Podcasts about prison entrepreneurship program

In this episode of the Embracing Brokenness podcast, host Steve Adams engages in a profound conversation with Chip Skowron, a former Hedge Fund Manager indicted for insider trading, who shares his transformative journey from a life of self-serving behaviors and material success to one of redemption and purpose. Chip discusses his early traumas, the impact of his career changes, and his commitment to prison ministry, emphasizing the importance of celebrating stories of redemption and healing. This conversation delves into the themes of brokenness, redemption, and the transformative power of community. They reflect on their journey from a life of deceit and materialism to one of authenticity and purpose, emphasizing the importance of confession, community support, and the role of faith in healing. The discussion also highlights the significance of prison ministry and the Prison Entrepreneurship Program in fostering connections and providing hope for those affected by incarceration. Prison Entrepreneurship Program: https://www.pep.org/ New Caanan Society: https://newcanaansociety.org/ Chapters 00:00 The Journey of Redemption 05:29 From Medicine to Finance: A Life Transformed 12:34 The Impact of Early Trauma 20:18 Struggles with Identity and Expectations 25:08 Navigating Career Changes and Life Decisions 32:01 The Quest for Soul Satisfaction 34:52 The Consequences of Deceit and Brokenness 38:36 Transformation Through Community and Confession 41:40 The Power of Community in Adversity 45:45 Building Bridges: Prison Ministry and Redemption 48:55 Connecting Inside and Outside: The Prison Entrepreneurship Program 56:10 The Importance of Authentic Community 01:00:51 Hope and Healing Beyond Incarceration --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/embracing-brokenness/support

It's YOUR time to #EdUp  In this episode, #956, YOUR guest is ⁠Robert Gil⁠, Re-Entry Department Manager, ⁠Prison Entrepreneurship Program⁠ (PEP) YOUR host is ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson⁠, Owner of Vida Consulting for Higher Education & Trustee at ⁠San Jacinto College⁠, How does PEP prepare incarcerated individuals for successful re-entry into society? What makes PEP unique among prison education & rehabilitation programs? How does PEP's curriculum blend entrepreneurship, leadership, & personal development? What role does mentorship & community support play in PEP's success? How can individuals & organizations get involved with supporting PEP's mission? Listen in to #EdUp! Want to accelerate YOUR professional development? Want to get exclusive early access to ad-free episodes, extended episodes, bonus episodes, original content, invites to special events, & more? Want to get all this while helping to sustain EdUp, for only $2.99 a month? Then subscribe today to lock in YOUR $2.99/m life long founders rate! This offer will end on December 31, 2024!  BECOME A SUBSCRIBER TODAY! Thank YOU so much for tuning in. Join us on the next episode for YOUR time to EdUp! Connect with YOUR EdUp Team - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Elvin Freytes⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dr. Joe Sallustio⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ● Join YOUR EdUp community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The EdUp Experience⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! We make education YOUR business!

What happens when a Wall Street Hedge Fund Founder goes to prison. He rises in again to become a force for change of reentry. In this episode of the Nightmare Success In an Out podcast, Brent Cassity interviews Chip Skowron, the CEO of Prison Entrepreneurship Program. Chip shares his journey from being the founder of one the largest Hedge Funds on Wall Street, Frontpoint Partners, to being convicted of insider trading and serving a five-year federal sentence. Chip graduated from Yale University Medical School. He discusses his upbringing, struggles with addiction, and the pivotal moments that led him to change his life. Chip also talks about the importance of faith, the support he received from the New Canaan Society, and the power of starting over. Chip Skowron shares his experience leading up to his time in prison and the profound impact it had on him. He talks about the fear and uncertainty he felt before his indictment and the preparations he made for his time away from his family. Chip also discusses the vulnerability and deep connections he formed with other inmates while in prison, and how that experience shaped his perspective on manhood and relationships. Chip shares his struggles of reentry back into society. He emphasizes the importance of hope and community in the reentry process and the need for collective efforts to support individuals coming out of prison. Chip's giving back to help others is inspiring for those who have experienced hitting rock bottom. Show sponsors: White Collar Support Group prisonist.org START HERE, Autoplazadirect.com "Your Personal Car Concierge." --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/brent-cassity/support

On today's episode of The Greatness Machine, Darius chats with Cat Hoke, founder of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program and Defy Ventures, entrepreneur, author, and speaker. As a Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighter, Cat mastered the art of “breakfall”: how to prevent injury when you get taken down. Cat works with gang leaders in the most notorious prisons, leading gang intervention programs. Her Hustle 2.0 initiative reduces crime, violence, and recidivism by providing evidence-based rehabilitation programs that equip incarcerated people with the tools to transform their lives by changing their thoughts and behaviors. You'll discover how Cat started wrestling at a young age and ended up as the only girl on the team. You'll learn what you can learn working with incarcerated people. You'll also discover details of Cat's Hustle 2.0 program. Topics include: How Cat started wrestling at a young age and ended up as the only girl on the team What you can learn working with incarcerated people Details on the Hustle 2.0 initiative And other topics… Connect with Cat: Website: https://www.cathoke.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherinehokeny/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catherine_hoke/  Connect with Darius: Website: https://therealdarius.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariusmirshahzadeh/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whoompdarius/ YouTube: https://therealdarius.com/youtube Book: The Core Value Equation https://www.amazon.com/Core-Value-Equation-Framework-Limitless/dp/1544506708 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pulitzer-prize winning author, Bill Keller, argues that incarceration here in America is a shameful waste of lives and money. The former New York Times executive editor says prison rehabilitation has been neglected with only a handful of successful reentry programs for inmates. Join us as Host Eddie Robinson chats unguarded with the founding editor-in-chief of the Marshall Project, Bill Keller. The acclaimed author of “What's Prison For?” builds a compelling case that criminal justice reform must take place now and compares American caged prisons to their foreign counterparts, where corrections officers are considered therapists and social workers. Who or what is standing in the way of much-needed reform in this country? And can educational programming and therapeutic interventions really solve the problem?

Nationwide, half of the prisoners released are incarcerated again within three years. But participants in the Texas-based Prison Entrepreneurship Program are seeing a return-to-prison rate of less than 7%. Al Massey was a graduate of that program and went on to serve as its Executive Relations Manager, helping prisoners prepare for their release by developing values-based business skills and a support structure to pursue their entrepreneurial visions. He joins us to talk about the program, the hurdles prisoners face re-integrating into society, what prison life is really like, differences between private and public prisons, and criminal justice reform. Learn more about the Prison Entrepreneurship Program at pep.org.

Many U.S. prisons are trade schools for crime. High recidivism rates underscore the failure of the current criminal justice system. Released and rearrested inmates pass through an expensive revolving door.  The Texas prison used to be called the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC), but there was little evidence that it corrected bad behavior.  In Texas, nearly one-fourth of the prisoners released return within three years. Nationally, half of the prisoners released return within three years. However, the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP), an independent nonprofit organization in Texas, puts inmates within one to three years of parole eligibility on the path to jobs and even running a business.  Less than 7% of its graduates return to prison within three years. 500 participants are chosen yearly out of more than 10,000 eligible inmates. The screening process, which is more selective than prestigious universities, includes a 20-page application, three exams, and an interview with PEP staff members. Death row inmates or those convicted of sex crimes are not eligible. The program exposes them to PEP's ten driving values: fresh-start outlook, servant-leader mentality, love, innovation, accountability, integrity, execution, fun, excellence, and wise stewardship.  The entrepreneurship program starts with a three-month Leadership Academy that teaches character development and computer skills.  Next, they take a rigorous six-month “mini-MBA” course taught by staff, volunteer business executives, and college students. Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business has worked with PEP since 2007. It awards certificates of Entrepreneurship at the program's graduation ceremonies. All of the inmates who have graduated get a job within 90 days of walking out of prison. More than 1,500 PEP graduates have launched 300 businesses. Six of those companies generate more than $1 million in annual sales. Nearly half of the grads own homes within three years of their release. Bryan Kelley, the CEO of PEP, has “walked the line” in the prison system. Kelley served 22 years of a life sentence for a drug-related murder. (note: In this context, "walk the line" refers to the white lines painted on the floors of prison cellblocks. Inmates must stay inside the white line and against the wall as they walk in both directions.) Investigative reporter Robert Riggs spent a decade in every corner of the prison system, exposing corruption in the Texas parole system. Riggs interviews Kelley about the life-changing Prison Entrepreneurship Program. FOLLOW the True Crime Reporter® Podcast  SIGN UP FOR my True Crime Newsletter THANK YOU FOR THE FIVE-STAR REVIEWS ON APPLE Please leave one – it really helps. TELL ME about a STORY OR SUBJECT  that you want to hear more about

Many U.S. prisons are trade schools for crime. High recidivism rates underscore the failure of the current criminal justice system. Released and rearrested inmates pass through an expensive revolving door.  The Texas prison used to be called the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC), but there was little evidence it was correcting bad behavior.  In Texas, nearly one-fourth of the prisoners released return within three years. Nationally, half of the prisoners released return within three years. But the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP), an independent nonprofit organization in Texas, puts inmates who are within one to three years of parole eligibility on the path to jobs and even running a business.  Less than 7% of its graduates return to prison within three years. 500 participants are chosen yearly out of more than 10,000 eligible inmates. The screening process, which is more selective than prestigious universities, includes a 20-page application, three exams, and an interview with PEP staff members. Death row inmates or those convicted of sex crimes are not eligible. The program exposes them to PEP's ten driving values: fresh-start outlook, servant-leader mentality, love, innovation, accountability, integrity, execution, fun, excellence, and wise stewardship.  The entrepreneurship program starts with a three-month Leadership Academy that teaches character development and computer skills.  Next, they take a rigorous six-month “mini-MBA” course taught by staff, volunteer business executives, and college students. Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business has been working with PEP since 2007. It awards certificates of Entrepreneurship at the program's graduation ceremonies. All of the inmates who have graduated get a job within 90-days of walking out of prison. 300 businesses have been launched by more than 1,500 PEP graduates.  Six of those companies generate more than $1 million in annual sales.  Nearly half of the grads own homes within three years of their release. Bryan Kelley, the CEO of PEP, has himself “walked the line” in the prison system. Kelley served 22 years of a life sentence for a drug-related murder. (note: In this context "walk the line" refers to the white lines painted on the floors of prison cellblocks. Inmates must stay inside the white line and against the wall, as they walk in both directions.) Investigative reporter Robert Riggs spent a decade in every corner of the prison system exposing corruption in the Texas parole system. Riggs interviews Kelley about the life-changing Prison Entrepreneurship Program.

