Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think at some point I would love to go back to just work on, I don’t know, album artwork, or just lock myself away in a cabin and just draw typography. But for now, I feel like there’s some stories I want to tell. And for some of those stories to really resonate, they need to be put into people’s hands and experience. And so until I’ve told those stories, I feel like there’s unfinished business.

00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about use the product, it’s about mus the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest, Jason Yuan. Hello. And Jason, you are a prolific creator of all sorts. The one that struck me as very interesting from your background is that you got your start in stage design, which you described as a bit of a two-way interface. I’d love to hear about that.

00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think what’s interesting about stage design and theater design in general is that It’s so inherently multidisciplinary. So even if you say I’m designing on a show, you might mean costume design, stage design, set design, sound design, and all of those have to be choreographed perfectly. They have to work together.

And then, obviously, the stage needs to be used by the actors. It needs to be functional. People need to be able to enter and exit. It needs to be safe. So that’s one aspect of like, I guess the people that it needs to work for and then obviously you have the audience who rely on. The culmination of how the stage design works in conjunction with all the other elements to bring them into a world and to tell the story. And so it’s fairly high pressure because so many people rely on it and because theater is sort of in the moment, if something doesn’t work or God forbid if something unsafe happens, like that’s on you, partially, so. Design has always sort of felt very high stakes, even in interaction design now where you could always ship a bug fix or you might be able to delay the launch or incrementally improve things over time in theater unless you’re a very prolific show, you don’t really get that luxury.

00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can imagine the live performance element creates a sense of, well, I suppose drama would be the word for it, but for the people who are creating it as well, you have this showtime moment and everything’s got to come together and work right, and if it doesn’t, the problems are all up there for everyone in the audience to see very dramatically.

00:02:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, something that frustrates a lot of people that I’ve worked with in tech, sort of, I’ve always carried the show must go on mentality. That sometimes, you know, applies, but then if you’re working on indie projects where like there’s no real deadline, people are like, why, why though? It’s ready when it’s ready. And I’m like, no, like the show must go on. So that’s been interesting trying to find elements I want to keep from my past now that I’m practicing something that’s fairly different.

00:03:01 - Speaker 2: At some point you made the transition to the digital technology world and lots of interesting work in your portfolio there, including Mercury OS we’ll talk maybe a bit on a little bit, which was how I first discovered your work. You’ve also been working on MakeSpace. What else is on the recent portfolio.

00:03:21 - Speaker 1: You know, after Mercury came out, there was so much feedback from people who wanted to see it become real in some way.

I worked on several smaller spin-off projects that were inspired by the initial vision, like, I don’t think it was ever designed to be a thing that I saw ship as this. It’s a very point of view.

Mercury was designed from a very specific point of view through the lens of someone who is frustrated that my own mind as someone who lives with ADHD and PTSD and just, I find a lot of things particularly stressful in computers like file systems and how I have to constantly open and close apps and switch context uses. It was a very specific point of view there about like operating systems, but, you know, trying to think about a way to make some of the ideas actually happen.

Has taken up a lot of my past year, I think. And in some ways makespace is kind of an offshoot of that in the sense that I think the spirit of reimagining something that I felt like could have a lot more potential exists in Maspace.

And, you know, when Asa and I first started working on it, the code name was untitled OS. So I think from Makespace came this fascination. Of like exploring platforms, but then also exploring smaller, more contained experiences that attempt to deliver sort of flow state to people. I think I’ll be sharing some of them soon, is what I’ll say. There’s two particularly I’m excited about. The first one is sort of looking at screenshots as a metaphor, sort of inspired by. I saw this guy tweet once like screenshots and then you save and then obviously Omar’s work on screen notate.

00:05:15 - Speaker 2: Universal solvent is usually the way we put that now.

00:05:18 - Speaker 1: A screenshot sort of experience is something I’ve been working on with a collaborator called Tyler Egert, and he’s currently at this startup called Reple. And then a separate project is sort of like a take on a to do list that sort of imagines to do lists in the context of your social media feed. But that’s a much longer conversation, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of that soon.

00:05:40 - Speaker 2: We’ll be excited to see those. Well, yeah, I’ll link the projects we’re mentioning here other than the ones that aren’t out yet, of course, in the show notes. So yeah, Mercury OS, which is kind of a rethink everything in the sort of the operating system interface, and then MakeSpace, I can see the thread there, I can see how that’s related. Makespace is an app for lack of better word for kind of spatial video chat experience if I’m understanding that correct. But you can see how that’s an offshoot or a different way to cut the kind of the operating system space, but maybe a little bit more focused specifically around the video meeting domain. Does that sound about right?

00:06:18 - Speaker 1: Yes, and I think the original prototype that Asa hacked together was just spatial browsing. I think video was the second thing we added.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, so it kind of started as a vision for a spatial browser.

And when we brought Wei Wei into the project, she had all these amazing ideas about like bidirectional linking and then we had ideas about like how to use web apps, like how this might enable people to disassemble and reassemble web apps.

And like use them as modules and how you could essentially author your own ideal interface environments.

And then sort of the faces going into that experience is sort of like COVID was raging here.

It was having a grand old time and we just felt like, why not coexist next to, we think about breaking boundaries between app silos. What about the silo between what I do on my computer and people.

So yeah, that’s a little bit about how that project came together.

00:07:14 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good way to tee up the topic that we’re kind of theming around today, which is rethinking the OS, and I wrote an article recently kind of talking about some core interactions and I listed off some of these what I would call concept projects. You tell me if you think it’s fair to group these together, but I put Mercury Desktop Neo is one that our colleague. Leonard, the Muse designer did while he was in university. There’s another one called artifacts, which is very interesting, goes very deep, and all of these have maybe the quality of sort of really rethinking from the ground up.

It’s not just how do we remake one part of this, but if we really had a blank slate, how would we, how, how would we want. to be knowing what we know now in terms of new software, new paradigms with, yeah, whether it’s social media or video capabilities or really large screens or touch screens.

A lot has changed since the core interactions that make up certainly the desktop operating systems, even mobile in a way is now well established compared to all that’s come up.

00:08:19 - Speaker 1: I remember I seen Desktop Neo and then this other project artifacts and around the time that I was writing the story around Mercury, and I remember thinking like, oh fuck, am I allowed to swear?

00:08:32 - Speaker 2: Oh, it just means that when I edit the XML for the episode, I have to flip the explicit switch from yes to no. Although it is very good that the podcast RSS feed format lets you flag specific episodes. I had to first do this for Josh Miller from the browser company. He was an enthusiastic swearer, and I felt like editing that out would be taking away some of the. The character. So please proceed.

