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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I think happened was that you got people who knew how to bend and to mold computers and software in the same place as people who were very efficient and effective and curious and playful around things like design and getting things done, and had real needs, right? And sort of that’s some biases there, I think is what drove Mac OS to become such a successful platform.

00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use as a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse’s company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Rasmus Anderson.

00:00:45 - Speaker 1: Hello, hello.

00:00:48 - Speaker 2: And Rasmus, I understand you’re an amateur gardener.

00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that wouldn’t be very far from a lie. I do have a little front yard, tiny tiny one, and a tiny backyard, and it is a constant fight with nature, but, you know, it’s kind of fun.

00:01:07 - Speaker 2: And I always find it funny, weeds are not particularly a thing that there’s no like clear definition other than just a plant that you don’t want to be growing there. So one man’s weed is another person’s desired plant, is that about right?

00:01:22 - Speaker 1: I think that’s right, yeah. I mean, I grew up in Sweden and I remember my parents playing this like really smart game on me and my brother, where we would have these, they’re called mscruso, which are kind of pretty, but they’re definitely weed. There’s these beautiful kind of yellow flowers, and they can break through asphalt. They’re like really strong growers. You know, and as a kid, you know, parents would be like, hey, let’s do like an adventure thing, and like you find all these in the yard, and like for each of them, we line them up and count them and we would just like, Wow, this is cool. And we would go and pick them and light them up.

And our parents would be like, you know, behind the corner, that would be like, we totally fooled them.

So yeah, they’ weeding as a kid without really knowing that I was doing that.

00:02:07 - Speaker 2: Nice one. We lived on a farm just for a little while, while my dad was stationed at a naval station that was kind of in the boonies, you might say, and my mom was a pretty serious gardener growing her own vegetables and fruits, and we had fruit trees and stuff like that.

But I certainly remember that some things, the tomato plants grew fast and easy. There was the watermelon plants that we got one summer with me and my brother just ate watermelon and spit the seeds into a nearby garden bed, and then there were some others that were endless frustration for my mom trying to coax out of the ground.

So yeah, I think my strategy if I’m ever in the position of being a yard owner, will be to just identify all of the hardiest plants that grow, even if you don’t want them to, and just say these are what I’m specifically cultivating.

00:02:51 - Speaker 1: I like this strategy. This someone once said this. I’m sure that there are like children books and stuff written around this. I’m not sure, but someone said this and I thought it was kind of interesting that there’s a gardening approach to like steering a system, right? And there’s sort of like more of the plan and design approach to steering a system, meaning that if you have this sort of like organic type of system, like a garden, right? Or maybe software. It’s going to just keep changing, and the gardener’s approach is that by doing something like Adam, what you were saying, you kind of identify the things that you want to cultivate, and you give them a better opportunities. And then you look at things like weed or things that you want to move, and you sort of like give them worse opportunities, right? You sort of steer the system like that and see where it goes, whereas the I don’t know if there’s a better word for it, but the planning and the signing of the system from scratch, you’re like constantly trying to hope that it evolves in the direction you want to, which is, I think, never really the case, right?

00:03:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that is I use gardening as a metaphor often for those kinds of organic growth things for something like a community where you just can’t directly direct what’s going to happen, what you can do is encourage and nurture and create opportunities, as you said, for the kinds of things you want to see and and discourage the kinds of things you don’t want to see.

But that’s part of the joy maybe is you don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out. If you come at it from a kind of a builder, engineer, architect perspective that I’m gonna plan down to every last little detail in the blueprint, and then I’ll make reality match that exactly, you’re likely to be frustrated and disappointed.

00:04:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. I think this somehow we just kind of slipped into this, and that’s interesting in itself, but this is kind of what I’m trying to do with my project Playbit.

See, we can get into it a little bit more in detail in a few minutes, but I think that there’s this opportunity to encourage, sort of like a different way of building software, not like radically different, but sort of like somewhere in between big scale and tiny tiny scale software, kind of like personal software.

But anyhow, I think that a cultural change, right? Sort of like creating this garden where interesting like plants and stuff can grow to kind of spin off this metaphor. It’s a really interesting idea, and that’s sort of like the core of playbit. That is the idea around it. That’s what I’m trying to do with it, rather than to build on a specific type of technology. Now, software is like part of, you know, my strategy to make the change happen, or at least I hope I can. But the goal of play but this is sort of like cultural change or really like offering and, you know, a different or a slightly different at least culture to software building.

