0:00:00Craig Maud, welcome to the talk show for the first time, right? Please tell me I'm not forgetting.
0:00:07Definitely the first time. First time.
0:00:11Three hundred and some episodes in, I start to worry.
0:00:15It's crazy, man. I can't believe you've done 311 of these things.
0:00:19Especially at my pace.
0:00:21Well, you know, 30 years of podcasting, you'll get there.
0:00:28But I've been meaning—you and I have been pals for a long time.
0:00:31I suspect that more than usual on my show, there might be a fair number of listeners who are not
0:00:40familiar with you, or maybe only tangentially so. I mean, I certainly linked you on Daring
0:00:46Fireball semi-frequently, but you're not part of the regular Mac punditry crowd.
0:00:52So tell everybody about yourself a little.
0:00:57I never know. I always just tell people I'm a writer. That's like to simplify.
0:01:01I like that. I like that answer, too. I actually don't know where you were
0:01:05raised. Somewhere in America, right?
0:01:09Yeah, over near Hartford, Connecticut.
0:01:12But you've lived in Japan now for 20 years?
0:01:1720, yeah, we're on year 21 right now.
0:01:20So you went there for university, stayed.
0:01:25And you now run Special Projects, which is—we have
0:01:31such a good name, but also such a terrible name. Right?
0:01:37I love it. I am so happy with that name. It's one of my favorite name things ever. I'm so glad,
0:01:48because it was called something else before. It was called the Explorers Club, and I never liked
0:01:53that name. I don't know what it was about that name that never resonated for me. It was driving
0:01:58me crazy. Every time I had to write it, I wanted to stop doing it. I was like, "Right, Explorers
0:02:05Club." And it just didn't work. There was something about it that was off. And so I switched
0:02:11to the Special Projects last summer, and a bunch of Explorers Club people freaked out. They went
0:02:16nuts about it. "Oh, that was my favorite part of every—" And I love it. I have zero regrets.
0:02:24But yeah, it's generic. I don't even know, but if you search the web for just plain Special Projects,
0:02:31does it come up? I've never even tried.
0:02:35See? But isn't that interesting that you've built a little business for yourself where that doesn't
0:02:39matter? Right? It doesn't matter. I mean, that is not why I picked the name Daring Fireball,
0:02:43but it is, in fact, a very—it's good. There's only one Daring Fireball.
0:02:47It works.
0:02:47Special Projects is your membership site. But you know what? This is hard to explain.
0:02:54Members—
0:02:59It is complicated, weirdly.
0:03:01Members can sign up. You offer—this is where it's a little confusing. You offer multiple newsletters.
0:03:09So compare and contrast with, say, Stratechery or our other mutual friend Dan Fromer's
0:03:16New Consumer, where you pay—there's one membership tier, and you get the main
0:03:23newsletter. Now, you have three newsletters. You have a website. You make books. And making books
0:03:33is probably the best verb I can say. I'm not trying to diminish you as a writer, but you also
0:03:38photograph them. You design them. You oversee the production of them. Now you're making short movies.
0:03:48Why not?
0:03:50But the basic dynamics of the arrangement are people can pay $10 a month or $100 a year
0:04:01to become members. That is the revenue that supports your career. And you get to spend your time
0:04:11writing, photographing, making videos, doing these things that you're driven to do.
0:04:18Is that a fair description?
0:04:21Tim Cynova Yeah, yeah. I'd say that's pretty good.
0:04:23If I was going to summarize it, maybe make it a little simpler, I produce a bunch of—I
0:04:31stuff like cultural output. One of the reasons why it's so difficult to frame my membership program
0:04:38in terms of what the clear value proposition is, is that I'm not selling, for example,
0:04:45background information on business. I'm not writing about finance. I'm not doing
0:04:50self-help stuff. I'm not going to give you tips to be a better person or whatever, necessarily.
0:04:57But I'm just producing all of this content. Most of it is for free under this umbrella of
0:05:03culture, cultural production, or for lack of a better phrase. And so the membership program
0:05:10is basically like NPR for me. So if you're a fan of the stuff that I've been making, which is
0:05:1695% of it is available for free, and you want to just support the production of that, that's what
0:05:23the membership program is. And then I've just added lots of small value adds for members,
0:05:30because what I found is that a membership program is one of the amazing bonuses of it. It's not just
0:05:36the revenue, but you develop this essentially gang of super fans that are amazing to bounce ideas
0:05:46off of. So I started doing, because of the pandemic, a bunch of members-only live streams
0:05:52of me just doing super boring work, just like the most boring work you can imagine. So I did 10
0:06:00hours of live streaming, building this website last March. And there'd be like 20, 30, 50 people
0:06:08on the live stream at any moment, all just members. So always really intimate. But what it allowed me
0:06:14to do that I didn't expect to happen was this running articulation of what it means to do this
0:06:23kind of work. So to just pull back, open the doors to, "Hey, this is actually, you see the end
0:06:30product, which is either this finished website or this finished book, but this is the 10, 20, 30
0:06:36hours of what I'm actually doing to produce this thing." When you're doing the live stream, you can
0:06:42live narrate it a little bit, take questions, people are like, "Oh, why are you doing that now?
0:06:46What's that tool you're using? What's that app you're using?" And you just share things. I've
0:06:51just found that to be really, really enriching and wonderful. And this weird bonus of the membership
0:06:58program that when I started it, I never thought would be part of it. These are things that I
0:07:04wouldn't want to do out into the, just to the general, to a general audience, because there is
0:07:11something so intimate about showing how you produce, say, design a book or how you're building
0:07:19this website. I'm in a sublime text. I'm writing, I'm editing live, essentially, on these live
0:07:25streams. And to do that in front of, say, if I opened it up to everyone who's following me,
0:07:29and it would say it'd be a thousand people or whatever, that's a very different performative
0:07:33experience than in front of 30 super fans that are going to support you and are going to,
0:07:39I don't know, just be positive in general. There's no posturing. So that, it's just been incredible
0:07:46to have this tool, basically a creative tool, to motivate me to be better and be more self-aware
0:07:54of why I use the software I use and why I make the decisions around the creative projects that I do.
0:08:01And that's been fantastic. That's been a really, really wonderful benefit.
0:08:05You're now starting year three. Yeah, we're in year three of the membership, right?
0:08:11Effectively, I think you started in February 2019. But, you know, February is early enough in a year
0:08:18where we could, you could just say it 2019 was the first year. 2020 was the second year, and now 2021.
0:08:25Yeah. And you've written copiously about your experiences. And to me, Dan Frommer has done the
0:08:32same thing and talking at a sort of meta level about, you know, what's worked, what hasn't worked
0:08:38and building this. And it's like your timing was serendipitous, right? Because you're way at your,
0:08:48like, two years ahead of the substack phenomenon. But, you know what I mean? So you can, you're not
0:08:55like a Johnny-come-lately to the "I'm going to run my independent publishing creative output work as
0:09:02a membership system." Basically, memberships are having a moment right now. They are. Well, yeah,
0:09:08because I think a little bit of what we've done is we've normalized over the last decade, really,
0:09:15in the last five years, we've normalized this idea of like, paying for stuff is a good thing to do.
0:09:21You know, it's like if you have things, institutions that you love,
0:09:25institutions that you want to see continue in the world, then it turns out that paying for them is
0:09:30positive. That's a positive signal and makes things sustainable. And so I think that's kind of
0:09:37tipped over into the independent creative world as well. And the tools have just gotten better.
0:09:43But you've built a lot of your system yourself, or at least you're taking some pre-built pieces,
0:09:50like a campaign monitor you use for sending out the actual newsletters, and snapping that into
0:09:55a system with, you know, what do you use, Stripe for payments or no, Memberful, right? But Memberful
0:10:00is sort of a thing that's built on Stripe. I don't think it's complicated, but you've explained it
0:10:09in great detail. But it is interesting, though, to me, like all of these things didn't really exist
0:10:1615 years ago, right? There was no Stripe of 15 years ago. I mean, there was, you know,
0:10:21PayPal was probably the Stripe of 15, 20 years ago, and you just couldn't use PayPal quite as
0:10:27snapped together seamlessly the way that you can use Stripe today.
0:10:32Right. Well, I mean, I think Stripe's masterstroke, and obviously Patrick and
0:10:36John knew this when they built it, is the API. You know, it's just, it was never this
0:10:43consumer-facing thing. As a consumer, you never went to Stripe.com. You still, for the most part,
0:10:48I don't think go to Stripe.com. And I think that, you know, in a lot of ways, this was the Twitter
0:10:54ecosystem in the beginning as well, where it was like, "Oh, hey, look, yeah, there's a Twitter
0:10:58client, but here's this API, and you can build amazing software on top of this incredible stream
0:11:03of, you know, sort of consciousness that's coming out of, you know, everyone on the timeline."
0:11:11And look at the vibrant ecosystem that can be built from that. Now, Twitter obviously
0:11:15pulled back from that mode of thinking, but I think Stripe is such a wonderful example of
0:11:21building a perfect bit of infrastructure and, you know, creating the right endpoints that anyone can
0:11:29plug into however they want to. And you do see things like Shopify. So Shopify doesn't use Stripe.
0:11:36You know, they've built Shopify payments. I think in the case of a company as large as Shopify,
0:11:41which is fascinating, actually, Shopify is like one of my most, absolutely most fascinating
0:11:46companies, I think, out there today. The fact that they're basically the only real Amazon competitor
0:11:52at this point, I think, is incredible. And the software is amazing. I don't know if you've used
0:11:56Shopify or if you've built anything on Shopify, but it's pretty great. I mean, it's not perfect,
0:12:02but it is, you know, if you compare AWS and Shopify, it's like one is very user-friendly.
0:12:10But for the most part, you know, like Memberful uses Stripe. Patreon probably uses Stripe as the
0:12:16back end. A lot of these, you know, Ghost uses Stripe as the back end. And what's interesting
0:12:19about Stripe, if it's used as the membership back end for payments, is that it's portable.
0:12:25You can essentially move all those Stripe tokens to whatever next platform you want to use.
0:12:31So you're not, if essentially you're not locked in, I'm not locked into Memberful,
0:12:36I can move to a different platform if I wanted to, which is really powerful.
0:12:39Yeah, and that's certainly one of the more compelling things about Substack's message,
0:12:44too, is that, you know, they let the creators, the authors who were writing on Substack know that if
0:12:50you ever want to leave, you can, you get to take your mailing list with you. Yeah, I wonder how
0:12:55long that's going to last, though. I don't know either, because the valuations are so, you know,
0:13:01the numbers they're talking about are so crazy. And it's like, I think it's a good business in
0:13:05terms of like a traditional business. And, you know, like the type of thing you and I run,
0:13:12where it's like, if your monthly income is higher than your monthly expenses, then that's pretty
0:13:19good, you know, as opposed to, you know, raising a bunch of venture capital and just having this
0:13:26fountain of money and just throwing it at it until all of a sudden it goes away, you know.
0:13:31I think it's going to be interesting. It's going to be interesting to watch what
0:13:36Substack does. I mean, $65 million is a lot of dollars, you know, and I think—
0:13:44It's a lot of $10 monthly newsletters.
0:13:47It's so many. But so—
0:13:50For a platform that allows the creators to move whenever they want. And the bigger you get,
0:13:56the more motivated, you know, they take—I think their split is like 90/10, and I don't know if
0:14:00that includes the Stripe payment. So it might be more like, you know, 87/13 if you include Stripe.
0:14:11You know, once you get into that thousand true beliefs—what's Kevin Kelly's term?
0:14:18The thousand true fans.
0:14:19Thousand true fans, yep.
0:14:20You know, but that is the basic model, and that has been the dream. You know,
0:14:24Kevin Kelly was the founding editor of Wired magazine, you know, long-standing career. But
0:14:31he had this theory that, you know, the internet allows an artist to make a good living with a
0:14:38thousand true fans who are maybe paying $10 a month or $100 a year or maybe just buy their album
0:14:47when it comes out. I don't know, I guess people don't really buy albums anymore. But, you know,
0:14:51you get the feeling that a thousand fans can support an artist very well and in a way that
0:14:57never was possible pre-internet. There was just no way. You couldn't do what you do. I couldn't do
0:15:03what I do, right? I mean, what would the pre-internet equivalent of what you're doing be?
0:15:08It would probably be running like an indie press, you know, and really cobbling together. It's
0:15:17interesting though, because in other countries, I think Americans have this impoverished view of
0:15:22what's possible as an independent artist, because there's just so few subsidies for artists in
0:15:28America relative to other countries. If you talk to a Canadian poet, and you're like, "Oh, it must
0:15:35be so tough being a poet." And they're like, "What are you talking about, man? We've got all these
0:15:39poet funds and grants and stuff up here in Canada." If you put together your first chat
0:15:46book or whatever, you get $50,000. There's just wild amounts of opportunity for artists in,
0:15:53I feel like in countries like Canada and in Europe, all over Europe, just the network of
0:16:01artist residencies and stuff. And I think that's always been the case. I don't think this is a
0:16:06relatively new thing. And so, yeah, I think probably the equivalent 20 or 30 years ago
0:16:12would be being a Canadian in Vancouver running a small independent publishing company and being
0:16:20really excited selling like 300 or 400 books a year. But it would be hard to get word out,
0:16:28right? And it's like, I'm so American, and my view is so warped by having grown up in the decades I
0:16:38did. Not to get zealotrous about it, but it's clear to me now in middle age and having a better sense
0:16:48of the decades of my adult life, that America took a profoundly capitalist turn in the '70s and '80s
0:17:05and has shaped things like that. I don't think it's weird that Canada has government-sponsored
0:17:14fellowships and things like that for poetry. And there are ways to get similar things from
0:17:23universities here in the United States, but it does sound weird to American ears that the
0:17:28government might just provide stipends to artists to have not just a subsidence level, but to
0:17:36actually have a nice life. And that it's just accepted across society that this is actually
0:17:45good for the country to be producing this. I just saw a quote from JFK talking about the arts.
0:17:52It was the thing that made me realize, it's just one of those things, knowing that you were going
0:18:01to be on the show, I just started catching certain Craig Motti-type things. But it's what gave me this
0:18:11thought about the turn that Reaganism had away from that Kennedy idea. The Kennedy Center for
0:18:19the Arts is still a big thing, but it was this quote from when he was president talking about
0:18:23how he looks forward to a day in America where we do just as much to support artists,
0:18:30society-wise, as we do scientists and teachers and stuff like that, and that it's good for the
0:18:36fabric of society to do that. And that just isn't a message we heard in the '80s or the '90s. And it's
0:18:45not even a partisan thing, it's just—because we had Reagan and then we had Clinton, so it's not
0:18:50like, oh, just the Republicans or Democrats. But it just wasn't the direction that things went.
0:18:59Yeah, well, which is weird, because America does have an amazing network of
0:19:03artist residencies. Just they're all privately funded, a lot of them. Arguably one of the best,
0:19:10one of the oldest and best writing residencies in the world is up in New Hampshire called McDowell.
0:19:17And I went there nine years ago, and it was life-changing. It really was. It was truly this
0:19:23life-changing experience of that. I think what's difficult about people being convinced that art
0:19:32is important in the world is I think folks have this false image of the artist as this,
0:19:40you know, hippie smoking Mary Jane and just like faffing around, right? That's sort of this like
0:19:46ridiculous image that I think a lot of people carry around of artists. But if you actually
0:19:50engage with serious, committed artists, it's like, you know, I've done projects at CERN,
0:19:58and I've been to residencies like this thing at McDowell. And I would put both of those activities,
0:20:05so the physics research at CERN and the artistic rigor and work and commitment at an institution
0:20:11like McDowell as operating at a very similar level. It's very interesting. It's one of those
0:20:16things that doesn't make any sense to you until you go and you live in there. I've spent three
0:20:20weeks at CERN, I've spent a month at McDowell, and you go and you live with these people,
0:20:25and you kind of participate in their universe. You just kind of breathe it in and you realize that
0:20:30rigor of curiosity and investigation is—there's a parity there between scientific exploration and
0:20:41artistic exploration, like absolutely undeniably. And it's really exciting, but it's also hard to
0:20:47convince people that sometimes, you know, it's like, it's like, oh, you just threw some paint
0:20:51on a canvas and, you know, and then rubbed your naked body over it or something like that. What
0:20:57are you doing? But often there's a tremendous amount of incredible, incredible, again, rigor of
0:21:06exploration happening behind so much art. You know, and in literature, it's maybe a little
0:21:11easier to see, like folks like James Baldwin, you know, and how his work and his essays are
0:21:15resonating. You know, they've had this resurgence in the last decade because of what's been
0:21:19happening in the world. And, you know, that's so powerful, you know, and that work was empowered
0:21:25by a lot of grants and residency work, and a lot of it happened in Europe. So I think it's really
0:21:32a shame that the arts sort of get thrown under the bus so quickly when it comes to budgets and
0:21:39whatnot. Yeah, it is one of these things where I think if you did the math on it, that the returns
0:21:46of money invested in the arts in terms of, I don't know, GDP and some—if you could really trace it
0:21:52all, you'd see a seriously positive return, like a good multiple on those investments, you know.