Many U.S. prisons are trade schools for crime. High recidivism rates underscore the failure of the current criminal justice system. Released and rearrested inmates pass through an expensive revolving door.  The Texas prison used to be called the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC), but there was little evidence it was correcting bad behavior.  In Texas, nearly one-fourth of the prisoners released return within three years. Nationally, half of the prisoners released return within three years. But the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP), an independent nonprofit organization in Texas, puts inmates who are within one to three years of parole eligibility on the path to jobs and even running a business.  Less than 7% of its graduates return to prison within three years. 500 participants are chosen yearly out of more than 10,000 eligible inmates. The screening process, which is more selective than prestigious universities, includes a 20-page application, three exams, and an interview with PEP staff members. Death row inmates or those convicted of sex crimes are not eligible. The program exposes them to PEP's ten driving values: fresh-start outlook, servant-leader mentality, love, innovation, accountability, integrity, execution, fun, excellence, and wise stewardship.  The entrepreneurship program starts with a three-month Leadership Academy that teaches character development and computer skills.  Next, they take a rigorous six-month “mini-MBA” course taught by staff, volunteer business executives, and college students. Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business has been working with PEP since 2007. It awards certificates of Entrepreneurship at the program's graduation ceremonies. All of the inmates who have graduated get a job within 90-days of walking out of prison. 300 businesses have been launched by more than 1,500 PEP graduates.  Six of those companies generate more than $1 million in annual sales.  Nearly half of the grads own homes within three years of their release. Bryan Kelley, the CEO of PEP, has himself “walked the line” in the prison system. Kelley served 22 years of a life sentence for a drug-related murder. (*note: In this context "walk the line" refers to the white lines painted on the floors of prison cellblocks. Inmates must stay inside the white line and against the wall, as they walk in both directions.) Investigative reporter Robert Riggs spent a decade in every corner of the prison system exposing corruption in the Texas parole system. Riggs interviews Kelley about the life-changing Prison Entrepreneurship Program. We want to become your favorite true crime podcast. Please leave a review wherever you listen. Join our true crime community and follow us here.  The True Crime Reporter® podcast features stories about serial killers, mass murderers, murder mysteries, homicides, cold cases, prisons, violent criminals, serial rapists, child abductors, child molesters, kidnappers, bank robbers, cyber criminals, and assorted violent criminals. True Crime Reporter® is a @2022 copyrighted and trade-marked production by True Crime Reporter®, LLC, in Dallas, Texas.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Discover how Howard Rambin III (CEO of Moody Rambin) has succeeded in business with the same partner since 1969, what he did to stop being a control freak, and how his assistant points out his his leadership blind spot (12 minutes). CEO Blindspots® Podcast Guest: Howard Rambin III. He is the CEO and Co-founder of Moody Rambin, and recent recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. Moody Rambin is Houston's largest, privately held, full-service commercial real estate firm in which Howard oversees project leasing, property management, tenant representation and investment services in the office, industrial and investment divisions of the company. Over the course of his career, Howard has developed, owned, operated and sold 25 suburban office buildings, apartment complexes, motels and retail shopping centers in the Houston area. He has closed over 15 million square feet of transactions ranging in size from 1,000 to over 1 million square feet. Furthermore, Howard founded Keep Houston Beautiful in 1974. The organization is dedicated to beautification, litter reduction and recycling education. Additionally, he is involved with a number of other organizations such as The Houston Angel Network, a nonprofit focused on angel investment and dedicated to developing the innovation ecosystem. Howard also participates in one-on-one professional coaching/mentoring sessions with his clients, and in groups with The Silver Fox Advisors and Prison Entrepreneurship Program. For more information about Howard and Moody Rambin; https://www.moodyrambin.com/about/team/howard-rambin-III/ To ask questions about this or one of the 160+ other CEO Blindspots® Podcast episodes, send an email to birgit@ceoblindspots.com CEO Blindspots® Podcast Host: Birgit Kamps Birgit was speaking five languages by the age of 10, and lived in five countries with her Dutch parents prior to becoming an American citizen. Birgit's professional experience includes starting and selling an “Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Private Company” and a “Best Company to Work for in Texas”, and serving as a Board Member with various companies. In addition, Birgit is the President of Hire Universe LLC, and the host of the CEO Blindspots® Podcast which was recognized by Spotify for having the “biggest listener growth” in the USA by 733%; https://www.ceoblindspots.com/

Show Summary . This by far is one of the most intriguing, impactful, interviews I have ever done. There are so many surprises along the way. You'll want to listen to the whole thing. Check out the pic below to see Jim's dad's old cell mate at Jim's son's wedding. They are holding a picture of Jim's dad. . Jim Buffington is the Chief Operating Officer for Bridges To Life and resides in Grand Prairie, Texas. He is a native Texan and is a graduate of the University of Arkansas with a BSBA degree in Marketing Management. Jim's 30-year business career was in Financial/Legal Services. Jim started volunteering with Bridges To Life in 2004 and then joined the staff as COO in 2016. . Bridges To Life is a restorative justice program which connects communities to prisons to reduce the recidivism rate (particularly that of violent crimes), reduce the number of crime victims, and enhance public safety. Since inception, more than 65,000 men and women have graduated from the faith-based program with the help of over 3,200 volunteers in 16 states and 7 countries. Most recently, the Bridges To Life Self-Study Program received Texas Governor Abbott's Criminal Justice Volunteer Service Award for the Most Innovative Program in 2020 in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. . When Jim was 12 years old, his mother was found murdered in the back seat of her car. A year later, his father and two other men were arrested, convicted, and incarcerated for the crime. Jim traveled a long road of pain and betrayal that could have led to a life of bitterness, but instead he chose another path: one of healing and forgiveness. . He volunteers as a Victim Impact Panel Speaker for: Texas Department of Criminal Justice Victim Services, Dallas County Probation, Texas Youth Commission, Dallas County Juvenile Justice Department and Tarrant County Juvenile Services in Fort Worth. . Jim is a Royal Family Kid's camp counselor and is a Board Member for Trinity Kids, Inc., Lillian Smith Family Violence Foundation, Brighter Tomorrows, and One CommunityUSA Pathway's to HOPE reentry program. He volunteers with Bill Glass Prison Ministry, Prison Entrepreneurship Program, and is an active member of Fielder Church in Arlington, Texas. . Jim received the Texas Governor's Criminal Justice Volunteer Service Pathfinder Award for his contributions to the welfare of crime victims in 2019, the Texas Governor's Criminal Justice Carol S. Vance Volunteer of the Year Service Award in 2008, and the Dallas Cowboys Community Quarterback Award for Volunteer Service in 2007. . Jim and his wife, Marilyn, who is an Arlington ISD elementary special education school teacher, have one son, Bryce, who is also a Bridges To Life volunteer.  . Resources Mentioned in the Show: . Watch the Forgiven Felons Documentary: https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/7abf5e84134e54a394b5b42544c08caa/forgiven-felons/season-1 . Watch the documentary Jim and his brothers are in: https://www.shalomworld.org/episode/forgiving-their-mothers-murderer . Watch video about Bridges To Life: https://www.shalomworld.org/episode/when-were-you-in-prison-lord-bridges-to-life . Bridges To Life website: http://www.bridgestolife.org/ . Bridges To Life Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bridgestolife . Bridges To Life LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridges-to-life . Our Sponsor's Information: RP Media, robprice6@gmail.com 214-354-6364 Tell them you heard it here. . How to get more involved with Forgiven Felons: . Leave a review and subscribe on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/background-check-podcast/id1515831127 . Learn about our Future Plans: https://www.forgivenfelons.org/future-plans . Give to our organization: https://www.forgivenfelons.org/support . Follow Forgiven Felons on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

On today's episode of https://therealdarius.com/the-greatness-machine-series/ (The Greatness Machine,) Darius chats with Cat Hoke, founder of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program and Defy Ventures, entrepreneur, author and speaker. As a Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighter, Cat mastered the art of “breakfall:” how to prevent injury when you get taken down. Cat works with gang leaders in the most notorious prisons, leading gang intervention programs.   Her Hustle 2.0 initiative reduces crime, violence, and recidivism by providing evidence-based rehabilitation programs that equip incarcerated people with the tools to transform their lives by changing their thoughts and behaviors.   You'll discover how Cat started wrestling at a young age, and ended up as the only girl on the team.   You'll learn what you can learn working with incarcerated people.   You'll also discover details of Cat's Hustle 2.0 program.   Join Darius and Cat for this fascinating and inspiring conversation.   Enjoy! What You'll Learn in this Show: How Cat started wrestling at a young age, and ended up as the only girl on the team. What you can learn working with incarcerated people. Details on the Hustle 2.0 initiative. And so much more...   Resources: https://www.cathoke.com (Cat's website) Cat's email https://therealdarius.com (The Real Darius) https://www.facebook.com/therealdariusm/ (Facebook) https://www.instagram.com/whoompdarius/ (Instagram) https://therealdarius.com/YT (YouTube) https://twitter.com/kingdarius (Twitter) https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariusmirshahzadeh/ (LinkedIn) This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bryan Kelley is the chief empowerment officer of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, or PEP. But to think of this as just another prison ministry would be a grave injustice. PEP doesn't want to simply change inmates, instead they want to transform the 150,000 men incarcerated in Texas from the inside out. Teaching practical entrepreneurial skills helps release fathers and husbands from generational bondage. Bryan joins us on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur Podcast to share the story of how PEP is doing just that. And he illustrates just what they are doing to set men up for meaningful and lasting success after they are released from prison. 

 http://www.survivingthesystem.org/ (http://www.survivingthesystem.org/) http://www.facebook.com/survivingthesystem (http://www.facebook.com/survivingthesystem) http://www.twitter.com/ststhepodcast (http://www.twitter.com/ststhepodcast) After serving 10 years in the system, Gregory LaBeet broke the cycle of recidivism to become a successful entrepreneur, an amazing husband and a productive member of society. He is a member of numerous prison reform and support groups, including The Prison Entrepreneurship Program, and has mentored over 1,000 prisoners and ex-offenders to transform their own lives. "No matter where your story began, you can rewrite the ending with the power of sincere change."– Gregory S. LaBeet https://www.gregorylabeet.com/ (https://www.gregorylabeet.com/) https://www.amazon.com/End-Recidivism-Ultimate-Transforming-Incarcerated/dp/1736549707/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=the+end+of+recidivism&qid=1624327143&sr=8-2 (https://www.amazon.com/End-Recidivism-Ultimate-Transforming-Incarcerated/dp/17365497[…]dchild=1&keywords=the+end+of+recidivism&qid=1624327143&sr=8-2)

Anthony Rose is an artist and experiential art curator working with the world's most expressive artists and commercial art collectors at United By Design. He is the founder and executive director of United By Design (UXD), an art agency that elevates physical and digital spaces with murals, sculptures, and installations for brands and businesses like Chevron, Gensler, and the Houston Astros. Anthony is co-founder of Satellites Art Project, an initiative documenting the connective beauty of art and technology during moments of physical isolation and distance. Anthony is also an active contributor to nonprofits around the nation like Good Measure, TEDxSanAntonio, and the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. You can follow Anthony on Twitter, get professional on LinkedIn, connect on Clubhouse or view some recent interactions on Instagram. Of course, if you'd like to work together or invite him to speak, feel free to contact Anthony via email. In this episode, we discuss... How Anthony got into doing artwork His experience painting murals before transitioning into graphic design How he made the transition from freelancing to building his art agency His thoughts on how to price your services How to build connections with commercial clients What his biggest mistake in business was And so much more! Social Media & Links: https://www.uxdmurals.com/, https://twitter.com/AJROSEART, https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyjamesrose/, https://www.joinclubhouse.com/@ajr, https://www.instagram.com/aj_from_uxd https://www.instagram.com/satellites.project/ @devonastimpson devonastimpson.com artbydevona.com  

After Bryan Kelley was given a life sentence for murder in 1992, he said he was tired of being a part of the problem and wanted to be a part of the solution. That was the beginning of Kelley’s journey with the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, which connects the nation’s top executives, entrepreneurs, and MBA students with convicted felons. Over 26-hundred men have graduated from the PEP since it launched in 2004. Kelley is one of them, and three years ago, he became the CEO. Small Biz Insider host Maggie Martin talks with Kelley about his journey and how PEP arms participants with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed when they return to society. Small Biz Insider is presented by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas.

