realizing that climate change is not something for scientists to solve, it’s too late for that, right? We need resilience at every level of our communities. Everybody is going to be finding new ways to live and working on new solutions to these problems, right? Social media driven sort of like cultural collapse. It is not something that only media theorists are going to solve. It’s all of us on our phones, on our computers, in our lives are going to find new ways to communicate. We’re going to need new tools to find that quiet space for ourselves, whether you’re, you know, designing knitting patterns or whether you’re Organizing neighborhood barbecues and potlucks, right? Like this is not solely a problem that affects sort of elite thinkers in society, and we should be building tools for everybody and thinking really about deep resilience through all of society. And so I think that’s something that I’ve been challenged on lately and I’ve been thinking a lot about and so I want to encourage everybody listening to remember that like this is an all of society problem and so we should be building all of society responses.

00:44:57 - Speaker 2: Well, after that grand and sweeping discussion of the big picture stuff, I’d actually be curious to just get a little nuts and bolts. What does an Ink & Switch project look like? Mark and I have talked before here about the Hollywood model a little bit, and you talked in the very beginning about the pens down, the strict pens down at the end of the project, but for example, two of these two projects you mentioned earlier, what does it actually look like start to finish?

00:45:22 - Speaker 1: So, we have a number of sort of active areas of research, and there are other areas we need to expand into and haven’t, but that’s a separate problem.

So, to do a project, the first step is to find a problem, and so we have a process of sort of developing project briefs we call pre-infusion.

And so, you know, around the lab and in our community of past and future collaborators are a lot of people who are sort of tracking these kinds of interesting problems, but a good Ink & Switch problem is one that we think is really important. That we don’t know how to solve and that we don’t think somebody else will solve for us if we just wait a little

00:46:03 - Speaker 1: bit.

00:46:04 - Speaker 2: So maybe an example here might be the rich text CRDT you mentioned earlier. We’ve done lots of projects with CRDTs because that’s a great technology for collaboration and local first, but then anytime we go to add text, you go, can we make this rich text? Nope, because there’s no such thing as a rich text CRDT. OK, well, put that in the future research bin somewhere.

00:46:26 - Speaker 1: Right, and I do want to point out that Kevin Jan’s uh YJS project has a rich tech CRDT, but it had some properties that we felt didn’t make it suitable for the particular task we had at hand, and also, while he’s done a ton of great work there, There’s no sort of documentation about how to do this that other people could pick up and draw from because it’s, you know, an implementation he wrote to solve his problems.

So we wanted to write something about this, both so that we could implement it as well, but also so that other people could learn from this and build on this work in a more sort of open way. So that’s a great example of a problem.

So basically do some research upfront. We usually have one person doing this sort of pre-infusion thing, they’ll look at the state of the art, they’ll try and scope a problem, they’ll define what we need to do, and they’ll kind of write up like a 1, maybe 2. Page description of what’s the problem we’re trying to solve and how are we going to solve it and who do we need on the team to be able to solve that.

And that’s important because as you’ve talked about the Hollywood model before, but for folks who haven’t heard that episode, we sort of treat each research project kind of like a film production. We put together a team of experts or domain knowledge or generalists with the right kind of philosophy, depending on the project. To execute on some vision, and then when it’s over, we ship the paper and most people move on and go on to whatever they’re doing next, just like you would if you were building a film, rather than these sort of like permanent staff researchers. So we do have a couple of folks like that around as well. And so that’s kind of the pre-infusion.

00:47:57 - Speaker 2: One thing I’ll just note briefly on the staff side is that being able to hire people kind of as short term for these projects, which are usually a couple of months, means that you can get the exact combination of skills that you need.

When we’ve done more kind of innovation oriented R&D within an existing company that has a standing staff, you know, when it comes time to say, well, we need to implement this back end system, what are we going to use? Well, we use Erlang because we have an Erlang programmer on the team rather than coming at it from what is actually the best technology or the specific skills that we need and go.

Find those people.

I think one of the more dramatic examples to that for me, Peter, was when you came into the lab and started advocating for CRDTs as a solution to the kind of sinking problems we’ve been thinking about a little bit, and then we decided to do a project around that, you know, this was 2016 or something, because this was such an early time for that.

There was probably only 10 or 12 people in the world who you could consider experts or even reasonably knowledgeable about CRDTs.

We literally made a list, you made a spreadsheet and contacted every one of them and saw who might like to work with us or who did we vibe with, and that’s how we met Martin Kleppman.

00:49:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and we’ve been working with him ever since.

00:49:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it turned out to be a great collaboration, but it’s a good example of where You don’t start from, you know, you say, well, we’ve got some post graphs experts on the team, let’s do post graphs. No, you start from what is actually needed if you look at the whole world of skills and technology and design needs and what have you, and then go find the specific person or people who have that exact skill.

00:49:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and one of the other sort of killer advantages of the lab is that there’s Code for America, and Code for America is this great organization that basically gets engineers to spend some time doing basically civic service, building software for some kind of governmental body or agency and. You know, we could debate sort of what percentage of that work ends up being sort of abandonwa or how effective that is, but I think the model is great, which is it sort of recognizes that in your career, you may have these gaps between things, you’re finished one thing, you’re not quite ready to start something new. And so Code for America, it’s sort of like an escape hatch that people use when they’re tired of their job or just need a break or want to do something different.

Similarly, because we run these sort of short term projects, We’ve had this amazing ability to bring in incredibly talented people who will be in eventually are snapped up by the top companies in our industry. Moments later, but we get to work with them for a few months on some really interesting project and not only do they influence our thinking, but we influence their thinking, and so we’ve really been able to scale our influence on the world. And to bring in a ton more insight and knowledge and sort of inspiration by working short term with people than we would have by working long term. And so I think that’s one of our like secret weapons for sure at the lab.

So, once we scope a project and kind of say, OK, well, we want to do this thing, we’re going to need these kinds of people, we go into recruiting mode, as we said, and we bring in a team. And then at that moment, our goal is like on kickoff day for a project, not always, but this is sort of the archetype. We want to have like a really clear sense of, you know, what’s the tech stack, what are we going to build, what are some vague milestones along the way. At this point, we’ve done prep, and you know, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Once the project gets started, things tend to change, but we want to come in with like a really clear direction and hit execution mode, and the team just focuses, they go head down. And they just engineer the crap out of it for like 2 or 3 months. We always pick sort of a fairly strict end date at the start of the project. You know, the fear of like impending deadlines helps everybody stay focused. And the other thing we do throughout the project is we do sort of a show and tell every other week where teams come and say like, hey, this is what we’ve been up to, you know, share with the rest of the lab, get feedback, but that sort of regular cadence of showing your work both helps people to stay focused and on task, but it also gives you kind of like regular mile. Stone so you don’t end up rabbit holing too bad. You know, it’s not like there’s like a law, but you have to show up on this day and have something new to demo. But if you’re going to turn up on Friday, on Monday, you know, this week we’re going to be showing our work, so you sort of make that extra little bit of effort to like make sure things work a little better or to polish something up a little bit or just to make sure you don’t break the build on Thursday kind of thing. So I really like that cadence. And then at the end of that time, it’s sort of like pencils down, project is done. And in the beginning, we really just sort of like at the end of the project, someone on the project, the project lead, would usually write a little internal Google doc talking about what we did, and in the really early days, everybody at the lab was on the same project, so everybody knew what the project did because you did it together. But at the end of the project, these days we’re spending more and more time writing, editing and publishing. And today that process generally takes 2 months, 2 to 3 months of work, and it’s certainly not full time work and often overlaps with pre-infusion for the next project, but it’s very much this kind of like process of not just publishing to share the knowledge with everybody else, but also mining your memories of that experience for insight and figuring out what happened. So that you can tell that story, and the process of writing, I think, really turns the work into knowledge in a really powerful way. And so as valuable as it is to publish this work to everybody outside of the lab, I think it’s at least as valuable to those of us inside the lab because it adds this extra level of rigor and understanding that we all benefit from. And then at the end of the publication, we put up these massive essays with lots of cool interactive elements and links on the sides. And then you dust your hands and take a quick breather and head back into pre-infusion and do another.

00:54:01 - Speaker 2: I think the you can switch essay style is something that developed over time. I think you wrote one of the first pieces just kind of as a medium post, you said, hey, we should publish about this work, and then we’ve gotten more comprehensive over time and really putting a lot of effort, like you said, basically now, at least in terms of wall clock time spending essentially as much time writing.

And distilling the results to understand what’s important, what are the real findings, and then put it into this very nicely comprehensible thing that others can read and learn from.

And certainly I’ve experienced that thing you talk about, which is taking the time to do that.

I feel like I extract more insights from the project through the writing process.

And then in terms of remembering it both in terms of institutional memory, but also in terms of just as an individual, I remember the things better or I can go reference my own work. It happens with some frequency of muse where we say a design question comes up or a technical question. I say, you know, actually we researched that exact thing at I can switch, let me go pull up the reference and.

Sometimes we have some internal docs, but those tend to be pretty rough and they haven’t been through the same clarifying process of writing for an external audience. But when we’ve published about it publicly, then it’s much easier to both find what you’re looking for, but then also be able to draw from that and our team can use that to make decisions about something we’re working on the product.

00:55:24 - Speaker 1: Oh, it’s great to hear that that stuff is benefiting you and that you’re able to take advantage of that.

I mean, obviously you’re very close to the lab, but it’s nice to know that our target audience is able to get that kind of yield.

I’m always asking how we can reinvent the lab, you know, I’ve just talked about what the lab is, but I’m always thinking to myself about what’s next. I’m always thinking about how can we change.

We’ve gotten much better at writing, we’ve developed this, we call it the academic voice, it’s not academic, academia has too much jargon and It has a really powerful culture around like these latexch publications. We try to make our writing more accessible than academic papers generally are in terms of tone and language, but we try to take a lot of inspiration from academic writing in terms of maintaining a sedate tone, avoiding superlatives, supporting any statements that we make.

We do actually publish a lot of our work in various academic venues these days. But first and foremost, we published for the web and for this sort of industry audience and for ourselves, and the academic version sort of follows on from that.

00:56:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the academic format, you might think of as being an illustration of how the lab sits on the innovation spectrum between startups and classic academia, where, yeah, academia, you know, you typically have, yeah, these PDFs, they’re published in particular venues, you’ve got peer review, you’ve got a lot of conventions about citations and things designed to enforce rigor. And then in the startup world, people do publish, but it’s usually some engineer tried a framework one time and they wrote a blog post about their insights on that.

00:57:02 - Speaker 1: Right, or the point of it is like this marketing exercise for a product.

00:57:05 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, marketing for startups, yeah.

00:57:08 - Speaker 1: We try to be very sober in our presentation and to be really explicit about trade-offs and shortcomings and open questions, and I think that serves us well and it serves our readers well because we try to make sure that we portray the work we do with the inspiration and the context that we hope will make people excited about it. We also try to be really transparent about what we have and haven’t done and what remains to be done as well.

00:57:35 - Speaker 2: Well, as a place to end, you mentioned what’s next for the lab or how might it expand or reinvent itself, what exactly is on your mind there?

00:57:45 - Speaker 1: Well, to me, the biggest areas where we can improve are both growing the scope of the kind of work that we do in terms of both getting broader and deeper, I want to see us expand into other adjacent areas, hardware, and I’d like to see us expanding into ever more fields of research, but some of that comes down to just sort of like funding bandwidth and people around.

But I’m also interested in Expanding the ways that we work and opening up the lab to more people. We have this vision of a new kind of computer, and you know, it’s that vision of a different kind of way of using computing, not just programming, but computing that is more empowering, that makes us better versions of ourselves, that lets us do more things to do better work, to work better together, to think deeper.

And I just think that our current working model is doing fine, but there has to be so much more opportunity for us to take what we’re doing to a wider audience and to get more people involved.

And I think some of that is writing more about the why behind the work, but some of that is also finding new ways to get more people involved.

So, I’m always eager to experiment with new things, not just in terms of doing the research, but also uh getting New kinds of projects started and approved and so on, and yeah, we’re just gonna keep pushing the envelope and keep doing the work out there. So, if you hear this and you’re interested and you think that’s something I really want to do, hey, send an email to me, hello at inkinswitch.com, and who knows, maybe there’s an opportunity there.

00:59:26 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. You can write us on Twitter if you’ve got feedback at @museapphq, and we’re on email as hello at museapp.com. We always appreciate it if you leave a review on Apple Podcasts. And Peter, I’m so glad that you’re continuing to push both the vision for better computing and the vision for how we can do innovation in this independent way and really looking forward to seeing what comes out of ThinkSwitch next.

00:59:55 - Speaker 1: Well, thanks so much for having me on, and it’s just a joy listening to the podcast and seeing Muses out there, building great software and testing these ideas in the market that we’re working on at the lab. So let’s keep that alchemy going.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think complexity gets a bad rap because I think a lot of times people think complexity is the opposite of simple and everyone loves simple because simple is elegant. How do you have your creator tools give people the knowledge of how to be able to address such complexity?

00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, David Hong of Webflow.

00:00:38 - Speaker 1: Hey, thanks so much for having me.

00:00:41 - Speaker 2: Now something that we talk about quite a bit in the Muse world, maybe we take inspiration from physical workspaces, physical studios, but I understand you are creating your own physical studio screen free these days.

00:00:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s one of the pandemic projects, if you will.

We’ve been working in our garage and trying to create a more creative space that just really fosters movement and I think the inspiration just came from Back pain, you know, and just sitting in front of your desk all the time and just being on Zoom, which is a lot of my day these days. And I was watching Brett Victor seeing faces again and just really got a lot of inspiration of like How do you leverage like physical spaces to create stuff? So my girlfriend’s an interior designer and I used to do a lot of art. I went to school for art, which ties a lot into a lot of the work I’m interested in these days and really just wanted to create a space for us to be like, let’s just work all analog and really Just to feel something, right? Just create something really physical, just to really deviate away from what feels like a 100% digital world right now.

00:01:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, doing things with your hands, the texture of paper or certainly craft materials. I like to go to just art stores, craft stores, and yeah, I like highlighters and I like chunky markers and I like butcher paper, and I like all that sort of thing, and I have less as the digital tools get better and better and in fact. Superior, particularly in their shareability, which is really important on your kind of distributed teams, those things become more of a curiosity maybe or something I keep around, but every once in a while I get them out for a similar reason to that. But yeah, maybe that means I should really just take up like wood block carving or something like that.

00:02:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah. The thing that’s interesting about that too is I think in many ways, our tools are processing way faster than we can think about our ideas.

And the thing I love about working on paper and those chunky markers like you said, is it gives you time to really kind of flush through the idea and work on it because the problem today is not the level of computation you have access to, maybe 10 or 20 years ago.

It’s like you can process and build anything, but it’s just like how do you Hash out the ideas and I’ve really kind of found this return to working on paper recently and that’s whether it’s drawing up a user flow or creating low fidelity wireframes. It’s been really helpful to work in that material that almost intentionally slows down and gives you time to think a little bit deeper.

00:03:24 - Speaker 2: And I’d love to hear a bit about your backstory, days before web flow, and then what you’ve been doing now that you’re there.

00:03:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so, right before I joined Webflow, I was the head of product design at a health tech startup called One Medical and was there for about 4 years. I led design and research there.

