Metamuse

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: A theme that runs through all of this, whether it’s a big company or a small team, is it’s really about building our collective knowledge. We can extract all the most relevant pieces of information from everyone’s domain and bring them together. From that comes a plan that we all feel ownership for, and then when we go off to do our heads down work, we’re working off that shared plan where we for a brief moment, brief beautiful moment in time, we understood the problem in a totality that no single human could. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And Mark, I don’t know if I told you, but my Christmas gift was a used guitar, acoustic guitar, and I’ve been blinking around on that, maybe not quite at the same level as devotion as your piano studies, but I’m quite enjoying it and I found myself reflecting on the tacit knowledge revolution of YouTube theme that you’ve brought up multiple times on this podcast because the last time I tried to play guitar, I don’t know if it was in high school or something. And you would seek out these COVID nuggets of knowledge from just people you would meet or whatever and lessons were expensive and time consuming, but now you just go on YouTube and there’s just tons of people who will just show you exactly what you want to know at whatever pace you want in great detail. You can watch it in slow motion if you want, you can rewind. That’s a really incredible way to do self-learning, particularly if you’re not that devoted to it. It’s just kind of a little side hobby when you have a few spare minutes. 00:01:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s amazing what you can find on YouTube these days. It’s so helpful. Now, for you, is YouTube the primary source, or do you also do an app or do you do Zoom lessons? 00:01:56 - Speaker 1: There is a guitar tab app, you know, essentially a tab is like the sheet music effectively for guitar. We can look up a folk song or a popular song and find out how to play it. Actually, our colleague Yulia, who plays the ukulele a bit, pointed me towards that. So that’s nice for learning a specific song, but it’s more about technique, which is, OK, you know, I’d always got to figure it out with like plucking with my fingers, but maybe, you know, playing with a pick could be a good technique to learn, but when I try to do it, it sounds terrible. How do I do that? And again, there’s probably a conventional method of, you know, you sign up for lessons or whatever, but I just don’t have time, interest, whatever for that. But this very self-directed method of I can just type into the YouTube search bar, acoustic guitar, beginner strumming technique or beginner picking technique, and inevitably there’s dozens of really high quality choices. Well, I’ve got exciting news to share. Muse for Teams is now in beta, so it’s open sign up. Anyone can go to the Museapp.com/teams/signup page and you can pick a team and try it out. And essentially this takes the thinking tool of Muse that we’ve been working on for a few years, but adds these collaboration features, what you would think of from like a Google Docs or a Figma with the avatars and the cursors moving around the board. But we’ve had this in kind of an alpha test with a small number of teams. The last 5 months or so, and we’ve done quite a lot. I’ll link out to the announcement there, everything from a new NavA and board Zoom and connection tool, as well as all these collaboration features you expect like comments and following and copying board URLs. So yeah, we’re really excited to share that with the world and it was quite a lot of hard work by everyone on the team, including both of us. So give ourselves a little back pat for that and we’re looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks. 00:03:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m really excited. This is one of the big pieces in our long term puzzle collaboration, so excited to see it finally land. 00:03:57 - Speaker 1: Indeed, yeah, I think we’ve often spoken about that long term roadmap as the do the individual thinking tool on the iPad first, then we go to the multi-device with kind of Mac and iPad and the local first sync between them, and this is that next step, is being able to collaborate with others when that’s appropriate. And yeah, I’ll link out to the announcement post that has all the goodies and screenshots and videos and everything like that. But what I’ll direct your attention to for the purpose of this podcast episode is there’s a whole sample works

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 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 co

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think the process is just inherently much messier than that, and you need to let go a little bit and say the tool is going to help you make this stew, and then you’ll sleep on it for a few days and then somewhere else, something new will pop out. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. I’m Mark McGranaghan, and I’m here today with my colleague Adam Wiggins. How’s it going, Adam? 00:00:30 - Speaker 2: I’m pretty good, Mark. I just got back from a short trip up to the Baltic Sea, which is a pretty easy train ride from where I live in Berlin. This is the first real trip I’ve taken since, I guess, pandemic started, so about 667 months. And it was really refreshing, even though it was just a couple of days, and I was reminded of something you said when we, I think it was in our very 2nd episode of the podcast about having good ideas, which is how fresh surroundings refresh your brain creatively. And yeah, I had that there and it was really, was really that came to mind because I was really reminded of how much I, I missed that in this time where travel is not a part of our lives the way it used to be. 00:01:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m always surprised by how powerful that effect is. So today our topic is tools for thought. Now Adam, what does that mean for you? 00:01:21 - Speaker 2: Well, Tools for Though means a lot of things to me, but I think the first place my head goes to is Howard Rheingold’s classic book from, I think it was the 80s, where he details Xerox PARC and many of these visionary folks who are thinking about computing in its early days and what that could do for humans and our creative and productive lives. But I actually stepped back even a little bit from there because the original tools for thought, I feel like are anything that lets you externalize your thoughts. And so pen and paper, you know, writing, language, uh, is the starting place there, the printing press maybe. Uh, but more in modern times, things like sketchbooks or I don’t know, in a startup office, you’ve got whiteboards in a school, you’ve got chalkboards, Post-it notes are a great tool for thought, in fact, because you can write down these little snippets of information and move them around maybe in a physical space with colleagues. Um, there’s even something like, I remember at a team summit we had a few years back, might have even been there in the park in Seattle, you wanted to illustrate a point and ended up grabbing a stick and basically drawing a very simple diagram in the dirt, right? So anything that lets you really either make visual or somehow externalize what’s in your mind, I think is, is a type of tool for thought. And that also includes, I think the cult of the consumption side, which is Um, what I usually call active reading. So a book and a highlighter together, I think is, is a type of tool for thought. The act of highlighting passages that you find impactful or relevant to what you’re trying to learn about makes this learning, this reading process into an active process and a learning one, and that, that becomes a tool for thought as well. 00:03:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I’m sure we’ll dive into a lot of different kind of specific instantiations of tools for thought. But another way to think about this is, what is the problem you’re trying to solve here? Two possibilities, one would be, you’re trying to obtain the knowledge that has already been generated by someone else. You’re trying to learn some facts, memorize some figures, maybe uh retain some ideas and different tools for thought can help you with that. Another angle would be, you’re trying to generate new ideas, novel thoughts, and uh a tool might help you accomplish that as well. And I think actually which one you’re trying to do is quite important for which tool you choose. 00:03:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, another reference I was looking up in prep for this episode was Andy Matzek’s work, and he’s got a piece called How Do We Develop Transformative Tools for Thought, and his work, his current research track is more on that learning, retaining side of things, these mnemonic devices and so on. This is a nice article. I’ll I’ll link it to the show notes because he does on the later part of the article, he describes a lot of this history, particularly around the computing tools for thought, Steve Jobs and the bicycle for the Mind. Uh, he talks about that he thinks, quoting Alan Kay, who’s who’s one of the sort of big visionaries in this world, uh, as saying that actually medium for thought in some cases might