On today's show, Strategy + Action = The Keys to Launching a Viable Startup I'm excited to bring you John Selzer to the show today. John is truly the embodiment of his LinkedIn headline - Helping Companies and Founders Realize Their Vision. While broad in scope, that description matches what's at the heart of everything John does. He's built a consulting firm, Septariate, around this mission. He's an executive volunteer for the Prison Entrepreneurship Program to extend the mission to those who wouldn't otherwise have access. And I've watched him live that mission at least a hundred times on Tuesday mornings, helping both new and seasoned entrepreneurs get past a hurdle in their business. So often it's the “unsexy” things that make the difference in a startup and allow the company to scale - or heck, even just stay alive from year one to year two. When a company gets funded or goes through an acquisition, we don't usually hear about the CRM their sales team had in place or that the founder “kept his cap table clean”. And because of that, company founders miss so many of the fundamental elements of business that investors look for and that keep a company in business. John not only has the knowledge to guide startups through these fundamentals, he does everything he can to help as many of them as possible, conveying that knowledge in a way they can understand. And last but not least, when you need sarcastic comments thrown into any public gathering, this is the guy to call. Welcome to the show, John Selzer.

If you take away all the programs in Texas Department of Criminal Justice, that are volunteer based, you find any rehabilitative elements  to our prison system. In fact, our system can sometimes hinder the really good programs from having a lasting impact.  But if you look real closely you can find some really awesome ones. Prison Entrepreneurship Program is one of these programs. It takes inmates through some character, leadership, and businesses principles that when applied, can assure success.  Bryan is a graduate of the program and now the CEO. His story will touch you as he shares how he almost went off the grid when his lawyer told him to man up. If you're looking for a great program to get involved with, check out PEP on the show notes.  For more about PEP and all the show notes please click below.  Show Notes: https://forgivenfelons.org/backgroundcheck How to get more involved: Leave a review and subscribe on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/background-check-podcast/id1515831127 Learn about our Future Plans: https://www.forgivenfelons.org/future-plans Give to our organization: https://www.forgivenfelons.org/support

In  this episode of the Dudes n Beer podcast host Christopher Jordan welcomes to the show Patrick McGee, Director of In-Prison Initiatives and Al Massey, Executive Relations Manager for the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, or “PEP” to discuss this amazing program created to reduce prison recidivism in United States prisons while giving those preparing for release a unique opportunity to gain necessary job skills for the world beyond their fettered confines, and to improve their life outside the prison walls? With a scant approximate 5% of the world's population the United States houses an astonishing 20+% of the world's prison population. That is a staggering statistic! Even more staggering is the stigma placed on those who have been adjudicated into a system made for “reform”. Yet the recidivism rate in America seems to show otherwise…does that mean that the prison system is full of hardened criminals? FAR FROM IT! What are we doing to help these people as the system is supposed to do? What can we do to help them reintegrate into society and be better people for themselves but for their families and communities as well? That is where the Prison Entrepreneurship program comes in! Established in 2004, the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. They have pioneered innovative programs that connect the nation's top executives, entrepreneurs, and MBA students with convicted felons. Their entrepreneurship boot camp and re-entry programs are proven solutions for preventing recidivism, maximizing self-sufficiency and transforming broken lives.Join the Dudes n Beer podcast as we delve into the world of the Prison Entreprenuership Program and how it is helping people across the country improve their lives!The Dudes n Beer podcast is a proud member of the HC Universal Network family of podcasts. Visit our LISTEN LIVE page and join the conversation.

In this episode of the Dudes n Beer podcast host Christopher Jordan welcomes to the show Patrick McGee, Director of In-Prison Initiatives for the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, or “PEP” to discuss this amazing program created to reduce prison recidivism in United States prisons while giving those preparing for release a unique opportunity to gain necessary job skills for the world beyond their fettered confines, and to improve their life outside the prison walls? With a scant approximate 5% of the world’s population the United States houses an astonishing 20+% of the world’s prison population. That is a staggering statistic! Even more staggering is the stigma placed on those who have been adjudicated into a system made for “reform”. Yet the recidivism rate in America seems to show otherwise…does that mean that the prison system is full of hardened criminals? FAR FROM IT! What are we doing to help these people as the system is supposed to do? What can we do to help them reintegrate into society and be better people for themselves but for their families and communities as well? That is where the Prison Entrepreneurship program comes in! Established in 2004, the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. They have pioneered innovative programs that connect the nation’s top executives, entrepreneurs, and MBA students with convicted felons. Their entrepreneurship boot camp and re-entry programs are proven solutions for preventing recidivism, maximizing self-sufficiency and transforming broken lives. Join the Dudes n Beer podcast as we delve into the world of the Prison Entreprenuership Program and how it is helping people across the country improve their lives! The Dudes n Beer podcast is a proud member of the HC Universal Network family of podcasts. Visit our LISTEN LIVE page and join the conversation.

In  this episode of the Dudes n Beer podcast host Christopher Jordan welcomes to the show Patrick McGee, Director of In-Prison Initiatives and Al Massey, Executive Relations Manager for the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, or “PEP” to discuss this amazing program created to reduce prison recidivism in United States prisons while giving those preparing for release a unique opportunity to gain necessary job skills for the world beyond their fettered confines, and to improve their life outside the prison walls? With a scant approximate 5% of the world’s population the United States houses an astonishing 20+% of the world’s prison population. That is a staggering statistic! Even more staggering is the stigma placed on those who have been adjudicated into a system made for “reform”. Yet the recidivism rate in America seems to show otherwise…does that mean that the prison system is full of hardened criminals? FAR FROM IT! What are we doing to help these people as the system is supposed to do? What can we do to help them reintegrate into society and be better people for themselves but for their families and communities as well? That is where the Prison Entrepreneurship program comes in! Established in 2004, the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. They have pioneered innovative programs that connect the nation’s top executives, entrepreneurs, and MBA students with convicted felons. Their entrepreneurship boot camp and re-entry programs are proven solutions for preventing recidivism, maximizing self-sufficiency and transforming broken lives. Join the Dudes n Beer podcast as we delve into the world of the Prison Entreprenuership Program and how it is helping people across the country improve their lives! The Dudes n Beer podcast is a proud member of the HC Universal Network family of podcasts. Visit our LISTEN LIVE page and join the conversation.

In  this episode of the Dudes n Beer podcast host Christopher Jordan welcomes to the show Patrick McGee, Director of In-Prison Initiatives and Al Massey, Executive Relations Manager for the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, or “PEP” to discuss this amazing program created to reduce prison recidivism in United States prisons while The post DnB Ep 274: Reducing Prison Recidivism in America with the Prison Entrepreneurship Program appeared first on Dudes n Beer Podcast.

Restored Hope At PEP, we are servant leaders on a mission to transform inmates and executives by unlocking human potential through entrepreneurial passion, education and mentoring. Our success hinges on the execution of this mission and the application of our Ten Driving Values.

This week, Cory speaks to Catherine Hoke, the founder of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) and Founder and CEO of Defy Ventures. Defy is a national organization that transforms the lives of business leaders and people with criminal histories through their collaboration along the entrepreneurial journey. Before quitting her corporate job to start PEP, Catherine was an associate at private equity firm Summit Partners and went on to become the Director of Investment Development at American Securities. In this episode, she tells us how she went from the corporate world to prison, her experiences working with the incarcerated, second chances, forgiveness, and the similarities between prisoners and CEO’s. Catherine also offers advice on how to overcome a crisis. She has just released her new book now available to purchase, A Second Chance: For You, For Me, And For The Rest Of Us. “YOU ARE NOT YOUR PAST. YOU ARE NOT EQUAL TO THE WORST THING THAT YOU HAVE DONE.”

Stephen is a Proven community leader, public speaker, and New Decision Coach who has dedicated his life to the advancement of the marginalized citizen returning from incarceration. Stephen is a life transformation specialist and advocate for growth. His belief is that education, mentoring, and entrepreneurial passion can be an amazing conduit to the transformation of one's life.

Debra Myers is Big Cheese & Chief Excitement Officer (AKA CEO) of Enfusia, a premium bath products company that manufactures and distributes everything from Bath Bombs to CBD infused oils nationwide. Debra started Enfusia in her bathroom and has built it into a company that sells products in major retailers like Kroger, Whole Foods and fine hotels. Debra is a champion of people and has a mission to hire people who might not have the opportunity to enjoy the dignity of making progress. She is passionate about entrepreneurship and leadership. She is a guest lecturer at The University of Houston and she volunteers her time for the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. Podcast Segments [2:18] - Early stages of Enfusia. [4:37] - Starting Enfusia & helping others. [9:02] - Debra’s passion for her business. [11:11] - Why bath products? [13:06] - Where does Debra’s determination come from? [15:24] - Learning to problem solve. [18:10] - How important is leadership in growing a company? [20:56] - Learning from mistakes made. [22:53] - Caring about your employees. [27:26] - Debra’s understanding of the marketplace. [31:52] - Are challenges part of success? [34:25] - Challenges that have helped her as a leader. [38:44] - Debra’s role as a CEO [40:50] - Tactics, routines, & habits. [45:41] - Advice for new business owners. [52:52] -  Continuing to personally grow. [55:48] - Debra’s book recommendations. [57:32] - People Debra follows. [58:39] - Encouraging others to pursue leadership roles. [1:01:41] - Is it harder for women to be a leader or business owner? [1:04:43] - Debra’s words of wisdom. Selected links from show Enfusia Website Enfusia Facebook Who Moved My Cheese? Good to Great Freakonomics EntreLeadership

Catherine "Cat" Hoke is Founder of Prison Entrepreneurship Program and Defy, both programs created to give hope, teach skills and send ex-felons out in society to succeed. Both programs bring people and resources from the business world into direct contact with the incarcerated to raise the felons' expectations and to show business leaders on the outside that many felons are people who have made mistakes and want to make up for them. She is not without controversy, which follows her now even after her best-selling book, "A Second Chance". Felony Inc Podcast with your hosts Dave Dahl and Ladd Justesen We record the Felony Inc Podcast inside NedSpace in the Bigfoot Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Portland. Audio engineer, mixer and podcast editor is Allon Beausoleil Show logo was designed by Carolyn Main Website was designed by Cameron Grimes Production assistant is Chelsea Lancaster Theme music "Free" written and recorded by Dave Dahl, all rights reserved, motherfuckers This weeks podcast brought to you in part by soap-on-a-rope, when you don't want to drop stuff Felony Inc Podcast supports City Central Concern at centralcityconcern.org 10% of gross revenue at Startup Radio Network goes to support women entrepreneurs in developing countries thru kiva.org/lender/markgrimes Listen to the Felony Inc Podcast live on-air every Friday at 10:00am pacific time on Startup Radio Network at startupradionetwork.com

Cat Hoke, Founder of nonprofits Defy Ventures and Prison Entrepreneurship Program, joins host Dr. Dawn Graham to discuss her new book "A Second Chance: For You, for Me, and for the Rest of Us" and how people with convictions can move forward to find employment on Career Talk. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Bryan Kelly is the CEO of Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) and Sam Rangel is a PEP entrepreneur. Prison Entrepreneurship Program is a business program that connects executives, entrepreneurs, and MBA students with convicted felons. PEP is a nine-month "mini MBA" course culminating in a shark-tank style competition. 100% of PEP's graduates land a job within 90 days of release and nearly 100% remain employed after 12 months. Surprisingly, this non-profit receives no tax dollars. They are funded entirely by our community, from every dollar to every volunteer (no volunteers has ever been victimized while serving the program). PEP is a tremendous success and they just started a program in a women's prison. They are looking to replicate the system in other prisons and we can help by going to www.pep.org and giving a few dollars or a few hours of our time.