00:03:41 - Speaker 2: Quick personal note, I was a customer there while I lived in San Francisco. This was kind of A doctor’s office, but reimagined a bit in terms of being more user experience centric. Is that a right way to describe it?

00:03:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s accurate. I hope you had a good experience with it too.

00:03:57 - Speaker 2: I did. I’m missing that there is no such thing in Berlin as far as I know. User experience is not a key feature of doctors I visited here, sad to say.

00:04:08 - Speaker 1: Healthcare experience is something where I think we need more designers and more technology, like thinking about that end user experience. Yeah.

So when I was at one medical, one of the first features I started working on was our video visits platform. So it was being able to do a one on one virtual call which You and your doctor, and I built that prototype using Quartz composer and kind of started that from the initial prototype of like how we could even wire the AV and really test these cases. So a lot of what I’ve been interested in is design prototyping in a lot of ways.

And prior to one medical, I was director of mobile design at a company called Black Pixel that was really focused on Like iOS and Mac apps doing our own products, but then also doing a lot of client services as well. And what brought me to web flow was after I left one Medical, I think. It’s really great when you leave a place that you feel like you could be there for another 4 years, and that’s kind of how I felt at one medical and was just looking for something a little bit different.

So I took a mini sabbatical, probably about 2 months off trying to figure out what’s next.

And my original idea was considering to do a startup around like prototyping on the iPad, because I think that was the year when Swift UI came out and I thought to myself, it’d be really cool to Build tools for people to build, and really build layout, and whether it was like a full-on developer tool or prototyping tool. That’s what I was exploring, but I think for me, I know how hard startups are and the life expectancy of those. So, you know, it’s something that I was continuing to explore lately, but then got connected with web flow. And for those who don’t know, web flows a visual development platform and it’s really focused on websites, blogs, and more dynamic web experiences. And I think the thing that got me really interested in that is this bridge between design and engineering. And it wasn’t just prototyping, but the stuff you build goes straight into production right away.

So you can build your site, publish it, and you know, wire up a domain and you’re done.

And I was just like, wow, you know, I think this is a really interesting space to be able to take the things that I was really excited about, which is like visual programming. And that is naturally just a part of it too. And I was like, OK, this is a company I have to join. Like I think at that time, they were growing and still growing, and I figured, you know what, instead of doing my own thing, I’d love to join forces with a company that’s already doing a good thing.

00:07:02 - Speaker 2: And thinking about the product positioning there. Is the target user or I’m sure you have a lot of diversity of customers now, but when you’re doing this design work, do you think of it as someone who’s coming from maybe a simpler tool, I don’t know, Squarespace comes to mind, and they want to upgrade and do something that’s more powerful and gives them more control over the CSS more capabilities, or is it actually the other way around, which is someone who’s been hand coding their HTML and they go, you know, this is a little bit tedious, and I’d like a visual tool that augments my ability to do that.

00:07:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, oh man, that’s such a good question, and I think it’s something we’re talking about a lot.

And the thing that I know for sure is, you know, our end user and who we’re targeting are designers, and not to get into this existential crisis, but it’s like, what is a designer, right? There’s so many different flavors of what a designer can do. I would say this predates my time at web flow, but I would say like when the early product was being developed. I think it was really focused on the web designer and the web designer that really knew, really familiar with HTML and CSS, you know, that material of code to create and build these sites, but I think as Our customer base has grown, you are kind of seeing people who maybe their mental models are more from the Squarespace or using a tool like FigMA or Adobe XD to really understand design, so they’re kind of bringing those mental models in. So I think the thing that I think about a lot is What are the different types of personas of designers that we’re looking to serve, and that could be many different levels, you know, could be designers who know code really well or they want to use no code tools so they don’t have to know code.

00:08:52 - Speaker 2: If I can make a comparison to Hiokku, this was a similar, I think dilemma we had, you might say in our user base, and of course a good product can be used by different types of people and it works to try to understand the different segments you’re trying to support.

Yeah, Hiroku both had developers who were people that maybe would have struggled a bit to get like a production deployment of. on rails and a SQL database and so on, and we made that much more possible for them to do, but it also had the other way around, which was professional developers that completely knew how to buy a server, install Linux on it, put it in a co-location facility or set up a VPS or whatever, do all that server and operation stuff.

They said, I don’t want to bother with that. I would rather outsource. To you, it’s undifferentiated work. I just want to build my app, but we have people that are sort of coming from two very different skill directions that land on kind of needing the same solution, but as you said, like their mental models of how everything works is going to be wildly different in that, hence the huge design challenge to make a single product that works for both of them.

00:09:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s such a tough challenge because what I ask myself is, who do you serve in that instance? And for me, the answer should be both approachable software for these sort of tools. is you want to be able to abstract away the complexity, but you also want to be able to pop the hood open, if you will, right? So if someone wants to use code and make things more extensible, there’s a lot of challenges if we cap that from people and they don’t have access to it and to what you mentioned with Hiroku it’s like. Do people go with a different solution, or do you find ways where it can be a little bit more flexible for what people’s needs are? And I think that’s the sweet spot you want to hit and it’s really hard to find, which kind of makes me really excited about this space because it’s not only like a diverse persona, but it’s also the different use cases and how people learn too. So really trying to figure out how you find that place where it meets both of those ends of the spectrum is really challenging.

00:10:57 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good moment to introduce our topic which is designing for creative tools. Now creative tools can include a pretty big gamut from word processors and video editing.

Here we’re talking about maybe the fairly far end of the spectrum on complexity, which is dynamic modeling tools, web design, development, but if you think of that spectrum as being on one far end as the pure consumer, very everyday apps, something like a kitchen timer.

Whether maybe things that are in the middle but still closer to that consumer side might be social media, for example, not to say there isn’t a ton of complexity in that, but compared to what you can do with creative tools or what the user can do with creative tools, there’s the variety of possible states essentially that a user can put their document into with anything on this end of the spectrum is vastly greater than some of those everyday apps.

And that creates some pretty big challenges, but also for the right kind of person, and I would count, I think the three of us in that category, those challenges can be very fun and interesting.

00:12:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it keeps you on your feet, for sure, and I think the word I keep attributing to this is just dynamic, right? It’s that it’s always changing, it’s always evolving.

And I think what’s most interesting for me in this space is you build a set of capabilities for people and you see what they do with it, right? And that’s different for what you alluded to is that, you know, a lot of my background before was consumer apps or networks and e-commerce and they’re more rigid in the user experience, so it’s more predictable with what people will do.

Like, of course, there’s flows you want to Optimized for, but I think there have been times where I imagine a lot of spaces of people working in creator tools see this a lot, where end users just subvert and find new ways to use your tool and you’re always so surprised by it and I think Rather being worried about what happened to you, embrace that and see where it goes, and I think that’s really interesting.

It’s just kind of like, uh, you know, this whole notion of like, I think Microsoft uses the term citizen developer or you know, end users creating stuff. Now it creates such a unknown journey map for a lot of these users, which I think is personally really cool.

00:13:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that rigid design you mentioned in, for example, e-commerce, that’s actually by design, you want a checkout form, for example, the number of forks in that path should be pretty minimal, right? The data is different, where I’m shipping to is different, maybe there’s a few options in there, but you don’t want to choose your own adventure on a checkout form and perhaps the work you did in the medical space was similar that you want something pretty structured, pretty rigid.

Everyone kind of does it more or less the same way with some essentially minor variation is really the complete opposite of a great creative tool.

I think almost by definition is one that your users will use it to make things that you never expected. They like you said, that subversive element.

00:14:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that’s why at Webflow, we tend to call things capabilities versus features, and we want to focus on that lens where it’s like, what are we equipping end users being able to do versus like, here’s this feature that will do X or do Y but it’s more like, here’s this capability, here’s this offering. Let’s see what you do with it.

00:14:32 - Speaker 2: I’d be curious to hear if there’s any cases you’ve seen so far of web flows, users and customers doing something interesting, unexpected, even even subversive.

00:14:43 - Speaker 1: Oh man.

00:14:43 - Speaker 3: Have you had any bitcoin miners like we did on Hookku?

00:14:46 - Speaker 1: Not yet, not yet. We’ll see, there’s still time for that.

I’d love to hear the Hiroka use case. There’s two that come to mind for me, and one is a weblow community member created, I think it’s called The Big Bed, and it’s a children’s story that he illustrated. I can’t remember if it was directly about his daughter, but it was this narrative that they created.

So he created an interactive site with web flow that had audio and just this really great immersive experience.

And then there’s another use case where someone in the blood flow community created a game that I used to love playing is he actually recreated some of the intro and functionality of the game Civilization in web flow, and I’m just like, oh my goodness, there’s so many events, so many interactions built this, and you could tell like the people who built this is just, it’s pure passion for learning and just love of creating stuff and like.

When I saw those two things, especially, I’m just like, oh my goodness, like this isn’t just for building like the websites built on Twitter bootstrap where they all kind of look the same. It’s kind of returning this sort of expressive form of the web, which got me really excited because I think in my iOS days, I think at that time the web was becoming a little bit stagnant and less expressive, but kind of seeing these sort of tools come back for people to be expressive on the web, I think it’s really awesome.

00:16:18 - Speaker 2: I think we talked with Wei Weixu a bit about kind of personalization in our online spaces, and I think I expressed my love of personal websites and the web and HTML remains and has only gotten better with years, even if there’s fewer sort of GeoCity style places for people that easily have their own spaces, what you can express through a personal site is greater than ever before, but that’s balanced out or maybe just drowned out would be the way to put it by.

Yeah, maybe social media profiles or even just sites that are designed to be a profile for you, and it’s nice cause you upload a picture and you type in a bio and you click on three things you like and it gives you a nice looking page, but yeah, it lacks that personality, that expressiveness, and certainly that handmade element, but that’s still live on the web in terms of what you can do with HTML.

You have to get away a little bit from the template driven world of say a Squarespace and a little bit closer to the metal if we want to call it that, and I think you know hand coded HTML is a great way to go, but not to drop in too many metause references here, but we also talked with Maggie Appleton about visual programming, which I think David discussing that episode is part of how you and I got talking and Talks about, well, look, we don’t want to replace code, but maybe we want to layer new kinds of visualization tools on top of it.

I think the web is really, really perfect potentially for that, and you see a small version of that and say the developer tools, the Chrome slash fire bug derived developer tools, but there’s so much more we could do with that, I think.

00:17:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for me, the word I keep coming back to is expression, right? And the expression of how you create, and I think.

I don’t like using like web 12 and 3 just because I think it’s just like a continuous evolution, but for the sake, let’s say web 2’s a lot of social media, a lot of feeds, and that’s where conversation happened, right? And I think for me, I grew up in the earlier days of the internet having a Geo City site using Dreamweaver to build my personal websites.

I use this analogy of like visiting people’s homes and you would go to people’s home pages to be able to see that expression and now things are in social graphs, right? And there’s still a lot of where web 3 might move and I still think it’s.

Really early, but through all this, I think there’s a lot of this interest to kind of bring personal expression back and bring back personal websites, blogs.

RSS is a technology that I continue to use and love today, and I think there’s like a resurgence to this because people want expression in the content, you know, whether it’s personal expression or that of the people they interact with.

00:19:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely hitting on some recurrent themes from the podcast here, just kind of give another angle on it.

This idea of a personalized space is so important for professionals because almost by definition, you’re spending all of your waking, working time in it.

And if you have no agency over how it works and how it looks and how it feels, that’s very demoralizing and discouraging. So for that reason alone, it’s very important.

There’s other angle of like being able to do things that the creator of the tool didn’t specifically envision. In some ways, that’s the very definition of a creative professional, as someone who’s doing something novel, who’s doing these.

Combinations because if there was no novelty for it, it’d be more like turning a crank and why pay really high professional labor rates for doing that, right? And so the tool has to facilitate it.

You have to make this leap of, we’re going to provide these primitives and building blocks and people are going to reassemble them into games or whatever, you know, civilization, who knows, right? You have to be able to support that.

00:19:56 - Speaker 2: So going a layer deeper on what it means to design creative tools and design for creators, including designers and developers. One of the big topics in design is always mental models, and I’d be really curious to hear about the mental models you’re using for web flow, David, maybe Mark, you could talk to Muse a little bit or maybe we have some other examples from our collective experience, but maybe to start, Mark, could you define mental model just to make sure we’re all on the same page?

00:20:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so a mental model is sort of the platonic forms you’re dealing with in the domain. It’s the nouns and the verbs and how they interact, you know, what is the way that you think about the space? What are the primitives, how do you build on top of them? How do you combine them? So, for example, with a desktop OS you have things like files, folders, windows, things like that, mouse, and so forth.

00:20:51 - Speaker 2: One trick I’ve always liked for coming to grips with the mental model of some system that I’m designing is to write a glossary, essentially a list of all your vocabulary, and these are things that you’re surfacing to your user.

So for example, I think I might have first tried this for the Hiroku add-on system.

And in writing that glossary, I realized first of all we had way too many things. There was like 20 different things in there we were expecting people to keep track of, many of which were like kind of a relatively new concepts and certainly pretty abstract ones. So we’re looking for ways to kind of reduce those.

Second, I found that sometimes we would use two words to mean basically the same thing, and that’s confusing. But then third, it kind of forces me at least to ask, does each one of these serve a really good purpose? Is a person going to have a clear understanding of what this item is? They know this term refers to that, and they can either connect it to something else they already knew before they started kind of using the product or reading your documentation or whatever, or for the very few you want to offer as new, is it worth your while to introduce this new term, this new concept.

And of course one of the tricks, I think you Kind of illustrated pretty well there, Mark, is to take physical world metaphors. So your desktop is on your computer as a literal metaphor to your top of your desk. Files and folders are also metaphors, although even there you see where it’s an imperfect. fit.

My mom actually has commented on this a number of times, which is she’s worked with paper files and folders for a long time and from her perspective, a file folder is one kind of thing and it’s one of those folding manila envelopes that you can put pieces of paper and documents into. So she thinks that you should call files documents and you should call folders files, and now of course, we’re set now, but it’s a good example of where users have preexisting expectations, you’re trying to borrow these metaphors, but they don’t necessarily map perfectly, but you get some leverage there because you’re not asking someone to learn a whole bunch of new words that don’t map to anything they know from any other domain.

00:22:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and my experience has been that the product architecture, which is the phrase we sometimes give to coming up with and naming these mental models, is incredibly important. If you get this even a little bit wrong, it’s gonna make everything much harder down the road, and in particular for some people to be able to span the full range of use cases from very simple to very complex, and to be able to do unanticipated recombinations, they have to be really solid.

00:23:24 - Speaker 2: So what kind of mental models do you make use of in web flow, David?

00:23:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a challenge in a lot of creator tools is to decide how opinionated you should be. And what I mean by that is when you become opinionated, there’s kind of a trade-off with that, right? You can kind of really help guide people in how they build certain concepts, or do you be more open ended and you give people the flexibility to explore that. And I think the thing that’s tricky with that is The question I ask myself is what mental models do people come in with using web flow, so someone who is a front end developer, the way they approach using web flow is going to be dramatically different than someone who may use FIMA. And I think the thing that’s hard is In design, there’s a lot of these things that are very similar, but not necessarily identical, right? So, for example, in Xcode, the auto layout engine is a lot different than auto layout in Figma, but yet, these are things that people associate with how to approach using it.