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: There just really doesn’t seem to be an effective concrete practice for taking like day to day insights and accumulating them, like rolling them up into a snowball of novel ideas. 00:00:16 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Adam, and a guest today, Andy Matuschek. Hello, thanks for joining us today, Andy. I think you’re about as close as there is to Rockstar and the tools for thought space. 00:00:39 - Speaker 1: That’s a really distressing statement. 00:00:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we’ll, we’ll talk more about why this space is so small a little later on, but for those that might not know you that are listening, maybe you can briefly give us your background. 00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Sure, I’ve kind of a meandering background. It begins in technology. When I was a kid, I was constantly developing video game engines and kind of these tools for creative people. I, um, with a couple of roommates, I worked on the, the first native Mac OS 10 graphics app and did that for a bunch of years and then made some open source software for developing. I was always really into tools for others. Went off to Caltech and kind of got introduced to science, serious science. And uh kind of got my, my very pragmatic engineer perspective salted uh with all that. But unlike all of my peers who who went off to get a PhD, I, I went off to Apple and got a different kind of, it kind of felt like a graduate program of studying at the, the heels of all of these people with like jeweler’s loops that they were using to to look at individual pixels of devices and There, there my work became much less about just programming and much more about kind of the intersection between technology and design. I, I got myself involved in in all these projects that it kind of the through line was that they, they were about what was central to dynamic media, uh, as opposed to just pictures on screens. So things like, you know, interactive gestures and like the 3D parallax effect and, you know, crazy page curls and And all this stuff we’ve talked before about. 00:02:07 - Speaker 2: Uh, the way that Apple’s environment maybe has less of that distinction between design and engineering or there were a lot of people that sat really on the intersection of those two things and it was part of what allowed them to do and continues to allow them to do really innovative things on interface and and maybe you’re a person that sits in that place as well, right? 00:02:26 - Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, yeah, it’s it’s interesting because like from an org chart perspective, there’s really heavy boundaries between engineering and design, and like I was on the engineering side of the house, like I sat with the engineers, but uh for several years, I, I would like Spend much of my day sitting in the human interface lab, like next to a designer, and we’re just kind of like tossing prototypes back and forth all day. And so it became this kind of mind meld thing where those people could tweak values in the prototypes I built and you know, I would end up tweaking design elements as I was building prototypes and it kind of just the titles fell away. But over time, I kind of, I began to feel that these experiments we were doing with the dynamic medium, I would love to see them applied to things which had More, more meaning, more impact in the world. And so I, I got really interested in, in education research. I started writing about that. And uh the folks at Khan Academy reached out and asked whether I’d like to do that kind of work with them. Um, so I joined Khan Academy and and took along, uh, one of my Apple colleagues, Mei Li Ku, who is a wonderful designer and, and together we started this like R&D lab, uh, at Khan Academy where we explored all kinds of uh novel educational environments from that perspective of like trying to trying to look at what the dynamic medium alone can do. Trying to make these active learning environments and I did that for about 5 years and um I started getting a little disillusioned with institutional education and um I started getting really interested in the kind of knowledge work that people like you and me do every day, where you’re reading information, writing information, creating new things, pursuing uh novel ideas every day, and I’m wondering how we could augment some of that. Uh, so now I have this kind of independent research practice where I’m pursuing oddball questions like what comes after the book? Can we make something that does the job of a book but better?

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I really thrive off of urban energy, but I also I’m at a point where I want a little more green, a little more quiet, a little more space, and can I get those two things together. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, and I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Mark, what’s the air quality like in Seattle right now? 00:00:33 - Speaker 2: It’s much improved. We got hit really bad by that smoke, but we got some proper Seattle rains, and now it’s really clean out here. 00:00:40 - Speaker 1: I love the uh smell of the air after a good rain, and I can only imagine how different it must be in the wake of the wildfire smoke. Our colleague Julia found it a little funny because actually in the demo video that’s on our website that you recorded, there’s some content related to Seattle and there’s actually a whole board about natural disaster risk and wildfires explicitly called out there, and I think it’s pretty low, mostly in the Pacific Northwest, I assume because it’s raining or whatever, but apparently not in that calculation is what happens if wildfires hundreds of miles away happen and then the smoke drifts. 00:01:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. The immediate area here is safe cause it’s very wet, so it’s hard to catch fire, but we definitely can get smoke as we were reminded the past few weeks. 00:01:23 - Speaker 1: So our topic today is leaving San Francisco, and we both have a personal story on this. You moved to Seattle a few years back, leaving the Bay Area, and I moved to Berlin 7 years ago now, after 7 years in San Francisco. And there’s a little in the zeitgeist in the discussion here, the pandemic has led a lot more companies to remote work, and in turn has made people who work for those companies have more sort of flexibility where they can work from wildfires are probably a piece of that as well, but in general, I feel like I’ve seen in my Social networks and colleagues, people considering leaving the Bay Area or in some cases they’ve done so. There’s a great article by Kevin Lana who speaks about that, that I’ll link in the show notes. And we’ve also got tech companies like Stripe and Zapier being willing to essentially pay you to move someplace cheaper, which is sort of interesting. But the topic here isn’t to debate the merits of the Bay Area, but I thought it would be really interesting to reflect on not just our personal stories, but how you make a decision like this. Because it feels like an unprecedented social shift in some ways, which is most people, and me included, most of my early life, I went to where I needed to go for school, you know, university, where can I get a good education that will have me, and then later on to pursue employment. And I didn’t make any kind of calculus of where do I want to live. I made the calculus of where can I get the best job for myself, and then that naturally dictated where I was going to live. And it’s something I feel like I’m seeing a lot of lately. I had a bunch of conversations with folks where people are going through the same process that I went through some years back when I embraced remote work, maybe you did as well, which is to realize that you have the opportunity, the privilege to just pick where you want to live and have that be based on some criteria that’s not coupled to your employment. But also realizing maybe the weight of that responsibility or it’s not the right way to put it, maybe that it’s a great opportunity, but how do you decide if you can do more or less anywhere in the world or within some time zone band, what criteria do you use? Where do you even start? So that’s why I thought it would be an interesting topic for us today. So Mark, I know you moved to the Bay Area, kind of at the start of your professional career. That’s when we got the chance to work together and I think for you it was like me, an incredible opportunity to build your early career and then just a couple of years back, you moved to Seattle. I’d love to hear a little bit of that story. 00:03:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so I moved to San Francisco originally. It was 10 or 11 years ago, I think. And at the time, I knew I wanted to be in startups and San Francisco was basically the place that you went for that. Another possible option would have been New York City, but it was definitely second place as compared to San Francisco, and actually at the time, San Francisco was much cheaper than New York. Jokes kind of on me there eventually, but that was a factor at the time. And yeah, I was there for maybe 7 or 8 years or something lik

