00:00:00 ◼ ► Craig Maud, welcome to the talk show for the first time, right? Please tell me I'm not forgetting.
00:00:31 ◼ ► I suspect that more than usual on my show, there might be a fair number of listeners who are not
00:00:40 ◼ ► familiar with you, or maybe only tangentially so. I mean, I certainly linked you on Daring
00:01:37 ◼ ► I love it. I am so happy with that name. It's one of my favorite name things ever. I'm so glad,
00:01:48 ◼ ► because it was called something else before. It was called the Explorers Club, and I never liked
00:01:53 ◼ ► that name. I don't know what it was about that name that never resonated for me. It was driving
00:01:58 ◼ ► me crazy. Every time I had to write it, I wanted to stop doing it. I was like, "Right, Explorers
00:02:05 ◼ ► Club." And it just didn't work. There was something about it that was off. And so I switched
00:02:11 ◼ ► to the Special Projects last summer, and a bunch of Explorers Club people freaked out. They went
00:02:16 ◼ ► nuts about it. "Oh, that was my favorite part of every—" And I love it. I have zero regrets.
00:02:24 ◼ ► But yeah, it's generic. I don't even know, but if you search the web for just plain Special Projects,
00:02:35 ◼ ► See? But isn't that interesting that you've built a little business for yourself where that doesn't
00:02:39 ◼ ► matter? Right? It doesn't matter. I mean, that is not why I picked the name Daring Fireball,
00:03:01 ◼ ► Members can sign up. You offer—this is where it's a little confusing. You offer multiple newsletters.
00:03:23 ◼ ► newsletter. Now, you have three newsletters. You have a website. You make books. And making books
00:03:33 ◼ ► is probably the best verb I can say. I'm not trying to diminish you as a writer, but you also
00:03:38 ◼ ► photograph them. You design them. You oversee the production of them. Now you're making short movies.
00:03:50 ◼ ► But the basic dynamics of the arrangement are people can pay $10 a month or $100 a year
00:04:01 ◼ ► to become members. That is the revenue that supports your career. And you get to spend your time
00:04:31 ◼ ► stuff like cultural output. One of the reasons why it's so difficult to frame my membership program
00:04:50 ◼ ► self-help stuff. I'm not going to give you tips to be a better person or whatever, necessarily.
00:04:57 ◼ ► But I'm just producing all of this content. Most of it is for free under this umbrella of
00:05:03 ◼ ► culture, cultural production, or for lack of a better phrase. And so the membership program
00:05:10 ◼ ► is basically like NPR for me. So if you're a fan of the stuff that I've been making, which is
00:05:16 ◼ ► 95% of it is available for free, and you want to just support the production of that, that's what
00:05:23 ◼ ► the membership program is. And then I've just added lots of small value adds for members,
00:05:30 ◼ ► because what I found is that a membership program is one of the amazing bonuses of it. It's not just
00:05:36 ◼ ► the revenue, but you develop this essentially gang of super fans that are amazing to bounce ideas
00:05:46 ◼ ► off of. So I started doing, because of the pandemic, a bunch of members-only live streams
00:05:52 ◼ ► of me just doing super boring work, just like the most boring work you can imagine. So I did 10
00:06:00 ◼ ► hours of live streaming, building this website last March. And there'd be like 20, 30, 50 people
00:06:08 ◼ ► on the live stream at any moment, all just members. So always really intimate. But what it allowed me
00:06:14 ◼ ► to do that I didn't expect to happen was this running articulation of what it means to do this
00:06:23 ◼ ► kind of work. So to just pull back, open the doors to, "Hey, this is actually, you see the end
00:06:30 ◼ ► product, which is either this finished website or this finished book, but this is the 10, 20, 30
00:06:36 ◼ ► hours of what I'm actually doing to produce this thing." When you're doing the live stream, you can
00:06:42 ◼ ► live narrate it a little bit, take questions, people are like, "Oh, why are you doing that now?