So I think When we’re thinking about the mental models of web flow, I think a lot of things that we’re asking ourselves is like, what do people come in expecting, right? So, someone who’s coming in and using layout may not think of things as divs, right? And also think about things like nesting and parent-child relationships. They may be thinking of it as an infinite canvas that they drag and move freeform. And unless you kind of set position to absolute, there’s really no way of doing that in a way that produces good code and That can be frustrating for users if you’re coming in not knowing box model and some of these web design practices. So I think a lot of things we’re thinking about like, how do we become more opinionated in our own product without like biasing them on what to build, right? So for example, a lot of this can come from onboarding new users and teaching them like, hey, these are the core aspects of web design that’s going to be really important for you. To know, you already know this, great, you can skip it, right? But if you don’t know, it’s going to be really helpful for people to really understand those mental models, because I think for me, really being true to the material and the material in this case being like HTML and CSS I think. I personally wouldn’t want to abstract it so far away where you’re creating some like proprietary markup or something, right? You really want to make sure that you can get as close to the native output as much as possible, but abstracting how people build with. That I think is key.

00:26:08 - Speaker 2: It also occurs to me that some of the mental models are things about what do my users come in expecting a front end developer versus a designer, for example, but also, as you said, the material, you just inherit a bunch of things that are just true whether or not you want them to be, and certainly the web and HTML and CSS are full of plenty of quirks and history and that sort of thing, and so something about how the grid system works or something about how Flexbox works or what have you, you’re just gonna inherit that. Some of that may be good because there’s good mental models, some of it may be more like baggage or gets in your way, and so presumably, maybe I’m realizing now I’m just kind of resting what she said, but just for my own understanding, you’re trying to figure out which things are abstractions you really want to surface to your users because they’re useful, they’re powerful, they’re compre. Sensible, they fit well with the visual tool you’re creating and which are weird quirks of the web that don’t really help you to know and I don’t need to know about, I don’t know what JavaScript mification, it’s just we do that quietly behind the scenes and kind of tuck it away and you don’t need to really like have a concept for that in your mind to get value from the tool.

00:27:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think this is why I like the jobs to be done framework where you’re kind of focusing on that outcome that a customer wants, right? And I think for us, when we think about it. There’s like multiple ways to build a layout, right? But if we’re kind of looking at some of the best practices of like, here are the things that people typically try to build and it solves like 80% of those use cases, like how do we surface more of that because the likelihood of what people want to build with that is higher, right? And there’s always going to be this option B, C, D, and E that people can explore. But when you give them A through E all at once. It’s this paradox of choice, right? So if I drop a div and then you’re asking like, OK, you can use display, flex box or grid, someone who doesn’t know what the difference is three are, they probably just pick one, right? And then really just trial by error with that.

But if we can be more opinionated about some of these things, I think it helps reduce the cognitive load of decisions that people have to make. So can we streamline people to what we think is the best decision while giving them that option to subvert it or explore other paths to, as opposed to give them all the divergent paths at once.

00:28:38 - Speaker 2: Now here we’ve spoken a little bit about sort of things within the page ad, a flex box, and that sort of thing, but actually the web has a huge number of abstractions or that mental model glossary for the web would include pages, include URLs, would include links. I think all of those are pretty well understood even by non-creators, which is actually pretty great and so you can just rely on using those things, I assume, even something like a website, what actually is a website. Where are the edges of it that may or may not be fully understood by the average person, they may not fully grasp when they sort of leave Facebook and go to another site, but certainly I think for your target audience, those things are probably really well understood and you can totally lean on that, is that right to guess.

00:29:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s the beauty of building for the web is there’s such a rich taxonomy and a lot of like standards already set on that, that even if people aren’t familiar with it, it’s not like they’re learning just web flows mental model, right? They’re learning the mental models of like building a website and links, buttons, and even in layout, you know, thinking about sections and Some other elements that are offered to people. So I think that’s the thing that’s been helpful for us is that it’s like, as you’re learning web flow, you’re learning the web mental model as well.

00:30:01 - Speaker 2: Can you give us an example of something, you know, we’ve talked about this kind of visualization element, which in many cases I think a visualization tool is something that doesn’t really add a new mental model, it just helps you better, well, literally see what it is that, yeah, understand, for example, margins and padding. It sort of shows you how those layout. Is there some major new abstraction that web flow gives you that’s sort of a new capability that’s added to your user’s tool kit, but it is not something that comes from the web, but is something you created as part of your universe of mental models.

00:30:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s not something we originally created, but maybe I’ll throw this example out here because we just had our no code conference. We announced a capability that we call logic.

And now when you have the UI side of things, and you have logic, and you have data with our CMS offering, it’s essentially a 1 to 1 connection to model view controller, right? And I think as we start exploring this is like, The question I’m asking is, do we teach everyone the fundamentals of model view controller and ask them to build it the exact same way? Are there ways to leverage those ways of doing things in new ways? And I think for us, there’s a lot to be able to explore there, even with our CMS, right? It’s like we’re letting people buying data to layout and building collections with them not necessarily knowing. What a collection is and how you would build that in code, right? So I think it’s not necessarily like inventing new definitions of things, but maybe new ways of manipulating and using it. And I think for us now that we have data, UI and logic, being able to manipulate, layout or data based on events, there’s a lot for us to really explore on how end users interact with that.

00:32:00 - Speaker 3: This brings us to another interesting aspect of designing for creative tools, which is the social aspect.

So increasingly designing tools and then using the design tools takes place across many people, and there’s interesting social dynamics there.

So especially if you look at a domain like the web, which is very multidimensional, like you can use absolute positioning or box model or grid or whatever, you have to come to some common language and understanding as a team, and sometimes you just gotta kind of pick one or be on the same page or at least call things the same thing. So an important job of design tools I think is helping teams reach that agreement. I can give you two examples. One is Hiroku, where there’s basically a lot of ways you can design and deploy an app, and Hirokoku picked one, and there were good reasons why Hiokku picked that way, and we said basically you should do this, like you should use Git and you should not write to the local file system and so on and so forth, you should use environment variables and Yes, those were good choices to make in of themselves, but they also basically forced everyone onto the same path, which was itself another example that’s maybe more analogous to web flow is Ruby on Rails, where basically it need people to pick a way to do NBC like, put this here, put this here, call this that, use this convention for converting between lower case and uppercase, and just do it, it’ll be fine. And there’s actually a huge service and just picking these defaults and having these guard rails in place.

00:33:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s really interesting you bring that up, Mark, because I think one of the things we’re really thinking about and that’s really top of my mind is how does collaboration work in web design and in a tool like web flow, and I can give some examples of that is one, let’s say you have an end user creating their site, but perhaps they find inspiration from our showcase and they pick a template to use, right? But that template is built Flexbox only. And let’s say they use CSS grid or something else for their site, they drop it in and just boom, the whole layout just collapses, right? So I think for us, that’s something to really think about.

It’s just like, again, just how do users understand like how the material’s created, right? And I don’t know if it’s something where we’re like, want everyone to use flash. Xbox only and get rid of the other stuff because there’s implications with that.

But how do we kind of nullify and make sure that when people are using other resources that people build, like in a community aspect, that there’s clarity, there’s good documentation, and there’s some good best practices around that.

And I think the other thing.

That you touched on, Mark, that I think is really interesting is, how do you think about like design architecture as a team, right? And if you have multiple designers working in web flow on a larger team, it’s like, how do you make these agreements and how do you declare these things that’s like, hey, as we’re working, this is our approach to Naming our CSS architecture or this is kind of how we want to approach building pages and having that.

I think a lot of that lives off platform right now today. Some of the things that we’re thinking about is just like how do we enable teams to work better in web flow, and I think we’re still doing a lot of research on it and trying to figure out like what that best case is.

00:35:13 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems inevitable that all design tools are going to become collaborative and social, at least have the capability to do things as a group, and it’s interesting that we’re sort of working our way up. So the first thing was like Google Docs, which is text, and then you add the whole office suite, and now we’re working on complex tools like Figma and web flow, and I think eventually we’ll get to video that’s probably the hardest one to do collaboratively because of bandwidth, but we’re gonna get there. It’ll be interesting to see how that all plays out.

00:35:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m starting to see a lot of startups working on collaborative video too, so I think definitely a really gnarly problem, but I think it’s a sign, like you said, it’s inevitable that everyone’s shifting to collaboration in as real time as possible too.

00:35:55 - Speaker 2: A bit of a tangent, but it’s certainly a reminder of something I feel like comes up on Twitter from time to time, which is, it does seem odd that you basically have all of these startups that are reimplementing collaboration, typically inspired by Google Docs or some combination of Google Docs and GitHub. And in fact, given that we want every single tool to be collaborative, couldn’t you imagine that as an element of the operating system or the file system? And instead, every single startup that does this has their own big engineering team and like needs to build it all, but one can’t help but to envision that future operating system where by default that is part of anything you build.

00:36:36 - Speaker 1: I think about that a lot about annotations too. Couldn’t annotations and commenting be more native across the operating system based on the objects that you’re working with, but like you said, a lot of these tools, it’s part of this walled garden, right? And everyone’s building their own version of it and there’s got to be a way where How do you take that a layer deeper, like either in the operating system or being more open source about it, but it is interesting, like everyone’s kind of building these same like set of features, and I always think about annotations and commenting as ones that I would love something like that on the OS level.

00:37:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I actually had the aspiration for such a thing existing.

I think it could be an OS service or a web service sort of like S3, and I repeatedly hear people ask for this, and I think there are two big hurdles.

One is there’s an expertise hurdle, which I think is not obvious until you try to do it, but it’s very, very hard to build such a system, and I think it’s basically impossible to do without having a motivating example product.

So I think it’s most likely this gets extracted out from either a company or someone who has experience with the domain of trying to build such a system.

And I think there’s an important path dependence thing where yes, everyone wants the operating system to support this, but, you know, it’d be very convenient if the operating system was the one that already ran, you know, my program, right? I don’t want to have to rewrite all my stuff or change my business or lose my business for such an operating system. So there’s a first mover problem. So, basically, I’m looking for the bookstore that wants to get into the business of web services in this space, and I think they’re out there somewhere. If you are, remember, we’re looking for such people, so contact us please.

00:38:16 - Speaker 2: David, what you mentioned earlier about the dropping a Flexbox component into a grid layout also makes me think of another thread here, which is the kind of componentization elements of things.

Yeah, I think a product with a good mental model, a good set of abstractions, the elements of it can be combined together in a lot of different ways, again, ways the creator didn’t originally expect, but you take that even a step further, which is not just that I, the person using the tool within my document, can Do interesting and different things, but then you can go from there to, as you said, the collaboration, we’re on a team and we’re working together on something like a website or a document, but then the furthest step is to go from there to, you have these components that you can plug together where maybe the I don’t even know the person that made this calendar widget that I’m plugging in.

But I feel like this has been a dream for a long time, and maybe one that there’s been many attempts, I think OpenDoc is kind of a famous one there, maybe ActiveX kind of Microsoft had a couple of different iterations of object embedding and yeah, I’m curious if you have a take on that path of computing history attempts.

00:39:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I can speak about the promise of OpenDoc cause candidly speaking, I never really had a chance to play around with it and. Implemented, but I think this idea of component software that is reusable and adds value for people immediately, I think it’s still a lot of ways the dream, right? And when we think about community plug in the ecosystems, it’s an aspiration I want to continue to pushing now, there’s a lot of trade-offs in practice because I think for me. Someone who used like cocoa pods a lot, right? There was something around like how open are these plug-in ecosystems, and I think that’s a tough tradeoff for any platform that’s being built, but I think for me with OpenDoc, I kind of felt like web objects was a lot of this too, in this world where you now have people who can build components. That serve other people and really being able to open up like how work is done, right, whether within your company or externally, but I think OpenDoc is just one of those still kind of waiting for that promise to be fulfilled and then I think that vision is so inspiring.

00:40:40 - Speaker 3: I think this is a super interesting frontier as well, and I think it’s like understudied and under theorized. I think people don’t appreciate how complex it is, especially when these plug-ins are turned complete and they have access to compute and data, you know, that is your compute and your data, they can do wild stuff and there’s sort of a this problem in the engineering world of libraries.

And I think we’re still in the very early days of how we think about libraries, which is basically we download a bunch of random code from the internet and run at our computers and who knows, you know, a lot of it’s probably like mining Bitcoin or, you know, stealing my keys.

It’s a complete mess. And I think it requires a very serious design and engineering effort. As well as again this respect of the path dependence problem where you need a way to bootstrap the ecosystem and to incentivize the ecosystem. So I’m so optimistic. I just think it’s a very hard problem.

00:41:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, you’re right, it’s still so early in the way that we’re doing it.

And I think one of the things, like let’s take no code, for example, and use this open doc analogies. I’ve always described as no code being like the 3D printer for building on the web. So what it does is really creates repetition and reusability in a great way, right? Now, no code tools, there’s always going to be this threshold where if you’re doing something sophisticated, you might need to code it, right? So it’s never this like one or the other, but I think it kind of evolves into that and I see that with component software too, in the sense that it’s like, I think about this all the time. If I’m building an app, I’m like, why do I always have to build the same authentication flows, right? Or kind of build these things that people predict. It’s a very rigid solution intentionally, like, you know, e-commerce and check out some of these things like why do these things have to be constantly unique, right? There’s clear interactions of what people expect in those. And how do you do those things at scale. So then the things that need to be unique for your business or your product, you can really focus on that. And I think that’s where, again, I think this whole concept of like component software, I still very much believe in it. It’s a very ambitious vision and I think in a lot of ways still pretty early.

00:42:54 - Speaker 2: By the way, it probably is worth defining no code briefly for the audience. Again, we suspect a lot of folks may have at a minimum part of it, but given that you put on a conference with that name, it seems like you might be an authority to speak to what you think that word means, you know, what the category is, what the movement is, etc.

00:43:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. With like what it’s not, right, which is not the absence of code or any existence of that. And it’s really more of like the primitive that you build with.

So instead of building, using code in a command line interface or a text editor, it’s through like visual abstractions.

So there’s no code and low code.

But yeah, it is something funny where It’s not even in my opinion, combating with code, right? It’s just kind of the existence of these two approaches in a lot of ways. And I think the companies that are going to excel at this is they’re probably going to use a combination of both, right, depending on some of the different use cases, but yeah, no code is kind of starting with not needing to learn how to code and you’re kind of focused on like the visual abstractions of creating with code.

00:44:05 - Speaker 2: My sense is that it’s often non-programmers doing automation and particularly connecting services together, so I think of the if this, then that and Zapier as being kind of a starting place, very simple, just, I don’t know, we use a Zapier integration for someone tweets about X, then put it in the Slack channel, for example, or you get an email with a PDF, stick it in this Dropbox. Those kinds of basic automations and that certainly I’m sure professional software engineers sometimes use such service just because it’s easier, less work to maintain or whatever than using their full on development stack, but I think very often it’s a business person or a designer or some other person that the writing a, I don’t know what a shell script to do the same thing would probably be out of reach for them.

00:44:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes me think about and name any use case, right, where before you’d have to like ask an engineer to run a rake task to be able to get all these things done.