0:21:59And yet it's one of these difficult, conceptually difficult things for people to grasp, and
0:22:05certainly people in government, it seems. They're like, "We don't need the painting program. We
0:22:09don't need the music program." Yeah, if you can't prove it in a spreadsheet, it has no value.
0:22:19It is the mindset. Which is such a problem these days, because the world is getting to this level
0:22:26of complexity where these one-to-one direct relationships between action and output are
0:22:32becoming so abstract that you need to develop this rigor of investigation that I think a lot of
0:22:45people don't have, where it's like, "Oh, why is this happening in the world right now?" And
0:22:49instead of just—this is why conspiracy theories are so seductive, is because they reduce the
0:22:54complexity of the fact that the world is this crazy spiderweb of things, and if you pluck a string
0:23:03over here, it's going to resonate in weird ways on the other side of the world. And to follow those
0:23:09threads out requires commitment, and it requires an intellectual curiosity that is often lost
0:23:15on YouTube or in a Twitter stream or something like that. So anyway, it's a weird moment, but
0:23:24to bring it back to these membership programs that we have, it is incredibly empowering right now to,
0:23:28I think, if you are a self-motivated creative person, all the tools are there. All the tools
0:23:34are there, and the people, the fans, the folks who want to support your work, they know how to do it.
0:23:41We've figured it out, and that's exciting. What do you think was the start of this, really, this
0:23:48current push? Would you say Kickstarter a decade ago was really the thing that kind of activated
0:23:55this world? Yeah, I think so. Maybe. It's hard to say. Kickstarter was certainly super influential,
0:24:03because it certainly—and I've always thought—and again, there's all sorts of Kickstarters that I've
0:24:11supported over the years, and some of them are just purely digital to buy somebody's ebook or
0:24:16something like that. But for the most part, most of the Kickstarters I've had an interest in were
0:24:20to produce physical items. One of my favorites is the Studio Neat Guys, who make all sorts of
0:24:27great products. I think maybe their first was the Glyph. It was like the first
0:24:32tripod mount for the iPhone. But just to make things, right? And to get—but to actually make
0:24:42a physical item, you need capital, right? The advantage to doing something purely digital,
0:24:49like my website, Daring Fireball, is I could bootstrap it with almost no money at all.
0:24:55I mean, it was ridiculous. When I got started the first, I think at least, two years of Daring
0:25:02Fireball, I was on a $12 a month shared hosting account. And it was great. It was probably more
0:25:10than I needed. I probably could have downgraded to the $8 one. That's phenomenal. And for me,
0:25:18personally, it was always—I sympathize with you when you launched your project and you said you
0:25:26dreaded it and you didn't want to ask. I mean, because I did memberships back in the day.
0:25:30Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because I remember I was a—I'm pretty sure I was a member
0:25:35because I wanted that full RSS feed. That was the perk, right? I've told this story numerous times,
0:25:41but I'll try to tell it again. But the basic idea was—2004 was when I started selling t-shirts and
0:25:52memberships and 2006 is when I quit my job at Joy & went full-time thinking I needed to go full-time
0:26:01to have the—you know, the chicken and the egg problem was that you need to go full-time first
0:26:08to produce the work and then the audience will grow. And if I kept waiting forever with Daring
0:26:15Fireball as a side project, I wasn't going to get there. What am I waiting for? And the fear of
0:26:21failure was mortifying, absolutely enough to completely seize me up. But on the other hand,
0:26:31I don't know who told me. But somebody effectively said, "What is the worst that could
0:26:37possibly happen?" It's probably my wife. But if it doesn't work out financially, you lose nothing,
0:26:44right? And if anything, if I just spend a year and a bunch of savings doing even more writing
0:26:53than ever before and become better known, if I did need to get a job somewhere else,
0:26:59I'd be better known than I was before, right? But anyway, my membership system, my idea was—so
0:27:07anybody who bought a t-shirt got a membership and if you didn't want a t-shirt, you could just pay
0:27:13$19 a year and become a member. And the exclusive perk, because I did have the idea even back then,
0:27:22there had to be something, right? There's got to be—even if you think and most of the people say,
0:27:28"I just love Daring Fireball. I would love to just support you." I just want to give you the thing.
0:27:32What pushes them over the edge—you always mentioned the NPR tote bags. Nobody really
0:27:37gives a shit about the tote bags or the umbrellas. But it pushes people over the edge. They're like,
0:27:44"Well, I might as well get it now. I'll get the tote bag. I've been meaning to give money to
0:27:47NPR. The umbrella looks nice. I'll get the umbrella. I don't really need a tote bag."
0:27:53Full content RSS feeds were—this sounds very old, although I guess it still is an issue.
0:28:06It seems like most of the RSS feeds I read now, though, are all from independent blogs,
0:28:11right? Just people. And so, of course, they have the full content because they're not trying to
0:28:16hoard it behind some kind of publications gateway. But it was a huge thing because everybody in the
0:28:25original golden era of RSS, the bigger publications—I'll throw Ars Technica under the
0:28:32bus. Ars Technica just had excerpts in their articles. And so, you'd get the headline,
0:28:38you'd know who wrote it, you'd get the summary. And then if you wanted to read the full article,
0:28:43you had to double-click or whatever the action was in your feed reader of choice to go to the
0:28:49Ars Technica website because the website is where they had the ads, and the ads are how they made
0:28:56the money. So, it wasn't like they were ripping anybody off. It was clear why they were doing it.
0:29:01The ads were only generating money on their website, so they felt like they couldn't
0:29:07give away the articles in the RSS. So, I guess I forget if I only had excerpts. I forget what
0:29:15I had before. But I wanted to—I knew people wanted to read full articles from Daring Fireball
0:29:21in the RSS reader, and I wanted to make people happy. But I was already trying—the nascent days
0:29:27of my sponsorship system were there, too. And that's so I had my ads on the website.
0:29:32And so, I thought, "Well, I'll do this thing, and you pay $19, and then you'll get your own
0:29:37little private URL, and you can read the full content." And it did pretty well. I mean,
0:29:41it absolutely—the membership thing absolutely helped me in that first year when I went full
0:29:47time in 2006. I wouldn't have made it without it. My analogy was—it still is—is like,
0:29:57early 2006, I went full time, made the big announcement, asked people for their support.
0:30:02And we had, I forget how many, tens of thousands of dollars in savings that we had sort of,
0:30:08you know, "Okay, this is what we can live off while we try to get this thing into black."
0:30:12And it was like an airplane slowly approaching the ground, but then starting to pull up,
0:30:18you know, like by summer, it was like the monthly revenue was getting closer. It's like,
0:30:22but it's gonna come—this is gonna come really close to eating through all the savings
0:30:29until the point later in the year. But by the end of the year, it was break-even month to month,
0:30:35which was pretty amazing. And was there any fear of,
0:30:39I guess, like, reputational hits that you could take by doing this?
0:30:47I guess so, because, you know, I mean, my big fear would be that if it hadn't worked, and I had to
0:30:52take a full time job somewhere, you know, that either A, the job would, by some aspect of it,
0:31:02require me to stop writing during Fireball, right? Like, if I become a full time staff
0:31:08writer at Macworld or something like that, or in theory, there's some role of the dice over the last
0:31:1620 years where I wind up working at Apple, right? I mean, it could have happened at some point, and
0:31:24the earlier years were probably more likely. But obviously, you know, I don't know if you've ever
0:31:30noticed this, but most people who work at Apple don't write a personal blog, where they espouse
0:31:36strong opinions about Apple and its products and competitors, and etc. Would I have had to shudder
0:31:44during Fireball? I doubt it. But I mean, you know, some kind of announcement like, "Hey, I've taken
0:31:48a job at Apple, and we're moving to Cupertino, and you know, blah, blah, blah," would have
0:31:54disappointed me greatly, to say the least. Well, and you go ahead, right? I mean, that's kind of
0:31:59what's the biggest thing that's at stake in a lot of these cases. Well, and the other thing to me
0:32:03is that I've never been successful working for somebody else. I forget the longest I've ever had
0:32:11a job. But it's not much more than two years, and that's at anything. And it's because
0:32:18I'm a friendly fellow, and I think I get, you know, it's not like I'm irascible,
0:32:25and I'm not listening. It's just though, eventually, this is what I need to be doing,
0:32:31and I'm going to spend my time on, you know, time I should be spending on work, I would be spending
0:32:36writing stuff for during Fireball, because I just feel compelled to do it. And so what I
0:32:40desperately needed to do is figure out a way to make that work financially. Right. Well,
0:32:45that was always my, I'm right there with you. You know, my whole thing was always, when I run out of
0:32:50independent stuff that I absolutely need to do, then I'll go think about getting a job.
0:32:56That was, that was, and it's not like I had a trust fund. I, you know, I came from this little
0:33:05airplane engine factory town where I'm one of like 10 people who made it out of that town
0:33:10from a high school class. And it was more just, you know, living in Japan is such a huge life
0:33:18hack. I think that people have this misconstrued sense of the cost of living in Japan. Actually,
0:33:24living in Tokyo in my 20s was the only way I was able to do all the work I did and make as little
0:33:32money as I did. I was, you know, in my, for most of my 20s, I was making about $20,000 a year,
0:33:37max, like cobbling that together through certain projects and whatever. And my whole thing was like,
0:33:43as soon as I ran out of, I need to make this, I need to make this, I need to make this,
0:33:49then I'll go find a job somewhere else. But that impulse to work on these other projects was so
0:33:58overwhelming and all consuming that there's that Steve Jobs quote of like, you know,
0:34:02do you wake up in the morning and like, is, you know, are you doing the thing you want to do
0:34:07that day? You know, every day you ask, is this what I want to be doing? Is this what I want?
0:34:10And I just, every day I woke up and I had a thing that I must do. And that was, you know, I tried to
0:34:18basically protect the time around that by minimizing my cost of living. You know,
0:34:24for most of my 20s, my yearly, this is going to sound insane, but my yearly, like base cost
0:34:29of living was about $10,000. That was living in Tokyo. Right.
0:34:34That's crazy. I didn't know that the economics worked like that in Tokyo.
0:34:37If I had $10,000 coming in for the year, I would not, I could have a roof over my head and I could
0:34:44be eating decently well. And I could be, you know, working on all the projects that I wanted to work
0:34:49on because like, you know, like you said, a lot of web stuff, there's no, there's no cost to it.
0:34:54You know, the servers were, were relatively cheap. I did have a Rackspace server at one point,
0:34:59which was my biggest cost by far in my life. Absolutely. And like 50 bucks a month.
0:35:07Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. But it was, you know, that was, I needed that to do certain,
0:35:12certain programming things and have tasks processing data in the background and blah,
0:35:17blah, blah. And you know, that was, that was, that was my big expense. But you know,
0:35:23for the most part, you could do this online work in this kind of miraculous way where
0:35:28if you had a computer and a fast internet connection and in Japan, we, I've had fiber
0:35:33in Japan for the last 18 years. You know, and it's like 30 bucks a month. It's like,
0:35:39it's pretty, that was always just there. You know, you can kind of build as an, as an individual
0:35:45creator. I'd say the last 20 years have probably been one of the most miraculous, incredible
0:35:50moments in history in terms of what one person can do and the, and the amount of exposure they
0:35:56can get for their work. It's just, it's, it's astounding to think back on it.
0:36:00Well, I, I've, I was thinking about that rereading your essays on, on the system you've built for
0:36:07running special projects and how it is, it's, it's a longer list of components than, okay,
0:36:16get a shared hosting account and install movable type or WordPress or remember gray matter, you
0:36:22know, find a blogging package, unzip it, type something into a config file, and then you just
0:36:31start banging away on CSS and HTML templates and that's it. There's more components, but it's also
0:36:39very clearly something, you know, you, I, you and I are similar in a way that we're technically
0:36:47adept enough that we can do a lot of this on our own. You know, like I'm, I'm much more of a writer
0:36:53than anything else, but I have a computer science degree and that was, that was a huge, huge boon.
0:36:58And, you know, and there's a reason why a lot of the people whose site, you know, like Kotki,
0:37:04who's still going strong, but also, you know, was a web developer. Heather Armstrong at deuce.com
0:37:12was a web developer and could build her own website. You know, being able to build your
0:37:17own website was not necessarily required, but you either needed to do it yourself or have somebody
0:37:25who could do it for you. You couldn't just snap the pieces together.
0:37:28Brian Smith Right. Well, the way I'm doing it is definitely not
0:37:32the recommended way. You know, it's like my way I would, you know, I think I say that most of my,
0:37:38my writeups, I'm like, look, I'm going to show you how I do it and do not do this. Like, this is the
0:37:44anti-pattern unless, I mean, I also have a computer science degree and, you know, unless you really,
0:37:51really like this stuff. And for me, you know, like I like I wrote about in Wired the other day,
0:37:55you know, there is something really healing and palliative about this kind of work for me,
0:38:01that has a deep connection to my childhood. And, you know, it's like kind of this safe space
0:38:05server work. And so like, I am not turned off by it. But you could basically, I think, fire up like
0:38:11a ghost instance, you know, shared, you know, like a hosted ghost instance, and you basically have
0:38:16everything you need. It does the memberships, it does the newsletters, it does the blog, you have
0:38:20control over the design if you want, but you don't have to mess with it. And you have complete
0:38:25ownership of the whole stack, and requires a relatively little technical sort of input.
0:38:33And so I think, you know, that's, that's, that's pretty great. But yeah, definitely the my,
0:38:40my tech stack is not, not recommended. You know, it's like,
0:38:44You protest too much. We're from, we're from this era, you know, I feel like this is a great
0:38:51example of just carrying forward your baggage, you know, throughout your entire life. Like we
0:38:56carry all this psychic baggage with us and all this, you know, the physical baggage of like,
0:39:01injuries and stuff. And like, one of the things that definitely I think I'm carrying forward is
0:39:05like this need, this technical obsession baggage where I'm like, oh, if it's not, if it doesn't
0:39:10have 400 moving parts that I have to compile something in the in the terminal that it's not
0:39:14really doing the work. There is something I find meditative about all that crap. So
0:39:18that's how I justify it. All right, let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor. It's our
0:39:23good friends at flat file. One of the worst ways that you can spend your time is manually formatting
0:39:29spreadsheets. Boo, terrible. Thankfully, our friends at flat file have created portal. That's
0:39:36their elegant import button. So your customers can confidently import their data the first time.
0:39:43Onboarding customer data with flat file portal frees you, your engineers, your team,
0:39:49and your customers from having to manually format and fuss with spreadsheets for hours and no need
0:39:56to maintain your own custom data importer. That's what flat file does. They're the experts on
0:40:02parsing spreadsheets to get organized structured data out of them. Let them do it for you.
0:40:07Portal integrates with virtually any application and in minutes you can transform your customer
0:40:14data onboarding from emailing a bunch of Excel files back and forth, keeping track of versions
0:40:20on your own with the subject in the email to importing even the messiest customer data just
0:40:27in minutes. Are you ready to solve your data chaos? Visit flatfile.io. I'll repeat that URL
0:40:35for you. flatfile.io. So you mentioned the piece you just wrote, I think a couple days ago in Wired.
0:40:45It just came out yesterday. Yeah. Well, I started it three years ago, but it came out yesterday.