00:06:46 ◼ ► What's that tool you're using? What's that app you're using?" And you just share things. I've
00:06:51 ◼ ► just found that to be really, really enriching and wonderful. And this weird bonus of the membership
00:06:58 ◼ ► program that when I started it, I never thought would be part of it. These are things that I
00:07:04 ◼ ► wouldn't want to do out into the, just to the general, to a general audience, because there is
00:07:11 ◼ ► something so intimate about showing how you produce, say, design a book or how you're building
00:07:19 ◼ ► this website. I'm in a sublime text. I'm writing, I'm editing live, essentially, on these live
00:07:25 ◼ ► streams. And to do that in front of, say, if I opened it up to everyone who's following me,
00:07:29 ◼ ► and it would say it'd be a thousand people or whatever, that's a very different performative
00:07:33 ◼ ► experience than in front of 30 super fans that are going to support you and are going to,
00:07:39 ◼ ► I don't know, just be positive in general. There's no posturing. So that, it's just been incredible
00:07:46 ◼ ► to have this tool, basically a creative tool, to motivate me to be better and be more self-aware
00:07:54 ◼ ► of why I use the software I use and why I make the decisions around the creative projects that I do.
00:08:11 ◼ ► Effectively, I think you started in February 2019. But, you know, February is early enough in a year
00:08:18 ◼ ► where we could, you could just say it 2019 was the first year. 2020 was the second year, and now 2021.
00:08:25 ◼ ► Yeah. And you've written copiously about your experiences. And to me, Dan Frommer has done the
00:08:32 ◼ ► same thing and talking at a sort of meta level about, you know, what's worked, what hasn't worked
00:08:38 ◼ ► and building this. And it's like your timing was serendipitous, right? Because you're way at your,
00:08:48 ◼ ► like, two years ahead of the substack phenomenon. But, you know what I mean? So you can, you're not
00:08:55 ◼ ► like a Johnny-come-lately to the "I'm going to run my independent publishing creative output work as
00:09:02 ◼ ► a membership system." Basically, memberships are having a moment right now. They are. Well, yeah,
00:09:08 ◼ ► because I think a little bit of what we've done is we've normalized over the last decade, really,
00:09:15 ◼ ► in the last five years, we've normalized this idea of like, paying for stuff is a good thing to do.
00:09:25 ◼ ► institutions that you want to see continue in the world, then it turns out that paying for them is
00:09:30 ◼ ► positive. That's a positive signal and makes things sustainable. And so I think that's kind of
00:09:37 ◼ ► tipped over into the independent creative world as well. And the tools have just gotten better.
00:09:43 ◼ ► But you've built a lot of your system yourself, or at least you're taking some pre-built pieces,
00:09:50 ◼ ► like a campaign monitor you use for sending out the actual newsletters, and snapping that into
00:09:55 ◼ ► a system with, you know, what do you use, Stripe for payments or no, Memberful, right? But Memberful
00:10:00 ◼ ► is sort of a thing that's built on Stripe. I don't think it's complicated, but you've explained it
00:10:09 ◼ ► in great detail. But it is interesting, though, to me, like all of these things didn't really exist
00:10:21 ◼ ► PayPal was probably the Stripe of 15, 20 years ago, and you just couldn't use PayPal quite as
00:10:43 ◼ ► consumer-facing thing. As a consumer, you never went to Stripe.com. You still, for the most part,
00:10:48 ◼ ► I don't think go to Stripe.com. And I think that, you know, in a lot of ways, this was the Twitter
00:10:54 ◼ ► ecosystem in the beginning as well, where it was like, "Oh, hey, look, yeah, there's a Twitter
00:10:58 ◼ ► client, but here's this API, and you can build amazing software on top of this incredible stream
00:11:03 ◼ ► of, you know, sort of consciousness that's coming out of, you know, everyone on the timeline."
00:11:15 ◼ ► pulled back from that mode of thinking, but I think Stripe is such a wonderful example of
00:11:21 ◼ ► building a perfect bit of infrastructure and, you know, creating the right endpoints that anyone can
00:11:29 ◼ ► plug into however they want to. And you do see things like Shopify. So Shopify doesn't use Stripe.