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: One of the things that’s really important, whether you’re talking about product principles or company values, is you have to be able to negate them, cause otherwise you don’t use them to resolve conflict. 00:00:14 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and my former colleague, now friend Max Schoening. Hey, Adam. Max, great to have you here. So, Max has an impressive career in the tech world, both as an indie developer making cloud app years back. The 3 of us worked together at Hiroku and now you’re leading the design team at GitHub. More importantly, for our purposes, you are an early user, you are our very first customer for Muse, and you’re also an advisor, so we get to bombard you with our half-finished ideas once a month, and you can tell them, tell us why they’re bad. 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Uh, thank you for that very generous introduction, and it’s, it’s quite the privilege to be a part of the Muse creation process, even if it’s on the sidelines. 00:01:07 - Speaker 2: Now I understand you just got back from a camping trip. That sounded pretty fun. 00:01:10 - Speaker 1: Uh, yeah, I did. I spent The last week completely off the grid, my wife and I with the dog went and drove up to the Tahoe National Forest in a 4x4 sprinter van and did nothing but hike and sort of be in nature, which at this moment in time feels or is an immense privilege, right? But it was good to disconnect a little. 00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Now our topic today is principled products. Now this is your idea, Max. So maybe you can explain what this is all about. 00:01:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it might be interesting to to start at the beginning of how I was introduced to Muse because I think we had talked, we share lots of interest, sort of end user programming, end user computing, and also tools for thought and and making tools for people who make stuff. And so naturally, when you started Muse, you shared it with me and I think my first, I don’t quite remember, so please, please correct me here, Adam, but I think my first reaction was, OK, well, why would I use this? This is not letting me draw the way that I want to draw. 00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember giving you a quick uh just in person demo. I think you were visiting your mom here in Berlin. You stopped by my place. I said, hey, I’m working on this new thing and just showed you, you know, a pretty early version and you I think you liked, you had a positive reaction to the zooming kind of spatial interface, uh, but then when you went off to try it on your own a little bit, you said, well, yeah, the ink’s kind of ugly and I have a better sketchbook app. using notability at the time and yeah, for purely for sketching, that’s true today as well. Notability is a better choice. 00:02:38 - Speaker 1: I think I narrowed in on the on the ink engine very quickly versus acknowledging the principles that Muse kind of stands for. And I think that’s what triggered this entire thought process in me of to actually consider to make Muse work for you, you have to consider the principles that the creators in this case, the two of you and the rest of the team sort of put into the process. And that’s where I think the train of thought of, OK, what are principled products sort of came from, as I tried to define what a principle what we mean by principled, I kind of came to the to the realization of it’s just a set of rules or laws that guide the behavior of the people who make the thing, but then there is even a secondary layer which I think is much more interesting, which is a set of rules or laws that guide the behavior of the people using the thing. And I think Muse is you framed it, Mark or Adam, I don’t remember, but as a as a tool for thought and a tool for rumination. The moment that you gave me, this is obviously not a very scalable process, but you gave me this onboarding onto the muse philosophy after I initially rejected the app and then it clicked. 00:03:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, that’s great to hear. Now we just need to figure out how to kind of replicate and scale up. That process, I guess, but in the near term happy to to do the one off, uh, one-off on boardings, I guess. Now, I’d be curious to hear from, from both of you, both of you guys, what are other principal products. And I assume that many, many products are driven by mission or they have a purpose or uniting set of values, but I assume that when we, when we say when we really say principal products in the way you just described Max, that&r

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: We have to make sure that if you’re a brand new obsidian user, it feels accessible, it has infinite depth, and you can go as deep and crazy as you want, but that that surface level is intuitive and inviting to most people, and that’s a really hard thing to balance. 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us as a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about me use 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. I joined today by Stefan Ago of Obsidian. How’s it going? And Stefan, you’ve got some nice recipes up on your website alongside various blog posts about tools for thought and technology. Tell me a little bit about pillowy Swedish cinnamon rolls. 00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Oh, that’s a good one. So I grew up in France. My mom is half American, half Swedish, my dad is 100% French, and my mom is. A teacher, later in life she became a professional baker. She was always cooking and baking throughout my childhood and taught us a lot. And she was also trying to infuse the household with her American culture and her Swedish culture as well, because I lived in France until I was 17. And so, One of those things is a Swedish cinnamon roll. I think in the US, you know, the kind of cinnamon roll that you’re used to is probably derived from that. It’s usually made with, you know, cinnamon or cardamom, and I came across this technique which is common in Asia called tanghong, which is a technique for making bread out of a, it’s almost like a very, I don’t know if anyone knows what a roux is, which is also a French technique, which is a mix of flour and water that you use to make gravy and other types of things. You use basically a very Like a slurry of water and flour that you don’t darken at all, and you put part of that into the dough. And what it does is somehow, I don’t know all of the chemistry of this, but I think what it does is it encapsulates some of the moisture into the flour, and so when you mix that into the main part of the dough. The dough stays really soft and fluffy and pillowy, and it’s just a really amazing texture. And so I discovered this technique and I think, you know, it’s used for like milk buns and different things in Asia, but I thought it would be a good fit for the Swedish cinnamon roll that I always love to make around the holidays, you know, in December, even though I live in Los Angeles now and it’s not so cold, it’s just a kind of a nice memory. And so it turned out to be the perfect fit in an interesting fusion of two things. And so I put this recipe out. I don’t have very many recipes on my website, but it started to become a little bit of a section, and so I decided to post more of these because they’re really fun for me and very iterative. I like to incorporate techniques that I find online and get feedback from people who try it and. Iterate on them, so maybe it will become a more important section of my website. I think there’s only 2 or 3 recipes on there right now. 00:03:28 - Speaker 2: Especially like the I guess cultural mashup aspect of that, obviously drawing from your own heritage but also reaching outside of that. I always find, I guess as a person who’s an immigrant myself and I’m raising my child who has two parents from different countries and is living in a third country, so maybe not too dissimilar from your upbringing. And yeah, I think there’s just a lot of, I don’t know, interesting, you know, if we say everything is a remix now, you know, this kind of remix of fundamental cultures, I just think there’s a lot there. 00:04:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, being able to pick and choose techniques, ideas from different cultures and like bring them together is really fun. That’s how I grew up, and so it just comes naturally to me. 00:04:13 - Speaker 2: And tell us a little bit about your background in the professional world. 00:04:18 - Speaker 1: Well, so today I’m the CEO of Obsidian. Obsidian is an app probably a lot of your listeners will know about in the tools for thought kind of space. Before that, I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. I’ve run lots of companies, probably the most well known of them is called Lumi. We built a platform that helps entrepreneurs and Teams collaborate with manufacturers, particularly in the packaging space, so it’s a really interesting problem of There’s so much manufacturing capability in the world. Like there’s all these factories that are out there that can make things, but I find that the interface to access that capacity is Very confusing and difficult, and the idea behind the company was what if we could make it as easy to i

