Podcasts about doug engelbart

Jon and Keith are back at it ladies and gentleman. We are here at the Shat Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in a highly guarded and secretive location in of all places, Alabama, with some exciting SHAT to share with you. So, have you ever heard of Douglas Engelbart? We hadn't either until recently. He is most famously known as the inventor of the ubiquitous computer input device known as the mouse! But there's much more you fabulous flumadiddlers. On December 9th of the tumultuous year of our Lord, 1968, he did a thing! A big thing! He demonstrated the future of computing, or as the wikipedias puts it... He did a 90-minute presentation demonstrating for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system.  So sit back and enjoy as we caress your earholes with this amazing story.

Gutenburg shipped the first working printing press around 1450 and typeface was born. Before then most books were hand written, often in blackletter calligraphy. And they were expensive.    The next few decades saw Nicolas Jensen develop the Roman typeface, Aldus Manutius and Francesco Griffo create the first italic typeface. This represented a period where people were experimenting with making type that would save space. The 1700s saw the start of a focus on readability. William Caslon created the Old Style typeface in 1734. John Baskerville developed Transitional typefaces in 1757. And Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni created two typefaces that would become the modern family of Serif. Then slab Serif, which we now call Antique, came in 1815 ushering in an era of experimenting with using type for larger formats, suitable for advertisements in various printed materials. These were necessary as more presses were printing more books and made possible by new levels of precision in the metal-casting. People started experimenting with various forms of typewriters in the mid-1860s and by the 1920s we got Frederic Goudy, the first real full-time type designer. Before him, it was part of a job. After him, it was a job. And we still use some of the typefaces he crafted, like Copperplate Gothic. And we saw an explosion of new fonts like Times New Roman in 1931. At the time, most typewriters used typefaces on the end of a metal shaft. Hit a kit, the shaft hammers onto a strip of ink and leaves a letter on the page. Kerning, or the space between characters, and letter placement were often there to reduce the chance that those metal hammers jammed. And replacing a font would have meant replacing tons of precision parts. Then came the IBM Selectric typewriter in 1961. Here we saw precision parts that put all those letters on a ball. Hit a key, the ball rotates and presses the ink onto the paper. And the ball could be replaced. A single document could now have multiple fonts without a ton of work. Xerox exploded that same year with the Xerox 914, one of the most successful products of all time. Now, we could type amazing documents with multiple fonts in the same document quickly - and photocopy them. And some of the numbers on those fancy documents were being spat out by those fancy computers, with their tubes. But as computers became transistorized heading into the 60s, it was only a matter of time before we put fonts on computer screens. Here, we initially used bitmaps to render letters onto a screen. By bitmap we mean that a series, or an array of pixels on a screen is a map of bits and where each should be displayed on a screen. We used to call these raster fonts, but the drawback was that to make characters bigger, we needed a whole new map of bits. To go to a bigger screen, we probably needed a whole new map of bits. As people thought about things like bold, underline, italics, guess what - also a new file. But through the 50s, transistor counts weren't nearly high enough to do something different than bitmaps as they rendered very quickly and you know, displays weren't very high quality so who could tell the difference anyways.  Whirlwind was the first computer to project real-time graphics on the screen and the characters were simple blocky letters. But as the resolution of screens and the speed of interactivity increased, so did what was possible with drawing glyphs on screens.  Rudolf Hell was a German, experimenting with using cathode ray tubes to project a CRT image onto paper that was photosensitive and thus print using CRT. He designed a simple font called Digital Grotesk, in 1968. It looked good on the CRT and the paper. And so that font would not only be used to digitize typesetting, loosely based on Neuzeit Book. And we quickly realized bitmaps weren't efficient to draw fonts to screen and by 1974 moved to outline, or vector, fonts. Here a Bézier curve was drawn onto the screen using an algorithm that created the character, or glyph using an outline and then filling in the space between. These took up less memory and so drew on the screen faster. Those could be defined in an operating system, and were used not only to draw characters but also by some game designers to draw entire screens of information by defining a character as a block and so taking up less memory to do graphics.  These were scalable and by 1979 another German, Peter Karow, used spline algorithms wrote Ikarus, software that allowed a person to draw a shape on a screen and rasterize that. Now we could graphically create fonts that were scalable.  In the meantime, the team at Xerox PARC had been experimenting with different ways to send pages of content to the first laser printers. Bob Sproull and Bill Newman created the Press format for the Star. But this wasn't incredibly flexible like what Karow would create. John Gaffney who was working with Ivan Sutherland at Evans & Sutherland, had been working with John Warnock on an interpreter that could pull information from a database of graphics. When he went to Xerox, he teamed up with Martin Newell to create J&M, which harnessed the latest chips to process graphics and character type onto printers. As it progressed, they renamed it to Interpress. Chuck Geschke started the Imaging Sciences Laboratory at Xerox PARC and eventually left Xerox with Warnock to start a company called Adobe in Warnock's garage, which they named after a creek behind his house. Bill Paxton had worked on “The Mother of All Demos” with Doug Engelbart at Stanford, where he got his PhD and then moved to Xerox PARC. There he worked on bitmap displays, laser printers, and GUIs - and so he joined Adobe as a co-founder in 1983 and worked on the font algorithms and helped ship a page description language, along with Chuck Geschke, Doug Brotz, and Ed Taft.  Steve Jobs tried to buy Adobe in 1982 for $5 million. But instead they sold him just shy of 20% of the company and got a five-year license for PostScript. This allowed them to focus on making the PostScript language more extensible, and creating the Type 1 fonts. These had 2 parts. One that was a set of bit maps And another that was a font file that could be used to send the font to a device.  We see this time and time again. The simpler an interface and the more down-market the science gets, the faster we see innovative industries come out of the work done. There were lots of fonts by now. The original 1984 Mac saw Susan Kare work with Jobs and others to ship a bunch of fonts named after cities like Chicago and San Francisco. She would design the fonts on paper and then conjure up the hex (that's hexadecimal) for graphics and fonts. She would then manually type the hexadecimal notation for each letter of each font.  Previously, custom fonts were reserved for high end marketing and industrial designers. Apple considered licensing existing fonts but decided to go their own route. She painstakingly created new fonts and gave them the names of towns along train stops around Philadelphia where she grew up. Steve Jobs went for the city approach but insisted they be cool cities. And so the Chicago, Monaco, New York, Cairo, Toronto, Venice, Geneva, and Los Angeles fonts were born - with her personally developing Geneva, Chicago, and Cairo. And she did it in 9 x 7.  I can still remember the magic of sitting down at a computer with a graphical interface for the first time. I remember opening MacPaint and changing between the fonts, marveling at the typefaces. I'd certainly seen different fonts in books. But never had I made a document and been able to set my own typeface! Not only that they could be in italics, outline, and bold. Those were all her. And she inspired a whole generation of innovation. Here, we see a clean line from Ivan Sutherland and the pioneering work done at MIT to the University of Utah to Stanford through the oNLine System (or NLS) to Xerox PARC and then to Apple. But with the rise of Windows and other graphical operating systems. As Apple's 5 year license for PostScript came and went they started developing their own font standard as a competitor to Adobe, which they called TrueType. Here we saw Times Roman, Courier, and symbols that could replace the PostScript fonts and updating to Geneva, Monaco, and others. They may not have gotten along with Microsoft, but they licensed TrueType to them nonetheless to make sure it was more widely adopted. And in exchange they got a license for TrueImage, which was a page description language that was compatible with PostScript. Given how high resolution screens had gotten it was time for the birth of anti-aliasing. He we could clean up the blocky “jaggies” as the gamers call them. Vertical and horizontal lines in the 8-bit era looked fine but distorted at higher resolutions and so spatial anti-aliasing and then post-processing anti-aliasing was born. By the 90s, Adobe was looking for the answer to TrueImage. So 1993 brought us PDF, now an international standard in ISO 32000-1:2008. But PDF Reader and other tools were good to Adobe for many years, along with Illustrator and then Photoshop and then the other products in the Adobe portfolio. By this time, even though Steve Jobs was gone, Apple was hard at work on new font technology that resulted in Apple Advanced Typography, or AAT. AAT gave us ligature control, better kerning and the ability to write characters on different axes.  But even though Jobs was gone, negotiations between Apple and Microsoft broke down to license AAT to Microsoft. They were bitter competitors and Windows 95 wasn't even out yet. So Microsoft started work on OpenType, their own font standardized language in 1994 and Adobe joined the project to ship the next generation in 1997. And that would evolve into an open standard by the mid-2000s. And once an open standard, sometimes the de facto standard as opposed to those that need to be licensed. By then the web had become a thing. Early browsers and the wars between them to increment features meant developers had to build and test on potentially 4 or 5 different computers and often be frustrated by the results. So the WC3 began standardizing how a lot of elements worked  in Extensible Markup Language, or XML. Images, layouts, colors, even fonts. SVGs are XML-based vector image. In other words the browser interprets a language that displays the image. That became a way to render Web Open Format or WOFF 1 was published in 2009 with contributions by Dutch educator Erik van Blokland, Jonathan Kew, and Tal Leming. This built on the CSS font styling rules that had shipped in Internet Explorer 4 and would slowly be added to every browser shipped, including Firefox since 3.6, Chrome since 6.0, Internet Explorer since 9, and Apple's Safari since 5.1. Then WOFF 2 added Brotli compression to get sizes down and render faster. WOFF has been a part of the W3C open web standard since 2011.  Out of Apple's TrueType came TrueType GX, which added variable fonts. Here, a single font file could contain a number or range of variants to the initial font. So a family of fonts could be in a single file. OpenType added variable fonts in 2016, with Apple, Microsoft, and Google all announcing support. And of course the company that had been there since the beginning, Adobe, jumped on board as well. Fewer font files, faster page loads.  So here we've looked at the progression of fonts from the printing press, becoming more efficient to conserve paper, through the advent of the electronic typewriter to the early bitmap fonts for screens to the vectorization led by Adobe into the Mac then Windows. We also see rethinking the font entirely so multiple scripts and character sets and axes can be represented and rendered efficiently.  I am now converting all my user names into pig Latin for maximum security. Luckily those are character sets that are pretty widely supported. The ability to add color to pig Latin means that OpenType-SVG will allow me add spiffy color to my glyphs. It makes us wonder what's next for fonts. Maybe being able to design our own, or more to the point, customize those developed by others to make them our own. We didn't touch on emoji yet. But we'll just have to save the evolution of character sets and emoji for another day. In the meantime, let's think on the fact that fonts are such a big deal because Steve Jobs took a caligraphy class from a Trappist monk named Robert Palladino while enrolled at Reed College. Today we can painstakingly choose just the right font with just the right meaning because Palladino left the monastic life to marry and have a son. He taught jobs about serif and san serif and kerning and the art of typography.  That style and attention to detail was one aspect of the original Mac that taught the world that computers could have style and grace as well. It's not hard to imagine if entire computers still only supported one font or even one font per document. Palladino never owned or used a computer though. His influence can be felt through the influence his pupil Jobs had. And it's actually amazing how many people who had such dramatic impacts on computing never really used one. Because so many smaller evolutions came after them. What evolutions do we see on the horizon today? And how many who put a snippet of code on a service like GitHub may never know the impact they have on so many?

Continuing with the second half of our interview, with virtual space pioneer David A. Smith from Croquet. We look to the future by asking: Can we close the interactive loop? To answer this, we went back to the future where we discussed Doug Engelbart's Mother of all Demos from 1968. Which featured video conferencing and the use of the mouse. You can watch that video on YouTube here. Check out Croquet with a free Metaverse Web Showcase here Questions? Comments? I love to hear feedback from listeners and read them back the following episode. Send them directly to me friendlyfuturist@podcastswest.com.au Remember, folks, that this podcast is for educational purposes only and should not be seen as financial advice. Please do your own research before any finance or investment decisions. What topics and or trends would you like to hear about? Send in your thoughts to friendlyfutrist@podcastswest.com.au Tweet me directly: @friendlyfutruri1 or @beplayableoz How to support me :) Join the new Discord community and meet fellow Futureheads here Leave a 5-star review and spread the word! Let's grow the movement of optimists and forward thinkers! https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-friendly-futurist-1602097 Creating weekly podcasts is thirsty work, so why not shout Dave another tasty soy flat white? https://www.buymeacoffee.com/futureheads The full interviews for each of our guests are available on my Substack https://substack.com/profile/20391916-the-friendly-futurist?r=c52i4&s=r&utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=web Alternatively, you can tip us with Bitcoin Cash here: https://cointr.ee/podcastswest We have also pledged for Unicef, to help with humanitarian efforts during the Ukraine crisis., will you join us? Any small change will help https://www.unicef.org/appeals/ukraine

What I learned from reading Pieces of the Action by Vannevar Bush.Support Founders' sponsors: Tiny: The easiest way to sell your business. Quick and straightforward exits for Founders. andCapital: Raise, hold, and spend capital all in one place. and Tegus is a search engine for business knowledge that's used by founders, investors, and executives. It's incredible what they're building. Try it for free by visiting Tegus.[7:15] Pieces of the Action offers his hard-won lessons on how to operate and manage effectively within complex organizations and drive ambitious, unprecedented programs to fruition.[8:54] Stripe Press Books:The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell WaldropThe Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 by Jordan Mechner.[9:24] Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century by G. Pascal Zachary[10:40] Any exploration of the institutions that shape how we do research, generate discoveries, create inventions, and turn ideas into innovations inevitably leads back to Vannevar Bush.[11:26] No American has had greater influence in the growth of science and technology than Vannevar Bush.[12:23] That's why I'm going to encourage you to order this book —because when you pick it up and you read it —you're reading the words of an 80 year old genius. One of the most formidable and accomplished people that has ever lived— laying out what he learned over his six decade long career.[14:38] A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman (Founders #95)[15:12] Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing by Thierry Bardini[15:48] I don't know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug Engelbart's ideas. —  The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson. (Founders #157)[18:54] Bush points out that tipping points often rest with far-seeing, energetic individuals. We can be those individuals.[20:36] I went into this book with little more than a name and came out with the closest thing to a mentor someone you've never met can be.[20:58] We are not the first to face problems, and as we face them we can hold our heads high. In such spirit was this book written.[24:38] The essence of civilization is the transmission of the findings of each generation to the next.[29:00] This is not a call for optimism, it is a call for determination.[31:12] It is pleasant to turn to situations where conservatism or lethargy were overcome by farseeing, energetic individuals.[31:34] People are really a power law and that the best ones can change everything. —Sam Hinkie[33:46] There should never be, throughout an organization, any doubt as to where authority for making decisions resides, or any doubt that they will be promptly made.[34:32] You can drive great people by making the speed of decision making really slow. Why would great people stay in an organization where they can't get things done? They look around after a while, and they're, like, "Look, I love the mission, but I can't get my job done because our speed of decision making is too slow." — Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos by Jeff Bezos and Walter Isaacson.(Founders #155)[38:36] Rigid lines of authority do not produce the best innovations.[38:42] Research projects flowered in pockets all around the company, many of them without Steve's blessing or even awareness.They'd come to Steve's attention only if one of his key managers decided that the project or technology showed real potential.In that case, Steve would check it out, and the information he'd glean would go into the learning machine that was his brain. Sometimes that's where it would sit, and nothing would happen. Sometimes, on the other hand, he'd concoct a way to combine it with something else he'd seen, or perhaps to twist it in a way to benefit an entirely different project altogether.This was one of his great talents, the ability to synthesize separate developments and technologies into something previously unimaginable. —Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli (Founders #265)[40:56] He was so industrious that he became a positive annoyance to others who felt less inclined to work.  —Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power by James McGrath Morris. (Founders #135)[42:22] Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and The Secret Palace of Science That Changed The Course of World War II by Jennet Conant. (Founders #143)[45:35] If a man is a good judge of men, he can go far on that skill alone.[46:00] All the past episodes mentioned by Vannevar Bush in this book:General Leslie Groves: The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer—The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Bomb by James Kunetka. (Founders #215)J. Robert Oppenheimer: The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer—The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Bomb by James Kunetka. (Founders #215)Alfred Lee Loomis: Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and The Secret Palace of Science That Changed The Course of World War II by Jennet Conant. (Founders #143)J.P. Morgan: The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow. (Founders #139)The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Battle to Transform American Capitalism by Susan Berfield. (Founders #142)Orville Wright: The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. (Founders #239)Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies by Lawrence Goldstone. (Founders #241)Edwin Land: Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg. (Founders #263)Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos. (Founders #264)Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West by Mark Foster. (Founders #66)Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering by Thomas Boyd (Founders #125)Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bellby Charlotte Gray. (Founders #138)[48:21] Difficulties are often encountered in bringing an invention into production and use.[48:47] An invention has some of the characteristics of a poem.It is said that a poet may derive real joy out of making a poem, even if it is never published, even if he does not recite it to his friends, even if it is not a very good poem.No doubt, one has to be a poet to understand this.In the same way, an inventor can derive real satisfaction out of making an invention, even if he never expects to make a nickel out of it, even if he knows it is a bit foolish, provided he feels it involves ingenuity and insight.An inventor invents because he cannot help it, and also because he gets quiet fun out of doing so.Sometimes he even makes money at it, but not by himself. One has to be an inventor to understand this.One evening in Dayton, I dined alone with Orville Wright.During a long evening, we discussed inventions we had made that had never amounted to anything. He took me up to the attic and showed me models of various weird gadgets.I had plenty of similar efforts to tell him about, and we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.Neither of us would have thus spilled things except to a fellow practitioner, one who had enjoyed the elation of creation and who knew that such elation is, to a true devotee, independent of practical results.So it is also, I understand, with poets.[51:28] Against The Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson (Founders #200)[52:21] When picking an industry to enter, my favorite rule of thumb is this: Pick an industry where the founders of the industry—the founders of the important companies in the industry—are still alive and actively involved. — The Pmarca Blog Archive Ebook by Marc Andreessen. (Founders #50)[57:18] If a company operates only under patents it owns, and infringes on no others, its monopoly should not be disturbed, and the courts so hold. An excellent example is Polaroid Corporation. Founded by Edwin Land, one of the most ingenious men I ever knew (and also one of the wisest), it has grown and prospered because of his inventions and those of his team.[1:00:46] I came to the realization that they knew more about the subject than I did. In some ways, this was not strange. They were concentrating on it and I was getting involved in other things.[1:01:31] P.T. Barnum: An American Life by Robert Wilson. (Founders #137)[1:05:53] We make progress, lots of progress, in nearly every intellectual field, only to find that the more we probe, the faster our field of ignorance expands.[1:11:41] All the books from Stripe Press—Get 60 days free of Readwise. It is the best app I pay for. I couldn't make Founders without it.—“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

## 内容简介本期我从Douglas Engelbart的《增强人类智力 - 一个概念框架》展开，讨论工具设计与增强人类智力的关系，即工具用以提升人处理问题与决策的能力。再详细介绍了增强系统的组成与作用：语言、工具、方法论和训练。最后借马克思·韦伯《以学术为业》演讲的观点对于母题的重要作用，以及母题落地的实际问题进行回应。### 参考：- Doug Engelbart's landmark report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework(1962)- The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)- Vannevar Bush- Dynamicland - Bret Victor- 汪丁丁 - 《行为金融学讲义》- 设计乘数 # 41：从行为社会科学基本问题看去- 马克思韦伯 《以学术为业》

## 内容简介本期我从Douglas Engelbart的《增强人类智力 - 一个概念框架》展开，讨论工具设计与增强人类智力的关系，即工具用以提升人处理问题与决策的能力。再详细介绍了增强系统的组成与作用：语言、工具、方法论和训练。最后借马克思·韦伯《以学术为业》演讲的观点对于母题的重要作用，以及母题落地的实际问题进行回应。### 参考：- Doug Engelbart's landmark report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework(1962)- The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)- Vannevar Bush- Dynamicland - Bret Victor- 汪丁丁 - 《行为金融学讲义》- 设计乘数 # 41：从行为社会科学基本问题看去- 马克思韦伯 《以学术为业》

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We're getting back to my hypertext series with a big of an obscure tale. ZOG is a hypertext system what was first developed in 1972 at Carnegie-Melon University. It then stagnated until the latter half of the 1970s when it was picked back up. By 1983 it was cruising on a US Navy aircraft carrier. ZOG presents a hypertext system with some very modern notions. But here's the part that gets me excited: ZOG was developed after Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos. So, in theory, ZOG should take ques from this seminal event. Right? ... right?   Selected sources:   https://www.campwoodsw.com/mentorwizard/PROMISHistory.pdf - History of PROMIS   https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA049512.pdf - 1977 ZOG Report   https://apps.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA158084 - 1984 USS Carl Vinson Report

We had this Mac lab in school. And even though they were a few years old at the time, we had a whole room full of Macintosh SEs. I'd been using the Apple II Cs before that and these just felt like Isaac Asimov himself dropped them off just for me to play with. Only thing: no BASIC interpreter. But in the Apple menu, tucked away in the corner was a little application called HyperCard. HyperCard wasn't left by Asimov, but instead burst from the mind of Bill Atkinson. Atkinson was the 51st employee at Apple and a former student of Jeff Raskin, the initial inventor of the Mac before Steve Jobs took over. Steve Jobs convinced him to join Apple where he started with the Lisa and then joined the Mac team until he left with the team who created General Magic and helped bring shape to the world of mobile devices. But while at Apple he was on the original Mac team developing the menu bar, the double-click, Atkinson dithering, MacPaint, QuickDraw, and HyperCard.  Those were all amazing tools and many came out of his work on the original 1984 Mac and the Lisa days before that. But HyperCard was something entirely different. It was a glimpse into the future, even if self-contained on a given computer. See, there had been this idea floating around for awhile.  Vannevar Bush initially introduced the world to a device with all the world's information available in his article “As We May Think” in 1946. Doug Engelbart had a team of researchers working on the oN-Line System that saw him give “The Mother of All Demos in 1968” where he showed how that might look, complete with a graphical interface and hypertext, including linked content. Ted Nelson introduced furthered the ideas in 1969 of having linked content, which evolved into what we now call hyperlinks. Although Nelson thought ahead to include the idea of what he called transclusions, or the snippets of text displayed on the screen from their live, original source.  HyperCard built on that wealth of information with a database that had a graphical front-end that allowed inserting media and a programming language they called HyperTalk. Databases were nothing new. But a simple form creator that supported graphics and again stressed simple, was new. Something else that was brewing was this idea of software economics. Brooks' Law laid it out but Barry Boehm's book on Software Engineering Economics took the idea of rapid application development another step forward in 1981. People wanted to build smaller programs faster. And so many people wanted to build tools that we needed to make it easier to do so in order for computers to make us more productive. Against that backdrop, Atkinson took some acid and came up with the idea for a tool he initially called WildCard. Dan Winkler signed onto the project to help build the programming language, HyperTalk, and they got to work in 1986. They changed the name of the program to HyperCard and released it in 1987 at MacWorld. Regular old people could create programs without knowing how to write code. There were a number of User Interface (UI) components that could easily be dropped on the screen, and true to his experience there was panel of elements like boxes, erasers, and text, just like we'd seen in MacPaint. Suppose you wanted a button, just pick it up from the menu and drop it where it goes. Then make a little script using the HyperText that read more like the English language than a programming language like LISP.  Each stack might be synonymous with a web page today. And a card was a building block of those stacks. Consider the desktop metaphor extended to a rolodex of cards. Those cards can be stacked up. There were template cards and if the background on a template changed, that flowed to each card that used the template, like styles in Keynote might today. The cards could have text fields, video, images, buttons, or anything else an author could think of. And the author word is important. Apple wanted everyone to feel like they could author a hypercard stack or program or application or… app. Just as they do with Swift Playgrounds today. That never left the DNA. We can see that ease of use in how scripting is done in HyperTalk. Not only the word scripting rather than programming, but how HyperTalk is weakly typed. This is to say there's no memory safety or type safety, so a variable might be used as an integer or boolean. That either involves more work by the interpreter or compiler - or programs tend to crash a lot. Put the work on the programmers who build programming tools rather than the authors of HyperCard stacks. The ease of use and visual design made Hypercard popular instantly. It was the first of its kind. It didn't compile at first, although larger stacks got slow because HyperTalk was interpreted, so the team added a just-in-time compiler in 1989 with HyperCard 2.0. They also added a debugger.  There were some funny behaviors. Like some cards could have objects that other cards in a stack didn't have. This led to many a migration woe for larger stacks that moved into modern tools. One that could almost be considered HyperCard 3, was FileMaker. Apple spun their software business out as Claris, who bought Noshuba software, which had this interesting little database program called Nutshell. That became FileMaker in 1985. By the time HyperCard was ready to become 3.0, FileMaker Pro was launched in 1990.  Attempts to make Hypercard 3.0 were still made, but Hypercard had its run by the mid-1990s and died a nice quiet death. The web was here and starting to spread. The concept of a bunch of stacks on just one computer had run its course. Now we wanted pages that anyone could access. HyperCard could have become that but that isn't its place in history. It was a stepping stone and yet a milestone and a legacy that lives on. Because it was a small tool in a large company. Atkinson and some of the other team that built the original Mac were off to General Magic. Yet there was still this idea, this legacy.  Hypercard's interface inspired many modern applications we use to create applications. The first was probably Delphi, from Borland. But over time Visual Studio (which we still use today) for Microsoft's Visual Basic. Even Powerpoint has some similarities with HyperCard's interface. WinPlus was similar to Hypercard as well. Even today, several applications and tools use HyperCard's ideas such as HyperNext, HyperStudio, SuperCard, and LiveCode. HyperCard also certainly inspired FileMaker and every Apple development environment since - and through that, most every tool we use to build software, which we call the IDE, or Integrated Development Environment. The most important IDE for any Apple developer is Xcode. Open Xcode to build an app and look at Interface Builder and you can almost feel Bill Atkinson's pupils dilated pupils looking back at you, 10 hours into a trip. And within those pupils visions - visions of graphical elements being dropped into a card and people digitized CD collections, built a repository for their book collection, put all the Grateful Dead shows they'd recorded into a stack, or even built an application to automate their business. Oh and let's not forget the Zine, or music and scene magazines that were so popular in the era that saw photocopying come down in price. HyperCard made for a pretty sweet Zine.  HyperCard sprang from a trip when the graphical interface was still just coming into its own. Digital computing might have been 40 years old but the information theorists and engineers hadn't been as interested in making things easy to use. They wouldn't have been against it, but they weren't trying to appeal to regular humans. Apple was, and still is. The success of HyperCard seems to have taken everyone by surprise. Apple sold the last copy in 2004, but the legacy lives on. Successful products help to mass- Its success made a huge impact at that time as well on the upcoming technology. Its popularity declined in the mid-1990s and it died quietly when Apple sold its last copy in 2004. But it surely left a legacy that has inspired many - especially old-school Apple programmers, in today's “there's an app for that” world.

NLS, or the oN-Line System, is often looked at as a mile marker in the development of modern computing. It was the first system to use a mouse, one of the first functional examples of hypertext, pioneered remote collaboration, and so much more. But how much do you know about NLS itself? In this series of episode I'm picking apart the system behind the legend. Part 1 deals primarily with the early roots of NLS, Augmenting Human Intellect, and Doug Engelbart's vision of hypertext. Surprisingly, a lot of this episode has to do with punch cards and a more obscure related technology: the edge notched card. Selected Sources: https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/138 - Augmenting Human Intellect https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/englebar.htm - Engelbart Oral History, with the Smithsonian