00:11:36 ◼ ► You know, they've built Shopify payments. I think in the case of a company as large as Shopify,
00:11:41 ◼ ► which is fascinating, actually, Shopify is like one of my most, absolutely most fascinating
00:11:46 ◼ ► companies, I think, out there today. The fact that they're basically the only real Amazon competitor
00:11:52 ◼ ► at this point, I think, is incredible. And the software is amazing. I don't know if you've used
00:11:56 ◼ ► Shopify or if you've built anything on Shopify, but it's pretty great. I mean, it's not perfect,
00:12:02 ◼ ► but it is, you know, if you compare AWS and Shopify, it's like one is very user-friendly.
00:12:10 ◼ ► But for the most part, you know, like Memberful uses Stripe. Patreon probably uses Stripe as the
00:12:16 ◼ ► back end. A lot of these, you know, Ghost uses Stripe as the back end. And what's interesting
00:12:19 ◼ ► about Stripe, if it's used as the membership back end for payments, is that it's portable.
00:12:25 ◼ ► You can essentially move all those Stripe tokens to whatever next platform you want to use.
00:12:44 ◼ ► too, is that, you know, they let the creators, the authors who were writing on Substack know that if
00:12:50 ◼ ► you ever want to leave, you can, you get to take your mailing list with you. Yeah, I wonder how
00:12:55 ◼ ► long that's going to last, though. I don't know either, because the valuations are so, you know,
00:13:01 ◼ ► the numbers they're talking about are so crazy. And it's like, I think it's a good business in
00:13:05 ◼ ► terms of like a traditional business. And, you know, like the type of thing you and I run,
00:13:12 ◼ ► where it's like, if your monthly income is higher than your monthly expenses, then that's pretty
00:13:19 ◼ ► good, you know, as opposed to, you know, raising a bunch of venture capital and just having this
00:13:26 ◼ ► fountain of money and just throwing it at it until all of a sudden it goes away, you know.
00:13:50 ◼ ► For a platform that allows the creators to move whenever they want. And the bigger you get,
00:13:56 ◼ ► the more motivated, you know, they take—I think their split is like 90/10, and I don't know if
00:14:00 ◼ ► that includes the Stripe payment. So it might be more like, you know, 87/13 if you include Stripe.
00:14:24 ◼ ► Kevin Kelly was the founding editor of Wired magazine, you know, long-standing career. But
00:14:31 ◼ ► he had this theory that, you know, the internet allows an artist to make a good living with a
00:14:38 ◼ ► thousand true fans who are maybe paying $10 a month or $100 a year or maybe just buy their album
00:14:47 ◼ ► when it comes out. I don't know, I guess people don't really buy albums anymore. But, you know,
00:14:51 ◼ ► you get the feeling that a thousand fans can support an artist very well and in a way that
00:14:57 ◼ ► never was possible pre-internet. There was just no way. You couldn't do what you do. I couldn't do
00:15:03 ◼ ► what I do, right? I mean, what would the pre-internet equivalent of what you're doing be?
00:15:08 ◼ ► It would probably be running like an indie press, you know, and really cobbling together. It's
00:15:17 ◼ ► interesting though, because in other countries, I think Americans have this impoverished view of
00:15:22 ◼ ► what's possible as an independent artist, because there's just so few subsidies for artists in
00:15:28 ◼ ► America relative to other countries. If you talk to a Canadian poet, and you're like, "Oh, it must
00:15:35 ◼ ► be so tough being a poet." And they're like, "What are you talking about, man? We've got all these
00:15:39 ◼ ► poet funds and grants and stuff up here in Canada." If you put together your first chat
00:15:46 ◼ ► book or whatever, you get $50,000. There's just wild amounts of opportunity for artists in,
00:15:53 ◼ ► I feel like in countries like Canada and in Europe, all over Europe, just the network of
00:16:01 ◼ ► artist residencies and stuff. And I think that's always been the case. I don't think this is a
00:16:12 ◼ ► would be being a Canadian in Vancouver running a small independent publishing company and being
00:16:20 ◼ ► really excited selling like 300 or 400 books a year. But it would be hard to get word out,
00:16:28 ◼ ► right? And it's like, I'm so American, and my view is so warped by having grown up in the decades I
00:16:38 ◼ ► did. Not to get zealotrous about it, but it's clear to me now in middle age and having a better sense
00:16:48 ◼ ► of the decades of my adult life, that America took a profoundly capitalist turn in the '70s and '80s
00:17:05 ◼ ► and has shaped things like that. I don't think it's weird that Canada has government-sponsored
00:17:14 ◼ ► fellowships and things like that for poetry. And there are ways to get similar things from
00:17:23 ◼ ► universities here in the United States, but it does sound weird to American ears that the
00:17:28 ◼ ► government might just provide stipends to artists to have not just a subsidence level, but to
00:17:36 ◼ ► actually have a nice life. And that it's just accepted across society that this is actually
00:17:45 ◼ ► good for the country to be producing this. I just saw a quote from JFK talking about the arts.