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: We’ll just say that I’m so happy that you are taking this forward and making sure this product not only continues to exist and be maintained, but indeed to grow because there really is nothing like it out there for unstructured thinking. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Adam Wulf. Hey, good to be here again. Well, we’ll jump straight into it today because we have some important and honestly pretty bittersweet news. So New Software Incorporated is the company of course that you and I and the rest of our team work for Wulf, and we’ve been working to build this beautiful product. Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say we didn’t manage to find sustainable business. This is something we’ve been working on for 4 years now, and yeah, somehow the particular combination we’ve tried to do hasn’t worked, so we need to make some big changes. So in the near term that’s big scale down of the team. I’ll be stepping away from day to day activities. Most of the team is moving on, but the potential silver lining here is, well, if you’ve offered to step up with a lot of passion and vigor to carry on, use the product as a solo printer. So there’s a lot to unpack there and we’ll dive into that throughout this episode, but I just want to lead with that news and maybe we can just start with a feelings check. How are you feeling right now, Adam Wulf? 00:01:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it’s a weird feeling because I’m very excited about the future of Muse. We can keep the product alive, and I know we have a very energetic user base, and so I’m thrilled that Muse, the product will continue, but of course I’m very disappointed, frankly sad that I’m gonna be losing my teammates that I’ve enjoyed working with for the past 3 years. It’s been just a fantastic company to work for, and a wonderful group of people to work with, and Everyone will be sorely missed, absolutely. 00:02:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll echo that. I’m feeling a lot of sadness, particularly around exactly what you said, the team. I really feel this is one of the best teams I’ve worked with, just the perfect blend of skills and personalities, really perfectly suited for what we were working on, great working chemistry, and yeah, I think I enjoyed the day to day of my job here at Muse the last 4 years more than probably any other venture I’ve ever worked on. And yeah, leaving that behind, you know, you and I will still work together as, you know, be in an advisory capacity, I’ll probably be a podcast host, so we’ll certainly be in each other’s lives and I’ll be in the muse world, but it’s a whole different thing from having a big team that’s, you know, fully engaged and working together all the time. 00:02:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s the thing that’s been emotionally so difficult or strange or confusing to some extent. is so much of the muse I know is Disappearing or changing because the muse I know is the 6 of you, right? And so it’s all of my team is leaving and that’s, you know, extremely disappointing. But then the other side of it is there’s a lot of muse that is staying the same. It’s the product is staying the same. We have the 3.0 release, uh, that a lot of our users are on right now and are enjoying, and that’s been a huge effort for all of us this past year. A lot of exciting plans coming up to continue Muse and to grow the feature set, and so, I really feel pulled in kind of two different emotional directions. One is honestly a grieving process of the group that I know and the group that I’ve worked with is moving on and is going to different chapters, and that’s hard, and at the same time, we use the product is continuing and I believe it’s gonna keep growing and has now uh Business plan that does fit, even though our current one, you know, unfortunately did not fit. I think there’s new. Business stability now, which is a great thing and really gives it a strong future. But it’s such a weird dichotomy in my brain. My left brain is thinking one thing and my right brain is thinking the other thing, and I’m still trying to, I think, to pull everything together and see it for what it is, but it’s a lot to process, I think, for everyone, for all of us on the team and all the new places we’re going. 00:04:36 - Speaker 1: Well, before we get into what the future holds, what the new era of Muse might be, and why there’s still a long life ahead of it, I do want to address what I thin

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Being able to do important and deep work in a world where information is not scarce, but abundant, not only abundant, but so abundant that it essentially becomes a problem. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. How’s it going, Mark? Alright, Adam, how are you doing? Yeah, I’m doing well. Reading an interesting book about the life of Claude Shannon, the guy that invented information theory. So this was at Bell Labs circa I guess middle of the last century. Uh, for example, the, uh, that seminal paper coined the term bit, which I think I, I almost take for granted sometimes these fundamental inventions, you think, well, it’s just always, we’ve always known what a bit is, but in fact, boiling information down to a stream of ones and zeros and being able to reason about that mathematically is a uh an extremely significant breakthrough to put the, to put it mildly and surprisingly recent from my perspective. Yeah, interesting. So our topic today is the information age, and I usually put information age in caps. It’s in comparison to say the Iron Age or the industrial revolution. And I guess the the basic idea with this is that humanity or society has entered an era that’s defined by the I guess the massive availability and the free flow of information. This dates back to, I think the Wikipedia page talked about the invention of the transistor which kind of made possible things. Like global telephone networks and radio and TV, but obviously the computer as well came out of that. I think it’s become particularly cute or the information age and how different that is from what came before is really dramatic in the last 10 years or so, uh, with smartphones and the internet and social media. Uh, one statistic I read recently, I found a little Uh, mind blowing was that the essentially there’s total penetration of internet and smartphones, the stat I read was that there’s 5 or 5.5 billion people on Earth who are over the age of 15, so adults, and of those 5 billion of them have some kind of mobile phone and about 4 billion of them have smartphones. So for our purposes. Again, everyone’s connected, and now this new age is kind of defined by that. 00:02:35 - Speaker 2: Well, that’s a broad and weighty topic. What’s on your mind about the information age then? 00:02:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, obviously connects to to muse here because we see it. As a tool that helps with this, which is particularly for creative professionals and being able to do important and deep work in a world where information is not scarce, but abundant, not only abundant, but so abundant that the it essentially becomes a problem. I read a nice article the other day called the Information Pathology. And they make this comparison to how in the 20th century, the abundance of food sort of slipped our widespread health problems from not enough nutrition, not enough calories, which essentially is a problem most humans had faced most of their lives or, you know, most of the existence of, uh, certainly civilization and flipped it over to now we’re worried about essentially having access to too much food, that the problems are obesity and uh diabetes and heart disease and so forth. And the author here makes a comparison to say, well, maybe in the 21st century, we have a similar thing with information, where we’re also hardwired in many ways to seek information, that new information is a way to be. Prepared for what the future might hold, assess our safety and do things to improve our lives when you know things about what’s going on in the world around you that can be extremely helpful to say the least. But then you add in this era of hyperconnectivity and the 24 hour news cycle and social media and newsletters and everything’s being pushed to you all the time and everything seems important. And that can quickly turn into more of a gambler at a slot machine getting the the dopamine hit from that next, um, that next piece of information rather than, yeah, rather than spending your life on things that are more meaningful to the point that we have people thinking about things like digital detox and Deleting social media from their apps and this is, this is quite a big topic now of how you actually manage this problem of information abundance. 00:04:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you had shared that article with me, and I found it very interesting and indeed alarming. The topic of food and nutrition is one that I’d studied for a while, and that’s an area where there’s something that’s incr

