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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think it’s important to deliberately not decide too soon what you’re gonna do in that situation, cause you need time for the existing structure of your brain to basically disintegrate a little bit, like, let those pathways fade away, let the daily patterns of thinking and doing melt away, and create some space for new ideas and new ventures to enter.

00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac.

This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam.

So by now, I think a lot of the listeners have heard the news that the Muse team is downsizing, talked extensively with Adam Wulf about that in the last episode since he’s the one carrying the torch forward here. But I felt like it would be really worthwhile for you and I to discuss, reflect on this podcast here, because I think it has in some ways its own life, that’s a little bit independent from use the product or the company, even though in many ways it’s also intertwined, which we’ll talk about, but one implication of this news, of course, as you and I both are not going to be doing news as our day job anymore, and I’ll ask you the same question I asked Wulf, which is feelings check, where are you at right now?

00:01:23 - Speaker 1: Well, I’m excited for Adam Wulf and the product to continue. I think Adam’s a great person to be carrying that torch and as a very heavy user of news still, I’m, I’m happy to see that for sure.

You know, otherwise, it’s, it’s certainly a little bit saddening and disappointing. You work on this so hard for 4 or 5 years plus if you include the work at the lab, it doesn’t quite pan out the way that you’d hoped to.

It’s a bummer for sure. But at the same time, it feels like the right move, it feels like the right time. There’s always a natural 4 or 5 year cadence I found where it makes sense to pick your head up and look at new stuff.

00:01:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the 4 or 5 year duration thing when I look back to my career as an entrepreneur and other projects I’ve been involved in that usually is kind of about the period of time that can kind of keep extended concentration on one. Particular topic, you know, you could certainly say the 4 or 5 years I spent on In and Switch were very closely related to the 4 or 5 years I spent on Muse, but in some senses like a resetting of the venue, a different, I don’t know, environment, a slightly different team, even if there’s overlap. Yeah, I don’t know, sometimes that can be a good thing, even if this isn’t quite the way I would have wanted to do it, but there is something about that timeline.

Well, for this episode, I thought we could spend some time reviewing, retrospecting, and indeed, I think taking a bit of a victory lap for all we’ve done here on this podcast, which as I said, I think has had almost its own life and identity that is complementary to but also stands apart from you. Maybe it’s a little bit of a self-indulgent episode, but, you know, I don’t know, I think we’ve earned it. Yeah.

So just to start us off, I took the liberty of doing a little lightweight data science here and just kind of dug in on our episode history. So, I don’t know, maybe some interesting insights to glean here. So not counting this episode, there’s 83 episodes currently in our back catalog, and they total 83 hours, 5 minutes and 52 seconds.

With the shortest episode was episode 4, which was Partnership Freedom and responsibility at 37 minutes and 20 seconds, and the longest was actually a very recent one on spatial computing. That was an hour and 35 minutes, and the median ends up being almost exactly an hour, which I was surprised by. I actually thought it would be a little longer than that, but I’m also pleased because that’s kind of what I’m shooting for. We usually record for 1 hour and 15, maybe an hour and a half, and then trim it down and There’s various schools of thought around this, but for me, an hour is the right chunk of time. It allows you to go deep on something, but it’s not so long that, for example, if you listen to a podcast on a run or a commute or something that you’re going to need to listen to it in chunks. I thought that was interesting, but I’m glad we kind of landed there.

00:04:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I really like this length. I can even go longer. It’s interesting. I listen to a lot of podcasts that are 40 minutes, 30 minutes, even 20 minutes, nominal time, which by the way, that’s, you listen at 2x so it’s half that in real life. And so often they’re in a good conversation and I was just like, well, the time’s up, that’s it for today. bro, it’s your podcast. You can go as long as you want. How do you do?

00:04:38 - Speaker 2: Right, right, this is a network TV where you have a slot to hit, right? Yeah.

Yeah, well, there’s very much something to be said for having time to really get into something.

I’ve noticed, for example, with guests, I feel like the conversation usually starts to get really juicy around 30 to 40 minutes in, and there’s probably something there about you have the context, you’ve hit all the not quite service level things but basic questions, and then that’s a foundation upon which you can go a little deeper.

And there’s one podcast I listened to for a while that would typically do like 3 hour interviews and they explicitly say, You know, we want to go deeper with our guests than, you know, if they’re interviewed on a talk show on TV or something, you probably are only going to get to those same talking points and those same questions that they get asked over and over. But if you do the longer conversation, you spend the first hour on that stuff and then you kind of go off script or you get a little deeper.