00:17:52 ◼ ► It was the thing that made me realize, it's just one of those things, knowing that you were going
00:18:01 ◼ ► to be on the show, I just started catching certain Craig Motti-type things. But it's what gave me this
00:18:11 ◼ ► thought about the turn that Reaganism had away from that Kennedy idea. The Kennedy Center for
00:18:19 ◼ ► the Arts is still a big thing, but it was this quote from when he was president talking about
00:18:30 ◼ ► society-wise, as we do scientists and teachers and stuff like that, and that it's good for the
00:18:36 ◼ ► fabric of society to do that. And that just isn't a message we heard in the '80s or the '90s. And it's
00:18:45 ◼ ► not even a partisan thing, it's just—because we had Reagan and then we had Clinton, so it's not
00:18:50 ◼ ► like, oh, just the Republicans or Democrats. But it just wasn't the direction that things went.
00:19:03 ◼ ► artist residencies. Just they're all privately funded, a lot of them. Arguably one of the best,
00:19:10 ◼ ► one of the oldest and best writing residencies in the world is up in New Hampshire called McDowell.
00:19:17 ◼ ► And I went there nine years ago, and it was life-changing. It really was. It was truly this
00:19:23 ◼ ► life-changing experience of that. I think what's difficult about people being convinced that art
00:19:32 ◼ ► is important in the world is I think folks have this false image of the artist as this,
00:19:40 ◼ ► you know, hippie smoking Mary Jane and just like faffing around, right? That's sort of this like
00:19:46 ◼ ► ridiculous image that I think a lot of people carry around of artists. But if you actually
00:19:50 ◼ ► engage with serious, committed artists, it's like, you know, I've done projects at CERN,
00:19:58 ◼ ► and I've been to residencies like this thing at McDowell. And I would put both of those activities,
00:20:05 ◼ ► so the physics research at CERN and the artistic rigor and work and commitment at an institution
00:20:11 ◼ ► like McDowell as operating at a very similar level. It's very interesting. It's one of those
00:20:16 ◼ ► things that doesn't make any sense to you until you go and you live in there. I've spent three
00:20:20 ◼ ► weeks at CERN, I've spent a month at McDowell, and you go and you live with these people,
00:20:25 ◼ ► and you kind of participate in their universe. You just kind of breathe it in and you realize that
00:20:30 ◼ ► rigor of curiosity and investigation is—there's a parity there between scientific exploration and
00:20:41 ◼ ► artistic exploration, like absolutely undeniably. And it's really exciting, but it's also hard to
00:20:47 ◼ ► convince people that sometimes, you know, it's like, it's like, oh, you just threw some paint
00:20:51 ◼ ► on a canvas and, you know, and then rubbed your naked body over it or something like that. What
00:20:57 ◼ ► are you doing? But often there's a tremendous amount of incredible, incredible, again, rigor of
00:21:06 ◼ ► exploration happening behind so much art. You know, and in literature, it's maybe a little
00:21:11 ◼ ► easier to see, like folks like James Baldwin, you know, and how his work and his essays are
00:21:15 ◼ ► resonating. You know, they've had this resurgence in the last decade because of what's been
00:21:19 ◼ ► happening in the world. And, you know, that's so powerful, you know, and that work was empowered
00:21:25 ◼ ► by a lot of grants and residency work, and a lot of it happened in Europe. So I think it's really
00:21:32 ◼ ► a shame that the arts sort of get thrown under the bus so quickly when it comes to budgets and
00:21:39 ◼ ► whatnot. Yeah, it is one of these things where I think if you did the math on it, that the returns
00:21:46 ◼ ► of money invested in the arts in terms of, I don't know, GDP and some—if you could really trace it
00:21:52 ◼ ► all, you'd see a seriously positive return, like a good multiple on those investments, you know.