Josh Munoz is the reentry manager with the Prison Entrepreneurship Program in Austin, Texas. Prison Entrepreneurship program, or PEP, is widely considered the gold standard in entrepreneurship programs for currently and formerly incarcerated people. https://www.pep.org/ Since 2004, PEP graduates have started 361 businesses and have a recidivism rate of just 7%. Josh is a graduate of the program, and joined the staff after leaving prison. His story is powerful, and the success of PEP will teach and inspire you to harness the power of formerly incarcerated people to adopt the entrepreneurial mindset and make the world a better, more prosperous place. Report on PEP: http://icic.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ICIC_PEP-Impact-Analysis_final_post.pdf

Jay Steinfeld is Founder of Blinds.com. He set up the original eCommerce site NoBrainerBlinds for $3000 in 1996 and has since grown the eCommerce company to over $200 million in annual revenue. It is the world’s top retailer for blinds and shades and provides blinds for over a million windows every year. The company was acquired in 2014 by Home Depot. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: [0:55] Jeremy’s introduction to this episode. [2:00] Jay talks about starting his first business out of his home. [6:00] Starting an eCommerce business at the beginning of online sales. [11:50] What did Jay want to be when he was a kid? [13:15] Was is a good decision for Jay to go into accounting? [15:15] What did Jay learn from working at Meineke? [17:50] Jay talks about getting feedback from his employees. [19:10] Core values. [21:00] Experiments and risks in business. [24:20] Work and family life. [33:00] Training salespeople. [38:00] Shaping the buying experience. [43:00] Gathering investors. [47:00] Acquiring competitors. [51:15] Wowing the customer. [52:30] Marketing with videos. [57:00] Marketing on radio and TV. [58:30] Home Depot acquires Jay’s company. [1:04:30] Lessons learned from acquisition. [1:07:30] Why did Jay stay on when Home Depot acquired Blinds.com? [1:09:00] What skills has Jay had to develop as a CEO that were different from an entrenpuer? [1:11:40] Lowest moment and highest moment in business. In this episode… It isn’t sexy but most businesses would LOVE to be known for quality customer service. The problem is that is costs money and resources to build that kind of culture in your company. But those costs can end up paying HUGE rewards. Jay Steinfeld and his company have built a reputation of providing quality customer service. On this episode, Jay and Jeremy discuss taking risks, enjoying work, providing the best product to customers, and so much more. This is an episode that any business leader would be wise to listen to, there are so many applications! Don’t miss this episode of Inspired Insider. Taking risks in business can be scary. What if you fail? What if it all comes crashing down around you? However, taking risks is necessary! It's been said that if you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done. Are you taking risks? Jay Steinfeld will be the first to tell you that he is risk averse. But he has forced himself and his organization to push through the uncomfortable and take risks. They don’t take HUGE risks, rather they have committed themselves to constant experimentation. They regularly take small risks in the hope that one pays off and becomes the next great idea. Jay thinks of this process as an investment in his company’s future. Learn more from Jay and the lessons he has learned in business on this episode of Inspired Insider. Do you LOVE your job? Does getting up for work each morning fire you up? Meet someone who loves what he does, Jay Steinfeld. Jay is the CEO of Blinds.com and he considers his job FUN. He has spent years building up his team and his business from a small operation out of his home to an industry leading multimillion dollar company. The joy and excitement Jay has for his job have spread throughout his organization. In fact, having fun is one of their core values. If you’d like to hear Jay expand on his core values and catch why he is so fired up about his job, make sure to listen to this episode of Inspired Insider! In many sales circles, the emphasis is on the features that a product provides. But this approach doesn’t take into consideration the prospective customer's perspective. It doesn’t anticipate the customer's needs. A good salesperson listens to their customer and matches them to the product that will provide them the most benefit. This approach is central to Jay Steinfeld and his team at Blinds.com. Jay’s many years of experience in sales and specifically dealing with the sale of blinds has shaped his perspective. He wants his salespeople to give outstanding service to their customers. Learn more about Jay’s insights and how you can apply them to your industry on this episode of Inspired Insider. The reputation of customer service in our society isn’t always positive. You hear horror stories of people calling in and having to spend hours on hold and then get someone who isn’t interested in taking care of their problem. On the other side, you hear stories that speak of customer service employees having a terrible working experience. When a business gets customer service right, they stand out. Jay Steinfeld’s company, Blinds.com holds to high customer service standards. In fact, it was their excellent reputation for customer service that factored into Home Depot decision to acquire them. Their reputation in this area is not by accident. Jay Steinfeld talks about how this is something he has carried with him through all his years in business. To hear more about Jay’s lessons in customer service, make sure to catch this episode of Inspired Insider! Resources Mentioned on this episode Jay’s Twitter Page: twitter.com/blindscomceo Blind.com’s Facebook Page: facebook.com/Blindscom Blinds | Window Blinds and Shades | Custom Window Coverings Danny Sullivan Eric Ward Nick Usborne XPRIZE Proflowers Fedex Meineke Jay’s Inc articles: inc.com/author/jay-steinfeld Prison Entrepreneurship Program

Mark Sinatra is CEO of Staff One HR. Before joining Staff One HR, Mark co-founded Gordian Capital, a private investment company that focuses on making long-term investments in lower middle market companies. He has worked in the private equity, investment banking, consulting, and business process outsourcing industries. He came to Staff One HR with some impressive roles under his belt at companies that include Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, Andersen, RR Donnelley and also The Parthenon Group. Mark is actively involved in the PEO industry as a Board Director of both ESAC and NAPEO.  When he's not working, Mark is helping in the community. He is a Board Advisor to The Kikulu Foundation, a Board Director for First3years, a partner with Social Venture Partners – Dallas, and a volunteer with the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. Mark also is a member of Young Presidents' Organization (YPO) - Lone Star Chapter. He is an MBA graduate of the Wharton School of Business, and holds a BA in Economics from Fordham University.  Mark earned the SHRM-CP Certification in August 2015. On this episode he shares his unique journey into entrepreneurship through acquisition. 

New business ideas are being pitched in an unconventional setting that may come as a surprise to some. MBA students are going to jail to help inmates develop business plans.