0:40:50This is so amazing that it came out right before you were on the show because this is how I think
0:40:54about it too. And I've been writing less code than I did when I was younger. And it's like,
0:41:04I don't want to say my skills have been atrophying, but my priorities to bubble up
0:41:11something on my weird Moonman to-do system, to bubble it up to, okay, here's the thing I'm
0:41:20actually going to spend this afternoon on, to be a programming project as opposed to writing
0:41:27something or reading something. It's gotten lower. And I've made an effort in recent months to do a
0:41:37little more of that. There's nothing, I don't really have a lot that's visible. And if there's
0:41:41anything I need to do going forward the rest of this year differently, it's to actually write
0:41:47about more of them. Daring Fireball used to have a lot more posts. Every once in a while,
0:41:52I get stuck reading old posts on Daring Fireball. And I'm like, "Hey, this was pretty good back then."
0:41:56But just explaining how I made a little thing that does a thing. And I've started making more
0:42:04little things, but I haven't taken the time to actually write them up. But the mental aspect of
0:42:11it that you mentioned is so true for me. I find it to be therapeutic. And depending on my mood,
0:42:20almost necessary. And it's interesting, I can't, I should be able to, right? Because this is what
0:42:29I do. I talk about this stuff and I write about this stuff. And I consider myself both a writer
0:42:34and a programmer. So I should be able to express myself more clearly about how I see the difference
0:42:40between writing a new iPhone review, a multi-thousand word iPhone review, and writing
0:42:49some kind of computer program to run on my server or something like that. There are similar parts
0:42:56to it, but there's something fundamentally more satisfying about programming. It's like, I feel
0:43:05more compelled to do prose writing, but it's the programming that is, "Hey, this is neat." And
0:43:12there's a thing you mentioned in it that once you get a piece of code running, it doesn't just feel
0:43:16like you made something. It feels like you've made something that has a bit of life to it.
0:43:21Jon Sorrentino Yeah. Yeah.
0:43:23Chris
0:43:49So, okay, let's back up. Let's back up. So part of it is I just want to work with editors because
0:43:54I want to get better at writing. So that's like, that's, I would say, 90, that's 70% of it. So it's
0:44:00just, I want to get better at writing and just writing on my own and writing for my newsletters
0:44:05or blogs or whatever. I can, you know, that activates a certain muscle of just doing the work.
0:44:11But if you go to the gym, you can go to the gym, you know, five times a week for 10 years,
0:44:18and you could be doing, you could just have stupid habits that you're stuck doing. And so I find like
0:44:24working with an editor is kind of like hiring a personal trainer or whatever. And working with a
0:44:28great editor is just such a joy. And I know that working with the right editor will elevate the
0:44:36quality of a piece far higher than I could get it on my own. And so, you know, I was working on a
0:44:43novel for years. And part of that process was applying for fellowships and applying for workshops.
0:44:51I was at, I did the Iowa Writers' Workshop program. They have like a two-month intensive summer
0:44:57edition of the Fiction Writers' Workshop there. And, you know, going out there and doing that,
0:45:04these were all things to basically force myself to work with people who have spent a lot of time
0:45:11thinking about this, these kinds of writing, in that case, the writing fiction, and in the case
0:45:16of working with editors at Wired or The Atlantic, you know, doing this sort of nonfiction, this,
0:45:23you know, 1000 to 1500 word, or 800 to 1500 word nonfiction stuff for a publication like Wired or
0:45:29The Atlantic. So a big part of it is just, if I write something that I'm kind of excited about,
0:45:35that I feel like, you know, hits on, like a quote unquote, sort of truth that I haven't seen
0:45:42articulated clearly, recently, you know, a lot of these things are kind of like have been done
0:45:47before written about 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there's something recent hasn't come
0:45:51up that's kind of hit on the same notes. And I feel like, okay, yeah, there's something interesting
0:45:55going on here that I feel is like, is very true for me. And I would like this idea to have the
0:46:05ability to impact or to reach as many people as possible. Wired just has a much bigger
0:46:11readership than anything I'm ever going to cobble together. So that's the other 30%. So it's 70%
0:46:16working with a great editor to make me better, and to learn how to think about writing better
0:46:23stories, and to elevate the story itself. And then the 30% is just the platform. And then
0:46:30somewhere in there, there's the payment component, which is less important now because I have the
0:46:35membership program, but is nice, like, Wired actually pays pretty well, like, I got paid
0:46:40decently for that piece. And so that's, that's, you know, altogether, that's kind of, that's
0:46:46how I end up deciding to put things in certain publications. And so when I, like I said, I wrote
0:46:52this, I started writing this three years ago, and I wrote it for one of my newsletters, the Roden
0:46:58newsletter. And a lot of times at the end of that Roden newsletter, I'll have like a big essay or
0:47:02I'll put, I kind of, I don't go into it thinking I'm going to write an essay, I have this, this
0:47:07topic I want to kind of play with. And it turns into an essay often. And I was thinking about
0:47:13server work, working on, I'd done all this server stuff, I moved off of one of my, one of those old
0:47:18Rackspace servers. And I found the process of that move to be so healing, and really important to be
0:47:25at that moment. And, and I started writing about that. And I got that Roden essay done. And I
0:47:31thought, you know, there's something more here. I don't want to just put this in the newsletter,
0:47:36and then have that be done. I want to think about a different place for this. And I'd like to work
0:47:44with an editor on this. And so that was kind of why I held it back. But, but sometimes I'll put
0:47:50stuff in the newsletter. And it just takes off like crazy, like the, like the, my fast software
0:47:56is the best software essay was originally in a newsletter. And then that had such an immediate
0:48:04visceral reach from just the newsletter, I gave it its own, I ripped it out of the newsletter,
0:48:10I cleaned it up a bit, gave it its own URL on my, on my homepage under the essays header. And
0:48:17that thing had crazy reach. So sometimes you like, you can have massive reach if you're an
0:48:21independent writer. But I find it so difficult to tell what is going to have, what's going to
0:48:27sort of strike that chord. And, and so I find a good way to kind of, if you have a piece that
0:48:33you really want to get out in the world, to a bigger audience than going with The Atlantic
0:48:38or Wired, if you can, if you can get in there is a way to kind of hack that.
0:48:43Ben Thompson and I have talked about the fact that neither, neither of us has an editor. And yeah,
0:48:48it's not that I'm opposed, but I'm certainly not going to hire one for Daring Firewall. Right?
0:48:56I mean, I don't know why I even laugh at that. I could, you know, it is an interesting skill,
0:49:02I think. And I'm not even saying, I'm not trying to say like my writing could not be improved
0:49:08through editing. But like for a couple of years, I was writing back page columns for Mac world a
0:49:17couple of times a year, which is an interesting experience. And, and when I first started doing
0:49:24it, the money was very meaningful to me. And it's a similar thing. Mac world paid very well
0:49:30for a back page column. And, and it was important. It was fascinating because my dad was incredibly
0:49:38impressed. It's like, I think he finally understood what I do. Because he could, he could go and buy a
0:49:45copy of Mac world and open it up to the back page. And there's my picture and my, my byline,
0:49:51you know, in print. But my time writing the Mac world columns, I don't recall ever once having
0:50:01one really seriously improved through editing. Not, and I, I, I'm sure that there are people
0:50:08who worked at Mac world who are listening to this. I don't mean to slag on their editors at all.
0:50:17It just, I, you know, I've always been a pretty careful self-editing writer. It's,
0:50:25yeah. And a few times when my, my columns were changed, it was for the worse because they were
0:50:34edited slightly for space. And I felt like I already had no needless words to omit, you know,
0:50:43and that the point was lost. Right. Well, I, you know, it is, it is, I think finding great editors
0:50:52is critical, you know, and I think that's, that's why when I, when I say I'm pitching to Wired or
0:50:58whatever, I'm really pitching to specific people. And I'm only, I only want to work with this person
0:51:03or that person, you know, and that's, that's because I know that they're gonna, they're gonna
0:51:07elevate it. But even with my book last year, you know, Kisa by Kisa, I worked with, I actually had,
0:51:15I had two, two editors, really. One was sort of a technical copy focused editor that definitely
0:51:28made it better. There were just all these inconsistencies and stuff. And then I had another
0:51:32editor who was, was, was sort of on a bigger picture level. And these are super talented
0:51:38people and super accomplished people. And they absolutely made that manuscript better, you know,
0:51:46like, and a lot, a lot of it for me is just having the conversations, you know, there's this like
0:51:50old adage of like, how do you, how do you help a physicist do, you know, work at the blackboard?
0:51:55It's like, buy him a dog, you know, just give him someone to talk to. That's all, that's all you
0:52:00need a lot of times is just someone to articulate like, what did you do today? What are you doing
0:52:05in this paragraph? Now Skaard, the guy who wrote the My Struggles, mega, you know, auto novel,
0:52:13you know, I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He's, I think he's Norwegian. He wrote like,
0:52:21like, I think like 90% of all Norwegian people have read his novels. But he wrote this two,
0:52:263000 page kind of pseudo autobiographical fiction thing. And part of that process for him writing
0:52:34was that at the end of every day, every day, he would write and then he would call his editor and
0:52:40he would read to the editor everything he wrote that day. Just as a way of like, am I crazy? Is
0:52:46this shit? You know, it's like, is it does this make sense? You know, it just I think like that
0:52:52sounding board for certain writers can be so powerful. And, and so that's for me, that's
0:52:59definitely kind of like what where I'm reaching for when I'm when I'm reaching to work with an
0:53:05editor. That said, I have had essays turn, they turn very into very different things because I
0:53:14was young and I and I was nervous. And I was publishing with a big name brand publication and
0:53:21I was afraid to push back. And I've had things go out that I'm actually somewhat embarrassed by
0:53:26because the message was changed so dramatically from what I originally intended to write to what
0:53:33ended up getting published that I did. I definitely, I think it made me cautious about
0:53:39editors. And it's made me more aware of what you should fight for when you're working with someone
0:53:46and not to be afraid to fight for that because, you know, the worst thing that can happen is that
0:53:50you have this, this message that's been kind of perverted by the editorial process. Because the
0:53:56publication can sometimes have an image for where they want the piece to go, for whatever reason.
0:54:01And, you know, that may, if that's not aligned with what you want, then definitely pull out,
0:54:05you know, if talking to young writers out there who may end up working with editors, like,
0:54:10you know, own, make sure you know where you want that thing to go and, and fight for it,
0:54:15fight for fight for that core. On a sentence by sentence level, you might have to give up some
0:54:20things. But like, if the core message is being perverted, definitely pull back. And you know,
0:54:25in some cases, maybe even just pull the piece if it's not going to go where you want it to go.
0:54:28My problem, my other problem with the Macworld backpage column was that I'm fundamentally
0:54:37too selfish about Daring Fireball. And the pieces I see, and this is where I think I see the
0:54:45difference, like this, your column here, that you just published in Wired has a different feel to it
0:54:52than your special projects writing, right? Your special projects writing is more intimate.
0:54:59And you've got a voice that is sort of knowing, because you know, you're writing for this audience
0:55:07of people who already know who you are, as opposed to the giant megaphone of Wired, where you're
0:55:12writing for an audience where I'll bet most of the people who've already read it had never heard of
0:55:17you before or don't recall hearing, you know, right, right. My problem with the Macworld backpage
0:55:23is that they were just, they were the same things that I write for Daring Fireball, except when I
0:55:29wrote for the back page, they had to be exactly 700 words or whatever nine, I think it was like,
0:55:34900 words. And if I had a 600 word idea, well, I had to figure out a way to pad it. And if I had
0:55:41a 1200 word idea, I had to figure out a way to cut it. And I was very frustrated by that. And,
0:55:46but I also, all you know, it, I love, still like Macworld, but at the time Macworld,
0:55:55the Macworld backpage was, that was the shiznit, right? That's where David Pogue
0:56:00used to write. That's where Steven Levy used to write in the 80s. And there I was, you know,
0:56:07this is what I wanted to do when I started writing about this stuff is be on the back page of
0:56:10Macworld. And then as soon as I got there, I, I wanted to not be there anymore. Well, when,
0:56:16when were you, when were you doing the Macworld stuff? 2006 to 2008. I want to say, do you,
0:56:21do you feel like that had a, like a marked effect on your profile? Like, do you think that that
0:56:27brought in a bunch of Daring Fireball? Yeah, it certainly didn't hurt. You know, I think,
0:56:31I think I did just the right amount of it. I don't want to complain too much, but, but the fundamental
0:56:35tension I felt was that when I did a back page column that I didn't feel came out right. And,
0:56:41and that, that hard length limit is not a good skill that I have. And, and by, by exercising
0:56:51my writing muscles, writing at Daring Fireball, I wasn't building that muscle, right? Like writing
0:56:57to a set back page column length, you know, I, those muscles have atrophied for me. Um, so if I
0:57:05had, I turned in a bad column, I felt terribly guilty about it. Just terrible because it's like,
0:57:10this is, I just knew that this wasn't the best work that I could do. And here I, here I am
0:57:15so lucky that I'm able to write at, on this page that I've always wanted to be on.
0:57:19But then on the other hand, when I'd write a really good one,
0:57:24I would feel terrible that it was at Macworld and not at Daring Fireball.
0:57:31Right, right. Cause you're not, yeah, you're not, you're not building the foundation of your,
0:57:35your castle or whatever, you know, you're giving, you're giving that brick to someone else.
0:57:40Yeah, no, that's, I think that's a very universal feeling for a lot of people who do independent
0:57:47work and then, uh, you know, go off to, to either work in a company or work at a publication.
0:57:52And that's what, you know, part of what's been interesting about the sub stack thing is like,
0:57:55basically people building up inside of a big, a big publication, the cache and the name value,
0:58:04their brand inside of a pub, and then taking that brand value and monetizing it, you know,
0:58:11basically going in reverse. And, uh, I think that's really fascinating. You know, I think in
0:58:17some ways it's really smart. Um, and in other ways, I think a lot of people will find out that
0:58:25being, you know, doing independent work is exhausting in a way that, you know, having,
0:58:29having the, the institution there is actually quite helpful sometimes.
0:58:32Right. No, no, no question about it. I wonder how long it'll last for some people, you know?
0:58:37Yeah.
0:58:39I know, uh, so, uh, you know, Andrew Sullivan has as a big, big high name sub stack now. And he,
0:58:49he came from the world of magazine editing, but then had his personal blog for a number of years,
0:58:56during the Bush administration. And, you know, I think he's been pretty clear that he effectively
0:59:00burned out on it. Um, and I just wonder, you know, what's the difference going to be this time.
0:59:06And, and he's enormously prolific. I mean, you know, uh, his weekly newsletter, it's like,
0:59:13I can't believe that every week on the week, he, he couldn't write that much.
0:59:16Right. No, well, there's a couple of newsletter writers that I just kind of want to, I want to
0:59:22like pull them aside and go, you don't have to write this much. It's just, it's too much.
0:59:27Sometimes, sometimes, uh, I don't know about you, but my newsletter folder in my inbox,
0:59:32it's like increasingly difficult to go in there because I'm like, okay, all right,
0:59:37we've got another 5,000 word, you know, PC. It's, it's so, um, it's so, I'm, I'm, I'm blown away by
0:59:46the, by the prolific nature of some of these, some of these writers. And like, I think it really
0:59:51does bring up sustainability issues, like psychic sustainability issues. Cause it's like, you can
0:59:58burn out for sure. Um, and I, you know, if you build up a certain momentum and you feel like you,
1:00:04your readers have an expectation, I think that's, that's where the burnout happens is like,
1:00:08you're writing these 5,000 word giant newsletters a couple of times a week. And, uh, you know,
1:00:14you want to take a break, but you're worried everyone's going to freak out. But the reality is,
1:00:17is that no one's going to freak out and everyone's going to be like, Hey, take a break.
1:00:21That's fine. Um, but we can kind of back ourselves into these weird psychic corners and,
1:00:26you know, and that's where you, uh, that's where you get into trouble, I think. So,
1:00:29All right. Let me take another break here and thank our next friends, our good friends at
1:00:33Squarespace. Squarespace is a long time supporter of this show. You've heard me talk about them
1:00:39probably dozens of times, all in one publishing platform, everything from domain name registration
1:00:47to componentizing your website with what you want. Do you want to blog? Do you want to host a
1:00:53podcast? Do you, are you an artist? Do you want to put up a portfolio of your work? Um,
1:01:00dozens and dozens of great templates to choose from, but you can tweak those templates to your
1:01:06heart's content. If you do know how to code with CSS and HTML, and you can get in there to your
1:01:11heart's content. And if you don't know the difference between HTML and CSS or somebody,
1:01:17you know, has come to you for help with a website and you know, they don't know CSS,
1:01:21they can design and tweak the website in a purely visual manner, right on Squarespace's website.