The Internet is not a simple story to tell. In fact, every sentence here is worthy of an episode if not a few.  Many would claim the Internet began back in 1969 when the first node of the ARPAnet went online. That was the year we got the first color pictures of earthen from Apollo 10 and the year Nixon announced the US was leaving Vietnam. It was also the year of Stonewall, the moon landing, the Manson murders, and Woodstock. A lot was about to change. But maybe the story of the Internet starts before that, when the basic research to network computers began as a means of networking nuclear missile sites with fault-tolerant connections in the event of, well, nuclear war. Or the Internet began when a T3 backbone was built to host all the datas. Or the Internet began with the telegraph, when the first data was sent over electronic current. Or maybe the Internet began when the Chinese used fires to send messages across the Great Wall of China. Or maybe the Internet began when drums sent messages over long distances in ancient Africa, like early forms of packets flowing over Wi-Fi-esque sound waves.  We need to make complex stories simpler in order to teach them, so if the first node of the ARPAnet in 1969 is where this journey should end, feel free to stop here. To dig in a little deeper, though, that ARPAnet was just one of many networks that would merge into an interconnected network of networks. We had dialup providers like CompuServe, America Online, and even The WELL. We had regional timesharing networks like the DTSS out of Dartmouth University and PLATO out of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. We had corporate time sharing networks and systems. Each competed or coexisted or took time from others or pushed more people to others through their evolutions. Many used their own custom protocols for connectivity. But most were walled gardens, unable to communicate with the others.  So if the story is more complicated than that the ARPAnet was the ancestor to the Internet, why is that the story we hear? Let's start that journey with a memo that we did an episode on called “Memorandum For Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network” sent by JCR Licklider in 1963 and can be considered the allspark that lit the bonfire called The ARPANet. Which isn't exactly the Internet but isn't not. In that memo, Lick proposed a network of computers available to research scientists of the early 60s. Scientists from computing centers that would evolve into supercomputing centers and then a network open to the world, even our phones, televisions, and watches. It took a few years, but eventually ARPA brought in Larry Roberts, and by late 1968 ARPA awarded an RFQ to build a network to a company called Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) who would build Interface Message Processors, or IMPs. The IMPS were computers that connected a number of sites and routed traffic. The first IMP, which might be thought of more as a network interface card today, went online at UCLA in 1969 with additional sites coming on frequently over the next few years. That system would become ARPANET. The first node of ARPAnet went online at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA for short). It grew as leased lines and more IMPs became more available. As they grew, the early computer scientists realized that each site had different computers running various and random stacks of applications and different operating systems. So we needed to standardize certain aspects connectivity between different computers.  Given that UCLA was the first site to come online, Steve Crocker from there began organizing notes about protocols and how systems connected with one another in what they called RFCs, or Request for Comments. That series of notes was then managed by a team that included Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler from Stanford once Doug Engelbart's project on the “Augmentation of Human Intellect” at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) became the second node to go online. SRI developed a Network Information Center, where Feinler maintained a list of host names (which evolved into the hosts file) and a list of address mappings which would later evolve into the functions of Internic which would be turned over to the US Department of Commerce when the number of devices connected to the Internet exploded. Feinler and Jon Postel from UCLA would maintain those though, until his death 28 years later and those RFCs include everything from opening terminal connections into machines to file sharing to addressing and now any place where the networking needs to become a standard.  The development of many of those early protocols that made computers useful over a network were also being funded by ARPA. They funded a number of projects to build tools that enabled the sharing of data, like file sharing and some advancements were loosely connected by people just doing things to make them useful and so by 1971 we also had email. But all those protocols needed to flow over a common form of connectivity that was scalable. Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, and Donald Davies were independently investigating packet switching and Roberts brought Kleinrock into the project as he was at UCLA. Bob Kahn entered the picture in 1972. He would team up with Vint Cerf from Stanford who came up with encapsulation and so they would define the protocol that underlies the Internet, TCP/IP. By 1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn wrote RFC 675 where they coined the term internet as shorthand for internetwork. The number of RFCs was exploding as was the number of nodes. The University of California Santa Barbara then the University of Utah to connect Ivan Sutherland's work. The network was national when BBN connected to it in 1970. Now there were 13 IMPs and by 1971, 18, then 29 in 72 and 40 in 73. Once the need arose, Kleinrock would go on to work with Farouk Kamoun to develop the hierarchical routing theories in the late 70s. By 1976, ARPA became DARPA. The network grew to 213 hosts in 1981 and by 1982, TCP/IP became the standard for the US DOD and in 1983, ARPANET moved fully over to TCP/IP. And so TCP/IP, or Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol is the most dominant networking protocol on the planet. It was written to help improve performance on the ARPAnet with the ingenious idea to encapsulate traffic. But in the 80s, it was just for researchers still. That is, until NSFNet was launched by the National Science Foundation in 1986.  And it was international, with the University College of London connecting in 1971, which would go on to inspire a British research network called JANET that built their own set of protocols called the Colored Book protocols. And the Norwegian Seismic Array connected over satellite in 1973. So networks were forming all over the place, often just time sharing networks where people dialed into a single computer. Another networking project going on at the time that was also getting funding from ARPA as well as the Air Force was PLATO. Out of the University of Illinois, was meant for teaching and began on a mainframe in 1960. But by the time ARPAnet was growing PLATO was on version IV and running on a CDC Cyber. The time sharing system hosted a number of courses, as they referred to programs. These included actual courseware, games, convent with audio and video, message boards, instant messaging, custom touch screen plasma displays, and the ability to dial into the system over lines, making the system another early network. In fact, there were multiple CDC Cybers that could communicate with one another. And many on ARPAnet also used PLATO, cross pollinating non-defense backed academia with a number of academic institutions.  The defense backing couldn't last forever. The Mansfield Amendment in 1973 banned general research by defense agencies. This meant that ARPA funding started to dry up and the scientists working on those projects needed a new place to fund their playtime. Bob Taylor split to go work at Xerox, where he was able to pick the best of the scientists he'd helped fund at ARPA. He helped bring in people from Stanford Research Institute, where they had been working on the oNLineSystem, or NLS and people like Bob Metcalfe who brought us Ethernet and better collusion detection. Metcalfe would go on to found 3Com a great switch and network interface company during the rise of the Internet. But there were plenty of people who could see the productivity gains from ARPAnet and didn't want it to disappear. And the National Science Foundation (NSF) was flush with cash. And the ARPA crew was increasingly aware of non-defense oriented use of the system. So the NSF started up a little project called CSNET in 1981 so the growing number of supercomputers could be shared between all the research universities. It was free for universities that could get connected and from 1985 to 1993 NSFNET, surged from 2,000 users to 2,000,000 users. Paul Mockapetris made the Internet easier than when it was an academic-only network by developing the Domain Name System, or DNS, in 1983. That's how we can call up remote computers by names rather than IP addresses. And of course DNS was yet another of the protocols in Postel at UCLAs list of protocol standards, which by 1986 after the selection of TCP/IP for NSFnet, would become the standardization body known as the IETF, or Internet Engineering Task Force for short. Maintaining a set of protocols that all vendors needed to work with was one of the best growth hacks ever. No vendor could have kept up with demand with a 1,000x growth in such a small number of years. NSFNet started with six nodes in 1985, connected by LSI-11 Fuzzball routers and quickly outgrew that backbone. They put it out to bid and Merit Network won out in a partnership between MCI, the State of Michigan, and IBM. Merit had begun before the first ARPAnet connections went online as a collaborative effort by Michigan State University, Wayne State University, and the University of Michigan. They'd been connecting their own machines since 1971 and had implemented TCP/IP and bridged to ARPANET. The money was getting bigger, they got $39 million from NSF to build what would emerge as the commercial Internet.  They launched in 1987 with 13 sites over 14 lines. By 1988 they'd gone nationwide going from a 56k backbone to a T1 and then 14 T1s. But the growth was too fast for even that. They re-engineered and by 1990 planned to add T3 lines running in parallel with the T1s for a time. By 1991 there were 16 backbones with traffic and users growing by an astounding 20% per month.  Vint Cerf ended up at MCI where he helped lobby for the privatization of the internet and helped found the Internet Society in 1988. The lobby worked and led to the the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act in 1992. Before that, use of NSFNET was supposed to be for research and now it could expand to non-research and education uses. This allowed NSF to bring on even more nodes. And so by 1993 it was clear that this was growing beyond what a governmental institution whose charge was science could justify as “research” for any longer.  By 1994, Vent Cerf was designing the architecture and building the teams that would build the commercial internet backbone at MCI. And so NSFNET began the process of unloading the backbone and helped the world develop the commercial Internet by sprinkling a little money and know-how throughout the telecommunications industry, which was about to explode. NSFNET went offline in 1995 but by then there were networks in England, South Korea, Japan, Africa, and CERN was connected to NSFNET over TCP/IP. And Cisco was selling routers that would fuel an explosion internationally. There was a war of standards and yet over time we settled on TCP/IP as THE standard.  And those were just some of the nets. The Internet is really not just NSFNET or ARPANET but a combination of a lot of nets. At the time there were a lot of time sharing computers that people could dial into and following the release of the Altair, there was a rapidly growing personal computer market with modems becoming more and more approachable towards the end of the 1970s. You see, we talked about these larger networks but not hardware.  The first modulator demodulator, or modem, was the Bell 101 dataset, which had been invented all the way back in 1958, loosely based on a previous model developed to manage SAGE computers. But the transfer rate, or baud, had stopped being improved upon at 300 for almost 20 years and not much had changed. That is, until Hayes Hayes Microcomputer Products released a modem designed to run on the Altair 8800 S-100 bus in 1978. Personal computers could talk to one another.  And one of those Altair owners was Ward Christensen met Randy Suess at the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange and the two of them had this weird idea. Have a computer host a bulletin board on one of their computers. People could dial into it and discuss their Altair computers when it snowed too much to meet in person for their club. They started writing a little code and before you know it we had a tool they called Computerized Bulletin Board System software, or CBBS. The software and more importantly, the idea of a BBS spread like wildfire right along with the Atari, TRS-80, Commodores and Apple computers that were igniting the personal computing revolution. The number of nodes grew and as people started playing games, the speed of those modems jumped up with the v.32 standard hitting 9600 baud in 84, and over 25k in the early 90s. By the early 1980s, we got Fidonet, which was a network of Bulletin Board Systems and by the early 90s we had 25,000 BBS's. And other nets had been on the rise. And these were commercial ventures. The largest of those dial-up providers was America Online, or AOL. AOL began in 1985 and like most of the other dial-up providers of the day were there to connect people to a computer they hosted, like a timesharing system, and give access to fun things. Games, news, stocks, movie reviews, chatting with your friends, etc. There was also CompuServe, The Well, PSINet, Netcom, Usenet, Alternate, and many others. Some started to communicate with one another with the rise of the Metropolitan Area Exchanges who got an NSF grant to establish switched ethernet exchanges and the Commercial Internet Exchange in 1991, established by PSINet, UUNet, and CERFnet out of California.  Those slowly moved over to the Internet and even AOL got connected to the Internet in 1989 and thus the dial-up providers went from effectively being timesharing systems to Internet Service Providers as more and more people expanded their horizons away from the walled garden of the time sharing world and towards the Internet. The number of BBS systems started to wind down. All these IP addresses couldn't be managed easily and so IANA evolved out of being managed by contracts from research universities to DARPA and then to IANA as a part of ICANN and eventually the development of Regional Internet Registries so AFRINIC could serve Africa, ARIN could serve Antarctica, Canada, the Caribbean, and the US, APNIC could serve South, East, and Southeast Asia as well as Oceania LACNIC could serve Latin America and RIPE NCC could serve Europe, Central Asia, and West Asia. By the 90s the Cold War was winding down (temporarily at least) so they even added Russia to RIPE NCC. And so using tools like WinSOCK any old person could get on the Internet by dialing up. Modems for dial-ups transitioned to DSL and cable modems. We got the emergence of fiber with regional centers and even national FiOS connections. And because of all the hard work of all of these people and the money dumped into it by the various governments and research agencies, life is pretty darn good.  When we think of the Internet today we think of this interconnected web of endpoints and content that is all available. Much of that was made possible by the development of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in in 1991 at CERN, and Mosaic came out of the National Center for Supercomputing applications, or NCSA at the University of Illinois, quickly becoming the browser everyone wanted to use until Mark Andreeson left to form Netscape. Netscape's IPO is probably one of the most pivotal moments where investors from around the world realized that all of this research and tech was built on standards and while there were some patents, the standards were freely useable by anyone.  Those standards let to an explosion of companies like Yahoo! from a couple of Stanford grad students and Amazon, started by a young hedge fund Vice President named Jeff Bezos who noticed all the money pouring into these companies and went off to do his own thing in 1994. The companies that arose to create and commercialize content and ideas to bring every industry online was ferocious.  And there were the researchers still writing the standards and even commercial interests helping with that. And there were open source contributors who helped make some of those standards easier to implement by regular old humans. And tools for those who build tools. And from there the Internet became what we think of today. Quicker and quicker connections and more and more productivity gains, a better quality of life, better telemetry into all aspects of our lives and with the miniaturization of devices to support wearables that even extends to our bodies. Yet still sitting on the same fundamental building blocks as before. The IANA functions to manage IP addressing has moved to the private sector as have many an onramp to the Internet. Especially as internet access has become more ubiquitous and we are entering into the era of 5g connectivity.  And it continues to evolve as we pivot due to new needs and threats a globally connected world represent. IPv6, various secure DNS options, options for spam and phishing, and dealing with the equality gaps  surfaced by our new online world. We have disinformation so sometimes we might wonder what's real and what isn't. After all, any old person can create a web site that looks legit and put whatever they want on it. Who's to say what reality is other than what we want it to be. This was pretty much what Morpheus was offering with his choices of pills in the Matrix. But underneath it all, there's history. And it's a history as complicated as unraveling the meaning of an increasingly digital world. And it is wonderful and frightening and lovely and dangerous and true and false and destroying the world and saving the world all at the same time.  This episode is pretty simplistic and many of the aspects we cover have entire episodes of the podcast dedicated to them. From the history of Amazon to Bob Taylor to AOL to the IETF to DNS and even Network Time Protocol. It's a story that leaves people out necessarily; otherwise scope creep would go all the way back to to include Volta and the constant electrical current humanity received with the battery. But hey, we also have an episode on that! And many an advance has plenty of books and scholarly works dedicated to it - all the way back to the first known computer (in the form of clockwork), the Antikythera Device out of Ancient Greece. Heck even Louis Gerschner deserves a mention for selling IBM's stake in all this to focus on things that kept the company going, not moonshots.  But I'd like to dedicate this episode to everyone not mentioned due to trying to tell a story of emergent networks. Just because they were growing fast and our modern infrastructure was becoming more and more deterministic doesn't mean that whether it was writing a text editor or helping fund or pushing paper or writing specs or selling network services or getting zapped while trying to figure out how to move current that there aren't so, so, so many people that are a part of this story. Each with their own story to be told. As we round the corner into the third season of the podcast we'll start having more guests. If you have a story and would like to join us use the email button on thehistoryofcomputing.net to drop us a line. We'd love to chat!

Nearly everything is fine in moderation. Plastics exploded as an industry in the post World War II boom of the 50s and on - but goes back far further. A plastic is a category of materials called a polymer. These are materials comprised of long chains of molecules that can be easily found in nature because cellulose, the cellular walls of plants, comes in many forms. But while the word plastics comes from easily pliable materials, we don't usually think of plant-based products as plastics. Instead, we think of the synthetic polymers. But documented uses go back thousands of years, especially with early uses of natural rubbers, milk proteins, gums, and shellacs. But as we rounded the corner into the mid-1800s with the rise of chemistry things picked up steam. That's when Charles Goodyear wanted to keep tires from popping and so discovered vulcanization as a means to treat rubber. Vulcanization is when rubber is heated and mixed with other chemicals like sulphur. Then in 1869 John Wesley Hyatt looked for an alternative to natural ivory for things like billiards. He found that cotton fibers could be treated with camphor, which came from the waxy wood of camphor laurels. The substance could be shaped, dried, and then come off as most anything nature produced. When Wesley innovated plastics most camphor was extracted from trees, but today most camphor is synthetically produced from petroleum-based products, further freeing humans from needing natural materials to produce goods. Not only could we skip killing elephants but we could avoid chopping down forests to meet our needs for goods. Leo Baekeland gave us Bakelite in 1907. By then we were using other materials and the hunt was on for all kinds of materials. Shellac had been used as a moisture sealant for centuries and came from the female lac bugs in trees around India but could also be used to insulate electrical components. Baekeland created a phenol and formaldehyde solution he called Novolak but as with the advent of steel realized that he could change the temperature and how much pressure was applied to the solution that he could make it harder and more moldable - thus Bakelite became the first fully synthetic polymer. Hermann Staudinger started doing more of the academic research to explain why these reactions were happening. In 1920, he wrote a paper that looked at rubber, starch, and other polymers, explaining how their long chains of molecular units were linked by covalent bonds. Thus their high molecular weights. He would go on to collaborate with his wife Magda Voita, who was a bonanist and his polymer theories proven. And so plastics went from experimentation to science.  Scientists and experimenters alike continued to investigate uses and by 1925 there was even a magazine called Plastics. They could add filler to Bakelite and create colored plastics for all kinds of uses and started molding jewelry, gears, and other trinkets. They could heat it to 300 degrees and then inject it into molds. And so plastic manufacturing was born. As with many of the things we interact with in our modern world, use grew through the decades and there were other industries that started to merge, evolve, and diverge.  Éleuthère Irénée du Pont had worked with gunpowder in France and his family immigrated to the United States after the French Revolution. He'd worked with chemist Antoine Lavoisier while a student and started producing gunpowder in the early 1800s. That company, which evolved into the modern DuPont, always excelled in various materials sciences and through the 1920s also focused on a number of polymers. One of their employees, Wallace Carothers, invented neoprene and so gave us our first super polymer in 1928. He would go on to invent nylon as a synthetic form of silk in 1935. DuPont also brought us Teflon and insecticides in 1935. Acrylic acid went back to the mid-1800s but as people were experimenting with combining chemicals around the same time we saw British chemists John Crawford and Rowland Hill and independently German Otto Röhm develop products based on polymathy methacrylate. Here, they were creating clear, hard plastic to be used like glass. The Brits called theirs Perspex and the Germans called theirs Plexiglas when they went to market, with our friends back at DuPont creating yet another called Lucite.  The period between World War I and World War II saw advancements in nearly every science - from mechanical computing to early electrical switching and of course, plastics. The Great Depression saw a slow-down in the advancements but World War II and some of the basic research happening around the world caused an explosion as governments dumped money into build-ups. That's when DuPont cranked out parachutes and tires and even got involved in building the Savannah Hanford plutonium plant as a part of the Manhattan Project. This took them away from things like nylon, which led to riots. We were clearly in the era of synthetics used in clothing.  Leading up to the war and beyond, every supply chain of natural goods got constrained. And so synthetic replacements for these were being heavily researched and new uses were being discovered all over the place. Add in assembly lines and we were pumping out things to bring joy or improve lives at a constant clip. BASF had been making dyes since the 1860s but chemicals are chemicals and had developed polystyrene in the 1930s and continued to grow and benefit from both licensing and developing other materials like Styropor insulating foam.    Dow Chemical had been founded in the 1800s by Herbert Henry Dow, but became an important part of the supply chain for the growing synthetics businesses, working with Corning to produce silicones and producing styrene and magnesium for light parts for aircraft. They too would help in nuclear developments, managing the Rocky Flats plutonium triggers plant and then napalm, Agent Orange, breast implants, plastic bottles, and anything else we could mix chemicals with. Expanded polystyrene led to plastics in cups, packaging, and anything else. By the 60s we were fully in a synthetic world. A great quote from 1967's “The Graduate” was “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.” The future was here. And much of that future involved injection molding machines, now more and more common. Many a mainframe was encased in metal but with hard plastics we could build faceplates out of plastic. The IBM mainframes had lots of blinking lights recessed into holes in plastic with metal switches sticking out. Turns out people get shocked less when the whole thing isn't metal.  The minicomputers were smaller but by the time of the PDP-11 there were plastic toggles and a plastic front on the chassis. The Altair 8800 ended up looking a lot like that, but bringing that technology to the hobbyist. By the time the personal computer started to go mainstream, the full case was made of injection molding. The things that went inside computers were increasingly plastic as well. Going back to the early days of mechanical computing, gears were made out of metal. But tubes were often mounted on circuits screwed to wooden boards. Albert Hanson had worked on foil conductors that were laminated to insulating boards going back to 1903 but Charles Ducas patented electroplating circuit patterns in 1927 and Austrian Paul Eisler invented printed circuits for radio sets in the mid-1930s. John Sargrove then figured out he could spray metal onto plastic boards made of Bakelite in the late 1930s and uses expanded to proximity fuzes in World War II and then Motorola helped bring them into broader consumer electronics in the early 1950s. Printed circuit boards then moved to screen printing metallic paint onto various surfaces and Harry Rubinstein patented printing components, which helped pave the way for integrated circuits. Board lamination and etching was added to the process and conductive inks used in the creation might be etched copper, plated substrates or even silver inks as are used in RFID tags. We've learned over time to make things easier and with more precise machinery we were able to build smaller and smaller boards, chips, and eventually 3d printed electronics - even the Circuit Scribe to draw circuits. Doug Engelbart's first mouse was wood but by the time Steve Jobs insisted they be mass produceable they'd been plastic for Englebart and then the Alto. Computer keyboards had evolved out of the flexowriter and so become plastic as well. Even the springs that caused keys to bounce back up eventually replaced with plastic and rubberized materials in different configurations.  Plastic is great for insulating electronics, they are poor conductors of heat, they're light, they're easy to mold, they're hardy, synthetics require less than 5% of the oil we use, and they're recyclable. Silicone, another polymer, is a term coined by the English chemist F.S. Kipping in 1901. His academic work while at University College, Nottingham would kickstart the synthetic rubber and silicone lubricant industries. But that's not silicon. That's an element and a tetravalent metalloid at that. Silicon was discovered in 1787 by Antoine Lavoisier. Yup the same guy that taught Du Pont. While William Shockley started off with germanium and silicon when he was inventing the transistor, it was Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce who realized how well it acted as an insulator or a semiconductor it ended up used in what we now think of as the microchip. But again, that's not a plastic… Plastic of course has its drawbacks. Especially since we don't consume plastics in moderation. It takes 400 to a thousand years do decompose many plastics. The rampant use in every aspect of our lives has led to animals dying after eating plastic, or getting caught in islands of it as plastic is all over the oceans and other waterways around the world. That's 5 and a quarter trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean that weighs a combined 270,000 tons with another 8 million pieces flowing in there each and every day. In short, the overuse of plastics is hurting our environment. Or at least our inability to control our rampant consumerism is leading to their overuse. They do melt at low temperatures, which can work as a good or bad thing. When they do, they can release hazardous fumes like PCBs and dioxins. Due to many of the chemical compounds they often rely on fossil fuels and so are derived from non-renewable resources. But they're affordable and represent a trillion dollar industry. And we can all do better at recycling - which of course requires energy and those bonds break down over time so we can't recycle forever. Oh and the byproducts from the creation of products is downright toxic. We could argue that plastic is one of the most important discoveries in the history of humanity. That guy from The Graduate certainly would. We could argue it's one of the worst. But we also just have to realize that our modern lives, and especially all those devices we carry around, wouldn't be possible without plastics and other synthetic polymers. There's a future where instead of running out to the store for certain items, we just 3d print them. Maybe we even make filament from printed materials we no longer need. The move to recyclable materials for packaging helps reduce the negative impacts of plastics. But so does just consuming less. Except devices. We obviously need the latest and greatest of each of those all the time!  Here's the thing, half of plastics are single-purpose. Much of it is packaging like containers and wrappers. But can you imagine life without the 380 million tons of plastics the world produces a year? Just look around right now. Couldn't tell you how many parts of this microphone, computer, and all the cables and adapters are made of it. How many couldn't be made by anything else. There was a world without plastics for thousands of years of human civilization. We'll look at one of those single-purpose plastic-heavy industries called fast food in an episode soon. But it's not the plastics that are such a problem. It's the wasteful rampant consumerism. When I take out my recycling I can't help but think that what goes in the recycling versus compost versus garbage is as much a symbol of who I want to be as what I actually end up eating and relying on to live. And yet, I remain hopeful for the world in that these discoveries can actually end up bringing us back into harmony with the world around us without reverting to luddites and walking back all of these amazing developments like we see in the science fiction dystopian futures.

Carla Gericke joins the show once again to talk all about the latest goings-on in the Free State of New Hampshire! She previews this year's PorcFest, planned to be the biggest one yet, coronavirus be damned...get your tickets now! She also discusses a couple of serious topics, namely the targeting of two separate, New Hampshire-based cryptocurrency projects by the government: the longtime owners of some BTM machines who have been targeted by the ATF & FBI for alleged money laundering & wire fraud, and the SEC's targeting of LBRY and its video streaming service Odyssey that could destroy the service. Plus, Carla chats with Tatiana about police misconduct, COVID restrictions, the vaccine passport, and her new book The Ecstatic Pessimist!About the GuestCarla Gericke (JD, MFA) is an advocate of liberty specializing in localized voluntarism, self-determination, and how responsible human action can lead to peace and prosperity. She is president emeritus of theFree State Project, and lives in New Hampshire with thousands of fellow freedom fighters. In 2014, Carla won a landmark court case affirming the 1st Amendment right to film police encounters. She has appeared on WMUR, CNN, and Fox News, been featured inGQand Playboy, been quoted inThe Economist, and has discussed libertarianism onthe BBC. She has visited more than 40 countries, hiked to the base camp of the 10th highest mountain in the world, lost a shoe in a taxi more than once, had her passport stolen in Goa, got kidnapped in Vietnam, and has noshed on more "mystery meat" street food than she cares to admit. Carla once spent an entire summer while working as in-house counsel at Logitech eating tuna fish sandwiches with Doug Engelbart (the Mother Of All Demos dude), she worked on Apple's acquisition of Steve Job's NeXT, and bought her first Bitcoin for $6. Carla co-hosts theTold You Sopodcast, and co-chairs Manch Talk TV. She serves on several non-profit boards, follows a Keto lifestyle (read about her transformation), practices yoga and shooting, and plays a mean game of Scrabble. Carla enjoys cooking, gardening, painting, reading, and watching documentary films. She has twice run for New Hampshire Senate, garnering 42% of the vote in 2018 against an 11-term incumbent, and over 44% in 2020!Carla's first book, The Ecstatic Pessimist, a collection of award-winning short stories, flashes, speeches, and essays is available now!The Ecstatic Pessimist - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087XWGSFN/?tag=tatianashow-20PorcFest - http://porcfest.com/Free State Project - https://www.fsp.org/Carla for NH Senate - https://www.carla4nhsenate.com/TatianaMoroz.com - https://www.tatianamoroz.com/Friends and Sponsors of the Show:Proof of Love - http://proofoflovecast.com/Crypto Media Hub - https://www.cryptomediahub.com/Global Crypto Advisors - http://globalcryptoadvisors.com*You have been listening to the Tatiana Show. This show may contain adult content, language, and humor and is intended for mature audiences. If that's not you, please stop listening. Nothing you hear on The Tatiana Show is intended as financial advice, legal advice, or really, anything other than entertainment. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Oh, and if you're hearing us on an affiliate network, the ideas and views expressed on this show, are not necessarily those of the network you are listening on, or of any sponsors or any affiliate products you may hear about on the show.

Carla Gericke joins the show once again to talk all about the latest goings-on in the Free State of New Hampshire! She previews this year's PorcFest, planned to be the biggest one yet, coronavirus be damned...get your tickets now! She also discusses a couple of serious topics, namely the targeting of two separate, New Hampshire-based cryptocurrency projects by the government: the longtime owners of some BTM machines who have been targeted by the ATF & FBI for alleged money laundering & wire fraud, and the SEC's targeting of LBRY and its video streaming service Odyssey that could destroy the service. Plus, Carla chats with Tatiana about police misconduct, COVID restrictions, the vaccine passport, and her new book The Ecstatic Pessimist! About the Guest Carla Gericke (JD, MFA) is an advocate of liberty specializing in localized voluntarism, self-determination, and how responsible human action can lead to peace and prosperity. She is president emeritus of the Free State Project, and lives in New Hampshire with thousands of fellow freedom fighters. In 2014, Carla won a landmark court case affirming the 1st Amendment right to film police encounters. She has appeared on WMUR, CNN, and Fox News, been featured in GQ and Playboy, been quoted in The Economist, and has discussed libertarianism on the BBC. She has visited more than 40 countries, hiked to the base camp of the 10th highest mountain in the world, lost a shoe in a taxi more than once, had her passport stolen in Goa, got kidnapped in Vietnam, and has noshed on more “mystery meat” street food than she cares to admit. Carla once spent an entire summer while working as in-house counsel at Logitech eating tuna fish sandwiches with Doug Engelbart (the Mother Of All Demos dude), she worked on Apple’s acquisition of Steve Job’s NeXT, and bought her first Bitcoin for $6. Carla co-hosts the Told You So podcast, and co-chairs Manch Talk TV. She serves on several non-profit boards, follows a Keto lifestyle (read about her transformation), practices yoga and shooting, and plays a mean game of Scrabble. Carla enjoys cooking, gardening, painting, reading, and watching documentary films. She has twice run for New Hampshire Senate, garnering 42% of the vote in 2018 against an 11-term incumbent, and over 44% in 2020! Carla’s first book, The Ecstatic Pessimist, a collection of award-winning short stories, flashes, speeches, and essays is available now! The Ecstatic Pessimist - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087XWGSFN/?tag=tatianashow-20 PorcFest - http://porcfest.com/ Free State Project - https://www.fsp.org/ Carla for NH Senate - https://www.carla4nhsenate.com/ TatianaMoroz.com - https://www.tatianamoroz.com/ Friends and Sponsors of the Show:Proof of Love - http://proofoflovecast.com/Crypto Media Hub - https://www.cryptomediahub.com/ Global Crypto Advisors - http://globalcryptoadvisors.com *You have been listening to the Tatiana Show. This show may contain adult content, language, and humor and is intended for mature audiences.  If that’s not you, please stop listening. Nothing you hear on The Tatiana Show is intended as financial advice, legal advice, or really, anything other than entertainment. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Oh, and if you’re hearing us on an affiliate network, the ideas and views expressed on this show, are not necessarily those of the network you are listening on, or of any sponsors or any affiliate products you may hear about on the show.

2015 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page. This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It's also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative. For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how they happen.

What I learned from reading The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson.Subscribe to continue listening and gain access to all full episodes. All subscriptions come with a 7-day free trial. What other people are saying:“Uniquely outstanding. No fluff and all substance. David does an outstanding job summarizing these biographies and hones in on the elements that make his subjects so unique among entrepreneurs. I particularly enjoy that he focuses on both the founder’s positive and negative characteristics as a way of highlighting things to mimic and avoid.”“Without a doubt, the highest value-to-cost ratio I’ve taken advantage of in the last year is the Founders podcast premium feed. Tap into eons of knowledge and experiences, condensed into digestible portions, for roughly the cost of a takeout meal. Highly, highly recommend.“I haven’t found a better return on my time and money than your podcast for inspiration and time-tested wisdom to help me on my journey.“It is worth every penny. I cannot put into words how fantastic this podcast is. Just stop reading this and get the full access.”“Reading a biography is a privilege that condenses a life's journey, all its lessons, loves AND mistakes into 20 odd hours of reading. Here David condenses many of the best and intriguing Bios into 1-2 hours. Presented organically and thoughtfully with full book links and show notes for ease. Subscribe right away!”START YOUR 7 DAY FREE TRIAL HERE. 

My guest in this episode is Molly Wright Steenson, a designer, author, professor, and international speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of design, architecture, and artificial intelligence.  In this wide-ranging discussion, Molly explains how the history of computational technologies, architecture, pattern language and AI combined to define the fields of Agile, interaction design, UX, AI and pretty much the rest of today's digital world. Show Notes  This episode's archive and transcript (https://pln.me/p10) Molly at Girlwonder.com (http://www.girlwonder.com/) Molly on Twitter (https://twitter.com/maximolly) Molly on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mollysteenson/) Molly at CMU (https://design.cmu.edu/people/faculty/molly-steenson#profile-main) Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (https://amzn.to/32ZApiF) Bauhaus Futures (https://amzn.to/361wHGP) Molly talking pneumatic tubes (https://soundcloud.com/roman-mars/61-a-series-of-tubes) Mark Pesce and Dr. Genevieve Bell’s podcast on the Mother of All Demos (https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/12/07/1968-when-the-world-began-the-mother-of-all-demos/) Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY) Doctor’s Note newsletter (https://pln.me/nws) Andy on Twitter (https://twitter.com/apolaine) Andy on LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/in/andypolaine) Polaine.com (https://www.polaine.com/) Get in touch! (https://www.polaine.com/contact) And if you like Power of Ten, please consider giving it a rating or review on iTunes.

In this very short episode, I will be saying a few words for William English. White Rabbit: Interview with Doug Engelbart and Bill English, Moderated by John Markoff. Link This is a text to speech generated voice. Subscribe to My Newsletter : http://eepurl.com/gruRrX In this Weekly Newsletter, I'm going to share with you what's new in the world of Technology, Security and Privacy for everyone. One e-mail every week and no spam, I promise.

How cool would it be to talk to some of the greatest minds from the past and get their opinions on important matters happening today? For the Institute for the Future (TIFT), Eileen Clegg designs timeline murals used to reveal patterns between society and technology which gives TIFT information to forecast the future. Jack Russo wonders if augmented human intelligence could be in the future as he and Eileen Clegg celebrate Douglas Engelbart's theory of coevolution and the idea that mapping and organizing information could solve problems all over the world.

Liberty activist and NH state senate candidate Carla Gericke joins Tatiana and Josh in the first part of the show to discuss coronavirus response in New Hampshire and nationwide, and why she believes the full lockdown was an unnecessary infringement of our rights. She also discusses her ongoing New Hampshire state senate campaign and her plans for this year’s PorcFest. Then, GIVE Nation co-founder and blockchain strategist Alyze Sam joins Tatiana to talk about Virtual Blockchain Week, a live streaming event featuring some of the biggest names in crypto (and Tatiana’s performance at the after party), as well as her involvement with the charity organization GIVE Nation. About the Guests:Carla Gericke (JD, MFA) is an advocate of liberty specializing in localized voluntarism, self-determination, and how responsible human action can lead to peace and prosperity. She is president emeritus of the Free State Project, and lives in New Hampshire with thousands of fellow freedom fighters. In 2014, Carla won a landmark court case affirming the 1st Amendment right to film police encounters. She has appeared on WMUR, CNN, and Fox News, been featured in GQ and Playboy, been quoted in The Economist, and has discussed libertarianism on the BBC. She has visited more than 40 countries, hiked to the base camp of the 10th highest mountain in the world, lost a shoe in a taxi more than once, had her passport stolen in Goa, got kidnapped in Vietnam, and has noshed on more “mystery meat” street food than she cares to admit. Carla once spent an entire summer while working as in-house counsel at Logitech eating tuna fish sandwiches with Doug Engelbart (the Mother Of All Demos dude), she worked on Apple’s acquisition of Steve Job’s NeXT, and bought her first Bitcoin for $6. Carla co-hosts the Told You So podcast, and co-chairs Manch Talk TV. She serves on several non-profit boards, follows a Keto lifestyle (read about her transformation), practices yoga and shooting, and plays a mean game of Scrabble. Carla enjoys cooking, gardening, painting, reading, and watching documentary films. She has twice run for New Hampshire Senate, garnering 42% of the vote in 2018 against an 11-term incumbent, and believes in 2020, third time will be the charm! DONATE to her race TODAY! Carla's first book, The Ecstatic Pessimist, a collection of award-winning short stories, flashes, speeches, and essays is forthcoming next month. Show your support by pre-ordering the Amazon Kindle version of The Ecstatic Pessimist now!   Alyze Sam is a refreshing blockchain strategist, a novel educator, and vehemently driven advocate. First, dedicating her life to her patients in hospice nursing, Sam passionately embraced the world of financial technology after nearly losing her own life, not once, but twice! Sam feels her destiny lies within serving her community and assisting other ‘underdogs’ with love and education. She’s achieving these dreams with roles as; Co-Founder and Chief Executive Assistant for GIVE Nation, a non-profit children’s financial literacy AI/blockchain project which rewards altruistic behaviors.  She’s a Founder and Community Director of Women in Blockchain International and sits as an  ‘Social Impact Advisor’ for blockchain nonprofits; Blockchance.eu & Women in Blockchain Foundation. Alyze has been an active participant and speaker in the internationally known Women in Blockchain community.   If you like this content, please send a tip with BTC to: 1Q2QHoNowg8D2QzWhBQU1YrraG771aCpgS More Info: The Ecstatic Pessimist (Pre-order) PorcFest Free State Project Carla for NH Senate Told You So GIVE Nation Women in Blockchain  Virtual Blockchain Week  TatianaMoroz.com Vaultoro Friends and Sponsors of the Show: Proof of LoveCrypto Media Hub *You have been listening to the Tatiana Show. This show may contain adult content, language, and humor and is intended for mature audiences.  If that’s not you, please stop listening. Nothing you hear on The Tatiana Show is intended as financial advice, legal advice, or really, anything other than entertainment. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Oh, and if you’re hearing us on an affiliate network, the ideas and views expressed on this show, are not necessarily those of the network you are listening on, or of any sponsors or any affiliate products you may hear about on the show. 

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to look at the impact Stewart Brand had on computing. Brand was one of the greatest muses of the interactive computing and then the internet revolutions. This isn't to take anything away from his capacity to create, but the inspiration he provided gave him far more reach than nearly anyone in computing. There's a decent chance you might not know who he his. There's even a chance that you've never heard of any of his creations. But you live and breath some of his ideas on a daily basis. So who was this guy and what did he do? Well, Stewart Brand was born in 1938, in Rockford, Illinois. He would go on to study biology at Stanford, enter the military and then study design and photography at other schools in the San Francisco area. This was a special time in San Francisco. Revolution was in the air. And one of the earliest scientific studies had him legitimately dosing on LSD. One of my all-time favorite books was The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe. In the book, Wolfe follows Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters along a journey of LSD and Benzedrine riddled hippy goodness, riding a converted school bus across the country and delivering a new kind of culture straight out of Haight-Ashbury and to the heart of middle America. All while steering clear of the shoes FBI agents of the day wore. Here he would have met members of the Grateful Dead, Neal Cassady, members of the Hells Angels, Wavy Gravy, Paul Krassner, and maybe even Kerouac and Ginsberg. This was a transition from the Beat Generation to the Hippies of the 60s. Then he started the Whole Earth Catalog. Here, he showed the first satallite imagery of the planet Earth, which he'd begun campaigning NASA to release two years earlier. In the 5 years he made the magazine, he spread ideals like ecology, a do it yourself mentality, self-sufficiency, and what the next wave of progress would look like. People like Craig Newmark of Craig's List would see the magazine and it would help to form a new world view. In fact, the Whole Earth Catalog was a direct influence on Craig's List. Steve Jobs compared the Whole Earth Catalog to a 60s era Google. It inspired Wired Magazine. Earth Day would be created two years later. Brand would loan equipment and inspire spinoffs of dozens of magazines and books. And even an inspiration for many early websites. The catalog put him in touch with so, so many influential people. One of the first was Doug Engelbart and The Mother Of All Demos involves him in the invention of the mouse and the first video conferencing. In fact, Brand helped produce the Mother Of All Demos! As we moved into the 70s he chronicled the oncoming hacker culture, and the connection to the 60s-era counterculture. He inspired and worked with Larry Brilliant, Lee Felsenstein, and Ted Nelson. He basically invented being a “futurist” founding CoEvolution Quarterly and spreading the word of digital utopianism. The Whole Earth Software Review would come along with the advent of personal computers. The end of the 70s would also see him become a special advisor to former California governor Jerry Brown. In the 70s and 80s, he saw the Internet form and went on to found one of the earliest Internet communities, called The WELL, or Whole Earth Lectronic Link. Collaborations in the WELL gave us Barlow's The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a safe haunt for Kevin Mitnick while on the run, Grateful Dead tape trading, and many other Digerati. There would be other virtual communities and innovations to the concept like social networks, eventually giving us online forums, 4chan, Yelp, Facebook, LinkedIn, and corporate virtual communities. But it started with The Well. He would go on to become a visiting scientist in the MIT Media Lab, organize conferences, found the Global Business Network with Peter Schwarts, Jay Ogilvy and other great thinkers to help with promoting values and various planning like scenario planning, a corporate strategy that involves thinking from the outside in. This is now a practice inside Deloitte. The decades proceeded on and Brand inspired whole new generations to leverage humor to push the buttons of authority. Much as the pranksters inspired him on the bus. But it wasn't just anti-authority. It was a new and innovative approach in an upcoming era of maximizing short-term profits at the expense of the future. Brand founded The Long Now Foundation with an outlook that looked 10,000 years in the future. They started a clock on Jeff Bezos' land in Texas, they started archiving languages approaching extinction, Brian Eno led seminars about long-term thinking, and inspired Anathem, a novel from one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson. Peter Norton, Pierre Omidyar, Bruce Sterling, Chris Anderson of the Economist and many others are also involved. But Brand inspired other counter-cultures as well. In the era of e-zines, he inspired Jesse Dresden, who Brand knew as Jefferson Airplane Spencer Drydens kid. The kid turned out to be dFx, who would found HoHo Con an inspiration for DefCon. Stewart Brand wrote 5 books in addition to the countless hours he spent editing books, magazines, web sites, and papers. Today, you'll find him pimping blockchain and cryptocurrency, in an attempt to continue decentralization and innovation. He inherited a playful counter-culture. He watched the rise and fall and has since both watched and inspired the innovative iterations of countless technologies, extending of course into bio-hacking. He's hobnobbed with the hippies, the minicomputer timeshares, the PC hackers, the founders of the internet, the tycoons of the web, and then helped set strategy for industry, NGOs, and governments. He left something with each. Urania was the muse of astronomy, some of the top science in ancient Greece. And he would probably giggle if anyone compared him to the muse. Both on the bus in the 60s, and in his 80s today. He's one of the greats and we're lucky he graced us with his presence on this rock - that he helped us see from above for the first time. Just as I'm lucky you elected to listen to this episode. So next time you're arguing about silly little things at work, think about what really matters and listen to one of his Ted Talks. Context. 10,000 years. Have a great week and thanks for listening to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast.