00:08:55 - Speaker 1: You, you can feel free to add a bleep somewhere. I think that’s always fun and dramatic and it feels like you’re in a sitcom.

Anyway, so, yeah, I remember seeing Desktop Neo and artifacts, and I was like, fuck. People are gonna be like, you ripped them off, because the things that I recognized was this desire to extend the desktop horizontally.

To have the component of like your windows should be able to flow horizontally and off this arbitrary bounding box.

And I think like Mercury is definitely not the first project to sort of envision that.

And I really think that all of these speculative projects point towards that future of people wanting, for lack of a better word, more space, and also, I think it’s something that I would be curious to see.

Happening in some way. I mean, one could argue that with iOS 14 widgets, I know that it seems like quite an incremental or even catch up, so to speak, but if you look into the future and you imagine like widgets and also app clips, and now things can live in your home screen that are more than just icons, and then your home screen having the ability to obviously swipe between pages, some interesting connections there that I would be curious to see where that leads.

00:10:11 - Speaker 2: Hm. Mark, what’s your take on rethinking the OS, these concept projects, and then more to the point maybe where they point, which is, do we need or is there value in a fairly dramatic rethink of the fundamental interactions versus, you know, what we have is tried and true.

00:10:30 - Speaker 3: Well, I think it’s certainly always worth trying. There’s so much upside if you get it right, if you land on something interesting. So I’m glad to see all the experiments, and I do think that the fundamentals underpinning all of our work are changing, so we’re getting bigger screens, we’re getting touch screens, we’re getting new. Graphics pipelines that are much more GPUs and parallellyzed, and I think a huge one is we’re getting very different economic models around the operating systems and the platforms and all of those have, and I think will continue to drive changes. So iOS was about touch and the new economic model mostly. And things like these new desktop explorations, I would say are more powerful, bigger screens and touch moving into the desktop platform and things like that, as well as having enough processing power and media that things become much more rich, interactive, visual in a way that they weren’t really even 10 years ago. So, I think it’s worth pursuing.

00:11:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s one of the things I think a lot about with what do computing for productive uses look like in the relatively near future is we now have this huge screens, the multimedia stuff, you know, video is just absolutely everywhere, for example, but we also have the diversity of input. This is one thing I like a lot about the. iPad stylus, touch with the fingers, trackpad, keyboard, you can throw voice in the mix there, and then if you go to, OK, everyone’s waiting for that drafting table sized or maybe just IMAX sized iPad that seems likely to come in the not too distant future or something like it. And then you can imagine something that feels a lot more like a room-sized thing where maybe you have multiple screens, which is already the case that we all kind of have our phones sitting there in the desktop and maybe you’ve also got the tablet. You got the voice interfaces, you’ve got the different kinds of inputs, and you put all that together and I don’t know what it adds up to necessarily, but it does seem to imply some fundamentally different relationship with your computing devices, even just how you relate to them in physical space, your posture as you use them.

00:12:28 - Speaker 3: And speaking of the human element here, we’ve done a kind of systems analysis of why might you different operating systems to emerge. There’s also the human side, which is when you put these new OS’s in front of people, you get a very positive reaction. They say things like, yes, this is how I want to feel as a user of my computer. It’s a very visceral reaction. And so I think there is a, there’s a gap between how computers currently work and how people want to feel when they’re using their tools. And that I think is still a big space to explore.

00:12:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think when I started with Mercury, it started as a purely like surface level ergonomics project.

It was so funny. It started as a design system of like, let’s make things look better. And then I’m like, wait, no, like that’s not actually why I don’t like my computer.

Things look OK, generally, and I’m like, OK, well, maybe let’s make things move better. And then I’m like, hm I don’t know that the choreography is necessarily a problem that much. And then there was a phase where I realized that the ways that we are conditioned to think about interaction design. When I first started learning about it, it was like you use sketch, and then you, which is basically illustrator, and you have art boards, and then you link art boards together and then you basically make a choose your own adventure presentation thing. And that’s interaction design. And I realized like the real ergonomics part that I felt like was missing was the in between. Each moment of transition should feel like a moment of power, should feel like you can sort of change your mind or keep going, but the way that we’ve been conditioned to design sort of digital products don’t really. I don’t really feel like it affords that way of thinking about how interfaces work, unless you use something like origami or court composer or code. And so it was at that moment that I’m like, maybe this ergonomic problem goes a little deeper, and that’s when I started to think on more of like a system level. I think before that, I didn’t feel like I had permission to, you know? During my internship at Apple, it was actually a friend of mine, Marissa. We were just having a conversation about Siri one night and she just started asking like, do you think this is really like what voice interfaces should be like? Do you think there should be all these different modes? Do you think that having a little brick in your phone that holds all the power is the right way for computers to sort of expand into and. I had just never thought about things like that before. I was just trying to make screens that moved, that looked and felt ergonomic. I wasn’t thinking about the actual base layer, why? And so after that, it sort of felt like suddenly a whole new world of just asking questions and digging myself into a rabbit hole was just possible. And the process behind thinking of Mercury was very similar. It was basically that, but in a design process. And I think what you’re saying about people being drawn to These very tactile experiences, I think, in the process of researching for Mercury, I read a lot of like white paper style things. And I was just incredibly bored or not stimulated by them because I’m like, yeah, you kind of have these drawings that look like memes of diagrams that look like they go in a patent. I care about this because I happen to like designing computers, but you put it in front of anyone else, and they’re like, why should I care? And so it became apparent that If I wanted to create a vision that people cared about, that I would have to focus a lot on the craftsmanship, the visual design, and also the storytelling delivery.

00:15:45 - Speaker 3: It’s funny you mentioned that Adam and I were just talking about this this morning. You basically can’t explainm to people with text. It just doesn’t work as an empirical matter. What really works is video and animation. And I think this is resonant with what you were saying, where you need the right medium to convey your emotional message.

00:16:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I learned about the concept of a tool for thought after moving to the bay. It’s one of those things where I just like kind of don’t get it, where kind of everything is a tool for thought. Um, but I kind of understand why there is this specific community that’s very obsessed over thinking about thinking tools, essentially. And I think giving something a phrase gives it power sort of reference points. And so I think absolutely like, I think when I first found news, I can’t remember the copywriting, but I can remember seeing the gesture on the iPad and seeing things zoom in and out and seeing writing being just all over it and just thinking like, yeah, that’s how it should work. And I think it’s successful in that it makes things seem very obvious in hindsight, and I think that’s sort of a quality that I really aspire to achieve when I design.