So I see that, but I’m also a 1x listener and so for me, a 3 hour podcast, it basically never get to the end, no matter how interesting it is. So yeah, there’s pros and cons there and certainly we try to let the episodes be their natural length while at the same time, I guess respecting the listeners’ time and trying to, you know, kind of make it information dense perhaps.

Another piece of the podcast I have always, I guess, been proud of is our show notes, and so this is something where stuff we talk about, which is often weird obscure projects or articles or whatever, we try to link that so that you don’t need to just Google around for it. So we have a total of 1,943 notes, all of which are links, so that’s around 23 per episode.

And then the other thing I thought was interesting was just the podcast format, the RSS format calls it A, which is a lot but basically the people who are on the podcast. And so I did a little breakdown there and it turns out that, well, not surprisingly, I am on 83 episodes, you are on 75, and then a few of our team members like Leonard and Adam Wulf and Julia were on a few each, and then we have a couple of guests like Jeffrey Lid and Max Schoening were on a couple of times, and then, of course, after that, it’s the one-offs.

And the author thing points to what I would call almost a type breakdown, which is when we started the podcast, and we can tell the origin story here in a minute, but we didn’t necessarily envision it as a guest. Thing we kind of experimented with that early on. It worked well and we expanded that, but when I kind of did a breakdown, I discovered that episodes that are just me and you, which I think of as kind of our baseline or what have you, where the co-hosts, is actually only 28% of the total, whereas 57% are something with a guest. So when you look at it that way, it actually seems like this podcast is more about having guests than it is about you and I. But on the other hand, I think those kind of non-guest episodes are pretty often touch on pretty foundational topics. And then the last category, which actually might be my favorite and I almost wish we could have gotten more of is what I call the team episodes, and that’s where we bring on someone who is on the Muse team, so they’re not an external guest, but they are someone who you don’t normally hear from. And so that’s about 15% of our episodes, and as we’ll talk about some of our favorites, but I think that category is the one I in some ways like the best.

00:07:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this makes sense to me because ultimately the podcast ended up being about ideas. So there are podcasts that are about the personalities of the hosts, and there are podcasts that are about the lives and activities of the guests, but ours end up being more about the ideas around computing and use and so on, and we have a lot of ideas, obviously, the team members have experience and things to contribute there too, and then all these different guests. It kind of makes sense to me in that respect.

00:08:18 - Speaker 2: Now the origin story here is that I’ve sort of always wanted to start a podcast about something.

I just really like the audio format. I actually got a portable MP3 player, not an iPod, but some other product, a long time ago, just for that because I always liked, for example, like MR my mom listened to NPR, but for me, and I have the same problem with broadcast television, I just can’t do it on someone else’s schedule. I need to do it on my own time.

And eventually when it became possible to get like audio format through again, MP3s or even in some cases like audio CDs, you have books on audiobooks, I just love that format. There’s something kind of, even though it’s slower or less efficient in some ways than reading. There’s also something intimate and you get to know the personality or character of the host in a certain way and it can be engaging and importantly, it’s something you can do while you’re doing something else. You’re driving, you’re running, you’re doing chores in the house, and that’s a really nice way to keep the intellect part of your brain stimulated while you’re doing something a little more rote.

00:09:25 - Speaker 1: Also, you gotta put that radio voice to work. I don’t know if we’ve ever mentioned this on the podcast, but I get comments constantly about Adam’s perfect radio voice.

00:09:35 - Speaker 2: Well, I’m glad I never would have guessed that. I mean, most people don’t like hearing their own voice recorded and I count myself among that, and I just kind of powered through it cause I felt it was a good format and it’s not that important how your voice sounds.

But yeah, glad to hear the good feedback there.

So yeah, I guess we’ve always both liked the podcast format and then I don’t know, inspiration struck, it was actually our very last in-person team summit right before COVID hit. This would have been, I think January 2020, we were in Sedona, Arizona, and I just pitched you this idea. We did a little test recording just using the memo, audio memo apps on our phones up in that freezing attic in that house we were staying in. It was only maybe 20 minutes long, but we sort of spliced it together and were able to listen to a little prototype basically.

00:10:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that was funny. I remember my teeth were almost chattering. It was so cold up there, and then I was really impressed cause you edited the whole episode on your iPad. I just can’t do any like production work on iPads, but you did it somehow.