One person with Uncommon Sense can have a profound effect on the world. Wait until you hear the story of Doug Engelbart: he’s the visionary behind many of the technologies you use most every day (13-3/4 minutes). Show Page: https://thisistrue.com/podcast50

TOR: The Dark Net Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we're able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! I've heard people claim the Internet was meant to be open. The Internet was built using United States defense department grants. It wasn't meant to be a freedom movement. These concepts were co-opted by some of the hippies who worked on the Internet. People I highly respect, like Stuart Brand and Doug Engelbart. Generations of engineers and thinkers later we got net neutrality, we got the idea that people should be anonymous. They rightfully looked to the Internet as a new freedom. But to be clear, those were never in the design requirement for any of the original Internet specifications. And sometimes the intent tells you a lot about the architecture and therefore explains the evolution and why certain aspects were necessary. The Internet began in the 1960s. But the modern Internet began in 1981 when the National Science Foundation took over funding and implemented Internet Protocol Suite, giving the IP part of the name to the acronym TCP/IP. Every device on the Internet has an IP address. You ask another host on the Internet for information and the site responds with that information. That response routes to the IP address listed as the source IP address in the packets of data you sent when you made the request. You can send the source IP address as an address other than your own, but then the response will be sent to the wrong place. Every device in a communication between two computers is meant to know the source and destination address of all the other devices involved in that communication. The Internet was meant to be resilient. It's really expensive to have a private network, or a network where your computer talks directly to another. Let's say your computer and another computer would like to have a conversation. That conversation likely passes through 10-12 other devices, if not more. The devices between you were once called IMPs but they're now called routers. Those devices keep a table of addresses they've attempted to communicate with and the routes between other routers that they took to get there. Thus the name. Once upon a time those routes were programmed in manually. Later the routers got smarter, forming a pyramid scheme where they look to bigger routers that have more resources to host larger and larger routing tables. The explosion of devices on the Internet also led to a technology called Network Address Translation. This is where one of the 3,720,249,092 is split into potentially hundreds of thousands of devices and your device communicates with the Internet through that device. These are routers that route traffic back to the private address you're using to communicate with the Internet. When bad people started to join us on the Internet these devices ended up with a second use, to keep others from communicating with your device. That's when some routers started acting as a firewall. Putting names to the side, this is the most basic way to explain how computers communicate over the Internet. This public Internet was then a place where anyone with access to those routers could listen to what was passing over them. Thus we started to encrypt our communications. Thus http became https. Each protocol would encrypt traffic in its own way. But then we needed to hide all of our traffic. And maybe even what sites we were going to. A common technique to hide who you are online is to establish a VPN into a computer. A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a point to point network, established over existing Internet protocols. The VPN server you are logging into knows what IP address you are on. It can also intercept your communications, replay them, and even if encrypted, be aware of who you are actually communicating with. So a few minutes of over-simplified text lays out the basis of the Internet routing scheme under IPv4, that was initiated in 1983, the year the movie WarGames was released. Remember, the Internet was meant o build a resilient, fault tolerant network so that in the event of nuclear war, the US could retaliate and kill the other half of the people left in the world. If you've seen WarGames you have a pretty good idea of what we're talking about here. Just to repeat: Privacy was never a concern in the design of the Internet. The United States has people in every country in the world that need to communicate home in real time. They need to do so in a secure and private manner. Part of the transition of the Internet to the National Science Foundation was to implement MilNet, their own network. But let's say you're an operative in Iran. If you try to connect to milnet then you're likely to nat have a very good day. So these operatives needed to communicate back to the United States over a public network. If they used a VPN then the connection isn't fully secured and they run the risk of getting found because eventually someone would be discovered and all traffic to a given address would be analyzed and that source device tracked down and more bad days. Let's say you're a political dissident in a foreign country. You want to post photos of war crimes. You need a way to securely and anonymously communicate with a friendly place to host that information. Enter the United States Naval Research Laboratory with Paul Syverson, David Goldschlag, and Michael Reed who were asked to find some ways to help protect the US intelligence community when they were on the public Internet. Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson would join the project and DARPA would pick up funding in 1997. They came up with what we now called TOR, or The Onion Router. Any property on the Internet that is intentionally exclusionary to the public can be considered a dark net or part of the dark web. Although usually we aren't talking about your company intranet when we refer to these networks. Tor is simple and incredibly complicated. You install software, or a browser extension. Tor routes your data through a bunch of nodes. Each of those computers or routers is only aware of the node in front of or behind it in the communication route and encrypting the next node sent. Since each step is encrypted, these layers of encryption can be considered like a network with layers like an onion. The name might also come from the fact that a lot of people cry when they realize what TOR speeds are like. So if each step is partially encrypted, a compromise of any device in the route will still defeat network surveillance. Instead we're *usually* talking about something like Tor. This is all pretty ingenious. So anyone can access the Internet anonymously? Yes. And when they do they can do anything they want, totally anonymously, right? Yes. And this is what is often called the Dark Web? Ish. There are sites you can access anonymously through Tor. Those sites might deal in drugs, fraud, counterfeit anything, gambling, hacking, porn, illegal guns, prostitution, anything. And anything might be really, really bad. You can quickly find terrible things, from violence for hire to child pornography. Humans can be despicable. Wait, so are we saying the US government really supports TOR? Yes. Most of the funding for the TOR project comes from the US government. Human Rights Watch, Reddit, and Google kick in money here and there. But it's not much comparably. China, Turkey, and Venezuela banned Tor? Duh. They would ban it in North Korea but they don't need to. TOR was used by Edward Snowden in 2013 to send leaked information to The Washington Post and The Guardian. And the use of the network has picked up ever since. According to leaked information the NSA finds TOR annoying. Even though the US government funds it. As does the Russian government, who's offered a bounty for deanonymization techniques. After the fallout from Snowden's leaked data, the US passed a bill allowing libraries to run Tor, opening the door for more exit nodes, or public-facing IP addresses for Tor. Now Tor isn't the be all end-all. Your traffic is sent through an exit node. So let's think about those library computers. If you're listening to network traffic on one of those computers and the traffic being sent isn't encrypted then, well, your email password is exposed. And flaws do come up every now and then. But they're publicly exposed and then the maintainers solve for them. I've heard people claim that since Tor is government-funded, it's watched by the government. Well, anything is possible. But consider this, the source code is published as well. It's on GitHub at GitHub.com/torproject. If there are any intentional flaws they're right there in broad daylight. The projects have been available for years. Given the fact that you have the source code, why don't you give cracking it a shot? I have about 500 more episodes to record in the queue. We'll see who wins that race. I should probably go start recording the next one now. All you spooks out there listening through Tor, stay safe. And to all the listeners, thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're so lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we're able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is gonna' be a bit boring. It's on APIs. An API is an Application Program Interface this is a set of tools, protocols or routines used for building applications. See boring! Most applications and code today are just a collection of REST endpoints interconnected with fancy development languages. We can pull in a lot of information from other apps and get a lot of code as we call it these days “for free”. It's hard to imagine a world without APIs. It's hard to imagine what software would be like if we still had to write memory to a specific register in order to accomplish basic software tasks. Obfuscating these low level tasks is done by providing classes of software to give developers access to common tasks they need to perform. These days, we just take this for granted. But once upon a time, you did have to write all of that code over and over, on PCs, initially in BASIC, PASCAL, or assembly for really high performance tasks. Then along comes Roy Fieldings. He writes the Architectural Styles and Design of Network-based Software Architectures dissertation in 2000. But APIs came out of a need for interaction between apps and devices. Between apps and web services. Between objects and other objects. The concept of the API started long before y2k though. In the 60s, we had libraries in operating systems. But what Subrata Dasgupta referred to as the second age of computer science in the seminal book by the same name began in 1970. And the explosion of computer science as a field in the 70s gave us the rise of Message Oriented Middleware and then Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) becomes the bridge into mainframe systems. This started a weird time. IBM ruled the world, but they were listening to the needs of customers and released MQSeries, to facilitate message queues. I release message queues are boring. Sorry. I've always felt like the second age of computer science is split right down the middle. The 1980s brought us into the era of object oriented programming when Alan Kotok and his coworkers from Xerox PARC gave us Smallltalk, the first popular object oriented programming language and began to codify methods and classes. Life was pretty good. This led to a slow adoption across the world of the principals of Alan Kay vis a viz Doug Engelbart vis a viz and Vanever Bush. The message passing and queuing systems were most helpful in very large software projects where there were a lot of procedures or classes you might want to share to reduce the cyclomatic complexity of those projects. Suddenly distributed computing began to be a thing. And while it started in research institutes like PARC and academia, it proliferated into the enterprise throughout the 80s. Enterprise computing is boring. Sorry again. The 90s brought grunge. And I guess this little uninteresting thing called the web. And with the web came JavaScript. It was pretty easy to build an API endpoint, or a programmatic point that you programmed to talk to a site, using a JSP or JavaServer Page helps software developers create dynamically generated pages such as those that respond to a query for information and then pass that query on to a database and provide the response. You could also use PHP, Ruby, ASP, and even NeXT's Web Objects, the very name of which indicates an Object Oriented Programming language. The maturity of an API development environment led to Service-Oriented Architectures in the early 2000s, where we got into more function-based granularity. Instead of simply writing an endpoint to make data that was in our pages accessible, we would build those endpoints to build pages on and then build contracts for those endpoints that guaranteed that we would not break the functionality other teams needed. Now other teams could treat our code as classes they'd written themselves. APIs had shot into the mainstream. Roy Fielding's dissertation legitimized APIs and over the next few years entire methodologies for managing teams based on the model began to emerge. Fielding wasn't just an academic. He would help create the standards for HTTP communication. And suddenly having an API became a feature that helped propel the business. This is where APIs get a bit more interesting. You could transact online. eBay shipped an API in 2000, giving developers the ability to build their own portals. They also released low-code options called widgets that you could just drop into a page and call to produce a tile, or iFrame. The first Amazon APIs shipped in 2002, in an early SOAP iteration, along with with widgets as well. In fact, embedding widgets became much bigger than APIs and iFrames are still common practice today, although I've never found a *REAL* developer who liked them. I guess I should add that to my interview questions. The Twitter API, released in 2006, gave other vendors the ability to write their own Twitter app, but also gave us the concept of OAuth, a federated identity. Amazon released their initial APIs that year, making it possible to use their storage and compute clusters and automate the tasks to set them up and tear them down. Additional APIs would come later, giving budding developers the ability to write software and host data in databases, even without building their own big data compute clusters. This too helped open the doors to an explosion of apps and web apps. These days they basically offer everything, including machine learning, as a service, all accessible through an API. The iPhone 3g wasn't boring. It came along in 2009. All of a sudden; and suddenly the world of mobile app development was unlocked. Foursqure came along at about the same time and opened up their APIs. This really gave the whole concept of using other vendor APIs as a way to accomplish various tasks without having to write all the code to do some of those tasks themselves. From there, more and more vendors began to open APIs and not only could you pull in information but you could also push more information out. And the ability to see settings gives us the ability to change them as well. From the consumer Foursqure to the Enterprise, now we have microservices available to do anything you might want to do. Microservices are applications that get deployed as modular services. Private APIs, or those that are undocumented. Public APIs, or interfaces anyone can access. Partner APIs, or those requiring a key to access. At this point, any data you might want to get into an app, is probably available through an API. Companies connect to their own API to get data, especially for apps. And if a vendor refuses to release their own API, chances are some enterprising young developer will find a way if there's an actual desire to leverage their data, which is what happened to Instagram. Until they opened up their API at least. And Facebook, who released their API to any developer well over a decade is probably the most villainized in this regard. You see, Facebook allowed a pretty crazy amount of data to be accessible in their API until all of a sudden Cambridge Analytica supposedly stole elections with that data. There's nothing boring about stealing elections! Whether you think that's true or not, the fact that Facebook is the largest and most popular social network in the history of the world shines a light when technology currently being used by everyone in the industry is taken advantage of. I'm not sticking up for them or villainizing them; but when I helped to write one of the early Facebook games and I was shown what we now refer to as personally identifiable data, and able to crawl a user to get to their friends to invite them to add our game, and then their friends, it didn't seem in the least bit strange. We'd done spidery things with other games. Nothing weird here. The world is a better place now that we have OAUth grant types and every other limiter on the planet. Stripe in fact gave any developer access to quickly and easily process financial transactions. And while there were well-entrenched competitors, they took over the market by making the best APIs available. They understood that if you make it easy and enjoyable for developers, they will push for adoption. And cottage industries of apps have sprung up over the years, where apps aggregate data into a single pane of glass from other sources. Tools like Wikipedia embrace this, banks allow Mint and Quickbooks to aggregate and even control finances, while advertising-driven businesses like portals and social networks seem to despise it, understandably. Sometimes they allow it to gain market share and then start to charge a licensing fee when they reach a point where the cost is too big not to, like what happened with Apple using Google Maps until suddenly they started their own mapping services. Apple by the way has never been great about exposing or even documenting their publicly accessible APIs outside of those used in their operating systems, APNs and profile management environment. The network services Apple provides have long been closed off. Today, if you write software, you typically want that software to be what's known as API-first. API-first software begins with the tasks users want your software to perform. The architecture and design means the front-end or any apps just talk to those backend services and perform as little logic not available through an API as possible. This allows you to issue keys to other vendors and build integrations so those vendors can do everything you would do, and maybe more. Suddenly, anything is possible. Combined with continuous deployment, contiuous testing, continuous design, and continuous research, we heavily reduce the need to build so much, slashing the time it takes to market and the cost it takes to get to market substantially. When I think of what it means to be nimble. No matter how big the team, that's what I think of. Getting new products and innovations to market shouldn't be boring. APIs have helped to fulfill some of the best promises of the Information Age, putting an unparalleled amount of information at our fingertips. The original visionary of all of this, Vannevar Bush, would be proud. But I realize that this isn't the most exciting of topics. So thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're so lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Today my conversation is with David Smith. He’s the CEO and Founder of Croquet Studios David Smith is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who has focused on interactive 3D and using 3D as a basis for new user environments and entertainment for over thirty years. His specialty is system design and advanced user interfaces. He is a pioneer in 3D graphics, robotics, telepresence, artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR). He creates world-class teams and ships impossible products. In 1987, Smith created The Colony, the very first real-time 3D adventure game/shooter and the precursor to today's first-person shooters. The game was developed for the Apple Macintosh and won the "Best Adventure Game of the Year" award from MacWorld Magazine. In 1990, Smith founded Virtus Corporation and developed Virtus Walkthrough, the first real-time 3D design application for personal computers. Virtus Walkthrough won the very first MacWorld/MacUser Breakthrough Product of the Year. David was Chief Innovation Officer at Lockheed Martin and a Senior Fellow at Lockheed Martin MST, focused on next-generation, human centric computing and collaboration platforms. Here he developed a number of key technologies and won the Lockheed Martin TLS Inventor of the Year for the last four years (every year he has been eligible). What’s really, really interesting is that he worked closely with authors Tom Clancy (Rainbow Six, Hunt for Red October) and Michael Crichton (Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park) to develop games. But that’s only the beginning. . . . David believes that the year 1968 was the most critical year in computer science. In this one year, three key individuals launched what he considers, and what he’s continuing to build upon, is this goal of enhancing humans’ ability to solve hard problems using computers to think in a different way. Again, enhancing humans’ ability to solve hard problems using computers to think in a different way. He’s building upon the work of, really the pioneers in the internet: Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Ivan Sutherland’s work - all focused on working with the Xerox Alto Project from a long time ago – close to 50-years ago. Some of these breakthroughs - that even amazed Steve Jobs, as you can see on some of his YouTube videos from years’ ago when he was stunned as he looked at the Xerox Alto project. At that time, what really stuck out for Steve Jobs was the gooey interface. This was really that first interface between a computer and a human. David’s passion is to continue to use his skills and his competencies and capabilities in 3D and 3D engineering and design. His goal is to develop these applications and systems and platforms that are really going to transform how we use computers and solve big problems in the coming years. He’s exploring the  use of 3D and graphical situations that we can’t even imagine right now, and problem solving and using computers to solve interesting challenges and complex problems moving forward. So, with that, I wanted to introduce you to my conversation and wonderful interview with David Smith. Read the full transcript here Major Take-Aways from This Episode: What is an Augmented Conversation? The future of turning a computer into a vehicle to exchange ideas in real-time and sophisticated areas. How a fusion of ideas reinvents and redefines the vision of what computing is. How to get in touch with David A. Smith: Linkedin   Blog  Twitter  YouTube Resources Referenced Platform for the Future of AR & VR |David Smith|TEDxBeacon Street   ARIA ARIA - AR in Action, David Smith   Croquet Demo, Part 1, David A. Smith  Croquet Demo, Part 2, David A. Smith    This episode is sponsored by the CIO Innovation Forum, dedicated to Business Digital Leaders who want to be a part of 20% of the planet and help their businesses win with innovation and transformation. Credits OUTRO music provided by Ben’s Sound: http://www.bensound.com/ Other Ways to Listen to the Podcast  iTunes | Libsyn | Soundcloud | RSS | LinkedIn Leave a Review If you enjoyed listening to my podcast, please take a minute to leave a review here! Click here for instructions on how to leave an iTunes review if you’re doing this for the first time. About Bill Murphy Bill Murphy is a world renowned IT Security Expert dedicated to your success as an IT business leader. Follow Bill on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

This week’s episode brought to you by Pittsburgh Things, Core Life Eatery, Sprezzatura, Slice on Broadway, and Alex Kahrs Design & Media! We're winding down to our year-end episode, but before we get to the year in review, Sorg and Chilla are sharing some of the week's tech news, including: Chilla is sharing his pleas for NASA to save Tony Stark as his Awesome Thing of the Week. Sorg's Awesome Thing of the Week is how Doug Engelbart predicted the future - 50 years ago. The Huawei finance chief was arrested in Canada. Our friend Brian likes experimenting with tech in his bathroom, and he found a solution for his Echo Dot. It seems like it's been forever, but Apple Watch has an ECG app for heart rhythm notifications. The recent Giphy update integrates TrueDepth camera and a universal keyboard. There's a live action MarioKart race in Florida?!?! There's a hipster nativity, and Sorg approves. How about a VR experience of Van Gogh's Starry Night? Marvel Alliance has a Nintendo Switch exclusive. Street Fighter will display in-game advertising. Sorg saw some advertising that worked to get his attention for the RETRO Color 8-bit iPhone case. The Fire/Echo device is having a fire sale. badum tss John Romero gifts Doom 18 new levels for its 25th birthday. After the show remember to: Eat at Slice on Broadway (@Pgh_Slice) if you are in the Pittsburgh area! It is Awesome! (sliceonbroadway.com) Check out our sponsors as a part of YaJagoff’s HOLLA-day Gift Guide: Pittsburgh Things Pittsburgh themed apparel n’at. Core Life Eatery at the Block at Northway on McKnight Rd Sprezzatura creates and serves heritage-inspired cooking for events and the public. Want to be part of our studio audience? Hit us up at awesomecast@sorgatronmedia.com and we’ll save you a seat! Join our AwesomeCast Facebook Group to see what we’re sharing and to join the discussion! Follow these awesome people on Twitter: John Chichilla (@chilla) and Sorg (@Sorgatron) Have you seen our AwesomeTips videos? You can support the show at Patreon.com/awesomecast! Remember to check out our friends at the River’s Edge (@RiversEdgePGH) and The 405 Media (@The405Radio) who replay the show on their stream throughout the week! Also, check out sorgatronmedia.com and awesomecast.com for more entertainment; and view us livestreaming Tuesdays around 7:00 PM EST

This week’s episode brought to you by Pittsburgh Things, Core Life Eatery, Sprezzatura, Slice on Broadway, and Alex Kahrs Design & Media! We're winding down to our year-end episode, but before we get to the year in review, Sorg and Chilla are sharing some of the week's tech news, including: Chilla is sharing his pleas for NASA to save Tony Stark as his Awesome Thing of the Week. Sorg's Awesome Thing of the Week is how Doug Engelbart predicted the future - 50 years ago. The Huawei finance chief was arrested in Canada. Our friend Brian likes experimenting with tech in his bathroom, and he found a solution for his Echo Dot. It seems like it's been forever, but Apple Watch has an ECG app for heart rhythm notifications. The recent Giphy update integrates TrueDepth camera and a universal keyboard. There's a live action MarioKart race in Florida?!?! There's a hipster nativity, and Sorg approves. How about a VR experience of Van Gogh's Starry Night? Marvel Alliance has a Nintendo Switch exclusive. Street Fighter will display in-game advertising. Sorg saw some advertising that worked to get his attention for the RETRO Color 8-bit iPhone case. The Fire/Echo device is having a fire sale. badum tss John Romero gifts Doom 18 new levels for its 25th birthday. After the show remember to: Eat at Slice on Broadway (@Pgh_Slice) if you are in the Pittsburgh area! It is Awesome! (sliceonbroadway.com) Check out our sponsors as a part of YaJagoff’s HOLLA-day Gift Guide: Pittsburgh Things Pittsburgh themed apparel n’at. Core Life Eatery at the Block at Northway on McKnight Rd Sprezzatura creates and serves heritage-inspired cooking for events and the public. Want to be part of our studio audience? Hit us up at awesomecast@sorgatronmedia.com and we’ll save you a seat! Join our AwesomeCast Facebook Group to see what we’re sharing and to join the discussion! Follow these awesome people on Twitter: John Chichilla (@chilla) and Sorg (@Sorgatron) Have you seen our AwesomeTips videos? You can support the show at Patreon.com/awesomecast! Remember to check out our friends at the River’s Edge (@RiversEdgePGH) and The 405 Media (@The405Radio) who replay the show on their stream throughout the week! Also, check out sorgatronmedia.com and awesomecast.com for more entertainment; and view us livestreaming Tuesdays around 7:00 PM EST

Doug Engelbart was the first to actually build a computer that might seem familiar to us, today. He came to Silicon Valley after a stint in the Navy as a radar technician during World War II. Engelbart was, in his own estimation, a “naïve drifter,” but something about the Valley inspired him to think big. Engelbart's idea was that computers of the future should be optimized for human needs—communication and collaboration.

Doug Engelbart's 1968 computer demo was hugely influential for the tech industry, but it took some time for his vision to be accepted by his colleagues. In fact, some of his ideas are just now being implemented. Why does it sometimes take so long for the future to take hold? And why is it that some "get it" much earlier than others? And what does that mean for the banking industry? We tackle all those topic in this week's podcast. 