News is interesting because you can tell a lot of OS or platform level thinking goes into it and it’s an app. And same with sort of makespace where even though internally we think about it as like a social collaborative operating system, it’s an app. And then my instinct is that there’s going to be a lot more in the coming years slash months, and I would be curious to see like, you know how Android has like launchers, that, but for my desktop experience.

Though I’m unclear how that might happen. But something very compelling someone said to me was like, Google search is basically an OS now. And when I think about operating systems, it’s less like Unix and like how you actually what this is, and engineers are probably going to send me death threats, but like I really don’t care. Why should I care about that? As a person who likes computers and likes to play with computers, I just want to worry about how it feels and looks, and that’s really how customers were users. I don’t like that word either, but customers would think about it or people. So double edged sword, probably.

00:17:51 - Speaker 3: I think this is also kind of inevitable because operating systems are, by definition very general and complex. It’s about being able to host other programs, and it’s the nature of complex things that they inevitably arise from simple things. I forget the person this is named after, but that’s a lie if we can put it in the show notes.

So that’s why we see most of the platforms evolve from something simpler, either from an app, so I would put the Web browser in this category, it started as an app on, you know, Windows and Mac and so on, but now it’s basically a whole other platform.

Or you see basically a small kernel of fixed apps evolve into a platform. This is the iOS story. There wasn’t an app store, remember, it was just, there was the calculator and the male app and Safari, and that was, you know, kind of it. If you want something else too bad. But eventually they generalized it into a real platform, a real OS that can run user supplied apps.

00:18:36 - Speaker 2: If you want that back even further, I usually think the iPod is the start of the iOS story. So it really was a completely dedicated device for playing music and had a very, very simple, but in fact innovative interface, the little wheel was recognizable. It was fit for the purpose of on the go, music listening. Very simple screen, but all designed to really solve that problem extremely well in a way that maybe MP3 players at the time didn’t. And then yeah, that evolved upwards into more and more complex platforms to the point that today I think it’s one of the world’s most sophisticated places to build applications.

00:19:12 - Speaker 3: And this to me is a really interesting and important research question in. Operating systems, what’s the path that you take in the path dependent sense to get to the place you want to be? Like you need to have a vision, you need some provocations for, OK, I think we want this style of operating system, but it’s very much a social, economic path dependent question on how you actually get there. It’s extraordinarily expensive to develop an operating system these days. So you can’t just suppose the final step.

00:19:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and now it also has to live up to everyone’s expectations of not only what it can do, but the ecosystem that it brings. And I think, you know, I have zero idea how any of this will happen, slash if it’s ever going to happen, but I would love to live in a world one day where instead of having like 500 note taking apps, I can just piece together and buy a la carte elements of different experiences that I like. Obviously there’s an entire conversation around like how capitalism works and what’s profitable and blah blah blah, but, you know, one can dream.

Mainly I’m just tired of I’m tired of opening all my Adobe apps, and they’re basically like a canvas that you draw things on and then different ways to make things adhere to or not adhere to the grid and treating things as faster versus vector blah blah blah.

Like to me, uh, it just seems like mentally I just envisioned it as a canvas that I can bring in different tools as needed and that should be how my workflow is, which one day like, it would be amazing if something like Makespace would turn into that sort of platform. Given its inherently spatial nature.

00:20:50 - Speaker 3: The Canvas thing is interesting. We’ve seen that emerge as a key content type, I would argue over the past few years. By Canvas, I mean it’s free form, it’s mixed media, uh, you have some flexibility, so Figma, Makerspace, makespace, Muse, a lot of these apps have developed this and they’re all kind of circling around a similar idea. It’s like this thing where you can put whatever you want, however you want. And that hasn’t quite been baked into an operating system proper yet, although it’s funny, it kind of harkens back to the old school classic desktops, which we almost forget about, but that’s like the OG canvas.

00:21:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Something that we’ve talked about a lot internally is how used to our people to this canvas metaphor when they don’t spend their days clicking around in FigMA or using Adobe Suite.

00:21:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s sort of the opposite of the particularly the phone innovation of you have one app at a time, it’s full screen, and that’s all you can do. And actually that’s an improvement for certain cases on the desktop complex windows that overlap with buttons on them, and you can minimize things and they have these menus and there’s focus and there’s all this confusing stuff to keep track of, but at the same time.

Time for a more powerful environment where you do have multiple documents open, you need to move things around between them. You have different kinds of media, different kinds of things that you need to look alongside each other, move stuff between things, copy paste, and so on, the mobile one app at a time is the wrong metaphor. And so yeah, in a way, these tools where the primary document is a canvas that you can put things on in a very free form way that does. and back to the GUI operating system, uh, metaphor that came out of Xerox PARC, but there you had something where you have one document, which is sort of your desktop, maybe you have 4 if you have virtual workspaces, and then the windows that you arrange, they’re very kind of temporary, right? They’re just what’s in memory, there’s no persistence, there’s no sense of a board and certainly I can’t share it. I guess there’s screen share, but.

So in a way, there is something to that metaphor.

I think what you find when you reinvent or rethink something is that the best qualities of a previous or of an older idea come through, but you also leave behind a lot of the things that maybe you don’t want or you can improve upon it in a dramatic way, but you can only do that, I think by having a little bit of a break.

It would be hard to imagine, for example, Linux, Windows and Mac. Evolving into Figma or evolving into makespace or uses. I don’t think that could happen. They have too much baggage in history.

00:23:25 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the primary change that I’ve experienced in my year in the valley is, you know, last year I was all like, it’s not too late to we start delete everything, you know, everything sucks. We need to start from scratch, just everyone to stop, like, no more software.

Um, whereas now I’m a lot less. I mean, I still live for speculative proposals or provocations. I love when people ask questions and when people rebel a little bit, but I think working on the sort of future stuff like it’s Tends to be a very lonely process, and you don’t get that satisfaction of like opening night when like audiences actually get to experience the work and walk away with a little bit of their lives may be changed. Sound like such a theater kid right now, but I swear that part has not died.

Silicon Valley can’t kill me. Um, but I think I’m learning more as a creator to hold both truths at once, to have a series of clear North stars that I think. would really help people that I’m curious about exploring and also finding practical concrete ways to head there. So I’m not just like randomly in a lab somewhere, which is like that’s fine too, but I don’t think I’m there yet.

00:24:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that duality is really important. You got to dream big, but also be willing to find ways to bring that into practice.