Now you’re empowering people, like you said, maybe they’re on the business side of things or not on the engineering and product side to be able to create their own automations in that way. And the question I always ask myself is like, this is the stuff you want to democratize even within your own company, right? It may not be the stuff like an engineer even wants to work on. So it’s like, again, it’s not contrary to how you do it, it’s just kind of really thinking about some of these use cases. I don’t know, do you all remember Yahoo pipes? That was another one that I think about with the automations too.

00:45:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I had to do some serious digging around in the web archives to find a screenshot of that because I wanted to reference it for the inco switch end user programming article that we did.

But yeah, I think of that as one of the original put together flow-based programming with, I guess the emerging idea of web services or the fact that URL over here as a web report and another API over here is where I can feed in my travel plans and maybe I can connect all those together with well pipes. And maybe it was before its time, I’m not sure, but the concept there was so simple and maybe coming back to our mental models point, you know, you even look at a screenshot, you instantly understand what this is doing and what it might be capable of.

Now another thing that I think about when thinking of a tool like what you’re making with web flow, I think Kokku had some of this as well, and I think any kind of creative tool always has this, you know, you talk about your ideal is the low floor, high ceiling, that’s the idea, it’s relatively easy to get started with, but you don’t get constrained later on.

There’s also these powerful cases, but I do think there are cases where you do want to say, OK, you’re asking for something that actually is more kind of off the edge of what we actually want to offer with the tool.

Certainly when we ran this Hiroku, someone would come in. I want to tune all these kernel parameters, whatever, we’d say, well, look, this actually isn’t the right platform for you because that level of control and customization is exactly what we’re trying to save you from. We’ve just made good choices there that will work pretty well for most people, and you can just remove thinking about all that kind of stuff from your head.

And an example, you know, that I like to cite a lot for end user programming is Flash, which I think did a really great job of bringing animators and maybe what we would now call motion designers into something that was essentially kind of a programming environment, but it’s been speculated on some of these uh flash dyed postmortems that came along a couple of years ago that one of the Issues that it faced was in those early days, it was so accessible to animators, then people started making games, those games would get pretty complicated, they would need all these things that just professional software engineers need, want, expect in terms of data layer, caching. Complexity of the language, all that kind of stuff, ability to add libraries and dependencies, and eventually it became such a powerful programming tool that it actually lost that ease and that accessibility. Essentially the floor kind of crept up as they pushed up the ceiling. So I also think in designing a particular tool, it’s very reasonable to decide our spectrum of use. cases, you know, there’s some that’s going to be too trivial or too, you know, we don’t want to make things so easy, you know, we push you out to some more beginner tool, but there’s also a ceiling somewhere where we say, look, you actually reached the limit of what this tool is for. We’re not designing it for you. You should go use this over here that’s more powerful but also has, you know, other trade-offs.

00:48:38 - Speaker 3: Furthermore, I think there are different ways to do this. So I think the ideal way, again, if you have the right mental model and product architecture is to have basically a nested mental model, a nested architecture where you can peel back layers and get at the granular abstractions within.

There’s all kinds of examples on Hooku. I think we did do a pretty good job with this. If you get push an app to compile and deploy it, it just basically picks how I think it should compile based on what the app looks like.

But if you want, you can swap in your own compilation step and say, here’s the script that I want to compile this app, but critically, both the Hiokku default and that. use the same interface. They’re totally interchangeable.

It’s like basically peeling off that one layer and saying I want to insert something different into this interface. It’s not saying, oh well, you know, Her only deploys Ruby. I gotta go do my whole own thing on AWS from scratch, right? You get to granually pick apart pieces and there are all kinds of examples of that.

In contrast, sometimes I see these programming tools that are like code generators where there’s a super complicated problem and you invoke the code generator and it spits out 100 files. And as long as you don’t need to do anything different, you’re fine, but as soon as you need to do something different, you’re completely out of luck. It’s like you’re often hand editing these 100 different files. So I think the extent that you can create a system where you can peel back these individual abstractions while still enjoying the stack overall, that’s great.

00:49:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it makes me think about, I’ll give a small example.

So there’s this note taking tool I love called Obsidian, and the thing I love about Obsidian is you use your local markdown files, right? So. If Obsidian ever gets to a point where it’s not scaling for me, which I think it serves my use case, well, you still kind of have the native markdown files and you’re not kind of stuck in that application layer, right? And I think great applications will figure out ways to be more of a facilitator than controller on that, you know, and I think for some like web flow, we think about, OK, we no longer are meeting the threshold of what like a certain customer wants, they can still export their code. But are there other things we can kind of build to make that interoperability a little bit easier too. So I think that’s the trick is like being in an application that can be great at facilitating some of these things. So if such things do evolve too, that you’re not kind of locked into that, but I think what you said, Mark is spot on.

00:50:57 - Speaker 2: Yes, I guess in the ideal world you design your tools so that.

You start with a basic set of primitives, abstractions, mental model glossary that hopefully someone can understand and do something useful with when they need a little more power in some particular areas, that’s where they, as you said, mark, peel it back or I think David you put it as kind of popping the hood, and you can go down one layer at least for that spot, but you’re not completely off in some new world, you’re still within the kind of universe of abstractions that all fits together.

And then there’s a final step, which might be what you referenced there David, which is where you actually do get to the end of what the tool can do for you, but hopefully now it’s not, now I’m really screwed and I have to just kind of recreate everything from scratch in some new environment, but rather you can, I think it’s React Native uses this term. Eject, where you essentially can say I want to take my project out of the React Native world to just make it a standard X code or Android Studio project, and there’s no going back once you eject or no easy going back, but that’s your out, right?

00:52:05 - Speaker 1: Interesting choice of words for React Native.

00:52:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s actually the kind of project that I was thinking of in my previous example where if you have to eject in that case, I think it’s pretty bad. I mean, you can still run.

Another example of ejection would actually be with deploying apps with Hiokku. If you have a standard app, you can deploy to Hiroku, but you can also take that standard, like Ruby on Rails app, for example, and deploy it somewhere else, sort of an injection in a sense.

Hm. This is a very important concept, by the way. Another way I think about this would be as an efficient frontier where the axes are difficulty slash complexity and the other axis is power, and what you want is you want a smooth trade off on those where you can always add a little bit more complexity to get a little bit more power. If you need it. And so if you need a little bit more power, you never have to undergo a huge complexity jump, like migrating your app to a whole different platform. For example, there’s little changes you can make along the way. And furthermore, you want that frontier pushed out as far as possible, so that the minimal amount of complexity is needed for the given amount of power.

00:53:01 - Speaker 1: I think complexity gets a bad rap too, because I think a lot of times people think complexity is the opposite of simple and everyone loves simple because simple is elegant, so then complexity becomes a sort of like villainous thing, right? And I think there are times where we do need to embrace complexity, but how do you make it approachable, right? And I think that is the thing to solve, right, is to figure out like when there is a time where complexity is called for, how do you have your creative tools give people the knowledge of how, like again, to peel that layer back or pop the hood open to be able to address such complexity as opposed to avoiding it entirely.

00:53:45 - Speaker 3: And again, I keep coming back to this idea of mental models, often with complexity, you’re dealing with a fundamental reality of the underlying world, and if you ignore it or try to cover it up for long enough, you just make it worse, you have to address it. But on the other hand, you don’t want to make that problem any worse than it is by, for example, combining two problems and giving yourself three problems.

00:54:06 - Speaker 2: I’m reminded of the Einstein quote, Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler, which is, yeah, the world is complex, it can be messy.

You’re creating a tool for someone to model something about the world or create their own little mini made up world, and they are just going to need to deal with that complexity.

In the web world, that’s something like all the different browsers and all the different devices that someone might browse from and different screen sizes and the difference between interaction on touch versus mouse versus trackpad versus stylus.

Those things all exist and you need to deal with them when you’re creating something and attempt to totally abstract all that away because it sounds too complicated. It may impair the ability of the creator to make something that’s really good.

00:54:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, because abstractions still derived from the original thing, right? And I love the idea of really focusing on where you address complexity as opposed to neglecting it or putting it everywhere, right? So when you have these complex things to solve, what’s the optimal place to solve it?

00:55:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I do think we’re in kind of a golden age or the beginning of a golden age for creative tools that includes being more interesting, maybe place for designers to go work on tools for thought and things like that, that the the stodgy old kind of vanilla styles of the office suites of the past and so forth are giving way to more stylish and interesting and opinionated tools for thought and developer tools and designer tools. I’d be curious to hear from both of you looking forward to kind of the future, you know, if we could fast forward that trend 3 or 5 years, how does creative tools look different in the near future?

00:55:50 - Speaker 1: I think you’re gonna see a lot more participation in it, and it’s almost like.

The consumerization of creator tools, which I think is exciting.

And the reason I’m excited about it is I believe some of the people with the best ideas and things that can be life changing and can really change the world, probably don’t know how to code. They might not know how to design. So being able to give a platform for people to explore and express, kind of gives the continuation of such idea to manifest in other ways. Now, it may not be that person who ends up creating it, but maybe it sparks an idea somewhere else. So I’m always like a big fan of participation in anything because I think for me, honestly, if it wasn’t for visual programming tools like Hypercard and Quartz Composer, I may not have gotten into an interest in Building software and if I went the conventional route, I probably would have failed. So I think for me, that’s what I’m excited about is that like, this whole notion of like end user programming and it being more accessible, just for people to play and explore is pretty exciting for me.

00:57:03 - Speaker 2: It’s funny, I’m obviously a huge proponent of end user programming and more people learning how to grasp the power of the dynamic medium that is computers, not just as users, but as creators of software.

But when you use the word consumerization, Then that actually almost gives me a little bit of an opposite reaction and intellectually, I think I agree with you that more participation, more accessibility is better, but I guess as a crafts person and I love my niche and sometimes kind of complicated powerful tools, then what consumerization brings to mind for me, I don’t know, Instagram stories, or for example, you’ve seen this in some of Apple’s creator products like they have for audio editing, you’ve got. Logic Audio, but then you’ve also got GarageBand, which is installed in a reac. It’s pretty simple and easy to use, which is nice, but then in some ways they brought some of that design aesthetic to logic, maybe taken away some of the things that the longtime pro users of that could be described as like a dumbing down. So it’s interesting to reflect on that reaction of myself. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I don’t think I’m proud of it, but I just had that twinge when you said that word.

00:58:12 - Speaker 3: Oh Adam, I got a different phrase for you. What if we called it end user creating as a sort of generalization of end user programming, and this is a road we’re already part of the way down.

So it used to be that even end users couldn’t do something like word processing that was kind of a professional activity you had a typist or whatever. And we’ve since brought the Office suite to end users, and now I think we’re in the process of doing that for richer media, so audio, video, web pages.

Of course, those are things that are kind of on the cusp right now of even a few years ago, it was quite hard for someone to casually do audio editing or video editing, but now you go look on YouTube and there’s these like super, super niche, random people doing super random stuff, but the video quality is like insane because everyone can do video editing now. And I think that kind of progress is going to continue.

00:58:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s interesting.

I think Adam, even when I said that word, I had a similar reaction too and it just makes me wonder, like, has the term consumer transformed in a way that, you know, needs to evolve a little bit, but I’ll give you an example.

There’s an awesome. iOS app called Universe, which lets you build websites like on your phone. And I think for that, that to me is like the consumerization of a creator tool, right? You’re kind of taking the mental models of what people are used to on their. Smartphone dragging and dropping these swipe gestures, but instead of consuming content, maybe it’s more the consumers are becoming creators, right? So it’s kind of normalizing creators in that way and I think the universe is a great example of that. But just wanted to say when I said that word too, I had a certain mental model that came to mind and I think it’s, yeah, kind of like, maybe it’s more turning consumers and the creators rather with the mental models that they know.

00:59:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that, and certainly I have my own career to thank for that in a way.

As a kid, I loved video games, I was a consumer of video games, and that led me to think I want to be able to create these for myself, how can I do that? Back in those days that was breaking out your basic prompt and you know, doing some turtle graphics and that sort of thing.

Nowadays, we have quite different tools at our disposal, but having that smooth on ramp and folks have talked about how we in some ways have lost that as computing has gotten more sophisticated, it means, yeah, that same eight year old with an iPad, they’re playing the games and they’re thinking, how can I create these games and they kind of can’t because, you know, basically the whole stack of software creation and design.

Tools lives on a totally different platform and you know, requires professional buy in and is incredibly complicated, but anything that brings us back the other way and puts that creator power into the hands of interested people who, you know, they may just dabble in it and that’s fun and satisfying and they never go further and others may actually find their spark there and their inspiration and they go from there to something more sophisticated.

And both are great. Having that smooth ramp rather than gaps or a wall or a gap, whatever metaphor you want to use on the other side are the quote unquote serious professionals, and you have to do some kind of ritual to prove your worth to be part of them, but in fact, that if you have that spark, that bug to create and you pursue it, the opportunities are in front of you to take it as far as you wish to take it.

01:01:35 - Speaker 1: It’s interesting you mention that, Adam, because I think what it dawned on me is the same way I got into computers from playing video games and understanding how sprites are created that kind of sparked this curiosity for me to create.

I don’t know if that’s happened for mobile and tablets yet, right, because even though the inspiration is on device to be able to create, it’s off device and maybe this is where Xcode is going to bring a lot more things to.

The iPad and be more mobile centric, but maybe perhaps that’s the reason we’ve seen so much like hyper consumerism on these smartphones is that the tools on device, we may not have had that evolution yet, right, the same way as on my Apple II or name any old computer, it was like on device and you’re creating on the same platform. I don’t know if that’s really happened with mobile, a lot of that still kind of locked in, so it’d be interesting to see how that evolves over the years.

01:02:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the web has its own version of that. I think in many ways the web is better in the sense that maybe it’s a little more hidden in the menus now, but you can still view source on any web page. You’ve got to have tools inspector and certainly anyone that wants to grab a glitch account or a web flow account can start making simple web apps without a huge amount of ceremony.

Nevertheless, there is still a bit of a gap you jump over and certainly in compared to the original vision for the web, which was something much more read-write, something much more where you kind of right click a page and say edit, and it takes you in, or maybe something like Beaker browser has an interesting vision there or essentially any web page you’re on, you can click a fork button, you get a local copy and you can start editing it.

I like to see things like that because I feel like it helps. Reverse or provides a counterbalance to the tendency that as systems get more complicated, of course they get less accessible, and the tools for creation get further and further away from the regular tools for using.

So hopefully we can say web flow is part of that story as well. Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ or via email, hello at museApp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. David, thanks so much for help making creation on the web, something that’s more accessible.

01:03:59 - Speaker 1: Oh, it’s such a joy. I feel like it’s a life purpose in many ways and yeah, thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: There’s been very little innovation and research more generally into what is a good interface for inputting equations. So I think most people are probably familiar with Microsoft Word or Excel have these equation editors where you basically open this palette and there is a preview and there is a button for every possible mathematical symbol or operator you can imagine.

00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined by our guest Sarah Lim, who goes by Slim. Hello, hello, and Slim, you’ve got various interesting affiliations including UC Berkeley, Notion, Inc and Switch, but what I’m interested in right now is the lessons you’ve learned from playing classic video games. Tell me about that.