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | PlayerFM Keep up with the North Star Podcast. My guest today is Michael Nielsen a scientist, writer and computer programmer who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael has written on various topics from quantum teleportation, geometric complexity and the future of science. Michael is the most original thinker I have discovered in a long time when it comes to artificial intelligence, augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation and using new media to enable new ways of thinking. Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. This conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They are challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today.  Michael and I explored the history of tools and jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of the spreadsheet as a tool for human thought.  “Before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language which is the most significant event in some ways. That’s probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species.” LINKS Find Michael Online Michael’s Website Michael’s Twitter Michael’s Free Ebook: Neural Networks and Deep Learning Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science Quantum Computation and Quantum Information Mentioned In the Show 2:12 Michael’s Essay Extreme Thinking 21:48 Photoshop 21:49 Microsoft Word 24:02 The David Bowie Exhibit 28:08 Google AI’s Deep Dream Images 29:26 Alpha Go 30:26 Brian Eno’s Infamous Airport Music 33:41 Listen to Speed of Life by Dirty South Books Mentioned 46:06 Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig 54:12 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut People Mentioned 13:27 Rembrandt Van Rijn’s Artwork 15:01 Monet’s Gallery 15:02 Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Impressionist Art 15:05 Picasso’s Paintings 15:18 Paul Cezanne’s Post-Impressionist Art 25:40 David Brooke’s NYT Column 35:19 Franco of Cologne 56:58 Alan Kay’s Ted Talk on the future of education 57:04 Doug Engelbart 58:35 Karl Schroeder 01:02:06 Elon Musk’s Mars-bound company, SpaceX 01:04:25 Alex Tabarrok Show Topics 4:01 Michael’s North Star, which drives the direction of his research 5:32 Michael talks about how he sets his long-term goals and how he’s propelled by ideas he’s excited to see in the world. 7:13 The invention of language. Michael discusses human biology and how it’s easier to learn a language than writing or mathematics.  9:28 Michael talks about humanity’s ability to bootstrap itself. Examples include maps, planes, and photography  17:33 Limitations in media due to consolidation and the small number of communication platforms available to us  18:30 How self-driving cars and smartphones highlight the strange intersection where artificial intelligence meets human interaction and the possibilities that exist as technology improves 21:45 Why does Photoshop improve your editing skills, while Microsoft Word doesn’t improve your writing skills? 27:07 Michael’s opinion on how Artificial Intelligence can help people be more creative “Really good AI systems are going to depend upon building and currently depend on building very good models of different parts of the world, to the extent that we can then build tools to actually look in and see what those models are telling us about the world.”  30:22 The intersection of algorithms and creativity. Are algorithms the musicians of the future? 36:51 The emerging ability to create interactive visual representations of spreadsheets that are used in media, internally in companies, elections and more. “I’m interested in the shift from having media be predominantly static to dynamic, which the New York Times is a perfect example of. They can tell stories on newyorktimes.com that they can’t tell in the newspaper that gets delivered to your doorstep.” 45:42 The strategies Michael uses to successfully trail blaze uncharted territory and how they emulate building a sculpture   53:30 Michael’s learning and information consumption process, inspired by the idea that you are what you pretend to be 56:44 The foundation of Michael’s worldview. The people and ideas that have shaped and inspired Michael.  01:02:26 Michael’s hypothesis for the 21st century project involving blockchain and cryptocurrencies and their ability to make implementing marketplaces easier than ever before “The key point is that some of these cryptocurrencies actually, potentially, make it very easy to implement marketplaces. It’s plausible to me that the 21st century [project] turns out to be about [marketplaces]. It’s about inventing new types of markets, which really means inventing new types of collective action.” Host David Perell and Guest Michael Nielsen TRANSCRIPT Hello and welcome to the North Star. I'm your host, David Perell, the founder of North Star Media, and this is the North Star podcast. This show is a deep dive into the stories, habits, ideas, strategies, and rituals that guide fulfilled people and create enormous success for them, and while the guests are diverse, they share profound similarities. They're guided by purpose, live with intense joy, learn passionately, and see the world with a unique lens. With each episode, we get to jump into their minds, soak up their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives. My guest today is Michael Nielson, a scientist, writer, and computer programmer, who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael's written on various topics from quantum teleportation to geometric complexity to the future of science, and now Michael is the most original thinker I've discovered in a long time. When it comes to artificial intelligence to augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation, or using new media to enable new ways of thinking, Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. Now, this conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They're challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today. Michael and I explored the history of tools. This is an extension of human thought and we jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of this spreadsheet as a tool for human thought. Here's my conversation with Michael Nielson. DAVID: Michael Nielson, welcome to the North Star Podcast. MICHAEL: Thank you, David. DAVID: So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. MICHAEL: So day to day, I'm a researcher at Y Combinator Research. I'm basically a reformed theoretical physicist. My original background is doing quantum computing work. And then I've moved around a bit over the years. I've worked on open science, I've worked on artificial intelligence and most of my current work is around tools for thought. DAVID: So you wrote an essay which I really enjoyed called Extreme Thinking. And in it, you said that one of the single most important principle of learning is having a strong sense of purpose and a strong sense of meaning. So let's be in there. What is that for you? MICHAEL: Okay. You've done your background. Haven't thought about that essay in years. God knows how long ago I wrote it. Having a strong sense of purpose. What did I actually mean? Let me kind of reboot my own thinking. It's, it's kind of the banal point of view. How much you want something really matters. There's this lovely interview with the physicist Richard Feynman, where he's asked about this Indian mathematical prodigy Ramanujan. A movie was made about Ramanujan’s mathematical prowess a couple of years ago. He was kind of this great genius. And a Feynman was asked what made Ramanujan so good. And the interview was expecting him to say something about how bright this guy was or whatever. And Feynman said instead, that it was desire. It was just that love of mathematics was at the heart of it. And he couldn't stop thinking about it and he was thinking about it. He was doing in many ways, I guess the hard things. It's very difficult to do the hard things that actually block you unless you have such a strong desire that you're willing to go through those things. Of course, I think you see that in all people who get really good at something, whether it be sort of a, just a skill like playing the violin or something, which is much more complicated. DAVID: So what is it for you? What is that sort of, I hate to say I want to just throw that out here, that North Star, so to speak, of what drives you in your research? MICHAEL: Research is funny. You go through these sort of down periods in which you don't necessarily have something driving you on. That used to really bother me early in my career. That was sort of a need to always be moving. But now I think that it's actually important to allow yourself to do that. That's actually how you find the problems, which really get, get you excited. If you don't sort of take those pauses, then you're not gonna find something that's really worth working on. I haven't actually answered your question. I think I know I've jumped to that other point because that's one thing that really matters to me and it was something that was hard to learn. DAVID: So one thing that I've been thinking a lot about recently is you sort of see it in companies. You see it in countries like Singapore, companies like Amazon and then something like the Long Now Foundation with like the 10,000-year clock. And I'm wondering to you in terms of learning, there's always sort of a tension between short-term learning and long-term learning. Like short-term learning so often is maybe trying to learn something that feels a little bit richer. So for me, that's reading, whereas maybe for a long-term learning project there are things I'd like to learn like Python. I'd like to learn some other things like that. And I'm wondering, do you set long-term learning goals for yourself or how would you think about that trade off? MICHAEL: I try to sit long-time learning goals to myself, in many ways against my better judgment. It's funny like you're very disconnected from you a year from now or five years from now, or 10 years from now. I can't remember, but Eisenhower or Bonaparte or somebody like that said that the planning is invaluable or planning plans are overrated, but planning is invaluable. And I think that's true. And this is the right sort of attitude to take towards these long-term lending goals. Sure. It's a great idea to decide that you're going out. Actually, I wouldn't say it was a great idea to say that you're going to learn python, I might say. However, there was a great idea to learn python if you had some project that you desperately wanted to do that it required you to learn python, then it's worth doing, otherwise stay away from python. I certainly favor, coupling learning stuff to projects that you're excited to actually see in the world. But also, then you may give stuff up, you don't become a master of python and instead you spend whatever, a hundred hours or so learning about it for this project that takes you a few hundred hours, and if you want to do a successor project which involves it, more of it. Great, you'll become better. And if you don't, well you move onto something else. DAVID: Right. Well now I want to dive into the thing that I'm most excited to talk to you about today and that's tools that extend human thought. And so let's start with the history of that. We'll go back sort of the history of tools and there's had great Walter Ong quote about how there are no new thoughts without new technologies. And maybe we can start there with maybe the invention of writing, the invention of mathematics and then work through that and work to where you see the future of human thought going with new technologies. MICHAEL: Actually, I mean before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language, which is almost certainly the most significant single event in some ways. The history of the planet suddenly, you know, that's probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species. Um, I say invention, but it's not even really invention. There's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that language is in some important sense built into our biology. Not the details of language. Um, but this second language acquisition device, it seems like every human is relatively very set to receive language. The actual details depend on the culture we grow up on. Obviously, you don't grow up speaking French if you were born in San Francisco and unless you were in a French-speaking household, some very interesting process of evolution going on there where you have something which is fundamentally a technology in some sense languages, humans, a human invention. It's something that's constructed. It's culturally carried. Um, it, there's all these connections between different words. There's almost sort of a graph of connections between the words if you like, or all sorts of interesting associations. So in that sense, it's a technology, something that's been constructed, but it's also something which has been over time built into our biology. Now if you look at later technologies of thought things like say mathematics, those are much, much later. That hasn't been the same sort of period of time. Those don't seem to be built into our biology in quite the same way. There's actually some hints of that we have some intrinsic sense of number and there's some sort of interesting experiments that suggest that we were built to do certain rudimentary kinds of mathematical reasoning but there's no, you know, section of the brain which specializes sort of from birth in solving quadratic equations, much less doing algebraic geometry or whatever, you know, super advanced. So it becomes this cultural thing over the last few thousand years, this kind of amazing process whereby we've started to bootstrap ourselves. If you think about something like say the invention of maps, which really has changed the way people relate to the environment. Initially, they were very rudimentary things. Um, and people just kept having new ideas for making maps more and more powerful as tools for thought. Okay. I can give you an example. You know, a very simple thing, if you've ever been to say the underground in London or most other subway systems around the world. It was actually the underground when this first happened, if you look at the map of the underground, I mean it's a very complicated map, but you can get pretty good at reasoning about how to get from one place to another. And if you look at maps prior to, I think it was 1936, in fact, the maps were much more complicated. And the reason was that mapmakers up to that point had the idea that where the stations were shown on the map had to correspond to the geography of London. Exactly. And then somebody involved in producing the underground map had just a brilliant insight that actually people don't care. They care about the connections between the stations and they want to know about the lines and they want some rough idea of the geography, but they're quite happy for it to be very rough indeed and he was able to dramatically simplify that map by simply doing away with any notion of exact geography. DAVID: Well, it's funny because I noticed the exact same thing in New York and so often you have insights when you see two things coming together. So I was on the subway coming home one day and I was looking at the map and I always thought that Manhattan was way smaller than Brooklyn, but on the subway map, Manhattan is actually the same size as Brooklyn. And in Manhattan where the majority of the subway action is, it takes up a disproportionate share of the New York City subway map. And then I went home to go read Power Broker, which is a book about Robert Moses building the highways and they had to scale map. And what I saw was that Brooklyn was way, way bigger than Manhattan. And from predominantly looking at subway maps. Actually, my topological geographical understanding of New York was flawed and I think exactly to your point. MICHAEL: It's interesting. When you think about what's going on there and what it is, is some person or a small group of people is thinking very hard about how to represent their understanding of the city and then the building, tools, sort of a technological tool of thought that actually then saves millions or in the case of a New York subway or the London underground, hundreds of millions or billions of people, mostly just seconds, sometimes, probably minutes. Like those maps would be substantially more complicated sort of every single day. So it's only a small difference. I mean, and it's just one invention, right? But, you know, our culture is of course accumulated thousands or millions of these inventions. DAVID: One of my other favorite ones from being a kid was I would always go on airplanes and I'd look at the route map and it would always show that the airplanes would fly over the North Pole, but on two-dimensional space that was never clear to me. And I remember being with my dad one night, we bought a globe and we took a rubber band and we stretched why it was actually shorter to fly over the North Pole, say if you're going from New York to India. And that was one of the first times in my life that I actually didn't realize it at the time, but understood exactly what I think you're trying to get at there. How about photography? Because that's another one that I think is really striking, vivid from the horse to slow motion to time lapses. MICHAEL: Photography I think is interesting in this vein in two separate ways. One is actually what it did to painting, which is of course painters have been getting more and more interested in being more and more realistic. And honestly, by the beginning of the 19th century, I think painting was pretty boring. Yeah, if you go back to say the 16th and 17th centuries, you have people who are already just astoundingly good at depicting things in a realistic fashion. To my mind, Rembrandt is probably still the best portrait painter in some sense to ever live. DAVID: And is that because he was the best at painting something that looked real? MICHAEL: I think he did something better than that. He did this very clever thing, you know, you will see a photograph or a picture of somebody and you'll say, oh, that really looks like them. And I think actually most of the time we, our minds almost construct this kind of composite image that we think of as what David looks like or what our mother looks like or whatever. But actually moment to moment, they mostly don't look like that. They mostly, you know, their faces a little bit more drawn or it's, you know, the skin color is a little bit different. And my guess, my theory of Rembrandt, is that he may have actually been very, very good at figuring out almost what that image was and actually capturing that. So, yeah, I mean this is purely hypothetical. I have no real reason to believe it, but I think it's why I responded so strongly to his paintings. DAVID: And then what happened? So after Rembrandt, what changed? MICHAEL: So like I said, you mean you keep going for a sort of another 200 years, people just keep getting more and more realistic in some sense. You have all the great landscape painters and then you have this catastrophe where photography comes along and all of a sudden you're being able to paint in a more and more realistic fashion. It doesn't seem like such a hot thing to be doing anymore. And if for some painters, I think this was a bit of a disaster, a bit of dose. I said of this modern wave, you start to see through people like Monet and Renoir. But then I think Picasso, for me anyway, was really the pivotal figure in realizing that actually what art could become, is the invention of completely new ways of seeing. And he starts to play inspired by Cezanne and others in really interesting ways with the construction of figures and such. Showing things from multiple angles in one painting and different points of view. And he just plays with hundreds of ideas along these lines, through all of his painting and how we see and what we see in how we actually construct reality in their heads from the images that we see. And he did so much of that. It really became something that I think a lot of artists, I'm not an artist or a sophisticated art theory person, but it became something that other people realized was actually an extraordinarily interesting thing to be doing. And much of the most interesting modern art is really a descendant of that understanding that it's a useful thing to be doing. A really interesting thing to be doing rather than becoming more and more realistic is actually finding more and more interesting ways of seeing and being able to represent the world. DAVID: So I think that the quote is attributed to Marshall McLuhan, but I have heard that Winston Churchill said it. And first, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. And that seems to be sort of the foundation of a lot of the things that you're saying. MICHAEL: Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, on the other side, you also have, to your original question about photography. Photographers have gradually started to realize that they could shape how they saw nature. Ansel Adams and people like this, you know. Just what an eye. And understanding his tools so verbally he's not just capturing what you see. He's constructing stuff in really, really interesting ways. DAVID: And how about moving forward in terms of your work, thinking about where we are now to thinking about the future of technology. For example, one thing that frustrates me a bit as a podcast host is, you know, we just had this conversation about art and it's the limits of the audio medium to not be able to show the paintings of Rembrandt and Cezanne that we just alluded to. So as you think about jumping off of that, as you think about where we are now in terms of media to moving forward, what are some of the challenges that you see and the issues that you're grappling with? MICHAEL: One thing for sure, which I think inhibits a lot of exploration. We're trapped in a relatively small number of platforms. The web is this amazing thing as our phones, iOS and whatnot, but they're also pretty limited and that bothers me a little bit. Basically when you sort of narrow down to just a few platforms which have captured almost all of the attention, that's quite limiting. People also, they tend not to make their own hardware. They don't do these kinds of these kinds of things. If that were to change, I think that would certainly be exciting. Something that I think is very, very interesting over the next few years, artificial intelligence has gotten to the point now where we can do a pretty good job in understanding what's actually going on inside a room. Like we can set up sufficient cameras. If you think about something like self-driving cars, essentially what they're doing is they're building up a complete model of the environment and if that model is not pretty darned good, then you can't do self-driving cars, you need to know where the pedestrians are and where the signs are and all these kinds of things and if there's an obstruction and that technology when brought into, you know, the whole of the rest of the world means that you're pretty good at passing out. You know what's inside the room. Oh, there's a chair over there, there's a dog which is moving in that direction, there's a person, there’s a baby and sort of understanding all those actions and ideally starting to understand all the gestures which people are making as well. So we're in this very strange state right at the moment. Where the way we talk to computers is we have these tiny little rectangles and we talk to them through basically a square inch or so of sort of skin, which is our eyes. And then we, you know, we tap away with our fingers and the whole of the rest of our body and our existence is completely uncoupled from that. We've effectively reduced ourselves to our fingers and our eyes. We a couple to it only through the whatever, 100 square inches, couple hundred square inches of our screens or less if you're on a phone and everything else in the environment is gone. But we're actually at a point where we're nearly able to do an understanding of all of that sufficiently well that actually other modes of interaction will become possible. I don't think we're quite there yet, but we're pretty close. And you start to think about, something like one of my favorite sport is tennis. You think about what a tennis player can do with their body or you think about what a dancer can do with their body. It's just extraordinary. And all of that mode of being human and sort of understanding we can build up antibodies is completely shut out from the computing experience at the moment. And I think over the next sort of five to ten years that will start to reenter and then in the decades hence, it will just seem strange that it was ever shut out. DAVID: So help me understand this. So when you mean by start to reenter, do mean that we'll be able to control computers with other parts of our bodies or that we'll be spending less time maybe typing on keyboards. Help me flesh this out. MICHAEL: I just mean that at the moment. As you speak to David, you are waving your arms around and all sorts of interesting ways and there is no computer system which is aware of it, what your computer system is aware of. You're doing this recording. That's it. And even that, it doesn't understand in any sort of significant way. Once you've gained the ability to understand the environment. Lots of interesting things become possible. The obvious example, which everybody immediately understands is that self driving cars become possible. There's this sort of enormous capacity. But I think it's certainly reasonably likely that much more than that will become possible over the next 10 to 20 years. As your computer system becomes completely aware of your environment or as aware as you're willing to allow it to be. DAVID: You made a really interesting analogy in one of your essays about the difference between Photoshop and Microsoft Word. That was really fascinating to me because I know both programs pretty well. But to know Microsoft word doesn't necessarily mean that I'm a better writer. It actually doesn't mean that at all. But to know Photoshop well probably makes me pretty good at image manipulation. I'm sure there's more there, but if you could walk me through your thought process as you were thinking through that. I think that's really interesting. MICHAEL: So it's really about a difference in the type of tools which are built into the program. So in Photoshop, which I should say, I don't know that well, I know Word pretty well. I've certainly spent a lot more time in it than I have ever spent in Photoshop. But in Photoshop, you do have these very interesting tools which have been built in, which really condense an enormous amount of understanding of ideas like layers or an idea, different brushes, these kinds of ideas. There's just a tremendous amount of understanding which has been built in there. When I watch friends who are really good with these kinds of programs, what they can do with layers is just amazing. They understand all these kind of clever screening techniques. It seems like such a simple idea and yet they're able to do these things that let you do astonishing things just with sort of three or four apparently very simple operations. So in that sense, there are some very deep ideas about image manipulation, which had been built directly into Photoshop. By contrast, there's not really very many deep ideas about writing built into Microsoft Word. If you talk to writers about how they go about their actual craft and you say, well, you know, what heuristics do use to write stories and whatnot. Most of the ideas which they use aren't, you know, they don't correspond directly to any set of tools inside Word. Probably the one exception is ideas, like outlining. There are some tools which have been built into word and that's maybe an example where in fact Word does help the writer a little bit, but I don't think to nearly the same extent as Photoshop seems to. DAVID: I went to an awesome exhibit for David Bowie and one of the things that David but we did when he was writing songs was he had this word manipulator which would just throw him like 20, 30 words and the point wasn't that he would use those words. The point was that by getting words, his mind would then go to different places and so often when you're in my experience and clearly his, when you're trying to create something, it helps to just be thrown raw material at you rather than the perennial, oh my goodness, I'm looking at a white screen with like this clicking thing that is just terrifying, Word doesn't help you in that way. MICHAEL: So an example of something which does operate a little bit in that way, it was a Ph.D. thesis was somebody wrote at MIT about what was called the Remembrance Agent. And what it would do, it was a plugin essentially for a text editor that it would, look at what you are currently writing and it would search through your hard disk for documents that seemed like they might actually be relevant. Just kind of prompt you with what you're writing. Seems like it might be related to this or this or this or this or this. And to be perfectly honest, it didn't actually work all that well. I think mostly because the underlying machine learning algorithms it used weren't very clever. It's defunct now as far as I know. I tried to get it to run on my machine or a year or two ago and I couldn't get it running. It was still an interesting thing to do. It had exactly this same kind of the belly sort of experience. Even if they weren't terribly relevant. You kind of couldn't understand why on earth you are being shown it. It's still jogged your mind in an interesting way. DAVID: Yeah. I get a lot of help out of that. Actually, I’ll put this example. So David Brooks, you know the columnist for the New York Times. When he writes, what he does is he gets all of his notes and he just puts his notes on the floor and he literally crawls all around and tries to piece the notes together and so he's not even writing. He's just organizing ideas and it must really help him as it helps me to just have raw material and just organize it all in the same place. MICHAEL: There's a great British humorist, PG Boathouse, he supposedly wrote on I think it was the three by five-inch cards. He'd write a paragraph on each one, but he had supposedly a very complicated system in his office, well not complicated at all, but it must have looked amazing where he would basically paste the cards to the wall and as the quality of each paragraph rose, he would move the paragraph up the wall and I think the idea was something like once it got to the end, it was a lion or something, every paragraph in the book had to get above that line and at that point it was ready to go. DAVID: So I've been thinking a lot about sort of so often in normal media we take AI sort of on one side and art on another side. But I think that so many of the really interesting things that will emerge out of this as the collaboration between the two. And you've written a bit about art and AI, so how can maybe art or artificial intelligence help people be more creative in this way? MICHAEL: I think we still don't know the answer to the question, unfortunately. The hoped-for answer the answer that might turn out to be true. Real AI systems are going to build up very good models of different parts of the world, maybe better than any human has of those parts of the world. It might be the case, I don't know. It might be the case that something like the Google translate system, maybe in some sense that system already knows some facts about translation that would be pretty difficult to track down in any individual human mind and sort of so much about translation in some significant ways. I'm just speculating here. But if you can start to interrogate that understanding, it becomes a really useful sort of a prosthetic for human beings. If you've seen any of these amazing, well I guess probably the classics, the deep dream images that came out of Google brain a couple of years ago. Basically, you take ordinary images and you're sort of running them backwards through a neural net somehow. You're sort of seeing something about how the neural net sees that image. You get these very beautiful images as a result. There's something strange going on and sort of revealing about your own way of seeing the world. And at the same time, it's based on some structure which this neural net has discovered inside these images which is not ordinarily directly accessible to you. It's showing you that structure. So sort of I think the right way to think about this is that really good AI systems are going to depend upon building and do currently depend on building very good models of different parts of the world and to the extent that we can then build tools to actually look in and see what those models are telling us about the world, we can learn interesting new things which are useful for us. I think the conventional way, certainly the science fiction way to think about AI is that we're going to give it commands and it's going to do stuff. How you shut the whatever it is, the door or so on and so forth, and there was certainly will be a certain amount of that. Or with AlphaGo what is the best move to take now, but actually in some sense, with something like AlphaGo, it's probably more interesting to be able to look into it and see what it's understanding is of the board position than it is to ask what's the best move to be taken. A colleague showed me a go program, a prototype, what it would do. It was a very simple kind of a thing, but it would help train beginners. I think it was Go, but by essentially colorizing different parts of the board according to whether they were good or bad moves to be taking in its estimation. If you're a sophisticated player, it probably wasn't terribly helpful, but if you're just a beginner, there's an interesting kind of a conditioning going on there. At least potentially a which lets you start to see. You get a feeling for immediate feedback from. And all that's happening there is that you're seeing a little bit into one of these machine learning algorithms and that's maybe helping you see the world in a slightly different way. DAVID: As I was preparing for this podcast, you've liked a lot to Brian Eno and his work. So I spent as much time reading Brian Eno, which I'm super happy that I went down those rabbit holes. But one of the things that he said that was really interesting, so he's one of the fathers of ambient music and he said that a lot of art and especially music, there will sort of be algorithms where you sort of create an algorithm that to the listener might even sound better than what a human would produce. And he said two things that were interesting. The first one is that you create an algorithm and then a bunch of different musical forms could flower out of that algorithm. And then also said that often the art that algorithms create is more appealing to the viewer. But it takes some time to get there. And had the creator just followed their intuition. They probably would have never gotten there. MICHAEL: It certainly seems like it might be true. And that's the whole sort of interesting thing with that kind of computer-generated music is to, I think the creators of it often don't know where they're gonna end up. To be honest, I think my favorite music is all still by human composers. I do enjoy performances by people who live code. There's something really spectacular about that. So there are people who, they will set up the computer and hook it up to speakers and they will hook the text editor up to a projector and they'll have essentially usually a modified form of the programming language list a or people use a few different systems I guess. And they will write a program which producers music onstage and they'll just do it in real time and you know, it starts out sounding terrible of course. And that lasts for about 20 seconds and by about sort of 30 or 40 seconds in, already it's approaching the limits of complex, interesting music and I think even if you don't really have a clue what they're doing as they program, there's still something really hypnotic and interesting about watching them actually go through this process of creating music sort of both before your eyes and before your ears. It's a really interesting creative experience and sometimes quite beautiful. I think I suspect that if I just heard one of those pieces separately, I probably wouldn't do so much for me, but actually having a done in real time and sort of seeing the process of creation, it really changes the experience and makes it very, very interesting. And sometimes, I mean, sometimes it's just beautiful. That's the good moment, right? When clearly the person doing it has something beautiful happen. You feel something beautiful happen and everybody else around you feel something beautiful and spontaneous. It's just happened. That's quite a remarkable experience. Something really interesting is happening with the computer. It's not something that was anticipated by the creator. It arose out of an interaction between them and their machine. And it is actually beautiful. DAVID: Absolutely. Sort of on a similar vein, there's a song called Speed of Life by Dirty South. So I really liked electronic music, but what he does is he constructs a symphony, but he goes one layer at a time. It's about eight and a half minute song and he just goes layer after layer, after layer, after layer. And what's really cool about listening to it is you appreciate the depth of a piece of music that you would never be able to appreciate if you didn't have that. And also by being able to listen to it over and over again. Because before we had recording, you would only hear a certain piece of music live and one time. And so there are new forms that are bursting out of now because we listen to songs so often. MICHAEL: It's interesting to think, there's a sort of a history to that as well. If you go back, essentially modern systems for recording music, if you go back much more than a thousand years. And we didn't really have them. There's a multi-thousand-year history of recorded music. But a lot of the early technology was lost and it wasn't until sort of I think the eighth, ninth century that people started to do it again. But we didn't get all the way to button sheet music overnight. There was a whole lot of different inventions. For instance, the early representations didn't show absolute pitch. They didn't show the duration of the note. Those were ideas that had to be invented. So in I think it was 1026, somebody introduced the idea of actually showing a scale where you can have absolute pitch. And then a century or two after that, Franco of Cologne had the idea of representing duration. And so they said like tiny little things, but then you start to think about, well, what does that mean for the ability to compose music? It means now that actually, you can start to compose pieces, which for many, many, many different instruments. So you start to get the ability to have orchestral music. So you go from being able to basically you have to kind of instruct small groups of players that's the best you can hope to do and get them to practice together and whatever. So maybe you can do something like a piece for a relatively small number of people, but it's very hard to do something for an 80 piece orchestra. Right? So all of a sudden that kind of amazing orchestral music I think becomes possible. And then, you know, we're sort of in version 2.0 of that now where of course you can lay a thousand tracks on top of one another if you want. You get ideas like micropolyphony. And these things where you look at the score and it's just incredible, there are 10,000 notes in 10 seconds. DAVID: Well, to your point I was at a tea house in Berkeley on Monday right by UC Berkeley's campus and the people next to me, they were debating the musical notes that they were looking at but not listening to the music and it was evident that they both had such a clear ability to listen to music without even listening to it, that they could write the notes together and have this discussion and it was somebody who doesn't know so much about music. It was really impressive. MICHAEL: That sounds like a very interesting conversation. DAVID: I think it was. So one thing that I'm interested in and that sort of have this dream of, is I have a lot of friends in New York who do data visualization and sort of two things parallel. I have this vision of like remember the Harry Potter book where the newspaper comes alive and it becomes like a rich dynamic medium. So I have that compared with some immersive world that you can walk through and be able to like touch and move around data and I actually think there's some cool opportunities there and whatnot. But in terms of thinking about the future of being able to visualize numbers and the way that things change and whatnot. MICHAEL: I think it's a really complicated question like it actually needs to be broken down. So one thing, for example, I think it's one of the most interesting things you can do with computers. Lots of people never really get much experience playing with models and yet it's possible to do this. Now, basically, you can start to build very simple models. The example that a lot of people do get that they didn't use to get, is spreadsheets. So, you can sort of create a spreadsheet that is a simple model of your company or some organization or a country or of whatever. And the interesting thing about the spreadsheet is really that you can play with it. And it sort of, it's reactive in this interesting way. Anybody who spends as much time with spreadsheets is they start to build up hypotheses, oh, what would happen if I changed this number over here? How would it affect my bottom line? How would it affect the GDP of the country? How would it affect this? How would it affect that? And you know, as you kind of use it, you start to introduce, you start to make your model more complicated. If you're modeling some kind of a factory yet maybe you start to say, well, what would be the effect if a carbon tax was introduced? So you introduce some new column into the spreadsheet or maybe several extra columns into the spreadsheet and you start to ask questions, well, what would the structure of the carbon tax be? What would help you know, all these sorts of what if questions. And you start very incrementally to build up models. So this experience, of course, so many people take for granted. It was not an experience that almost anybody in the world had say 20 or 30 years ago. Well, spreadsheets data about 1980 or so, but this is certainly an experience that was extremely rare prior to 1980 and it's become a relatively common, but it hasn't made its way out into mass media. We don't as part of our everyday lives or the great majority of people don't have this experience of just exploring models. And I think it's one of the most interesting things which particularly the New York Times and to some extent some of the other newsrooms have done is they've started in a small way to build these models into the news reading experience. So, in particular, the data visualization team at the New York Times, people like Amanda Cox and others have done this really interesting thing where you start to get some of these models. You might have seen, for example, in the last few elections. They've built this very interesting model showing basically if you can sort of make choices about how different states will vote. So if such and such votes for Trump, what are Hillary's chances of winning the election. And you may have seen they have this sort of amazing interactive visualization of it where you can just go through and you can sort of look at the key swing states, what happens if Pennsylvania votes for so and so what happens if Florida does? And that's an example where they've built an enormous amount of sort of pulling information into this model and then you can play with it to build up some sort of understanding. And I mean, it's a very simple example. I certainly think that you know, normatively, we're not there yet. We don't actually have a shared understanding. There's very little shared language even around these models. You think about something like a map. A map is an incredibly sophisticated object, which however we will start learning from a very young age. And so we're actually really good at parsing them. We know if somebody shows us a map, how to engage, how to interpret it, how to use it. And if somebody just came from another planet, actually they need to learn all those things. How do you represent a road? How do you represent a shop on a map? How do you represent this or that, why do we know that up is north like that's a convention. All those kinds of things actually need to be learned and we learned them when we were small. With these kinds of things which the Times and other media outlets are trying to do, we lack all of that collective knowledge and so they're having to start from scratch and I think that over a couple of generations actually, they'll start to evolve a lot of conventions and people will start to take it for granted. But in a lot of contexts actually you're not just going to be given a narrative, you know, just going to be told sort of how some columnist thinks the world is. Instead, you'll actually expect to be given some kind of a model which you can play with. You can start to ask questions and sort of run your own hypotheses in much the same way as somebody who runs a business might actually set up a spreadsheet to model their business and ask interesting questions. It's not perfect. The model is certainly that the map is not the territory as they say, but it is nonetheless a different way of engaging rather than just having some expert tell you, oh, the world is this way. DAVID: I'm interested in sort of the shift from having media be predominantly static to dynamic, which the New York Times is a perfect example. They can tell stories on Newyorktimes.com that they can't tell in the newspaper that gets delivered to your doorstep. But what's really cool about spreadsheets that you're talking about is like when I use Excel, being able to go from numbers, so then different graphs and have the exact same data set, but some ways of visualizing that data totally clicked for me and sometimes nothing happens. MICHAEL: Sure. Yeah. And we're still in the early days of that too. There's so much sort of about literacy there. And I think so much about literacy is really about opportunity. People have been complaining essentially forever that the kids of today are not literate enough. But of course, once you actually provide people with the opportunity and a good reason to want to do something, then they can become very literate very quickly. I think basically going back to the rise of social media sort of 10 or 15 years ago, so Facebook around whatever, 2006, 2007 twitter a little bit later, and then all the other platforms which have come along since. They reward being a good writer. So all of a sudden a whole lot of people who normally wouldn't have necessarily been good writers are significantly more likely to become good writers. It depends on the platform. Certainly, Facebook is a relatively visual medium. Twitter probably helps. I think twitter and text messaging probably are actually good. Certainly, you're rewarded for being able to condense an awful lot into a small period. People complain that it's not good English, whatever that is. But I think I'm more interested in whether something is a virtuosic English than I am and whether or not it's grammatically correct. People are astonishingly good at that, but the same thing needs to start to happen with these kinds of models and with data visualizations and things like that. At the moment, you know, you have this priestly caste that makes a few of them and that's an interesting thing to be able to do, but it's not really part of the everyday experience of most people. It's an interesting question whether or not that's gonna change as it going to in the province of some small group of people, or will it actually become something that people just expect to be able to do? Spreadsheets are super interesting in that regard. They actually did. I think if you've talked to somebody in 1960 and said that by 2018, tens of millions of people around the world would be building sophisticated mathematical models as just part of their everyday life. It would've seemed absolutely ludicrous. But actually, that kind of model of literacy has become relatively common. I don't know whether we'll get to 8 billion people though. I think we probably will. DAVID: So when I was in high school I went to, what I like to say is the weirdest school in the weirdest city in America. I went to the weirdest high school in San Francisco and rather than teaching us math, they had us get in groups of three and four and they had us discover everything on our own. So we would have these things called problem sets and we would do about one a week and the teacher would come around and sort of help us every now and then. But the goal was really to get three or four people to think through every single problem. And they called it discovery-based learning, which you've also talked about too. So my question to you is we're really used to learning when the map is clear and it's clear what to do and you can sort of follow a set path, but you actually do the opposite. The map is unclear and you're actually trailblazing and charting new territory. What strategies do you have to sort of sense where to move? MICHAEL: There's sort of a precursor question which is how do you maintain your morale and the Robert Pirsig book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He proposes a university subject, gumptionology 101. Gumption is almost the most important quality that we have. The ability to keep going when things don't seem very good. And mostly that's about having ways of being playful and ways of essentially not running out of ideas. Some of that is about a very interesting tension between having, being ambitious in what you'd like to achieve, but also being very willing to sort of celebrate the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest successes. Suddenly a lot of creative people I know I think really struggle with that. They might be very good at celebrating tiny successes but not have that significant ambitions, but they might be extremely ambitious, but because they're so ambitious, if an idea doesn't look Nobel prize worthy, they're not particularly interested in it. You know, they struggle with just kind of the goofing around and they often feel pretty bad because of course most days you're not at your best, you don't actually have the greatest idea. So there's some interesting tension to manage there. There's really two different types of work. One is where you have a pretty good goal, you know what success looks like, right? But you may also be doing something that's more like problem discovery where you don't even know where you're going. Typically if you're going to compose a piece of music. Well, I'm not a composer, but certainly, my understanding from, from friends who are, is that they don't necessarily start out with a very clear idea of where they're going. Some composers do, but a lot, it's a process of discovery. Actually, a publisher once told me somebody who has published a lot of well-known books that she described one of her authors as a writing for discovery. Like he didn't know what his book was going to be about, he had a bunch of kind of vague ideas and the whole point of writing the book was to actually figure out what it was that he wanted to say, what problem was he really interested in. So we'd start with some very, very good ideas and they kind of get gradually refined. And it was very interesting. I really liked his books and it was interesting to see that. They looked like they'd been very carefully planned and he really knew what he was doing and she told me that no, he'd sort of come in and chat with her and be like, well, I'm sort of interested over here. And he'd have phrases and sort of ideas. But he didn't actually have a clear plan and then he'd get through this process of several years of gradually figuring out what it was that he wanted to say. And often the most significant themes wouldn't actually emerge until relatively late in that whole process. I asked another actually quite a well-known writer, I just bumped into when he was, he was reporting a story for a major magazine and I think he'd been working, he'd been reporting for two weeks, I think at that point. So just out interviewing people and whatever. And I said, how's it going? And he said, Oh yeah, pretty good. I said, what's your story about? He said, I don't know yet, which I thought was very interesting. He had a subject, he was following a person around. But he didn't actually know what his story was. DAVID: So the analogy that I have in my head as you're talking about this, it's like sculpture, right? Where you start maybe with a big thing of granite or whatnot, and slowly but surely you're carving the stone or whatnot and you're trying to come up with a form. But so often maybe it's the little details at the end that are so far removed from that piece of stone at the very beginning that make a sculpture exceptional. MICHAEL: Indeed. And you wonder what's going on. I haven't done sculpture. I've done a lot of writing and writing often feels so sometimes I know what I want to say. Those are the easy pieces to write, but more often it's writing for discovery and there you need to be very happy celebrating tiny improvements. I mean just fixing a word needs to be an event you actually enjoy, if not, the process will be an absolute nightmare. But then there's this sort of instinct where you realize, oh, that's a phrase that A: I should really refine and B: it might actually be the key to making this whole thing work and that seems to be a very instinctive kind of a process. Something that you, if you write enough, you start to get some sense of what actually works for you in those ways. The recognition is really hard. It's very tempting to just discount yourself. Like to not notice when you have a good phrase or something like that and sort of contrary wise sometimes to hang onto your darlings too long. You have the idea that you think it's about and it's actually wrong. DAVID: Why do you write and why do you choose the medium of writing to think through things sometimes? I know that you choose other ones as well. MICHAEL: Writing has this beautiful quality that you can improve your thoughts. That's really helpful. A friend of mine who makes very popular YouTube videos about mathematics has said to me that he doesn't really feel like people are learning much mathematics from them. Instead, it's almost a form of advertising like they get some sense of what it is. They know that it's very beautiful. They get excited. All those things are very important and matter a lot to him, but he believes that only a tiny, tiny number of people are actually really understanding much detail at all. There's actually a small group who have apparently do kind of. They have a way of processing video that lets them understand. DAVID: Also, I think you probably have to, with something like math, I've been trying to learn economics online and with something like math or economics that's a bit complex and difficult, you have to go back and re-watch and re-watch, but I think that there's a human tendency to want to watch more and more and more and it's hard to learn that way. You actually have to watch things again. MICHAEL: Absolutely. Totally. And you know, I have a friend who when he listens to podcasts, if he doesn't understand something, he, he rewinds it 30 seconds. But most people just don't have that discipline. Of course, you want to keep going. So I think the written word for most people is a little bit easier if they want to do that kind of detailed understanding. It's more random access to start with. It's easier to kind of skip around and to concentrate and say, well, I didn't really get that sentence. I'm going to think about it a little bit more, or yeah, I can see what's going to happen in those two or three paragraphs. I'll just very quickly skip through them. It's more built for that kind of detailed understanding, so you're getting really two very different experiences. In the case of the video, very often really what you're getting is principally an emotional experience with some bits and pieces of understanding tacked on with the written word. Often a lot of that emotion is stripped out, which makes can make it much harder to motivate yourself. You need that sort of emotional connection to the material, but it is actually, I think a great deal easier to understand sort of the details of it. There's a real kind of choice to be to be made. There's also the fact that people just seem to respond better to videos. If you want a large audience, you're probably better off making YouTube videos than you are publishing essays. DAVID: My last question to you, as somebody who admires your pace and speed of learning and what's been really fun about preparing for this podcast and come across your work is I really do feel like I've accessed a new perspective on the world which is really cool and I get excited probably most excited when I come across thinkers who don't think like anyone who I've come across before, so I'm asking to you first of all, how do you think about your learning process and what you consume and second of all, who have been the people and the ideas that have really formed the foundation of your thought? MICHAEL: A Kurt Vonnegut quote from his book, I think it's Cat's Cradle. He says, we become what we pretend to be, so you must be careful what we pretend to be and I think there's something closely analogously true, which is that we become what we pay attention to, so we should be careful what we pay attention to and that means being fairly careful how you curate your information diet. There's a lot of things. There's a lot of mistakes I've made. Paying attention to angry people is not very good. I think ideas like the filter bubble, for example, are actually bad ideas. And for the most part, it sounds virtuous to say, oh, I'm going to pay attention to people who disagree with me politically and whatever. Well, okay, there's a certain amount of truth to that. It's a good idea probably to pay attention to the very best arguments from the very best exponents of the other different political views. So sure, seek those people out, but you don't need to seek out the random person who has a different political view from you. And that's how most people actually interpret that kind of injunction. They, they're not looking for the very best alternate points of view. So that's something you need to be careful about. There's a whole lot of things like that I enjoy. So for example, I think one person, it's interesting on twitter to look, he's, he's no longer active but he's still following people is Marc Andreessen and I think he follows, it's like 18,000 people or something and it's really interesting just to look through the list of followers because it's all over the map and much of it I wouldn't find interesting at all, but you'll find the strangest corners people in sort of remote villages in India and people doing really interesting things in South Africa. Okay. So he's a venture capitalist but they're not connected to venture capital at all. So many of them, they're just doing interesting things all over the world and I wouldn't advocate doing the same thing. You kind of need to cultivate your own tastes and your own interests. But there's something very interesting about that sort of capitalist city of interests and curiosity about the world, which I think is probably very good for almost anybody to cultivate. I haven't really answered your question. DAVID: I do want to ask who were the people or the ideas or the areas of the world that have really shaped and inspired your thinking because I'm asking selfishly because I want to go down those rabbit holes. MICHAEL: Alright. A couple of people, Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart, who are two of the people who really developed the idea of what a computer might be. In the 1950's and 60's, people mostly thought computers were machines for solving mathematical problems, predicting the weather next week, computing artillery tables, doing these kinds of things. And they understood that actually there could be devices which humans would use for themselves to solve their own problems. That would be sort of almost personal prosthetics for the mind. They'd be new media. We could use to think with and a lot of their best ideas I think out there, there's still this kind of vision for the future. And if you look particularly at some of Alan Kay's talks, there's still a lot of interesting ideas there. DAVID: That the perspective is worth 80 IQ points. That's still true. MICHAEL: For example, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, right? He's actually, he's got a real gift for coming up with piddly little things, but there's also quite deep ideas. They're not two-year projects or five-year projects, they're thousand year projects or an entire civilization. And we're just getting started on them. I think that's true. Actually. It's in general, maybe that's an interesting variation question, which is, you know, what are the thousand year projects? A friend of mine, Cal Schroeder, who's a science fiction writer, has this term, The Project, which he uses to organize some of his thinking about science fictional civilizations. So The Project is whatever a civilization is currently doing, which possibly no member of the civilization is even aware of. So you might ask the question, what was the project for our planet in the 20th century? I think one plausible answer might be, for example, it was actually eliminating infectious diseases. You think about things like polio and smallpox and so many of these diseases were huge things at the start of the 20th century and they become much, much smaller by the end of the 20th century. Obviously AIDS is this terrible disease, but in fact, by historical comparison, even something like the Spanish flu, it's actually relatively small. I think it's several hundred million people it may have killed. Maybe that was actually the project for human civilization in the 20th century. I think it's interesting to think about those kinds of questions and sort of the, you know, where are the people who are sort of most connected to those? So I certainly think Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay. DAVID: Talk about Doug Engelbart, I know nothing about him. MICHAEL: So Engelbart is the person who I think more than anybody invented modern computing. He did this famous demo in 1968, 1969. It's often called the mother of all demos, in front of an audience of a thousand people I believe. Quite a while since I've watched it and it demonstrates a windowing system and what looks like a modern word processor, but it's not just a word processor. They're actually hooked up remotely to a person in another location and they're actually collaborating in real time. And it's the first public showing I believe of the mouse and of all these different sorts of ideas. And you look at other images of computers at the time and they're these giant machines with tapes and whatever. And here's this vision that looks a lot more like sort of Microsoft Windows and a than anything else. And it's got all these things like real-time collaboration between people in different locations that we really didn't have at scale until relatively recently. And he lays out a huge fraction of these ideas in 1962 in a paper he wrote then. But that paper is another one of these huge things. He's asking questions that you don't answer over two years or five years. You answer over a thousand years. I think it's Augmenting Human Intellect is the title of that paper. So he's certainly somebody else that I think is a very interesting thinker. There's something really interesting about the ability to ask an enormous question, but then actually to have other questions at every scale. So you know what to do in the next 10 minutes that will move you a little bit towar

Journalist and author Michael Pollan talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about his new book, “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.” Pollan, perhaps best known for his books about food, like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” says the new book traces his learning process as he tried to understand why almost every human society has experimented with mind-altering substances. Silicon Valley is certainly no exception: Pollan says that tech pioneer Ampex was ground zero of the tech scene’s experimentation with LSD, starting in the 1950s; engineers discovered that dropping acid helped them design the first computer chips, and shared this finding with Doug Engelbart, who would go to invent the mouse, the graphical user interface and key components of the internet. Pollan also talks about the broader medical, political and social implications of using psychedelics, and how they might one day become legal and more socially acceptable in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howard Rheingold is a self described communicator and artist. He is also the author of Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution and Net Smart: How to Thrive Online . The podcast explores the theme of digital literacy. Figures like Doug Engelbart and Vannevar Bush are also discussed. Other books discussed include Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution and Anne Blair’s Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Open hardware like Raspberry Pi Model B+ (B PLUS) 512MB Computer Board and Arduino Uno Ultimate Starter Kit — Includes 72 page Instruction Book are also touched upon. RIP website: remotely-interested.com RIP facebook: https://www.facebook.com/remotely.interested/ RIP twitter: https://twitter.com/ThatInterested

章节（时:分:秒）： 00:00:00: 前戏（微软 HoloLens） 00:03:39: Daisy Bell 00:04:16: 如何成为《IT 公论》会员 00:04:58: 如何用小费支持《IT 公论》（支付宝 / PayPal: hi@itgonglun.com） 00:05:11: 如何订阅 IPN 最近开通的 Telegram Channel 00:06:41: 上期不鸟万书评提到的《Far from the Tree》 00:12:33: 他们说 Apple Watch 让妳可以少看手机，但频频看手表比频频看手机更加无礼 00:14:41: 听众反馈三则 00:33:29: 新的 21 寸 4K iMac 00:40:50: 802.11ac / 5G 的欺骗性 00:43:09: Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse 2, Magic Trackpad 2 01:04:25: Steven Levy 在 Backchannel 关于苹果设计实验室的报道 01:11:43: iWork 升级 01:18:51: Dropbox Paper 和多人协作文本编辑产品的设计 01:30:39: Overcast 2 的商业模式争议 / 品牌光环和价值判断 02:23:52: 尾声 本期会员通讯将于稍后发至各位会员邮箱。每月三十元，支持不鸟万如一和 Rio 把《IT 公论》做成最好的科技播客。请访问 itgonglun.com/member。若您无意入会，但喜欢某一期节目，也欢迎用支付宝或 PayPal 支付小费至 hi@itgonglun.com，支付宝用户亦可扫描下方二维码： 相关链接 IPN 最近开通的 Telegram Channel 失读症（dyslexia） 《Far from the Tree》 《Far from the Tree》繁体中文译本《背离亲缘（上）》 Sheeple 《無次元》 iBeacon Steven Levy Steven Levy: What I Saw Inside Apple’s Top Secret Input Lab Steven Levy: Exclusive: Why Apple is Still Sweating the Details on iMac Stephen Hackett 评 El Capitan 和 iOS 9 里的 Notes Dropbox Paper Quip Simplenote nvALT Bret Victor: A few words on Doug Engelbart Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing: SRI’s 1968 Demo (Highlights) CAP theorem Marco Arment: Pragmatic App Pricing Samantha Bielefeld: The Elephant in the Room Samantha Bielefeld: Big Money is Coming ATP 第一三九期 《纽约客》Emily Nussbaum: The Price is Right Stitcher Richard Stallman IPN 播客网络常见问题解答 人物简介 不鸟万如一：字节社创始人。 Rio: Apple4us 程序员。

中国国际航空公司可笑的伪舱内 Wi-Fi，Google 的新图标，即将重返中国的 Google Play Store，以及 Facebook 的智能机器人「M」。 本期会员通讯将于稍后发至各位会员邮箱。每月三十元，支持不鸟万如一和 Rio 把《IT 公论》做成最好的科技播客。请访问 itgonglun.com/member。若您无意入会，但喜欢某一期节目，也欢迎用支付宝或 PayPal 支付小费至 hi@itgonglun.com，支付宝用户亦可扫描下方二维码： 相关链接 John Markoff 关于人工智能和机器人学的新书《Machines of Loving Grace》 乔布斯电子邮件生成器 《Wired》杂志关于 Facebook M 的文章 John McCarthy Doug Engelbart Robot or Not? Hans Moravec Norbert Wiener IPN 播客网络常见问题解答 人物简介 不鸟万如一：字节社创始人。 Rio: Apple4us 程序员。

We hebben het over waardige vervangers voor Google Reader, The Internet of Things, Doug Engelbart en GTAV in deze 160ste Tech45.