00:05:39 - Speaker 2: Culture is so important, certainly for programming communities, but more broadly just creation of any end artifact comes not just from the tools and the materials and the intentions of the creators, but also this ineffable thing we call culture.

Yeah, well, I’m really excited to hear more about Playbit, which is a brand new project you’re working on, just for the listener’s sake. It would be great to briefly touch on your background.

You’ve got a very impressive resume fresh off of working at FIMA.

Before that you did Dropbox. You were early at Spotify, and just looking down that list, you know, I find myself thinking, well, if you were an investor, that would be pretty impressive, and I would assume you’re just sort of leaving the things out that were misses. But as someone that goes to work for companies, you don’t have the ability to do such a portfolio strategy. I’m wondering if you feel like you have a particular knack for spotting high potential companies early on, or is it more a spot of luck or some combination?

00:06:35 - Speaker 1: That’s a good question. I think it’s probably the latter. It’s a little bit of a combination.

Really, it’s this kind of idea of intuition, right? You have a lot of experience. I do have quite a lot of experience at this point, and I think that has put up these neurons in such a way that I have some sense at least, at least within this particular kind of industry that I’m in.

Someone was asking me this the other day actually, this little Twitter like texting back and forth, but I think that there’s a couple of things you can do that don’t require experience to build up intuition.

And one thing is just to like really understand what you like to do, right? And so this is not specifically around, you know, successful technology companies, but I think it’s like a foundational sort of like a cornerstone.

To being successful with like, really anything, is to understand like what you really want, right? Not what your parents told you that you should want, or not what like your peers tell you that you should want, but what you really want. No, no, that’s really hard, and maybe that’s the hardest thing in life actually to know what you really want.

00:07:37 - Speaker 2: I’ll echo that as well, which is for me, I had this experience of growing up with video games and that being my passion, and I was just convinced I would go into the game industry, and that was my path, and I actually did that and then I was miserable and I didn’t like it and I what on paper you might say, or hypothetically, I thought I wanted to do in practice didn’t actually work for me. And then when I had an opportunity to join a company. Making basically from my perspective, pretty boring business software. I jumped into that and discovered I loved it and I was much better at a thing that I loved to do or fit with my natural passion somehow.

So I think it’s also a maybe coming back to our gardening metaphor, a bit of a discovery and looking for opportunities and noticing what’s growing, what’s sprouting really naturally, and then encouraging. that rather than having some preconceived notion of what you think you should do, which might come from parents, certainly could come from, you know, the tech industry, which lionizes certain kinds of companies or certain kinds of people and instead kind of paying attention to your own internal compass for this is a thing that I could really see myself spending every minute thinking about for the next 5 years, 10 years, or career.

00:08:47 - Speaker 1: That’s just so interesting to hear you say that, but you had that experience, which I think a lot of us have, right? If we had this idea, maybe we want to be a chef or an astronaut, or, you know, a fire person or whatever when we’re kids, right? And like most of us end up not doing that, right? We end up doing something else. And I think that happens a few times in life where, like you, you know, We see this thing, it’s like very exciting, we pursue it, and then we stumble upon something else, and that just, you know, we stumble upon probably 100 different things, right? But one of those things where like, whoa, damn, this is really fun, and this is really interesting.

Yeah, so getting back to your question a few minutes ago, I think that if you have that sort of like cornerstone idea of the learning about myself, it’s just something that I should always work on. Then on top of that, I think what you can do is To try to learn about the people that are working at various different companies or like looking for passion in people, like finding out what incentives are driving them to make a change. And with a change, I mean like a technology startup, right, usually exists for one of two reasons, and the first reason is that people want to make a change or want to see a change in the world, right? It can be a very small scale, a very big scale.

And the second thing, I think that often you have these ulterior motives, you have power, fortune, you know, impressing other people, like all those things. There’s nothing bad about those things, right? But they are usually then hidden away that there’s this facade of like, no, we’re really trying to make a machine here with this YouTube for cats or whatever. And really like someone just wanted to like build a really cool thing so they can sell it and get rich, right? And again, there’s no judgment here if that’s your thing, that’s cool, but that’s not what I’m interested in.

So that’s one of the things that I tried to see and figure out and really spend time on understanding when speaking with a company or a few people who want to make a change, right? Like, are they driven by passion for this change? Like, can they see this world and like, you know, in 3 years, if we have this thing, and people are using it, like, this is how their lives are different. This is how they can like do things that they can’t do before. Like that’s the sort of thing. To me it’s like, kind of rare. It might be surprisingly rare, actually, which is kind of weird. And to find that out, I think the easiest way is just to spend a little bit of time with a lot of different people. So if you’re interviewing for a company, ask if you can spend a few hours with 1 or 2 people on the team, rather than, can I spend half an hour with like 10 different people.