1:01:29Great analytics. It's, it's just a great service. People from this podcast keep signing up for
1:01:37Squarespace websites. They keep coming back to sponsored some more, put it in your back pocket.
1:01:42Maybe you don't need a website right now today in, in April, 2021, maybe later in the year,
1:01:48you will. Well, remember Squarespace go to squarespace.com/talk show that squarespace.com/talk
1:01:59show. And when you, when you do that, you get a 30 day free trial when your 30 days are up and you
1:02:04want to keep the website. Just remember that same code talk show, T A L K S H O W. You save 10%
1:02:11off your first purchase, 10%. You could prepay for up to a year, save a lot of money. My thanks
1:02:17to Squarespace for their continuing support of the show. All right, let's get into some complaining.
1:02:25Fast software is, fast software is good software. That was a good article. What's,
1:02:30what, summarize the gist of your argument. Fast software is good software.
1:02:34You know, software that I think anytime your software, basically fast software allows you
1:02:42to maintain a slow flow state. So you can, anytime software slows down and, and this is not just,
1:02:51you know, whatever, if you're doing ML processing or whatever, doing a big database chunk,
1:02:56you know, whatever dump or whatever, that's going to take time. Sure. If you're rendering frames or
1:03:00that's going to take time, I'm not talking about that space of software. I'm talking about kind of
1:03:04interface components. I'm talking about keyboard accessibility. I'm talking about just the speed at
1:03:10which the software moves with you. So if that, you know, bicycle for the mind metaphor that Jobs is,
1:03:16you know, there's always referenced. If, if you take that, uh, as kind of the base for this,
1:03:21it's like you want the bike to just be really beautifully tuned and you want the gears to change
1:03:27when you change the gears immediately. You don't want the derailleur to get stuck. You don't want
1:03:32the brakes to squeal. You just want the thing to feel like a beautifully engineered, well-oiled
1:03:38machine. And, and fastness, I think is a core part of that. So it's like as, as if you want to move
1:03:43between, you know, this window and that window, if you want to carry a piece of data from this window
1:03:48to that window, if you want to select something, if you want to fix something, if you want to
1:03:53manipulate something, it all should happen instantaneously. I think at the speed at which
1:03:58you want to want to do that action, that's kind of the base of it. I sometimes think back to, uh,
1:04:04my days doing print graphic design and learning QuarkXPress at the Drexel student newspaper
1:04:12and how incredibly powerful QuarkXPress, I know it still exists. I'm sure it still
1:04:20does the same stuff it does. Um, what do you use for your book? Do you use InDesign?
1:04:25InDesign? Yeah. InDesign was, was Quark for Adobe. I mean, InDesign is, you know,
1:04:33they used to be that there was Quark and PageMaker and PageMaker sort of fell by the,
1:04:40you know, fell out of relevancy and Adobe sort of backed the wrong horse there. And then they,
1:04:46you know, InDesign felt right at home to somebody who knew Quark. And it was, you know,
1:04:54I think it was unofficially code named the Quark killer at Adobe. Um, but I think back to like
1:05:01the mid nineties and how it, at the student newspaper and, you know, we had old computers
1:05:07too, old Macs, you know, the whole place, uh, more or less spent its entire budget on buying new,
1:05:16new Macs every couple of years just to keep the thing running. Um, it, it, Quark was so,
1:05:22and I know people used to complain about Quark the company, but Quark, the, you know, and that
1:05:28they're, they're, they apparently were run by relatively unpleasant people and that they had
1:05:33onerous licensing terms and, um, but man, the app was so lean and mean and fast and it made things,
1:05:43anything that could be fast was fast and precise, very precise. And it, and, uh, I still remember
1:05:53keyboard shortcuts. And I remember that like, if you were like, if you selected an item on the
1:05:58pace board and we're using the arrow keys to nudge it around, I think it defaulted to like hundreds
1:06:03of an inch. And if you wanted to make it thousands of an inch, you just held down the option key,
1:06:07why you use the arrows and just little things like that. And then if there was something else
1:06:12that was similar, like you'd have to, you know, you'd wanted more precise nudging, guess what?
1:06:16You use the option key. Um, I don't know. And it's like, there's so much, it was so,
1:06:22it was so fast on those old computers. Imagine how fast it could be today. And yet so much of
1:06:29our software doesn't have that, that feel and it doesn't have that precision. And one of the things
1:06:36I know you and I have been convincing behind the scenes before we come on, but talking about
1:06:41frustrations with iOS and maybe iPad iOS in particular, but I, I still think it's,
1:06:49I don't know what the answer is, but I know that Apple didn't find it yet, which to the question
1:06:56of how do you precisely select text on a tech, on a touch screen. It is incredible how often I'm
1:07:02trying to select text across lines and can't quite get the start and end exactly where I want it.
1:07:09Whereas 25 years ago, I was never off by a character. I just, and I never had to think
1:07:15about it. Yeah. Yeah, no, I've been thinking about this quite a bit over the last couple
1:07:22of days. Cause I figured we'd, we'd, we'd, we'd dig into this world and, and I think like what's
1:07:26for me, the answer to iPad OS is the MacBook M1. I just, that's it. I've, I've, I've really
1:07:36been thinking a lot about the miracle that is Mac OS, how actually iOS feels like what you'd expect
1:07:48software or operating systems to work like in, in a certain way. And in a way iOS is really
1:07:54the sensible operating system. It is everything about it is totally sensible. Everything is
1:08:00sandboxed. Everything is locked down. There's walls everywhere. You're kind of on a, on an iPhone.
1:08:05I think it's on a, on a, or on a phone size device. I think it is one of the most perfect
1:08:12instantiations of an OS out there. You know, it's like where you're just doing single tasks.
1:08:16You're not really moving data between things. You're not trying to do anything that's too
1:08:21complicated. You're just, you know, it's like an in and out kind of device. You're not theoretically,
1:08:25I know we all live with these things attached to our faces now, but theoretically, you know,
1:08:30the use case for, for a mobile phone or a mobile phone sized internet device is to go in and get a
1:08:38little bit of information, you know, pay for something or whatever, and then get out, you
1:08:43know, it's meant to be in and out. And I think iOS is superb. It is so good. It is, you know,
1:08:49easy to set up very little vectors for attacks. You know, you're not gonna, you don't have to run
1:08:56antivirus software. You don't have to worry about what you're installing. You know, it's like in a
1:08:59lot of ways it's incredible. And then the problem was putting it on the iPad and then giving the
1:09:06iPad such an amazing screen. It's such an amazing processor in that 2018 iPad Pro and being like,
1:09:15here you go. Here's a, here's a Ferrari engine. But we've strapped it to, you know, the Homer
1:09:21Simpson car. You're just like, I can't, I can't use this thing. I can't, you know, I can't maximize
1:09:28the power of this engine except for in like very weird ways where it's like a single task of like,
1:09:35okay, I can render this video really quickly. But the process of like, importing the video from my
1:09:40high end camera is onerous and impossible. There's no file system that I can access, you know, it's
1:09:46just like all these, all these things that kind of got in the way of really maximizing the value of
1:09:52what was on offer. But I would say you can't, it's really difficult to balance out that incredible
1:10:00simplicity of the iPhone experience, and really the kind of like tuned perfection of that use case
1:10:07for general computing. And so anyway, that the tension for me with with iPad was always that.
1:10:14And then at the same time, you know, 2018, we were deep in the quagmire hell of the Intel MacBook,
1:10:22it was the worst keyboard. You know, it was the processors weren't getting any faster,
1:10:26it was expensive, they were hot, the battery lasted like what, two hours?
1:10:30The keyboard was the worst part, because that was self inflicted on Apple's part, right?
1:10:34It was like the, so stupid, just the added indignity of these are not great computers,
1:10:40they're struggling, you know, the one that everybody wanted, the retina MacBook Air was
1:10:45years late. And you know, it was because Intel didn't have chips that would let Apple make the
1:10:52Mac, retina MacBook Air that they wanted to make. Yeah, well, I think, and that people wanted to buy,
1:10:59right? Yeah, no, in hindsight, the 2016 MacBook Pro is probably the worst computer Apple's ever
1:11:07released, like bar none. It's just, and maybe in the 90s or the 80s, that I like, my history is a
1:11:15little fuzzy back then we couldn't, we couldn't afford Apple computers when I was a kid. So I was
1:11:20never paying attention to. So we were always like, if we had anything, it was I remember there's a
1:11:25period of Apple clones that existed. Oh, Scully. Yeah, what were they called? I forget what they
1:11:29were called. And they even had, but that was, they stole like ROMs out of discarded Apple IIs to like,
1:11:36is that what they did? But that was all we, that was all we had. Apple clone.
1:11:41Did they clone the ROM like in Halt and Fish fires? Something like that. It was,
1:11:47they were crazy. They never really took off. No, but I mean, anyway, so I buy Apple history back
1:11:53there is extremely fuzzy, but I started with like the late, like whatever was released in 1999, the
1:12:01power book that was in 1999. That was my first real Mac. And I would say of all of the computers
1:12:08I've owned, yeah, the 2016 MacBook Pro, the keyboard didn't work. It broke on me multiple
1:12:13times. The USB C ports were bad. I don't know if you remember, but like USB plugs just wouldn't stay
1:12:21in. They didn't have, they didn't have the clicking mechanism. They didn't have like that docking
1:12:25mechanism that everything seems to have now where they have these really secure connections. Anyway,
1:12:29just, and the battery would last 12 seconds. It was just truly horrible. So I think it was
1:12:35all of those things together. And then you have this beautiful, super capable iPad and you're
1:12:40just like, Oh, I want this to be my main computer, but I can't do anything on it. And there was
1:12:47a sort of stretch there. I know we've reiterated a lot since the M1s came out and talking about Apple's
1:12:54sort of, you know, that summit that they had me and Panzorino and Inafrid come out for,
1:13:00where they sort of re-emphasized their commitment to pro Mac hardware and software.
1:13:07But it was a depressing number of years because Apple doesn't explain itself. And so they're not
1:13:15going to say, look, the reason we're still selling a $999 MacBook Air without a retina to screen,
1:13:23all of these years after the iPad and iPhone have gone retina and non-retina just looks so
1:13:30bad, even though it's, you know, a more expensive product, you know, that you could, you know,
1:13:36configure a MacBook Air for 1500 bucks. And yet it was still not retina, looked really dated.
1:13:43Tim Cook gave an interview at one point where he said, and people really latched onto it,
1:13:48but he said something like that he does 80% of his work on an iPad. It created the perception
1:13:54that the Mac was on its way out. Right. And, you know, I never believed it, but I was worried
1:14:02about it. Right. Like I would not have bet on it, but I also understand why people who would have
1:14:08bet on it were thinking it. They weren't crazy. Right. The MacBook Air really, their most popular,
1:14:15single most popular Mac ever made by far the MacBook Air. Somebody, people who've worked in
1:14:23Apple stores have told me, you have no idea how many people like by what margin MacBook Air's,
1:14:30I don't know if that's true right now. I haven't, I don't know about, but I would,
1:14:33I would bet that it is though. Cause I, I think most people, if they're going to buy an M1,
1:14:37they want a portable, not a Mac mini, even though it's cool that the Mac mini exists.
1:14:43And I don't think they see the value in the more expensive 13 inch MacBook Pro. I love it.
1:14:49I'm on, I'm on, I'm on a MacBook Air right now. It's, you know, I, I think that it's so
1:14:55incredibly popular and yet they, they seemingly abandoned it. Right. And they, and they weren't
1:15:02going to explain why they weren't going to say, look, we know that this is outdated. We have big
1:15:07plans, but we can't build. I mean, and part of it isn't, is just Apple being Apple. And part of it
1:15:13is that no professional company is going to throw Intel under the bus. You know, that's just not how
1:15:18you do business, you know? Right. But at the same time, they're not going to do what other companies
1:15:23do and cut prices and say, well, okay, the MacBook Air is getting old, but how about this? We'll sell
1:15:29it for $650 because it's three years. This ridiculous computer is three years old because
1:15:35Apple likes to maintain their price points so that when they do come out with a new one,
1:15:40it's not like, oh, the new retina MacBook Air jerked the price up 50% because they had cut
1:15:46the price on the old one. Right. So Apple, you know, and, and the, how can I forget the trash can
1:15:52Mac Pro, which had, which languished for even longer. Right. And it was ridiculously expensive.
1:15:59It started at five, $5,000 and, you know, five years in hadn't been updated.
1:16:05It looked like it was, it was, it was a, it was a dark period. And especially if like
1:16:12me and you, you just feel like the Mac or Mac OS is the OS where it's the bicycle for your mind.
1:16:22And I use my iPad a lot and I love, you know, the iPhone, but I don't feel, I don't, I, I've often
1:16:30used the analogy of like feeling like you're pedaling uphill versus pedaling downhill to
1:16:35extend the bicycle for the mind thing. And the problem with that metaphor is that usually when
1:16:41you say something's going downhill, it means it's bad. Right. But that's not what I mean. I mean,
1:16:48it's good. It feels like the bike is propelling itself and you don't even have to, you don't even
1:16:52realize, you know, you're just, all you have to do is steer and you don't have to exert any force to
1:16:58make the bike go down. Whereas when, you know, I used to have for, I had a six month internship
1:17:04right outside Philadelphia and at the, there's a huge hill. I had to ride my bike up every morning
1:17:10and it was a internship over the summer. And there were times where I've, they were always,
1:17:16never, it was never an issue. I had my own office, but there were times where I would just be drenched
1:17:21with sweat, but then on the way home, I got to go downhill and it's sort of the way you want it,
1:17:27right? It's better to work hard to get to work. And then when the day's over and you get to go
1:17:31home and have fun, you just go flying down the hill at 40 miles an hour. I have that feeling
1:17:38about Mac OS and it was worrisome to me when it felt like, you know, maybe they're not committed
1:17:46to it. And now we have these M1 Macs and to me, the best overall version of Mac OS in quite a
1:17:54while. Maybe it was like Catalina was so buggy for me for most of the year. And I think in hindsight,
1:18:03it might be because they had to pull or chose to pull engineers to work on Big Sur so that
1:18:10Big Sur would be ready for the M1, you know, Apple Silicon. And so maybe being the release right
1:18:17before a processor transition was sort of a bad roll of the dice for Catalina. I was just going
1:18:23to say this, but just this paucity of engineers issue at Apple always strikes me as insane,
1:18:29you know, that there's this limited number, this very, very limited number of engineers,
1:18:33and they have to be kind of moved between big projects. But yeah, I mean, but maybe that was
1:18:39the case with Catalina, like just all the heavy hitters were off somewhere else getting this thing
1:18:45ready for the M1. Well, it does sound like that, right? How can you be the richest company in the
1:18:49world and be starved for engineers? But on the other hand, there is the mythical man month,
1:18:53right? And that I think Apple very consistently has always understood, at least from the next
1:19:01reunification onward, you know, under Steve Jobs' leadership, that the mythical man month is real,
1:19:10and that you've got to keep teams, however many thousands of engineers they have, they get broken
1:19:15up into relatively small teams. I know a bunch of people who work at Apple, but most of the people,
1:19:20almost everybody I know at Apple is effectively on a small team. And I think that's sort of the
1:19:27only way to get anything done. I, you know. Yeah, well, but I think that confluence of
1:19:34feeling like Apple is letting the macOS world sort of like dissolve, you know, in all sorts of
1:19:45different ways. And the MacBooks themselves were just not good machines, not reliable machines.
1:19:49And then Catalina being truly, for me too, really unreliable OS, you know, that just felt
1:19:56unpolished, which is not something you want your operating system to feel like. It's like,
1:20:03you want that foundation to be as strong as possible if you're working on all these big
1:20:07projects. And you know, you're essentially your life force is connected with this operating system.
1:20:14But the, I think like the Phoenix Rising ascendance of Big Sur plus the M1s, for me,
1:20:22has just really made me feel good. I just feel, I don't know about you, but I just feel like,
1:20:29yes. And, you know, the corollary of that too is like, I just don't worry now about iPadOS.