This podcast is determined to get to you, the listener. Neither lightning, nor national holiday, nor technical mishaps will stop it! And after it has successfully made its way to your ears, you may wonder why it tried so hard for so very little . . . .Headlines:SECURITY NEWS: Exploit found in Android. puts 99% of devices at riskEuropean Union is going "all French" on us over NSA (which is, ironic)Who is the worst in blocking info?How you look to the NSAGoodbye, TechNet. You were a true friend.HP promises a "unique" smartphone. Remember that "unique" =/= "good"Doublefine gets 7 times the funding they wanted, makes half the game they promised.Of COURSE, Apple wants to patent something that another company made years ago21 right click salute to Doug Engelbart. The creator of the computer mouse passed away.Talking point:Adam Savage on RFID myth and why they couldn’t produce an episode on it.Zuke’s Favorite: From my nightmares to your 3D printerStark’s Favorite: Media stringerSchmidty’s Favorite: Ted-Ed: If Superpowers Were Real See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tim and David discuss more in-app purchasing after feedback from Owen Rubin. Also discussed, Windows Phone 8, Doug Engelbart, and more.

DigitalOutbox Episode 172 DigitalOutbox Episode 172 - Doug Engelbart, Three and EE Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 0:57 - Doug Engelbart, American inventor and computing legend, passes away 1:46 - Facebook to stop ads running next to offensive material 4:34 - UK to crack down on online piracy and counterfeiting with new government unit 6:31 - AutoRip comes to the UK 8:28 - Samsung buys set top box maker Boxee 11:15 - BlackBerry Misses In Q1 2014 13:34 - 3 mobile slashes pay-as-you-go costs 17:46 - EE doubles 4G speeds this week and offers UK's first shared data plans 22:07 - Ubisoft website hacked, usernames and encrypted passwords exposed 23:40 - Zynga Confirms Xbox Head Don Mattrick as New CEO

NMC Fellows Award presented to Doug Engelbart, best known for inventing the computer mouse, and pioneer of human-computer interaction, including GUIs, hypertext, and groupware, as well as strategic organizing principles for continuous improvement and innovation.

Doug Engelbart, best known for inventing the computer mouse, and pioneer of human-computer interaction, including GUIs, hypertext, and groupware, as well as strategic organizing principles for continuous improvement and innovation.

Stranova Interview Series Vol. 28, published April 4, 2007. Our latest podcast features Doug Engelbart, a visionary who has helped shape many of the major inventions of what we now think of as the internet as well as the early stages of computing, from early concepts of microelectronics to the invention of the computer mouse. In this weeks’ podcast, learn how one man’s lifelong passion to create a meaningful legacy of work that could benefit all mankind has provided the drive and the vision to take him to perhaps his most challenging innovations yet, the means by which we can harness our Collective Intelligence and realize his complex concept of vast human Augumentation.