When kids grow into adulthood without a great dad (or mom) they may have a very hard time becoming a great parent to their own children. Annie talks with Keith Zafren, founder of The Great Dads Project, about being a great dad, no matter what kind of father you had. About Keith Zafren Keith Zafren is a Jack Canfield trained certified Success Skills trainer and a founding board member and fatherhood trainer for the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. He is also the founder of The Great Dads Project, the proud and loving father of three sons as well as the author of the award winning book, "How to Be a Great Dad–No Matter What Kind of Father You Had." Learn more at http://TheGreatDadsProject.org Copyright © 2009-2018 Annie Fox and Electric Eggplant. All Rights Reserved.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: This ends up becoming a question about file standards more than it does about application functionality. I can take a notion document and fairly easily translate that into a text file, a very linear document format. There’s currently not really a file format for spatial canvas. Right now there’s just not a good way for Muse to talk to another spatial canvas app. 00:00:30 - 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. 00:00:45 - Speaker 2: Hey, Adam, and another colleague, Adam Wulf. 00:00:48 - Speaker 1: Hey everyone. 00:00:49 - Speaker 2: And Wulf, I understand you recently spent some time in prison. 00:00:53 - Speaker 1: That’s true, and it’s so good to be out with everyone again. I, of course, was not technically in prison, well, I guess I was. I volunteer with a program called the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. They actually help felons who are near release go through and kind of 3 month entrepreneurship school. They do character development and then learn about starting their own business, and really help them get their feet under their ground again, find their sea legs when they get released. So they do a lot with employment. And housing and support, and a lot of education on the inside of the walls, and a lot of support on the outside of the walls and family reunification, and it’s really just a wonderful program that helps. Inmates helps their families, and ends up helping society. And so the, the big number that matters is national recidivism, which is the number of people who get released from prison and go back into prison, is extremely high. It’s somewhere around like 40 or 50% end up going back into prison. And graduates of this program, it’s as low as like 5 or 7%, and so it just has a dramatic effect for these men and for their families. And so it’s been really fun to volunteer with the past. Gosh, probably 5 years, something like that. So, yeah, if anyone ever wants to be locked in prison with me, then give me a shout out. We’ll make it happen. 00:02:18 - Speaker 2: Sounds like a really worthy program. Well, we’ll link them in the show notes. I’m definitely a believer that how a society treats the people that need to be removed for sort of justice reasons and what you do when they’ve, you know, fulfilled their debt to society, as the saying goes, and how you make a transition back to normal life says a lot about it. It seems like a really great program you’re involved in there. So we can jump straight into our topic today, which is listener questions. This is our second mailbag episode. Mark, you and I did one year and change back, and I think it was quite a lot of fun to go through all the questions people submitted. And now feels like a good time to me just because we’re 2 months or so out from the launch of our 2.0 product and the dust is still settling, but in many ways we spent a lot of the last two months just answering questions through all channels Twitter. Hacker news, but most especially through our support channel, that’s hello@museapp.com and the in-app thing. So we’re in a question answering mood and we have a lot of common questions that we thought would be good to kind of address on air as well as we put out a call on Twitter for folks to submit questions. We’ve got lots of really interesting ones, more than we’ll have time to answer, so we’ll do our best to get to as many of them as we can. You fellows ready? Let’s do it. Yeah. So I guess we’ll start with roadmap just because that tends to be the biggest or most numerous questions are in that category, what features we building and when, but we can go from there and how people use Muse or how we use Muse, things about the broader ecosystem, tools for thought, as well as more even broader than that, some things about how our team works and even some things about Ink & Switch. So the nuts and bolts of roadmap doesn’t work for you. You can jump forward a little bit and things will get more far ranging. But yeah, starting at the beginning here, so I think a broad question many people ask, but here I’ll quote from Penny Chase who basically just said, I’d like a glimpse into the Muse roadmap, and we answered that question mark, I think a year, year and a half ago, and I think it included, you know, going local for sync and going multi-device and having desktop apps. So check, has that roadmap changed other than what we’ve accomplished since then. 00:04:30 - Speaker 3: Well, the good news is that with this launch, I think we’ve got a lot of validation on the direction that we’ve been going since day one, really, which is this idea of a tool for helping you have better ideas that spans your iPad, Mac, iPhone, eventually the web, and is very rich. And what we’ve heard from our users, I think, is, yes, and let’s see the rest of it. And just to give a few buckets there, I think one building on the local first sync, you have the phone, that’s a pretty obvious gap for us right now, a more complete phone app, both in terms of making the phone a better tool for getting things into and out of your corpus, and also being able to look up stuff on the go. You can also see something with the web, sharing on the web or even a full blown web client. and also building on sync. We talked during our tech episode how that’s really the foundation for collaboration, both synchronous and asynchronous, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see something there. And then back in the what we call like app features, there’s some pretty standard stuff that I think we’re missing. Better search, linking, these are things that people ask for very often. Another one I would say is more rich tech support. That’s a really foundational content site, and I could see other content types like videos and better support for free ride web pages and so on. And then there’s a few more things I think we need in terms of like organizing and managing your content, stuff like non-spatial collections we’ve had on our list for a long time, a better inbox, which might be a variant of that. But those are, I think the main buckets on the horizon and then I still have on my medium to long term was this idea of end user programming or like scriptability, programmability more generally. I think that’s incredibly powerful and we have a really compelling foundation for that. I think we need a little bit more on the core app first. 00:06:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one way I’ve summarized it to myself and others is Muse 1 was a multimedia thinking canvas for iPad only. Muse 2 goes multi-device. We’ve got the desktop and iPad, the local first syncing between them, phone, I think is going to be part of the 2. X series, at least that’s my hope, kind of it’s part of that vision. It’s everywhere you need it, and then Muse 3 is where you get into the sharing collaboration, making it more than. It will always be first and foremost a personal tool as something that is better connected to the outside world, both other humans, but also other tools through integrations and things like that. And then yeah, maybe the end user programming feels like the, I don’t know if that’s Muse 4 or just kind of the finishing move that ties it all together. 00:06:58 - Speaker 1: In some ways I see use one as use the teenager and Muse 2 as used the college graduate, and now we have all of the education and skills and life foundation to be able to bring Muse to this great career beyond in collaboration and teams and end user programming and text formatting and we finally entered adulthood, I think, ready to go out into the workforce and make a difference in the world? 00:07:23 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Now on some specific features folks have asked about, a big one here is Zoom, being able to zoom in closer on some things, usually images or PDFs, and being able to zoom out further, especially boards as your boards get bigger and more complex, and a representative tweet on this is from our friend Marsen Igna, who says, where can I read more about why Muse has no zoom out for bird’s eye view of my board? Yeah, it clashes with the navigation gesture, but I’d love to work at 50 to 75% zoom. 00:08:01 - Speaker 1: When I think of Zoom, I think of solving at least two different problems. The first problem is on a very large board, I want to zoom out and still be able to work and move selections around to kind of reorganize a very large desk or very large workspace. The second problem is I’m working on a very large board, and I want to quickly jump to a different location. Scrolling is currently just kind of wandering around in the wild, and I’d really like to be able to see a map and quickly go from the bottom left to the top right or the top middle. So I think whenever we do build Zoom, we need to think about it in that kind of context of which problem are we trying to solve? Do we find a solution that maybe can solve both problems? It’s not obvious to me which of those is the most important to start with, or the right lens to look at the feature through. 00:08:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, Zoom is a very subtle challenge in Muse, just mechanically speaking, say you want to zoom out, OK, you pinch to zoom out on a board. How do we know that that’s different from wanting to zoom out to the next level up? That’s a problem we can solve, right? And you can have a quasi mode to toggle between the two, or you can have a detent in there somewhere or something. It’s just it’s quite subtle. Another challenge with Zoom that we’ve known about since our research in the lab is with these freeform canvases, especially if you have Zoom and especially if you have infiniteness, you have this real risk of becoming lost. Like you’re looking at this solid off-white thing and it looks the same regardless of where you are and how far you are zoomed in, and people just get totally discombobulated. And so we’re trying to push back against that a little bit. And this isn’t just a challenge for boards. We’ve also got a lot of requests for zooming into PDFs and images. So there’s a lot of stuff going on. You got zoom in, you got zoom out, you got navigation versus the document, you got different from document types, got temporary versus permanent. There’s a lot of stuff to figure out. So the answer is we just gotta sit down and do it. I think it’s very doable. It’s gonna take some time and some design work, and maybe some cutting of the Gordian not as Adam would say, you know, just get the 80% in there. I think we’ll get it done eventually. 00:10:05 - Speaker 2: We actually even discussed that as a potential thing to work on post launch. We were looking for things that would be more smaller projects, quick wins, crowd pleasers, just things to refresh our palettes after working so long on this big massive release with big data migration and so on. And actually the conclusion we came to is it was too big of a project because we do want to think about all that stuff holistically and even if we do just carve off a small piece of it to do first, just doing a kind of boring and obvious way to do it like there’s a zoom level drop down or something like that we think will quickly create the problems that I think make a lot of other software not that enjoyable to use, which is disorientation and so on, and it’s particularly bad in the infinite canvas setting, but yeah, we need it, we badly need it as people’s boards get more sophisticated, as people are bringing in more different types of PDFs and images as they just want to do more things. Yeah, you need the ability to zoom and we’ll solve that hopefully much sooner than later. 00:11:03 - Speaker 1: I think Zoom is also related to accessibility and potentially text size and text formatting, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But tech sizes for some users can feel a bit small in use, and being able to zoom into a board or into an image in PDF mark, as you mentioned, is also related in some ways to allowing for custom text sizes or larger headers or text formatting, just generally being able to. See content no matter what your screen size happens to be, if you’re on a small iPad or a large iPad or a big screen. 00:11:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, then we’re getting into the real Pandora’s box on the implementation side of when do you rasterize this content. If you only have one zoom level, you have a lot of flexibility and kind of do it whenever you want. But if you’re zooming all over the place, you either need to rasterize later or essentially suffer the effects of rescaling, so it’s quite gnarly. 00:11:55 - Speaker 2: A related one that’s challenging technically is dark mode. Again, another one we’ve gotten many, many requests for over the. Well, years now, and one of my favorite stories actually, actually one of the best ways to ask for features is to tell a story, as we would say in our podcast episode about storytelling, attaching something to a story makes it much more memorable. So one story I remember well was someone writing that they were on an international flight, you know, overnight flight, 10 hours, 12 hours or something, and they spent the whole session basically with Muse and they had a bunch of PDFs loaded up and deep reading and deep thinking, perfect opportunity for that, right? But they’re in this darkened cabin. They turn their screen brightness down, but it’s just still too bright and they’re kind of afraid of waking the other passengers and so on. 00:12:44 - Speaker 2: Oh, that’s such a vivid image just blasting the cabins, but many folks have asked for it for similar reasons or just because they like dark mode. But because we have the zooming interface that uses what we call internally snapshots, which are basically those thumbnails you see of the boards that give you this, you have this scaling transition, this sense of seamless zoom and traveling around in this kind of open world where you’re never loading a document or what have you, and that’s very nice, but the snapshot rendering. actually pretty CPU intensive. You see this also, if you log in to a new device like an iPad with an account that has a lot of data in it and it downloads it all, the downloading it may take a while, but then generating all the snapshots actually will also cause your device to be pretty busy for a while if you have a lot of boards and deeply nested boards and so on. And so dark mode has the problem that, OK, now we basically need to generate new snapshots for every single board and do we keep both of them all, you know, do we make two all the time and slow down every regeneration every time you change something for a feature that maybe most people won’t ever use. Or is it when you switch modes, do we turn on the regeneration and suddenly your iPad is heating up and you grinding the CPU for 5 minutes while it tries to re-render everything and maybe you just want to check it quickly and then you switch it back and now it’s grinding again for another 5 minutes, so totally solvable, but I guess it’s, as with many things because we have this unique zooming interface and nested boards, that’s something that sets me apart, makes it unique and pretty special to my mind. But it also can make what seem like basic features much harder. 