00:11:20 - Speaker 2: Interesting. So it sounds like you’re, you know, come back to that investor kind of analogy I made before where going to work for a company, you’re investing your time rather than your money, which in many ways is even a more scarce and valuable resource. You think of it as less in terms of let me a value. I don’t know, the market opportunity here, whether I think this has the potential to be something good or big or what have you, and instead more is kind of looking into the souls of the people who are working on it to understand their motivation and their drive and their passion.

00:11:52 - Speaker 1: For sure, yeah. This is probably a cliche at this point, but If you have a group of good people that you’re working on, it’s not that important what you’re working on. Right, I think that’s a very extreme way of looking at it. I think in reality it’s not as clear cut as that. It’s not as true as that.

But I do think that it does hold true to some extent, right, that if you flip it around, right, if you do some sort of kind of Greek philosophy approach then, you know, you say sort of like, what if everything is good, right? So you start out in like ideal scenario. So it’s every person is amazing on the team. The business is doing great. The mission is something that is so close to my heart, like, I’m just thinking about it day and night, right? And so on.

And now you start like taking things away, right? You have this kind of little thing in front of you, and now you start thinking that, OK, let’s see if I take away the mission, right? And I have all the other things still, like, does this feel like something I want to do for 4 years, right? Not in day, right? It’s like, oh maybe, you know, you start taking things away, and I think If you start out in the ideal case, right, you play these different stories out, and you take away the group of people, right? So you replace that with like, people who you would consider, like, not being good, right? Like, maybe they had a bad influence on you, maybe they create a lot of stress for you, maybe they’re just not good at the craft and so on, whatever that means to you.

I think for most people, like, it stops pretty early in terms of like, yeah, I would still do this. Like you would be like, well, you know. With making such a big change, and I’m really involved emotionally in this mission and everything, but like the people I work with are paying, it’s like, I don’t wanna do that, right? Life is so tiny, it’s so short, and you look back in the past and the things you remember, it’s not the bugs you squashed in code or like the pixels you made. It’s gonna be the people and like. The change that the company is trying to make and the group of people are trying to make, I think it is very important, right? And this is where it really loops back the first thing that I was talking about a few minutes ago about like learning about yourself and knowing yourself. I have a few friends who are very concerned about the environment of Earth and stuff like that, and choose to leave their traditional tech jobs to go work for, you know, uh renewable energy companies and stuff like that. And for them, you know, the mission is very important, right? And the people are very important. So, I think you want to really like look at all of these different things, like, a group of people who are amazing, who are very unsuccessful at doing what they do, is not gonna be a fun experience anyways, right? So yeah, I don’t think there’s a magic bullet, there’s no sort of golden arrow or whatever metaphor here, but I think one really good thing to look for is this sort of like passionate people, and what drives them to make that change.

00:14:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m a fan of that. Seeking opportunities in my own career and when I’m in the position of giving career advice to others, I usually say something like optimize for the people, find the team that you have that collaboration magic with, and that will be just far greater return than the exact perfect mission. Um, I do think, you know, those things related, probably because if you share values and you share passions around a particular mission, that’s likely to be a team that you work really well with. But yeah, given the choice between a thing that’s slightly off from what I might actually be my ideal, the perfect team, and the other way around, I always go for the team.

00:15:16 - Speaker 1: I’m curious here, Adam and Mark, how you’re looking at this as well. You’re both experienced in the software industry, yes I am, like, kind of flipping the question back to you. What are some of the things you might do or look for in order to understand if this, you know, company group of people are gonna be successful. It’s just gonna be like a fun ride for me, so to speak.

00:15:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’d love to hear from Mark on that since he’s actually, now that I think of it, picked some pretty good ones, including for Muse, he was at Stripe. And so, yeah, I guess I never asked, did you see that as, oh, these guys are gonna be huge, I really want to be on board early. My stock will be worth a lot, or was it more, this is an interesting domain, and I want to work with these people who knows the company will be successful, or that wasn’t part of your calculation.

00:16:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s tough for me to give an answer to that, because to my mind, there’s a lot of, you know, it, when you see it, and to your point about having experience and neurons and pattern matching.