Evidently all computing innovations that we thought were invented by young technoturks in the 1980s actually sprang to being, formed almost as fully as we use them today, back in the late 1960s. So we learned by watching Doug Engelbart's 1968 Demo tonight at reboot. Mice, hypertext, outliners, keyword searching, regular expressions, it's all there. If you ever have a chance to see it do: you will be amazed. I've attached a brief audio excerpt from tonight's showing, captured on my iBook in the hall.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Rather than giving someone this hermetically sealed box, can we use an analogy like build a beautiful Lego set for them and hand it to them, where if they like it just as it is, that’s fine. And if they want to add one Lego right there, it’s not a big deal. They sort of see the composition of how this thing was made, they have a little bit of flexibility to tweak it because it’s made out of parts they understand. 00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. I’m joined by Jeffrey Litt. 00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Hello, hello. It’s good to be here. 00:00:41 - Speaker 2: So Jeffrey, one thing I’m thinking about these days in raising my young child is growing up in a multilingual household, since both of her parents are from two different countries and we’re living in a third country. I know you grew up in a multilingual household as an adult, what are your reflections on that experience? 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so my mom’s Japanese and I grew up sort of half my childhood in the US, half in Japan, and when I was a kid, my mom sort of forced me and my brother to learn Japanese when we were in the US and I was just thinking about how I’m so grateful now that she sort of overrode our preferences as children, and that now I have some proficiency in the language and so raising kids is complicated. 00:01:20 - Speaker 2: There is going to be, I can see this already at this young age, and I think if it gets only more so as children get more agency naturally with age, which is parents do know better. They’re just older and wiser and know how the world works and At the same time, a kid needs to find their own way, and authoritarian upbringing doesn’t sound particularly like a good way to blossom as a person. So finding that balance between what’s prescribed by parents, you’ll thank me when you’re older. In this case, literally so versus let a kid find their own path. I think that’s an ongoing philosophical moral dilemma. 00:01:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, especially for something as difficult as learning a language. You know, I do think with whether it’s sports or music or these skills that take a lot of time to master, I’ve also been grateful that my parents helped me learn to love Japanese and build some of that motivation, whether that’s from visits to Japan to hang out there as a kid. I tend to believe that the goal of education at a young age isn’t primarily to transfer the skill. It’s to, as they say, light that fire that eventually keeps learning going, and to this day. I’m practicing my Japanese trying to keep it up, and so I think that’s an important balance this track too. 00:02:31 - Speaker 2: What’s that saying? If you want to set sail on a boat you’re building, you don’t teach someone to build a boat, you teach them to yearn for the ocean. 00:02:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, I think there’s a lot of that at play. 00:02:43 - Speaker 2: So Jeffrey, I’ve been wanting to get you on the podcast for a while here. We got the chance to work together on the Cambria project at Ik and Switch last year, but I’d love to hear just a little bit about your background, how you came to be doing this work in the tools for Though and independent research space. 00:02:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’m currently doing a PhD at MIT in computer science. I’m in a lab called the Software Design Group, led by my advisor Daniel Jackson. And at the highest level, the questions I’m trying to explore are how do we empower more people to kind of take full advantage of the medium of computing? I think it’s very ironic that we’ve invented this infinitely flexible thing called software, and most of the way that we use it ends up being a small group of people, make some stuff and throw it over a wall, and everyone else uses it. And I’m just interested in new approaches to building software that changed that dynamic. But before coming into this academic side of things, a lot of my thinking on this area actually came from working in startups and shipping real software to people. If you had asked me 5 years ago, are you gonna be doing a PhD, I would have laughed at you and said, you know, no, I’m not that kind of academically minded person. But over my time in startups, I got really interested in these topics and I decided that Rather than go try to start a company or something, the academic environment offers a certain amount of freedom from the need to ship real software immediately, the need to make money immediately, that I thought would be really valuable for kind of thinking more deeply about what the problem actually is here, and maybe bigger picture ways to reorient the way that we build software. 00:04:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. You have both industry background, as they might say, ship stuff fast, solve real customer problems, and kind of academic mindset, longer time horizons, more of a search for basic truths, trying to think bigger and more expansively and more philosophically, and that’s actually, I think, a place. That I and Switch kind of excels or part of its reason for existence is to kind of be in that middle space between those two worlds which I think is not well occupied and certainly for creative tools generally I feel like that at least right now is the space where we need the most minds and the most effort. 00:04:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s part of why I have really enjoyed following and can switch his work over the years and have gotten to collaborate a bit with the lab, and I think it fills this really important middle place between those two worlds. Too often I think startups are kind of not reflecting on the larger possibilities of what they could be doing if they had more than, you know, 3 months ahead to think about. And on the other side, you have academics who, I think sometimes It’s not really clear to me how idea transfer really happens from academic human computer interaction research to the real world sometimes. I don’t think it’s a smooth process where, you know, startups are devouring papers that are being written and trying to implement them in the real world. I think it’s a much messier process. If you look at even someone like Doug Engelbart, who I think is a hero for a lot of people in this community, it was really hard for him to get his ideas out into the world, ultimately succeeded, but through a pretty circuitous path. So I think it’s really valuable to have institutions that are thinking about both of those worlds simultaneously, with the ultimate goal of actually deploying in some form, their ideas, as opposed to just sort of just handling the ideas half of things. 00:06:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, that’s why I think I really enjoy following your work so much, is that you do fit in that middle space and hopefully can be a role model for the rest of us on that. 00:06:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m trying to, it’s tricky. There are a lot of tensions to navigate as I’m sure that you guys have experienced. 00:06:23 - Speaker 2: And I also thank you for being one of the very early users of Muse during the beta as well as a customer. I hope you’ll consider renewing your subscription when that comes up again. You’ve both tweeted lots of screenshots about how you use it, which is, I think, really great for other people seeing how you use things and the every publication even wrote an article. of detailing your work and you talked about a lot of different tools in your flow, include some screenshots of use there so very much appreciate your business, but probably even more than that, the kind of very public moral support makes a big difference, especially in the early days of a product when you know you don’t have so many believers just yet. 00:07:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for building such a great tool. I mean, I bought the big iPad Pro originally when I was starting to dip my toes into the academic waters and being confronted with a lot of 8.5 by 11 PDFs and decided I wanted a nicer way to read them, but something felt like it was missing there in terms of synthesizing across them. And when Muse appeared, I was like, this is it. This is maybe the early versions weren’t the perfect product yet, but I could tell the vision was exactly what I needed, and so it’s been a blast using it. 00:07:29 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is bring your own client, which is something you’ve written about, and of course I’ll link that article in our show notes here, but maybe you can tee up for the listeners a little bit what that’s all about. 00:07:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So bring your own client means having the flexibility to pick what application you want to use when you’re working with some data, and for there to be some independence, especially I think between people who are collaborating on the same project, to pick the software that they want to bring to the table. So I think like to give a concrete example, right, back in the old days when we used to email each other files to work on a document, let’s say I could email you a Word doc. And then you might open that Word doc in Apple Pages or OpenOffice, whatever your preferred word processor is, and then you would send that doc back to me, and I don’t care what application you used on your end, as long as I get a file back, we can work together, right? And in fact, if we’re emailing files, I also don’t care what email client you’re using. There’s sort of this inherent point of flexibility built in where we get to make these individual choices about how we want to work. And broadly, the topic I’ve been thinking a lot about these days is how I think that we are starting to lose some of that flexibility with the way that computing is headed. So I’m very interested in this overall ethos of bringing our own clients and perhaps even building or customizing our own clients, um, to gain a little more control over our experience with software. 00:08:56 - Speaker 2: I think email is one of the best examples perhaps because it’s this really one of the oldest standards in some ways, sort of the first internet protocol in some ways, and the plethora of different clients that have existed over time. I don’t know, I used Pine and later mutt, this kind of terminal-based clients. At university in the 1990s and going forward to Gmail was this big revelation in terms of lots of great interface innovations as well as backend innovations, but it could just work right away. You didn’t need the person on the other end to be also a Gmail user, they could be with any email client. 00:09:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think email is one of those domains that really demonstrates how valuable it can be to have this flexibility. You know, I think sometimes it can be tempting to say, does this really matter? What’s the big deal? Can’t we just all agree on the same software to use? But if you look at something like email, I know a lot of people, some of them not that technical, who have really strong opinions about what email client they want to use because they’ve just found one that works well for them. I’ve had many moments of my favorite email clients sort of going out of business or being acquired and hopping from one to the next and searching for that elusive best client. And I think for anyone who’s sort of an email for like 8 hours a day at their job. You start to see why having this degree of flexibility genuinely matters for people, and it’s not just like a little convenience, it’s actually a big deal. 00:10:23 - Speaker 2: Right, and so you see this not only in the big example of Gmail that really revolutionized a lot of things about how email works, but even nowadays we have a plethora of new clients, superhuman, tempo is another cool up and coming one, or for example on the Muse team for our inbound support where you can just basically email hello at museapp.com that goes into a product called Front and so this is kind of a group inbox email thing that has quite different characteristics from what an individual might want. But it’s nice because the person on the other end, they don’t care what we’re using, they can just send us an email, maybe they include attachments, maybe they include whatever we reply back within that, so that gives each party in this back and forth can use what suits them and what’s gonna suit a team that’s going through a bunch of support requests is just dramatically different from what might suit an individual doing their own personal inbox. 00:11:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually personally use Tempo, and I think it’s a great example of a niche product. It’s really perfect for what I’m looking for. They have a really minimalist design. They have this concept of batching your emails so you don’t get distracted. And for me, as someone who’s at least trying to not check my email 100 times a day, it’s sort of aligned with what I want. I don’t think it’s necessarily the perfect product for everyone or even the majority of people, but I think it’s right for me, and it’s just great that because we have this shared protocol, I can make that choice to adopt this niche product that maybe only 1% of email users will ever use. Without convincing all this other 99% to join me in using this thing, we sort of take this for granted with email, but look at Slack. There’s not really a concept of a third party Slack client, right? And I think it’s easy to forget how monolithic that experience is. Every team that uses Slack is stuck with the exact same user interface with no ability for individuals or even teams to really meaningfully customize it. And I think that’s a tremendous design challenge to try to make something that works well for so many different people and so many different workforces. 00:12:21 - Speaker 2: Maybe there you illustrate the trade off though Slack because it is an integrated product where they control every part of it, the client, the API, the data storage, all of it, they can work on a very integrated and sleek experience. Twitter went through something similar in their early days. They were moving in this direction of being a platform. There was this initial explosion of clients that tried interesting things. Like TweetDeck and Tweety and so on, and ultimately they decided it was a product decision within their company. We don’t want to be a platform. We don’t want to be the next email. We want to provide an end to end curated experience where when we are going to add a new feature, whether it’s images and video in line or something else that we can fully control what that looks like for all the parties in the equation. And that’s a trade-off that I think you always have to make, an email is a good example. You do get weird stuff that happens when you email between two clients and they don’t quite agree about how to display the results, and also it’s very difficult to add new things. I say that speaking as someone who would really like to embed video into email newsletters and you just can’t do it. You got to use animated GIFs which are low quality and slow to download and so on, but it’s just not a standard that can quickly evolve. 00:13:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is indeed one of the core tensions in this idea. How do we balance moving fast with a single decision being made about an ecosystem versus having this more distributed approach. One idea that I find interesting though is kind of this idea of partial compatibility. Can we find sort of middle points between these extremes of a single rigid standard that hasn’t evolved since the 80s versus a company that just decides whatever it wants and imposes it on everyone. I think we can potentially at least try to have app ecosystems where you might have two applications that share 80% of their functionality, and there might be parts around the edges that don’t work perfectly together, but that might be something you can manage as a team, especially if you’re working with people and you know what tools they’re using. I’m really interested in finding tools and sort of platform approaches to mediate this kind of fuzzier partial interoperability. 00:14:34 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s a really interesting spectrum here, or maybe even a whole world of different possibilities. I’m reminded, for example, of this idea of aftermarket support that you see in consumer durable goods like cameras, for example, and there through fiat or evolution, you have some standards, some connection points where people can. Plug in often literally and you might have the core the proprietary, but there’s all these extensions and accessories that you can put on it and because of that, you get an enormous ecosystem of tools and so on that you can build around the core, like a good example of this would be tractor attachments, where there’s the 3 point hitch, and you can basically put whatever you want on a. you know, a plow, a snow blower, whatever. And that’s really interesting because you enable profitable commercial entities and there’s only a few of them to build the extremely complex integrated tractor. And then you have this whole world of mom and pop metal fabrication shops building random implements for 200 bucks. It’s really interesting balance, and I don’t see that very often in software. 00:15:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s also interesting in software to look at domains where you often have a lot of tools that look pretty similar to each other if you squint. Take to do list software or like team issue tracker software, for example. Every time I see a landing page for a new project management tool, there’s a lot of concepts there that look pretty familiar. You have things to do, you assign them to people, you have some notion of projects. And yet every tool has a little bit of some unique spin on that problem. There’s perhaps new ideas that they bring for organizing stuff, and yet I think it’s reasonable to say that maybe 80% of the core ideas are shared. So something we actually worked on on the Cambria project that I worked on at I can Switch last summer was, let’s say, as one example, you have one to do list app that’s decided that you can assign something to multiple people to work together on. And another app says that a to do is assigned to a single person. And what if you want those apps to interoperate, you might just say this is impossible, but you could also say, well, if you assign something to multiple people, we’ll just show the first one on the other app that only allows a single assignee, and maybe that’s good enough for your use case to get by with that sort of partial little bit of bridging between those ideas. And I think if we can get creative about bridging between similar but not identical apps more, that opens up a lot more possibilities for how we can have tools work better together. 00:16:54 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Another thing that I’m reminded of here is the metadata that you can put at the top of HTML pages. I’m actually forgetting the name, what’s the right name for this? 00:17:02 - Speaker 1: The meta tags, the meta tags, I guess, yeah. 00:17:04 - Speaker 3: And there’s a whole world of emergent, somewhat adopted, partially adopted, somewhat conflicting standards for preview cards and Twitter preview cards and open network preview cards and, but it kind of works out, right, because there’s this basic platform entry point, which is the meta tags and then different platforms and users adopt different subsets of them, but in practice it tends to work pretty well. 00:17:28 - Speaker 2: I think the web obviously in many ways is a great example of an open and evolving standard that on one hand has innovated a lot and continues to over a pretty long period of time but also is not owned by any one vendor and browsers come and go and so on. But one principle that’s often used there is this idea of progressive enhancement. which maybe is kind of what you’re pointing to there, Mark, which is you can drop in something like if there’s some fancy new audio thing or some fancy new video thing or some fancy new interaction capability, you can either first of all just handle the degradation case of this browser doesn’t support that, so let me do something. Simpler, but in many cases just putting in, for example, those meta tags that produce, for example, a certain kind of unfurl card will just be ignored by older browsers that don’t know what that is. They just kind of skip over that and if you’re in that situation or You just don’t see that information and probably something similar happens with, yeah, you use an older browser to load a page that has, I don’t know, some fancy new video thing, you just see an empty box or whatever. That’s not great, but it still works for you, you can still get most of the content. 00:18:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we have a lot to learn from the web in terms of how to promote sort of a more flexible notion of what software can be. One really cool thing about the web, right, is that people don’t have to build plug-in APIs into their UIs for you to mess with them. So if you know a little bit of JavaScript hacking, or even, you know, how to open the DOM Inspector on a website, you can go in and delete ads, you can change stuff, you can install browser extensions that modify stuff and none of that is Using some official API, right? It’s just that the nature of the platform is that when you build a website, sort of by default, there’s a lot of hooks built in for people to reverse engineer how it was made and to pretty intrusively modify any part of it. And I think that’s a really interesting goal to aspire to and more software as opposed to a more traditional plug-in API like in a lot of platforms, if there’s no API for it, you’re stuck, you can’t customize that aspect of the software. Of course there are trade-offs, you know. The reverse engineering approach is harder, it tends to be less secure, and it’s a lot harder to maintain over time because things change out from under you. But on the other hand, I think there’s a certain beauty to being able to make changes that not only did the original authors of the software not anticipate and explicitly authorize you to make, but even sometimes ones that they actively don’t want you to make, right? So ad blocker being the prime example of that. And so I’m very excited about the potential for browser extensions as a mechanism for a more customizable kind of software, especially as the web just seems to keep growing and growing as where all software is going to end up living. 00:20:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one of my favorite party tricks is opening the Dev Tools console in someone’s browser and doing something like just changing a background color or some text on any website you want Facebook, CNN.com, whitehouse.gov and you know, it can blow people’s minds, wow, you’re an Uber hacker, but I actually also use that as an entry point for getting people interested in programming, letting them see without needing to install any new tools in their computer. Kind of how the web works a little bit under the hood and that they could do this too. 00:20:42 - Speaker 1: I love doing that too. If I’m trying to teach kids about HTML, I’ll always have them vandalize their school website and the Chrome deaf tools inspector and they just get such a thrill. I think it’s, you know, If you’re brought up in this world where software seems to be this immutable object that is just presented to you, and then someone shows you this little trick you can play, that all of a sudden makes it yours and something you can mess with, I think that’s just a really powerful ethos to instill in people. I think Alan Kay would call it. Popping open the hood and seeing something sensible inside and just a little bit of that ability to mess with the internals, I think can go a long way. Adults too, you know, I’ve shown like sales people how to fake a mockup in the browser, and I’ve seen people, adults scream with delight when they realize they can do this stuff. I do think there’s also a problem, which is that stepping from a little bit of dom hacking and depth tools to actually making a real browser extension, is this enormous leap. Like, if you think about it, you know, to publish a browser extension or even to save one for yourself, you go from messing around in depth tools to, OK, I’m going to learn. All these weird APIs and I’m gonna open up a code editor now, and I have to learn some JavaScript, and there’s just this huge chasm, and one of the things I’m interested in is finding ways to, I guess, bridge that gap, or just make it a smoother slope from that first hint of malleability to taking further steps down that path. I think, for example, spreadsheets do this really well, and this is one of my favorite things about the way spreadsheets are designed. There’s a lot of things that make spreadsheets magical for me, but one of them is that you can take your first step of just typing in some numbers, right? It’s just a data table, there’s nothing special. And then you want to add together some numbers, so you learn to use the sum function, let’s say. And then you just keep taking these little little steps. There’s not that much learning involved with any one of them. There’s not that many concepts involved. And fast forward 2 years and you’re like running a whole business on like a bunch of V lookups, right? And I’ve met so many people who don’t consider themselves that technically literate, who are in fact incredibly capable in this medium, and I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that you can sort of accidentally end up becoming an expert, because no one of those steps was too big. Even though it is the case that, in fact, if you add up all the little steps, you did learn a lot. There was work invested, but it’s a much smoother path to mastery. 00:23:09 - Speaker 2: End user programming is something I think we’re all passionate about here and we’ve written about it in Switch and elsewhere, but this particular element of a gradual step by step rather than having this big jump from user of software to producer of software, I think is a really key part of it. We haven’t cracked the code on that yet as an industry, let’s say. One great discussion of this. Again, coming back to the web, there’s there’s a YouTube talk I’ll link in the show notes, but essentially someone talks about how they had first were using, I think it was LiveJournal, they quickly learned that you can customize the background color or something by pasting this little magic snippet of CSS and that leads you to doing more customizations, and then you go from there to kind of going to full HTML and CSS. There are some break points there if you’re gonna, you know, move off to your own home. Hosting or whatever. There’s a similar kind of path also with HTML that are just files that you FTP to a shared server, or shared host of some kind and then you’re just writing HTML but you can actually break out into PHP with these little codes. So all of these technologies, perhaps not even purposefully, I’m not even sure they were specifically designed to have that gradual ramp, but they do spreadsheets, HTML. PHP all have that kind of ramp, and that ramp is how you can avoid hitting some wall where you have to have some deep intrinsic motivation. I want to learn to be a software engineer or manipulate computers in this way. And instead you’re just on the way to solving your problem. You find some ways to do that by pasting some magic codes into your thing. Maybe you get a little curious and you follow where that leads, and pretty soon you’re an empowered computer user. 00:24:49 - Speaker 1: For me, this comes back to the bring your own client thing. One of the most frustrating experiences for me in software is when you’re in some sort of monolithic ecosystem, and you hit a wall of something you really want to do, but you can’t do, and depending on how the ecosystem around you is arranged, you might just have no choice. That’s sort of it. You can file a feedback request with the company that makes the software, and they will tell you, you know, we have put it on the backlog. Good luck with that. 00:25:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s on our roadmap. Honestly, I make that answer myself in a new support requests all the time and it’s genuinely true, but I’ve never. Worked on a software project that doesn’t have a roadmap backlog, whatever it is, that is just way longer than what you could ever hope to do in a lifetime. 00:25:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve been on both sides of that too. Actually, a lot of how I got into this whole topic to begin with was from my experience being on the other side of that conversation. So before starting a PhD and doing research stuff, worked in startups, I spent a while at an education technology company, where we were building software for K through 12 schools and When we started, we were a very small team. I was fortunate enough to join early. We were like 6 people living in a house together. We only had a few customers, and so we had the ability to focus a lot of attention on any individual request that came in. But as we grew over time, starting to serve thousands of schools across the country, it just became harder and harder to manage all this feedback. And I think the default answer and what you’re supposed to do, given the way software is currently arranged, is to just get better at saying no. So, you sort of assume, well, we’re a resource constrained team, we are the only ones who can change the software. We don’t have the time to do everything everyone wants, and so we’re just going to do less. And I think that on the one hand, that can reflect sort of a wise style of design where you’re not just building a faster horse, you’re like digging deeper and really building something better than they could have asked for, but often in my experience, it was not that at all. It was just that only 5 people wanted something. And I agreed with them, you know, sure, that makes total sense for you. I can see why you want that. I wish I could build it for you, but there’s only 5 of you. And so I’m sorry, and that just really, I think, was a frustrating experience for me, and I found myself wondering, why does my team, you know, in this office in Boston have to be making these decisions for these teachers in like Idaho or whatever. One of the bright spots against that sort of philosophy though was coming back to spreadsheets. I remember this feedback call we had with a customer where We wanted to ask them, how did you like our data reports that we’re showing you, cause we were essentially building data dashboards for schools, and they told us, oh yeah, we don’t use your data reports at all. We use spreadsheets. Let me show you. And so they had exported the CSV and made their own thing. And on the one hand, it was sort of annoying for us having spent so much of our time trying to build this beautiful product experience for them. But on the other hand, it was so cool to see how they had built this really weird and ugly, but extremely functional spreadsheet that did exactly what they wanted for their school, and aggregated the data in a completely different way that had to do with how the teams worked within their school. And I thought what was neat about that was that spreadsheets were this flexible tool kit that they could use to build their own thing, even something as tiny as changing a single word of copy that might have been bothering them and causing friction in their whatever political environment in their school. There’s so many tiny things that I think people would change if they could, but it’s just that the way software is built requires everything to funnel through the original team building thing, which is who’s never gonna have the time. And so, I wish we could reorganize software to support more of that style of customization. 00:28:20 - Speaker 2: So we’ve already touched on some of your work here, Jeffrey. I’ll link your articles on bringing your own client as well as one about browser extensions being underrated, but then maybe you can also talk about some of the projects you’ve done that have to do with how you see solving this problem more broadly. 00:28:39 - Speaker 1: So on the topic of interoperability, one idea that I’m excited about is thinking about better ways to synchronize across existing cloud applications. So I think there’s a way in which, you know, if you’re using one app and I’m using a different app, and if we can establish a bridge between them, where let’s say I’m editing a doc in Google Docs and you’re using Dropbox Paper or your preferred editor, and imagine every single keystroke data is being transmitted live between them. That starts to create this more flexible feeling where the data is not locked in any individual app, and it more kind of lives between the apps. And so one new project that I’m sort of embarking on now is trying to create tools that mediate that kind of synchronization across tools. Some of the hardest part comes back to that partial compatibility issue we talked about earlier, where if there’s changes I’m making that are going to mess up your experience or that aren’t going to propagate to the app you’re using. How can we help users understand the relationship between these apps and feel comfortable with the overall user experience of stitching them together? And I think this gets at some of the toughest challenges in these sort of more flexible software ecosystems is that if we’re all using the same thing, it’s really easy for me to know what you see and what your experience looks like, and the more we diverge. I think it’s really important that I’m at least able to preserve a mental model of maybe there’s some data I’m putting in that you’re not able to see for some reason, and if I’m not aware of that, that’s gonna cause problems, right? And so, a lot of my thinking these days is about building these sorts of sync tools to mediate that gap. 00:30:05 - Speaker 2: I can think of a few examples of that, particularly in the enterprise world, for example, kind of Salesforce to SQL database stuff where your sales team wants to use their CRM because that’s got all these tools and things that suit them, and they’re typing stuff into a web dashboard and getting reminders about who they need to follow up on. But then your data team or your programmers, you know, they’re not going to go cook around in the Salesforce interface. They need to pull stuff into a proper database like a postres database and so syncing seamlessly between those is valuable. Do you have other concrete examples you mentioned the project management tool case. What are some other ones that you see as kind of like key use cases? 00:30:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s funny, sales data is one I’ve heard a lot about too from people and it’s sort of a more mundane use case. I’m not sure I would classify it in sort of the creative tool space, but I think it points to how this need just pops up a lot inside of companies. 00:30:57 - Speaker 2: I’ll go ahead and count sales as creative work. I actually have this discussion of fair fair bit, which is sort of I like to use the term creative professional when I talk about sort of the target audience for muse, but also maybe just the kind of person I’m interested in serving generally. And a lot of people do respond to that with, oh, well, I’m an attorney or I’m an accountant, is that really creative work? And I think it is, I think there is creativity that goes into, for example, financial modeling, and absolutely there can be creativity that goes into sales. It’s not traditional artist type stuff, so I would go ahead and count that. 00:31:30 - Speaker 1: That’s totally fair, and in fact, I think it points to why tools matter in any profession. Like, there’s a reason that people want to synchronize HubSpot with MailChimp. There’s something going on there about what individual tools are good at in the entire life cycle of how you want to run your process, and the need for sync emerges from the reality that no one tool can do everything perfectly. And so I think that’s totally valid. 00:31:53 - Speaker 2: I’m reminded of the phrase toolmaker humility, which came up in our podcast withalant from Kraft where he really tries to keep that in his heart as he designs the product of knowing you’re not only, not the only tool that people are using. but you’re probably a large collection of both process and over time your toolkit is changing and that sort of thing, and I just feel it’s so easy for toolmakers to want to make the everything tool. Don’t worry, we’ll just do everything and you can put everything in here and we’ll be all in one place and then it can all work together seamlessly and that has never been how the world has worked. It is never going to be how the world works. If you can design your tool to play as well as possible and be aware of that reality, I think everyone’s better off. 00:32:38 - Speaker 1: I think it’s tricky though, because you need not only the willingness of the tool makers to play with other tools, but you need a platform that supports that interoperability in the right way. So I think Kraft is the perfect specific example of this. I think they’ve done the best possible thing you could expect a writing tool to do today, which is that I think as Balant mentioned on this podcast, they let you save your documents either to their cloud, which gives you real-time collaboration, you can comment and things like that, or you can save it to a file, which gives you more control. It is sort of locally stored with you. You have the ability to save it wherever you want. Other people can potentially open those files in different applications, I think, is the ultimate goal of that teams, but it’s an either or. So if you want to collaborate in real time and have that flexibility to open those files in other applications, there’s no technological solution to that today that exists. There’s no platform that team can build on to support that, and to me that’s the key missing piece. There’s this ecosystem missing there, that means that even in this dream world where Google decides they want their party editors to exist for Google Docs or something, supporting that technically is very challenging, and so I think we need better platform support for that kind of thing, in addition to thinking about business incentives for people to even want to do in the first place. 00:33:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a great example to bring up. I agree there’s a huge technical challenge here. It’s one that I and many people around me and the Ink & Switch research lab have been working on for some years now. Yeah, so you would need to have that in place, something like files for the real-time collaborative internet. What is that abstraction. And then on top of that you do have this whole issue of business and incentives and dynamics and path dependence because let’s say conservatively that creating this technology takes 10 engineer years. a million dollars, who’s going to put that up and then how do you actually turn that into a public platform that’s optimized for the benefit of all the individual users and not the creator? It’s a tough problem. One of the things that I liked about this project that you mentioned, where you’re synchronizing data between cloud services, is that it does grapple with the reality of, here’s our initial condition of there are a bunch of proprietary. cloud services that do have important data and it’d be ideal if they had a perfect JSO API, but that’s not the reality that we live in. So we need to find a way to help our users get data back and forth between them. I feel like a lot of the conversations in this space, that is a space of open systems are of the form, we should X where X is design and build and use a perfect open system. That’s not gonna happen. In fact, it’s unreasonable for you to ask other people dedicate their moral lives to your pet projects, right? So you need to find a way to grapple with these dynamics and get out there in reality. 00:35:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a tension I think a lot about between sort of an incremental approach versus a first principles approach. I think you could frame it. For example, the solid project, which is led by Tim Berners-Lee and is pretty prominent in this space, is one attempt where their idea is, you know, we’re gonna essentially fundamentally rearchitect how web apps are built. We’re going to give users these little, they call them pods, where the users control their own data, and then web applications can connect to your pod to access and edit your data, but the applications themselves don’t store the data. And I think that’s a lovely vision. I would love to see something like that succeed, but as you’re saying, Mark, I think the biggest challenge is, how are we possibly going to get from the world we have today to that future? Are we really going to rebuild the web stack from scratch? And is the experience going to be better enough for both developers and users to incentivize such a massive shift? I tend to think that no amount of, you know, legislation or regulation, let’s say, is going to successfully push us to a solution if it’s not better for both developers and users. And so I think we need to think about making it incredibly easy and awesome for both of those groups in order to get from where we are today to that beautiful future. 00:36:34 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to be clear, I do believe it’s possible to get to a future that looks very different from the present, a radically different future, but necessarily you are going to get there in incremental steps, which might be incremental steps from the status quo or incremental steps from zilch, basically where you’re building up a new system in the context of the current ecosystem. I think both of those are viable. I agree. I think what we need here is entrepreneurs in the broadest sense, not just of commercial ventures, but of ideas and nonprofits and politics and all these things to really work towards the future that they want to see. 00:37:04 - Speaker 1: I think another really important thing on the entrepreneurship theme there is being realistic about use cases. I think my favorite startup style thinkers are the people who can really focus on what is this technology actually useful for, and how can we focus in on that one killer app. And I’m not sure that we’ve necessarily found that killer app yet in this space. For me, I think collaborative writing might be the one personally, but I worry that you can make all the tech demos you want. But a lot of things take off in a particular niche. And I’m interested in finding where’s the place where people desperately are needing this real-time interoperability to the point that they would actually abandon their familiar tools. 00:37:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like this actually afflicts quite a few projects in the space where, again, they’re thinking in terms of generalities and they don’t have a specific use case in mind. I actually called this the mark rule for product management, which is you need to have a single named human being like an email who specifically wants your projects. And that sounds like a low bar, but in a lot of cases, you ask people that and they’re like, oh, it’s salespeople. Well, do you have a specific one in mind that I can email? Well, not always, right? So it’s a good baseline. 00:38:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think often, especially with this kind of customizable software, it’s tempting to get into wouldn’t it be cool if conversations that where it might be nice, but there’s no real pain. One use case that I think is really compelling to me is I read a paper recently by some researchers at Northwestern University on accessibility issues and collaborative writing. And they talk about how people with sight impairments have a really hard time using Google Docs with their teammates, because there are certain accessibility issues around how that platform works. And what they often end up doing is they’ll either convince their team to adopt a different workflow, or they’ll just give up and copy paste text out into a Word doc or something, edit it there, and then paste it back. And it’s very, very cumbersome. It’s not just a little inconvenience, it really limits their ability to be a true member of their team. And they have to make this incredibly uncomfortable choice where they talk about the social anxiety around trying to convince all of their coworkers to use a different tool, or just internalizing that friction and deciding to try to live with it. And I think that if you imagine a world of greater interoperability, could we have a text editor that is much more optimized for this specific group of people who have very different needs and still allow them to collaborate with their peers more effectively? The more that people’s needs differ, especially people with disabilities, I think often have fairly different kinds of needs and a lot of other people. I think that those are use cases I’m thinking a lot about in terms of where we really need better interoperability. 00:39:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s a great motivating factor. It’s easy to think of the what ifs in terms of cool conveniences and emojis and so on, but let’s not forget about that as well. 00:39:51 - Speaker 1: I also think as an antidote to cool conveniences, there’s sort of an interesting paradoxical way that software customization actually promotes very boring stability. So I think one of the special things about, let’s say, programmers and their text editors, which is a place where we have some of this file-based interoperability, is that if you talk to programmers, often they’ve invested like a decade plus in using a particular editor, right? And they’ve carried it with them from job to job, they’ve really made it their own. And they have successfully been able to avoid switching tools because of interoperability. It’s not this kind of tinkering, trying a bunch of new things mindset. It’s exactly the opposite of just getting to invest deeply in one tool and to keep using it. I think that’s an underrated benefit of interoperability is just. Yeah, being able to make that deep investment. 00:40:42 - Speaker 2: The revealed preferences of software engineers is that yeah, very standardized file formats, usually plain text, wide variety of source editors, wide variety of different kinds of plug-ins and liters and things like that. I guess you do have to agree on your version control system that needs to be at least somewhat standardized on your team. Terminal, even things like database clients, you know, SQL is pretty standardized, so software engineers seem to prefer software that changes less. And has more interoperability and it does have the problem of, as we mentioned previously with email or Twitter as a platform versus a product. Yes, it is hard. Someone says, you know, programming editors or source code would be really great if you could drop in an image. I could put in a little diagram of my Architecture or something like that in a comment that would make perfect sense. I think that would be a big improvement, but that would be very hard to do because the plain text format we’ve all been using a very long time and all the tools are built around that, but essentially software engineers prefer that versus something sort of newer and shinier and with more features. 00:41:50 - Speaker 3: Yeah, in fact, it’s the ecosystem that is extraordinarily susceptible to customization and extension because all the participants are able and in fact inclined to do that. So kind of competitively, it’s very hard to win without leveraging that. I think a good example of that is the editor wars which to my mind are now kind of coming to a close and BS code is one to a large extent I think because of the incredible platformization they have with extensions and language servers and so forth, and typically there’s going to be a bunch of editors. I use a different one. But they’ve been able to really pull ahead while accelerating the whole ecosystem for developers because they lean so heavily into the open platform angle. 00:42:28 - Speaker 1: I also think though that the diversity of text editors can teach us something about how to reconcile this partial compatibility thing we were talking about, because if you think about it, yes, the base format of the code being shared between people can be really stripped down into this text format, but some editors like VS code, do a lot with that format. They’ll run fancy analysis on top of it and do syntax highlighting and all these like autocomplete things, which are not inherently part of the data exchange format. They’re just Bells and whistles that each individual editor gets to add on top to that experience. But I’m not forced to opt into that. I can use a stripped down, I could use Microsoft notepad to edit code if I wanted to, right? There’s nothing stopping me from doing that. 00:43:08 - Speaker 2: Ed is the standard text editor. 00:43:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah. In fact, I think when I was like 12 years old, that’s probably when I started using to write code because I didn’t know any better. And I think That’s an interesting, for me lesson to reflect on is can we get more places where there’s this shared core and then more functionality built up as optional app specific extensions. 00:43:27 - Speaker 2: And then we touched briefly on, I guess, financial incentives, and we look at the interoperability problem writ large. Certainly it comes from the world of files, kind of classic desktop files, and yeah, there was problems with sort of format openness like Word docs. Files, for example, but ultimately files did seem to have a lot of that agency and interoperability, and it’s really both mobile and cloud that I think brought us these more closed up hermetically sealed systems, both for their own reasons. I think mobile is more around kind of safety and security and comprehensibility to end users, particularly very non-technical users. But on the maybe cloud web app side, particularly B2B software, now you get into this thing where data is considered to be where the value is. James Chen used this terminology data swamp. That that’s kind of like the aggregating a bunch of data together and that’s where the value is and you even see that in what people expect to pay for software. We run up against that with Muse, we talked to Balant from Kraft about that as well, which is people are in the mindset of, oh, if you’re going to host my data for me, then you need to run a server or whatever, then I can justify paying a subscription. But if I’m just buying the software, they feel like software isn’t valuable on its own, and of course that’s really restrictive for making truly great software and furthermore, it creates all these incentives around of course you want to lock up the data, of course, something like a two-way sync. Like you described, that’s hurting my business’s value. So trying to find a way to create financial incentives and paying for the software and the value that provides you versus the data, the data swamp, that’s a tough one. 00:45:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s tough. One angle that I like circling back to a previous podcast on games is, so to kind of recap the dynamic there is that there are some ecosystems that are so high powered because of their open platformized, scriptable, customizable, whatever nature that no amount of proprietary excellence can compete. And I don’t think we’ve quite found or charted that path in the world of creative tools. You think about, I don’t know, Photoshop. Could an open Photoshop be so much better such that it displaces Adobe Photoshop? I mean, maybe, right? I don’t yet see the path for that, but perhaps in the world of multi devices or multi users or other use cases, there is. So I think that’s one promising angle. There are other angles, but that to me seems perhaps the most interesting. 00:46:01 - Speaker 2: That’s an interesting one to think of the way that for example the web and its open standards and interoperability displaced and was clearly a huge improvement on the more closed up formats like Flash or maybe Java Servlets that came before. Clearly the web was just so much superior and it In addition to being open, hackable, you can pop open your DOM Inspector and do stuff to any web page. So what would be an equivalent of that that would make Photoshop or even something a beloved current piece of software like Sketch or FIMA? What would make those things feel like a Java servelet by comparison? 00:46:38 - Speaker 1: I think there’s a really tricky balance here to strike because it is very valuable to have someone think through an entire unified product experience and make it all fit together in a coherent way. I know this is something you’ve thought about a lot with when I use Muse, it feels like someone has taken care to design this whole environment and I don’t have to do much work to sort of put together a bunch of pieces. And 90% of people most of the time, don’t want to like assemble their own software from scratch, right? There’s a reason we pay designers. is to think through these problems for us. And I think that’s totally a good thing, and designers bring a lot of value in that way. But at the same time, I think that we can think about rather than giving someone this hermetically sealed box, can we use an analogy like build a beautiful Lego set for them and hand it to them, where if they like it just as it is, that’s fine. And if they want to add one Lego right there, it’s not a big deal. They sort of see the composition of how this thing was made. They have a little bit of flexibility to tweak it because it’s made out of parts they understand. I think that’s a design ethos that sometimes I feel like we’re in danger of moving away from. There’s this great story in one of my favorite books about end user programming, which is called Changing Minds by Andy Dessa, who’s sort of an education and computing researcher, and he talks about this nightmare he had where he’s riding a bike, and he looks down at the gears, and they are labeled not with numbers, but with words, like this is gravel mode, this is like uphill mode. And he has no idea how to use the thing, you know, if I’m going downhill on gravel, do I use gravel mode or downhill mode? And he talks about how like, because we’re used to riding bikes with number gears, this sounds sort of ridiculous, but you can imagine the product manager that had that conversation where they said, these numbers make no sense to people. People don’t want to like, see 1234, they want to understand the function. We need to give them an easier way to understand what this tool is for. But what you’re robbing them of is a structural sense of what’s going on underneath to provide that functionality. So that the moment you go off the expected use cases for the thing, you have nothing to lean on. You have no coherent understanding of the system, and so everything just falls apart. And what he contends is that people can actually learn sometimes more than I think we give them credit for. Like, it’s not actually that hard to learn a bike. Everyone learns how to ride a. Like, even though it takes some practice and you have to feel out the gears to understand how they work. Once you’ve put in that little bit of effort, you have this sort of generalizable understanding of the system that can go a long way and is much more generically applicable. And so I think it’d be nice to see a little bit more of that style reflected in how we build software for people. 00:49:09 - Speaker 2: Well said, yeah, I think the design ethos often is kind of polarized towards the edges, which are either making pure consumer stuff. It just has to be as simple as possible, no choices, no customization, just can’t have no chance of going off the rails. And getting confused or we have the full on I’m going to build my own PC from parts and put together my own Linux distribution and assemble my raspberry Pi and you put together all my special VS code plugins and there’s kind of nothing in between sometimes. 00:49:43 - Speaker 3: This reminds me of an important point about these platforms and ecosystems. If you look at the successful spaces, whether it’s software or protocols or hardware, it generally is not, you have some platform and then a bunch of individual users completely customizing their setup. What tends to happen is you have the platform, you have a small number of secondary market providers, if you will, who provide modules. Sanctions, implements, what have you, and a much bigger group that tries, by the way, but a lot of that stuff just kind of gets filtered out, doesn’t bubble up the top. But if you create an opportunity for people to have a business or some other sense of fulfillment from providing these things to the community, you only need a few of them. To really enhance the ecosystem. And yes, you’re gonna have some users who want to build their whole tractor from scratch or who want to go in and fiddle with the HTML and CSS that’s fine, but often the real main potatoes of these ecosystems is the secondary market of service module extension providers. And the somewhat sad consequence of that as someone who’s really into end user programming is that often it’s not the end user programming experience that matters the most. If you look at how hard it often is to build a module or extension or an add-on, often it’s frankly a huge pain, but people who are doing that as a small business, as a major hobby, they’re willing to get over that and then they can provide the service for all the other users in the ecosystem. So it often ends up being important is distribution, obviously platform access, and some ability to monetize or get the equivalent personal fulfillment. 00:51:20 - Speaker 1: I’m not sure I totally agree that it’s sad for end user programming. I think you’re totally right that there’s this collaborative dynamic, but for me, that’s sort of just one part of the picture to keep in mind when we’re designing tools for this. So like, for example, and I think there’s a similar dynamic in spreadsheet usage, where there’s been some great studies by Bonnie Nardi, who’s kind of like a hero in the end user programming community of how spreadsheets are used in offices and What it turns out being is that there’s like someone in the office who’s like the spreadsheet person, right? And when you have a really complicated formula, right, you go to them and they help you and they figure it out, and then you go back to your desk and keep working on it. But the key thing there is that there is a large part of that ecosystem that is available to you, even as a novice, and you don’t have to like, again, ask someone to ship you a hermetically sealed thing. Maybe you can sort of read the formula they wrote and start to learn a bit. And so I think Having fuzzier boundaries of expertise and enabling more collaboration is a thing to strive for. One project I’ve worked on that sort of embodies this goal a bit is this project called Wildcard, which is a tool kit for people to build their own browser extensions without programming. And the rough idea there is, like you were saying, Mark, it’s pretty hard to build a browser extension. Some browser extensions are extremely complicated. And when I install them, I have no idea how they work inside. If I want to tweak the extension, or maybe compose two extensions in a new way, that’s typically really hard to do. And the thesis of the Wildcard Project is that, yes, some extensions need to be really complicated like you said, but also there are some extensions that I think don’t need to be that complicated. I remember using for a while an extension that added a checkbox next to every transaction on a bank statement, so you could just remember whether you’d already written it down somewhere else. And this had like thousands of installs on the Chrome extension store, you know, that’s not a sophisticated thing. But again, it’s really hard to even build something that simple as a non-programmer. So the goal of Wildcard is, can we take that subset of extensions, which is not that complicated and make it accessible to normal people to build. And actually, as you can tell, you know, I’m sort of a spreadsheets fan. And so the paradigm we went with was, what if you could edit a website in a spreadsheet is the vision. You know, you open up a little pane, you see some data in a table that sort of represents what’s in the page, like on a news site, it might be a list of articles with their names and authors and whatever. And then, As you mess with the spreadsheet, whether that’s sorting and filtering or adding new columns with little formulas in them, all of that flows back into the page and modifies it. And the goal there is that if you’ve used a spreadsheet, you can maybe learn your way around this environment, you don’t need to like open a code editor, you’re just right there in the website and you can build and share these customizations with other people. Now, again, it might be the case that 90% of users of this thing eventually will just install pre-made things that others made, but if they’re not written in JavaScript, if they’re in this sort of more user friendly paradigm, maybe more people will end up popping the hood there and making little tweaks of their own. So I think it’s this delicate balance there. 00:54:15 - Speaker 2: Well, before we go, one question I think that can come up sometimes is this question of designing software for other people, and maybe you can imagine that product designers who their whole role in fact is doing that and software as this abstract hard to understand thing you actually need another person with that expertise to design it for you. But you could actually swing back the other way as well and say, how can anyone else know your needs? And in fact, this is why some of the startup advice is solve your own problem, build something for yourself because you know it in an intimate way that no one else can. Where do you stand on this? How can others design software? 