00:14:17 - Speaker 1: I use Zoho mail for my male client and their dark mode. It was an interesting choice because they need to be able to support dark mode for attachments that anyone can send and so it’s not only their own interface, but they’re trying to create a dark mode for the content of the email itself and what they settled on was for those attachments to literally invert the colors, which was functional but a bit jarring. 00:14:51 - Speaker 2: When greens turn into purples and everything else, and so there’s er colors can be really funky, especially like a picture of a face, for example. 00:14:56 - Speaker 1: Yes, exactly, yeah, photos or anything else, and so I’m not sure what their heuristic was for when to invert the image and when to lead the image in plain color. There were certainly some surprises when I first turned that on. 00:15:12 - Speaker 2: Another frequent request is search. A representative question here was asked by Josh Job, who asks, Are there plans for search inside the app, i.e., text? I worry I won’t be able to find anything if I can’t search the contents of blocks if I go big on muse. 00:15:28 - Speaker 1: I look at search As a navigation feature, almost more than anything else. Back in the very olden days of the internet, there was the Yahoo directory, and you just manually search down into homeownership, lawn care, to find the nearest nursery to get some plants, whereas now you just go to Google and you say find me cheap plants. I think the same thing for M where a lot of navigation is pinch in, pitch out, pinch in, pinch out, trying to find. Where you want to go and muse and search. Has this ability to jump very quickly from one side of your tree to the other side of your tree and back, and Supporting the content, both PDF content, text block content, and really making as rich of a search as possible. I think it is really gonna open up new workflows inside of Muse, and something I’m particularly excited about. 00:16:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I would emphasize that I think search is really important for navigation as well as the more obvious use case of finding stuff, especially on the desktop where you have a keyboard. So if I want to go to my to do list and muse, it should be like command PTO enter all in one flow, 100 milliseconds or so and I’m there. And by the way, search should be. Much faster and better in use because of local first data. A huge issue that you have with search on most apps, traditional SAS apps that they got to go to whatever Virginia and, you know, query the database and then come back. And then when you load the actual page, you gotta go all the way back again and get the data. This should all be able to happen locally within a few tens of milliseconds. So there’s really no excuse for searching out to be awesome and you just need to spend a little bit of time on it. 00:17:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely slop that one as it’s important, we definitely want it. Everyone asks for it. Now it’s a matter of when does it, you know, when does it bubble up on the priority list of all the stuff we want to do. I will go ahead and reference something you and I have talked about before, Mark, just because it was, I think pretty foundational. We started Us, which is a book called The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff where they do a pretty thorough academic survey of basically how people use computers over the last 20 to 30 years. And looking at files and search through things like Google and searching on your local computer and so forth, and there’s a lot of predictions of either tagging or search or other things kind of killing the file system and well if you kind of maybe hinted in that direction, which is we don’t need a Yahoo style directory of the internet anymore because we have Google. But I think the total sum of human knowledge of Google or Wikipedia or something is a little bit in a different category from my own stuff and spatial navigation and particularly the sense that things live in a place. This was one of the takeaways from the research in that book as well, which was things like symbolic links, for example, outside of file references where you basically can have a pointer. To file in multiple places, the vast majority of even relatively power users didn’t use these or didn’t use them much because it actually is very powerful for our brains, spatial memory to say I know where this lives. It’s 3 folders deep. I get to it from here. And certainly I think that can be heavily supplemented by things like search or tagging or other ways to get at your data and providing more approaches is good, but we felt like the foundation of the spatial navigation is actually going back to something that has proven to just work incredibly well for personal data sets. 00:19:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I do think the main use case of search is going to be, I basically know this thing exists and probably even know where it is. I just don’t want to traverse the whole mind palace. I want to teleport with my search command right to where I know what it is. There will be some cases where you are actually doing a legit keyword search and just I’m not sure what, if anything, you have in your corpus about that. Yeah, the navigation is really important. 00:19:26 - Speaker 1: Using search to jump into a document, feels very natural to me, and I’m switching context and starting a new task, and then once I’m in that task, I think it’s more natural, uh, Wiggins, as you mentioned, to walk around the mine palace and just pinch in, pinch out and stay in that context because A search result in jumping through search feels very jarring sometimes to switch context so suddenly inside of the app, and I don’t know, we’ll leave it there because it’s not fully baked in my mind. 00:20:03 - Speaker 3: I do think there’s a very interesting question around what is the flavor of search. The default way to do it is that search is a feature. It’s like this little box up in the corner and you type things and then a medium sized box appears with links and you click on a link and then you go back and tap. We’ve long had this idea, again, going all the way back to the lab. of search that’s more integrated into the flow and capabilities of the app. So just to give you an idea, you can imagine, I’m not promising to do this, but you can imagine you have a search view, which is like a card and can be saved and persisted and moved and shared and resized within your corpus. It’s like a magic card. You type in the top of the card, and as you’re typing, the view changes to present different subsets of your corpus, which you can then teleport through to go to those rooms, if you will. But then you can do stuff like save this search, you know, I want to save all my long chair references on a card so I can go back to them later. That’s pretty cool. And you can also start to imagine. All the things you’re building around search, like the results for you as being a capability that’s general to the rest of the app. Things like seeing a view over your data is something you want elsewhere. So for example, we’ve talked about the idea of an archive. That should just be like a different view. It’s like search is the lead equals true and you might have some sugar in the app around that to make it easier and more standard to access that. But I like the idea of searches as building powerful generalized views versus a very specialized feature and wanting to get that right is I think why we’ve Delete a little bit on implementing it. 00:21:36 - Speaker 2: Daniel Rivera writes, uses my new go to for brainstorming, love how simple it is for quick ideas and sketches on the iPad, but I do wish it had inking for desktop. Is that coming? 00:21:48 - Speaker 1: I would love for it too. There’s no technical reason we can’t have ink on the desktop. All the code is obviously shared between the iPad and the Mac. I think the big question is, what does that input mechanism look like? Is there a way to Use the trackpad for ink input. Is that something where the the mouse is generally very bad at organic ink lettering if it’s anything beyond just a simple line or a simple arrow. Another thing we’ve talked about is using Wacom tablets and stylus tablets that I think could be very promising, but is obviously fairly niche use case for a subset of users, but I think it would be a very powerful way to bring ink into the Mac. 00:22:36 - Speaker 2: You know, one interesting thing is we already support that, not kind of on purpose, but we’ve had a number of folks write in to say, hey, I see that I can ink on Mac with my Wacom tablet, but I can’t, I don’t know what, get out the inkwer or you know, it’s sort of like partial because it just so happens that the input events that it sends is the same as the Apple pencil and we respond to that. So we’ve done nothing explicit to support it and it’s kind of doesn’t work great. You could imagine if we had a lot of demand there, we would put the effort in to make that work. Yeah I agree drawing with a mouse is just the worst freeform drawing even with a trackpad. What I do think we might want is first of all, just highlighting, which could be highlighting of text, highlighting of cards. Craft does a really great job at this. Just a very simple way to add colors. Colors can give you context or they just brighten up your document, which is nice. But I think you can also look at something like a diagramming tool where you’re drawing, say, arrows between elements or you’re making a connection between them like an OO. So I think those things would make sense on the desktop, the idea of just being able to kind of circle something or try to handwrite something really hard for me to imagine there’s anything we can do there that would have a feel that would be acceptable from our perspective. 00:23:50 - Speaker 1: I’m glad you brought up the mind mapping because that’s, I think the most common scenario for me on the Mac. is wanting to draw just a very quick line between two cards, or a very quick box around a couple of cards. It’s a feature Leonard has been experimenting with some various designs to start connecting cards and create a bit more of a mind map and I think there is a way that we can create some of these features in a mouse friendly and Mac friendly way. That’s also balanced with not trying to create too many tiny little features or expand Muse into a grab bag of a billion features. I think the simplicity of Muse is extremely important, and so balancing what each platform is able to do and what each platform is designed to do, is a very delicate balance between supporting literally every use case on every platform. And optimizing for specific use cases on specific platforms. 00:24:46 - Speaker 2: If it starts to feel like a technical drawing tool with a huge toolbar and lots of options, and let’s see, I just want to draw an arrow between two things. Do I use the loose, you know, wire-like connection? Do I use the structured arrow? Do I use ink and draw an actual arrow? And if you find yourself making choices like that in the moment, I think that’s really gets in the way of your thinking process. So yeah, it has to be balanced against our kind of overall mission and design values. 00:25:15 - Speaker 3: Also part of the thinking here is about inking on the desktop as in Mac and inking on the desktop as in your office desk. And part of the original idea with Muse was that you have these different complimentary devices, and they’re not only used at disjoint times, you might actually use them at the same time. I was actually just rummaging in my archives from like 5 years ago yesterday, and I was looking at one of the original presentations I did about what would eventually become used, and we had this idea of you have A desktop like a Mac, and then right in front of you, basically where your keyboard is, you have an iPad and you’re using your Mac for the big heads up display and seeing all these PDFs and so on. And then when you want to do a little drawing that you insert into your presentation, for example, you just draw that on your iPad because that’s the device that’s better for that. So, that’s not to say we shouldn’t have some sort of inking capability in the map, but I would also just point out that there’s this possibility of running two devices at the same time. We might need to add a little bit more kind of smoothness to make that even better, but that’s a possibility as well. 00:26:17 - Speaker 2: I do that with some frequency, actually, I’ll kind of convert my desk chair from the sitting upright mode, good posture, you know, 90 degree knees, feet flat on the ground, which I’ll use when I’m typing and using the mouse, and I’ll kind of convert it to the leaning way back mode, stick my feet up on the desk and have kind of my iPad and my pencil in my lap, but I still have muse up on the big monitor. I can see it live updating as I’m going and often see a bigger view, just have a much bigger monitor of the board I’m moving around. But yeah, if we wanted to put more effort into supporting that simultaneous use case, one for me that would take a lot of friction out would be having the iPad be on the same, you know, when I open it, it’s on the same board that my desktop is on, but maybe not everyone wants that feature. Maybe you actually want to keep them on different ones, so I don’t know that would need some thought. 00:27:05 - Speaker 3: Well, maybe you should be able to make a search card that’s recently seen boards and put that in your inbox. 00:27:12 - Speaker 2: Smart. So another category of feature request is web sharing, and we’ve got a few examples here, including InterPlato ask or board shareable and navigable on the web with a shared link, and then Nikita, who asks, I wish to have notion like level of control on which canvas and which depth I want to share a link. My biggest barrier to using Muse is that I want to share my research as I do it. 00:27:37 - Speaker 1: This is something we’ve experimented with pre-sync that was very useful for a number of users, and I think post-sync we’re finally in a place where we can start thinking about this again. One of the limits in the presync era was the web share was fully static, and there was just no ability for anyone reading it to add comments or certainly to add content, whereas now post-sync. We can imagine a web viewer that is a full client of Muse that is able to interact with and sync content back up into your corpus, and so you can share feedback, get comments and content from your team, and have that go straight back into your muse. And so I think that’s a powerful team and collaboration feature that we’re certainly thinking about that sync has finally given us the foundation to support. 