I feel like you have the one extreme, which is, you might call it ivory tower head in the clouds, dreamer thing, and it’s much easier to think the big thoughts and the inspiring ideas because you’re free of the baggage of, I don’t know, reality or the status quo or what have you. But I think it’s ultimately unsatisfying and I think I’ve seen people who are Maybe tend towards that dreamer side, be even frustrated or even become bitter because they think I have all these great ideas. I figured it all out, but those ideas, if they don’t see them come to fruition somehow, it ultimately feels sort of unsatisfying.

But the flip side of that, of course, which is people who are really in the day to day and the practical and being very pragmatic and incremental, which I think certainly the tech world has a very strong iterative, you know, just make your MVP and build on that. thing which I think is very good for getting going and discovering a problem and so on, but sometimes you do that that means you’re losing the ability to think big thoughts, dream big dreams, go further, move past what’s here today.

And so there’s some, I feel there is some way to resolve that duality, although in a way, I think as an industry and certainly for me as an individual, I’m still trying to figure out exactly how you get the best of both worlds and hopefully the worst of neither.

00:26:04 - Speaker 1: I kind of just do things through the lens of culture to get anything to actually take off or have impact. Essentially, you need to change culture in a certain way or to have an idea influence culture. And I think there’s a place for it, you know, speculative or utopian dystopian ideas, and certainly, you know, those ideas are exciting and can excite a lot of people as like sort of aspirational pressure. Which is a term I stole from Asa, where you make something and then if enough people care about it, then that creates momentum towards that one day. And then the sort of more incremental thing is a slower way to more immediately start bending culture. I don’t think everyone should care about computers as deeply as like, maybe I do, or obviously you guys do, cause people have their own stuff going on, divorces, and I think that’s it. I think that’s the only thing that happens to people.

But Um, so like, like we don’t have time. Like, don’t make me fucking worry about that. But at the same time, because computers are basically worlds that we live in now, people should feel empowered to think about it or question it if they want to. It’s sort of like, I guess politics in a way. It affects you whether you like it or not. And I think more people feel empowered to have an opinion on politics versus on like the operating system. And I think I would love to help make that conversation more accessible in some way.

00:27:24 - Speaker 3: You might not be interested in operating systems, but operating systems are interested in you.

00:27:30 - Speaker 1: The old saying, oh my goodness, is that it really, that’s that’s the same.

00:27:34 - Speaker 3: Well, it’s a classic thing with politics, right,

00:27:37 - Speaker 2: um, yeah, right, you can ignore that I don’t want to think about that, but in the end it does affect your life and that’s why it’s important for us all to be concerned citizens.

Now happily, part of the magic of capitalism or just the world we live in generally is that there’s specialization. And so it’s OK that there’s people like 3 of us who for some unknown reason seem to be. obsessed with computers and we’re devoting our careers to trying to make them better as we, um, as we see, take that word to mean, whereas there’s others who are obsessed with other things and they can work on those things and hopefully we can all together make a better world for all of us.

But that said, I think it is a really great point. I’m often struck when I speak to friends who are not from the tech world, and I can talk about. I don’t know, a design decision that Facebook is making, for example, and for them, it’s more like just a force of nature. There’s no the concept that there’s people behind it who are actively making a decision to do one thing versus another thing versus that it’s far away, yeah, unchangeable thing, doesn’t even enter their minds. And I understand why technology is hard to understand if you’re not in the field. Even if you’re in the field, frankly, it’s pretty hard to understand to keep up with everything, but as you said, empowered to have an opinion at the very least seems worthwhile.

00:28:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember as I was trying to think about Mercury or operating systems, I think certain people I worked with were mentors would be like, why is it something you care about? Like, are you gonna ship this thing? Like, are you gonna go propose it to like Craig Federation? Like, why? Like it’s not gonna ship. What’s the point? And I disagree still, I think. If we just stop caring about anything that we can’t change, you might as well just stop caring, period.

Certainly these days it’s quite easy to just associate your life away. I mean I’ve I’ve certainly been doing a lot of that. I think something that was very interesting to me when I first arrived here, I think one of the first things.

I did was my friend took me to Dynamicland. but my friend informed me of who Brett Victor was slash I, I knew who Warrior Dream was, but not who Brett Victor was, you know, and then about Dynamic land and that it existed.

So I went and like the first thing that I thought was like, oh my God, people should be using this to make theater. This is interactive theater. Like, why isn’t this in my black box? Where are the artists, you know? And that’s something that from what I understand, maybe community outreach is not necessarily like a focus of theirs in this present moment, but I think if you’re serious about getting people excited and therefore affecting change on a cultural level, I think it starts with getting culture makers excited and. It takes me longer to do write-ups than to design things because it’s so important to me that people who had no idea of why they should care about an operating system can read the story I wrote and then walk away feeling like, yeah, I care now too.

And I received lots of emails from people who are also had certain neurodiverse tendencies or just like friends in theater who I didn’t think I had permission. Like, I, I didn’t know that. Like, now I’m a lot more angry at my devices, and I’m like, you’re welcome. And I love that. I want to be remembered for making lots of people really angry. In a good way.

00:30:56 - Speaker 2: Well, yeah, people in my life often point out how I seem to be more dissatisfied with the digital technologies that we interact with every day than anyone else they know, and that sort of maybe seems like a strange, a surprising juxtaposition when I work in the field and claim to enjoy computers and the internet and software and all those sorts of things, but my patience for things that, you know, are trying to hijack my attention. Or faces that are too slow, or things that just treat me in ways that I think are not the way that these devices which are designed to serve us and help us and make us better, often do sadly these days, but it’s connected part of my passion for it is precisely because I think we can do better. Yeah.

So when you talk about Brett Victor, his work is just the pinnacle of inspiring, but as far as I know, he is not doing things to really Bring his work to practical. He’s not trying to produce spin out startups or take one of his code bases and make it open source so someone can build on it. He’s trying to show what might be possible to get us to aspire to something higher to to get us excited. And I know many people who point directly to his work as something that got them maybe specifically interested in design or specifically interested in productivity tools design or specifically interested in. And user programming or some other aspect of this kind of computing for thinking and productivity and creativity.