00:54:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this may be a slightly extreme way to put it, but I think I’m pretty pessimistic that it’s possible to design truly great software for someone besides yourself. Especially if the person you’re designing for is operating in a complex environment, like, for example, I had experience designing for teachers, and I’ve never been a teacher in a classroom before.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Titles of books are probably one of the best sources of inspiration for messaging. Book covers are so inspiring to me because it’s a visual and a title and the title’s so short and it captures the entire thesis of the book. 00:00:22 - 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. Joined today by Hilary Maloney. Hi. And Hillary, we on the Muse team often like to work from interesting, inspiring nature locations with sometimes limited internet connectivity. Hui in particular is famous for this, at least on our team. I understand that while you were working with us recently on a project, you got to do a little work in the less connected parts of California. 00:01:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I spent a lot of my time climbing and traveling around California in a camper van and got to do quite a bit of this project, traveling down in Bishop and I’d work in the mornings out of the van and then kind of go about my day. So it’s really cool to work, you know, flexibly with this team and see that you guys have that as part of your working style. 00:01:24 - Speaker 2: Now, how do you fit together your day kind of interleaving, obviously these very different activities of going out into, I guess bouldering is the, the official term for it. Yeah, exactly. Sort of going out and doing that, which I’m just gonna assume in my head that it’s like this documentary Free Solo that you look exactly like that guy climbing up the side of the mountain there in Yosemite, but do you do that kind of like you like to work early and then do the physical stuff later or the inverse? How do you put it together? 00:01:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m definitely a morning person, so I like to get up really early, especially when I’m camping, you know, if you’ve ever been camping, you naturally wake up at like 5 a.m. And so I like to get a few hours of work in the morning when my brain is fresh and then kind of go about my day and being really physical and active, I think is almost part of my process. We can talk about that more, but I think, you know, being in your body is so important to doing creative work and having ideas. And so yeah, I tend to kind of start in the morning and then that physical experience is really important for me. 00:02:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, same here, and I think I didn’t realize that and I don’t know, my twenties maybe when I was, you know, get my career started and was more about being at the computer and being focused, but later, yeah, that in your body, as well as maybe almost paint that as the inverse, which is actually getting out of your head, which is when you do very intellectual work all the time and you’re almost unaware of your body, almost to the detriment of your physical health. But if you go do something particularly that’s really demanding, whether it’s something like bouldering, for me, a really intensive hike, for example, with a lot of elevation change or run, anything like that, it sort of forces you to leave the higher plane of your mind and go to a more primal state, but I think that actually is better for when you return to your mind, somehow your ideas and your creativity has rearranged itself. I don’t know, it’s like, there’s something to it there. 00:03:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I feel very seen by that. It’s kind of a necessary part of the life, you know, and doing hard complex work, and I’m definitely drawn to, as you described, those very intense experiences as well. Even sometimes walking isn’t enough. I need to run or surf or climb or something that’s like very physically demanding, and you’re exactly right. It’s really about getting out of your mind as much as it is getting into your body. 00:03:56 - Speaker 2: And tell us about your background and in particular, maybe even how you would label what you do. I think I’ve heard you refer to yourself as a strategist. Tell us what you do and how you came to do that. 00:04:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’m a brand strategist and researcher. My background is really in kind of classical brand marketing and advertising. So I’ve spent a lot of my career working in advertising agencies, but I also really love working with startups, so I do a lot of side projects as well. And I really think of myself as a marketing generalist. Maybe you guys feel this in software, but I think a lot of fields are becoming super super specialized and there’s routes you kind of take to specialize in your career and I’ve tried to stay really broad, so I do quite a lot of of marketing work and like to do messaging, which we’re going to talk about, but I also do a lot of advertising and different skills within the discipline. Yeah, so how did I start in marketing? I actually studied journalism and that just got me really interested in storytelling, but found pretty early on, I liked applying that to brands, and I like being at the intersection of communication and really business and business strategy and kind of the why behind it. 00:05:14 - Speaker 2: Now, is this a, you tried your hand at, I don’t know, when I think of journalism, I maybe I’m thinking of investigative journalism, but going out into the field, researching a story and then writing. You know, a medium form piece about that. And did you try that and find it didn’t work for you and then you somehow stumbled into this brand thing or was it just more like, I don’t know, there’s certainly probably more commercial opportunity, not journalism is not known these days for being like a growth industry in particular. 00:05:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. For me, it was in school. I was in a pretty good journalism program and we did a lot of field work as part of our program. I studied photojournalism specifically, so I was doing a lot of photo stories and reporting and coming back into, we had critiques, almost like art school style critiques with our photojournalism program and My professor just recognized in my work that I was drawn to telling stories about businesses in our community and in particular in a documentary style journalism class, I was producing a lot of work that was like going behind these businesses and telling their stories, and my professor actually kind of pulled me aside and he was like, I think you need to go into more of like an advertising path with your kind of natural. Interests. So actually in school, I made that pivot and started taking some marketing and advertising classes and then started working in the marketing field at a startup actually is my first job. 00:06:46 - Speaker 2: Anything we’ve heard of? 00:06:48 - Speaker 1: Probably not. It was called Parlour. It was an interior design app, so actually kind of interesting. I’ve had this red thread in my experience of creative tools and creative communities, but it was a workflow and e-commerce app for interior designers, so very specific, but we made it into beta and then we just didn’t find enough scale kind of in the right amount of time. But it was a really, really fun marketing experience and a really fun brand to build. So it was really exciting and, you know, you learn a lot in startups and not finding market fit, and I definitely learned a lot. So it’s a fun fun place to start my career for sure. 00:07:31 - Speaker 2: Well, that’s good you took the positive lesson from that. I feel you could take the negative one, which is, boy, these startups are unstable and uncertain, and it kind of sucks to pour a bunch of creative energy into a thing that ultimately falls flat in the marketplace, but it seems you took it more as learning experience and just a chance to try something that’s kind of high risk, but high risk means sometimes it doesn’t work out in the end. 00:07:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. 00:07:55 - Speaker 2: So I’m very pleased to say that Muse 2.0 is out. We launched a couple of days ago and I’ll link the launch memo in the show notes. You can read that for all the goodies, MacAs, sync, text blocks, etc. Now, as part of that, we have an all new website, and if you go look at the homepage, you can already see we’re talking about the product quite differently, the Muse 2 product quite differently to how we talked about Muse one. So that naturally leads to our topic today, which is messaging. Now the project you did with us, Hillary, was working on our messaging. And where we landed is sort of 3 parts. The first is dive into big ideas. So this is our brand messaging, it’s aspirational, it’s why you might want to use the product without telling you what it is. And then we have two more product level descriptions. One is a very short one, that’s tool for deep work, and then there’s a slightly longer one, which is flexible boards for note taking, whiteboarding, and connecting the dots. And we’ll try to use those on our website, but also on our App Store page and our Twitter bio. You even heard it in the podcast intro, especially anytime someone, especially new comes across our product or company and they just want to know really briefly, what are these folks about, what is this product about? So congratulations Hillary on the successful result. 00:09:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m super happy with where we landed, and it’s exciting to start seeing it coming to life across the site and different places that we’re using that marketing language. 00:09:22 - Speaker 2: So if we go to the definitional element here, tell us maybe for someone who’s a designer, engineer, founder, someone who’s in the tech world but maybe doesn’t necessarily know what that term means. 00:09:35 - Speaker 1: I define messaging as a system of communication that’s rooted in strategy. So, you know, it sounds like it might be limited to just like copywriting or headlines or that kind of thing. I think the most important thing is that it has a strong point of view and that it’s maybe rooted in a moment in time for your business. So maybe you’re thinking about a particular audience that’s critical to your growth kind of right now. A new product is a very, you know, common reason why you would revisit your messaging and really thinking about your positioning relative to the category. So there’s a lot of that research and context that goes into creating that system of messaging. And I think that’s something Adam, you and I spoke about pretty early on when you were kind of running into this problem of how do we articulate news in this really simple way. The solution is really to create a system of brand, product, taglines, just longer descriptions that you can use, so it’s much more than kind of one line, it’s that system and the reason behind it. 00:10:47 - Speaker 2: And one of the exercises we did in the kind of early part of the project was to look at some comparable products, either, yeah, competitors or pseudo competitors, but others that are just in the creative tools space or the sorts of products that people who also use Muse or might use Muse would also use. And that was illuminating to me and talking about that point in time element you mentioned that I think is important, which is, you gave the example of notion. And I think their website a couple of years ago said something like, your team’s source of truth, and I remember when I saw that, that really clicked for me, that resonated. I said, ah, OK, this is like a modern team wiki, it’s a place to put all your kind of internal documentation about your company. OK, I got it. But I think at that point in their existence, they were targeting people like me, basically startup people at small and medium sized companies. Now, you pointed out and looking at their current messaging and you had some screenshots of their website, you’re guessing, paraphrasing here, correct me if I’m wrong, but from the outside it seems like they’ve transitioned to trying to message to the enterprise. They’re moving to these larger companies because they basically have completely owned the startup market. Everyone knows what notion is and uses it, they don’t need to convince anyone through. Website. So now this new category that they’re expanding to, which is these larger, more kind of traditional or conservative companies, and they need different messaging. And so for me, I look at the notion’s website now and the stuff they say there doesn’t speak to me at all. I’m like why do they are messaging worse, but it’s not worse, it’s just different for a new audience. Is that the right interpretation? 00:12:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and I think they have right now a line around for every team, and so when I see that, I can see that their strategy is really about moving beyond technical teams in the organization. And if I had to guess, Notion might be experiencing a ton of love for the product among just technical teams where they have a really strong brand, and now they need to build that same sort of traction within more teams in the organization so that there is that enterprise value. That’s just my total assumption based on the messaging, but I do tend to do that like you said, you know, in our discovery process, we Looked at a lot of different companies in the space and at this point in my career, I kind of go through the world just interpreting strategies and problems brands are trying to solve based on their commercial or some kind of ad that I see or something, so. Yeah. 00:13:24 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I also appreciated this idea of identifying a point in time for the messaging, because I feel like one of the challenges we had before was it just felt so daunting to think about the messaging from Us, which is this product that we aspire to be working on for many years, and we have huge ambitions for, and how do you summarize that all in one word or even one sentence. But this project, I feel like we’ve cut scope, as Adam would say, when in doubt cut scope and say, OK, for this product and this launch, what’s the message that we want to communicate to these new users? And that seems much more doable. 00:13:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe to that point in time element, while we were less strategic perhaps about choosing kind of our muse 1. X messaging. So there we identified that we’re a tool for thought, and we have this second level message, deep thinking doesn’t happen in front of a computer. And so that was kind of the core, and then we also described the product as a spatial canvas, that’s kind of the product description, and then the more aspirational, the category is tool for thought. And I think that did work really well for us at a point in time, which was that term was maybe on the rise, particularly among a particular niche audience of people, and because we were early on, that worked really well, but I look at it now and I go, OK, well, we want to be a little more accessible, and so our website is kind of like, if you don’t know exactly what is a tool for thought, If you’re not one of those very small, you know, number of people on that inside club, it doesn’t really give you a lot of information, it sort of pushes you away. And again, I think that’s fine when you’re early on and you need to build a smaller audience, and it’s OK if it’s sort of niche, and so one of the goals for this project was to be slightly more accessible. Now, it’s not mainstream by any sense, I don’t think news would ever be that, but we wanted to go a step further into making it comprehensible. You don’t necessarily need to know who Doug Engelbart is in order to get benefit from use as one example. I think that’ll still always be our core community. We certainly will use tool for Though in a lot of contexts, including in describing this podcast, and so on, but it’s a chance to, and so if you think of that point in time and the problem that we’re trying to solve, it is, how do we take what we think is a great product and make it a little bit more accessible while still staying true to what we’re all about. So Hillary, I mentioned earlier, this kind of brand or aspirational message versus, you know, what is your product, what category you were in practically, what does it do? You talked about that quite a bit and the difference between the brand message and the product message as we work together. How do you think about that, broadly? 00:16:01 - Speaker 1: So brand messaging is really about creating a feeling or an emotional pull toward your brand and product is much more functional, leaning into the features and benefits of using the product. And as companies get really big, even, you know, like Fortune 100 type companies which I tend to work on more in my full-time job, brand gets really far away from product where in many cases it’s not even rooted in the product. That happens in categories where products are really commodities, so that doesn’t happen as much in tech, but a good example of this if you think about candy. A lot of candy is the same. You’re not going to really talk about the benefits of the product. It’s sweet. Exactly. Even that, like, you know, gummy worm commercials that are just about like crazy, you know, fun, these brands tend to create a mood or some kind of character, something that just helps it be relevant to people and just be liked, and then there’s not really anything they could say about the product that’s compelling. 00:17:14 - Speaker 2: You know, in our brand episode we talked about Coca-Cola, maybe as one of the purest brands they’ve invested for, I don’t know, over a century now, I think in associating with Americana and Santa Claus and friends and family and good vibes and I don’t know, support the war effort during World War 2, yeah, happiness, but it’s sugar water in the end, and yeah, it’s got a certain flavor to it, but you know, it’s sort of the ultimate commodity, but they built this incredible brand around that. They don’t need to spend a lot of time talking about. This is a beverage you can drink that tastes sweet and also has caffeine in it. 00:17:49 - Speaker 1: Exactly. So I kind of come to tech with this extremely broad lens on brands, and I think this category requires a lot more respect for product communication than you typically see in like marketing. So I tend to be among my like marketing community, a little bit of an outsider on that, like when I get the chance to work on, you know, more tech brands like I’ve worked on Dropbox in the past and we transfer in many cases in a more traditional agency setting, you know, I’m the one asking like, what does the product do and how do we turn that into something. So I think when I started this Muse project, We want to, of course, have brand messaging because Muse has a really strong brand, but I think just coming into where you guys are as a product, there’s so much education to do on just what the product is that it was like fairly clear to me that that was where we needed to start. And where we landed and kind of the messaging hierarchy, and that’s really, I think, what can be helpful is how do you think about brand and product messaging relative to one another, which one should you lead with? And we landed with. big ideas as the lead message on the website, but there’s so much more focus, you know, if you think of the total kind of share of messaging in the hierarchy that we landed with, there’s a lot of product messaging there and product education there. And then as people go deeper, they get into those, you know, what are the principles behind the product, who’s the team, what’s your background and the research perspective, and that starts to really build a lot of that more emotional pull to muse. So it’s definitely both. It’s just like how do you get into the details of working out. Again, your point in time as a brand and what’s the most important thing you need to do. And I think for us, it’s a little bit of category, creation, right? Like this is kind of a new kind of product and also just education. So we definitely think over the course of the project started going more into focusing on product communication, but I’d be curious, Adam, what you thought about this too because I know this is something we debated quite a bit. 00:20:10 - Speaker 2: We did, and coming back to those comparables, again, one of the early pieces of kind of research you did was just looking at, you know, I gave you a list of what I thought of as being, again, competitor is the wrong word for it, but sort of tools that are in our sphere somehow, because they are again, other ones that people who are customers and users use, they’re just ones we like, we just think they are a good team or have good brand or whatever. So one example of a smaller team we talked about a bit was My Mind. So if you look at their website, they are very heavy on the brand messaging, right, which is, I think the opposite of most technical products, particularly apps, you know, if you go look at Bear notes or Obsidian or one of these many kind of text oriented note taking tools that really lead with, here’s what this thing is and what you can do and here’s a screenshot. And then the brand stuff, you know, what’s our manifesto tends to come later. Whereas my mind really leads very heavily with a visual style, with a, you know, reclaim your mind, and here’s all the things we’re sort of fighting against in the world, and you have to really scroll quite a bit before you find out what actually is this thing? What, what do I use it for, what platforms even run on? And it was kind of nice to have that as a bracketing thing. Here’s a very extreme investment in brand, that’s a technical, you know, productivity software tool that’s in our kind of world, and then we had others that were on the other extreme, which again tends to be most, but I think especially a lot of iOS apps that are especially if it’s just made by a small, you know, one or two developers where they don’t have some big highfalutin thing, they’re just like, hey, here’s an app that Lets you do X and then here’s a screenshot, and hope you like it, click here to download it. And so having that spectrum. And I think for us, one of the things we were trying to incorporate into this project is what we’ve learned over the last several years of trying to explain. This weird product. And one of the things I’ve learned is that we’ve tried lots of different things we can kind of put on a website or on an app store page or whatever, and none of it quite seems to capture it well, and maybe it’s because we haven’t quite found the right words. Some of it is that we’re trying to do something that’s pretty new, and so therefore, there isn’t just a brief summary, but I do think a big part of it is what you ended up calling the brand messaging. Which is, we know that someone who, for example, listens to a couple of episodes of the podcast first and then tries the product, is much more likely to find success, not because we explain in any way how the product works, it’s more that you know how we’re thinking about it. And what our values are, what our culture is, and sort of if you’re drawn to that or you just like it, but you have it in your mind, and then you go to use the product, you know this is something different. There’s a different set of values that go into it, and so you’re not likely to bring the same preconceived notions that you might expect from another, I don’t know, iPad app. So with that kind of top of mind for me, I came in and said, and you started to talk about this difference, and so my perspective was maybe we should lead with the brand messaging. Maybe, you know, it doesn’t necessarily need to be pages and pages' worth, but maybe that first above the fold thing should really be about. Here’s how we think about having good ideas. Independent of the product we’re building, and then you read that, and if it resonates with you, you scroll a little further and then we explain, by the way, we have this product, and I think we explored some of those ideas, but you ultimately were on the side of, actually, we really should lead with the product messaging and the brand stuff goes a little later. 00:23:41 - Speaker 1: I think one other great example to think about is Apple as a brand, you know, we talked about Coke and I think sometimes these big brands that we all have so much experience with can help us just add a little more context to these very esoteric ideas of, you know, product and brand, and I think Apple is one that we might assume really leads with a lot of brand messaging, right, because they just have such a strong brand, we’ve actually combed through. All of their marketing, especially their website, but even their marketing commercials, their events, all of these things, most of what they actually say is about the product. And that’s something I’ve started talking a lot with my team of strategists at work is Apple is really a product marketer, and it’s really interesting when you look at that in detail, because the way that they actually express all these brand ideas that we have extremely strong associations with like creativity, right, design. Those things are all implicit. They’re in the style of everything they do, the actual design of their products, right? They never really say those words, and I think that that really gets into strategy and brand, even messaging kind of can push you toward how do we express this implicitly, right? And not everything needs to be in explicit terms. So that’s something that I think we started to talk about actually at the end of this project. That is really important for people to think about as they think about how do they want to express all of these things, right, about you as a company, when your audience has so little time, a lot of it needs to come through in that more implicit communication style. 00:25:31 - Speaker 3: Yeah, Hillary, it’s a very astute observation. I’m scrolling through Apple.com now and it’s just completely about products and they actually get very detailed, you know, they’re bragging about their chips and their cameras and their batteries and everything, and there’s nothing about design even though of course the design is beautiful. 00:25:46 - Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, design is one of those things, right? You can’t really say I’m good at design and have someone trust that, you have to demonstrate that your design is excellent, you know, right. 00:25:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah. Thinking about Apple’s kind of marketing and brand and whatever also makes me think of their pretty famous. I think Steve Jobs led campaign Think Different, and that would be pure brand marketing, right? It’s doesn’t show their product at all. It shows these. Great thinkers from history, but many of whom were maybe counter to the status quo of their time, and coming back to your point in time thing, that wouldn’t work for Apple now because they are the computing monopoly, but back when they were the very small David to the Microsoft Intel PC Goliath, that was great messaging. It basically said, being not in the majority being one of this kind of smaller group is something desirable. You stand apart. You don’t stand apart by using an iPhone these days, so that messaging would not work for them now. 00:26:54 - Speaker 1: Right, exactly, that’s when they were kind of they had this challenger brand strategy and another good example more recently that I think just is a great example of what we’re saying here is that campaign they did behind the Mac. And the only thing they said was behind the Mac, and then the actual imagery was what communicated like this is something people use for certain kinds of work, but they never, you know, described it in any more detail than that. So, yeah, another recent example. They definitely do a lot of brand marketing for sure. It’s just something that I think we don’t always really realize is how much product they talk about because their brand is so strong. 00:27:38 - Speaker 2: So I think one thing you learned working with us is we’re very about creative process. I’d love to dig in and see how creative people do what they do, and you had a pretty kind of specific process that we went through together. Tell us broadly what that is. 00:27:52 - Speaker 1: For this project, we had 4 phases. So we started with discovery and then we did a phase of strategy work and that involved what do we want our positioning to be. We talked about our persona, our kind of this inspiring ideal customer that could help us think about the messaging that would resonate with them. Then we actually went into the writing and then finally we did some user testing at the end. I think this process for me really reflects my approach as a strategist, maybe would be different for someone who’s primarily a writer that also has some strategy process. So, you know, actually thinking about it now, maybe it’s a bit. Scientific. I like to really have a lot of research and discovery that allows me to say, here are a few possible ways in or hypotheses, and even ultimately, we had, I think, 3 different versions of the messaging that we put into testing with new customers and we wanted to validate that it kind of landed on their ears in the same way that it did on ours, and that testing is, you know, really important and something I’ve just learned. In my career and come to really value in the process. 00:29:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I really appreciated the structure that you introduced for this project. Again, with marketing, it’s so easy, I think, to sit down and start typing stuff, you know, like tool for thought, big ideas, you know, HTML mockups, and I really appreciate that we started with, OK, first, let’s like understand reality with discovery, and then it was defining the problem, what are we trying to do here? And then it was coming up with multiple options and you can’t actually have a design decision unless you’re choosing among multiple options and then we picked one and validated with testing. So, I thought that was a great strategy. And on the discovery front, one thing that I really enjoyed was the industry survey that you did. We’ve alluded to it a little bit, but I think that would actually be worth talking about in and of itself, just because I think it’ll be interesting to our listeners who are in this space. 00:29:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. So I guess that first discovery phase was really immersing yourself in our world, which included listening to a bunch of the podcasts and reading all the memos and so on, but also kind of, you know, maybe snooping around our Twitter sphere and all that sort of thing. And I think one reason that was useful actually was. You’re an outside perspective, but you also do know creative tools, as you said, you’ve worked on things like Dropbox and we transfer and so on. So you know the space very broadly, but the niche tools for thought, community, all that stuff was basically new to you, so you had fresh eyes, so there was quite a bit of time where you were doing that. But then, yeah, you kind of went on from there to this, basically came up with some sort of slide decks and documents for us that tried to roll up how you saw. The industry we were in and the customers that we could choose to try to address and what order we might want to go after them. And I think one piece of this was, Mark, are you thinking of the two axis grid here? Yeah. You know, maybe you want to describe that for the listeners, of course, visual thinking things doesn’t translate super well to a podcast. 00:31:01 - Speaker 1: I’d be curious actually, Mark, to hear what you recall now and what has landed with you and then I can go into a little bit more of the process behind that. 00:31:11 - Speaker 3: Well I think one of the axes was individual versus team. And that makes a lot of sense to me, because we’ve long identified since before we started the company, that there was this critical pull over time towards teams because of how software pricing works, is something we talked about in the podcast a lot. And I think there are different ways we might have cut the other axis, but it was something like early stage, late stage, creative process, you know, informal versus formal, that sort of thing. I’m not sure actually what we ended up with. OK, we’ve pulled it up here. How close was I? Yes, personal and teams and knowledge management versus creative process, which I think is sort of the flip of that of what I just described. 00:31:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is what we call in strategy, like a 4 box and we use these for all kinds of things, but this in particular we used for the category landscape. So we wanted to look at, you know, here we’re looking at, I think, call it 25 brands and we looked at quite a few. This is just kind of a good number to get a general lay of the land. 00:32:17 - Speaker 2: Just to give a feel for that, that’s sort of notion, air table, it’s things like Rome and Kraft, it also includes something like Mirro, fig jam, so, these are all probably not necessarily our listener knows every one of these, but they’ll probably be familiar to a lot of folks who are in our sphere. 00:32:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So we kind of first created that list of, you know, all of these brands in the category or maybe slightly adjacent to it, to understand. We looked at all of these brands in a lot of detail, really going through their websites, and it kind of goes back to what we were speaking about with Apple, right? With notion, you might have a sense of notions brand or messaging. It’s really important to actually take that step and go through their site and say, oh, they’re not actually saying what I expected them to be saying. And so that’s a really important part of the process and not making assumptions based on your own experience with the product or your history with the product. So, I went through websites of all of these brands and then saw kind of what naturally are the axes that emerge, and what are the kind of themes that we’re seeing across their messaging. And so the big thing that I found and Mark, to your point, this is really Because of a natural dynamic in the category around pricing, personal versus team is kind of the most apparent one. And then maybe the less obvious one was that some products really position themselves for what we’re calling knowledge management, and a lot of them even say that explicitly. I think knowledge management or second brain, this kind of language is a little bit of a niche, but definitely growing, and we all have talked a lot about that. And then the other side, and I think what we got a lot more interested in for ourselves was. These tools that are really more for like just a day of work, you know, your creative process and helping you dive into a really rich hour of thinking. And that was a lot more interesting and that started to present a white space that we could have some messaging that would be more unique and ultimately, I think dive into big ideas really does that. Right? That’s so different from messaging that’s like, organize your notes forever. You know, we don’t really want to say anything like that. 00:34:39 - Speaker 2: For sure. That was a big insight, I think, which is it’s very easy to naturally align ourselves with, again, the Romes and obsidians and crafts of the world, or even some of these more nichey products like Devon Think that I take a lot of inspiration from, or my mind as we mentioned earlier, but even though some of those are fairly recent. I think Evernote is a mainstay in this space. They’ve been around quite a while now. It is all about remembering. Like Evernote’s logo is an elephant, which is, or, you know, we’re supposed to have long memories or whatever. And yeah, I think Obsidian has a similar thing, what do they say, like, notes you’ll pass on to your grandkids or something like that. It’s all about this longevity. And that you create this big knowledge base and you keep it over time, and the fact you can still find and pull up a note you wrote 5 years ago is the argument, and that really is the opposite of how people use Muse and where we think the value is, which is really about this active thinking, this point in time, it’s your desk, it’s where you make a mess for the thing you’re doing right now. And you know, I like to have and I think many of our users and customers like to have their boards as a kind of artifact or almost a memento of your thinking, but the thinking you did a couple of years ago, it’s just interesting for historical reasons, it’s not an active part of what you’re doing. And so when you look at that, you say, well, we, especially with our messaging around tool for thought. But also I think just generally people would naturally kind of put us in that sphere, but that gives you totally the wrong idea. We’re not about organizing, we’re not about long haul, long term, we’re about that active thinking that in a way is almost a little more transient. 00:36:21 - Speaker 3: I also just love, by the way, this as a general intellectual technique. We’ve talked about it on the podcast before where you generate a list of items and then you come up with two axes for them. So you get 4 boxes or maybe 9 boxes, and then you see which boxes are blank, and you sort of suppose that there must be interesting things you could do there. And sure enough, we have this literal white space for muse positioning, where in this creative process and personal square we suppose that you should be able to have a really great products. So I just find that a useful technique in general. 00:36:50 - Speaker 1: One other thing that we did in that discovery phase, and maybe it’s worth mentioning kind of my process there is really to look at what’s sometimes in the strategy world we call the four Cs. So the company, and Adam you mentioned, I had my own kind of podcast binge of metause and reading all the memos. The competitors, so we just described that in the category, which is closely related to competitors, but it’s more of that broader picture. And then the fourth one is the customer and there I did a lot of, you know, reading customer feedback and quotes and tweets and kind of pulling them out there. And in fact, one of the words that emerged that people use a lot naturally to talk about news is flexible. And flexible is a word that kind of made it all the way through our process into the final user facing copy in the end. So, a lot of things from that discovery phase informed ultimately the messaging. 00:37:55 - Speaker 2: And maybe we can speak to that, what was it, the 2nd or 3rd C, I guess the 3rd C which is category, because this is one we’ve perpetually struggled with, which is I think it’s really important to put yourself in a category because it’s how people know right off the bat what you are, and then you can go from there to differentiation, but everything we’ve sort of ever tried has just been wrong, and to some degree it’s maybe we need to kind of create a category which is sort of digital ideation tools. Traditionally, people do their kind of thinking, externalizing their thinking on sketchbooks and whiteboards and things, and so doing that through computing tools is relatively new. There isn’t a very established category for that. And we did end up with, yeah, you mentioned the flexible boards, which is part of what I was thinking with this, so this longer description of the product, which is flexible boards for note taking, whiteboarding, and connecting the dots. The last one’s interesting, we can come back to that, but the other two actually kind of imply category, right? Note taking is, and I’ve got mixed feelings about that for various reasons, because, you know, when you think of note taking, you can think of a lot of different things, many of which don’t necessarily give you an accurate. Picture, but it is the closest thing to a category that we fit a well established category that most people would know that we fit into. And I think whiteboarding, either that’s putting us in a category of physical whiteboards, but I think also it sort of works because we do have this emerging category of mirro, Millanote, fig jam, mural, basically digital whiteboarding, and especially collaborative whiteboarding has become a thing in the last couple of years, and that was not the case, you know, a year and a half ago when we were coming up with the Muse one messaging. So yeah, tell me about how you generally think about category, and then how you thought about trying to help us solve that problem. 00:39:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was very apparent to me when I started working on this project that Muse is creating a new category or it’s part of a few brands who are creating a new category of product. And I think that’s why messaging has been challenging because there are a lot of things you need to do. You need to tell people what world are you even in, you know, like, where am I? 00:40:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Is this a hat? Right, a restaurant, exactly. Is it a hotel? 00:40:17 - Speaker 1: Yes, so where am I? You know, what is this? What makes it different or when should I use it? Is it for me? There are a lot of questions to answer, and I think something that’s really exciting is the category is becoming a little more established. You mentioned a lot of products and we’ve, even as we were continuing to work on this project, we would see new things launching and new sites that we were kind of sharing with each other as a team and I love seeing more kind of competitors, so to speak, because it starts to alleviate how much work you need to do to describe to people what this category is. 00:40:56 - Speaker 2: So that’s part of this concept of positioning which I think Mark and I talked about in the episode, which is you’re positioning yourself relative to other things that people may already know. So there’s a bunch of companies that are doing a roughly similar thing. Actually, we even talked about this with Puran who’s doing kind of spatial canvas type thing that in many ways is Similar to Muse in terms of category or in terms of like what the product is, and he’s got the same, yeah, messaging challenges. How do you explain what this thing is, but it’s almost like the more of these kind of open canvases for thinking exist, then the more likely someone is to have stumbled across one or two of them. And then the more likely it is that they can, oh, it’s one of these, it’s kind of their mindset, and then you can go from there to, OK, so what makes your special or different. Exactly. And that’s like a way easier problem than let me explain to you from scratch a thing that you don’t know what it is or why it needs to exist or whether it’s something you’re interested in. 00:41:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And I think the spatial canvas category is kind of formalizing and taking shape, and I think that’s a really good thing for Muse, and the note taking whiteboarding and connecting the dots, the intention there isn’t so much to say like that’s our category as it is to say like, hey, if you’re a person that has these needs, this is what you can do with Muse and note taking and whiteboarding are more kind of Approachable and familiar ways people might understand this need that they’re starting to observe, you know, as they shift to working more virtually or just needing to be more organized and having tools that support that part of their process, they might start to understand that need through words like that. And that’s again something we just saw in reading how people talk about news. 00:42:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think part of what works about it is that if you read note taking and you immediately think, so this is a competitor to Apple notes, you know, that’s probably not quite right, but at least it does tell you again, kind of what corner of the universe you’re in at least, and then you read whiteboarding and that might also lead you to think, OK, this is a competitor with, you know, one of these more collaborative oriented. Whiteboards like a fig jam or a mural, and that’s also not quite right, but you put those two things together and you’re kind of, you know, in the right county, I guess, um, and then you can go from there into the details, and hopefully the details actually will help you narrow in, but you hopefully start from a place that, again, is roughly in the ballpark, I guess. 00:43:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:43:33 - Speaker 2: Mixing my metaphors here. 00:43:35 - Speaker 1: To me, something in that description that alluded to the powerful text features was important. I think that is a differentiator for Muse. It’s not just something where you can kind of like scatter around cards and look at them, right? You can do some pretty powerful things with text too, and I thought that was important to represent in the high level description of the product. 00:44:01 - Speaker 2: And connect the dots is an interesting one as well, because that’s probably one of the most frequent phrases we hear from customers when they talk about how they use Muse, which is, yeah, I guess it implies this. You sort of lay everything out and you’re trying to find the pattern, and you’re trying to find the people often jokingly refer to the, is it always sunny in Philadelphia meme with the like serial killer board thing with like yarn connecting, whatever. It’s kind of the Hollywood version of this, but it’s a literal connecting of the dots when you see this sort of thing, which is like some kind of thing that’s up on a wall, that has all the things you know, and you’re trying to put the pieces together to solve the case, it’s usually how it is. So, for whatever reason, that’s a phrase that people use a lot. So, our hope at least would be that we put that right on the front page of the website, and again, it’s not that that’s going to completely 100% tell you what this thing is, or whether it’s for you, or whether you would want it, but if connecting the dots in your work sounds like a thing you would like to be able to do, or there’s a thing you do do, or there’s something you need to do, now, you know, we’re narrowing in on the right kind of person for this product. The last piece I think is worth uh mentioning there, we sort of diverted from the creative process a little bit, but I was interested to pursue this all the way. So we spoke about dive into big ideas, we spoke about the flexible boards, then we have tool for deep work. Now, how’s that different from a tool for thought and what caused you to think that that would be a good sort of medium length or short descriptor for the product? 00:45:39 - Speaker 1: Deep work is an expression that kind of came to me, you know, and I, I really liked that it was something that already exists in culture, but to me deep work also, we’re using it to describe the product, but It has kind of like an emotional appeal to me. I think that’s, you know, in Cal Newport’s book, why the title is so salient and actually just as an aside, I think titles of books are probably one of the best kind of sources of inspiration for messaging. There was actually a moment in the Muse project where I was just like feeling a little stuck and Just went to a bookstore and was just reading all the titles, and book covers are so inspiring to me because it’s a visual and a title and the titles so short, and it captures like the entire thesis of the book. And I just think that is like the coolest thing. So that’s kind of a go to source of inspiration for me, and I think that book has been around for a long time now, the deep work book, but I think it really created an understanding of a big gap in modern work and, you know, in many ways my interest in deep work was also very much informed or maybe validated by the brand persona that we wrote. And we can talk a little bit more about that, but the work idealist is kind of the brand persona that we created for Muse as part of this project. And one of the things that we have in that is that this person who we really want to build our messaging for, right? Their work requires strategic skills, creativity, intellect, and they actively design their day around that focus work. There’s also an old Paul Graham essay about the manager’s work versus the maker’s work. A classic, classic, right? And I only started reading Paul Graham recently, but I remember kind of coming to that insight articulated and nowhere near as nice of a way. But when we first shifted to remote work in 2020. And I was working with a lot of, you know, project managers and, you know, me as a strategist creating so much work, I was feeling this tension of like all these people who just needed me to be in meetings all the time to kind of report out updates and it felt so personal. I was like, I need time to work, you know, and so that deep work idea, I just think is really a deep, deep emotional desire of people that we want to build this product for. And I think it’s also, you know, similar to big ideas, quite universal, you know, we have a point of view on different customer sets that are good for you, but we also know that tons of different kinds of professions. need this tool. And so we wanted to use language that had a kind of universal nature to it. And I think deep work does that. And the last thing I’ll say is, I think there was a little bit of a choice we made intentionally to position Muse for kind of cognitively demanding work, so to speak, or complex work. And that’s actually how I got to big ideas. I was like writing. I’m like, Muse is for complex ideas, you know, it’s like, we don’t want to say that complex, but That really is what it’s for. It’s most useful for like big hard problems that you’re trying to work out, and I felt like deep work and big ideas were two interesting ways to articulate that while still being fairly accessible. 00:49:28 - Speaker 2: The pairing there is interesting, which is big ideas might be what you’re working on, right? You’re working on your product that you think is going to change the world, you’re working on your nonprofit that you think is going to do great good, you’re thinking about impact, etc. and then the deep work is how is that you feel that you need to do these cognitively demanding things and We live in this world of distraction and what have you, and yeah, being pulled into meetings among other things, just to pick a small example, and that you need to really take control of your own time and your own process, and your own work life in order to do the top line thing that you want to do, which is have that impact your big ideas, bring your big ideas to life, that sort of thing. 00:50:09 - Speaker 3: I also think these are really important because they connote things like being immersed, even being engulfed, consequential, creating, and I think it’s a subtle but important contrast to collecting, categorizing, cross-linking, organizing, which is the mode of a lot of traditional other tools for thought, and I think it’s a really important difference with what we’re trying to do with Muse. 00:50:32 - Speaker 1: Absolutely. 00:50:34 - Speaker 2: The other thing I’ll note there is, so deep work obviously is a not only a relatively new idea, there was this book, although I suspect a lot of folks know the term, or at least can intuit it, but I think a lot of folks have probably picked up through osmosis what that term means, even if they haven’t read the book or even are aware that there’s a book. But it’s interesting to note that I think deep work and Tool for Thought are both Let’s say nichey terms, but I think deep work is much less niche. Yes, for example, if you just do a Google Trends search, dual thought doesn’t even show up, doesn’t even, uh, doesn’t even rate, or as deep work does. As just one example. So, maybe this, again, coming back to the point in time theme a little bit here, which is, you know, we were very early on really getting started, very, very niche audience of people, particularly coming out of the independent research world, you know, that was absolutely The right way to categorize ourselves and talk about what we’re doing. Now, we need something that is still niche, but maybe a layer up the accessibility chain, or a layer up the, kind of how likely is it that this term will be known to someone or resonate with them. So, I think it’s still a niche term, but just less niche. 00:51:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and Adam, one thing you spoke about early in the project, and I think we kept coming back to this is it’s very important that as we try to be more accessible, we don’t land in a place that feels very generic. And so I think we wanted to negotiate between the two and kind of land in a really nice middle ground and I think I feel like we’ve done that and Landed on something that still reflects kind of the aspiration and and really inspires you to use Muse, but it keeps it as a product that’s really designed for a certain kind of work, and it has a strong point of view and we’re not trying to be everything. We’re just trying to communicate like one very specific part of, you know, kind of your process and your work life that can happen here and can probably happen here better than anywhere else. 00:52:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right, I almost forgot about that, but when it comes to those really generic or what to me seem like really generic ways to market productivity software, it’s tough. Productivity software is very abstract, screenshots of it often look like just kind of white rectangles on the screen, and it’s hard to tell them apart maybe at first glance. But there are some tropes that I think that productivity software marketers reach for without realizing it for listeners who are thinking about, you know, writing some messaging for your productivity app, here’s some things that I would encourage you to avoid. One is organize your thoughts. I don’t know why everyone reaches for that. Even, you know, reviewers talking about Muse or whatever, but I can’t count the number of apps that I’ve seen describe themselves that way. And it may be a good term or it might make sense, but when everyone says it, it no longer has any meaning. It’s a cliche. Another one that’s in that category is the everything in one place, which we’re just talking about the, maybe notion has a little of that going on, maybe that works OK for them because they’ve broken out of the mainstream enough, or I’m not really sure, but I feel like so many, uh, whether it’s project management tools, notes, knowledge bases. I don’t know, enterprise, storage solutions, whatever, it’s everything in one place. You’re tired of like switching between all these different apps, just put everything into our app, and then we’ll take care of it all for you, and you won’t need to switch apps anymore. And of course that sort of thing is actually the opposite of what we like to do, which is like, just be one tool in your tool chain, and then we think great creators, you know, put together a lot of different tools to make their custom workflows. But putting that aside, I think even if you do strive to be a kind of everything app or put it all in one place, that term or that approach to speaking about a product then used so much, to me it just your eyes just roll over it because you’ve seen it so many times. 00:54:35 - Speaker 1: One I would add to that is unleash your creativity. Oh yeah, I know, yeah. Yeah. That one’s pretty common and, you know, it’s not wrong. It’s just exactly like you said, it’s like, once too many people have said that, it’s just not unique enough. A lot of this is, it’s an art and a science, and the process for sure is helpful. And Mark, you made a great point that adding the process to it really adds like a degree of rigor, I think, and like, I really need that. Process around the creativity, cause otherwise it can just grow into this huge thing that’s hard to really push it through into something really clean at the end. But at the same time, there’s a degree of intuition and how does it feel when you hear it, that’s extremely important to this process. So I think that kind of art and science piece is important. 00:55:39 - Speaker 3: Yeah, which, by the way, reflects how we’ve often talked about the creative process on the podcast, which is not that you have a series of steps that linearly follow from each other. It’s more like you collect up all this raw material and you chew on it and you go sleep and you go rock climbing and you come back two weeks later, it’s like, oh, now I realize we should say is X. 00:55:57 - Speaker 1: Yes, it’s definitely so interesting how similar that is across all different kinds of creative work, kind of moving between. Structure, getting out of structure and the structure can really help, and then you also have to get outside of it um to kind of get to creative and fresh ideas. 00:56:17 - Speaker 2: I think you briefly mentioned there this persona, which I know there’s some discussion in the design world about the usefulness of personas as kind of a generic stand-in for the person you’re designing for your target user, target customer. He, I think it was really helpful to try to describe in general terms, the kind of person that muses for. And so, as I mentioned, there’s the category struggles that we’ve had over the years. Another struggle we’ve had is the clear description of who is this product for. And, you know, it’s nice when you go to, I believe the jargon for it is verticals, so that is to say if your product is for writers or architects or academics or software engineers, that makes it pretty easy because on on your website, you can say, we are the best thinking workspace for interior designers. And it’s just people know pretty instantly if they consider themselves an interior designer or not, and if you’re not, well, you close your web browser and everyone saves some time, and if you are in that category, you go, OK, well, I’m one of those, so I’m gonna keep reading this is for me. And our various attempts to try to do that around vertical really doesn’t work. So for example, we have a pretty big, I would say probably maybe the biggest category of people that use our product to tend to be product, people of some kind, product designers, product managers, founders or other kind of like product oriented CEOs or whatever. So that’s a big category, but honestly it doesn’t make up probably more than 5%. So we have a very diverse set of architects, writers, doctors, attorneys. Game designers on and on, so we can’t use that easy shorthand, then you do still need to have some way to know who you’re trying to speak to. And so you came up with this work idealist persona, and I really like this, or I find it useful, and we don’t specifically talk about this, for example, on our website, it’s more a tool for us to understand. Who we’re trying to speak to, so that then we do, for example, write copy for the website or for the app store or something, we can write it with that person in mind. 00:58:28 - Speaker 3: Yes, and another aspect of Hillary’s research that I really appreciated here was this notion of change over time. So it’s the personas and the user segments that we had previously had good success with, who were now looking to connect with and who we might address in the future. There’s a Particular diagram and one of the PDFs that really stood out to me, which is a series of concentric circles. And I think the innermost one was like people who follow Adam and Mark on Twitter and tweet about Doug Engelbart, and the outermost is everyone who uses an iPad and a Mac, and we’re, you know, somewhere in the middle there, right, but it’s a progression over time. 00:59:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So the work idealist, you know, we spoke a little bit about There’s someone who actively kind of designs their day around this deep work idea. And one thing that I thought was important is that we think about like, they do actually hold quite progressive ideals toward work in general, and I think that gives us permission to have these kind of aspirational ideas kind of embedded in how we communicate. And in many ways it’s sort of built into what the product is, what you guys are building, right? It’s like you have this kind of core belief that there is a much better way to work on ideas that hasn’t been served yet in the market. So I thought like the work idealist and even the name of them like. It’s important that we sort of ground ourselves in something that’s a bit kind of idealist and aspirational as we start going to a broader market, because we don’t want to lose that kind of belief that is so important to who Muse is. 01:00:12 - Speaker 3: I’m also now remembering, I forget what they call this, but there’s this phases of adoption. Is that relevant at all to where there’s like pioneers and laggards and stuff like this? Does this sound familiar? 01:00:23 - Speaker 2: You might be thinking of the crossing the chasm, kind of there’s the early adopters and then the pragmatists, and then the late markets, and then the, what is it, the laggards, something like that. 01:00:34 - Speaker 1: And just in general, like how trend curves work definitely come into play in product adoption curves and the Crossing the chasm book, which I have not read, but you know, loosely familiar with the concepts, I think really applies that general notion of and the science on how trends move through society, it applies it in a really practical way to product marketing. That’s exactly what marked the diagram you’re recalling there kind of outlines just like the evangelists that we want to start with, but recognizing we need to get beyond them, right? And they’re not going to know everything that, you know, your Twitter followers know. So how do we expand the way we communicate, keeping our brand intact, and I think the work idealist, it kind of sets up this inspirational kind of character that we can think about on that path. 01:01:25 - Speaker 2: Right. And certainly part of what I liked about this persona is that it describes me, and I think it describes everyone on our team, right, which is someone who seeks meaning through their work, and you know, maybe a lot of us in creative fields, and especially tech, we’re lucky enough to have that we can kind of be a couple rungs up on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where our work can be not just a way to put food on the table, but a way to, yeah, do something that we think matters in the world. And so then we’re mindful about, you know, for example, choosing what problems we work on, what company you’re gonna go to work for, or maybe you start companies yourself, or maybe you’re a freelancer, and you have the luxury of choosing projects that you think are more important, or speak more to you, or are more li