00:10:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can back reference you to our episode on iPad where we had differing ideas on that. But yeah, certainly at the time I was excited about the iPad as a place for productivity. There’s a nice bit of audio editing software there called Ferri that in a lot of ways I think with the stylus, it’s actually very natural and yeah, I managed to kind of put it together with some even through in some stock music at the start just to kind of give it that sense. Yeah, I had one of our colleagues listen to it and they said, yeah, I think there’s a spark here, you know, I think you and I have a natural dynamic. We’ve been working together so long, and obviously we have lots of ideas, and so, yeah, those two things kind of made us say, let’s give it a go at this.

00:11:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and you alluded to this when you mentioned in the origin story, how the idea was to capture the conversations that you were hearing in the team, but for me, that goes back, I don’t know what it is, 12 or 13 years. So we’ve been having these conversations for that long. I remember we went on those ski trips we worked together on Hioku, we were on the ski lift and we would talk about our schemes for making Hioku better and stuff and so we’ve been at it for a while, just formalizing with the podcast.

00:11:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Now I think that in the original idea I had was that it would be something that was a little more spread out across the team. We would have different combinations of people and it wouldn’t be kind of one fixed host and ultimately kind of became my thing, I would say. I think even in the beginning, you and I traded off reading in the intro and stuff like that and in the end, I think that works fine. I’m the kind of organizer, showrunner, you know, kind of main host, and then we can have this rotating cast of characters, which indeed even extends out into the guests from the Tools for Thought community.

One of my big influences from the podcast world is the genre I’ve heard described as two guys talking. You know, that sounds gendered. It’s not always two men, but there’s something about two that makes a really good, you know, assuming that people have good dynamic and and interesting topics, there’s something kind of nice about that number in the back and forth. One person looks a little too monotone, once you get to 3 and especially above, there’s a lot of voices, it’s hard to keep track of it all.

And one of my favorites on that was a podcast called Hello Internet, which was not really about anything in particular, but just the hosts had interesting personalities that kind of contrasted each other, and there’s lots of others as well, like Gastropod is a great one. It’s kind of focused on food history and Lexicon Valley, which is a linguistics podcast back then had these two. Host, but one similarity across them, I think was that yeah, you have these two people in this kind of exchange, but then sometimes uh almost a contrast or something about the dynamic is you have the differing personalities maybe that play off each other.

For example, I’ve often described you in talking about the format of the show as being the kind of contrarian philosopher, you know, so maybe I come in with the more direct perspective or something like that and you come in with the contrarian and philosophical perspective and something about that just works.

00:13:25 - Speaker 1: So you mentioned two guys talking. I think there’s kind of two dimensions there. There’s the 2. There’s also the just talking.

So a lot of podcasts are heavily produced and they’re like they’re basically read, you know, you write scripts and then you read them, you might even have dramatic music going on in the background and everything, and, you know, there’s something to that, but I’ve always been a fan, both in podcasting and on YouTube of the just talking format.

It’s less scripted, it’s more train of thought, thing of life, whatever it may be. I think there’s something really to that.

Because importantly, there are a lot of ideas that you’re just never gonna get out of someone if they have to go through production, that write it down, get to produce it, especially with gas, you don’t know one has time for that, but everyone has time to sit down and talk in the microphone for an hour, so you get a lot of stuff out that you wouldn’t otherwise get.

00:14:09 - Speaker 2: The informality of it, the sense that you’re listening in on a conversation by, you know, practitioners in your field is certainly something I was always, always going for. I try to prep our guests actually and say, look, listen, I’m not, I’m not gonna treat this like an interview where it’s just like question and answer, hopefully. It’s the feeling a listener has is there’s sort of a fly on the wall at a hallway conversation at a conference where there’s two people that maybe are meeting for the first time but have this shared interest or this work in a shared domain and you’re sort of listening in on that.

The highly produced. Style, which I can appreciate sometimes, as you said, like, This American Life, I think kind of pioneered that and there’s a gimlet Media has a whole series. I, I feel like that’s a style now, but yeah, it’s very much scripted, and that’s less compelling to me.

Now, the other far extreme of that is just turn on a microphone and start talking, and we do do both prep work, which for me is helpful because you kind of have some notes we’re working from in a rough structure. But we also do editing, we’ll maybe talk about the production process a little bit, but you know, we remove false starts, we remove people talking over each other in some cases less often, but we’ll remove the whole sections that feel repetitious or boring, so a little bit of that editing to try to make it as listenable as possible and kind of respect the listener’s time and attention, but hopefully it still has Most of that kind of raw, unscripted, just real sense of, you know, people talking to each other.