And so you could say that that, you know, you could do it just that way and Jason, I see your work is seeing a lot of that. You do these pieces where it’s not just the design you’ve made, of course, but it’s also like you said, the write up where your intention is to help people understand why. And get excited and follow the story and you probably would be OK to stop there. Now you don’t have much say over maybe you lack the satisfaction of getting to deliver something all the way through to a customer and see it put a smile on their face. But one way to do it is kind of say, well, I’ve done my part, which is to inspire and step away, assuming that you can make that into a livelihood and let others kind of productionize, you might say. But it sounds like you don’t find that satisfying enough, or you want to take it past just that inspiration stage.

00:33:13 - Speaker 1: Um, I think if I lived in my ideal world, I would never worry about shipping anything ever.

I kind of view that sort of more as art though, versus design in a way. Like it feels more like a personal provocation expression, like a need to do something driven internally and design is a lot more.

I interpret it as a service, and you could argue that doing aspirational conceptual work is kind of a service, but I think of it more as art versus design.

And so I think if I was able to, and if I had that pedigree and following and just sweet, sweet cash.

Live in capitalism, can’t pretend to live out of it, you know, whatever. I would do it.

To be honest, I don’t know how long I will spend in the tech industry because I think at some point, I would love to go back to just work on, I don’t know, album artwork, or just lock myself away in a cabin and just draw typography.

But for now, I feel like there’s some stories I want to tell, and for some of those stories to really resonate, they need to be put into people’s hands and experience. And so until I’ve told those stories, I feel like there’s unfinished business just for me personally.

00:34:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to me, part of the motivation for bringing things into the real world is to understand if you got it right, because here’s the deal with reality.

It’s so complex, you can’t actually understand it.

These design heuristics are about coming up with a better guess and then incrementally perhaps arriving at the solution and really the only way to know is to try it.

So that’s one of the reasons why I like the balance we struck with ink and switch and Muse. You have this combination of academic thinking, far out planning and vision. But then you also force that to confront reality and see what comes up, and often it’s surprising, and it’s a little bit of a bummer when your visions are contradicted by the cold hard truth, but that’s important data if you ultimately want to move the needle in the real world.

00:34:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love exploring all the interesting gestures that you guys have in use, and there’s a certain point where I’m like, if I wanted to take this out of a layer, do I just hold on to it and then move and it turns out you actually just do that, which I loved. I love when things just naturally feel like. Connected to my intent in some weird magical way.

Just ergonomically, I love it.

And I think on the note of like designing productivity software, I think something that I wish I had done with Mercury or just in general, is thinking about all the ways that new paradigms are fun and playful. Like, I’m sure notion and Air Table are exciting advances towards tool for thought or whatever. But like, I don’t really associate spreadsheets and databases with fun. It’s like intriguing, but it’s not fun. And the thing you mentioned with iPod click wheel was it’s just fun. It was inherently fun. There’s no like real reason why that is more efficient than buttons or like a deep pad, but it was fun and because it was fun, people cared about it and it was also great for fidgeting, which I love. I think. Part of the reasons why I get so distracted in social media nowadays is my computer. I can’t really fidget. I can like move my mouse around and or I can like sort of just like fidge on my screen just by like moving things up now. But the interface itself is not really designed to let you fidget. Anyways, so iPod was so fun, and I want to see more tools for fun. Or tools for thoughts that happen to be playful and fun and really unapologetic about it. Like I could care less about bi-directional linking, like I have no fucking clue what that even means if it’s not fun and visually palatable.

00:36:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is a huge deal. And to my mind, the real poster child for this is emojis, and emojis, they seem goofy and insignificant, but they’re actually a huge deal. They’re a huge deal for Slack and to me, they’re a huge deal in notion. I was having trouble. It’s like, isn’t this kind of just like Google Docs, but you know, better and it’s like, well, yeah, but I can pick the emoji for each of my docs, oh, you know, and it just it gives you much more energy and it also allows you to communicate. more effectively, I would argue so. Yes, I think that’s a big thread.

00:37:15 - Speaker 2: The fun, the playfulness, the maybe joy, I think is one of the biggest things to come out of the mobile touchscreen iOS world.

And of course, consumer applications sort of were the first to get that, but I absolutely think yeah, even the term productivity tools I use that just because, well, it’s the kind of the industry name.

But I think when you look at, I’ve used the example before of Slack, and why I think Slack was successful is they make talking to your teammates fun. And it wasn’t really that much fun with hip chat and Campfire and IRC somewhat the Slack somehow tipped over between, I don’t know, animated gifts and unfurl cards and emojis and a couple of other things and just maybe the sleekness of the overall experience, good mobile app and stuff like that. They just made it the thing you wanted to do. And I think there is a version of that for almost any, yeah, what’s a spreadsheet for the TikTok generation, right?

00:38:11 - Speaker 1: So a cursed phrase. Oh my God, no. Oh my goodness.

00:38:17 - Speaker 2: But sort of embracing that, hopefully not the bad, you know, I think there’s a lot of downsides to the kind of engagement oriented social media stuff that is dominating a lot of, let’s say mainstream design thinking, but there is a version of that which does come down to the fun, the playfulness, the emotiveness, the just general joy you get when you think I want to use this. to do the thing you’re going to do more of it.

And that’s, that was absolutely our thinking with Muse. We’re a little more understated. We’re less of the emojis everywhere and animated gifts everywhere thing, but we do try to make it fun and interesting and fast and a little bit playful to interact with your ideas.

And so I think thinking of our overall mission to help people. Be more thoughtful when I talk to people about sort of deep thinking who maybe they know, maybe, for example, there’s an important decision in their life, they should really think through deeply, but it’s really hard. Deep thinking is hard. But if you had a tool that made it fun and you thought, well, this was a chance to use that thing, and I know it’s fun to use that thing, so therefore, you’re likely to do the activity, then maybe just a few more for more folks will want to do that.

00:39:25 - Speaker 1: I feel like play and fidgeting are just my tools for thought. I can’t think if I’m strapped to a chair somewhere. And some of my most exciting sort of revelations just always come from doing improv, which I deeply miss. But it seems like the world is kind of just on improv right now, in a way that’s really hard to say yes to. Anyway.

00:39:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, a little more specific nerdy tangent is like part of the reason why I think spring dampening works so well is because when you give something physics, Spring dampening here you’re talking about when you have a transition of some kind that instead of being a linear movement, it sort of speeds up at the beginning and then slows down as the transition is coming to a close, yeah.

00:40:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, except I don’t even like to think of it as a transition.

I kind of think of it as just reaction, um, because like if something is like If, if something is responsive to physics, you like bounce something a certain way, then theoretically you could also bounce it from the other way and you can start to play with it.