1:20:36It's like, oh, okay, this, okay, as long as macOS is being cared for. And truly, like,
1:20:43this operating system is, I think, the aberration, right? So it's like, if you think about what
1:20:48happened to get to this point of this, like, and I really think macOS is a beautiful combination of
1:20:54usability and power. And, you know, even some of the system security stuff they've added,
1:21:01doesn't really irk me as much as it irks other folks. But like, I think some of it is useful.
1:21:07But like, the fact that Next had to happen, right, so Steve getting kicked out of Apple had to happen,
1:21:13Next had to happen. Next OS being such an incredible OS, even if it had so few
1:21:20user seats in the world. And then that being, you know, the foundation for macOS, OS X, or
1:21:28Apple. Another thing that had to happen in there is Apple needed to, for us to get from there to
1:21:36here, Apple's own next, quote unquote, next generation operating system efforts had to
1:21:44spectacularly fail, right? Because the worst thing, it seemed at the time that like,
1:21:50Copeland, maybe you weren't using a Mac in the mid 90s, but Jason Sennell and I have talked about it,
1:21:55was that they, you know, they had these next generation, several of them, it's not worth
1:21:59going into the details. But it was always like Yoda talking to Luke Skywalker, always your eyes
1:22:05on the future, you know, and they were, Apple was always talking about operating systems that they
1:22:11planned to come out in three or four years, like crazy by today's standards. Like what, how can you
1:22:16be talking about an operating system years in advance, while the one you're selling today is
1:22:21technically falling apart, and in by by then modern standards. But the, it seemed at the time
1:22:29that the worst thing that could happen would be for this Apple's next generation operating system
1:22:34to fall apart, just flame out. But I think in hindsight, the really worst thing that could
1:22:40have happened would have been if it had just been sort of like, kind of good enough, right? And it
1:22:46would have, you know, then they wouldn't have had to buy next, we probably would have been left with
1:22:50something far less elegant and durable, right, that we'd still be talking about in the year 2021,
1:22:56as though it's, it's like you said, a phoenix rising from the ashes and is resurgent.
1:23:03You know, sometimes it's better to fail completely than to sort of half-ass your way through it.
1:23:07Yeah, well, and I mean, look at the thing that they're able to pick up and run with. I mean,
1:23:13the fact that that this massive consumer-focused facing OS has a BSD core to it, the fact that
1:23:21there's a terminal that you can drop into and kind of install and compile and run pretty much
1:23:26any piece of software you can find in the world, like, I'm so grateful for this flexibility.
1:23:34And then on top of it, being able to kind of do a certain level of scripting, and, you know, I find
1:23:41it to be a pleasurable universe to live in, you know, and this is a universe I live in for, you
1:23:47know, sometimes 10, 15 hours a day. And I think it's, this is why, in that like fast software,
1:23:54the best software, SA, like I have this kind of passionate/crazy obsession with this stuff, is that
1:24:03this is a fundamental tool for most humans. Like, this is the main tool for most of us living today
1:24:11who are doing a certain kind of work out there in the world. And like, to not expect the best
1:24:17version of that tool is crazy. It's like tantamount to like, being like, "Oh, hey, I'm going to use
1:24:24that. I'm a carpenter, and the hammer I'm going to use, like, sometimes the handles is going to,
1:24:29is just going to fold in on itself. It's going to break the handles. We don't, we just don't know
1:24:32how to make a good handle. And so I'm going to be hammering some nails and like, I don't know,
1:24:36one out of every five hammers, like the thing's just going to kind of fall apart, and I got to
1:24:39put a new handle on it. And that's just, that's just the hammers we got to live with. That's the
1:24:42hammer. It's like, no, that's insane. Like, figure out how to make a good hammer. Like, that's crazy.
1:24:47You would never as a carpenter accept that. And so I feel similarly, the problem with software and
1:24:53OS is that it's obviously so complex and so abstract that for most people, they can't
1:24:59articulate what it is that doesn't feel right about the tool. And so when I write essays like that,
1:25:04I'm just trying to give, like engineers and folks working in companies the fodder to be like, "Look,
1:25:11this is what, this is what I want us to aim for," you know, and I've had a lot of CEOs and, and
1:25:19independent software developers write to me and say, "Thank you for that. We've used this as like
1:25:23a, as a blueprint to kind of like, to think about features and to think about optimizations." And,
1:25:28you know, I think, like Patrick Collison's, you know, spoken to me about it, and, you know,
1:25:33I think that's, it's kind of a philosophy internally that Stripe had been operating under,
1:25:39you know, this, this idea of fast quickness and, you know, the API fastness and API smartness.
1:25:44And, you know, I think their company is a great example of doing that well, leads to success,
1:25:52you know, and like we were talking about earlier about these abstract things that you invest in,
1:25:55like, well, if I, if I invest in making it fast, because what you're talking about when you're
1:25:59talking about speed in software is effectively infrastructure and infrastructure, like I talk
1:26:04about in that, that wired essay is something that a lot of people have a difficult time
1:26:09understanding the value of, right? Because it doesn't have this immediate return,
1:26:12but you have to believe it's almost like a theology of, of, of software here is that you
1:26:18have to believe that the investment in this stuff is going to lead you to some sort of,
1:26:23you know, afterlife heaven, you know, in, in, in just pleasure ability and joy that is being spread
1:26:29to, you know, the, whatever potentially millions or billions of users of your software out in the
1:26:33world. I think that's really, there's almost like an ethical component to it because so many people
1:26:38are affected by these decisions and that to give those people a smooth, beautiful tool is just,
1:26:45to me, it's like so fundamental when we live in these worlds all day long.
1:26:50I know that, and it's hard to peg the exact, what's the anniversary we should celebrate from
1:26:56Mac OS X. And I think the one that just passed a couple of weeks ago, where it's 20 years to
1:27:02when the first version shipped to customers in boxes for $129, here's where you go to buy it.
1:27:15I that's as good of one as any. And I, this is one of those pieces where I started and it just never,
1:27:22it wasn't, it just wasn't coming out right. And I don't know why. But there is something
1:27:28about the durability of Mac OS X that it, and I think you touched on this, like,
1:27:35where would we be? We've got one OS that really works for me mentally. That's it. And if it wasn't
1:27:41for Mac OS X, I don't know what I would do. I really don't. I mean, there's only so long you
1:27:48could hold on to the old version and what, Windows? My son has a gaming PC, so I've gotten a taste of
1:27:56modern Windows. And it is, I see why people like it. And my son likes his PC and I get the whole
1:28:03gaming thing. But it is such a collection of technical debt and user interface cruft that
1:28:14it is kind of interesting that these two OSs that are seen as rivals, but they really are.
1:28:22There's a very different fundamental philosophy to what an operating system for users should do
1:28:29that Microsoft and Apple embody. And it's kind of interesting that the two that have decades,
1:28:36you know, that are truly, I mean, who would have thought? I mean, and like 25 years ago,
1:28:42would you ever thought we're still using Macs and Windows? It, you know, it didn't, that wasn't how
1:28:47computers worked in the 80s, in the early 90s. It was like, new things came and went, and operating
1:28:54systems died out and were replaced, you know, and the idea that you could have these operating
1:29:00systems that are here for decades, many decades, you know, it had never been done before. So I
1:29:08don't know that we knew it could be done. But when you look at Mac OS X today, you look at Big Sur,
1:29:14it is very hard for me to find a lot of spots in the OS where you would say, well, if they were
1:29:19going to do it all over again, it, they wouldn't have all this crap here. This, you know, system
1:29:26preferences is the one area a couple people have talked about, like that's the system preferences
1:29:31feels a little dated, especially the way that there's these little tiny boxes where you enter
1:29:36a bunch of things, and the window isn't resizable. And it, like you were talking about some of the
1:29:43new security features, I think they've done a good job of finding a middle ground of annoying us
1:29:49versus protecting us. The problem to me is the information architecture, that it's sort of
1:29:54hierarchical information that isn't presented in a hierarchical way, and it's hard to just see it all
1:29:59at once. And it's very strange to me that the iPhone has a better and more logical preferences
1:30:07app than the Mac. Sure, yeah. When it's the one that you're supposed to fiddle with less, right?
1:30:15Right. Yeah, well, I mean, I think, you know, in to what you were saying about us having still the
1:30:22same OS as we had 25 years ago, that's what makes iOS so impressive is that it came out of nowhere
1:30:30and it's now, is it the most used OS in the world? No, Android's got to be the most used.
1:30:36Android is. And it's the most used one that...
1:30:41It has, actually, I was going to say something snarky, but then I realized
1:30:45you probably have a billion Android listeners. No, I don't. I don't think I do. No, you should see.
1:30:50I think you'd be shocked. I recently disabled, a couple of weeks ago, I disabled Google Analytics.
1:30:59I actually don't even have, I don't have analytics on Darren Faribault at the moment. I guess I,
1:31:04that's, no, I don't even, I just, just give it, because you know what, here's what was,
1:31:09this is the way my sick mind works, Craig. I wanted to get rid of Google Analytics,
1:31:15but I was stuck choosing what to try to replace it with. And none of, you know, there's Plausible
1:31:20and Fathom are at the top of the list and seem pretty modern and very privacy minded,
1:31:26but I couldn't make a decision between them. And I was like, well, you know what, in the meantime,
1:31:30why don't I just shut off Google Analytics? Because then I can, you know, I could get the
1:31:35little privacy thing up in the Safari toolbar to stop giving me a less than sterling grain.
1:31:42Oh, interesting, huh.
1:31:43And I thought, here's what I thought, that'll force me to choose. And then it turned, it turns
1:31:49out, I turned it off and it's like, you know what, you don't need to know how many people are coming
1:31:53to your website. You don't. All these, all these things that, yeah, again, this is like the, you
1:31:59know, technical debt that you carry forward, right? It's like, we have this, you know, we put
1:32:04analytics on websites 20 years ago, and so we kind of keep doing it. And for me, I took Google
1:32:10Analytics off my site too, a couple months ago. And I think the most, the only real like tension
1:32:17I felt was, oh my God, I have like 18 years of unbroken data in the system. Like, do I really
1:32:24want to break, do I want to break that stretch? Like that's, but I've literally never looked at
1:32:29the historical, I've never been like, oh, I need to go look at what happened in, you know, 2009,
1:32:34July 8th, you know, on my website. So I, I think that speaks in general to like an over emphasis on
1:32:42archives. Like I'm a really big fan of deleting tweets. I have an auto tweet, the leader thing
1:32:49going on. And I think also like for Twitter, this idea that all tweets should last forever was a
1:32:55flawed philosophy to start the service with. I just don't, it doesn't make sense. Like, I'm just
1:33:01sorry. What most of us are saying on Twitter, honestly, can just disappear forever and the world
1:33:06will not be worse for it. Like I've, as I've gotten older, I've kind of embraced this, this
1:33:12idea that not everything has to be archived. Like, I think that was a very old school web 1.0 idea
1:33:18that like nothing can be deleted. Everything should be archived. You should have all your
1:33:22old email from 1997. I have never searched for an email older than like a couple of weeks. I mean,
1:33:33I don't say never, but you know, effectively, it's, it's my party trick. You know, I'll be
1:33:38with an old friend and I have, I have my Gmail has my email from, from 1999 and it, I imported
1:33:45it all a long time ago. And, uh, uh, it's a party trick I have with old friends where I'm like,
1:33:51let's find the first time we contacted each other and I can just search and there it is. And I can
1:33:56see the first email that we sent to each other. And that is actually kind of neat to think about
1:34:01the Genesis of a, of a friendship or relationship and be able to pinpoint the very first moment of
1:34:06contact. But yeah, aside from that, it's kind of pointless. So what do you do for the automatic
1:34:10Twitter deleting? What do you have? Did you write your own script? Do you use a service?
1:34:15Yeah, no, uh, well, Robin Sloan wrote a script. I mean, Robin Sloan's a really interesting example
1:34:21of a, a writer who also is very technically minded and very technically capable. And, uh, so he had,
1:34:29he had a, he has a Ruby script that just eats, eats your tweets. You can set, you know, how long
1:34:35you want to look back from. So I have everything over, over a week old being deleted and you can
1:34:40set a kind of like a, there's an array of tweet IDs to save. So I have a few that are saved. Um,
1:34:46but that's it. It just runs on, it runs on my, um, digital ocean server as a cron job.
1:34:51You don't have to remember to do it. It just happens once a week.
1:34:54Just does it. Goodbye. Uh, I probably should do that. I don't know. I, I did. There's that, that,
1:35:04the pack rat in my back of my head wants to keep them. And there were the, in those early years of
1:35:11Twitter, you remember favored, favored, I don't even know how you pronounce it. It was Dean
1:35:16Dean's little thing where it would collect, you know, like the most, I forget. I think he
1:35:23purposely never explained the algorithm because he didn't want it to be gained, but effectively,
1:35:29in a certain social circle, it was just the best jokes of the day. And it was like, this is all,
1:35:36this is all we did on Twitter is just crack dumb jokes and favorite the ones that we thought were
1:35:42funny. And then you could just check in on five or every day and see like the best of them. And,
1:35:48you know, and that whole circle of people is how I got to know Merlin, man. It's how I got to know,
1:35:54I might've known Merlin through the Mac circles, but like Adam Lissigore and so many people came
1:36:01out of that. And it's like, you know, I had some good jokes. I remember one, here's one of my
1:36:07favorites from that era. I don't know what year it was, but the whole, this is the whole, this is the
1:36:10whole tweet. You don't, you don't want to know what I would do for a Klondike bar. Do you remember
1:36:19that ad campaign? It was, Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm not saying that's a great joke. I should probably stick
1:36:27to tech, but for me, I felt like a good joke and I just, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. But I
1:36:34also don't want to go back. How would you even, how would I even find the tweet ID to protect it?
1:36:38But, but I, it, it, it makes me sick every time I see stories though, about people who like the,
1:36:47the woman who got the job as the editor of Teen Vogue and she's only 27 or 28. And it's like,
1:36:53she's clearly had a, you know, our career was going places. She was become the new editor in
1:36:58chief at Teen Vogue. And somebody found a bunch of tweets she wrote when she was a freshman in
1:37:03college, 19. And they were bad tweets. They were bad tweets, bad tweets. She apologized profusely
1:37:11for them, but it wasn't enough. And she wound up losing the job. And it's like, you know what,
1:37:17when she wrote those tweets as a 19 year old, she was not thinking of them as something that was
1:37:23anything other than ephemeral. You know, that there is something weird about Twitter where it
1:37:30feels ephemeral and it is not, right? By default. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, even if, even if you're
1:37:37deleting your tweets, I think somewhere they're being sucked up. But like for me, I mean,
1:37:42there was my, uh, Ku Klux Klan period of Twitter, early Twitter, where I was just supporting Ku
1:37:48Klux Klan stuff. No, no, no. I, thankfully I didn't have a weird period of like using Twitter
1:37:55as a, as a kind of like a racist soapbox or anything like that. But like for me, it's more
1:38:00just the weight. Like, like there's, there is a rat pack, a pack rat sort of element to it. And
1:38:08in general, I'm trying to get rid of stuff, physical or digital in my life. Like, I'm just
1:38:12trying to like, like I'm constantly selling things. Like I, I, I, I hate buying new, I like
1:38:20love buying new tools. Like I just got a new printer. Um, but I got it for a very specific
1:38:24purpose. And like, you know, the, the, the tension of buying the thing, getting the thing
1:38:28is now forcing me to like really use it. And I'm like, okay, I have to justify the fact that I
1:38:31brought this new object into my life, but I'm constantly selling stuff off. Um, you know, that
1:38:37if I, if I don't use it, it's like, it's gone. And Japan actually has a really amazing kind of eBay,
1:38:42um, like tool that handles all of the shipping and everything is anonymized. So you don't know where
1:38:48it's being shipped to and they don't know who you are. And it's wonderful. And like the, you know,
1:38:52they act as like a escrow service. And so it's, it's super great. You can just sell high value
1:38:58stuff. I like, I don't sell my, um, my old Mac books to the Apple store. I put it on the service
1:39:04cause I can get 50, 50% more and they sell within a day. Like it's just instant boom sold. And, um,
1:39:11so I'm constantly getting rid of stuff physically and I just find digitally as well. Like what,
1:39:17what is the value of me holding onto these things? And so what I did before I started doing the tweet
1:39:22delete thing is I just, I downloaded my archive and I have all of my original stuff on my hard
1:39:28drive. And if I really, really, really need that, um, it's there, but, uh, I don't know,
1:39:34it just feels like having that out in the open brought no value to me. And I even think like
1:39:41there's this argument of like, well, what if people like quote your tweets and an article or link to
1:39:45it or embed it? It's like, well, whatever, I don't know. Like, is the world going to end if three of
1:39:49my tweets that were quoted in some article like aren't, aren't there anymore? Like people will
1:39:53figure it out. They'll get the context like, you know, do a screenshot of the tweet if you,
1:39:57if you really want to include it in something like, I think there are ways around it. And, uh,
1:40:03uh, you know, to, to sort of make stuff that you want to reference a little more solid. But the
1:40:09thing that's really surprised me is I get emails all the time and messages all the time. Like, hey,
1:40:13that thing you tweeted two weeks ago, where did that go? Like, um, which is shocking that people
1:40:19use Twitter or seem to use Twitter as this, like as these pointers, like they book, I don't know if
1:40:24they're bookmarking the tweets to come back to or what is definitely something I don't do. I, you
1:40:30know, if I see a tweet that has something I like, it goes into things. It's like, okay, what's the
1:40:34link? Okay. It goes into things. I can set a reminder for me to come back to this in a week.