Well, over the years we’ve got so many nice emails, people tweeting about the podcast, reviews people leave on Apple Podcasts and other places, and I wanted to read a couple of those on air, again, partially for the indulgent victory lap, but partially because it’s so interesting to hear what people find valuable or interesting about what we’ve done, you know, it gives you a little bit of a mirror back onto your own work. So I’ll read a few here to you and we can react a bit live maybe. So maybe I’ll start with this one from Andy Dent Perth, who says this is the only tech slash design startup podcast I’ve been able to get my wife to listen to and not tune how well stuck in the car with me. And I like that one a lot because one of my goals generally with communications around the work I do, but certainly with the podcast specifically is to make it deep and specific to the feel. It’s obviously very much a niche, but at the same time, kind of try to make it approachable, it’s not like dripping with jargon or, or something like that, or if someone does use a term that maybe not everyone is likely to know right offhand that we try to stop and define that or you can, you know, it’s in the show notes, you can tap on it or click on it to get more information. So I’ve I’ve tried to sort of keep it accessible, but also for experts, I don’t know if that works, but I feel like that review kind of captured, yeah, maybe the accessible part has been at least somewhat successful.

00:17:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s encouraging to hear. For me, if there’s one theme that ran through a lot of our episodes, it was software that reflects the way people actually think. And so, the, the software piece that can be more technical, but the way people think, everyone should be able to relate to that if we’re doing it right. So hopefully that provides some surface area for people to latch on to.

00:17:30 - Speaker 2: Another review here that touches on something that we’re trying to achieve and sounds like we did, which is when I first left a review saying, listening to the Meta Muse podcast is like eavesdropping on a conversation among friends.

So certainly trying to create some of that warmth, create some of that. I mean, obviously this is, we’re talking about professional topics, we’re talking about the work we do, but I think for all of us and certainly for our guests, we are really passionate about it. It’s our life’s work. We put a lot of our heart and soul into it, even though in some cases it’s pretty abstract stuff, and obviously we’re doing it as a livelihood, but also, yeah, we’re trying to make it something we enjoy from a social perspective is right, the right way to put it.

But yeah, we should be friends, we should be a certain kind of professional or business friends among all of us here on the team and with our guests and with people in this community or set of overlapping communities that we’re a part of.

And speaking of community, we have a review from PPKN that’s titled Center of the tools for Thought Community, and I think it’s very generous to call the center, but I do think we have been a helpful gathering point for folks in this emerging space, and the review basically talks about guests from the thinking technology space and how tools shape the way we think, and so on. So, Yeah, a big part of it wasn’t necessarily our intention when we started, but I think you called it out from pretty early on that especially once we started bringing guests into the mix, this can be a form of community gathering, even though it’s not a forum where people can freely participate, it is something where we can bring folks who are working in the field, have again these fairly intimate and in-depth discussion, and then of course folks can discuss the ideas prompted by that on social media and so on.

00:19:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree it’s quite generous to call at the center, but it’s certainly been great to be a piece of that, you know, it’s a very special community. There’s a lot of cool work going on, and a lot of people who care deeply about software to help people think, so it’s been fun to be a part of that.

00:19:34 - Speaker 2: And the word community gets thrown around a lot, commercial companies use it to just describe people who use their product or something like that, which I don’t think is is quite right.

But I think that a community, especially when you talk about a professional pursuit like this can be just a set of people who share values, but if they’re all out kind of scattered on the internet and you don’t know how to find them or where they are, you can sort of just feel isolated.

I have these weird interests, no one around me understands or appreciates those things.

And then when you do find a community, you know, I felt that way, for example, coming to Silicon Valley and discovering the entrepreneurial community there, where it was something that previously had only had known a few people, basically my business partners who cared about or thought about or worked on the kind of things that I spent my days on, and then suddenly here’s a whole group of people who are all in touch with each other and supporting each other, not only intellectually but also emotionally, to be honest.

So I hope to some extent we’ve helped people discover and become part of the community and indeed inspire them to, well, realize you can make a career out of this stuff or at least some very passionate side projects.

Another one I’ll highlight here is, this is a tweet actually, it’s from Arnav Gosain, and they say the Meta Muse podcast sets the bar so high for the time spent to knowledge gained ratio. Each episode leaves me with so much to research about. Again, I liked this one because, yeah, I strive to do this, right? I want it to be information dense to me, that’s respecting the listeners’ time, as well as our guest time and so forth. And that that also loops around to the show notes a bit, which is a good episode. I think we’ll have some, you look at the show notes and you’re thinking, OK, all these obscure, interesting niche things, what possible conversation thread is going to tie them all together. So, that was a nice one to read.