00:28:32 - Speaker 2: I’ll note from that earlier very brief beta test we did where we just gave it to a few folks, the ability to kind of share a pretty static, basically they kind of dumped your muse board to Kind of like static image, static HTML page was not the lack of interactivity or not even being able to add comments, but actually just that it wasn’t live. So I think one of the things we get with the modern web conception of real-time collaboration, Google Docs, figMotion, etc. is that a URL becomes a place where you know you’re always seeing the latest version of something. So we do quite a bit of news board sharing internally. And actually a lot of times folks send us news boards either as, you know, PNG exports or full board bundles with feedback on the app or other comments, which we love. So it’s a great format for sharing work in progress and thinking with your colleagues, but it never fails, right? You go to share it, you know, I’ll just post it in a slack as an upload, which is a little clunky, but whatever, and then I realized I need to change three things that I left out or that are wrong. And I’m going back and deleting it from Slack and hoping that, you know, no one’s downloaded it yet and uploading it again, and this of course the whole world of email file attachments and finalfin2. doc and so on. So I think to me that’s why we kind of sunsetted that little experiment, the early shared web experiment, but now we do have the technology foundation for a live, even if it’s completely static, all you can do is navigate through it and maybe copy paste stuff in and out. If it’s live updating and you know you’re looking at the latest version, that is a game changer. Alright, so one last roadmap question here is about linking hyperlink or wiki or Rome style linking. So one example of someone who asked us is Robert Haysfield, who says any plans on enabling users to place the same board in multiple boards? I struggled before trying to use Muse because I don’t know, hierarchical organization without an ability to bridge trees makes it difficult for me to find things and pick up where I left off. So I think for sure linking you know Ted Nelson’s excellent branding with hyperlinking in the web is obviously hugely empowering. We saw it in wikis. I think Notion is the modern version of a team wiki and then Rome with its kind of invented the category of, personal knowledge graphs, back linking. Now there’s a whole profusion of apps that do this really, really well, often with the double bracket kind of linking format. And yeah, I’m happy to say on that one, we’re actually working on it right now. So for those of you who are prom members, keep an eye on your backstage pass, some goodies coming up there soon. 00:31:04 - Speaker 1: The Backstage pass on this one is gonna be a really helpful piece of feedback for us to hear from customers what they think of this linking feature, cause there’s a few different ways we’ve looked at building it. I know Yuli and Leonard are taking the lead on this, and It’s a lot more complicated than just, oh, put a link down, you click it and you go. There’s a lot of nuance in how those links are presented and How the content appears in a link and in a backlink, particularly because, at least for me, a lot of my boards don’t have titles. That’s probably a personal failure of myself, but linking to something that does not have a title, there’s not much metadata there, and so, showing a piece of the board you’re linking into is important, but then it gets a little confusing because it looks like a normal card, and so how do you tell the difference between a linked card and a normal unlinked card that’s not a mirror. So there’s a lot of nuance and kind of how these things are displayed and so the Feedback we get from customers in the Backstage Pass is really gonna help us to iron out all of those little details to make sure that this is not only as powerful as the linking features we all expect, but really fits within the music universe and fits within all of the rest of our content in a tidy way. 00:32:25 - Speaker 2: So another big category of questions is using Muse, and this is a place I feel we’ve underinvested, which is that you can’t get a lot of information beyond the mechanics of how to use the app, but in terms of how people use it, and we have some projects in the works on that to try to better showcase what people’s boards look like and what the different kinds of uses you might use muse for and what things Muse is not a good fit for, but a few questions here that folks raised. The first one is from Alex Antozek. Who says, how often do you guys use Muse for non-muse related work? 00:33:02 - Speaker 1: Most recently, I started using Muse for custom keyboard organization. So I’ve entered the rabbit hole of mechanical keyboards and building your own keyboards. I’ve recently come up for air, and I’m just using my regular laptop keyboard, but I think I’m gonna fall back down and fight the dragon again soon. But Muse has been very, very helpful because there’s 1000 parts and there’s 1000 versions of each part, and Linking to a random Amazon link just does not give enough context for what it is that I’m actually looking at. And so Muse has been very helpful. I can put it in a photo, a short description, a link, and some context about each of the different parts and each of the different steps of construction. So using Muse to organize all of those different parts and be able to physically see photos of them next to the link next to the description has been a really helpful way to map out that rabbit trail that I have found myself getting lost in. 00:34:02 - Speaker 2: You’re just looking over my current news home board, I think it’s about a 50/50 split, kind of depends on what big personal projects I have going on. You know, on the work side I have things like a little editorial calendar for the podcast, upcoming guests and things. We’ve got the chapter plan board that basically Leonard led the planning session and produced the shared board. I’d like to be able to go back and reference that things about Twitter, I draft all our shareholder updates there. I have a whole board that’s not news related, but it’s kind of career related, which is I which held a lovely un conference recently, and I have a bunch of notes from all the talks there and so on. Then on the personal side, I have things like, I don’t know, the Kita, that is to say the kindergarten daycare that my daughter attends, you know, they sent out a PDF that’s, here’s the days we’re off this summer, and you know, in some cases I excerpt out the like coming up month, especially when it’s a critical, OK, we’ve got the summer holiday, and how does that match up to our summer holiday and this sort of thing. But also holiday planning for sure. I mean, travel planning. It is, you know, in some ways a fairly basic use case, but it’s really helpful though you have pictures and maps and PDFs of tickets and it’s all in one place. I do personal journaling, you know, just classic daily pages, sit down and write out what’s on your mind in the morning. And then bigger projects, for example, when I was searching for a home a couple of years ago and eventually made a home purchase, but that is a place where the sharing and collaboration capabilities would be a big help because there I was doing it with someone else, my partner, and so I kind of have my personal world that’s inside Muse, but at some point we need to share and I can’t really share it directly with her, so then we kind of have some stuff stuck in an ocean or a Google doc somewhere, but that’s really awkward. So, yeah, when I have a bigger project, something like that, home improvement, yeah, personal hobbies, that sort of thing, that tends to occupy a big portion of my home board. 00:35:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I also really like Muse for personal projects, and one of my favorite pieces of it is that you can use it from the very beginning, where you’re just literally sketching out, you’re jotting down ideas, you’re taking little scribbling notes, and that board can evolve over time as you add text and PDFs and web links and images, and that rich multimedia is so important for these projects I find I can’t imagine going back to a world with just one content type. I also use Muse just for my to do list, that’s probably my heaviest use case. I’m in there every day, and that’s mostly just text, but it’s not all texts, you know, every once in a while there’s like, whatever, you gotta call the plumber, so you put the link for the plumber’s page on your to do list or what have you. And also just like that it’s two dimensional so that you don’t just have one. Huge multi-page linear list, which is, I don’t know demoralizing for me. So I have on the top left, it’s like today’s most important stuff, and then way off on the right side is, you know, longer term stuff, and you can just kind of move stuff in two dimensions. So, I like it for that. I also use Muse as my reading buffer. So for links and PDFs, I have a big per month reading board, and I kind of queue up stuff there and then maybe once on the weekend, I go and read it all and then archive that board and go back next month and so on. 00:37:08 - Speaker 2: Mm. One I’ve seen from a number of customers is making a daily reading board where it’s actually a link or a PDF and some notes or thoughts that was generated by that. It could even just be like a half a sentence scribble, nothing too complex or this made me think of this other thing, or here’s a tweet that’s connected to this, and they just make one per day and it just scrolls vertically or horizontally, and then they just like kind of accumulate these over time. And it’s a way to synthesize ideas and get more out of what you read and pull together the sparks of inspiration that you’re getting from consuming the information hot fire hose. So when we’ve heard frequently and I think we even addressed this in the last listener questions episode, but maybe it’s worth touching on here is basically about the home board and how you structure things or organize things there without explicit work workspaces. So a lot of apps, notion, craft, even Apple Notes or something like that will have kind of top level workspaces where you say, here’s my daily notes, and here’s my to do’s and here’s my stuff for work, and here’s my home. Improvement projects and you kind of bucket things that way and they find it surprising maybe that you have the top level home board, it’s just like any other board, it’s a free form thing you can put stuff however you want. You can make neatly organized, you can scroll vertically, stroll horizontally, scroll both ways, you can have a lot of stuff, a little stuff, it’s like completely up to you. What’s our answer on that one? 00:38:39 - Speaker 3: So in terms of home organization, I tend to have two dimensions going on. The first dimension is more obvious, which is, it tends to be organized by projects, ish or domain. But there’s also an organization along the dimension of like recency or proximity to the cash. It’s like the things that I’m currently and actively working on. So what I end up having is I have a few boards, both work and personal, that I’m very actively working on. And then I have a few more like archival boards that are more defined in terms of the domain. So I might have a board for my today’s to do list and a board for today’s reading, and a board for whatever my personal project is for this week. And then I have my muse board and my personal board, and I might even have, if I’m just a little bit discombobulate that day, I might even have just a few things blasted on the top level, like here’s a PDF that I want to read, and here’s a, you know, repro case from a youth book I’m working on. And what happens is things filter down through this cache hierarchy over time. And this is a good example of how we didn’t want to have too prescriptive a setup in terms of workspaces. Like if we just said you have to divide your corpus into workspaces, it wouldn’t work for having the second dimension of the cash hierarchy. Also just kind of go into the philosophy of why we don’t have a separate construct for workspaces. It’s kind of echoes the thing I was saying earlier about search cards, like we wanted you to have the full richness and power of muse to be able to organize your top level in the same way that you would be able to organize your individual boards. Like you have all these capabilities around, you know, freeform boards and inking and multimedia and different sizes. Like why should you have to throw that out the window just because it’s the top level? That seems exactly backwards. 00:40:16 - Speaker 2: I’m reminded of we talked about a very similar philosophical point with Pallo a couple episodes back where basically on sketch they originally had kind of an art board template editor that was a standalone thing but you quickly realized you wanted to do all the things to the templates that you wanted to do to a regular art board, so eventually they made it so you could just name an art board as a template and then whatever you do to that art board. Goes into the template and then you don’t need to make a duplicate editor but worse. And I think there’s something similar where if we’d make a top-level workspace, OK, you need to be able to move stuff, delete stuff, you probably want to duplicate things, and at some point you go, wait a minute, I want to just do all the same things I can do in my subboards. 00:41:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, now in fairness to them, many, many users who keep requesting this, I don’t think it’s just that people don’t understand this possibility of generalized boards being used at the top level. I think there is some sense in which the current freeform spatial boards aren’t the best fit for some top level use cases. If logically, you just want to split your space into A, B, and C, and you want that to be Coherent regardless of what device you’re on or what size you’re looking at or whatever, or as you add and remove top level spaces that having to manually manage that on a spatial board isn’t exactly right. And this comes to the topic of spatial collections, which we’ve had on the radar for a long time. And you can imagine a spatial collection working as follows. You put end things into the non-spatial collection, it’s like a folder basically, and then Muse automatically sizes and arranges these objects as appropriate, sort of like math finder. You can imagine it it sizes and arranges them and lines them up or whatever in a nice way. And if we had that primitive, I think a lot of users would opt to use that at the top level where they’re currently asking for the separate workspaces feature. But importantly, such a non-spatial collection could also be used all over the place. For example, my reading board should probably be a non-spatial collection, it’s a little goofy to have to manually manage literally 100 PDFs on a board. Um, there’s kind of like weirdly overlapping in places and whatever. And also, by the way, coming back to our search discussion, that should probably just be. A view that dynamically produces a non-spatial collection. So this is another example of how you get the right primitives and they can apply in a lot of different places, including this top of workspace idea. 00:42:32 - Speaker 1: I think one thing that’s interesting about the way I’ve organized my home board is. I have all of the projects that I care about visible when I’m fully scrolled to the top left corner, and then the priority is based on kind of the size of the card, and so my personal card is fairly large for family and that sort of thing, work, I often go into that, that’s a larger board. Then I have lots of much smaller boards. But then I’m able to actually hide less important boards outside of the scroll visible area, which is nice because some of those boards are important, but they kind of stress me out because I just don’t want to think about that project right now. And when that project shows up, I think, oh my gosh, I haven’t finished that project, and my heart starts racing. 00:43:14 - Speaker 2: And so if I just hide it out of view, tuck it off camera, exactly. 00:43:16 - Speaker 1: It’s, you know, out of sight, out of mind. I don’t have very much object permanence for some of these projects that are a bit more discouraging that they’re still around. And so, that’s been another nice thing for me, it’s just a trick to be able to focus on certain projects that I can see, and then when I don’t want to focus on it anymore, I can put it physically out of my sight, but still very readily available, and so that’s a nice thing. 