I feel like I’ve been lucky enough to work in the industry for a while, so I now I’m able to have perhaps some judgment of that.

I do think as a tactical matter, if people actually want to have a better chance of working at a high potential company in the classic sense, you can get a lot of information by asking people whose job it is to know these things.

So, Investors and hiring managers will often have a lot of data about companies that will do well. And then it kind of becomes like investors will always say, oh, it’s, it’s actually not hard to pick the company, it’s hard to get the deals. I think there’s a similar dynamic with joining companies where often a big part of it is actually getting hired.

But yeah, I think it’s a tactical matter, if you do ask around, you can get a lot of good data points.

But I also have similar sentiment in terms of, at a more personal level, what I look for in a company, and I would also say it’s about the people and the mission.

And I always go back to this idea of You know, we don’t have a whole lot of mortal life, and it would be a shame to spend the next 2 to 4 years of it working with people you didn’t care for. And when you say it like that, oh wow, you know, really should, uh, make sure that the people that you trust and look up to and want to become more alike, because as you spend 124 years with this team, you are going to basically become more like them. So is that something that you would be proud and excited to do, or that you would be afraid and ashamed of?

00:17:18 - Speaker 2: There’s a great patio. I think it’s even in an article writing about the culture at Stripe. He says, when you’re choosing your colleagues, these are people you’re essentially giving right access in your consciousness to. We don’t realize it, but just the people you’re around all the time, you become like them, whether you like it or not. So surround yourself with people you admire and you want to become more like, and that will come true.

00:17:42 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, I really like that.

00:17:44 - Speaker 3: This also might connect a little bit to our topic of playful software, because to my mind, one aspect of playfulness is sort of undertaking the process and the work for its own sake, without a lot of accountability to the end result and just kind of enjoying the process, you know, doing it for the memes, if you will. And I feel like you can only do that well if you actually really love what you’re working on and the discipline, but I’m curious to hear Rasmus, what your perspective on playful software is.

00:18:11 - Speaker 1: Well, I think for most people playful software, the first that comes to mind is probably games, right? And games, they’re sort of like almost the purest type of playful software. That is their primary and often only goal, right? To just be playful, to just entertain.

And so I think playful software that is not games have some amount of that sort of like entertainment that, you know, a privy guest of yours that Jason was saying sort of like fidget ability, you know, the idea that There’s some quality to the software that makes you want to just like, kind of toy around and play around with the software itself, not to produce something necessarily, although that might be the main reason for the software to exist. So I think if we’re looking for a definition of playful software, it’s probably something in the realms of game like entertainment like qualities that are kind of intertwined with some sort of utility.

00:19:09 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is really interesting, this nexus of entertainment versus playfulness versus utility.

So I feel like actually there’s some relations certainly between entertainment and playfulness, but I feel like they’re also somewhat separable.

Like you can have a game where it’s sort of a mindless game where you just plan to get really good at it, like a competitive game. And the flip side, you can have playfulness that is more just about exploring and seeing what you can do and what you can make and perhaps the stuff in the middle, like Minecraft is kind of in the middle there, it’s both entertaining and it’s playful, and I do think people tend to go towards games, but I think there’s another important element around what we’re calling playfulness that’s really important.

00:19:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s good points.

00:19:44 - Speaker 2: I’m suddenly reminded of a book by one of my favorite authors, Virginia Postrell.

And in there is a chapter where it asks the question of what actually is the difference between work and play. And it’s one of those things where you go, oh well, it’s obvious, and then when you try to come up with a definition like, well, you get paid to work and you don’t get paid to play, and really quickly, especially if you’re someone that’s, you know, in the tech industry, a designer, a developer, whatever, you find yourself doing things that look very, very similar, maybe in your free time that you do at your work, but it’s hard to pin down really what the difference is and She ends up defining it exactly as you said there, Mark, which is play is something that’s open ended, you don’t have a specific goal in mind, you can start out with, I’m gonna paint the painting of the sunset, and by the time you get to the end, you’ve decided instead to fold the canvas into an origami. Swan and, you know, you could do that if you want, whereas work you have this specific end goal that you need to get to, often in a particular time frame, and even if you find some interesting detour along the way, you kind of have to ignore that because you have made this commitment to deliver some specific result.