00:21:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think this also reflects an important aspect of modern quote unquote, social media, which is that a lot of the value is in taste, not taste in the sense of what color is a logo, although that could be important too, but what is important to pay attention to, what’s important to look at and to learn about. And so a lot of the work that we end up doing on the podcast is just collecting and synthesizing and filtering down. That from our experience, from our colleagues’ experience, from industry happenings, from prior art, from theory. And so on.

00:22:00 - Speaker 2: One of the personal journeys I went on in my career or life even is, I think when I was younger, I would kind of approach everything blank slate, oh, I need to price my product. I need to figure out how to roll out, you know, a major data migration, and in every case, I would just try to invent from first principles like no one’s ever done this before.

And at some point I realized actually lots of people have done, maybe not the exact thing that I or my team is trying to do. you can benefit so much from experience and I feel like learning from wisdom of the elders is just not a thing that’s really a part of the tech world that tends to skew young and yeah, maybe startup culture tends to attract young founders who are sort of almost like take pride in their naivety. And that’s part of what allows you to do new things as you’re not constrained by the thinking of the past, but at the same time, it could be a weakness because well you’re actually naive. And so for me, each podcast episode is not only a chance to talk about my experience and what we’ve, for example, been working on it, use around a certain thing, whether it’s pricing or product launches or whatever else, but also a chance to go research a little bit in some cases look back at notes on books I’ve read or yeah, do a little web searching, talk to some people and try to expand my own knowledge and just sort of realize that anything you want to do, someone else has already done it, thought about it, probably written a book about it. You know, there’s knowledge out there if you want to go, take the time to find it.

The last review I’ll mention here is from Metavi Bay. And this one’s titled Genuinely Curious, of course curious is a word we like a lot. We try to cultivate curiosity in our selves and in the product we’re working on, but this person writes, this podcast is an exploration of how we can work and think creatively with modern technology. The hosts approach each topic in an open and philosophical way. And again, that one caught my attention because I often even joke on it in this show, we can’t just talk about, hey, we’re launching this product and let’s talk about the details of that or we’re building a local first sync engine, so let’s talk about the details of that, but actually I always want to start with like really zoomed out, philosophical, explain like I’m 5. Whatever type of thing, like let’s try to really understand in a big picture way what this thing is and how what we’re trying to do now fits into that context. So, open and philosophical is quite what I’m going for, so I’m glad that comes through.

Yeah. Let’s talk about some favorite episodes, and of course there’s so many, there’s no way we could touch on all the lovely moments we’ve had, especially with guests. And one thing I did, again, kind of in that data sciencey realm was just to dig into our analytics a little bit to see which episodes were most downloaded or kind of reflecting popularity, and that wasn’t that useful partially because podcast analytics are quite tricky. You have these downloads, but that by itself. may not tell you a lot, a given podcast player might download things multiple times or only once for multiple people, and then you can kind of filter by unique IP but that in any case, it wasn’t that revealing. I will say our most downloaded episode of all time, according to these analytics is episode 30 with Molly Milky, and that’s computers and Creativity. Which indeed is a great episode and also when I tend to point people to when they say, OK, what’s an episode I should start with just because I think that really does talk about certainly the tools for thought elements, but also the kind of creative tools and what’s happening in the field there. It’s just a very zoomed out, I think, look at a lot of things that we tend to circle around on this podcast. But then the number 2 was actually our sync episode, which you might be interested in. I think you mentioned that as one of your favorites, and that’s definitely a much more technical episode, but I think for helping the local first called community or movement get off the ground and reporting, you know, kind of our real world experience there. I think that’s been. A very helpful thing, and I’ve told gets passed around sometimes in more technical communities as kind of like a starting place for someone that wants to learn about this world.

00:26:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s certainly the one that I’ve blanked out the most myself.

00:26:15 - Speaker 2: And then the other one I’ll mention that’s from the most downloaded list is episode 12. Now, I think to some extent these tend to be sort of backloaded because of course they’ve had years to accumulate downloads, but our 4th most downloaded is Andy Mapschzek, Growing Ideas, and that one was kind of a breakout hit for us.