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: No one would ever write a blog post or a book by hand or on a typewriter in 2023. Yet reading still pretty much takes place in the physical world, at least nonfiction, 90% of nonfiction reading is still paper books, and so our lofty ambition would be, we’ve created such a better reading experience using software that people are motivated to switch and read digitally. 00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but 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 today with guests Dan Doyen and Tristan Holmesy of ReadW Wise. 00:00:44 - Speaker 3: Hi, I’m Tristan, co-founder and technically CEO of ReadW Wise. 00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Excited to be here, Honored to be a guest, huge fan of the podcast. 00:00:54 - Speaker 2: And I understand you two had some fun with Falcon recently. 00:00:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s right. We were just off on a team offsite in Ireland. We’re a remote company, so we try and get the team together about twice a year, you know, with scheduling and all that. We’re about 14 people now, so getting 14 people out of one place is a little non-trivial these days, but we chose Ireland because we have an engineer. who already lives there, so you can kind of give us a good local experience. And as part of that, we had a fun little falconry event where, you know, you have the little glove. I think you’ve done it before, Adam, and the falconry instructor puts a little meat on your glove and then the birds fly onto your glove and eat the meat. 00:01:38 - Speaker 1: Dan, is that a good overview of, yeah, we were able to play with a falcon, a hawk, and 4 breeds of owls. 00:01:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so the fun part was the first owl was like this cute little, I think it was like a snowy owl or something, Barn owl, oh, barn owl, OK. So we take turns each like having the owl fly onto our glove. It flew on to dance, I think pretty successfully, and then we moved on to the next person, I think like one of our engineers or something, and instead of the bird flying onto the glove of the engineer, which had me, it flew back. On to Dan’s glove, which he wasn’t even holding properly or anything, and kind of gained this funny attachment to Dan. Then the instructor was like, Oh, that’s weird. Grabbed the bird and was like, OK, go over here. Go over here. He eventually got it onto the engineer’s glove, and then we did the next person, and the owl again flew onto Dan’s glove. And then that basically repeated for, you know, the next like 10 minutes until Dan had to like hide his glove and basically hide from the bird before it would stop flying to him, so. 00:02:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I grew up reading My Side of the Mountain, so I fancy myself a bit of a bird of prey expert. 00:02:40 - Speaker 2: Missed your calling as a bird whisperer. Yeah, I briefly had the chance to do the glove thing with the yeah, I think it was a falcon, and they’re just obviously really beautiful creatures, also very alien in a way, the way they move and the way they Obviously feathers and all this sort of thing, and obviously we see birds in our daily life, but birds of prey really feel like a different thing, I guess, and being that close and being aware of the weapons, you know, their claws or talons, I guess they’re called, and their beak and that sort of thing. It’s just, yeah, it can be a powerful experience. 00:03:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the descendants of dinosaurs. 00:03:18 - Speaker 2: Exactly right. And tell me a little about Reidwise. 00:03:22 - Speaker 3: Sure, so Readwise at a high level, we basically make software that helps people read better. There’s a lot of ways we do that. Most recently, we’ve been working on this app, which we call Reader or the Readise Reader, which is this piece of software which lets you read basically any type of content from PDFs to books, to articles, to YouTube videos, including their transcripts. To newsletters, to Twitter threads, to a lot more. We let you read that stuff, but more importantly, kind of save it, highlight it, and just kind of get the most out of your reading. And before we built Reader, we also built a slightly more niche app, which we now call ReadW 1.0, which basically helps you retain more from your reading and kind of manage all of your digital highlights. 00:04:06 - Speaker 2: And could you tell me a little bit about the journey you each took in your careers that led you to this venture? 00:04:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the Re Wi story really starts with Dan, so he can probably pick that off. 00:04:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll start. My journey was a little bit more non-traditional than Tristan’s or probably the typical gu

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: To borrow the Hobbit, one does not simply build a new sync layer. You start with a product and you want to build a sync layer, and now you have two products. You had a huge undertaking to build this kind of a system on the server and on the client and should not be a default answer, I think, for anyone, and it was not our default answer, but I think it worked out and was the correct decision for us in the end. 00:00:27 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleagues, Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Adam. And Adam Wulf. 00:00:44 - Speaker 1: Hey guys, it’s great to be back. 00:00:46 - Speaker 2: Now Wulf, you took a little staycation recently, and I understand you’re working on a little side hack project there called Developer Duck. Tell us about that. 00:00:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was kind of nice because the vacation just happened to align with all of the chat GPT AI magic that’s been released lately. So I spent a fair bit of the vacation just working on a prototype for a developer tool that uses AI to help developers kind of build faster to take over some of the tedious tasks so the developer can work on the more meaningful tasks. So it’s been a really fun adventure. It’s got, you know, X code integration and it’ll edit your source files for you or add comments or explain code you don’t understand or fill out code and replace comments with code and it’s got a chat feature as well, just like chat GPT but it’s focused and prompted more specifically for developers, so it’s a bit less for both and a code highlighting and all sorts of stuff. So it was just a really fun. Yeah, adventure to kind of see what can these AIs do now and is the hype real or is it really just someone behind a curtain? 00:01:59 - Speaker 2: And I think the name there is a reference to the uh rubber duck from the pragmatic programmer, am I wrong? 00:02:07 - Speaker 1: No, that’s exactly right. It’s a really common metaphor for programmers to talk to a rubber duck and just verbalizing the problem out loud and kind of pushing it through the language center of our brain helps us clarify what it is that we’re actually looking for. And so this is that sort of a thing. You can chat with the robot, express your problems, it’s able to prompt and kind of guide you towards solutions sometimes. But it’s really a great first step before you go interrupting a coworker and pulling them out of their flow state. You can stay in your flow state and talk to the rubber duck and hopefully get a solution without much delay in either your day or your coworker’s day. 00:02:52 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I found rubber ducking to be unreasonably effective, and so I can only imagine with the supercharging of Jet GPT it’s even better. 00:03:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s actually been really fun because a lot of times I’ll know what I need to do, but I don’t know the right jargon word to search Stack Overflow or to search Google. And so sometimes even just that, you know, the 1st 5 or 10 minutes of searching around is just understanding what is this problem actually called? Like, what is it that I actually need to do? I know the problem I need to solve, but I don’t know what the name of the solution is. And so just typing the problem into something like developer duck, it actually prompts back with, oh, these are actually great bunch of keywords and ideas and even possible solutions that I should go try, and then it’s something I can go and dig deeper on on Stack Overflow or Google or whatnot to find the final answer. 00:03:44 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is local first, one year later. So this is a reference to or let’s call it a sequel to an episode, the 3 of us recorded about a year ago where we dive deep on the technical architecture from Muse’s sync system, and I’ll link that episode and show notes. Now, as a reminder, local first is this idea that we want to get the benefits of cloud software. Think of Google Docs, where you can share and collaborate really easily with other people. But also gives you the benefits of call the more traditional style of just saving a file to your hard drive, right? It’s always fast, it’s available offline, and then you just have more data ownership generally. And part of how we do this is using a technology that comes pretty recently out of the computer science world called CRDTs. So at the time we we recorded them, we were still in beta with this device syncing, we’ve launched Muse 2.0, which included that and lots of people are using that in production. And now we have our

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think at some point I would love to go back to just work on, I don’t know, album artwork, or just lock myself away in a cabin and just draw typography. But for now, I feel like there’s some stories I want to tell. And for some of those stories to really resonate, they need to be put into people’s hands and experience. And so until I’ve told those stories, I feel like there’s unfinished business. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about use the product, it’s about mus the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest, Jason Yuan. Hello. And Jason, you are a prolific creator of all sorts. The one that struck me as very interesting from your background is that you got your start in stage design, which you described as a bit of a two-way interface. I’d love to hear about that. 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think what’s interesting about stage design and theater design in general is that It’s so inherently multidisciplinary. So even if you say I’m designing on a show, you might mean costume design, stage design, set design, sound design, and all of those have to be choreographed perfectly. They have to work together. And then, obviously, the stage needs to be used by the actors. It needs to be functional. People need to be able to enter and exit. It needs to be safe. So that’s one aspect of like, I guess the people that it needs to work for and then obviously you have the audience who rely on. The culmination of how the stage design works in conjunction with all the other elements to bring them into a world and to tell the story. And so it’s fairly high pressure because so many people rely on it and because theater is sort of in the moment, if something doesn’t work or God forbid if something unsafe happens, like that’s on you, partially, so. Design has always sort of felt very high stakes, even in interaction design now where you could always ship a bug fix or you might be able to delay the launch or incrementally improve things over time in theater unless you’re a very prolific show, you don’t really get that luxury. 00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can imagine the live performance element creates a sense of, well, I suppose drama would be the word for it, but for the people who are creating it as well, you have this showtime moment and everything’s got to come together and work right, and if it doesn’t, the problems are all up there for everyone in the audience to see very dramatically. 00:02:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, something that frustrates a lot of people that I’ve worked with in tech, sort of, I’ve always carried the show must go on mentality. That sometimes, you know, applies, but then if you’re working on indie projects where like there’s no real deadline, people are like, why, why though? It’s ready when it’s ready. And I’m like, no, like the show must go on. So that’s been interesting trying to find elements I want to keep from my past now that I’m practicing something that’s fairly different. 00:03:01 - Speaker 2: At some point you made the transition to the digital technology world and lots of interesting work in your portfolio there, including Mercury OS we’ll talk maybe a bit on a little bit, which was how I first discovered your work. You’ve also been working on MakeSpace. What else is on the recent portfolio. 00:03:21 - Speaker 1: You know, after Mercury came out, there was so much feedback from people who wanted to see it become real in some way. I worked on several smaller spin-off projects that were inspired by the initial vision, like, I don’t think it was ever designed to be a thing that I saw ship as this. It’s a very point of view. Mercury was designed from a very specific point of view through the lens of someone who is frustrated that my own mind as someone who lives with ADHD and PTSD and just, I find a lot of things particularly stressful in computers like file systems and how I have to constantly open and close apps and switch context uses. It was a very specific point of view there about like operating systems, but, you know, trying to think about a way to make some of the ideas actually happen. Has taken up a lot of my past year, I think. And in some ways makespace is kind of an offshoot of that in the sense that I think the spirit of reimagining something that I felt like could have a lot more potential exists in Maspace. And, you know, when Asa and I first started working on it, the code name was untitled OS. So I think from Makespace came this fascination. Of like exploring platforms, but then also exploring sma