And it doesn’t actually have to serve a concrete purpose. It’s just by nature of being responsive to physics, it makes it more playful because it kind of grounds it in the real world somehow. Whereas like, the reason why I don’t think of this transition is sort of Because it’s not like a set timing that you’re like, this transition will last for 1 2nd, it means if it’s the middle of doing something and you want it to stop, you Very difficult to describe. But that’s the more nerdy take on it is that because when you think about motion, not animation, but motion design and how things respond and react to your touch, they enforce, they create the physical world of your application. And when there is that sense of physics, there is a sense of play because then people can start experimenting with like plotting things together or breaking them apart or things like that. And to me, that’s fun. Although I feel like I hesitate to promote this.

00:41:26 - Speaker 3: It’s like very trendy right now, so you’re just like throwing it everywhere and I feel like not everything has to bounce be bouncy, but anyway, well, I think you’ve come to a very interesting distinction here because transition and animation, it almost implies that there is this point where as a user, you’ve indicated what wants to happen, the machine will now take over and for the next 200 milliseconds will direct the activities and until then you can’t do anything else.

And at the end, OK, the transition is complete. Now you can go resume clicking on things, whereas physics is more like every millisecond, you’re doing something and the machine is responding to what you’re doing and you’re never giving up control. And to me, the animation for the point of showing something isn’t as interesting as making it responsive to what you’re always doing, right,

00:41:58 - Speaker 3: the physics.

00:41:59 - Speaker 1: My pet peeve is when. Everyone designs motion for interfaces on the aftereffects and just have these like really specific 3 point motion curves and I’m like, literally no one’s gonna like that after the first round. They think, oh, this is fun and smooth. And the second time they’re gonna swipe something and it’s gonna have this perfectly choreographed transition and you’re like, oh, I don’t feel like that’s because I did something. I feel like I just triggered a 1 or 0. And that’s actually like, I think like for touch, like bounce and spring dampening works because your fingers are soft, so there is the inherent element of the input device has bounced. Whereas like, I don’t, for example, for mouse cursor interactions, since it’s very much like your mouse is either down or it’s not, it might be less appropriate.

Yeah. But on the most surface level, it’s fun and that was my first impression, you know, I wasn’t like, oh, this responds to my input and therefore, it’s a prosthetic to like, no, this is super fun swipe to unlock. So therefore, I shall sell out my soul to tech forever.

00:42:56 - Speaker 2: Maybe what you said there ties together a couple of themes we’ve touched on here, which is the mouse versus touch and how the system should respond in terms of like how things feel within the physics of the virtual world you’re interacting with.

I think there is this tendency, Mark usually calls it transliteration, which is if you take an application or a type of application that’s sort of for the desktop and you put it on to say a tablet or. vice versa, to basically bring across some of those same basic interactions. But in fact, the mouse or the trackpad is a much more precise tool than the finger. And there’s pros and cons to that. Sometimes the precision is actually really annoying. It’s too precise, it’s too fussy, and then other times it’s what you want, but in any case, the system responding to that.

And so I think, for example, one of the places that the Windows. The surface platform falls down a little bit is that it essentially treats those as the same thing. When you touch the screen, it’s essentially just kind of moving your mouse cursor there and clicking. And you know, that’s a very sort of obvious thing. They’re both ways to point, so why not do the same thing? And to be fair, they were pretty early, so they were still just exploring this, but a more thoughtful or a more considered way to go about it is to think of each of these input devices and as we have more and more of them and the diversity of them, as we talked about before, and making each one serve its different purpose, and that also means that the physics of the system should react and feel different. And obviously, it will take us a long time to build all that out potentially, but I think it’s really worth doing to make the kind of creative environment, at least that I want to have.

00:44:31 - Speaker 1: When I think about things like head tracking or eye tracking or even voice recognition, those are the moments that I’m curious to look at.

You know, not necessarily like, hey Alexa do blah blah blah blah blah, and it’s like very clear start and end, and you have a single thing you want to do, but more like as you’re in the process of doing something, maybe there are small ways that your body naturally responds to something that informs some part of the UI or how, I don’t know.

That starts a whole other conversation about muscle memory, modular interfaces, pros and cons, but it is a specific curiosity of mine, especially as I think we start moving away from.

We’ve been accumulating more and more devices and now I think we’re naturally headed to a world where your points of contact and essentially the, the power of the computer is more distributed.

It could be all over your home, it could be everywhere you go because of headphones that you’re wearing or certain headsets. And I think when that world arrives, I’m interested in seeing the ways that interfaces change to sort of see if interfaces kind of move towards the direction of like multimodal input, if at all.

00:45:39 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s exciting. This is another example of where the fundamentals are changing because until basically very recently, voice recognition wasn’t viable, wasn’t fast enough, it wasn’t cheap enough, it wasn’t accurate enough, and it’s just now, I think, crossing the threshold and probably similarly with eye tracking, but I know for a while they’ve had specialized hardware that you can use at labs but it was expensive and uncomfortable. That’s also, I think they can do it with commodity cameras now. So interesting times for sure.

00:46:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and something that I hope to see more in new tools for thought or productivity tools is just, as I mentioned, more embrace of just fun, physics, and also things just being more sexy in general. I think making something desirable is Oh God, I was reading this tweet the other day of some like thought leader going like, if you have to pick between like what you’re wearing in the morning, that you’re not doing real work, I’m like, shut the fuck up. Like, literally take your Patagonia vest and I don’t know, jump off the go but that’s too harsh. Just like, no, like, that’s so important to people like that. That’s what makes people human. Like we just naturally or instinctively, we just find certain things desirable, and that’s OK. And that should absolutely be a part of the consideration and focus for when we design new sort of environments and interactions that we hope people will care about.

And right now, Adam, I think you mentioned that it’s very hip and trendy to work on things like, you know, perhaps Instagram. Although probably not anymore, but like maybe TikTok, spreadsheets less. And I think part of it is just the inherent fun factor. And the other part of it is like, you don’t really associate culture with spreadsheets, but you absolutely associate culture with social media.

And so I really think that if you can create software with the intention of creating a cultural movement or a cultural shift, that will really perhaps help you in some way. I say you as like a disembodied you, not like you, um.

It’s like if I were, I don’t know, a meme generator, I would just have that diagram of Steve Jobs with the liberal arts and technology crossroads in his background, but yeah.

00:47:45 - Speaker 2: Now I love that tools are about the communities and the culture that come along with them.

We don’t use them in a vacuum. We don’t get excited to use them, and we don’t continue to use them and we don’t certainly in a collaborative work environment which we almost all find ourselves in, yeah, sharing.