In some ways that was our first high profile guest. We were still figuring out the guest format, but of course Andy is such a sparkling, you know, conversationalist wide mind that can go in so many different directions. And then, of course, he shared us with his audience and that in turn brought a lot of new listeners to the podcast. So, that’s in many ways quite a seminal one for us, I think. So Mark, I’ll turn it to you. Do you have some favorite episodes or even sort of themes of episodes that come to mind when you think back on these 80+ hours in front of the mic?

00:27:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I did look through every episode, and I came up with about a dozen that are my favorite. I don’t know if I’ll go read through them all, but there were a few themes. So the first and biggest theme was this tools for thought, reflecting how people think. So things like having good ideas, growing ideas, those are right up that alley.

You know, performance has been a big one for me. We did a few things on that. That’s one of the topics that I feel like I have much more to say about.

Then we did a series of episodes on local first, so the sync episode, the local first episode, I think we had one sync revisited or something like that, or local first one year later. Those were some of my favorites.

And then we also had a few, would seem like oddball episodes with the episode on cities. We had episodes on hiring and our corporate structure.

And those reflects my interest in economics very broadly defined, and that’s something that, again, we touched on, but I have a lot more to say about that, but I was happy to have a few episodes sharing some thoughts on it.

00:28:06 - Speaker 2: Speaking as the showrunner or sort of editorial editor in chief, that needs to sort of guide what topics we explore, definitely some of these, as you call them, oddball ones, yeah, we had one on film production, we had one on progress studies, we had the one on cities, as you point out, and I guess I feel, especially since we’re all about ideas and curiosity, that being a little bit broad. In kind of not necessarily just tech world stuff or just running a company or tools for thought or something like that, you know, that that would sort of be too narrow and indeed we are curious people with wide range of interests, so that seemed natural to do.

On the other hand, yeah, I think there’s probably points at which you go too far, you know, you got to have some uniting themes and topics and things that As an editor, you’re going to sort of draw, OK, this is clearly in, this is clearly out, there’s things I’m personally interested in and you’re personally interested in that wouldn’t be suitable for podcasts like that. So in some cases those were sort of taking risks and where we could, we also tried to relate it back, you know, the city’s episode, even though it was mostly about urban design. And urban planning, the guest there, Devin Sugle is, you know, from the tech world and product manager slash developer who could put things very much in terms that I think are familiar to what a lot of listeners of the podcast will resonate with them, even if it’s in this area that is something that maybe never even thought about before. So, yeah, those are some of the funnest to me, even if, yeah, there’s probably questions about where the edges should be, I guess.

00:29:41 - Speaker 1: And certainly it’s fair to have editorial ideas about where the edges would be, although I would say that both performance and economics, those are extremely related to software in my mind. Like the city’s discussion was basically about externalities, the economics of externalities and how they manifest in cities, but it’s also a huge deal in software and coordination problems again, a huge deal. So I have no problem justifying at least.

00:30:05 - Speaker 2: Hm. Yeah, looking back at a few of my favorites, looking across guests, and we’ve had so many great guests, but one that actually really stands out for me was this is episode 48, which is called Rich Text, that was with Slim, and Slim has worked with thinking and Switch, has worked at Notion, is now, I think, working in the academic world. But she is just so deep on this topic of kind of text as it is represented within computers, and indeed was even for me a mind expanding conversation because we went beyond just, OK, what you would think of, which is the text box in your messaging app or even the rich text editor inside your word processor, but we got into like equation editors and musical scoring and things like diagram tools, all these kind of like structured symbolic manipulation. And she’s been able to go both very deep and technical, but also we talk about why symbolic representation is just such an important and foundational technology for human knowledge. So that one was very memorable for me, both to record and to listen back to later.

00:31:10 - Speaker 1: It’s funny you mention that someone was just messaging me about rich text, and man, no one does not simply write a rich text editor.

00:31:18 - Speaker 2: Yes. On the team side, and I mentioned that sometimes these team episodes are some of my favorites, and yeah, it’s almost become a little bit of a joke on the team that, you know, I try to drag one of our colleagues in front of the microphone, who very often they prefer building stuff and you know, maybe English isn’t their first language and yeah, in general, just not super excited about being recorded, but they have so much amazing knowledge to.