00:20:54 - Speaker 1: And I’d say that as a designer, like playing is often a very important part of the understanding part of design, which I think is like a really big chunk of design work, right? You know, you have this opportunity or this kind of problem, like there’s something you’re pursuing, right, with your design project and Before you can make any decisions and any changes, right, in terms of like getting closer to solving it or changing it, you have to understand it, right? And so you take things apart, you put them back together, right? You’ll learn about things as you take things apart, you’ll find new parts so you didn’t see before, right? You’ll find new constraints of the project, you’re like, oh shoot, oh I guess this material is different, right? And so, I think, as you were saying, Adam, if you take a step back and you think about like, well, this kind of looks like play, doesn’t it? And I think in many ways it is straight up play. But it is sort of a semi open ended, closed ended play, right? It’s sort of like play for the purpose of learning. And I think this is where most of us in the tech industry, like, Can relate to playfulness in like the way we use software. So maybe on a weekend you’re like, oh, I’ve heard about this new like rust thing. Maybe I should like take the first bit, right? And you put together a whole world thing and you find a rust compiler and you write some code and you’re like, oh, what is, why can’t I borrow this thing, right, whatever. And the goal here, right, is play. You might not call it play, but unless your goal is to actually like get an output in the end or make a change or something like that, really what you’re doing, right, is learning. And I think that is often the reward, so to speak, the outcome. The product of play is to learn something.

00:22:35 - Speaker 3: Absolutely. I think it’s a great point. And just to reiterate, I think it’s really important to have this play access be separate from work versus entertainment. So that is, you can play in a domain that we typically think of as work, whether that’s design, engineering. Another example that I might throw in there is Elon Musk sending the roadster to space. It’s like, why are you doing that? I don’t know, it’d be fun, I guess. That’s also in a very serious domain where he is in fact learning a lot by undertaking that activity.

00:23:02 - Speaker 2: Also connects a bit to just our humanity, which is, of course, we’re trying to achieve things, be productive in the broad sense of the word, in our pursuits in our work life, but at the same time, we’re all people, we like stuff that’s fun, we like stuff that’s playful, and if you can find ways to do that, that fit in with the work and fit in with accomplishing your ends, I think it makes it more fun and engaging and enjoyable for everyone who’s involved.

00:23:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s something naturally even about play for sure. We can’t imagine our like ancestors running around naked in the woods with clubs, you know, kind of finding a pine cone or something on the ground or a stick and be like, oh, this kind of looks like a goat, you know, and you start playing with those things, and there’s something I think is very interesting, like when I was a kid, so I grew up in the countryside and Me and, you know, the other like 5 neighbors or whatever, and the kids, we would, you know, go into the woods and that’s how we would play, we, you know, build a little like imaginary little airplanes out of a pine cone and stick through it and stuff like that, right? And as a kid, you see a stick, and the stick is like anything. It can be anything you want, it can be an airplane, it can be a rocket, right? It can be a person, right? And as an adult we lose that, and I don’t know why, but I see a stick today and I’m like, oh, that’s a stick, right? And I’m like, damn it. You know, I wanna see the stick and I wanna feel like, whoa, this could be a weird sort of creature, you know, from a different planet that has like multiple heads, that kind of looks like a stick, but it’s not a stick. At some point I listened to someone who was trying to make a point of the educational system, at least in sort of like most of the world. Takes in one end of a machine, right? Imagine people walking in one end of the machine and they come out in the other end and like, in the end you walk in, there’s all these color and difference and, you know, different voices and stuff. And the other end is like this marching uniformed people, right? School kind of prints this pattern onto us, right? This is real, that is not real. This is play, that is not play, this is serious, right? And I’m not sure that’s like good for us, especially not for people in sort of the creative industry. Which I think is like a growing industry generally.

00:25:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. Another way to articulate this might be as we get older and as we go through institutional education, we tend to get annealed, that is kind of solidified, optimized, focused, structured, and play in addition to a way to learn, is a way to kind of foam roll your mind, you know, get some plasticity, break up some connective tissue so you can think of some new stuff. And so now that you make that point, I see that as a second key outcome. You know, you learn some stuff and you have some more flexibility in your head.

00:25:46 - Speaker 2: It also occurs to me that that means that play and imagination have a strong relationship and maybe this, as you said earlier, Erasmus, that like, when you talk about in design, play is very important. You might even say, this isn’t quite solved yet, let me play with it and try some stuff. And that’s connected to a little bit of an open-ended divergent thinking, imagination, out of the box, you know, looking at the stick and seeing the person of the rocket ship, and that actually is what could potentially lead you to the more practical breakthrough in doing your work.