00:01:01 - Speaker 1: So this arose when I was deciding whether to get the 14 inch or 16 inch M1 MacBook Pro and a critical question of our age, let’s be

00:01:10 - Speaker 1: honest. Exactly, exactly. I couldn’t decide. I posted a request for comments on Twitter, and then I had this realization that when I was 6 years old playing Organ Trail 5, which is a remake of Organ Trail 2, which is itself a remake of the original. I was in the initial outfitting stage, and you have 3 choices for your farm wagon. You can get the small farm wagon, the large farm wagon, and the Conestoga wagon. I actually don’t know if I’m pronouncing that correctly, but let’s assume I am. So I just naively chose the Conestoga wagon because as a 6 year old, I figured that bigger must be better and being able to store more supplies for your expedition would make it more successful. I eventually learned that the fact that the wagon is much larger and can store a lot more weight means that it’s a lot easier to overload it. Among other things, this requires constantly abandoning supplies to cut weight. It makes the roover forwarding minigame much more perilous. It’s a lot harder to control the wagon. And yeah, I never chose that wagon again on subsequent playthroughs, and I decided to get the 14-inch laptop.

00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Makes perfect sense to me and and what a great lesson for a six year old trade-offs, I feel like it’s one of the most important kind of fundamental concepts to understand as a human in this world, and I think many folks struggle with that well into adulthood. At least I feel like I’ve often been in certainly business conversations where trying to explain trade-offs is met with confusion.

00:02:35 - Speaker 1: They should just play Organ Trail.

00:02:37 - Speaker 2: Clearly that’s the solution. And tell us a little bit about your background.

00:02:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’ve been interested in basically all permutations really of user interfaces and programming languages for a really long time, so this includes the very different programming languages as user interfaces and programming languages for user interfaces, and then, you know, the combination of the two. So right now I’m doing a PhD in programming languages, interested in more of like the theoretical perspective, but in the past, I’ve worked on I guess, end user computing, which is really the broader vision of notion, I was at Khan Academy for a while on the long term research team.

00:03:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and there I think you worked with Andy Matuschek, who’s a good friend of ours and uh previous guest on the podcast.

00:03:24 - Speaker 1: Yes, definitely. That was the first time I worked with Andy in real depth, and I still really enjoy talking to him and occasionally collaborating with him today.

So, I guess, prior to that, I was doing a lot of research at the intersection of HCI or human computer interaction and programming tools, programming systems, I guess. So, one of the big projects that I worked on as an undergrad was focused on inspecting.

CSS on a webpage or more generally trying to understand what are the properties of like the code that influence how the page looks or a visual outcome of interest, and there I was really motivated by the fact that you have these software tools have their own Mental model, I guess, or just model of how code works and how different parts of the program interact to produce some output and then you have the user who has often this entirely different intuitive model of what matters, what’s important.

So they don’t care if this line of code is or isn’t evaluated, they care whether it actually has a visible effect on the output. So trying to reconcile those two paradigms, I think is a recurring theme in a lot of my work.

00:04:30 - Speaker 2: And I remember seeing a little demo maybe of some of the, I don’t know if it was a prototype or a full open source tool, but essentially a visualizer that helps you better understand which CSS rules are being applied. Am I remembering that right?

00:04:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so that was both part of the prototype and the eventual implementation in Firefox, but the idea there is The syntax of CSS really elides the complexity, I think, because syntactically it looks like you have all of these independent properties like color, red, you know, font size, 16 pixels, and they seem to be all equally important and at the same level of nesting, I guess, and what that really hides is the fact that there are a lot of dependencies between properties, so a certain property like Z index, you know, the perennial favorite Z index 9999999. Doesn’t take effect unless the element has like position relative, for example, and it’s not at all apparent if you’re writing those two properties that there is a dependency between them.

So I was working on visualizing kind of what those dependencies were. This actually arose because I wrote to Burt, who is one of the co-creators of CSS and was like, Hi, I’m interested in building a tool that visualizes these dependencies. Where can I find the computer readable list of all such dependencies? And he was like, oh, we don’t have one, you know, we have this SVG that tries to map out the dependencies between CSS 2.1 modules, and even there you can see all these circular dependencies, but we don’t have anything like what you’re looking for. That to me was totally bananas because it was the basic blocker to most people being able to go from writing really trivial CSS to more complicated layouts. So I was like, well, I guess this thing doesn’t exist, so I’d better go invent it.

00:06:12 - Speaker 2: Perfect way to find good research problems. Now, more recently, two projects I wanted to make sure we reference because they connect to what we’ll talk about today, which is recently worked on the equation editor at Ocean, and then you worked on a rich text CRDT called Paratext at In and Switch. Uh, would love to hear a little bit about those projects.

00:06:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. So I guess the Paroex project, which was the most recent one was collaboration with Jeffrey Litt, Martin Klutman and Peter Van Harperberg, and that one was really exciting because we were trying to build a CRDT that could handle rich text formatting and traditionally, you have all of these CRDTs that are designed for fairly bespoke applications. They’re things like a counter data type or a set data type that has certain behavior when you combine two sets, and we’re still at the stage of CRDT development where aside from things like JSON CRDTs like automerge, we don’t really have a one size fits all CRDT framework or solution. You still mostly have to hand design and implement the CRDT for a given application.

And it turns out that in the case of something like rich text, it’s a lot harder than just saying, oh, you know, we’ll store annotations in an array and call it a day, because the semantics for how you want different types of formatting to combine when people split and rejoin sessions and things like that are all very complex and it turns out that we have a lot of learned behaviors that arise, even from just like, Design decisions in Microsoft Word, where you expect certain annotations to be able to extend, certain annotations to not extend, things like that. Capturing all of the nuance in that behavior turns out to be really difficult and requires a lot of domain specific thinking.

But we think we have an approach that works and I would really encourage everyone to read the essay that we published and try to poke holes in it too. This was like the 5th version of the. algorithm, right? So like months ago, we were like, all right, let’s start writing and then Martin, who has just an incredible talent for these things is like, hey, everyone, you know, I found some issues with the approach and, you know, oh no, 00, and sort of we fix those, we’re like, all right, you know, this one’s good and just repeat this like week after week. So I really have to give him a ton of credit for both coming up with a lot of these problems and also figuring out ways to work around it.

00:08:33 - Speaker 2: We talked with Peter a little bit recently, Peter van Hardenberg, about the pencils down element of the lab, but also just research generally, which is there’s always more to solve, you know, it’s the classic XKCD, more research needed is always the end of every paper ever written, which is indeed the pursuit of the unknown. That’s part of what makes science and Seeking new knowledge, exciting and interesting, but at some point you do have to say we have a new quantum of knowledge and it’s worth publishing that. But then I think if it’s just straight up wrong or you see major problems that you feel embarrassed by, then if you want to invest more.

00:09:09 - Speaker 1: Right, exactly. I think in this case. There was a distinction between, there’s always more we can tack on versus we wanted to get it right, you know, and in particular, the history of both operational transforms or OT and CRDT for rich text, just text in general is such that it’s this minefield of I guess to use kind of a gruesome visual metaphor, just dead bodies everywhere.

You’re like, oh, you know, such and such algorithm was published and it’s such and such time and it was new hotness for a while and then we realized, oh, it was actually wrong and this new paper came out which proved like 4 of the algorithms were wrong and so on.

And so with correctness being such an important part of any algorithm, of course, but also kind of this white whale in the rich text field, we thought it was important to at least make a credible effort to having a correct algorithm.

00:09:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, I can highly recommend the Paroex essay.

One of the things I found interesting about it, maybe just for anyone who’s listening, whose head is spinning from all the specialized jargon here, CRDTs are a data structure for doing collaborative software, collaborative documents, and then, yeah, rich text, the Microsoft Word is the canonical example there.

You can bold things, you can italic things, you can make things bigger and smaller.

Well, part of what I enjoyed about this paper was actually that I felt, even if you have no interest in CRDTs, it has these lovely visualizations that show kind of the data representation of a sentence like the quick brown fox, and then if you bold quick, and then later someone else bolds fox, you know, how do those things merge together.

But even aside from the merging and the collaborative aspect, which obviously is the research, the novel research here. I felt it gave me a greater understanding of just how rich text editing works under the hood, which I guess I had a vague idea of, but hadn’t thought about it so deeply. So, highly recommend that paper. Just give them the figures, even if you don’t want to read the thousands of words.

00:11:05 - Speaker 1: I’m glad you like the figures. They were a real labor of sigma.

00:11:08 - Speaker 2: Perfect, yeah, so.

00:11:10 - Speaker 1: The one thing I would add is that CRDTs are a technology for collaboration, but the way they differ from operational transforms or OTs is that a CRDT is basically designed to operate in a decentralized setting, so you don’t need a persistent network connection to all the parts. you don’t need a centralized server. The idea is you can fluidly recover from network partitions by merging all of the data and operations that happened while you were offline, and this turns out to be really important to our vision of how collaborative editing should work because we think it’s really important for people to be able to do things like not always be editing in the same document at the same time as everyone. Maybe I want to take some space for myself to write in private and then have my changes sync up with everyone else thereafter. Maybe I’m, you know, self-conscious about other people editing. are seeing my work in progress, but I think that it would be interesting and helpful to look at what the main document looks like and how that’s evolving while I’m working in private, and you can have that kind of one way visibility with something like a CRDT versus with something like Google Docs, where it’s just sort of always online or always not editing in your own personal editor. Conversely, maybe I’m OK with everyone else seeing the work that I’m doing in progress, but I just find it really visually jarring to have all these cursors and different colors jumping around and People inserting text, bumping my paragraphs down the page. I’ve definitely been there. I’m not particularly precious about people seeing my work in progress, but I just cannot focus on writing when the page is just changing all around me. So in that situation, maybe I would want to allow other people to see my work in progress, so that we don’t duplicate effort or something like that, but I just have like a focus mode where incoming changes don’t disrupt my writing environment and these kinds of fork join one way window. Microgit style branching paradigms are really only enabled by a technology like CRDTs where you have the flexibility to separate and then come back together.

00:13:12 - Speaker 2: And I’m incredibly excited by the design research that needs to go into that.

Now at this point, I think we’re still on the technology level, you know, one way to think of it is Google Docs came along, I don’t know, 15, it’s almost 20 years ago now, I can’t even remember, let’s say 15 years ago, and this novel idea that We could both have a shared document or several people could have a shared document, all see the up to-date version and type into it and get, you know, a reasonable response or have that be coherent was an amazing breakthrough at the time and has since been kind of widely copied notion, Figma, many others.

But now maybe we can go beyond that, much more granularity, like you said, maybe borrowing from the developer version control workflows a little bit in a lightweight way, giving a lot more control and flexibility, and giving us a lot more choices about how we want to work most effectively.

But before we can even get onto those design decisions and how do we present all these different things to the user, what are the different options? We need this like fundamental underlying merge technology, hence the endless fascination that we have the lab and increasingly the technology industry generally has with CRDTs because it has the potential to enable all that.

00:14:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when we were working on the Paratax project, Peter was pushing really hard for, don’t make this just a technology project.

It’s a socio-technical endeavor and we need to invest a lot of time in the design component, also just doing user interviews, identifying how people interact with and.

How people collaborate in the status quo on text and Jeffrey and I actually did do a bunch of user interviews with people from all kinds of backgrounds. We’ve talked to people who write plays, people who produce a dramatic podcast kind of in this style of Night Vale.

I love Night Vale. Yeah, people who are in the writer’s room kind of working together with their collaborators on that, people who write lessons, video lessons for educational platforms. And there was a ton of really interesting Insights into user behavior around collaborative text.

We ended up just torn because we had this 12 week project and we were like, how should we best spend our time? Clearly, this is not just a technical area and we need to invest a lot in getting the design right, understanding what the design space even looks like since it hasn’t really been explored.

I really want to avoid, and this is a recurring theme in my work, I really want to avoid publishing or shipping something. And having it be this like, very broad, very shallow exploration into all the things that are possible. I think that this kind of work plays an important role, and there are a lot of people who do this well, just fermenting the space of possibilities and getting these ideas in a lot of people’s heads, who can then go on and do really cool things with them.

My personal style, I never want to feel like something is half baked, I guess, I would much rather ship this cohesive contribution like, here is an algorithm for building rich text. We think that this is a technical prerequisite to all of these interesting design choices, but the alternative with a 12 week period, and in fact, you know, this, the correctness and revision phase extended way over that. So thanks a lot to Martin and Jeffrey for leading during that part.

But it’s just already so hard to get it correct that trying to tack on a really substantive design exploration that does the area justice on top of that, I was just really worried it would stretched too thin.

So absolutely lots of room for future work in this particular. project. It’s very much a challenge in any area where you have simultaneously this rich design space that’s just asking to be explored with tons of prototypes and things like that, and then also to even realize the most simple of those prototypes, you require fundamentally new technology.

00:16:53 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ve been down that same path on many research projects as well, and often it’s that I’m excited for what the technology will enable, but also that in many cases it’s a combination, you know, some kind of peer to peer networking thing, but with that will enable us to provide a certain benefit to the user and I want to explore both of those things, but then that’s too much and then the whole thing is half baked exactly as you said. I’ve never found a perfect or even a good. Way to really manage that tradeoff. You just kind of pick your battles and hope for the best. Yeah, definitely. Well, I do want to hear about the equation editor project, but first I feel I should introduce our topic here, which I think folks could probably have gleaned is going to be rich text and rich text editing, and maybe we could just step back a moment and define that a little bit.

I think we know that texts, you know, symbolic representation of language is a pretty key thing, writing and the printing press and all that sort of thing. We wrote about that a little bit in our text blocks memo, which I’ll like in the show notes. But typically, I think computers for a lot of their early time and even now with something like computer code is typically plain text, that’s the dot TXT file is kind of almost the native style of text that you have and then rich text typically layers something on top of that. I don’t know, so maybe you could better define rich text for us to have a more concrete discussion about it.

00:18:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think rich text for most people basically evokes things like bold, italic, underline, the ability to augment plain text with annotations that are useful in formatting, actually, I think.

Notepad to word pad is the archetypal jump in software, if you’re thinking about it from the old Windows perspective.

In the past few years, I think we’ve started to see a real expansion of what rich text can look like. So, of course, we started out with something like Markdown, which is, of course, a plain text representation. But it’s designed to be able to capture more nuance in plain text and be rendered to something like HTML which very much supports rich text.

So in Markdown, you have not only these kinds of inline formatting elements like bold and italic and hyperlinks as well.

You also have support for images, which you could think of as more block level rich text elements, I guess, and I don’t think there’s a real clear consensus across editors on how block level rich text elements should be displayed.

Of course, in between you have things like bulleted lists and those tend to be handled in a fairly standard manner with nested lists and so on, but it quickly becomes like a question of taste. Which kinds of annotations you support.

So in editors like Coto or Notion, you have all these different block types where the block is really the atom of collaboration and editing, and then you can have things like, you know, file embeds or even database views, things like that.

So I think we’re at a point now where both block-based editors, I’m using block based editors in like the text or writing sense, not the structured editors for programming sense, although I have other things to say about that, but we’re at a point where you’re starting to see these block-based editors appear and I think that there are a lot of really interesting patterns that this permits that the paragraphs via linear sequence of characters, including new lines and whitespace does not permit, or at least doesn’t allow you to build as structured tooling around.