My perspective and I get to hear about that and be exposed to that through our our team discussions, but I think it’s really nice when we can to get that documented for the wider world and you know I really like the episode of MacA design, but one I think that I’ve heard folks come back to again and again is the one we did on Future of iPad, which obviously in many ways we bet our business on iPad as a platform. From the beginning as having this potential as a thinking tool, particularly with the pencil, and this was kind of coming back to that, like, what is the future of this device, what potential does it have a few years into it, and it was revealing because even though we’d had those some of those conversations internally, Having it for more of an external audience, I think revealed the way that me and you and Leonard, who is the other team member who was on with us, thought maybe about it a little bit differently and maybe even our ideas about it had evolved since we had started the company. It might be a little less timeless than some of our other stuff because we were talking about kind of the state of the iPad then, but I also kind of imagine that a lot of what we talked about then is still applicable.

And then for episodes that are just you and I, I mean there’s so many. I love that episode 3 on manuals. I think it was one of the first ones where I got some, you know, private messages from people like, wow, you’re on to something here. Again, a great example of something we were developing the first manual for news that caused me to start reflecting on, OK, wait, actually, what do I want out of documentation, product documentation? And indeed this also I was able to find an old tweet here by Mel Parcola, who says, if you’re building a product, don’t skimp on the manual, it can be so much more than a boring description of your interface. I feel inspired to dream bigger by this episode of the MUA HQ podcast. And this to me again speaks to part of why we’re doing this is not just to kind of verbalize and vocalize our experience, but also hopefully to inspire others to see, for example, manuals as something of a product documentation is less of a like, oh, OK, I guess we have to do this before we ship the product, and more something that can be an important and integrated part of the product experience and indeed something good and inspiring just as much as any other part of what you’re building.

I’ll also highlight the episodes on brand and product launches as being two that were really good for me personally to be able to kind of reflect on everything I had learned because a lot of the muse journey for me has been growing in the areas of storytelling, but also just kind of general marketing and that side of a business where I’ve traditionally been more on the product development side. So being able to in, you know, I’d read a bunch of books and talked to a bunch of people and then tried to do the work myself and not say that I’m an expert at it, but in many ways the best person to explain something to you is someone who’s just recently learned it. And so I think both of those episodes were for me, I had some light bulbs turned on around those topics, brand and product launches, and it was for me a chance to just kind of encapsulate that and talk through it all with you and in a way kind of lock in that knowledge for myself.

00:34:50 - Speaker 1: I see you also have the Learning from Games episode on your list, which I did as well.

This is reminding me of something interesting.

So there’s the extent to which I feel like we’ve said what we need or want to say about a topic, and then there’s the extent to which it, to my mind, has landed. So, for example, are like tools for thought, visual interfaces, infinite canvas stuff. I feel like we said a lot of what we had to say about that. It feels like it’s landed like people kind of understood what we were saying, and it’s percolated through the community, but some stuff like the local first thing stuff is sort of in between.

We said quite a bit, it’s starting to percolate, but it’s still hitting some barriers, and for some reason it’s not fully out there.

And then some stuff I feel like just hasn’t really landed.

It’s like the performance stuff and the importance of The game industry and architectures is, I think it’s like a huge deal, and people just don’t seem to know about it or care or whatever, so I don’t know if our delivery has been unconvincing or I’m misreading the state of the community, but it’s a little bit frustrating and disappointing that some of that stuff hasn’t gotten out there, but I’m glad at least we gave it a shot. It’s in the record.

00:35:52 - Speaker 2: The learning from games episodes specifically, I think that was so perfect because we both come at it from different perspectives but also have drawn a lot of inspiration from video games and it felt like a non sequitur, but then in many ways I think it was, you know, quite perfect and we got very good feedback on that one.

Yeah, now when it comes to software performance generally and why people are putting, you know, the struggles in the industry with computers keep getting faster, but our actual lived experience of them.

Keeps being more and more spinners and delays and waiting on computers to do their thing.

Yeah, it’s hard to say whether you know, is it a matter of timing, is it a matter of say it more, is it a matter of say it better, or is it a matter of, you know, we perceive something that others don’t like for me it’s just So clearly better when I use a piece of software that runs at 60 or more frames per second. It’s so superior to something where you’re staring at a spinner for seconds, but some other people maybe don’t experience it that way.

It’s not a huge deal for them. They’re, I don’t know, more patient than I am or something.

So it’s really hard to say to the extent we want to like, you know, illuminate this and get people to care and be excited and offer some positive directions you can go in terms of making software faster and more responsive to its users’ needs versus our desires and interests and tastes just aren’t in step with what most of the rest of humanity and our industry wants.

00:37:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean there’s there’s a lot of factors there.