00:26:17 - Speaker 1: It’s so true, so true, I think. If you think about cool stuff that people have made, right, like art or tools or anything, what have you, that you think it’s like, wow, this is brilliant, you know, this is so fun, or this is really smart, whatever. And you start digging into like the history of that in pretty much every single case, you’ll find that it’s a remix of other things, right? And so I think imagination and playfulness. is sort of like at least partially a practice of just exploring things, right? It’s maybe that’s a play part, right? You explore stuff, you see new things, right? And then here comes the imagination part, which is like, oh, out of all these different things, there’s like a new thing that can emerge, right? Like the iPod is a remix of this like brawn handheld radio, right? And then the iPhone is a remix of the iPod. You know, those things are very obviously remixes, because they’re, you know, visually very similar, but I think that there’s also conceptual remixes, and there’s like straight up like the word I’m using a remix, right, like from audio, there’s like, that is a very common practice.

00:27:24 - Speaker 3: This is also reminding me that there’s an important element of intellectual humility in play.

So we said perhaps play is when you don’t have accountability for the end work product, but wait a second, we’re in creative fields, our entire purpose is to come up with novel ideas by definition.

You don’t know how to get to that work product yet. If you did, you just go right there. So really it’s taking away some of your constraints and preconceptions about what it takes to create a novel work product and and exploring for a bit and saying, you know, press on the other side, it’ll be clear that what you were calling play was in fact work or fed into work, but you don’t know what that path is yet, so who are you to say what is or isn’t gonna have a good result eventually.

00:28:01 - Speaker 1: That is really interesting.

So Mark, what level of constraints, or what level of sort of like boundaries do you think you need to define in order for that to not be like this totally open ended sort of quick detour of what I’m talking about is to make sure this makes sense.

So like, I’ve seen this happening a couple of times in tech companies where you have a couple of interesting smart people who are playful, and the company recognizes that, and it recognizes the value and innovation and stuff, right? So they say, hey, you know, Lisa and Robin. Would you be interested in sitting in this corner just coming up with crazy shit, right? Maybe we’ll ship it. And I think in most cases that is like a failure, right? That will come up with all these incredible stuff, but there’s never any sort of traction around it. Maybe the constraints are way too vague, similarly to an art class, you know, if you ask someone to just paint anything they want, there’s just this paralysis, right, of like where they even start. So within that framework, like looping back to my question to you, Mark, what and how do you think about like setting up the right amount of constraints to be able to play around within there?

00:29:01 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a great question. I I don’t think there’s an easy answer, but One strategy that I like a lot is to follow the energy. So if you’re undertaking this project, let’s say we’re going to relax the constraint about classically measured business output, but we’re gonna maintain the constraint around there needs to be some energy here, which could be, you’re able to get other people excited about it, you’re able to get customers excited about it, you’re able to create something that’s aesthetically interesting. That to me is an important Source of energy.

And so we’re not gonna kind of constantly inorganically add energy to the system. We’re gonna give you a little bit of spark and some initial fuel, but then you need to build it up from there and kind of find your own path.

But you’re free to not go directly to this end destination. It could be that you go through basically an art project, or a recruiting project or a publication project, and then you go from there.

That helps a lot with kind of the mechanics of keeping the project going but again people are living their short moral lives and not gonna want to work on something that doesn’t have a lot of energy on it. So as you have more success, you tend to attract more people and it goes from there.

00:29:59 - Speaker 1: So energy that makes a lot of sense, kind of sense of urgency in different words, the sort of like things are happening. Do you think that Results or milestones, or even just celebrating like discrete moments of success or progress are important as well.

00:30:15 - Speaker 3: So this is a classic atomism back from the Hiroki days to make it real. We can link to the full list of atomisms. But it’s this idea of, even if it’s just a prototype or even a CLI session mockup, something that makes it real and makes it concrete for people, really helps people understand what it is and again build that energy. I also, I mentioned it briefly, but I think this idea of aesthetics is really important. There are good threads to pull when you have an idea that’s aesthetically exciting or appealing. That’s the way that I often draw energy on projects, even like programming type projects.

00:30:45 - Speaker 1: There’s this thing I’m thinking about now, which is And this varies in different parts of the world, but I think the same thing is sort of the financial thing is true.

Like, you look at a particular industry, like hairdressers, right, or pizza joints, and you look at like the topography and the colors and sort of like styling they put on their storefronts.

And there seems to be these sort of like pretty tight clusters of style, right? You’re like, why are all the pizza joints in this town using hobo for the typeface, right? It will be so much more interesting if like someone used copper Gothic, you know, or comic sense or any of the other sort of, you know, funky typefaces or something, you know, stern like Helvetica.