You could argue that for For example, a collaboration tool like GitHub or one like Figma, those bring along with them certain culture. And that’s part of why you, let’s say get into the tool and part of what keeps you there and part of what shapes your work and part of what makes it fun, and part of what inspires you or upsets you, maybe depending. But the point is, it’s not this dry, sterile, just kind of solving a problem and moving on. Uh there is culture with it.

00:48:30 - Speaker 1: I love that. And there’s that continued discourse between culture and impact and what you’re making. And something I hope to see more is like, you know, as we create these new environments to live in and live with. That we become more aware of certain implications or results of use and misuse, and that we take responsibility for those results.

That if our tool for, I don’t know, if I were to create a collaborative tool for thought and it was used to orchestrate DDOS attacks on women and minorities, I would personally take a long hard look on like the things that enable that, the culture that I have created around my tool and recognize that like.

I’m a human, I’m a creator. It is OK to bring your own perspective into things because you’ve made it, and that’s just something that is on my mind a lot these days, and there really is no way to ensure that your tool is not being misused to harm people, I don’t think.

00:49:27 - Speaker 2: Design ethics has become much more of a topic or perhaps technology ethics very broadly and more here you see this in social media news and news tools and things like that that are more about spreading ideas on a wide scale, but one could imagine that coming to more sort of productivity tools style space and then maybe you want to think ahead and think, OK, so the folks that were working on social media 15 years ago didn’t really picture the ways that their work could be used for harm.

And of course, you can never stop something. There’s always the potential to use something for harm, but there are ways to design it that maybe encourage more positive uses and strongly discourage more negative uses.

And I think there’s a tendency for tech world people who skew young, who skew optimistic to just think of the positive cases and not think of the negative cases and therefore not hedge against potential risk and think about the responsibility of the power that they’re wielding.

00:50:27 - Speaker 1: Something I hear a lot is like you’re so negative, but I think at the root of everything, I think I’m very optimistic about what people can be as a species, as cultures, and what technology could help with. I’m very optimistic about technology and people in general, but because of that optimism, sometimes it is expressed as anger or negativity, but I really admire those who kind of just believe.

Uh, fuck, I’m just gonna head into some, I’m gonna not say sappy shit on your on your podcast. I’m gonna save it for my memoir or my stand or my Netflix special.

My Netflix special is coming out in about 15 years. It will be called My Career, and that is the joke. Um, I, I predict massive success from over two audience members, but um. Yeah, oops, nice.

00:51:22 - Speaker 2: I actually just watched uh David Attenborough’s uh sort of career memoir. So yeah, all, all you got to do is have um 60 years of really impressive career like that guy, and then you two can have an inspiring Netflix special.

00:51:38 - Speaker 1: 60 years is a long time. Um, I don’t know. It, I’m curious for you both is thinking about computers and tools for thought and operating systems and essentially world building. When was the first time in your life that you noticed that instinct or curiosity?

00:51:59 - Speaker 3: For me, computer programming in particular came relatively late. I didn’t really get into it until college, which is late for a lot of people that are, for example, currently in the industry, but I’d always had an interest in building things more generally, you know, model planes and rockets and Other things like that. So I think I just more struck on the right medium eventually versus a general interest.

00:52:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, for me, I certainly was fascinated by computers from my first encounter, but I think it probably connects to exactly what you said, which is the world building. So the interest in computers and the interest in games kind of came together and I pretty quickly got on from playing games to making my own games, and making games is fundamentally an act of world building and the really appeal to the systematic part of my mind. And I think it definitely influenced a lot of my views on the world, which includes calling back to right where we started, which is that the world around us is mostly constructed, the society we live in, the governments, even the physical structures, they’re constructed by humans and we can choose to make them different. very hard to change those things, but they’re not, well, I would say not set in stone, but some things actually are set in stone.

But actually, even those are changeable. You just need a good jackhammer, right? And thinking of it as both this combination of, if you think systematically about the emergent effects of the world you’re building, whether that’s a game or something in the real world, something economic or social.

And then similarly, as we have these increasing virtual worlds, even beyond games, but productivity tools. And collaboration spaces and online forums for a meeting to converse with our fellow citizens about the society we all live in. These are all things that we construct and we have the ability to think systematically about how the design choices that go into them, the outputs in the form of the world that we live in, and the way that that causes people to be prosperous and happy or not. And so to me, yeah, right from the start, I think that shaped how I see everything about the world.

00:54:06 - Speaker 1: When was that start for you?

00:54:10 - Speaker 2: I think maybe about 8 years old.

00:54:12 - Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah. Oh my goodness.

To paraphrase one of my friends and collaborators on Makespace Maily, she often speaks of her different disciplines. I mean, she’s an interaction designer and also a DJ and also she’s interested in the culinary arts, and she just thinks about like those different practices as kind of canvases of art, and then You connect the canvases through your life to eventually create a path of your own.

That’s purely paraphrasing and probably fucked it up. My fascination also began with video games. Tomb Raider was the first movie I ever saw, very interesting choice for a 5 year old. But after that, I was just obsessed with this idea that you could inhabit someone’s life and body and adventure, and inhabit a space that might feel safer in some ways. Obviously a very utopian view on computation. And then I started graphic designing and PowerPoint. I don’t think I used a real design tool until college.

00:55:12 - Speaker 3: It’s the power of general purpose tools.

00:55:15 - Speaker 2: Well, it’s to your earlier point that everything is a tool for thought and so in this case, everything can be a way to design, right? I do designs and text files with AskiR where needed, so.

00:55:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah. What’s exciting about talking to folks like you is it reminds me of, and it opens my eyes to all the things that I’m so deeply curious about exploring and learning about. And it’s really inspiring in the sense that It feels like if you’re digging for diamonds and the more you dig, there’s more interesting shiny things and you just want to keep going until you end up burying yourself and then you end up living in Oakland forever alone. But that’s a different fanfiction.

00:55:56 - Speaker 2: That metaphor did not end the way I was expecting it to.

00:55:59 - Speaker 1: I don’t know. I feel like if you dig a tunnel deep enough, it’s eventually going to end up in Oakland. I feel like, I don’t know why everyone’s like, I’m in Oakland. Like how did you get there? But yeah, something I’m curious to hear your thoughts on. It’s sort of, as I’ve been more acquainted with the culture of human computer interaction, including important cultural figures and milestones and perhaps dreams that once were.