00:20:30 - Speaker 2: I’m trying to think what is actually the core of the difference between a block-based editor, that’s a notion, a RO uses working on its own block text implementation and a flow of characters, so that’s Microsoft Word, Google Docs, maybe even text editors. I guess it’s sort of like paragraphs are separated by like these sort of nested. Elements or have a parent to the document versus like two new lines embedded in the stream of characters, but I don’t know, that seems too unsophisticated, maybe have a better definition for us.

00:21:03 - Speaker 1: So, I actually think about this very similarly to in the like programming languages and editor tools space.

There is a distinction between structured editors and regular plain text editors for programs. The idea is that you might have a text-based programming language and you can write that perfectly fine in any buffer that allows you to put sequential characters, often AI is sufficient for some languages, and then on the other hand, These programs might have a lot of inherent structure. A simple example is with lisps which are built out of these parenthesis S expressions, everything is, you know, an S expression. You can think about like the structure of the tree formed by, I guess a forest, formed by having like these S expressions with subelements and stuff. that, and then you can do manipulations directly on the structure in a way that allows you to always have a syntactically correct program or at least a partial syntactically correct program by doing things like I’m just going to take this subtree, which is a sub-expression and move it somewhere else where there’s room for another subexpression. So, I think of block-based editors as capturing a very similar zeitgeist to structured editors for code, because instead of just having this linear buffer of characters that can have, you know, formatting or things like that, you can have new lines, you actually have more of a forest structure where you have lots of like individual blocks, and then you can have blocks that are children of other blocks and so on, and that allows you to Do things like move an entire subtree representing an outline to another position in the document without selecting all of the characters, you know, cut them and then paste them somewhere else. So things like reparenting becomes a lot easier, things like setting the background of an entire subtree becomes a lot easier. Just in general, you have more structure and there’s more things you can do with that structure, I guess is how I would phrase it. One of my favorite things that you can do with this model in notion is you can change the type of a block very easily. So let’s say I have a bullet list item, and then I hit enter and enter these like subnote or something like that as children of the initial bullet list item. I can turn the bullet list item into a page, and then all of a sudden it’s just a subpage in the document, and the sub bullets that were there before are just like top level bullets in that page. And this is particularly important for my workflow because I care a lot about starting out with something like really rough and sketchy and then progressively improving it or moving up and down the ladder of like fidelity into something more polished. So you might, for instance, start off with just an outline list or even a one dimensional list of to do blocks when you’re trying to do project planning or something. And then later on, let’s say I want to put these into like a tasks database with support for like a conbond view or something like that. I don’t actually want to sit there and like recreate all of these tasks in Jira. I’ve been there, you know, I’ve been the person making all the tasks in Jira after the meeting and then assigning them to people. What the workflow that I think notion is poised to enable and can certainly do a better job in this regard, but already offers some benefits on is like, can I just highlight all of these blocks because everything is a block, move them into some existing database and have them match the schema. That kind of like allowing people to do fast and loose prototyping with very unstructured primitives and then promote them into something more structured like in a relational database setting or similar, I think is the sweet spot, structured editing provides the sweet spot between like just completely unstructured text and these very high fidelity, high effort interfaces that allows you to kind of move between them.

00:24:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I really like that direction and framing, and if I can extend it a little bit, I think we can also look at a continuum of richness in terms of the content itself.

So you have plain text, what you might classically call rich text with links and bold and underlying. And then you maybe start to throw a few images in, and then what if you can put it in videos and what if you have a whole table, and that table is actually a database query, and you can nest the figment document, and this way you can see that there’s sort of continuum on the richness of the document. One reason I think Notion has been so successful, they’ve been pushing along that continuum while maintaining a sort of foundation of rich textness, which is very familiar and the important basic use case for a lot of people.

A related idea is that I think we’re seeing a lot of the classic document types converge. So if you look at a rich text like a Microsoft Word and a PowerPoint and increasingly spreadsheets, those all used to be 3 distinct Microsoft Office applications, and we’re seeing the value of them being in or being the same document.

This is actually one of the motivating ideas behind Muse and a lot of the research we’ve done in the lab, and the kind of something Slim was saying, you want to take your idea continuously through different media and different modalities and different degrees of fidelity, and you don’t want to jump between different applications do that. You want to be able to do it on the same canvas. That’s by the way, one of the reasons I like Canvas. It’s not only because it’s a free multimedia surface, but also it evokes this idea of like flexibility and potentiality, and I think that’s one of the things that’s really excited about these mixed media documents.

00:26:16 - Speaker 2: And I know if Jeffrey were here, he might jump in and say that one downside to our current application silo world is that the only way to have this deeply rich text where it’s images, video, a table, a database query, something like that, is to have the Uber application, to have the everything app, and certainly notion has probably gotten pretty far on that, but others kind of in In some ways are forced to do that, like we have to do some of that in Muse as well. People come in and ask for all these different types here as well, and there’s more of like an open doc inspired or Unix inspired future that maybe Jeffrey and others, including me, would hope for, which would be more that applications could be these individual data types and you could put them all together through some kind of more operating system connection.

But that is so completely reversed from kind of how all our computing devices work today. It’s hard to see how we might get to that.

00:27:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m certainly sympathetic to that concern, although I suspect the way out is through, and you get platforms from working killer apps.

And so the way we got the whole unit ecosystem was they wanted to build a computer for, you know, writing and running programs and then eventually got all this generalized text processing stuff, but it’s not like they started in like, oh, I’m gonna make a generalized text processing machine.

I don’t think that was really the way that they approached it and developed a success. So, I’m still hopeful we could do this, but I think you got to extract it from something that’s already working as an app, but it always helps to have an eye towards that, and I think we’ve done some of that with Muse.

00:27:46 - Speaker 1: I was just going to say that it’s not me talking about texts, unless I bring up my favorite piece of software of all time, which is Pandok.

And I think that Pandok actually is very relevant to this discussion. So for those who aren’t as familiar with it, Panok brands itself as this Swiss Army knife for document formats, and it’s sort of headline contribution is that it allows you to convert between all kinds of documents.

For instance, I can take a Word document and convert it to a PDF Word documents to something like, I don’t know, IPython notebook, Jupiter notebook, back and forth across this incredible bipartite graph of formats, but I think that the subtler contribution that Pandokc makes, which is extremely significant, is that Pandok has this form of markdown called Pandok markdown that essentially aligns and supersedes all of the different fragments of markdown that we’ve seen before.

So the problem with markdown basically is that the original specification is sort of ill-defined. There are several cases in which the behavior is not super clear and then on top of that, it’s not very expressive.

There aren’t very many constructs. So things like fenced code blocks, which many people associate very closely with Markdown today, that was only added by GitHubb flavored markdown, which is certainly widely used among the programming community, but not everyone is on GitHub, of course. And then you have things like table formatting or even like strike through really strike Through wasn’t defined in the original markdown specification either. And so you have markdown and then you have like GitHub flavored markdown, common mark is sort of this unifying effort remark down all these different is the markdown cinematic universe. I tried to make a joke about this. I had this joke ready for the markdown Cinematic universe when the last Marvel. Movie came out. But then like, it didn’t get nearly the traction in my timeline as the Dune did, perhaps understandably. So really, I’m just going to have to wait till the next movie comes out. It’s a real, real tragedy. No, but like, I guess you have this real pluralism of forms and it becomes very difficult to use markdown truly as a portable format because the way it renders in one editor or even parses can very much differ from editor to editor. So, Pandoc provides this format that essentially serves as an IR or intermediate representation between all these kinds of documents using a markdown supersets that somehow magically encapsulates everything.

00:30:18 - Speaker 2: And that includes not just markdown, but also like PDFs or Microsoft Word, that seems.

00:30:24 - Speaker 1: Well, so the way it works is it’s this compilation pipeline, I guess, that allows you to go from a markdown document.

It compiles it to PDF using PDF Lawtech or something. It outputs Lawtech, it outputs HTML various things, and you can think of it as being this intermediate representation because you start with this like Word document, you can turn that into markdown and you can go from that markdown format into any of these output formats, which turns out to be like really powerful because the main issue with these kinds of conversions is that it’s often lossy, there are features that are supported by Law tech, for instance, that aren’t supported by the web natively, there are features that are part of like Word documents that aren’t necessarily supported by HTML and so on and so forth.

So Pandok serves this role of like basically saying, OK, what is an intermediate language that can encapsulate all the different implementations of the same concept across different input and output formats.

And what I think is so remarkable about it is that oftentimes when you are using an AP. of software and you’re like, oh darn, you know, now I need to support this other thing too. You quickly end up in a situation where you have the snowball and things start to feel tacked on.

So you’re like, Oh man, it’s very clear that they just glommed on this additional syntax for this feature. And with Pandok, everything feels like very principled in its inclusion. And at the same time, whenever I’m using Pandok and I’m like, darn, I really wish there was a construct that I could use to express this. particular thing, I look up in the documentation and it’s always supported. So, as one of my favorite examples, one of the output formats that Handok supports is various slideshow frameworks. So Beamer for people who use Lawtech and Reveal JS for people who use HTML and CSS and these slideshow frameworks basically allow you to replace something like PowerPoint, Keynote, Google slides with essentially like a text-based format. I really like doing slideshows in Pandock markdown. There are a few reasons for that. The first reason is that it’s really useful to be able to reuse some of the same content from like my blog post or essay even in the slideshow. There are some really minor and almost petty, but really significant reasons. Like, I like to have equations or code blocks with syntax highlighting in my slideshows, and there’s not really a good solution to putting like a syntax highlighted code block in Keynote right now.

00:32:39 - Speaker 2: Last I remembered, the gold standard at the Ruby conferences I used to frequent was to take screenshot of Textmate and paste that in.

00:32:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s awful. I don’t want to see your like monochai editor with like the weird background that contrasts weirdly with the slide background. I just, ah, and it doesn’t scale on a huge conference display anyway, I digress, but The other reason why I really like doing my slideshows in text is actually that there is often a hierarchical structure to my presentations, right? I’ll have like these main top level sections and then I’ll have subsections, and then I’ll have like sub subsections and all of these manifest and slides. But in the gooey thumbnail view of most of these existing Slideshow editors like PowerPoint or Google slides, it reduces it all to like this linear list. It’s like, here are all of your thumbnails in order. And it makes it very hard, as soon as I have like an hour-long conference talk, how do I like jump to this subsection that I know exists, aside from like scrolling past like 117 thumbnails and trying to find the right one, right? And moreover, let’s say I want to Reorder a certain part of the talk because I think it better fits the narrative structure. Now I have to like figure out which thumbnails I need to drag to which other place or worse, go into the individual slide, select the text from that, move that somewhere else, and it’s just way, way clunkier actually than reordering some text in like a bullet list outline in my editor.

And then the other part is that I was talking about how Pandok has really great support, expressive support for idioms of different formats, and one thing you often have in slideshows is that I have some element on the screen and then I press, you know, the next button again and then another element will appear.

So in Pandoc you can denote this with just like an ellipsis basically so like dot dot dot and then if I have a slide where I have a paragraph and then the dot dot dot and then another paragraph, it will render with just the first paragraph visible and then I press next and then like the subsequent paragraph comes in.

And that’s like just a very lightweight way to handle these stepped. Animations compared to going to the animation pane and then clicking the element that I want to animate in and so on and so forth.

So it started off with me being like, I’ll just prototype in this format, but then it ended up supporting columns, it supports all these things that you actually want. And I was like, this is in many ways a more ergonomic way to handle long technical slideshows. Anyway, I have to chill for Pandok anytime I talk about rich text, I’m contractually obligated to do so.

00:35:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a great piece of software, use it here and there. I think I was doing some Asky doc kind of manuals many years ago and yeah, just in general, it’s also worth looking at the homepage that you mentioned the plot they have where it shows all the different formats that can convert between is quite fun. You click on that, you can zoom in.

00:35:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I had this really elaborate plan when I decided to go to Berkeley, that I was going to print out a door-sized poster of like that graph that shows all the formats they convert between and then show up at John McFarlane’s door and ask him to sign it. But then the pandemic interfered with some of those plans. Nonetheless, it remains on my list.

00:35:48 - Speaker 2: Good bucket list item, pretty unique one at that.

00:35:51 - Speaker 1: Also, I found my tweet, or I found the draft of my tweet, which is about eternals, and I said, directed by Chloe Zhao, the latest entry in the Markdown Cinematic Universe features an ensemble cast of multi markdown, GitHubb flavored markdown, PHP Markdown Extra, R Markdown, and Common Mark as they joined forces in battle against mankind’s ancient enemy, Doc X. Nice.

00:36:12 - Speaker 2: Wow. You would have gotten the like from me.

00:36:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’ll see if it ever sees the light of Twitter.com.

00:36:20 - Speaker 2: You briefly mentioned there equations and La tech, and maybe that’s a good chance to talk about the equation project you did for notion. And part of what I thought was so interesting or what I think in general is interesting about equations is that they are obviously an extremely important symbolic format, but in many ways extremely different from the pros we’ve been talking about.

So English or other languages, even languages that are right to left or something like that, they all have the same kind of basic flow and the way that we represent sound. So with these little squiggly symbols, even though the symbols themselves and sounds vary and how we put them together into words across languages, that’s a common thing. If you go to the mathematical realm, you have symbolic representation, but equations are the whole own beast, and I think one that has gotten a lot less attention from kind of the software and editing world. So tell us about that rabbit hole.

00:37:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so just as context for people, notion and many other applications actually have long supported block equations, an equation that basically takes up, you know, most of the page horizontally.

What is much more uncommon in editors is support for inline equations and so this can be something as simple as saying, You want to type let X be a variable, and X should be formatted or stylized mathematically.

Being able to refer to elements of a block level equation in inline text is a prerequisite for being able to do any kind of serious mathematical writing, yet because this is kind of this niche area that has historically been the purview of Overleaf and other law tech editors, it’s really not implemented.

In most editors.

So I pushed really hard to add inline equations and inline math to notion, because I was like, there’s a huge opportunity for people to write scientific or mathematical documents that take advantage of all of notion’s other features like being able to embed FIMA or embed illustrations and things like that, right? So, it turns out that it’s kind of difficult, exactly as you’re describing to do this equation format.

There’s been very little innovation and research more generally into what is like a good interface for inputting equations. So I think most people Probably familiar with Microsoft Word or Excel have these equation editors, or even like operating system level sometimes where you basically like open this palette, and there is a preview and there is a button for every possible mathematical symbol or operator you can imagine. And then for composite symbols like the fraction bar or integral or something like that, you find the button for that, you click it, and then you click into like the little subboxes and then you find whatever symbol you want and you put those there too. So it’s kind of a structured editor, but like in an unimaginably cumbersome interface. This is what I used to do my lab reports in high school, for example. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have things like law tech. Law tech is basically how everyone in at least in computer science and mathematics chooses to typeset their work, typesets complex mathematics. One of the real selling points of law tech, I think is that It turns out that operator spacing is really important, and there’s a big difference between, say, a dash that’s used like a hyphen or a dash character that’s used in text, and a hyphen or a dash character that’s used as a minus sign in an equation, the spacing is subtly different.