00:43:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you point to some interesting column folk behaviors there that now I realize I do, but up until you just described how you do it, I didn’t realize it’s something I do almost unconsciously, which is, yeah, the size and the position of the board reflects how roughly important it is or how large it’s looming in my consciousness and that as something is still kind of current, but maybe it’s in a monitoring state, I’ll tend to shrink it down a little bit and move it kind of down lower, it’s down more towards the bottom. And then eventually, once I decide it’s really not relevant to me anymore, then I’ll move it to a board called archive. And I think Mark you said you have her kind of project and category boards, I kind of just go to the Gmail route, which is archive everything. If I need to find it later, I’ll just scroll through all of it. Which I think brings us to another question on use use and also connects a bit to the roadmap, which is this one actually comes from our support channels. So since it was a private correspondence, I won’t name the person. I hope they’re all right with me quoting their words here since I think it’s representative of the common question. So they say, what is your recommendation for archival of old news boards? I find that currently my main board is getting clustered and I have a number of ideas that can be archived. I like to export the new board and add to Devonthink database for storage. Yeah, I sometimes do the same or I’ll periodically take my archive board when it gets kind of big and I think, OK, all this stuff is pretty old news now, just kind of historical interest and maybe I’ll just export it and save it on the Dropbox or iCloud or something. But I thought this one was interesting because a feature I’ve wanted from you is an archive button similar to what GitHub has this for repositories. Gmail obviously has it for email. There’s other examples, and I asked Leonard about this before we recorded just because I know it’s part of his vision for the user flow, and he basically says that he doesn’t think it’s useful to keep everything you ever have worked in in one giant space and sort of it’s nice to put something away when you’re done with it. Lets you focus on what’s currently important and you can think of it as kind of the muse home board is your desk is the stuff that’s active and current and important right now, but then there’s a longer term personal library, things that represent your knowledge work and thinking over the longer term, and so we may eventually have just, you know, a context menu option for archive, but then you can pull it up in some kind of a search or. A non-spatial collection or something like that, or maybe just automatically adds it to a board named archive, but it’s a sort of a nice way to decide you’re done with something and put it away, but no, you can still get to it when you want it, do the much more drastic act of deleting, which always just feels really wrong, especially for something you spent a lot of time thinking about and working on even if it’s not current anymore. What do you both think? How do you do your personal archival of boards and what do you think about potential features in that direction? 00:46:36 - Speaker 3: Well, there’s actually a lot going on with archiving, so there’s archiving in the sense of removing it from your desk, which I do through this cascading hierarchy ending in what are basically archive boards. There’s archiving in a sense of persisting the data in a file format that’s likely to be around and call it 1020, 30 years, which for me the only thing that I trust for that is like playing files on a Unix directory, so TXT, PDF, XML and JSON and so on. There’s archiving in the sense of like freeing up disk space, and there’s archiving in the sense of moving something into a third party knowledge management system. So the last one I don’t do, so I can’t really comment on it. In terms of persisting to stable file formats, I try to do that for all of my work. I basically cascade everything that I ever do into One of a half dozen file formats into a big directory called data, and I try really hard to never lose that directory, you know, I back it up in all kinds of different places and so on. That’s a nice forcing function. I do that occasionally with Muse, basically export to a muse bundle, call it, you know, Corpus-2022, whatever, month, day, and just save it and forget about it. 00:47:39 - Speaker 2: A quick note for our listeners here actually, because you’ve used the Corpus terminology, we use that internally to talk about a one person’s muse database, the collection of everything that’s in it. I think more publicly speaking we’ll typically say your muse, put something in your muse, but yeah, corpus is, I think it’s a Latin word for body, so it’s just the body of your knowledge, data, what have you. So we use that to differentiate from board or set of boards or a bundle export or one subset of data, but it represents one user’s complete. Yeah, use database. Now do muse bundles fulfill that kind of flat file format desire for you because they are zip files containing flat files? 00:48:21 - Speaker 3: Yeah, not completely ideal, but certainly if I ever needed to go back and get something, it’d be easy enough. 00:48:28 - Speaker 2: Certainly not as browsable as, for example, exporting everything to PDF or even images if you wanted to take the effort to work through the hierarchy and do an image of each board. 00:48:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I can actually imagine a world where both for this persistent durable archiving and for integration with third party apps, you really lean on the scriptability and programmability. You could have a little bot that says, whenever I see a new PDF, send it to my PDF manager. That sounds awesome, but I don’t do anything like that myself yet, I see. 00:48:57 - Speaker 1: Whenever I want to archive something, I think that the ark has already hinted at this. I think the Muse bundle format is a really nice one because it’s a zip file, you get some JSON, you get all the attachments, and so you know you always have all of your data there, kind of no matter what, and very simple to open formats that are gonna survive for the next. 50 years, and I’ll generally save that right next to a PDF export, and so I can open up the PDF, look at everything. If I really want it back, I can import it into Muse. If I’m 85 years old inside of my robot body in the future, then I can just open up the zip file and look at things that way, and so I know that I’ve got the future safety of those archive formats. 00:49:43 - Speaker 3: This is a bit of an aside, but I read a fair amount of history and you always read about these historical figures, papers, and like, basically everything is in there for a lot of these folks, like their drafts and their correspondence and their bills and whatever. And I asked around a little bit like, how do we have all this? Like, how do we have all these papers? And the answer that I got was basically people had a big box and they just, whenever they wrote something, they put it in the box or a copy of it in the box. And it’s not super useful the day, month, or year after you do that. But it over a course of a lifetime, it builds up and it’s nice to have all one’s papers. I wish I had known this when I was younger, so I could start archiving it, but as of a few years ago, I started building this set of documents. So hopefully that accrues over time. 00:50:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ve looked at the accumulated papers of Darwin, of Alexander Humboldt, Marie Curie, and other kind of famous thinkers in the past. It’s yeah, it’s a huge amount of content, right, because it’s, yeah, every random scribble and letter they wrote to someone, but of course very valuable for people that did do these breakthroughs, understanding how their minds worked and how they came to those conclusions, what their interactions with others in the field were like. But I wonder if there is also some function of just people didn’t move that much back in those days, because at least for me, who’s done a lot of moving in my life, including across continents, you know, hauling giant boxes of papers, feels kind of infeasible. Happily, hopefully digital archiving should be easier again if you take the steps that you describe, Mark, because there’s many ways that digital stuff is more ephemeral. 00:51:14 - Speaker 3: Well, maybe now we’re getting to the whole theory of information persistence, but I think not only are we moving more often, but I think this digital stuff is fundamentally more brittle. Certainly the very bespoke and fast moving apps, but even basic file formats on Unix directories, if you don’t quite actively maintain those, they go away after 5 or 10 years, like the disk corrupts and the media format is no longer readable and so on, whereas with a book, if you just like don’t light it on fire, it’s gonna be there in 100 years. I don’t know, it’s a very interesting property. I think we still haven’t fully confronted the consequences of trading off dynamism for durability in the computing realm. 00:51:51 - Speaker 2: And for interested listeners, I’ll point you to the Meta Muse episode on software longevity, when we take a deeper dive into the very topic. So one example is another question from Petty Chase, who asks how you and maybe customers who share their use cases and workflows with you use Muse with other tools of thought. And so typically we see a lot of people linking from knowledge graphs. This is where we do seemuse as complimentary to Rome, Obsidian, Logsick, and so forth that you can link out to Muse board. People often do that by getting the deep link. You just basically hit copy on the board and that will give you a muse app cola slash link. And also you can like, of course, the other way around. We’ve also seen folks use shortcuts to put, for example, news boards directly on their home screen as kind of like a launch point then obviously something like screen share, which I guess is less of a tool for thought, but I think is important in modern work, so using use as a real-time whiteboard or a kind of a presentation live presentation tool, including teachers, they use it for their classes kind of Choctaw style. We obviously use that for presentations and planning sessions on our team. As well. So I think those are some of the simple ones. Can you both think of other examples? 00:53:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for me personally, it ends up being more of an archive question than an integration question. I find myself almost purposefully keeping apps separate, and when I work in Muse, kind of process the information and create some sort of an output, and then I’ll take that and just physically export it into Notion is the other common app that I use for storage is kind of my knowledge graph, my personal wiki. And so I end up exporting from notion into Muse, processing around, doing some thinking and then exporting from use back into notion. But beyond that, I think links to and from are also a very nice thing, Wiggins that you mentioned, because then it’s integration agnostic, no matter what other apps people use, you can always create a link to and from things and so it becomes a very lightweight interaction point. I think there’s some risk for creating very heavyweight integrations. Maybe we’ll talk about that soon, but it can be very limiting, ironically, to create a very deep integration with some other app because it forces that workflow, as opposed to allowing a lot more flexibility with very lightweight integrations with lots of different apps. I think there’s some balance there, but I’ve found the very lightweight integration slash archiving export to be very helpful for my own use. 00:54:25 - Speaker 2: That’s a great point. Copy paste, drag and drop, shares sheets, you know, files in and out, that kind of quote unquote integration that is basically using standards rather than needing a many to many API integrations heavyweight thing I think is most always better. That said, that is certainly a place I think we can continue to get better. We’ve invested a lot there, but you mentioned the case of copy pasting. In and out of notion and weird things can happen with line breaks and some stuff comes across that seems like it should be left behind and other things sometimes get copied in or things get omitted, so I think continuing to improve that which partially is just the tricky challenge of trying to kind of work out what the other app is expecting in terms of line breaks and format content and You know, if you send the text in one way, you get a bunch of individual blocks, and if you send it another way, you get one giant block with a bunch of line breaks, for example. But yeah, I think that’s important and something we can improve a lot. It’s a fascinating question we get from our friend Tim Lloyd. Tim writes, text first tool for thoughts. Is that a noun tool for thoughts? Yeah, why not. Like Rome and spatial first, like muse. So he’s comparing text first and spatial first tools. Do you think these will converge? To tools that are great for both. Are the current differences more about technical feasibility and interaction challenges, or is it actually an incompatible vision or just two different kinds of ways to aid thinking? And if it is the latter that it’s sort of incompatible, the sort of spatial first is fundamentally different from text first, does that mean there’s things Muse would never do? That’s the end of Tim’s quote, but I’ll just add on, we’ve already talked about adding things like linking and search. What you expect from the text first tool for thoughts. So you know what’s the limit on that? And yeah, is there some world where both the text-based stuff grows to be more spatial or visual and use grows to be more textual, or is there a limit on that and they’re just sort of fundamentally different kinds of tools. 00:56:31 - Speaker 3: Well, OK, I think there’s some abstract sense in which we’re on a multi-dimensional tool space and there’s different points in those spaces for all the different tools like notion and Rome and uses and so on, and theoretically you can imagine those tools traversing the space to meet up somewhere. I think in practice. You make foundational decisions pretty early on that tend to strongly suggest which region of the space you’re going to tend to move around in. So I guess I would expect some convergence among these tools, but not 100% overlap in the future. I expect Rome, for example, will remain quite text focused and use will remain more free form and spatial, but You will get more tech support, you will get non-spatial support, and so on. I don’t think that they’ll exactly look the same in the end. 00:57:21 - Speaker 1: For me, this ends up becoming a question about file standards more than it does about the application functionality. And I say that because I can take a notion document and fairly easily translate that into a text file, a very linear document format. There’s currently not really a very good file format for Spatial canvas, and so converting a spatial canvas into a linear document. It is currently a very difficult thing and depends very much on the tool, and in some ways taking a document can translate literally into a very tall spatial document in air quotes there. But being able to convert to and from different formats, or even just have a standard format for what a spatial canvas document is, I think will really help. Bridging these two worlds together, because right now there’s just not a good way for Muse to talk to another spatial canvas app. There’s just not a language that we both speak to describe what a spatial canvas is. 00:58:28 - Speaker 2: It’s a great point that For example, for the top to bottom text oriented documents, I use now and basically always have