1:40:39You know, it's like, I don't rely on the original tweet object to be the canonical reference for
1:40:45that thing that I'm interested in. Um, but anyway, but Google analytics, similar sort of thing. I
1:40:51feel, I feel so much lighter getting rid of that crap and plausible is great. I have really enjoyed
1:40:58plausible. And the only thing I use analytics for is to see if there's a, um, some kind of incoming
1:41:05traffic spike. That means I've been linked somewhere that I just want to know about.
1:41:10It's just a way for me to keep track of like, if, if, uh, a big site has sent me traffic,
1:41:15that's all I use analytics for. That's it. Ah, yeah. Like if I linked to you, right.
1:41:19Oh yeah. I got the, got the, the Gruber, the Gruber led light that goes, I knocked a website
1:41:28offline a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a while. And again, I don't think it's because
1:41:33the amount of traffic that comes from a link from me is decreased. It's just the server
1:41:39infrastructure has gotten more and more Bulletproof and you know, WordPress sites are cached, have
1:41:45caching on by default. And I mean, that was always the nine out of 10 times where if I linked to
1:41:49something and the website went down, it was cause it was a default, the old WordPress without
1:41:55caching. Uh, yep. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I don't know. All right. Well, and cloud flare today too. I
1:42:03have everything I, I have up there is behind cloud flare. So it's just, that's another kind
1:42:09of miracle service. Like it's, it's so cheap. I don't understand how it can be so cheap. I
1:42:14really don't. I don't either. It's incredible. It's so cheap. And, uh, you know, digital ocean
1:42:21too, like the quality of server you get at digital ocean for the price you pay is amazing to me.
1:42:27I love it. I love, I'm a huge digital ocean fan. Um, it's just been wonderful working on their,
1:42:34you know, their service. They're, uh, you know, spinning up their service. I have a digital ocean
1:42:38server that all it is, is it's a, it's a wire guard, um, uh, VPN for me. That's it. You know,
1:42:45and it's like, it's cheaper, it's cheaper to buy the digital ocean server, have it auto update,
1:42:51do all the security updates automatically and, uh, have that be my VPN in the U S
1:42:57than it is to pay for a big VPN service. And then this way I also know
1:43:01what the server is that is running the VPN. That's pretty amazing.
1:43:06All right. Let me take, let me take one last break here and thank our third and final sponsor.
1:43:10Our good friends at Mack Weldon. Oh, I am wearing Mack Weldon right now. I know, I think it's like
1:43:16the third spot in a row where I've been able to say that. And I'm like looking down at this hoodie
1:43:21that I'm wearing and it's yep. Mack Weldon. I've got Mack Weldon stealth boxer briefs on underneath
1:43:27my jeans. They make men's basics and everything from socks and underwear to workout clothes,
1:43:35outdoor activities, the hoodie, my beloved hoodie that I'm wearing right here. Um,
1:43:40it's just a great, great company with all sorts of great clothing. Uh, perfect for everyday wear
1:43:47to be layered underneath workout gear. If that's what you want. And they've got sweatpants you can
1:43:53wear outside without feeling like you're wearing sweatpants. I bought a pair of sweatpants.
1:43:58John Sir, Cusa was on the show and gave me a hard time for going through the whole 2020
1:44:02pandemic without sweatpants. Apparently that's what everybody did. I got a pair of sweatpants.
1:44:08I've been wearing them. I'm probably going to buy another pair. I kind of like it. Still feel
1:44:12a little weird leaving the house in them, but a pretty nice for lounging about the house. Nice,
1:44:16nice pockets. I'll tell you what I hate about sweatpants in theory is I don't want to like,
1:44:22if I got my phone in my pocket, I don't want it falling out of my pocket because they're sweatpants
1:44:26pockets. Mack Weldon's. You don't have that problem. Nice deep pockets, very nice, secure
1:44:31design and cut to the pockets. Keeps your stuff from falling out when you sit on the couch.
1:44:35Like I said, socks, shirts, hoodies, underwear, polos, active shorts. Mack Weldon has it all.
1:44:43Great look. Great feel. I really love this stuff. I feel like by the time I'm done with this podcast,
1:44:49everybody listens to it. We're all going to be wearing the same Mack Weldon shirts and hoodies.
1:44:53They have a great loyalty program. Level one gets you free shipping for life. Once you hit it,
1:44:59you just get free shipping. Once you reach level two, and that's, you just have to spend 200 bucks.
1:45:04You spend 200 bucks on clothes, you get to level two, you get 20% off every subsequent order for
1:45:10the next year. Mack Weldon wants you to be comfortable. So if you don't like your first
1:45:15pair of underwear, you keep them. Don't mail your used underwear back to Mack Weldon. You keep them.
1:45:21They'll send you your money back. No questions asked. Now you can get 20% off your first order
1:45:27by going to mackweldon.com/talkshow and just use that promo code talk show.
1:45:32mackweldon.com/talk show promo code talk show gets you 20% off your first order.
1:45:38All right. I mean, let's talk some tools. I want to know how you make a book.
1:45:44Okay. So what pain. All right. InDesign for layout.
1:45:53InDesign for layout. Yeah. I was, I was a Quark person too. When I was a university, I learned
1:45:59on Quark, this is like 2000, 2001. And, uh, it was, it was really fast. It was really good. I
1:46:07think the thing that Quark did badly was font rendering. There was something about, I remember
1:46:14InDesign when InDesign came out, it just, I know what you're talking about. It was the open type
1:46:18support open types of that was it? Yes. And that was, that was infuriating. It was infuriating
1:46:26that Quark is like such a fundamental bit of digital typography that Quark dropped the ball
1:46:31on. And I think that was what pushed me to InDesign. And I remember using the InDesign beta
1:46:35and just, and I remember the literature is and all the other open types stuff just working and being
1:46:40like, okay, well, I guess I got to use this thing now. I remember it's, I remember an InDesigner
1:46:44ever since. I remember talking to Dean Allen about it and, and it basically, he was like, look,
1:46:48you're going to have a whole laundry list of things you liked better about Quark than InDesign,
1:46:54but InDesign does open type, right? Open type makes the old pre-open type postscript fonts
1:46:59look like junk. And therefore you need to use InDesign because there's too many, there's too
1:47:04many good features in there. And it was a very strange, I don't know if it was technical debt.
1:47:09I don't know what happened. The other thing about Quark, Quark made bad design a little too easy.
1:47:17I mean, the one thing that Quark did that you could never forgive them. And once you know
1:47:24that designers in the nineties were doing this with everything, you can't, you couldn't unsee it.
1:47:29But I guess most of the flyers and stuff people made are long gone, but you could select a range
1:47:34of text and then just with one little click, set it to be like 90% width to make it, you know,
1:47:41like to fake a slightly skinnier font, or if it like didn't quite fill the space set, set it to
1:47:47110% or 150%. And so people would like, if you wanted like a, like a tall, skinny sans serif,
1:47:56it was so trivially easy to just use like Helvetica and just make it skinny. But if you
1:48:03know anything about typography, it was, you know, you know, it was optically squished and was a
1:48:08crime against typographic. So InDesign for layout, what about? InDesign for layout. Yeah, InDesign
1:48:18for layout. I tried, I looked at Affinity Publisher and I think Affinity Publisher, I really like
1:48:24Affinity as a company. And I think I use Affinity Photo actually for all of my,
1:48:30I actually don't use it for much because I don't do, I use Lightroom for my photo editing and my
1:48:37catalog editing. So I keep all my, my serious photos in Lightroom classic. Or Lightroom CC
1:48:44is lacking a few features that to me make it unusable as a professional. And so I'm still
1:48:50in Lightroom classic. And I think a lot of people who are professional photographers
1:48:54are in Lightroom classic. And the fact that it's called Lightroom classic is a little bit
1:48:58unnerving because it feels like, it feels like Adobe wants to get rid of this thing.
1:49:03And so I'm in Lightroom classic for organizing my library and for doing photo, 90% of my photo
1:49:10edits. And I use Affinity Photo for doing essentially photo resizing and exporting
1:49:17in different sizes. I just find it's exported to be really fast. I just find Photoshop to have
1:49:23gotten so slow over the last decade. And a lot of it's, like if you do the web exporter dialogue,
1:49:33it comes up and it like loads a webpage or something. I don't know. It's just all so slow.
1:49:37It's very bad. It's very, very bad. Affinity, super fast, super easy. I love supporting
1:49:43independent software companies. You buy it once, you don't think about it again, yada, yada, yada.
1:49:47And so I tried Publisher, but it just didn't, the problem is that if you're working with
1:49:53real printers, like big printers, is that they want InDesign files. For them, it's easy to work
1:49:59with InDesign files and they may want to do things like check your, is all of your type properly set
1:50:07in K? Or did you accidentally set it as an RGB value? And so they want to double check all these
1:50:14things. And so having InDesign makes it a little bit easier to interface with these printers out in
1:50:18the world. So that's kind of why I'm still in there. I'm not using, honestly, I think InDesign
1:50:23from 20 years ago, whatever the feature set was, was enough for me. I don't do anything that
1:50:28InDesign I think has added in the last 10 years. So anyway, that's that. And for writing, I use
1:50:38Ulysses to do a lot of drafting of essays. And the reason I started using Ulysses was because A,
1:50:46it let me use Dropbox as my folder. So I like having my files on my local hard drive and I
1:50:53like that Dropbox then syncs, you know, in the background. And I actually have a NAS now that
1:50:58is pulling down a full Dropbox archive onto the NAS. And so it's, it, I feel like it's backed up
1:51:03there as well. But the reason I liked Ulysses was a lot of other of those like minimalist text
1:51:10editors back, I don't know when I started using it eight years ago, seven years ago, they didn't
1:51:17allow Dropbox. A lot of them were iCloud based or you couldn't, you couldn't, this is a real
1:51:25critical thing is like you'd have, you can have a folder in Ulysses where you can manually sort the
1:51:29files in the folder. So you don't have to have them sorted by date or by title. And for me,
1:51:33being able to move files around. So treating a folder like a table of contents was really
1:51:38critical for me. And when you're working on a book, it's super, super critical.
1:51:42Pete: That's like, it's sort of like you letting a touch, it's not a full outliner,
1:51:48but that's the idea behind real outlining software where, by which I mean, not like when you're in
1:51:55Apple notes and just type a dash and you're, you're typing in a thing that looks like an outline,
1:52:02but an outline where you can take any heading and just drag it up and down to reorganize it.
1:52:08Brian: Right, exactly. And so Ulysses also does a couple of neat things where,
1:52:15like if you select a number of files that are next to each other, it like just creates one document
1:52:20with all that in it. So you can kind of, you can, I mean, you can just feel like you're working,
1:52:25there's a flexibility to it. I think that when you're working on a book with chapters,
1:52:30that is great. And then Ulysses also has super powerful PDF export styling. So like I,
1:52:40you can write essentially CSS for the PDF exports. And so you can do really beautiful typographically
1:52:48good looking exports in Ulysses. And I love using that to basically put out the drafts,
1:52:52print out drafts. So I can do checks and stuff on the pieces. And so there's a huge Ulysses kind of
1:52:59element to the editing process. And then depending on the length of the thing or how, what stage I'm
1:53:08at, sometimes I'll bring it into Google Docs to work with editors. I find actually Google Docs
1:53:14is by far the best shared editing space in terms of writing notes in the margins, making suggestions,
1:53:22you know, okaying or rejecting suggestions, having conversations. It's just Google Docs has a lot of
1:53:28issues and Google Drive is one of the worst pieces of software. Like I don't understand how Google
1:53:34Drive is so difficult to use. It's to be beautifully complicated. I can never find what
1:53:41I'm looking for in Google Drive. Like there's some philosophy of engineering that's happened there
1:53:47about how it's going to show you, what it's going to show you and how it's thinking about hierarchies
1:53:52that just doesn't make sense to, I think, a normal user. And I had this thread on Twitter that's
1:53:56probably been deleted about Google Drive and like just hundreds of people chiming in being like,
1:54:02yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's so tough to use. But Google Docs, the trick with using it is
1:54:07to just put links to Docs in a text file and don't even touch Google Drive. And so, but Google Docs
1:54:14is, it really is, it's a great piece of software. And Google Docs actually does one thing
1:54:17in the fast software, best software philosophy that I wish I could do on Mac OS and it drives me
1:54:24crazy. And if anyone listening out there can program a shortcut, I have looked into this and
1:54:30I have not been able to figure out a solution to this problem. But in Google Docs, if you have a
1:54:35spelling, a misspelled word and you have the cursor on the word, you can tab into the spell
1:54:42correction options and hit enter and then it's, you never have to take your fingers off the
1:54:46keyboard. You don't have to use the trackpad. You don't have to right click on anything and select
1:54:51the corrected word. You can just inline right there super quickly select the correct spelling.
1:54:58So like things like that, I really love about it. But mainly the collaborative component is the
1:55:04super power. Do you know about the F5 shortcut? This isn't going to solve your problem with
1:55:07misspelling. But do you know that in TextEdit or any, any cocoa app, you can start typing a word
1:55:15and if you hit F5, you get auto completion based on the dictionary. So I remapped that keyboard
1:55:24shortcut because the F5 is very hard to type. And if you have, you know, and you have to turn off
1:55:30to get it by default, you have to turn off the magic, you know, keyboard brightness or whatever
1:55:36F5 does on your thing. And if you're using a MacBook Pro with a touch bar, you know,
1:55:42how you get F5. So I, I've remapped it to control return. And so because I pinky for control,
1:55:49right hand for return, and then it's, it's this universal auto complete. But I know, but that's,
1:55:57I, I know exactly what you're talking about, though, right? So you've got the insertion
1:56:02point on the red underlined word. And you're like, just give me the list. Don't, don't switch modes.
1:56:10Yeah, I've got to go to the trackpad. I've got a right click. I've got to it. And the thing is,
1:56:17the hit areas are so small, right? It's like, Oh, I've got to select just the right word. It's,
1:56:21it's, it's, it's exhausting. It's just weird. And Google anyway, Google Docs has a really nice
1:56:26solution for it that I would love. How do you invoke it? So you just, you hit the tab key.
1:56:31Is that what you do? I think so. I'm pretty sure I was testing it the other day. And I think
1:56:38there is, it's either you hit the tab or I think it's tab and it just brings you up
1:56:43into that into that pop up. And seems to work pretty well. I don't know. It, it, it's, it's
1:56:51an elegant, seems like an elegant solution, pretty obvious solution. But I haven't seen any other
1:56:56text editor do it. And it kind of drives me nuts. And even the command, semi colon, I know that's
1:57:02kind of like the universal spell checker, invoker. Even that, you know, it's like, you'd think that
1:57:07if you're doing that it would, it would move, you know, cause it's like, right now I'm doing it in
1:57:11this notes file and it's selecting the red squiggly underlined words, which is great,
1:57:16but you'd think it would select it and then show you here are the, here are the options,
1:57:20you know, and also giving you the option to please learn the spelling, which is a great thing to be
1:57:25able to just do from the keyboard. That's another one of those aspects of Mac OS X where maybe
1:57:29there's a little bit of cruft in that user interface. Like the system-wide spelling checker
1:57:34is sort of, hasn't really, I mean, they've updated the style of the windows, you know,
1:57:39each time they've revised the style of the windows and the operating, you know, the,
1:57:43the, the interface, but it's like the same basic, Hey, it's like a floating panel and everything's
1:57:52the, everything's really small, right? Like it, it's just the fun, you know, and just because they
1:57:58haven't resized anything from 2001, 2002, when pixel for pixel, that was actually a reasonably
1:58:06sized spelling checker panel. I bet it's from, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. I bet Next had that command
1:58:14semicolon. It's such a weird command, right? Command semicolon. I bet that's from Next. It's
1:58:20a holdover. Yeah. Anyway, anyway, you know, it's like people forget that actually Next, the text
1:58:28components of Next had essentially like hyperlinking built, had links built in,
1:58:33you know, like that. If you right click on something and want to make it a link and say,
1:58:36you know, that's all from Next. That's, that's 30 years old. That's a 30 year old interaction.