And one of the big things that Lawtech does is it basically allows you to declare certain operations in certain contexts as like a math operator versus just a symbol versus just like a tagged group of characters, and it correctly handles the spacing depending on what kinds of characters are around the operator in question. And so Lawtech basically produces really nice looking mathematics at the cost of this markdown which looks like I kind of smashed my keyboard that only had like 3 characters. It’s the exact opposite of the equation editors instead of having a button for every imaginable character, you only have 3 buttons. The buttons are backslash, open curly brace, and closed curly brace, and somehow like permuting those characters is supposed to get you like any possible mathematical outfit. There’s just two ends of the spectrum.

00:40:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I used to do my analysis homework in college in law tech, and I remember when I first looked up how you would input in law tech these formulas, like, that can’t be right. This is not the best way in the world to do this. In fact, that’s it, that’s the one and only way.

00:40:53 - Speaker 1: It really is, it’s terrifying. It’s the one and only way and the wild part is there are people who are like super, super good at law tech. They can like live tech their lecture notes. I was never nearly like that fast, but some people can do it usually with extensive use of macros, which macros are another selling point of law tech as you can define these kind of custom shorthand for operators you use a lot. But anyway, yeah, so you have a lot of tech sort of at the other end of the spectrum, like really quite unreadable, oftentimes, like, it’s like a right only format, many times.

00:41:23 - Speaker 2: And of a regular expressions come to mind on that as well, yeah.

00:41:26 - Speaker 1: It’s exactly the same zeitgeist, I think. It turns out that figuring out how to have like a combination, gooey, plain text interface that allows you to be like in a rich text editor like notion, then. into an inline equation field to have like an inline symbol and then go back into the GUI editor was like just very unexplored territory.

And it kind of makes sense that lots of people don’t prioritize this because many people that notion rightfully had the question like, oh, is this something we should be working on? But first of all, it turned out that if you actually tallied up like our user requests, inline math was like near the top.

Of editor feature based requests. And then more generally, it turns out that because this is like a prerequisite for many researchers and for students, you can get a lot of people on your platform who rely on it, you know, as a student to take notes and something like that, because there’s literally no alternative. And then they are able to stick around and use the platform for all kinds of other things.

So this is just kind of a plug that more editors should implement this.

But Yeah, I thought that this project was really interesting because in the interaction paradigm, you want to capture a lot of the things that are very fluid about editing regular text. So for instance, we knew it was important that you should be able to use the arrow keys to move left and right, kind of straight through a token without editing it if you wanted, or if you wanted to be able to go. Into a token and edit it using the arrow keys, you shouldn’t have to like use the mouse to click, although, of course, you should also be able to use the mouse to click. And when you have this formatted equation, we made the decision that the rendered equation would be represented as this atomic token. So if you were highlighting text to copy and paste and move around, it would be like highlighting a single character that would just be like the whole equation. But of course, you could go in and edit the equation. Any way you want it in kind of this pop up text editing interface.

I think another thing that’s the subtle interface challenge here is that like Mark was saying, there is often a Uh, disproportionately large number of characters used to represent the equivalent of like one character with a formatted output. And so that’s something you don’t really take into account. The output is like X with a hat in San Sara font, and then there’s like 25 characters of markup that goes into that, and you just need to like scale the interface appropriately to take that into account.

But I think that it’s really interesting because It shows the power of combining different input and output formats in like the same atom, right? So you have like a single line of text, and you want to have rich text that’s formatted and stylized and so on, hyperlinks, and then also equations or whatever inline rendered output of another input format that you have. I think that that’s really where GUI editors and whizzy wig editors can shine is being able to combine these like, Input formats and output formats like in the same line in Chu, yeah, I guess you can’t really do that at all with the terminal or something like that, and I say this as someone who uses like CLIIM for everything.

00:44:34 - Speaker 3: This is bringing back so many memories. I wish I had notion with equation support back when I was a math undergrad. It’s so nice.

00:44:41 - Speaker 1: I’m like the notion math stand guardian, I don’t know, something like that. And I’m always keeping track of like all the cool things people are doing using equations and notion.

A lot of people are doing like math blogs in notion, which is really awesome for me to see. Also, I just feel like they’re having tried lots of other things. They’re just like really isn’t. A good alternative short of like actually writing lots like for your blog, which no one really likes. And yeah, I mean, certainly it’s the kind of thing that I implemented originally, kind of, I was like, I’m gonna do this for myself, and then realized that lots of people would be able to benefit from it.

It’s been really cool to see a bit of reception it gets, like the inline math tweets on the notion, uh Twitter account overwhelmingly get the most engagement and interaction.

And initially, like the marketing team was shocked. They thought this would be the super niche feature, but no, it turns out that people love math and like, they may not be the most vocal proponents or they’re used to no one caring about math type setting, things like that.

For a while, I think it was the case that when I did find an editor that had support for equations of some kind, to me, it was overwhelmingly obvious that the people who implemented it did not regularly use equations for writing. I think you can often tell that with different features. So I think that having that kind of Representation is not quite the right word, but being able to see a feature that was designed by someone who really cares about using it themselves is really cool for people who are interested in typesetting, students, researchers, people who are interested in typesetting more mathematical text.

00:46:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it’s really important, like you were saying that it’s mixed media because you’re combining the equations, the inline equation and the block equation, by the way, in the world class form, which is a lot tech based with a world class rich text editor with text and images and stuff. It’s really nice. I do think there’s still one frontier here, especially for math, which is the fully gradual process from you’re taking handwritten notes and you’re working out a problem and you’re drawing squiggly diagrams all the way up through your finished homework. I remember when I was at math undergrad. I would basically have to do the homework twice. You do it once on paper. Nobody could read that, including myself, so that, you know, do it in lot again. And I always wish there was a way to do it incrementally. You sort of changed equation by equation and diagram by diagram into the final product. And I know there has been some research on uh turning equations into lot tech formulas with machine learning. I don’t know if I can do handwriting, but perhaps someday we’ll get the new support for equations and you can go all the way to the end.

00:47:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, like you, I share exactly the same frustration that you have to essentially do lots of things twice, and the relative position of everything is ambiguous, and Lawtech is what allows you to do things like have subscripts of subscripts, which would be really inscrutable in most people’s handwriting, including my own, and, you know, subscripts of subscripts along with super scripts and things like that. There are just so many ambiguous details and it turns out in my experience with like, anything that tries to automate the transition is that I always end up Going through and like really rewriting all of the details to be structured in a readable way.

You have this other problem which back in the days of like Wizzy Wig web editors like Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front Page and things like that, you would often end up with this problem where you try to do like any edit in the Wizzy Wig side and then you look at the generated HTML and it’s ridiculous. There’s just like 16 nested empty span tags, and no one would ever be able to maintain that.

And my worry is basically that when you automatically create Markup for something that has a very complex graphical representation, it’s really like one way, you know, maybe it will help you produce a compiled output, but it doesn’t actually help you go back in and like edit and tweak the representation later or it’s just so inscrutable if you do that it’s kind of also a reg x type situation.

I think we really need to get to some kind of like good intermediate representation that allows you to flexibly go both ways.

And that goes back to something that I think Adam and I were chatting about earlier, which is that a lot of people gripe and complain that like law tech is the best we have and, you know, I’m one of them, but It really is the case that, you know, lottech was just this like monumental effort by really a few people and amount of effort that would be like considered really impressive if I were to try to do the same thing but better today and not a lot of people just have like spare time to do this all in one text formatting, packaging, document representation project, even though it would have huge impact on the way people write and publish these kinds of documents. And so in many ways we’re sort of just bottlenecked on the fact that It’s hard to do incremental improvements to this particular area. We really depend on these like software monoliths to keep us afloat.

00:49:19 - Speaker 2: I’m not nearly as mathy as either of you, but I can’t help but make the comparison on these equation editing to what you mentioned earlier with kind of structured editors and programming, where whether there’s lightweight help from your text editor, things like code folding, syntax highlighting and autocomplete, or full structured editing, some of the visual programming stuff we talked about with Maggie Appleton, like Scratch, for example, or these flow based systems that are fully graph. and you sort of can’t have it in a bad state. And I can’t help but to think there might be some direction like that that is not necessarily the right only inscrutable tech, but is not the Microsoft Word one button literally for every symbol you might ever want.

It does seem like there might be some other path, and yeah, I agree it’s a monumental effort, but I mean, mathematics is so important and foundational and so much of human endeavor that certainly seems like one worth investing in, although perhaps hard to reap a profit from, and that makes it harder to put concentrated capital behind it.

00:50:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that there’s definitely very clear demand for I think something exactly like what you’re describing, which is somewhere in between the two extremes, and it is really relevant because ACM, which is the Association for Computing Machinery, the academic and professional body really for computer science, they are currently undergoing this.

Fiasco, maybe, I probably shouldn’t go on the record as calling it a fiasco.

The ACM is currently undergoing this initiative called TAPS, which is the ACM Publishing System, where they are attempting to revise the template by which all computer science research is published and disseminated, and the idea behind this is that right now, computer science research is published to these PDFs. Initially they were all two column PDFs, now I think there’s some one column PDFs. They want to output HTML as the archival format for various reasons, including that it offers much better reading experience on different screen widths, so like phones or tablets, which are increasingly how people are reading papers, not just printed out. And they are much more accessible than PDFs. PDFs are just like really quite inaccessible, especially to screen readers and other assistive technologies that are trying to parse out all the different math or whatever arbitrary formatting you’ve decided to use. The upshot of this, I guess, is that there are currently a group of very smart people who are trying to figure out how in the world we’re going to get people to start writing all of their papers and outputting them in a different format, in a world where everyone is already used to preparing. Their publications and preprints in law tech. And turns out that even if you solve the problem of like what the input syntax should be, rendering math in the browser is like an extremely unsolved problem.

00:52:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, isn’t the state of the art that it like generates PNG and sticks it in the web page?

00:52:09 - Speaker 1: Not exactly, but like almost. OK. So MathML, which is like an XML dialect or like mathematical markup language, was this effort to build.

HTML XML style syntax for typesetting mathematics.

Naturally, it is only implemented in Firefox, so that’s really unfortunate. So in terms of the state of the art, there are basically two libraries that you can use to typeset mathematics. There’s math Jack and Caltech.

Mathjax supports basically all valid law tech, including, you know, different. Environments and equations and things like that.

The problem is that Mathjacks is very slow. So if you ever go on math overflow or another like related stock exchange and you see like all of these answers with like weird gaps, and then as you watch before you, the page starts to like load all of the rendered equations like bumping everything down one level at a time. That’s math Jackson action.

And oftentimes it is doing what you’re describing where it is outputting like an SBG or a PNG or something like that, and it’s just like reflowing the page with every equation.

So then you have Caltech, which was a library developed at Konn Academy where they realized that math Jack’s performance was basically just like not satisfactory for their exercises and things like that. Sootte supports a much more limited subset of all of Law tech syntax, but it does it all using CSS basically, and it doesn’t reflow the page for every equation. It’s basically instant surrender.

So tech is what we use at Notion, it’s also what’s used in like Facebook Messenger, which supports equations if you ever tried that, and many other websites, and basically it means that your options, if you want to render math are only target Firefox. Use a limited subset of math that’s supported by Kottech and Consign yourself to like extremely slow, dozens of reflow, full expressive power rendering to inline PNG’s.

And so that’s just not like a great situation to be in, and we haven’t even gotten to the question of like how people write math. So I would say that people underestimate like how open this problem spaces.

00:54:17 - Speaker 3: Yeah, man.

00:54:19 - Speaker 1: Just take a moment of silence to like recognize the gravity of the situation.

00:54:23 - Speaker 3: This is an aside, I don’t know if you want to put this in the episode, but now I’m curious. It sounds like both of those are interpreted in the sense that the equations are rendered at load time instead of being compiled down to some like HTML and CSS that you can render without JavaScript. Like, basically, do you need JavaScript to render these pages?

00:54:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, basically, I should say you also need JavaScript, unless you’re doing the pre-compied to MathML and then hope that people are using Firefox.

00:54:47 - Speaker 3: Man, I feel like there’s no way that that stuff loads in 10 years, but we’ll see.

00:54:52 - Speaker 1: I actually had this exact argument, again, I don’t know if you want to put this in the episode.

I had this exact argument with Jonathan Aldrich, who’s on the taps committee when we were talking about this, and I think the point was not so much that you can guarantee that the artifact loads. Exactly the same way in 10 years, but that the representation is rich enough that one could feasibly build software that renders it the same way in 10 years. So it’s more about the fidelity of the like underlying representation where like a team of, I guess, digital, you know, archaeologists could recover the work that we were doing and not so much like we trust in the vendors to like keep everything stable, which is obviously never going to happen. You know, the only reason like PDFs are stable is because how many trillions of dollars of IP depend on being able to load the PDF the same way as it was written, you know, 30 years ago.

00:55:45 - Speaker 3: Yeah, interesting.

00:55:46 - Speaker 1: Nice. Going back to this idea earlier that Mark mentioned of the spectrum of like plain text, rich text, Wizzy wig editors.

One recurring theme for me is thinking about decoupling this spectrum into like what is the format and then what are like the editors and tools that we can use to interact with this format, so they structured, unstructured, etc.

I want to call outAR, which is a native application for Mac OS and iOS that does a really great job with this, which is that Bear is basically Something in between a whizzy wig and a plain text editor in that you’re always editing markdown documents and indeed, when you have something that’s bold, you can see the like asterisks around it that delimits that character.

But all of these standard, you know, Control B, U, editor shortcuts work as you would expect.

And more importantly, you can see like the formatting applied in real time.

So That when you do star star, hello star star, he suddenly becomes bold face in this gooey.

And so in many ways it combines like the fluidity and the real-time preview of a rich text editor or previewer with the flexibility of like ultimately just writing plain text characters. And I think this is like really unexplored area.

I don’t just mean something like Open VS code or VIM and type characters and then see like different formatting labels attached to the results.

I mean like a native application that’s really designed like for end use or end users, that doesn’t fully obscure the input syntax but does real time rendering in place.

It’s not even like in monospace font, right? It makes it feel much more like this is actually the output that you’re targeting. And not just like an input step that needs to be pre-processed. I think that there is a lot of room for applications that are kind of in between and in that same spaces where it doesn’t entirely obscure what you are writing, but it does give you a lot of the benefits of previewing things and having like a GUI application outside of the terminal in terms of like capturing the richness of the possible results.

00:57:52 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I like the bear approach a lot. Now, are there particular domains or types of documents that you think would be susceptible to this approach, or it just for rich tech specifically?

00:58:01 - Speaker 1: So I was making a list of like all of the different traditionally graphical outputs that have corresponding plain text representations and a lot of them I was thinking about, for example, in engraving sheet music, right, traditionally you would use a desktop program like Finae or Sibelius nowadays you have options like new score and flat, which are more web-based editors, but you see the staff and you click notes. In the staff like corresponding to where you want the note, and you know you use the quarter note or the 8th note cursor to pick the duration and so on.

And then at the other end of the spectrum you have Lily Pond, which is kind of like law tech I guess for engraving sheet music where you type a very like law tech-esque syntax and out comes, you know, beautifully typeset sheet music. For me this is like a little bit too. Gnu edgy, just because when I think of like composing music, I’m very much thinking about like what the staff looks like, just to be able to visualize chords and counterpoints and things like that.