And I think what’s going on is this recognition or this thing to like make it real, right? Imagine that we were starting a pizza joint, right? And we have ambition, right? We want this to be like the freaking best pizza in our town, right? So, you know, we look at other pizza places, and we have this intuition that we talked about before, right? Of what is like a real pizza place, right? We have our heroes, right? And chances are that they use hobo, right? We might not be aware of this, this might be unconscious.

So we go to, you know, our local printing press who make a sign for us, and they show us, you know, a bunch of different typefaces, they have an option, and we see the hobo one and we’re like, oh, that just feels right, you know. So you go with that and you reinforce this idea at a real pizza place to use hobo for a typeface.

And so I think this connects directly to what we’re talking about with a static being important and to make it real and a good atimus, which I’m gonna start saying now, by the way, so you’re all kind of wow, is that same thing, right? Let’s say you’re building like a MacOS app. And you have this idea for it.

If you create a design, just a picture, that’s like a fake screenshot that looks real, I think that there is a similar quality to that pizza you want.

People are gonna look at it and they’re gonna feel like, oh damn, this can be real, you know, we can make this happen. That looks like a real thing. I didn’t think of that, right? So yeah, I think aesthetics and presentation, and that mapping that to like your heroes and your ambitions, I think it’s super important for people to feel that this is possible, you know, and to drive the energy you were talking about, Mark.

00:32:58 - Speaker 3: This reminds me of another quick story here of kind of aesthetic and emotionally driven play session.

A long time ago at Hiroku, we had an issue with the command line client being very slow, and I was very frustrated with it, and I wanted to have a faster client.

So I undertook this playful project of just trying to make a very fast Hoku client that kind of only does Hello World, like it just lists your apps, but does it fast.

And that ended up not really going anywhere, but by undertaking that project, I discovered Go, and then eventually will go by example, and now we use Go for some of our server stuff, and that’s a whole world that I never would have been introduced to if I hadn’t just kind of followed my nose up. It would be cool if even with relaxing the constraint that eventually needs to shift to production.

00:33:36 - Speaker 1: Wait, are you behind Gobi sample? Oh yeah, man, I love that. Oh, that’s funny. Oh, that’s brilliant. Yeah. Oh, that’s fantastic, yeah.

00:33:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we actually use this as a bit of, I think of it as the mark publishing style, which is static HTML, maybe a little bit of, I don’t know, did you even have some kind of like template or build script for the basic site, but otherwise it’s this very almost I call brutalist HTML but a very effective design in the sense that it has the side by side code and description, if I’m remembering correctly.

And yeah, it’s this very kind of sleek, it loads fast because it’s a static site, it probably still works fine now with zero maintenance, and we were certainly inspired by that, both for the you can switch articles and later all the muse stuff. I’m just basically seeing the way that Mark does kind of HTML publishing of these essentially kind of a mini book on the web, was very influential for me and everything I’ve done subsequently.

00:34:35 - Speaker 1: Hm. In an interesting way, I think go by example is playful, right? It seems to be very uniform, right? And I think that uniformity creates this, rather than create, I think it removes some anxiety around navigation.

A lot of the web, I think, has this problem of creating anxiety around like, The user interface because everything is different, right? It’s like you you jumping between different planets. Anyhow, I think what makes go by example playful is that I’m guessing here and I’m extrapolating mostly from my own experience with using it. Like, when you’re in the mode of using it or visiting it, you are exploring, right? Otherwise you probably wouldn’t be visiting it, or you are there for entertainment, right, which is kind of playful too, as we talked about. So I think that there’s this category of things that They look and smell like pure utilities. They’re very uniform, they might seem boring, but they really are these like enablers or pieces of a puzzle for playfulness.

00:35:29 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I also think that’s often an origin story, so maybe we can use this as a way to learn more about your project where, you know, one lens on these projects is, you know, it’s a way to learn a programming language.

That doesn’t sound very interesting. But the other lens is it’s the result of a path that someone walked down around the change they wanted to see in the world.

So likewise for your project Playbi, you could describe it as someone’s building a new operating system, another one of those, right? But there’s much more to it in terms of where you’re coming from and why you’re building this and how you’re approaching it. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about Playbit.

00:35:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this, like many things, there was no eureka moments, which is interesting, I think you guys have talked about that on the show previously.