1:58:42You know what? I was editing the shared document that we have for this episode of the show and I
1:58:49was doing it on my iPad today and I thought, you know, this is something I should remember and
1:58:53bring it up when I'm talking to Craig. Like on the Mac, I know how to make something a link.
1:58:59I right click on it or go to the edit menu and there's edit link and then you get a thing. I
1:59:05know the shortcut. Isn't it command K? My fingers want it to be command K. You hit command K,
1:59:10you paste in the URL and now you have a link. And how do you do that on, on iPad OS or iOS?
1:59:19There's, there's no way, you know, there's no standard way across all apps. It's just,
1:59:24I don't know. There is something, sometimes I started thinking about things like that and how
1:59:29nice it is that it was so consistent. It is still so consistent across multiple applications and
1:59:38that the way you do it in text edit is the same way you do it in Apple notes. It's the same way
1:59:42you do it in Apple mail. It's, it works in text view in Safari, you know, and that the text view
1:59:49in Safari, even though it's a web browser inherits all of these things from cocoa for the spelling
1:59:55checker and stuff like that and the right click menu. And that even in Safari, you can have this
2:00:00text field and get the standard control click menu. I think this point of like, how do you
2:00:07make something a link is it perfectly embodies the iOS, you know, philosophy, which is that you
2:00:14weren't going to use this thing when I was was made the idea that people be, you know, copying
2:00:18and pasting links between the there's no, there wasn't even copy and paste, but like bringing
2:00:22links between apps, you know, it's just like, that wasn't, that wasn't the use case. So I think it
2:00:28speaks to like, there's a fundamental core of an operating system that gets made at the start. And
2:00:34there's a fundamental set of decisions, philosophical decisions about how the OS should
2:00:38function. And you can't change those over time, for better or for worse. And, you know, like this
2:00:45Mac OS link thing is 30 years old from, you know, from next. And iOS just didn't, you know, didn't
2:00:52have that philosophy in the in the beginning. So now, it's like, we're trying to bolt these things
2:00:55on or Apple's trying to bolt these things on like on iPad OS, and it just feels non native, you know,
2:01:01it just another thing for me, like on, on the iPad, iPad OS is the keyboard buffer doesn't exist
2:01:08between apps. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. And it's so like your command tabbing,
2:01:12and you start typing. Yeah. And you think that the app, you know, you're going from notes to messages,
2:01:19and you just start typing, and then you've lost like the first two words, because they just didn't
2:01:25show up. Exactly. I know that it's though those sorts of things. It's just like, okay, this wasn't
2:01:31made for these sorts of interactions. That's what it says to me. And you just have to you have to
2:01:38accept that it's not going to die. I don't think it's ever going to change. iPad OS will not will
2:01:42not get a keyboard buffer anytime soon. They did fix a bug that was driving me nuts about two years
2:01:47ago where the spotlight search didn't it like your first couple of characters in a spotlight search.
2:01:55Right. Always got lost for me. I do command space, start typing. And it doesn't matter how many times
2:02:00I got burned by it. I would do it again. Because whenever I'm thinking, oh, I should search
2:02:04spotlight for that. I I've already started typing the query before I even remembered,
2:02:09oh, this is going to eat my first few characters. And I brought it up to somebody at Apple, I filed
2:02:14a radar, I had a thing. And then they were like, they took a look at it. And they were like, huh,
2:02:19you're right. Yeah, that does that for me too. Huh. And then it got it got fixed in like a point
2:02:24upgrade to you know, like iPad OS 12.7. But it's like, how did that happen? How did how did more
2:02:30people inside Apple not not not be driven by this? Well, well, and also, here's another aspect of
2:02:37that. Why are those first characters so important for search? That that always it always shocks me
2:02:45how if you if you miss that first character, and this happens when you're on like the little
2:02:49keyboard or something on an iPhone, spotlight often will not be able to find like if you're
2:02:54trying to open mail and you type a I l it doesn't find mail or
2:02:59or if I search for egg mod instead of I missed the car. And it's like, how does that not find
2:03:06you anyway? It should it to me, there's a there's a kind of brokenness with search in general that
2:03:14over emphasizes that first character that I don't know to me that it feels like it should be fixed.
2:03:20I feel like Alford on, you know, on the Mac, on Mac, maybe is a little is a little more forgiving.
2:03:29There's, I mean, it's just fuzzy search. There's like, there's algorithms right out there that are
2:03:33very easy to just bolt onto any search field. And you get that that capability to get really
2:03:38accurate, fuzzy search that's not contingent on that those first couple of characters.
2:03:43Like, um, F Z F. Do you know that that little application for the term? I don't think so.
2:03:47F Z F? No. It's this crazy. It's this crazy search tool that allows you to basically do
2:03:55like infinite, infinitely deep searches on your computer based on, you know, super fuzzy search
2:04:03terms. So you can do CD and you can type like test and then you do you invoke it by by I think
2:04:10doing two asterisks and then hitting enter and then it turns it into an F Z F search.
2:04:14And basically it auto completes, you know, in all of the subdirectories, anything that has the word
2:04:19test in it, and then you can just, you can select the directory you want to go to. But like, you
2:04:24don't have to, you can, anyway, you can, you can type a series of words that, you know, will kind
2:04:28of get you six directories deep to the place you want to go. Um, and then invoke F Z F. And anyway,
2:04:34it's a very fast way to move. And it just, it speaks to the power of like, if you know how to
2:04:39use and expect fuzzy search to work properly, it's so empowering. It's like truly bicycle for the
2:04:44minds. It's like, you've just amplified your ability to kind of traverse directories or move
2:04:48through your OS, you know, five times faster. It's just one of those kinds of like really cool,
2:04:53magic tools. Um, but, but yeah, it would be nice if, if, uh, we could correct words from the
2:05:01keyboard. That's all I'm saying. All right. Last but not least. So is that everything for
2:05:07book production, right? You've got InDesign for design. You've got, you've got, uh,
2:05:12Ulysses for writing, Lightroom and maybe some affinity for photo editing.
2:05:19Yeah, that's, that's, that's the crux of it. And, um, yeah, I don't, I've tried to use things like
2:05:29Scrivener and I just find, I just find it's, it's an app that doesn't work the way I want to work.
2:05:34It's a little, a little bit too, too onerous, a little bit too finicky. Um, yeah, I think that's,
2:05:39that's, that's the core. So Kisa by Kisa, am I pronouncing it right? Because I, I probably would
2:05:45have said Kisa by Kisa. Uh, your first run was, uh, uh, as we had done the home stretch here,
2:05:57you, you decided to do a thousand copies and it sold out in like a day,
2:06:04like two, basically like two days. Yeah. It, and you know, and again, I don't think it's,
2:06:12it's not self-effacing. You're not fake modesty. It just sounds like that's a lot of copies of a
2:06:17$95 book to sell that quickly. Yeah. It's insane. It's insane. That's why I only made a thousand
2:06:25of them because I thought, I thought, well, there's no way I'm going to sell a thousand of
2:06:30these. My expectation like, and I'm truly, I'm not like feigning false modesty here. Like my
2:06:35expectation was I'll make a thousand of these and then it'll take three years to sell them all. That
2:06:40was what I expected. Keep them in a warehouse as they slowly go out. It, this is a hard thing to
2:06:45talk about on a podcast. It is a lovely book. How, what is the, the name of this cover style?
2:06:53Because it is, it looks like a hard bound book. It kind of feels like a hard bound book,
2:07:00but it actually has a little bit of flex to it that a true cardboard hard bound book doesn't have.
2:07:05Yeah. I mean, flex a bind is, uh, is, is essentially, I think what it's mainly called,
2:07:14um, flex, flex binding, flex bound, but it's all it is. You're just taking the, um, the boards of
2:07:20a hardcover book, uh, that are normally thicker and you're just sort of, you know, choosing
2:07:26thinner boards that aren't the, you know, it's, it's kind of between a paperback and a hardcover.
2:07:30Um, but, uh, I think it's like, I think we ended up at like 0.7 millimeters or something like that
2:07:36was the final, we did a bunch of tests to find, uh, one that had the right feel. And then what
2:07:41happens is when you, when you cover them in cloth, um, it gives it this extra durability. So the
2:07:49thing that drives me nuts about hardcover books is just, they feel a little bit violent in the hand
2:07:53because it's like, this is so hard and like either corners are kind of digging into your, into your,
2:07:57into your palm or whatever. And I really love, um, you know, the book of the field of paperbacks,
2:08:04but I understand that the perception of a paperback as being a cheaper thing is real. And for, you
2:08:10know, for good reason, because they do, they don't last as long. The binding's a little bit different,
2:08:14but like on this book, we're doing a hardcover binding and we're doing, uh, you know, hardcover
2:08:19style cloth wrap on the covers, but we're using, um, you know, boards that are, are closer to
2:08:28paperback boards. But you know, what you end up with is this, what I feel like is like the perfect,
2:08:32the perfect match of tactility and protection. So the book is, is very protected. It's not going to
2:08:38get damaged really. I mean, you can scuff up the, the, the cloth or whatever, but it's not going to
2:08:43rip on you like a paperback would. Um, and yet when you hold it, the hope is that it feels like
2:08:50intimate and kind of nice to hold. It's just comfortable, you know, and pleasurable to have
2:08:53in the hand. And, uh, I actually saw this binding for the first time 20 years ago on this, um, this
2:09:00book called Rome City Secrets that was published, uh, as this little guy, this thick little guy to
2:09:06Rome and it used the same kind of binding. And I've just always been spellbound by, I just thought,
2:09:11oh, this is it. This is the, this is the most amazing binding. I love this. And, uh, I've been
2:09:15trying to use it for a while. And finally with this book, I had enough latitude of being able to
2:09:21do what I wanted to do and do and run tests. And, um, uh, we were able to kind of dial this
2:09:26in into a place that I think feels really, feels really good. So yeah, that's part. And, and some
2:09:31people have written in and been like, you know, um, I thought this was a hardcover book, you know,
2:09:36uh, some, I think a couple of people have been upset because they thought they, they, they
2:09:41expected a hardcover because they like, oh, I didn't realize this was a paperback, you know,
2:09:45why is it $95? Well, literally the only thing different between this and, uh, and, and, uh,
2:09:52and a quote unquote real hardcover is like about half a millimeter of board. That's about it. Um,
2:09:57otherwise this is, this is definitely trust me, the costs of producing this thing are hardcover
2:10:02costs and the durability of this thing is going to be hardcover durability. So don't worry about it.
2:10:07Jon Moffitt But, so the first, the first edition sold out thousand copies now, though people can
2:10:12still buy the second edition. Is that what you're calling it? Second?
2:10:18David Bonilla Second edition. Yeah. Yeah. Cause the first edition
2:10:21is stamped, numbered, uh, and signed. And so that was what made it limited. And the second edition
2:10:28is also limited. We did 1200 copies and the second edition, I think there's about 200 left. Um, and,
2:10:35uh, it's not, it's not stamped or signed, so it's not editioned.
2:10:39Jon Moffitt I've got, I've got, I've got 200 on the button,
2:10:44not one 99. Nice. Not two Oh one copy 200. Boom. There you go. Uh, I gotta, I gotta,
2:10:51you must have a bunch of Tashin books, right? There's the best Tashin is this company that
2:10:57makes the world's greatest coffee table books. And some of them are insanely expensive. Um,
2:11:05and I've got a couple of the Kubrick ones and my 2001, I got copied nine 99, which I thought was,
2:11:12I don't know. I don't want to, I'm not, I'm only one of those guys who, you know, there's all sorts
2:11:17of numbers that you can read into it. I don't want to be one of these, you know, it means something,
2:11:21but I don't know. I thought that was pretty cool. So the other recent project project you've had
2:11:28is a short film. Is this the first short film you've done since you've been doing special
2:11:33projects? Yeah, well, this is the first short film I've ever done ever since before.
2:11:39Jon Moffitt It's so good. It makes me sick, Craig.
2:11:40I, so how much, how much of the work did you do? So the, the it's on YouTube. It is,
2:11:50uh, I don't have the note in front of me. What's the title?
2:11:53Craig Tompa Pizza, toast and coffee.
2:11:55Jon Moffitt Which is the same subject as
2:11:57Kisa by Kisa that you've, you know, gone on these extended journeys in Japan to experience pizza
2:12:06toast, which really does look delicious. I, it really does. It looks so good and coffee.
2:12:16And it's like, I don't know what more do you need for sustenance? But this, this short film,
2:12:22I'm not just saying it because you're on the show and you're a pal. It is beautiful. But did you do
2:12:27all of it yourself? I mean, did you, you shot it, you lit it. It is just, and it's just,
2:12:33it all just takes place on a rainy, like mid morning. It looks like.
2:12:39Jon Moffitt Yeah. Yeah. I had to, so, so the, a little bit of background on it is one of the
2:12:46things I've kind of codified, I guess, like when I was writing up the, the year in review in January
2:12:53this year, um, was that, is that I, all of the work I do is essentially to make books. So
2:12:59everything is pointing towards books and every project sub project I do has to be either in
2:13:04support of the books or adding some other element to the book or amplifying the book. And so like,
2:13:11I just find for me that that is, that is the most meaningful and simplest way to organize all of my
2:13:20creative work. Everything is aiming towards producing books. And so all of the walks I was
2:13:25doing, and I'm still doing these, you know, for listeners who don't know, I spend about
2:13:32two to six months out of the year walking across Japan. I'm about to go off on another big walk in
2:13:38May, actually, it'll be another six or 700 kilometers. I just did one in November that was
2:13:43700 kilometers. And so from these walks, I'm producing books and Kisa by Kisa was kind of
2:13:49the first book from these walks. And so I also last year, because of by dint of pandemic, I just
2:13:56started getting more into video, doing the live streams and playing with cameras and thinking
2:14:01about video just because we couldn't go anywhere. And so that just made me really look at the video
2:14:08world once again, which I hadn't taken a peek at in a long time, and realize like, the true
2:14:13advancements in photography right now are in videography, like it's a Renaissance moment for
2:14:19anyone who wants to do film. It's crazy how amazing and how quickly consumer pro cameras are
2:14:26advancing. And so it was sort of a confluence of all these things of like, going to these Kisa,
2:14:32these Kisa Ten, these Kisa is a Japanese style, old cafe. These are cafes that were mainly started in
2:14:39say the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. And they're mainly run by people who are just about to retire. And so
2:14:45they're all kind of just about to disappear. The numbers are dropping precipitously. So I would,
2:14:50in these walks across Japan, I, you know, the one organizing principle anywhere you go in the
2:14:55country, it may, they may be do have different foods or do, you know, a local specialty or,
2:15:00or whatever. But the one thing that is consistent is the presence of Kisa and barber shops, you got
2:15:06those everywhere. Lots of barber shops, lots of Kisa. And so I would just start going to these
2:15:12Kisa on these walks, I'd see them and just the stories and they, to me felt like they embodied
2:15:19really this cultural touchstone that was easy to overlook as a Japanese person, because you just
2:15:26kind of, you see them as inevitable and also as kind of throwaway things, whatever, it's a Kisa.
2:15:30But really, they're sort of community centers, a lot of Japan is depopulating in the countryside.
2:15:37And so the Kisa are these de facto community centers. And so you go to them, and they're just
2:15:41full of these octogenarians. And they're all like kind of, you know, chatting and farmers catching
2:15:45up and stuff like that. And so, to me, they became these really interesting and important cultural
2:15:50hubs. And pizza toast just happens to be kind of the food that they're, that's one of their staples.