I’ve moved through several stages of like, let’s say grief. Of like denial and then sort of acceptance or Hm, that’s poorly phrase. As I’ve I’ve accumulated more knowledge into this specific cultural dome. I hear from a lot of people that their North Star is they want to achieve Engelbart’s vision of computation, or they want to, you know, make Brett Victor proud or something, something Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, something something Xanadu, you know. And I’m curious to hear if that sounds familiar and in what ways do you relate or not relate to those modes of thought.

00:57:04 - Speaker 2: Oh, incredibly familiar. Mark, I’m curious to hear what your journey was on this, but there was a kind of Let’s call a research rabbit hole or just path to go down of discovering the works of these visionary folks that you just described and seeing the big ideas that they had and so long ago that it’s just really eye opening when you compare to on one hand that we’ve achieved so much and technology has come such a long way, particularly when you look at say just the raw horsepower, computational power of computers, but then you look and you feel like maybe we haven’t quite achieved. As much as it seems like we should in terms of what computers actually do for us, and all of those folks that you mentioned and others in that world are absolutely a source of inspiration and ideas in work that I’ve been doing in the last, I don’t know, now 5 or 6 years of my career.

At the same time, I do think you can over, not sure what the word is, fetishize that, which is this kind of romanticized past or You know, first of all, that these folks as visionaries, they didn’t fully manage to make their ideas come true, and I think that is a gap and that is one reason why I’m so interested in the topic we talked about earlier, which is not just how to have the big inspiring ideas, but how to bring them to reality.

And then the second part of it I think is that there is a version of the kind of the Aristotle problem, right, which is you don’t move on with new ideas because you’re so busy kind of treating the ancients as having the ultimate wisdom and you just need to unlock, you’re searching for the philosopher’s stone, and you know you can find it in the books, the coded books written by the ancients, and if you just look long enough rather than thinking, well, These folks were really impressive and amazing humans that did amazing work, but at the same time, I can do that kind of work too. And maybe there’s new ideas and fresh directions for us to explore.

It’s not about somehow achieving some ideal that was set forth previously, but more that we can fold those ideas in, and also learn from what worked and didn’t work with them and then make new ideas for an inspiring future.

00:59:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a lot of similar thoughts. For me, certainly the desiderata that were laid out by these visionaries resonate a lot. Things like computers should help us have better ideas, it should feel amazing to use them, bicycle for the mind.

Yeah, so at that level, it makes perfect sense.

But when I was researching this body of work, it actually made me fairly concerned because it’s so old, it means that something went quite wrong or failed. It’s kind of like how every year we find older and older cities and older and older human. Bones, it’s like we realize that more cities and civilizations have risen and fallen than we previously realized. So it’s actually just this aing set of cautionary tales. And so that’s why I focus so much in my thinking and research on the system’s problem of what’s the path, what are all the factors, and again, really grounding in reality, because there’s something about this problem that we don’t seem to get yet because we all say, bicycle for the mind, let’s do it. But 50 years later, we’re not quite there yet. So what’s the, what’s the thing that we’re missing? It’s something that I’m always looking out for.

01:00:14 - Speaker 1: I don’t think we’ll ever be there. I think there is always moving target.

And so my real benchmark now is sort of like when I set out to do something, it’s like, how do I want something to feel? And then maybe some work from like Xerox Park or whatever is an interesting poke at that and it’s an interesting thing to build on the shoulders of.

But then ultimately, when I come back to the things that I’ve made, I kind of just simplify it into like, does this evoke the feeling or emotion that I wanted it to. And I find that it’s much less stressful making that way compared to constantly trying to see if you can live up to some impossible standard. Even as an industry, I think it is a highway to burn out and cynicism. Like, I’m what, one year out of school and I’m already like, maybe I’ll go into fashion, like that seems like a more ethical industry and it’s like, and the narrator is like, it was not, um, but. Um, but, you know, from talking to a lot of folks here, like something that struck me was like, people didn’t really seem to believe that I was creating based on like, how something feels emotionally, or that that was a viable North star. But I look back on some of the things I was trying to explore, and I just wanted things to feel more fluid. And it led me to learning about all sorts of really cool inventors and inventions and That sort of set me off the beaten path a little bit, and I began to think like, oh my God, like motherball demos like Englebar, like blah blah blah blah blah, bicycle, tricycle, I don’t know, circus elephant for the mind, um, and, and I was just so frustrated. I’m like, it feels like, I don’t know, Dumbo with its ears clipped, but then one of my mentors just was like, you just simplify it. Like, why did you start doing this in the first place? Was it because of Englebar and I’m like, who? No, but. it wasn’t. I just wanted to make something that felt fluid and felt playful and fun and mentally I tried to guide myself back to just It’s the sort of the acting actor’s creed of like, a lot of people think acting is about pretending to be someone else, to pretend that someone else’s life is yours. But I think acting is about honesty. It’s about finding the things that resonate between someone else’s life and yours, the things that make you human, emotions, mistakes, trauma, hopes and dreams and. As best you can inhabit the things that are honest, and that’s how you can really reach sort of the hearts of people. And so I feel like when I came to the bay, a lot of people pointed me at certain directions that Progressively make things feel less and less honest to me. I’m just now a year later, finding my footing again of thinking like, maybe I don’t need to carry on someone’s torch or try to impress someone who couldn’t give less of a rat’s ass about me. Maybe I’ll be happier and more creative if I was just more honest. If I was just honest about the things I didn’t and didn’t care about. And I hope we create more spaces for people to be honest with themselves and the world around them.

01:03:20 - Speaker 2: I think that is a lovely noteend on.

01:03:21 - Speaker 1: Thank you. Oh, exit my soapbox. Wait, no, the term is get off my soapbox. I don’t really see how you would fit inside.

01:03:31 - Speaker 2: Maybe in the COVID times, you have a soapbox that has a self-contained plexiglass room.

01:03:37 - Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. That’s my ideal habitat. If I become extremely rich, I will move to a forest somewhere and live in a glass house within walking distance to Boba and CVS. And occasionally I will go on Twitter just to remind myself of. The fact that I can still feel angry. But also hopeful.

01:03:59 - Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, if any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at museApp.com by email. I really like to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes, and great that you’re out inspiring us all, Jason, to think bigger about things that we can improve and change about the world, and thanks for coming on to chat with us today.

01:04:22 - Speaker 1: Thank you for letting me ramble for so long. I feel kind of emotional. So yeah, thanks.

01:04:30 - Speaker 2: Well, when it’s such an interesting ramble, it’s easy to do. All right, see you both around.

01:04:34 - Speaker 3: Goodbye. See you, Adam.