My suspicion though is that people do in fact like fast software, but for systems reasons, it’s incredibly hard to deliver and candidly, we’ve seen that with views, you know, as much as I care about performance and you and I care about performance, just it’s hard to deliver.

All things considered. And so I think the way that it happens is there needs to be some very deep systems thinking about what from a systems perspective, ends up making fast software.

In addition to like, frankly, probably a lot of brute forcing in the form of very determined personalities. Yeah, but if there’s one kind of regret I have about the podcast, it’s that I didn’t spend more time on the systems ideas like around the economics of software and performance and stuff like that. So maybe that’s some topics for future episodes is either a guest or a transition host or something.

00:38:05 - Speaker 2: Indeed, I do want to talk about some episodes we want to do or haven’t gotten to or hope to do in the future or something like that, but I thought it would also be interesting here to take a little sidebar into the production process. Been in the position recently that a couple of folks who for various reasons are thinking about starting podcasts and ask us about our approach, which I don’t think it’s too wildly different from what folks in the rest of the What other podcasts folks do, but we do have a particular process and maybe be interesting to share with the audience.

00:38:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it would be worth just going through it, start to finish quickly.

00:38:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess there’s the what we call pre-production, and so this is largely coming up with topics and I guess I’ve developed a little radar for this in the form of, yeah, we’re having a discussion on the team about something we’re tackling again, we’re setting pricing, we’re working on the sync engine, we’re designing the Mac app, whatever, and then I go, oh, you know what, there’s a rich vein of discussion to be had here.

But also there’s the guest side of it, which in some cases is driven by the topic. There’s a topic I want to talk about and I want to go find a guest, but in many cases it’s just there’s someone I follow on Twitter or someone whose work I admire or someone who’s working on a product that I think is interesting or has an interesting philosophy that’s relevant to our audience and you know basically just cold email them and say, what do you think, do you want to come do this and get a pretty good response rate.

Now guests are a whole other thing because they need to be prepped, you know, maybe you do an initial call if you don’t know them that well and kind of talk through what kind of topics you might have, what the format of the show is. We do have a guest guide, maybe I’ll just make that into a public notion link and post that on the show notes for those who are interested, but yeah, we try to offer things like mic technique tips and things about, yeah, just kind of how we approach it.

We’re also quite particular about having the right kind of mic. So we either get someone to borrow from a friend or most people are able to find or track down some kind of doesn’t need to be super high end, but a podcast quality mic, right, not just AirPods or whatever kind of Bluetooth headset you use and that doesn’t always work. Sometimes there’s background noise in the room they’re recording or you know, it’s actually difficult to configure these things to have the right pickup settings or whatever, but All of this is to say that actually quite a bit of work happens before we do come on air with guests, a little less for non-guest episodes there, it’s more like with the guests, I kind of count on them to say a bunch of smart things. All I need to do is kind of ask questions and keep the conversation going when it’s just us, I do a lot more prep work so that I feel like I have useful things to say for an hour.

00:40:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and for both topics and guests, I go back to this idea of growing or cultivating, like we talked about in our episode, Growing Ideas, I think it’s called. You don’t just sit down and decide, OK, we’re gonna talk about X today. It takes weeks or months, you start with a possible episode title, and then you say, OK, can I write 12 bullet points of interesting things about this? Maybe, maybe not, maybe try to find a guest, they actually want to talk about something different, so it’s an iterative organic process for sure.

00:41:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, and discovering whether there’s enough depth to a topic to be sort of worth the recording time and the listeners listening time is largely a matter of, you know, for me, I make a blank board in muse and I start filling it out with stuff and trying to see and, you know, what are the connections here and what’s related and what’s not, and is this actually two episodes or actually is there not enough here to even fill one episode.

So that’s the kind of open-ended ideation that of course Muse was exactly built for, and of course it’s especially nice now that we have the collaboration capability because you and I and whoever else is gonna work on the the episode can kind of pull our notes in this very loose freeform, messy format. How much time would you say you spend on prep in the cases where I send you a board and say basically, hey, here’s what I think we should talk about, can you add your ideas?

00:41:58 - Speaker 1: Well, if it’s a topic that I’ve already thought a lot about, the prep work per se is pretty brief. Maybe it’s a half hour of getting the bullet points down of things that I want to be sure to cover and collecting links and references.

00:42:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the citation is big because otherwise you’re stumbling on air. Oh, there was this book and it was that, was it called this thing and that, you know, this kind of thing versus you can just grab the link to the book’s website is right there on the m board, I could confidently