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think that the future is not determined. I think that it is up to us, and I think that we should always believe fundamentally in the ability of human intelligence when properly applied to solve problems. 00:00:17 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest Jason Crawford from Routes of Progress. 00:00:35 - Speaker 1: Hello, thanks for having me on. 00:00:37 - Speaker 2: And Jason, when we first met, you were a tech founder working on Field Book. Tell me about that. 00:00:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. So most of my career has been in software and technology. I was a software engineer, engineering manager, and tech startup founder. Most recently, starting in 2013, I started a company called Field Book. Field Book was a sort of hybrid spreadsheet database, a lot like Air Table, so very much in the mode of a tool for thought and I’m very sympathetic to that general space of tools. I still have a soft place in my heart for it. In fact, Adam, one of the things That inspired me and helped give my mindset early on in developing that tool was a book that I think I learned about from you, A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi. 00:01:23 - Speaker 2: Um, yeah, so that was a 93. Yeah, you can believe that. 00:01:27 - Speaker 1: And still very relevant today, frankly, and so I told all my employees, recommended they read at least the first few chapters of that book and there’s a significant amount in there about spreadsheets, which are probably the greatest tool for thought ever created, so. 00:01:40 - Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I think the world’s most successful end user programming tool, which is almost everyone knows how to use a spreadsheet and probably can do at least the very most basic function like summing a column, and that is a small bit of computer code. 00:01:52 - Speaker 1: Exactly. So yeah, I built Field Book, worked on it for about 5 years. Unfortunately, didn’t work out, we ended up shutting down the product and selling the team. We did a sort of aquahire to start up Flexport. 00:02:04 - Speaker 2: And to be fair, the end user programming dream is one that many have chased and few have found there’s a few success stories, yeah, spreadsheets, you know, which are now decades old, maybe Flash, maybe Unity more recently, but it remains a really elusive dream to make a tool that both brings kind of the power of programming to an audience that is not already professional programmers. 00:02:27 - Speaker 1: It’s true, although at the same time, in the last couple of years, there’s been the notion of no code and low code has become, you know, much more prominent, and there have been a couple of major successes, so I’m happy to see tools like Air Table, tools like Notion, and, you know, a number of other sort of competitors in that space all keeping the dream alive and actually creating some pretty successful products. 00:02:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So going from there to, I don’t know, an independent scholar or educator or advocacy around progress studies seems like at least a pretty big leap. I’d love to hear that story. 00:03:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. So what happened was I got interested in the story of human progress early 2017. It began as not even a side project, it began as just a reading list, really. It was what books am I gonna read next. I always like to be reading a non-fiction book and at a certain point I discovered that it was kind of a good idea to read books in clusters, sort of pick a theme and then read a handful of books on one theme, and you can learn a lot more from that than just reading random books. So I decided to learn about the history of human progress, and mostly in the beginning at least was interested in focusing on kind of technological and industrial progress, really fascinated by just the simple basic fact of economic living conditions and standards of living throughout history, how much those have really skyrocketed in the last couple 100 years after, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of years of very slow progress and very little improvement overall in living conditions. And I just wanted to know, like, how did we get here? What were the major breakthroughs, the inventions and discoveries that created this standard of living? And ultimately I’m interested in getting to the root causes. When I started blogging about this, I called it the roots of progress. You know, so ultimately understanding what are the conditions, what are the root causes of this explosion of creativity and invention that ultimate

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Digital tools which were supposed to give us a creative canvas that was more flexible, that was easier to use, actually constrained us quite a bit because as you said, I almost had to decide what’s going to be the final format. What is the output going to look like before I actually know what the output is going to look like, and I have to make this decision upstream of working on something. 00:00:26 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. My guest and Laura Le Comf. Hey Adam. We’re here entering the holidays, and I’m curious to know what you both are planning to do with your holiday break. It’s a little different this year around. For me, the winter solstice, which I think in 2020 is on the December 21st, it can be a different day. But that’s one of my personal favorites to celebrate both because it’s not connected to any particular culture, but also because living now as I do in Northern Europe, where it gets very dark and cold, it’s a nice thing to celebrate when the days are getting longer. And Laura, what do you do in the holidays? 00:01:19 - Speaker 1: I usually have a very big dinner. I’m half French, half Algerian, and I guess in Algerian culture, the biggest the number of people around the table, the better the dinner. But obviously this year is going to be a little bit different, so it’s going to be small, probably just with my parents. The one thing that’s not going to change is that we’re going to have a mix of like French, European traditional Christmas food like turkey and stuff like that, and Algerian food as well, like couscous and meshwe and other little Algerian cakes and things like this. So yeah, just eating a lot with my family. 00:01:58 - Speaker 2: Well, that description made me hungry. And maybe you could tell us a little about your background and about Nes Labs. 00:02:05 - Speaker 1: Sure. I started my career working at Google first in London and then in San Francisco, and my last role there, I was working on the digital health team, where I was looking after the marketing and partnerships for products that were helping people being healthier, more productive, around self-care, fitness, all of. These kinds of verticals, and I left about 3 years ago. I’ve had a few stints trying to start different startups that didn’t work out for lots of different reasons, and I’m currently working on NetS Labs, which is a website with a blog and a newsletter and a private community that is for knowledge workers to be more Creative and productive while taking care of their mental health. And most of the content on the website is based on what I’ve been learning in the past two years when I basically decided to go back to university to study neuroscience in 2018, and I’ve been writing about everything I was learning and trying to apply it to creativity and productivity on my blog. 00:03:11 - Speaker 2: I feel like many of my favorite, you know, YouTubers or podcasters or whatever who are talking about, you know, it’s called productivity generally, but maybe it’s about building healthy habits and how to be focused and that sort of thing are people who are in some kind of higher education and knows something about that environment or working to get a master thesis or a PhD or whatever that has you more reflective maybe about sort of the meta element of how do I do this better. 00:03:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I call it mindful productivity because both at Google while I was working on startups and as a student, I actually experienced burnout a few times and I think there’s so much productivity advice out there that is really about getting stuff done. There’s very little that is about just asking yourself, should I really be doing this thing? Am I the right person to do it? Is there someone else who would actually be better to do this thing? And also just kind of checking in and asking yourself, how am I doing right now? How’s my mental health. So this is kind of what I write about as well because I think these are the basic questions you need to ask yourself if you want to do good work and find it enjoyable. 00:04:20 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s an interesting general dynamic here where Adam, you mentioned, when people are at a university, it seems like there might be more fruitful information about how to do something. I think there’s a general pattern where, OK, you’re a beginner, then you’re actively learning to become an expert, then you’re an expert, and then you’re teaching new beginners. I think ste