2:15:55And the reason why it's a staple is because a lot of these are post-war institutions,
2:15:59they didn't have full kitchens. And so to make pizza toast, all you need is a little toaster oven.
2:16:05And so it's a, it's an easy to make food that's kind of fun and sort of riffs off of, you know,
2:16:11Western food, but can be done, you know, very easily, you know, with next to nothing in terms
2:16:16of ingredients. And so that's sort of the kind of the history there of pizza toast in the context of
2:16:22Japanese society. And so this, I'd done this book on Kisa-ten, on Kisa, and I'd been doing all this
2:16:31video work. And when I put up my Craig's starter, because when I launched that Kisa book, I kind of,
2:16:39I was looking at Kickstarter and I realized like, the value that Kickstarter provided for the cut
2:16:45they took, I just kind of didn't exist there for me anymore. I have my audience, I didn't feel like
2:16:49Kickstarter was going to drive more audience to buy the thing. So I was looking at Shopify,
2:16:54and I realized I could basically clone Kickstarter on Shopify using templates. And I spent a couple
2:17:01of weeks and I just made my own Kickstarter. And I was able to, you know, the benefit is you can
2:17:05design it all in any way you want. Kickstarter, you're stuck with their templates, I could make
2:17:10my tiers however I wanted. One big benefit is I could offer discount codes, which Kickstarter
2:17:15doesn't let you do. You can't offer discount codes to anyone. And so all of these kind of these--
2:17:19So you can offer discounts to your members.
2:17:22That's which is exactly what I did. My goal with the membership program is to return
2:17:28the full membership in discounts every year to every member, at least. Like if you pay 100 bucks
2:17:35for the membership and you are interested in my work, and you want to buy my books or whatever,
2:17:39you will get that $100 back absolutely within the year through if you choose to take advantage of
2:17:46the discounts that I offer. So members got $50 off on the book. I feel like that's a pretty
2:17:52pretty powerful incentive. So the membership there to me feels like basically it's everyone's making
2:17:58an investment. It's like micro seed capital for me to be able to do these projects. And then once
2:18:03I can get the project done, I want to return that capital. Plus, they get the hopefully psychically
2:18:10positive return of this new piece of culture being in the world. So it's kind of a way of amplifying
2:18:14that quote unquote seed capital. But when I was making, when you run a Kickstarter or
2:18:19Craigstarter, you make these goals. You're like, "Well, man, if we sell 500 books, I'll do this."
2:18:24And one of the goals I made was if we sold 750 books during the pre-sale campaign, I would make
2:18:30a pizza toast YouTube show. And I was like, I'm definitely not going to sell 750 books.
2:18:39And so I'm definitely not going to have to make a pizza toast YouTube show. And sure enough,
2:18:43we sold 750 books in a day. So that made me go, "Okay, all right, let me look at this video world
2:18:50again." And I started getting into cameras to document the production process of the book.
2:18:55And just a few things led to another. And I just thought, "Okay, for this pizza toast show,
2:19:03quote unquote pizza toast show, why don't I do a vignette, a little profile of one of the cafes
2:19:10that I went to?" And it can be this kind of anthropological archetype or archive of this
2:19:17thing that is going to disappear. This cafe that I shot will be gone in 10 years. I'm almost 100%
2:19:24certain. It doesn't have 10 years left in it. And so to kind of have a 4K archival quality
2:19:31video of this moment, I felt like that was a really nice bonus thing to the book. And it
2:19:41kind of points back to the book and the book points to it.
2:19:44Tom Bilyeu: And you talk about making a short film like this as being book-like in concept,
2:19:50because it has a beginning and an end, right? Here's the thing, you can hold it. Here's the
2:19:54whole thing. You can just hit play, start to finish, it gets to the end, and you're done.
2:20:00You've enjoyed the movie. That's the one thing that to me is a little weird. It's a little
2:20:07incongruous to see it on YouTube, where YouTube is this. And I'm more pro-YouTube. I mean,
2:20:17I've started putting my live talk shows on YouTube. I mean, I'm never going to be a YouTuber.
2:20:24But the thing that I find so unsettling, and I feel like you and I have sort of touched on this,
2:20:29but that the endless scroll has a psychological weight that I think we're starting, we
2:20:38collectively are starting to come to grips with. And I think that that might be one of the things
2:20:43that's driving people back to things like newsletters and subscription sites. And I can
2:20:49subscribe to Mattie Iglesias' Slow, Boring, and a new one comes in, and I can hit the space bar a
2:20:56couple times to read it. And then I get to the bottom, and it's done. Right? And then I'm caught
2:21:03up. You can catch up on Daring Fireball, right? When you just start looking for new posts, scroll
2:21:10until you hit one that you remember seeing before, and then you know you're caught up. And you can
2:21:14close the tab and come back tomorrow or the next day, and there'll be new posts waiting for you.
2:21:20I think that the endless scroll of Twitter and Instagram and YouTube has a psychological weight.
2:21:30And your little movie stands so athwart of that, right? It's effectively a silent film. I mean,
2:21:39the sound effects of rain hitting the windows and, you know—
2:21:46Toast flopping. There's a flop of toast.
2:21:50Pour over coffee being brewed. I'm a big pour over man myself. Is that the—
2:21:57Oh, yeah.
2:21:58—the most popular thing in Japan?
2:22:01Yeah, it's a pretty classic pour over. The old cafes have been doing
2:22:08have been doing pour over, usually often with cloth drips, cloth nets.
2:22:14Pour over, and then there's also this siphon method where—do you know this thing where it's like a—it
2:22:19looks like a chemistry set, and it's got two bulbs, and the water kind of burbles up?
2:22:24Japan's been doing that for a very, very long time.
2:22:27But it is. It's just a contemplative little vignette. And it just is so—it could—in
2:22:35some ways it is a very—literally a very quiet little movie, but it also—it's
2:22:39different from the standard fare of YouTube. I found it very striking.
2:22:46Well, believe me, if I could not have it on YouTube, I would prefer to put it somewhere else.
2:22:53I thought about this, and I looked around, and the reality is that if you want to host 4K
2:22:59video somewhere, it's tough to do. And I just don't really like Vimeo. I just find Vimeo,
2:23:06the interface isn't that good, the algorithms aren't as good.
2:23:10YouTube, for all of its flaws, it has the best scaling algorithms, the best delivery algorithms,
2:23:19the best in-the-moment resizing, rescaling algorithms. So it's very bandwidth-aware and
2:23:26friendly. It goes from really crappy connections to fiber connections, and it kind of handles it
2:23:32all flawlessly. All of that, I think, is really important, and I don't see that present in any
2:23:38other consumer video platform that can host a 4K video. Also, I looked at the cost of doing it on
2:23:48my own, and it's crazy. It's so expensive. That thing I uploaded is a couple gigs. That's like
2:23:56a two or three gig video. And if you have, last I looked, it had like 15,000 views or whatever,
2:24:03if you have 15,000 people download two gigs off your server, it's going to hammer you.
2:24:08I looked at Cloudflare video hosting, I looked at all sorts of things, and just the economics of it
2:24:14were crazy. It's hard to understand how Google makes it work with YouTube, to be honest. And
2:24:18it's another one of those things that we've wound up with where there's one and only one YouTube,
2:24:25and there's nothing else that's even vaguely like YouTube. And when it works, it is the
2:24:30most amazing thing. I forget what I've just was searching for a commercial the other day.
2:24:38Oh, the Casio G-Shock watch, because there's a rumor that Apple's going to make a rubbery,
2:24:46rugged version of Apple Watch, and I wanted to look up the hockey puck version of the initial
2:24:53Casio. And of course they had it. Of course they did. And it was the first thing that came up.
2:24:57I just took a guess at the year. I was like, "Casio 1983 G-Shock ad, first hit." There it was.
2:25:04Wow. Yeah.
2:25:06And that is amazing when you think about it. Because in 1983, that ad was on TV every day,
2:25:14and I saw it every day. And then by 1993, I certainly remembered it, but I would have had
2:25:190% chance of finding a copy of it. 0.00. I mean, I wouldn't even know where to go. What? Call the
2:25:27Casio US headquarters and see if they'll send me a copy on VHS of an ad from 10 years ago?
2:25:34You couldn't do it.
2:25:36Right. Yeah. It is weird. It's an incredible archive. It really is. And yeah, and how does
2:25:45Google... I'd love to know the economics on it, like what their expenses are for all of that
2:25:51bandwidth, what they really are. But I think just the advertising, they make a lot of money
2:25:57advertising on YouTube. So my goal is if I get... I have to get to 4,000 hours viewed on my channel
2:26:05in public videos, and then I can turn off all advertising. Because I think right now,
2:26:11Google can still automatically put an ad on my stuff, even without me being able to say yes or
2:26:18no. So I have not turned on monetization for any of my videos. But if you cross a threshold,
2:26:23you're allowed to say, "Never, ever, ever put an ad on my stuff." And so I'm hoping that we get
2:26:30close to it with this video so I can turn off all the ads. So whatever...
2:26:33It's a little weird that you have to do it that way, but I guess it's sort of an anti-fraud type
2:26:38thing, to keep a spammer from just creating an endless series of new channels just to keep
2:26:45putting their ads on. But what exactly their game would be to not have ads, I'm not quite sure. But
2:26:52I'm sure that YouTube has run into every single imaginable form of fraud. Yeah.
2:26:58But no, but back to your question about the production of the video, it was like, "Yeah,
2:27:05it was just me. I brought a backpack with 20 kilograms of photo equipment in it, a few lenses,
2:27:11a light, a tripod, and that was it." The hardest part was convincing the guy in the video to let
2:27:21me shoot him. These old Kisa guys, they can't see any of the value in what they're doing.
2:27:26They can't imagine why anyone would want to watch them do this. And I think an element of him was,
2:27:35"Is this guy making fun of me?" There's kind of this, "Is this really? Is he serious?
2:27:40Is he not taking the piss?" And it was convincing Yamane-san. It was like, "Look,
2:27:47I know this is weird, but actually you make really beautiful, strangely interesting pizza toast."
2:27:56What's the deal with the way he slices the crust?
2:28:00Yeah, he's been doing the cafe for 45 years. And for the first two years before he opened,
2:28:08he worked at this hotel in Yokohama. And I guess one of the guys at the hotel in Yokohama who ran
2:28:13this fancy cafe would cut the toast in that way a little bit. So what he's doing, he's scoring it,
2:28:19and he scores two sides of the crust down like 80%. And then he cuts the rest of it,
2:28:26he scores the rest of it so that when it comes out of the toaster, he's able to evenly split it into
2:28:31three fingers, essentially. And then the reason why he cuts the crust down is that he has customers
2:28:37who don't like crust. And so if the crust is cut almost off, but not entirely, you can peel it off
2:28:44if you don't like it. But if you want to keep it, because it's been separated from the body of the
2:28:49bread, it actually collects an extra char. So it creates this nice mouthfeel, and you get this
2:28:57crunch from this crust that you wouldn't otherwise get. So that's the cutting philosophy.
2:29:02It's a lovely, lovely movie. I know we have to wrap it up. But the other thing we were talking
2:29:07about, we've slagged on some of Apple's software, but you were talking about getting to know Final
2:29:13Cut Pro and talking that you found it to be a revelation in terms of being good software.
2:29:21Oh, it's incredible. Have we slacked on it? I feel like we've said we've been very laudatory
2:29:28of Mac OS. And we've said the old 2016 MacBook Pros were horrible, which I think anyone would
2:29:36agree with that. And the DNA of iOS is not to be super fluid, to have that fluency. I think that's
2:29:46a fair criticism. But Final Cut Pro X is amazing. I love it. I'm entranced. It's some of the best
2:29:57software I've ever used. They got rid of the X. It's just Final Cut Pro now.
2:30:01When did they get rid of the X? I thought the X was pretty recent.
2:30:04I think they got rid of it because they got rid of the X in Mac OS X too. I don't know. Maybe.
2:30:09Oh. Oh, wow.
2:30:11But I don't use it because I haven't made a video. But when I did, I mean, I have my little goofy
2:30:20video where I show people how to take AirPods out of a case the right way. Even as a total punter,
2:30:29for lack of a better word, you could see that this is a great Mac app. It's not just a video editor.
2:30:37It is the video editor that the Mac deserves. And I guess it's polarizing in some ways because some
2:30:44people, if you don't like that Mac likeness of it, you're not going to like it. It's not Adobe
2:30:53Premiere. But it also makes me wonder what and when Apple decides to make their Pro Tools group
2:31:02is such an interesting group. Logic is still a huge deal. But then they got rid of Aperture.
2:31:08What the thinking is there is very strange to me. And as Adobe moves Lightroom in this way that you
2:31:17mentioned before, where they seem to be pushing people towards the cloud version of Lightroom,
2:31:23and away from the classic one, which is more of a Mac style way of working, not in the cloud,
2:31:28but here, I want it on my Mac. That Aperture decision just stands out to me as very hard to
2:31:37explain. Yeah, well, I mean, I think it was, there's probably a moment in Apple where they're
2:31:45like, we're going all in on photos, we're going from iPhotos to photos, we're going to make photos
2:31:50super powerful. We want everyone to be, you know, we just want this to be the place that you put all
2:31:54of your, you know, pro or amateur, whatever. It all goes in here. And I think that was just a flawed
2:32:00philosophy. Anyway, thank you so much for your time. So let's tell people where they can find
2:32:08out more stuff. So we'll put a link to copious show notes. This is great. The show, you've done
2:32:14most of the work for me. But we will link. Well, we did talk about most of it. We did. We did pretty
2:32:20good. This is actually for me, this is probably about as close as I ever stick to show notes.
2:32:25I promised to put a link to the movie on YouTube. Your website for special projects is just at
2:32:35craigmod.com. And your tweets where people can hurry up and read them before you delete them are
2:32:42on twitter.com/atcraigmod. No, just craigmod. Oh, just guess right. You don't put the ad in on
2:32:50Twitter. Anyway, I will also thank our sponsors for this episode. We had flat file where you can
2:32:59go and get your spreadsheets imported. We have Squarespace, the all in one web hosting solution,
2:33:06and Mack Weldon where you can buy fresh underwear, socks, hoodies, and more. Anything else you wanted
2:33:13to mention, Craig, before we part ways? No, just, you know, the best way to,
2:33:24if you're like, "Oh, I'm interested in this guy's stuff and I want to kind of support
2:33:27his stuff, but I don't want to be a member," the best thing to do is check out the books. I just
2:33:33feel like I'm really proud of the book work. So I'd say go there and investigate that. But if you
2:33:39do become a member, you get a big discount. Well, let me say this about the book. And
2:33:45if you went to the website and you looked at your website pages for the book and you're thinking,
2:33:52"Oh, I think I know what that book would be like," the book is exactly like that.
2:34:00You know, there's just something—I don't know how better to say it. The book has the exact vibe that
2:34:07I expected it to have, and it's truly lovely. Great. Well, thank you, man.
2:34:13Typographically gorgeous as well, but of course. Thank you. I had Frank Camaro's help on that.
2:34:18Oh man, that guy. This is the thing is like, also independently producing this book,
2:34:27you know, I talked to a bunch of agents and publishers in New York about doing a similar
2:34:31kind of book, but they were all, "You need to do something a little more normal first,
2:34:36and then you can do kind of this," because the book is a little experimental. But, you know,
2:34:41doing it on my own, one of the issues with "vanity publishing" is that you often don't get to work
2:34:47with these high-level amazing people that you can sometimes work with if you go to a big publisher.
2:34:52But I've built up such a great group of friends who are talented beyond me and 100x group of friends
2:35:01that I'm able to call on. You know, the typography, we did big sweeps with Frank Camaro. Rob Giampietro
2:35:09chimed in, gave me some feedback. I was able to work with Gray318, one of the best cover designers
2:35:15in the world, to do a bunch of feedback on the production of the book. And then the editors I
2:35:19worked with are two of the best editors that I know, you know, in their industry, in their
2:35:26worlds. They're top of the top. So I think that's also kind of a weird quirk is that I don't think
2:35:32I could have made—I'm so satisfied with where this book landed that I couldn't have landed in
2:35:39a better place in any other way. So, like, that's—and I don't say that lightly.
2:35:44- Well, you should be very proud. It is a wonderful book. All right, Craig, thanks for being on the show.
2:35:50- Boom. Thanks, John.