But I think the upshot is that like you could very easily have something in between where you have like a text-based or non-binary representation of like a piece of music or a composition, and then you can edit it either using like the text editor or using the structured editor of an existing Wizzy wigUY like composition software or notation software rather, and edit the same representation both ways. And then likewise, you have for diagram generation. This is an area that’s been A real pain point for me historically because you can basically do something like really low fidelity, like sketching on paper, but then if you don’t want to like take a picture and upload it to whatever document, right? All of the options are like very high fidelity, like there’s omnigraphle and whimsical and Sigma, which is even more involved where you get all of these nice things like lots of styles and force directed layout and so on and so forth, but it’s like quite cumbersome to input a diagram that you sketched in all of 30 seconds into omnigraphle in its full glory. And then you have like on the plain text end of the spectrum. The software like graph is Tie for Law tech things I really like are Mermaid, which is a markdown type syntax for quickly generating diagrams. There’s SVG Bob, which is incredible. It basically lets you turn Asy art into formatted SVG though, as a brief aside, I don’t actually know what problem this is solving. Aside from being incredibly cool, because at least for me, I consider myself someone who’s like fairly artistic, and it takes at least as much effort to figure out how to make a really nice Asky art like thought bubble as it does to figure out how to actually like do the SVG. I’ve always really wanted something that basically allows you to edit it either as text, which allows you to prototype really quickly, make a fast flow chart or something like that, and something. I’ve always really wanted an intermediate representation for diagrams where you can edit it either on the text end using something like mermaid to do really fast prototyping for a flow chart or something like that. And then if I wanted to have more precision and control, I could also pull it into software like omnigraphle or Figma and make fine grain tweaks, um, get like my nice force directed layout or control where individual nodes were if I find a grain control over positioning, things like that. I guess I think there are lots of different areas outside of just traditional documents that are ripe for an editor or a representation that learns some things from the plain text approach and some things from the whizzy wig approach. I think that we are, yeah, we’re getting close to being able to explore those, but I would love to see more work in this area.

01:01:40 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is very interesting. One challenge here I think is with plain text and rich text, the structure of the text and structure of the final output are going to be pretty close.

And so that makes it most feasible to have the thing where you’re seeing both the worlds superimposed with the double asterisks on both sides and the bold text, for example, with something like a diagram, if you were to represent a diagram in just like Like not like input, it would be a complete mess. It basically no resemblance to the final output, just be like a string of really opaque characters, and then it would compile out to a nice graph, but it’s kind of hard to go back and forth because of that.

One way to combine these two worlds would be to invoke the command palette metaphor that we see emerging so often, as you can imagine, OK, you’re editing a score or you’re editing a graph. And instead Having 1000 buttons around the edge of your screen like you do with these typical applications, the only interfaces you can click on stuff and then you can type stuff in the command poet. So you click up where you want to add a note and you say like B, you know, BQ, and it puts in the Bcor node and so on. And similarly with graphs, you could click on a node and you could invoke little commands with your text editor or perhaps edit the little node locally represented as a little text box. That’s kind of a way to bridge this issue of a pure tax representation would have no obvious correspondence to a 2D or a 3D image, but if you have some way to get more local nodes, it could work well.

01:03:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely.

01:03:01 - Speaker 2: And the thing that brings to mind for me is our oft-cited favorite tool for thought, which is the spreadsheet where you do have this, it’s a very, very simple version of that, this 2D layout, but in fact you do click on cells and type in symbolic there, so you are mixing a visual spatial layout, a very lightweight one with some symbolic representation.

01:03:23 - Speaker 3: Spreadsheet remains undefeated.

01:03:25 - Speaker 1: One thing that I find really interesting about spreadsheets, that’s I think often very unexplored is that many applications like Air Table notion is also very much guilty of this.

You can capture like the power of the spreadsheet as like a relational database or we like what happens if we impose better structure onto the different columns and things like that, but there’s like a separate totally untapped. Under explored area of spreadsheets, which is that it’s basically this canvas, right? Spreadsheets capture everything that people liked about table-based layouts in HTML with none of the stigma associated with it. And so you can create these like really complex interfaces that basically just do data. and things like that and put things, be like, OK, I’m going to like copy this data and bring it over closer to where I’m working now so I can reference it more easily. It’s basically just this grid, right? And that’s totally unstructured. It doesn’t correspond to any kind of relational format, but it’s also a really powerful computation paradigm.

01:04:20 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. I think people really love to be able to click somewhere and put stuff there. And a lot of spreadsheet use is just that. They just want to click there and put text or put a color, and there’s no formulas at all. And by the way, this goes back to our idea of convergence of the Office document types. I see people using Figma for this a lot, like they’re not designers, they’re not designing interface. They want to click and put pictures on a 2D canvas, and they want to click and put text there and you could see a sort of continuation of this world where these things continue to merge as the software gets more sophisticated.

01:04:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and then on the subject of diagrams real quickly, I remember that I want to mention sketch and sketch, which is this project by Brian Hempel, Justin Lubin, Robbie Shug at University of Chicago from a couple of years ago, and the idea there is you have direct manipulation programming for SBG.

So in the same you have this editor and then on the left side, you might see the code that outputs a certain SPG on the right side you see the SP. itself, and you should be able to do things like directly go in with the mouse, click an anchor point and drag it somewhere or do other kinds of transformations that people are used to when SVG editing, and it should obviously be reflected in the output, but also change the code that goes into it, and then you can make changes to the code and it will modify the output.

I think this is one of the most successful examples. I’ve seen of an editor that actually manages to keep this bidirectional linkage working and when you make manual edits with the direct manipulation edits with the cursor, it doesn’t totally botch your code and when you make changes with the code, it doesn’t lose all of your edits with the visual side. I think it would be great to see like more things like this for more structured areas like diagramming or things like that.

01:05:59 - Speaker 3: So many research projects to do.

01:06:02 - Speaker 1: Yes, lots to do.

01:06:04 - Speaker 2: So slum, I see a recurring theme in how you think about all of this, whether it’s equations, prose, rich texts, musical score, or diagrams, is this intermediate format concept, and maybe like a straw man or an outside view might come at this thinking, well, being able to see something like a markdown is sort of exposing plumbing that nerdy programmer types might like, but The reason we invented what you see is what you get word processors, whatever, 40 years ago or whatever it was, was to potentially liberate us from that.

But I see that you see the future is not one where those go away.

We want to expose that. There’s some value to that separately from a fully visual 100% mapping the rendered output and the way you edit it looking precisely.

The same, so I think that eliminates somewhat what I would imagine how you would answer the question I was going to ask you about the future, but with that in mind, I’ll basically say, yeah, if you look forward, say 5 or 10 years to what advances either have happened or that you hope to see happen in terms of how rich text works on our computing devices, what does that look like?

01:07:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s exactly like you were describing, we originally had this idea that you would be able to get a Wizzy Wig editor or something like Microsoft Word and totally decouple yourself from this underlying representation. I think that works up until the point where you have lots of different Output formats or different ways of viewing the document that people would like to use.

And as soon as you are in a world where even something like, let’s say I want to have two different views in a GUI application, all of a sudden it becomes much more beneficial to have some kind of intermediate format so that you don’t have to do like N times different renderers and parsers and compilation pipelines for all of these internal things.

01:08:01 - Speaker 2: So there’s a simple example of that earlier you mentioned the reading academic papers on different size screens, you know, a phone versus a desktop versus a printout, that even just the basic reflow of the text, simple as that seems to a narrower or wider screen actually is pretty complicated and There was an approach of designing for several different screen sizes, but now we know that that’s not very futureproof and doesn’t the way we want. And so as soon as you have anything that’s even slightly dynamic, even something as simple as text free flowing, that’s the place where you think in an immediate format is necessary.

01:08:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, like it’s not tractable to design like a phone version of the website for every possible phone and then like a tablet version for all the tablets and then a desktop version. And but also like a projector version, things like that.

So the layout and the appearance is driven by the content itself. And I think that there’s an idea of that for outputting a paper.

If you’re thinking about outputting another artifact like a diagram or something, I think there are situations where it’s really useful to be able to do standard direct manipulation diagram editing and then also situations where it’s really useful to be able To like select all of the text that corresponds to a certain subgraph and just like move it somewhere else and allowing people the flexibility of choosing between those different edit options, depending on what task they’re trying to perform, what problem they’re trying to solve is like a really big area of opportunity.

So I think like, we’re still at a stage where with all of these different new editors like Coda or Notion or even bare craft. Editors are still like very much borrowing from each other a lot and periodically striking out in the direction of like, here’s a new kind of block or a new kind of like cell or type of text that you can have, and I think that while we’re still in the stage of like churning feature churn around, what are the editing primitives that people care about, what things go in a document, it’s going to be hard to develop any kind of like unifying framework or IR for these documents to work together.

I’m hopeful that once we reach a scenario where there’s a little more stasis and maybe more overlap in the capabilities and interests of different editors, you could have like this intermediate platform that extends from things like Rome to notion or notion to air Table or something like that for the components that make sense to go into those other platforms, and then you can actually really flexibly move your data around between these areas and likewise, within applications, maybe you want to be able to start off with something really low fidelity and gradually get something higher fidelity, like it would be really nice to have a slider almost. That allows you to move up and down the ladder of abstraction, but failing that, like an intermediate tool that you can plug in and be like, OK, I want to take this like bullet list of to do items and upgrade it into a database for like things or something like that. Something that’s more plug and play that also handles structured data in the same way we have a tool like Handdoc for text. That’s what I’m really excited to see because I really think of rich text as slowly expanding to include all the things you might want to have in a document, which might include Embedded views of other databases or things like that. So just having a more expansive interpretation of rich text that is less constraining with respect to the kinds of artifacts that you can produce, allows you to combine more things together, has like a notion of structure that enables these kinds of really Powerful edits like re-parenting an entire subtree, while also allowing you to do things like select a linear region of text and copy it somewhere else. I think that’s kind of the direction we’re moving in, where we combine a lot of flexibility of plain text editors that we’ve seen to date with some of the power of having more structure.

01:11:51 - Speaker 3: It’s a pretty exciting future.

01:11:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, let’s hope we get there.

01:11:54 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at @museapphq. You can reach us on email, hello at museapp.com. You can also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. And slim, your drive and passion for all things text and in fact expanding my mind has been expanded on what even we would think of text as being and what these intermediate formats can do for us in the future. So I’m really excited that you’re on the forefront of this and pushing forward our tools.

01:12:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was great to talk about.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Which by the way, something that’s a little bit unique to digital systems versus classic analog systems, you know, if your wrench is rusty or doesn’t work as well, but it still basically works as a wrench, whereas if you have one bit off in your software, just crashes, you know, you’re out of luck.

00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. But this podcast isn’t about me as the product, it’s about me as the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Adam, Mark, you were giving us a very interesting little workshop at a team summit recently about the use of iPads in aviation.

00:00:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so aviation is one of the most interesting and powerful use cases I’ve come across for iPads in the wild.

It’s so powerful and important that folks are willing to spend $100 200 dollars, $300 a year for high-end aviation-related iPad software. So there’s something right going on there, no pun intended.

And as I’ve been exploring that world, there’s a very interesting contrast and sort of technology share between these super shiny iPads and this new software that’s being updated constantly, and the very old general aviation aircraft you tend to see out there.

This is the Cessna from the 60s, which by the way, is basically exactly the same as it was 60 or 70 years ago.

And then they’re being flown with these iPads from 1 to 2 years ago, and it’s very interesting to compare and contrast those worlds, and it led into this topic today actually because we were noticing that longevity of the aircraft versus the almost ephemerality of the iPads and the software and how much churn there seems to be in that world.

So we want to dig into it on the show.

00:01:51 - Speaker 2: So Cessna, which is kind of a small private plane, is an extremely complex piece of technology and also one that is used in very high stakes situation, i.e. if it fails, you fall out of the sky and die, and it has very complex controls as well, but those are all I guess analog is the right name, but, you know, again, they look the same as they did in the 60s, even new ones built today, and the ones built in the 60s, they continue to, essentially, you need to maintain them, you need to replace parts and upgrade them to comply with newer aviation regulations, but Again, they haven’t changed much in that underlying technology and that’s so wildly different from the world of not just iPad, but software and internet in general where change is at an incredible pace and in fact that’s probably desirable in this what’s the piece of software that’s kind of the commonly used pilot software.

00:02:44 - Speaker 1: For flight is the most common one.

00:02:46 - Speaker 2: So that’s got maps, it’s got weather, it’s got flight routes, it’s got locations of other planes, all of the stuff is being presumably downloaded or even streamed in through APIs. It’s all very real timey and current information, and you want that, in addition to just keeping up with all the new capabilities of the iPad. So you get maybe that separation is nice, you get the benefit of the really fast moving software and internet world that’s on this device that’s strapped to the pilot’s knee, but it’s completely decoupled from the safety reliability oriented core instruments that are built into the plane.

00:03:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, researching this reminded me a lot of navigation in cars. So my experience has always been if you buy or if you see a car that has like built in navigation, it’s always gonna be bad because it was designed 2 to 4 years ago and it wasn’t designed by a software company, but everyone just wants to use their iPhone, right, to navigate and they want to be able to plug it in and have it just their iPhone apps be displayed in the car. That’s a good way of embracing the reality that there is some shear between those two layers in terms of how fast the technology tends to evolve.

00:03:54 - Speaker 2: So then our topic today is software longevity, and I think you can slice this two ways. One is the software itself and how long that lasts or how durable that is, and then you can also cut it the other way, which is, yeah, software is eating the world or is invading everything from, you know, toasters to cars, and how does software’s dynamism impact the longevity of everything else as it creeps its way into the rest of our world. But as always, I like to start at the very beginning. So I guess first I have to ask what it means to you to talk about something being long-lived or having longevity, whether it’s software or a plane or something else.

00:04:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s the software being able to serve its stated purpose, which sounds very straightforward but has several important constituent parts. First of all, you actually need the software, you know, sometimes we just lose it. It needs to run, it needs to run correctly and needs to have access to the relevant data, needs to have access to the relevant pieces of the outside world in terms of APIs, and it needs the appropriate substrate to run on and interact with, and that’s probably other pieces that we could come up with. But there’s a lot of moving pieces that go into the software actually serving its original end goal.

00:05:07 - Speaker 2: For me thinking about that word longevity. I tend to think about what is long, I guess, what is a span of time that counts as long and of course it depends a lot on. What you’re talking about.

So if you’re talking about all of society, culture, humanity, then perhaps you’re talking in the thousands of years, hundreds or thousands of years. So for example, the long now is a phrase that we used in the local first paper, we tend to use it internally on our team to refer to longer term thinking.

This comes from the Long Now Foundation and the Long Now clock project, which is sort of this idea to build a clock that can keep time for, I think it’s 10,000 years. And it’s basically an art project, but it’s designed to inspire us to think longer term, and that can obviously connect to things about climate change or human culture, and since humans are naturally inclined to think probably pretty short term, actually really short term, we think about the day that’s ahead or the week that’s ahead of us, maybe at most, the year that’s ahead of us, we don’t tend to think in 10s or hundreds or thousands of years.

So it’s maybe a society level thing. I think for individuals and thinking about, you know, softwares that impacts our lives as individuals, I think there a human lifespan actually is a pretty good chunk of time to compare something to.