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: It’s very common that you want 3 views. You want a view which is temporal, what is the team working on this week? You want a view that’s personal, what is Mark thinking about right now? What does he want to have at hand. And then there’s a view which is subject base. What is the design of our sync system? And what link cards allow you to do is to have any given thing appear in each of those. 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 the product. It’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Adam. So a little bit of news from the new product side. We recently released a feature called Linked Cards to everyone and been quite surprised and happy with how useful these have proven to be. It was in beta through the Backstage Pass with our pro members for a few months, but yeah, it just seems so valuable to everyone. We are really happy to launch it broadly, and that’s especially true within the Muse for teams. Context. So we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about the future and our approach, and we’ll talk about some of these use cases that we’ve seen. But of course, we have to start with something philosophical and historical to set the context. So our topic today is linking. So, what comes to mind for you, Mark, when you hear that word? 00:01:26 - Speaker 1: That’s quite a rich set of precedents there. Perhaps the very first thing one thinks of is web links. Although, as we discussed, I don’t think that’s actually the closest case of prior art. Also comes to mind things like citations, but really dialing into linked cards, things like file system sim links, wiki backlinks, the knowledge graphs that you see in emerging knowledge management tools, things like that. 00:01:51 - Speaker 2: To me it’s an interesting topic because it is such a simple idea. It almost seems too simple. It’s just one place or work or piece of information is referencing another place or work or piece of information, but I think there is something very powerful emerges from that. I would say a lot of the current. Sort of tools for thought, excitement or revolution, if you want to call it that, and the productivity software space is largely built on the foundation of linking as a core idea, as well as the web, obviously, hypertext and hyperlinks, even though there’s much more to the web than just the link, that actually is a very foundational piece. And so it’s quite surprising what emerges from that. Yeah, you mentioned citations, be fun maybe to talk about that a little bit more towards the end, but I think that was sort of the original thing is, I don’t know, 1000 years ago, someone is writing a book and they want to reference another book or I don’t know, maybe it’s not even a book, maybe it’s a scroll and you just name it, right? You say the item titled this, maybe you give the author and when it was written as a way to kind of Hopefully unambiguously refer to this thing, and that implies that there is this greater canon of human knowledge, which indeed at some point we started to have a, if not unified, perhaps today you can say it’s a fairly unified sort of sphere of books and videos and newspaper articles and all that sort of thing. But yeah, you go back in history and just a simple idea of referencing another work that is not the one that you’re currently reading implies the larger sphere and indeed then you start to build this network and these connections and this implication of shared knowledge. So again, this one simple idea, just this simple reference of naming another thing from that comes this sort of giant hive mind of all human knowledge. 00:03:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it’s really important because, as we’ve said many times on the podcast, knowledge is built up in this web. It’s not a linear process. It’s this very messy, organic, incremental growth of knowledge that happens over time, and so things like citations help reify that. 00:04:07 - Speaker 2: And Another piece of prior art that’s more on the technical side is file systems. I think this was probably my first exposure to thinking about links as a first class item. So in Unix you have what’s called the sim link or symbolic link. There’s also hard links, but we don’t necessarily need to get into those. On Windows you have something that are called shortcuts, which I think a lot of people are familiar with just because there’s a little kind of icon that indicates this isn’t the original item, this is a pointer to that item, and you often get that on your desktop, for example. The application doesn’t live on your desktop, you just have a, well, a shortcut to it there for convenience. And Mac also has something called aliases, although of course it’s also Unix under the hood, so you can use some links, but regardless, this idea of linking things together where a file lives in one place in the hierarchical file system or on your hard drive, but you can reference it from another, that was my first real exposure to both the power of it, but also sometimes can be confusing, or you can tie yourself in knots with, you know, circular references or whatever. 00:05:08 - Speaker 1: I think file systems are interesting because they illustrate, there’s actually several very different types of things that can be happening here. So let me enumerate them quickly. You can have a duplicate to make a copy of a file. You could potentially recognize that those copies are the same objects by content addressing. You can have a transparent pointer. This would be like aiming or an alias where The second object is of a different type. It has a little arrow thing. It’s not a regular icon, but when you, for example, double click on it, it opens the underlying pointed to objects. So it’s mostly but not entirely behaving like the original thing. And then you can have something that behaves exactly like the original thing. If you have the recent tab in your finder, for example, the items there are the same thing as when you go to the original location in your file system, it’s kind of a different view. So when we talk about linking, we’re often referring to one or more of these things. I think it’s useful to remember that there’s several quite different types of objects in play. And maybe one more that we could add is the actual file system path. This would be comparable to the HTTPS URL on the web. Some people call that a link, some people would say the actual underlying hyperlink thing where you click the link, but these are all different objects and they have different properties. 00:06:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I would call the path, but I would think of the generic term for that is the address. And within a single computer system you usually have this unified way to reference a file, which is the path. Actually I would argue citations are probably a place where you know there’s all these standards, right? You use the Chicago Manual of style or the this or that. Basically how you do a citation is actually there’s a lot of specific formats and if you mess it up, you get in trouble, especially if you’re trying to do a scientific work. But coming to the web, one of the things that is so miraculous there is this totally unified address format. So there’s links and links have appeared in a lot of different computer software, but maybe what makes the World Wide Web and HTML work so well is that you have the URL, the Uniform Resource locator. And that that single address is unique in the world, or at least in the internet, which is, you know, our digital world, and that now that that is deployed so universally both in desktop browser software, but also in APIs and so on, that if you just have that one string and you don’t need to understand how it works or how to break the pieces apart or even certainly how the packets are routed, you just know that your web request is going to go to where you need it to. Which is again quite a miraculous, not just technical achievement or design achievement, but really kind of human coordination achievement that we’ve managed to deploy that so widely. And probably as long as we’re talking about the history here worth just giving a quick nod to, you know, links and well, the term hyperlink was coined by Ted Nelson, who’s quite good at these rather bombastic terms. Tranclusion is another one of his that we use with some frequency. But then also, for example, Doug Engelbart’s NLS included a version of linking Hypercard. A lot of that is about how cards link together. And so there’s the web, I think rolls together or is the best manifestation of all of those ideas, but the history of it in computing goes back to really to almost the beginning. Now another invention from the 1990s, sort of piggybacking on the web is the wiki, right? And I think Ward Cunningham was the inventor of the first of these, and it certainly builds on that foundation of the web. But one thing it brought that’s unique is what I usually call the double bracket notations, the idea that you can put in brackets a keyword, a very human readable keyword that is a link to someplace else and not the entire internet. It’s not a complete Globally addressable address, but it more makes that keyword into something we’re saying there’s a reference for this in this system in this wiki. And one of the interesting things about that, certainly there’s the accessibility that it’s very easy to use, but I think one of the fallouts of that or one of the implications is that you can link something that doesn’t exist yet. Which is an interesting idea, right? And I’ve certainly used this in Team wikis, for example, where there’s a project page I know I need to write because we’re talking about doing this project, but I haven’t done it yet, but I want to reference that. I can put that in brackets, and sometimes that link shows up in a different color or something like that. Wikipedia has a version of this as well, where you basically can link something that’s not there, you click on it and then it tells you this isn’t here yet. Would you like to add some content, but it’s a nice way to stub something out. 00:09:39 - Speaker 1: And there’s another very important behavior difference. So if we go back to the example of the file system, if you want to refer to a file several times, the first operation is very different. You gotta create the file and write the contents, and then subsequent operations create a different type of object, a similar link or an alias or something. So there’s a huge discontinuity and Typically on a file system, it’s not as native to go the other direction to get the so-called backlinks, and one of those backlinks that you’re basically missing it because there’s nothing pointing back to the place where you did the original operation from. Whereas on a wiki, for example, when you make a double bracket, that’s the same the first time, the second time, the 3rd time you do it. And furthermore, when you go to the backlink page for whatever was in double brackets, those backlinks are all symmetric. I believe, like there’s not special treatment for the first double bracket that you happen to have made mentioning some noun that is the current title of the page. Those properties are subtle, but as we discuss the muse approach to link cards, I think that will become important. 00:10:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think backlinks were present for a long time and things like Wikipedia and other places, but I really think the modern, call it linking back linking trend really came with what are now usually called knowledge graphs. So Rome kicked that whole thing off. The notion it always had linking, but they added backlinks, I think somewhat in reaction to the overnight success of Rome, then you have all these kind of Rome descended products like obsidian, LogSeek, even classic kind of text editor note tools like I writer or get. Into that now and I think what you referenced there with the backlink and links being symmetric, I think that’s why they call them the knowledge graph is this idea that the nodes are the notes and those notes might be something about a person or a thing or a concept or an event or a meeting or whatever, but the edges, those links in the graph represent relationships and actually seeing those relationships and again treating them as symmetric as you said. Of course, it gives you these cool visualizations where you see all the time you’ve invested in your notes and how they all fit together, or if you look at more like a larger scale Wiki like Wikipedia, you can see the relationship, the clustering of different knowledge, but sometimes the relationship between things is as important as the things themselves. 00:11:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I have to be honest, I’ve been surprised by how taken folks are with linking and back linking and explicit knowledge graphs. I certainly think that they’re useful in their own ways, but there’s something about them that people get really excited about. 00:12:15 - Speaker 2: Indeed, well, I certainly think of this trend scene, community. Around tools for thought in the last 3 or 4 years. Obviously I’m very happy. I’m sometimes surprised as well. I certainly find it very powerful. I’m also glad people get excited about it and in general, I think that’s part of what’s been great about this tools for thought, scene or community or just trend that we’ve had in the last few years, which is people getting excited about productivity software and excited about their knowledge tools. Now, sometimes I do think it gets a little bit narrowly focused on Linking and back linking knowledge graphs and lots of different variations on that, but I think that was a really good starting place. It’s a good example of showing how just managing our information in different ways can unlock new possibilities for individuals, for groups, for humanity as a whole, and obviously computing, the dynamic medium of computing has so much untapped potential that we are really just at the beginning of it, so I Certainly hope that the excitement over knowledge graphs is just a door opener to a wider world of tools for thought, productivity, and in general just continuing to explore what’s possible in the world of knowledge and information systems. Well, I guess that naturally brings us to the muse approach and this linked cards feature, and it came up a lot in the very early days of our product because we were part of the tools for Though scene from the beginning and people naturally think of the linking back linking knowledge graph stuff that that’s kind of like a foundational feature and obviously we are more focused on the visual and spatial elements, the free form sketching, bringing together your research materials to ruminate upon. But we always knew, hey, yeah, linking is super useful for all the reasons we just described, and we always knew we would want to bring it to the product at some point, but we wouldn’t necessarily, it wouldn’t be right to just straight up copy the double bracket notation or something like that. I mean, you know, maybe that could fit in, but we wanted something that would be more in tune with how we do things, the visual and spatial approach, and that’s what brought us to linked cards. 00:14:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and Muse, we think there’s a lot of value to each piece of content having a place, and for a long time, we said that a piece of content should have exactly one place, but we found that to be a little bit too limiting. So often you would have a board, for example, that you wanted to be able to access that made sense in the context of Say your daily work in the context of a longer term project and that presented a conundrum, what do you do in use to be able to access, say that board from both locations. Now, one thing you could do is the file system type approach where you have some canonical board in one place and you have a second class pointer board in another case, but that felt unsatisfying to us, like we didn’t want this two-tier system and this notion of like a pointer board versus a regular board. So this is where we come to linked cards. And the idea with linked cards is that it’s a set of cards, 2 or more, that point to the same content symmetrically. I think actually back some years ago now, we had this notion of like portals or mirrors, which I think are not as suitable for a public product, but I think described the notion of the sort of two views from two different locations into the same. Underlying content. So you can access the content from either place A or B, but when you zoom in, for example, you’re at the same place. And there’s also a sort of back leaking tight mechanism where you can from any of these linked card instances, say, where else is this card present, and you can seamlessly navigate to those other locations to move across different contexts. And then to close the loop here, if for some reason you were to delete one instance of two of these linked cards, you gracefully go back to the base case of a simple piece of content that’s in exactly one location. 00:16:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you mentioned the concept of location quite a bit there, and I think that ends up being key to it. This is something that’s different compared to a, for example, a notes tool that does not have the spatial component. The spatial component is so core to muse and what Muse is offering you as a thinking tool where something is located that’s in a little pile of some things over here versus this other pile over here might be really important for your thinking process or how you’re making sense of a set of materials. So naturally then where something lives, if it’s going to live in two places or more than two places, you need to have some concept of that, and key to this ends up being this little icon that basically goes in the upper left corner that lets you see all the places that it is, and then really importantly switch between them quickly. So you can use it as kind of a portal to essentially teleport to this other location in your larger knowledge sphere, and this proves to be a really helpful and useful concept that preserves the spatialness and preserves that sense of place that we think is so important, but kind of breaks the 1 to 1 relationship and gets you a lot more of the ability to build a more complex knowledge graph. 00:17:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and by the way, there’s a pretty slick animation that happens when you change locations like this that I think really nicely reflects what we’re trying to get after, which is when it works correctly, it’s hard to get it to work correctly in all cases because of the literal dimensionality of the canvas and the objects, but the content that is linked in multiple locations sort of stays in the same place, and the background around it shifts. So you are appearing in this new location, but you’re still anchored by this content that was meant to appear in multiple locations. I think that’s pretty slick. 00:17:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a really clever creation by Leonard and Julia because so much of how you are oriented is based around this navigation in and out of boards and panning around them and so we were worried or even in the early prototypes, I think when you saw you could just jump, it’s disorienting. So this transition animation serves more than the purpose of just being fun to look at or something like that, but actually helps you keep that sense of being oriented. 00:18:30 - Speaker 1: And now that I think about it, I’m actually not sure how common it is to have this backlink style navigation available without going into the object in question. Do you know what I mean? So like on a wiki, you can click on a link and then click on backlinks, and from there, get to a sibling page. But I don’t know how common it is to be able to go directly to a sibling page from the, say, link. 00:18:53 - Speaker 2: Hm, cause yeah, typically you’re viewing the board sort of from the outside, you’re seeing its thumbnail essentially, and then you’re deciding to go to this other place where it is located. Yeah, that’s true. This is why we needed to do our own take on this is that when you’re in that spatial setting, it’s just a different thing than when you’re in lists of documents that aren’t organized or you just don’t have a visual metaphor for it that works in that same way. Speaking of that, animation in general, the transition of being able to quickly jump between locations, this was actually quite a technical challenge to implement. So I thought it might be fun if we could get our colleague Yullia on the phone here briefly and see if she could tell us a little bit about how that worked. 00:19:41 - Speaker 3: Hello. 00:19:43 - Speaker 2: Hey, Julia, congratulations on shipping linked cards. 00:19:47 - Speaker 3: Oh, thanks, yeah, it’s been a long time coming. I guess it’s been sitting there in the backstage pass for a while, but it’s nice that we can finally give it to the whole world. And yeah, it looks like you are pretty excited about it. 00:19:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I feel like it was one of our smoother betas in the sense that we actually went pretty quickly from, I think it was in the backstage pass for I don’t know, 3 or 4 months, something like that, but it basically worked really great from the start. We needed to make a couple small tweaks, but nothing too dramatic. And yeah, people were finding it really useful, so it just sort of made sense to bring it into production. But Mark and I were just talking about the location switching and the transition animation as well as the challenges there, and I seem to remember in that first implementation there was a lot of technical challenges. I was hoping you could give us a little insight into that. 00:20:35 - Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s quite a few. I mean, I guess we could start with the transition since we were just talking about that, but um there’s actually quite a bit to uncover. So let’s see if we get to all of that. But yeah, one of the things that made this a bit challenging to implement is that of course, as being news, we had kind of high stakes for the UX and how we wanted it to feel. And Leonard, our designer, had initially prototyped something where you could just super quickly like hit a button and cycle through all of the different places where this link card existed. That ended up not being quite feasible, but we still wanted to make it pretty fast so that you can just go and select a different location and you’re basically there quite instantly. But yeah, depending on how large these boards are that these cards live in, rendering a big board can actually take quite a bit of time and there’s some tricks that we do when you transition from one board to the next, kind of just in a normal zoom in, that makes that feel instantaneous, even though it’s actually not quite instantaneous. So for every board that you have, we store a snapshot. They’re basically PNGs that render your entire board content into an image. And those are actually what you see in the little cards that represent your boards, and when you zoom in, we actually load a higher resolution version of that image kind of seamlessly as the transition happens so that when the transition finishes and you’re zoomed in for the first. Depending on how big the board is, 0.5 a second to maybe 1 2nd or 2, you’re actually still looking at the image of the board, and then as everything gets loaded in the background, we switch out that image for the actual board view that where you can interact with the cards and everything. So this usually happens behind the scenes and ideally the user never actually notices it. So for these transitions for the link cards, we basically had to do a similar trick. So when you first select from the drop down menu on the Mac or I think on the iPad, it’s a context menu as well, tapping on this button. When you first select a different location, we actually immediately load in the high resolution snapshot of that board. And we transform it to match exactly the position of the card in the board that you came from. So the idea is basically the card stays in the same place and then the content around it just changes. And yeah, to do that really fast we have to. Load in the JPEG, put the card on top of that image, then in the background, we actually load the entire board hierarchy and the real views, and then once that’s done, we remove the image and you’re actually in that board and you can start interacting with the content. 00:23:27 - Speaker 2: And it feels very quick to me, but certainly your brain needs a moment to process the new scene that you’re looking at before you’re gonna go do anything to it. And so that sort of like, is part of the stage magic there is use that moment of the human is reorienting themselves to the new location to do the work of rendering the interactive view. 00:23:49 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and most of the time it works actually quite nicely. Of course, since the card in the new location that you’re going to might actually be in a completely different position. Let’s say you come from a board where the card is on the very top left, kind of the first thing that you see in the board. And then you go to a board where it’s all the way at the bottom right, like maybe several screen widths away. Then there’s also the thing that we sometimes see where it kind of jumps a little bit because in the destination board it’s actually so close to the edge that you can’t scroll it into the place where the car was in the previous view. Maybe that’s getting a little bit too much into the details. 00:24:30 - Speaker 2: And I also remember really well we were in the midst of implementing this that a lot of other operations in the application that seemed unrelated to linked cards got really slow as a result, once we had this in our internal test flight builds and it just so we were at our team summit last August when we were working on this, and I remember you and Adam Wulf furiously drawing complex graphs and talking through the problem on the kitchen table in the house we were staying in. Can you tell me about what that was all about? 00:25:01 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so this was kind of a surprising turn that the whole thing took. We initially thought seems like a pretty straightforward feature. We just basically create a new card that points to the same document and then we display this little kind of link icon in the top left corner of the card to indicate that this is a link card, so there’s other cards that represent the same document. And the initial implementation of all of this was actually really fast, like kind of done in a few days, and then we noticed the app got really slow and it wasn’t initially clear why that was, but as we looked into it further, it actually turned out that the kind of database queries that had to happen to actually determine whether a card is a linked card or not a linked card. Ended up being extremely expensive. So the first thing that needs to happen is that we check for a given document how many cards actually point to this document. So that’s kind of one database create. That’s relatively simple. And if we have more than one card, you would think, OK, surely this is a linked card, so we should show this little icon. But it’s actually not enough to just look at the number of cards that point to this documents because some of these cards might actually not be in your corpus at all. They might be unreachable from the home board. And this is because when you delete something from your corpus, let’s say you delete a board that has a bunch of subcontent. We don’t actually go in and prune every single subboard and every single document that is contained in the subtree that is that board. We just set the board that you deleted to delete it and it disappears from your view hierarchy and as far as the app is concerned, you can’t actually navigate to it anymore from anywhere. But there might be somewhere in there a board or a card that points to that same board that you have also linked somewhere else, and that card is technically not deleted. It just happens to not be reachable from the home board. So we actually also for each card that points to the board we need to determine. Is this actually in the user’s graph? Is this card something that is in quotation mark deleted, so the user can’t actually reach it from their home board? Or is it actually in the corpus and we should include it in the list of linked cards for this particular document? And that actually ended up being an extremely expensive operation because you kind of have to tee up multiple queries to find the parent board of the parent board of the parent port. And if you eventually end up at the root of the corpus, then yes, this card is reachable. But doing this kind of on every render just because you want to display a board with a couple of cards in it and determine whether or not they should get a little icon in the corner. Just ended up really slowing down the app, just kind of rendering a pretty basic board structure started becoming very slow and affecting all kinds of parts in the app. So what we ended up doing was something that we had thought about on and off anyway because it was kind of a data structure that would help us in all kinds of different scenarios and working on the app and kind of working with the user’s content. We ended up creating a graph structure that actually maps out the user’s content in a very easily queriable way. So in this case we’re only storing the IDs of all the documents and their relationships to each other. So if a card displays a board, that’s basically one node of the graph, and then we build out the graph this way. And every time something changes, every time you add a card or delete a card or you move a card around, we update that graph immediately. So then every time we want to render something, we don’t need to do all of these database queries again. We just need to go to this graph and say give me all the cards that point to this document or give me all the parents of this cards, and from there on it then got very fast. Now of course you have kind of an additional. Data structure kind of model around the user data that you constantly have to maintain. So that’s of course leaves new surface area for bugs or kind of forgetting to update this as the code grows, but it’s so far had been really helpful and has made the app a lot faster in that regard again. 00:29:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is all in memory, right? 00:29:29 - Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. This gets built once when you launch the app and then just continuously updated. 00:29:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and we have a similar thing on the server and it’s definitely true that it’s a little bit troublesome to get all the details right of maintaining basically a second view over all the data, but at least it’s just a memory, so you get to blow it away each time the app starts, it makes it much more forgiving in my experience, versus something on disk, which is a whole another level of ordeal. 00:29:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s true. 00:29:56 - Speaker 2: And I think that’s always a trade-off with database or persistence layers is that the more indexes you have that slice the data in different ways you want to view it, the faster it will be, but now all those indexes have to be maintained, and if they get messed up, you need to regenerate them or something like that, and that’s the fine art of data persistence. 00:30:17 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. 00:30:19 - Speaker 2: As Mark and I were talking about earlier, one thing that introducing linked cards to Muse did was to break this strict 1 to 1. Cars are only in one place. Everything is a very direct hierarchy, and that changed things in the user interface. Certainly, for example, that you can navigate into a board from several different locations, and that comes up, I think, in both the individual user just, you know, when you pinch out, you expect to go back to the board you were on. Originally, but it also comes up even in our multiplayer world in terms of like where we’re going to show an avatar floating over a board relative to the path they took to get into it. Curious to know what kinds of challenges there’s been in adapting all of that. 00:31:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is something that we kind of noticed in hindsight when certain things in the app that used to be really easy, like navigate to a particular document based on his ID now suddenly had kind of unclear implications because that document isn’t just in one place anymore. So if for example, I have a deep link that points to a specific document and I open news. Clicking on that deep link, where do I actually go? Like, of course I go to the document, but what’s the context? Is it the linked card on my home board or is it the one that’s 5 levels deeply nested in one of the subboards or is it one that’s, you know, linked from somewhere else? So we can’t actually describe a position in your corpus anymore just by a particular document or board ID. This also became evident when Something that seems really trivial, like you close the app and then you open it up again, and we have to like launch it afresh and ideally bring you to the place that you’ve left off because that’s probably where you want to continue working. Previously we just basically always stored the idea of the board where the user was last on, and when the app launched, we opened that board and built the view hierarchy underneath it, so all of the parent boards all the way up to the root board underneath and that was it. So now we actually have to store the entire navigation stack, including every card, basically kind of leaving bread crumbs of where the user went to end up on the board that they’re currently viewing. And this all gets serialized to disk when the app quits so that when you launch the app again, we can look at these bread crumbs and retrace the steps to exactly where the user had come from. And we’re going to have to do that probably with all kinds of things like deep links or like sharing URLs for go to this sports. Well, which one do you mean? Do you mean the one on the home board or the one? levels deep down below, so we’re, we’re gonna have to start encoding these path information into all kinds of things, including, I think like you said, the presence of avatars in a board. Like if you’re in this board, you’re technically in 5 different locations, but we don’t want to show you avatar and all of these different locations. We want to show exactly the path you took to get to that board. 00:33:26 - Speaker 2: Do you remember anything about detecting cycles, like sort of putting a linked card inside itself and dealing with that as being part of the initial technical challenge as well? 00:33:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so detecting cycles actually has always been a big challenge for M and linked cards actually was a big relief for that because now instead of having to be really careful to prevent cycles, we can kind of allow them and embrace them. So in the pre-link cards were, there were. A few weird edge cases, for example, when you had two windows of muse open, so like split screen on the iPad or two actual windows on the Mac. And let’s say you have board A, B, C, where A is your root board and B is the board in between and then C is deeply nested, and you have board A in the one window and have board B open in the other window. And then you pick up board B, the card for board B in the window of board A, and then drag it into the other window and drop it into board B. Then you just drop B into B. So now B is contained in itself and you’ve effectively detached it from the view hierarchy. This is now also something that we can nicely detect with the corpus graph. And previously we had to really make sure to prevent these accidental operations. So basically disallow you from dropping the card there because that could very easily lead to not technically data loss, but data loss in the sense of you can’t get to that content anymore and we didn’t have any UI of kind of surfacing these detached cycles. So now when you do this instead of disallowing the operation, it’ll just drop a linked card of itself into B. And keep card B and A, but then also put a link card of B into B. And so now you have an endless loop of B and B, and you could try it out. I think you could basically go indefinitely navigate and probably at some point the app will crash because you have put hundreds of view controllers onto the navigation stack. I’m not actually sure what happens, but it does work well for quite some time and I guess technically if you’re 10 levels deep into B and you’re still on B. When you then quit and relaunch the app, we should also build the stack 10 levels deep, although I guess in this case, the card is actually the same, so I’m not quite sure how that would work, but yeah, there’s definitely lots of fun little edge cases like this. 00:35:52 - Speaker 2: And I think almost always if someone does one of those things you described, it’s an error essentially or they’re just doing it to see what happens. So it’s not so much that we need to make it make perfect sense, but more that just we need to not yet have the app crash or screw up your data or get you into a state that you can’t get out of. Yeah, exactly. Well, my head’s spinning a little bit with all the complexities here. I’m glad I get to just be a user and not need to load all of that into my brain. So thanks for taking us through it, and we’ll let you get back to your ex code. 00:36:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, my pleasure. Have a good one. 00:36:29 - Speaker 2: Bye bye. Bye. Few, I actually didn’t fully know what was there. I had a sense of it because we actually have one of our earliest boards that we have in our Muse for Teams shared workspace is one of the kind of scribblings that Wulf and Julia did together when they were thinking through this whole, what she was calling the corpus graph, this kind of relationship index. So, I had a sense there was something there, but I didn’t know quite how deep that rabbit hole went. Now another area to talk about is the design considerations that went into this. I think Yullia mentioned some of those in the sense of what happens when you do particular edge cases in the sense of the user’s mental model about this. I think you also mentioned briefly in passing the idea of having cards which were more of a reference, more like that file system shortcut. was one of our first prototypes. So if I remember correctly, they implemented prototypes of what we ended up with, which is this kind of each card is a mirror of each other and essentially any change you make to one happens to the other and there is no kind of source or original, but they had also mocked up something where there was a link card that was very similar to our web links, which of course are a reference, not a mirror. But that had a little richer of a preview, and we basically tried that out, and that actually felt pretty good. We liked that in a lot of ways, but somehow I think the mirror felt just more of the kind of embodied or physical or spatial style that fits with Muse. And actually that fed into the the name of it as well. When I was chatting with Leonard about this, he mentioned or he pointed out that we call them linked cards linked ending with an ED, not link cards, right? Link cards, which we have for web links, for example, where you can put deep links to other iOS apps. It’s really clear that that thing is not in use. It’s someplace else. This is a reference that will take you there. We’ll open it in a browser, that sort of thing. But the idea with the linked cards, which are usually boards, but can also be a PDF or a video or something else, they really are like the same thing and they are linked together and the content will always stay the same. 00:38:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you think about it from first principles, I think it makes sense that we ended up here, because when you’re dealing with external content, you don’t really have a choice. It has to be a link without an ED object, because it’s not something that you control. But when it’s internal, why not? You have full control over this, including the magical ability to make it appear in multiple locations. 00:38:58 - Speaker 2: Another design consideration here is what you do with things that are untitled. So this is something we consider a key feature. It was part of the Muse white paper that we published from the research lab a few years back, which is the ability to create something and not have to give it a name. Which I’m a fan of generally, I don’t necessarily want to have to name a project before I’ve decided what’s gonna go into it, but usually, of course, you end up with something that’s called Untitled, and then you end up with untitled parentheses 234, and so forth. That’s a really common thing you see in, I don’t know, classic word processors or whatever. But in Muse, you can put all kinds of items. In fact, most of your items don’t have names necessarily. You may only title a board or an image or something later, once you kind of know what it is or what it’s about. But of course, what that also means, the location switcher is showing you a text representation, so then we need to show you basically, this is an untitled board in the case, or an untitled card of some kind. I think that’s not fully solved. I think Leonard is still kind of chewing on that a little bit in the best way to manage that, but certainly as we get into more and more things that are not pure spatial and visual, things like search, for example, that’s gonna come up more and more. So I think this untitled boards design or untitled cards design challenge. That’s a key feature of the app. We want to keep that, that’s desirable, but at the same time, how do we handle that in a more of a text or list kind of setting like this. 00:40:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’ll continue to noodle on that. I think in practice it hasn’t been too bad because the places that you tend to put linked cards are relatively important and therefore tend to have titles. It has been my experience. So, more often than not, you have a suitable title in place, but yeah, I agree that as we get into more non-spatial content types, as I’ve been calling them, it’s gonna become more important. 00:40:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, maybe that brings us nicely to just talking about linked cards in practice, the use cases we’ve seen from users and customers as well as what we’ve experienced ourselves on the team, and definitely going into it, we didn’t necessarily know what all the use cases would be or what the best use cases would be, which is sort of a funny thing. I think you even raised the flag on this a little bit, which is you want to have a lot of clarity usually about what your use cases are before developing a feature. And we had a list of them, but it was sort of more driven by where we started the podcast, which was linking is just really useful, and probably if we add it, things will emerge that we wouldn’t have even predicted necessarily and I think that’s kind of how it panned out. Many and most of the use cases that we had in mind initially did come to light, but basically immediately once we released this in beta and then we had some lively discussion on our Discord and the beta’s channel where folks were trying this out and sharing what they were using it for, and we were almost immediately surprised by some of the interesting stuff that folks were doing with it. So maybe we could start with how we are using it personally or on the team. How have you found linked cards that fit into your new workflow, or have they? 00:42:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for me a little bit. So in both my personal corpus and on the team’s corpus, I’ve seen us use them for what I might call workflow purposes, where you have a board, it’s usually a board that you find that you want to access from a few different contexts. It might be, for example, you have a technical design for something that you want. On the one hand, in the context of your larger technical board and also in the context of your weekly planning, say, that sort of thing I find happens pretty frequently, and I do some stuff like that for personal projects where I want it on some maybe more temporal board versus more subject matter board, and it’s helpful to see the thing in both places. I also use it a little bit as a sort of bookmark feature where there’s some topic that you know is referenced in a few different places in your corpus, and you can create a board for that notion and then make a linked instance of that board in those handful of other places and you have a sort of bookmark access portal network, you know, underground tunnels to your different boards. Now, what I don’t use it for is the really high cardinality. Super dense reified web that you sometimes see with knowledge graph tools where like, each page has 10 links and you’re trying to form this really explicit graph of concepts. I’ve argued that I mean, I think there’s something to that, but the in fact network of concepts is so massively dense. It’s like the branching factor is thousands or more that I think you’re kind of fooling yourself if you think you’re gonna fully reify that in the tool. There’s still some uses to it, right, but in my mind, that stuff happens in my head, and where I find myself using the links is more for workflow purposes where I know I’m gonna want to traverse these networks of boards and non-hierarchical ways. 00:43:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I was surprised how useful it turned out to be. I guess I didn’t feel quite the burning desire for it, but again, we heard this just so often from users and customers and a few folks on our team also were really, really driven about it. And of course this reflects, yeah, a very flexible and general purpose tool like Muse. People use it in lots of different ways. Everyone has their own approach, not everyone uses every feature and so forth, but I was surprised how much I did find myself using it. Certainly a good bit in my personal muse, but where I’ve really been surprised about how useful it is is the team setting, and I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised from this because, you know, using something like Notion or even Google Docs back in the day when that was when we used more of our internal memos and project documentation. Yes, it’s just really, really useful. You’re going to build up this network collection of projects and concepts and processes and so forth, and it’s just very good to be able to reference them to each other. A really simple version of that that comes up basically every week in our planning is we’re having a discussion about, OK, these 3 people are working on this task this week, and they’re doing this and this and this, and by the way, they had previously had. You know, a whole design sketching section and talked through exactly what they’re going to do next. Here’s the board for that. And so kind of in the call, what will happen is someone will go and grab a linked card for that and drop it in the planning document right alongside. There’s the explicit list of tasks and assignments of what we’re doing for the week, but here’s the reference to and as these projects get more complex, particularly as our team is growing and so forth, sometimes it’s, you have 3 lines. Of tasks for the team that just describe what they’re doing for the week, but then you double click or you pinch to navigate into that subboard and you see this huge world of things whether it’s technical or design or whatever it is, and you either get a glimpse of it or maybe you think, OK, I’m going to sort of make a note to go review this later because I think it touches on my work or maybe you just go, Oh man, I’m glad those people are working on that and not me because it’s a whole huge world and I’m not going to load the context into my brain. But just that ability to just drop that reference there, and very casually, I think it’s just a really nice way to offer the depth if you want it, but you don’t necessarily need to go into it right there in the meeting. 00:46:10 - Speaker 1: Right. Another way to describe this might be different views into the same data. So I think it’s very common that you want 3 views. You want a view which is temporal, what is the team working on this week? You want a view that’s personal, what is Mark thinking about right now? What does he want to have at hand. And then there’s a view which is subject base. What is the design of our sync system? And what link cards allow you to do is to have any given thing, boards say appear. And each of those. And really importantly from you, as you alluded to this, it’s all symmetric because often the way this stuff happens in practice is someone is off noodling in their own world and, you know, how to do graph indexing for linked cards as he was describing. And it would really be a shame if You either disallowed or made it look weird if that was to get promoted into the weekly work and then into the sort of canonical subject matter board for sync or the client and what have you. But with linked cards, these things get promoted and they’re really peers among each other, so it’s very natural for stuff to Flow in organically versus you can imagine a world where there are 2 class links and then the subject board, for example, is this weird mix of like boards versus second class link boards, it just be kind of weird. Whereas here you get this very nice minor link icon to indicate that this board appears in other places, but otherwise it’s all symmetrical. 00:47:34 - Speaker 2: Another thing I’ve noticed is that the number of links, the number of other locations, I guess number of linked cards that is in that Droptown serves as a sort of measure of importance. So as one example here, you wrote a description of the roadmap essentially for multiplayer or multiplayer features in terms of technical capabilities we needed to build as well as some of the user facing stuff, and you wrote that pretty early in our process, and that’s been An important reference point for a lot of project planning and design work and so on. And so now there’s a pretty good list of stuff there and almost an interesting parallel there with, I think citation count in scientific papers where you can measure the influence of a paper by how often it’s cited some. Similar for boards. Our most important boards tend to get referenced a lot, and notably, I don’t think you necessarily know ahead of time which you’re going to turn out to be that, and maybe that’s to your point about the canonical location, which is something that might start in a board that I call Adam’s weird ideas in November. And it turns out that one of them is useful or interesting enough that it keeps coming up and gets referenced a lot, and the fact that it started life there isn’t important for its longer influence that it’s going to have on what our team is up to. 00:48:56 - Speaker 1: And speaking of personal workspaces and then promoting content into team spaces, I think the elegant transition from single instance to multiple linked instances is going to work really well because, so right now in our use for teams, basically everything is visible to everyone. Each of us has our own little workspace that’s carved out and some of it a little like pseudos screens over it so people don’t, I don’t know, annoy us too much or, you know, look in before stuff is ready. But ultimately, if you, Adam, have something in your personal workspace and then link to it from the team’s weekly planning board, for example, that backlink is gonna appear to everyone in the current views for Teams space. But you can imagine a world where the backlink calculation is done per user. So, in a world of more granular sharing that we’ll have in the future, it could be that when you do that promotion and you go to the weekly team planning board, you see the backlink to your personal space. But when I go, I don’t see that backlink. And in fact, it might just look like a regular board to me because that’s the only place that appears for me. And then perhaps if I want to link it from my scratch board, then I see the two ends. Says it’s on the weekly planning board and it’s on my personal space. So that’s, I think an important example of how the linkedness is a property that emerges of how many times a given document is visible to you. And right now that’s all the same because we’re all sharing the same team space, but eventually it’ll be more granular. 00:50:21 - Speaker 2: Right, right now you got your personal muse where it is by definition only visible to you, and then you’ve got teamwork spaces, which in our current data are essentially everyone on the team can see everything. But in the future world, we have in mind is one of much more granular sharing, as you said, the ability to share individual boards, as well as even within a team space having a private office, private workspace where you can get stuff ready, even though it is intended to be in that bucket of There’s something I’m doing for work or for this particular team or project, and it may be something that has some kind of a privacy screen over it, but you can relatively seamlessly move it into the shared space when you are ready to work on it. So yeah, it definitely opens up or it fits really cleanly into that paradigm. Well, maybe as a place to end, we’re gonna reference Ted Nelson again, I mentioned earlier, he invented the term for hyperlinks, but he also invented this term transclusion, and the muse take on transclusion so far is that you can grab what we call an excerpt from a PDF or an image, or even a frame from a video, and have a source link and indeed a little portal that takes you back to that place. But in some ways, linked cards have some of the same transclusion quality to them, and indeed, I think something we would like to see in the future is essentially a called a linked section or a linked portion of a board or other card, and actually at that point, then you start to see it as a sort of transclusion, right, a portal to that source, something you could potentially not only see but potentially change, you can obviously navigate into it. And the fact that it is this one specific subset, I think is also part of the potentially usefulness. Now, what the interface for that would look like, I think would be quite a design challenge, but I think the value of that would be fairly obvious and hopefully would make Ted Nelson proud. 00:52:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that would be very powerful. I’ve definitely found myself wanting something like that and have received several support requests looking for that kind of capability. And just reasoning by analogy, this is super useful on the web. You have vanilla URL links, and then you have so-called anchor links where you have the URL, the pound sign, and then some anchor tag, which typically corresponds to some heading or some other section of the web page. And when you click on that link, it takes you to the web page and scrolls right to the point. And sometimes with jobs you can even make it highlight the particular thing that you scrolled right to. Super valuable. And importantly with web links, the former is sort of a special instance of the latter. It’s like you’re basically link into the whole thing, and I kind of wonder if we can make that same thing work in Muse where instead of having separate linked card and excerpt slash transclusion features, there’s sort of a continuum. So you can think of a linked card as you have underlying content. You make an excerpt, but the excerpt is like the whole thing. If the window is the size of the entire document. And there’s another thing you can do, which is make an excerpt where the window is smaller than the entire document. But you can see how those are on a continuum, and then things like the back linking, for example, would be unified. I don’t know if that’s gonna work out. We need to think about it more, but I think that’d be pretty powerful if we can get to work. I also think both linked cards and excerpts could be relevant for maybe you call them computed views or derived views. The example that I constantly go to is search. So there’s one way to do search, which is like search is a totally separate thing with a totally separate interface, just kind of its own world. And then you click on links and it brings you back into the main app. The vision that I have for search is more like there’s some content type that you’re programmatically. Computing. So in the current muse, you can imagine you type some search terms and it computes a board that has a bunch of linked boards on it, which correspond to your search results, which would be a little bit weird, but you can imagine if a muse eventually has a non-spatial content type, basically a set type, which is more comparable to like a Maciner, and there. When you do a search, you compute a set of results in order to set maybe or a list and you present that in the same way that if you want to make a manual list, it would be, you know, very comparable how the set is built. And then furthermore, you can imagine. If you’re searching for text, for example, and it’s searching within PDF, it actually computes an excerpt object so that you can, you know, see where in the PDF the result is popping up and when you click on the excerpt in the same way that you animate a manually create excerpt, it goes to the PDF source. So I think these are pretty cool building blocks for eventual computed types like search results. 00:54:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I know something I always find myself wanting with search, generally, Google does a version of this, but I’m also thinking of Unix text search tools like Grap has a command line option to essentially give yourself a couple lines of context around the search term, maybe log search tools like Splunk. And when they don’t have that, you’re struggling to see, OK, like I found the error I searched for, but I really want to know what happened in the few lines before it. That context is really important, but sometimes there’s not even a way to get to that. So the idea of the excerpt where you can easily see the context or even go completely to the source, is something that’s generally very powerful in computing. Well, then maybe I’ll just encourage our listeners, if you haven’t given linked cards a try yet, to go check that out and use. You can basically use the right click contexts menu on your Mac or the context menu on the iPad and make yourself a little linked card and fool around and see if you like the metaphor we landed on there and tell us if you have any feedback, and we can wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. Join us on Discord to discuss the episode with me, Mark, and our community. I’ll put the link in the show notes. You can also follow us on Twitter at mAppHQ. And Mark, I think the 1st 50 or so years of linking and computing have been pretty good. I’m looking forward to seeing what the future holds. 00:56:28 - Speaker 1: Great I.