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Curious is interesting because of course you can describe your mindset as a user of Muse, but it could also apply to the software itself. And I do think there’s an element of Muse is a little bit weird. It’s a little bit different, it’s a newcomer, and it takes an approach that no other app has really taken before. 00:00:22 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined today by Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Mark. 00:00:36 - Speaker 1: Adam, so exciting times for you? 00:00:39 - Speaker 2: It is. I’m expecting a baby very soon. 00:00:42 - Speaker 1: Congrats. 00:00:43 - Speaker 2: And while there’s many things that make pregnancy its own journey both emotional and physical, I will say that one of the big challenges and one that’s emotionally fraught is picking a name. And I was familiar with this from picking names for products, companies, I don’t know, software libraries, but something that is going to affect another human whose opinion you cannot consult on it for literally the rest of their life. Oh, it feels like a lot of responsibility. 00:01:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet. 00:01:11 - Speaker 2: And maybe that also connects to our topic today, which is brand. 00:01:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, brand is not necessarily the native territory for you and me. We grew up in the engineering and product areas mostly, but we’ve been, especially you have been getting into this, I think more as we’ve gone to start this business. So where are you at in your journey on brands? 00:01:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s been a long journey. I definitely started from maybe a place of assuming brand was, I don’t know, a logo or something and not the hard or important part of a business. And one of the things that turned me around a bit on that or opened my eyes, I guess, to the importance and potential power of brand was reading history, as always, that’s something that gives a lot of context for me. There’s a book here called Brand New and it essentially walks through some historical examples, including the company that was the first real department store in the United States, or some more recent history like Dell. The story that really struck me, I think was Heinz, which nowadays has a very strong brand for ketchup. They got started at the time when, and hopefully I can remember the story correctly, it’s been a number of years since I read the book, but basically they got started at a time when mass produced foods were first starting to become a thing that was possible thanks to the US being connected by rail transit for the first time. And apparently what had happened was Heinz was originally a pickled foods company, and apparently this was a big problem to solve because this was something that American families and traditionally the women would end up being in a position where they would do a bunch of essentially pickling of foods for the winter, and it was hugely labor intensive and not a lot of fun and whatever, and at some point someone figured out that, OK, you can send traveling salesmen around to sell pickled foods. But the problem with that is you’re buying a product that you won’t use for many months later, and so it would turn out that a lot of times these were shady and they would open it up in the wintertime and discover like sawdust inside. And so this was essentially a problem to solve if you want to take advantage of this potential at scale food business. But how do you build some trust in the same way that you would have trust with your local merchant where if they sell you something bad, you can go back and complain to them. And I guess Heinz was one of the pioneers here of thinking, well, I’m just going to literally put my name on the label in a very not only a name that’s always kind of the same, but a very recognizable typeface or logo or logo mark, and I’ll put that on there and I’ll work really hard to make sure the quality is high and build a reputation and connect that to the name and the logo and even the shape of the jar, and that was immensely successful and built the food empire that exists today, and now of course that’s totally standard practice, but at the time that was a huge innovation. And so thinking of brand as a technology, you use the term social technology sometimes. I don’t know if this would fall into that category, but that was an unlocking thing. And of course mass produced food, while we have some negative associations with that health wise nowadays, it was a huge unlocker for basically low cost food and more people being able to have full and healthy diets, um, which is, you know

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: There’s so many zillions of startups trying to try every single angle and opportunity in that area. And so the marginal return to investing your personal time in terms of the impact on the world might be relatively smaller there. Whereas there’s this whole space that I feel like is really under explored. And if you just make it about 80%, making a profit and 20% making a statement, that opens up all kinds of incredible opportunities. 00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by Mark McGramigan. Hey, Adam. And Mark, since we last spoke, I am a father. Congrats. Yeah, it’s great, or at least the non-sleep deprived parts are great. I’m actually on parental leave right now, but I enjoy doing this podcast enough. I thought I could sneak back for just an hour here, but if my brain is not at full capacity, let’s just say you’ll have to carry things for us. OK. Now, way back in episode 4, we talked about our partnership model. And the context there was we were hiring the 5th member of our team, our engineering partner, and I’m happy to say we have through that process, we added Adam Wulf to the team, really great engineer with a particular specialty in inking, which is quite important for us, and he’s been doing great on the team, so we’re now 5. And in the course of that, of course, we talked about kind of the nature of the company and how it’s different from other models, particularly the startup model, but I thought it would be good to both first take an episode to talk more explicitly about what this somewhat unusual business structure we chose was, and then also it’s been a year and a half actually coming up on 2 years now since we started this thing and so being able to essentially say how’s it going? Is this working out the way that we expected. And just to frame things up a little bit, a starting place and a point of inspiration for both of us is a book called Small Giants, and I read this many, many years ago, I think when I was in my startup lifestyle, I would say, but it it had a big impact on me, and the book basically profiles a bunch of, let’s call them, businesses that are maybe have an outsized impact. But they’re less about huge size or making it to the S&P 500 or something like that. So for example, they have Clif Bars in there or Whole Foods, which I think at the time the book was wrote was really kind of an up and comer, independent up and comer, or Union Square Cafe, which is quite kind of unique restaurant in the New York area, since expanded to other locations. And the process of profiling these businesses, they showed kind of a maybe an alternate to, I think they’re thinking more an alternate to the standard kind of public company path, but I at least for me, I read it as an alternate to the startup world, which at the time I was just completely immersed in. I was kind of the only way to do things with the startup way, and this book suggested another path. 00:03:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that book was quite influential on me as well. So Adam, I’m curious, what from the book did you find yourself taking away the most and applying to your future adventures? 00:03:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, in prep for this episode, I went and pulled out my Kindle highlights as a PDF and scanned through those a bit, and I have to say I’m not sure it’s actually a great book in terms of how it’s written, but there’s just a couple of core ideas that really hit home. One of those is they talk about businesses with soul or another term they use quite a bit is mojo, which is kind of a funny one. They talk about optimizing for mojo overgrowth and growth, of course, a business exists to Earn money, that’s it’s kind of practical function in the economy, and growth typically goes with that, it’s almost a requirement. So if you’re not growing, you’re stagnating. And that is taken to a real extreme in the startup world. I mean, Paul Graham even has an essay, Startup equals Growth, which just says, that is your sole purpose for being, grow, grow, grow fast as you can, and the counterpoint this book presents is mojo and expressing something kind of artistically and Having the soul is something you can choose. Of course, you still need to pay attention to the business fundamentals. You do still need to grow, but you can choose to have maybe a different balance where you say, you know what, this mojo thing we want to optimize for that and have enough growth to be successful but not have it be growth at the cost of absolutely every other thing. 00:04:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. For me,