The slow hunch, the slow hunch, yeah, exactly.

So this very much is what happened with Playbit. So for years and years, probably over 10 years, you know, I’ve been interested in operating systems and systems. This is one of these things that I’ve learned about myself that what I find really fun and exciting to work on in terms of software are things that enable a lot of people to make things with them, right? So tools, in other words, I mean, you guys are there with me. And so I started thinking about MacO 9, it’s so tight, you know, it’s so nice. Windows 2000 came around, I was like, wow, it’s so snappy. Anyhow, fast forwarding a little bit.

MacOS 10, I think is just like this wonderful amazing operating system. And this very interesting point in time in 2001 or 2002 or so, when Mac was 10.1 or so is the first kind of usable version of it, started getting some traction.

I think what happened was that this is probably mostly accidental, but You got these people who were really interested in kind of moldable, malleable software and like poking at things, hacking at things, and they were using BSD and Linux and stuff, right? And they had to give up a good user experience and sure people have different opinions about this, but this is my opinion.

00:37:19 - Speaker 2: I was a Linux on the desktop user for many years and Many things I really loved about it, but I do not miss fighting with getting the Wi Fi chip working or wake from sleep or editing. I spent so many hours of my life editing XOg.com trying to get the resolution to match the refresh rate of my monitor or whatever. And that’s the kind of pain you’re willing to go through for this hackable interface. And yet, my experience was the same. I landed on Mac OS eventually because it gave me so much of that Unix underpinning that’s very kind of powerful and moldable uh with also good hardware integration.

00:37:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s right, that Linux traditionally and still today at least the Linux kernel is most distributions, right, is configuration over convention, whereas Mark, you were talking about Go briefly and Go is sort of like the opposite of that.

I’m, I’m a huge fan of Go, like the way it’s designed as a programming language too, but in particular the way it went about the design, where it’s convention over configuration, and we can talk more about that later. But I think what happened was that you have that one part, right, of people who are really interested like you had um of the moldability of software and like the ability to fully customize your computing experience. And then on the other hand, you have people who want to use a computer and be efficient as users of a computer, right? And before MacOS 10, I think you had to make a choice. You had to say, I’m gonna use Windows or Mac OS 9. I’m not gonna be able to do this like multiple hackable stuff. I can do some basic programming or whatever, or I’m gonna do that stuff, but I’m gonna live with all this pain, right? And that quiz 10 came around and it’s like, hey, you know what, you can have both, right? And so, what I think happened was that you got people who knew how to bend and to mold computers and software in the same place as people who were very efficient and effective, and curious and playful around things like design and getting things done, and had real needs, right? And sort of that’s some biases there, I think is what drove Mac OS to become such a successful platform in terms of application quality, right? You just go and look at evidence of this, right? You go and look at a lot of web apps that are trying to mimic desktop apps. In most cases you will find them using metaphors and sometimes even a statics from Macan. It’s pretty rare that you find these things that are in the absence of a native host to mimic Windows, right? Anyhow, so that happened. I think that was very interesting.

It’s clear to me now that that is a slowly dying thing, right? Macco is 10:15, you can’t use the VM Nets thing unless you have a special signed certificate from Apple that you can. To get if you’re like become a partner with them, right? You actually cannot run it, even as the owner of the computer, you cannot use it, right? Sure, you can be roots, right? You can pseudo and use it, whatever, but you can’t make any apps using it. And Mac OS 11, takes that to the next step, right? And that’s fine. Anyhow.

So, in the context of all of these things, I think that there is going to be a need, right, in terms of like allowing people to keep being playful and exploring. Software at this sort of like more, I own a desktop computer. I want to be able to like do crazy shit with it, even if that means breaking it, right? And so I started thinking a few years ago, I was saying to myself that I’m gonna put a bet that in the next 10 years, there’s not gonna be a Mac OS 10 more, and Apple is just gonna be about iOS. And I think that’s, I’m still believing that. And what then, right? Is there gonna be sort of a Linux based desktop thing that emerges? Is Windows kind of like, finally. Start like a skunkworks team somewhere. They’re just like, let’s throw out like 95% of all the crap and build that. I don’t know. So I was like, should I try to do something about this? It’s really hard to build a business, I think, around the idea of an operating system, especially replacing Windows MacOs, which are just so good, right? They’re just so good and asking someone to just replace that with something is a big ask.

00:41:24 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe the way I would characterize it actually is less about good or not and more just the amount of stuff that needs to go into what people would consider a modern operating system today ranging from har