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: So I think there’s space and the good thing is that niches are powerful now because niches are big enough. So if you only solve a smaller problem, but you solve that really well, you have a shot at that. 00:00:17 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, joined today by my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, Valan Oros of Kraft. Hey, Adam. And B, you live in Budapest, which is a city I had the opportunity to visit for about a week some time back, did all the things I suppose a tourist normally does, got a bike, rode around, looked at the big beautiful bridges, observed the main government building, which is really a stunning piece of architecture. Power limits, yeah, looks even better in real life than in the pictures, I would say. But of course, that’s probably the tourists perspective. What do you like about living in the city as more of a native. 00:01:07 - Speaker 1: So for me, living in the city is really about being close to my friends and family. So I’ve been born in Budapest. I think Budapest is a very livable city in the sense it has walkable areas, it has greener areas, you can use cars. And really interesting part about Budapest is I always think, you know, we’re so small in Central Europe and nobody will know anything about Budapest. But typically, this is what happens when I talk to people, hey, I’ve been beat up and they say, yeah, I’ve been there, you know, I’ve been there for 1 week or 2 days as a tourist and I love the city. So it’s nice, it’s actually more widely visited than I would have assumed earlier. 00:01:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, Berlin is also a city that has a lot of tourism, of course, but uh it’s had a different feel in this last year when travel restrictions and the normally areas that are full of tourists are pretty quiet. Not, I don’t necessarily see that as good or bad, it just changes the energy is Budapest got a different feel in this last year. 00:02:05 - Speaker 1: Yes, it got a very different feeling and I actually have to say I loved it. So we have areas like the castle in Budapest, which usually, you know, us locals do not visit because it’s very full with tourists, and in these days it’s been quite empty, so I have a small girl and we went out there a lot and, you know, play on the cannons and in the old streets. So it’s funny how a little bit it felt like you can get back very loved part of your city for locals, and it has a very, very different picture. So at least there are some things that aren’t totally negative in the sense of, we did actually rediscover a big chunk of our city. And I like that a lot. 00:02:54 - Speaker 2: Um, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, obviously there’s a big economic impact for a place that is a big part of the economy is tourism, but yeah, good to find that silver lining, I guess. And before we get into our topic here, I’d love to hear about your journey that led you to creating craft, and of course maybe you should tell the audience also what craft is. I’m a user customer. I’ve used it to write any of the recent news newsletters. I also wrote a pretty long essay called Making Computers Better that was entirely written using craft, so it’s my go to writing tool these days, but I’d love to hear your description of how you pitch the product to folks and your journey in coming here. 00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s very interesting. So for me, Cry at Kraft is a product that helps me think, and I like to think a lot through writing, and it was really inspired by the fact that I’m a very mobile person. My job has been in the last 10 years of I ran a company which built mobile apps and then I ran mobile for Skyscanner, which is a flight meta search engine, so it helps you find flights, and I’ve been overseeing the mobile product. And I always had this frustration that it’s so hard to think on our devices, so hard to capture notes, so hard to structure our thoughts, and really this was the real inspiration for me of how could I use these beautiful touch devices and it’s not just the iPhone, it’s also the iPad. And when I started in 2016, we didn’t have the pencil or the pencil probably we had, but the first generation, and it wasn’t the iPad Pros, but you could just feel that this device is so much easier to move around, you know, you can pick it up, it’s battery life, it’s superior, so it was the tool I wanted to use for my work every day, but just the lack of software because essentially at that time, And even today, frankly, most iPad products are b

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I actually say mostly seriously that games in the world of gaming predicts a lot of trends. So it goes from kind of pro games to mainstream games to consumer software to software for startups to software for enterprises. 00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. U is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. How are things in Seattle, Mark? 00:00:37 - Speaker 1: Going all right. We got the cherry blossoms this week in Seattle, which is exciting, and it’s a sign that we’re turning into the strong half of the Seattle weather calendar in the summer here. 00:00:47 - Speaker 2: Very nice, yeah, we’re seeing just a little bit of flowers starting to peek out on the trees. Here in Berlin, although it’s always an experience where you see the first flowers kind of try to come out when it seems like it might be warm enough on those first sunny days in March, and then inevitably it turns really cold again and they all die. Yeah. So you see this thing where there’s the pioneers that are trying to break through, and then eventually the weather turns and it comes into full bloom, which is absolutely excellent for those that like colorful flower rich environment, like me, probably pretty bad for those with allergies, I’m imagining. 00:01:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. All right, so I’m excited to do an episode, Adam, about learning from games. Now, games, gaming, the gaming ecosystem, something that’s come up on a lot of previous podcasts. We’ve mentioned it here and there, but I thought it would be a good time to do a proper episode, collecting all of the things that we’ve learned and gleaned from that industry. 00:01:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we mentioned in passing lots of times. I think we talked about it last time with Rasmus Anderson. It was a big part of our conversation with Andy Works, and he’s since published a great article essentially on exactly this topic called Serious Play. I’ll link in the show notes, of course, talking about his journey of playing a lot of games when he was younger, then eventually becoming, I don’t know, an adult with responsibilities and, you know, you don’t have As much time for that sort of thing anymore, and then rediscovering really rich uh world of of games that exist now, both the big budget stuff and the indie games, and also what we can learn from that, why these are important as artistic, as cultural, and certainly as inspiration for design. So Mark, when you’ve been inclined to reference games in connection with news, productivity, software tools for thought, it seems like they don’t have much in common, right? The productivity world is very focused on, well, being productive, which is almost the opposite of what you think of games are for, which is entertainment. So why is there a connection? Why are these two things so relevant to each other? 00:02:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s kind of the question of the podcast, isn’t it? Maybe we can start by motivating a little bit because I think we’re kind of sleeping on games as an industry. It’s something that in the typical world of Silicon Valley kind of flies under the radar for a variety of reasons, but in fact, games are a huge deal. It’s an enormous industry. They’re extremely influential in terms of the amount of time that people spend on them and the culture, and as we’ll see, I think there’s a lot of technology, products, social things that games have figured out. I think there’s a lot to learn there. 00:03:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one comparison you can make there is Hollywood, right? Films, TV, and I think it’s well understood, or most people would say, yeah, of course, Hollywood and films broadly have this huge impact on our culture. It’s this really big industry. The celebrities from that movie stars are lionized in our world and in our culture, and everything from patterns of speech to social change has happened often through seeing things like, I don’t know, gay couples on TV and movies. I think that helped pave the way for a broader acceptance and legal change of that. And so, that seems fairly clear, but games maybe, as you say, we’re sleeping on them, they fly under the radar, they’re seen for some reason as less influential or less important, but of course, if you look at something like just the dollars or the total kind of money that goes into the industry, it’s actually larger than Hollywood, much larger than films, um, and maybe on par with maybe something like professional sports. So, this is something that is ongoing, already has had huge cultural impac