00:21:59 ◼ ► And yet it's one of these difficult, conceptually difficult things for people to grasp, and
00:22:05 ◼ ► certainly people in government, it seems. They're like, "We don't need the painting program. We
00:22:09 ◼ ► don't need the music program." Yeah, if you can't prove it in a spreadsheet, it has no value.
00:22:19 ◼ ► It is the mindset. Which is such a problem these days, because the world is getting to this level
00:22:26 ◼ ► of complexity where these one-to-one direct relationships between action and output are
00:22:32 ◼ ► becoming so abstract that you need to develop this rigor of investigation that I think a lot of
00:22:45 ◼ ► people don't have, where it's like, "Oh, why is this happening in the world right now?" And
00:22:49 ◼ ► instead of just—this is why conspiracy theories are so seductive, is because they reduce the
00:22:54 ◼ ► complexity of the fact that the world is this crazy spiderweb of things, and if you pluck a string
00:23:03 ◼ ► over here, it's going to resonate in weird ways on the other side of the world. And to follow those
00:23:09 ◼ ► threads out requires commitment, and it requires an intellectual curiosity that is often lost
00:23:15 ◼ ► on YouTube or in a Twitter stream or something like that. So anyway, it's a weird moment, but
00:23:24 ◼ ► to bring it back to these membership programs that we have, it is incredibly empowering right now to,
00:23:28 ◼ ► I think, if you are a self-motivated creative person, all the tools are there. All the tools
00:23:34 ◼ ► are there, and the people, the fans, the folks who want to support your work, they know how to do it.
00:23:41 ◼ ► We've figured it out, and that's exciting. What do you think was the start of this, really, this
00:23:48 ◼ ► current push? Would you say Kickstarter a decade ago was really the thing that kind of activated
00:23:55 ◼ ► this world? Yeah, I think so. Maybe. It's hard to say. Kickstarter was certainly super influential,
00:24:03 ◼ ► because it certainly—and I've always thought—and again, there's all sorts of Kickstarters that I've
00:24:11 ◼ ► supported over the years, and some of them are just purely digital to buy somebody's ebook or
00:24:16 ◼ ► something like that. But for the most part, most of the Kickstarters I've had an interest in were
00:24:20 ◼ ► to produce physical items. One of my favorites is the Studio Neat Guys, who make all sorts of
00:24:32 ◼ ► tripod mount for the iPhone. But just to make things, right? And to get—but to actually make
00:24:42 ◼ ► a physical item, you need capital, right? The advantage to doing something purely digital,
00:24:55 ◼ ► I mean, it was ridiculous. When I got started the first, I think at least, two years of Daring
00:25:02 ◼ ► Fireball, I was on a $12 a month shared hosting account. And it was great. It was probably more
00:25:10 ◼ ► than I needed. I probably could have downgraded to the $8 one. That's phenomenal. And for me,
00:25:18 ◼ ► personally, it was always—I sympathize with you when you launched your project and you said you
00:25:26 ◼ ► dreaded it and you didn't want to ask. I mean, because I did memberships back in the day.
00:25:30 ◼ ► Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because I remember I was a—I'm pretty sure I was a member
00:25:35 ◼ ► because I wanted that full RSS feed. That was the perk, right? I've told this story numerous times,
00:25:41 ◼ ► but I'll try to tell it again. But the basic idea was—2004 was when I started selling t-shirts and
00:25:52 ◼ ► memberships and 2006 is when I quit my job at Joy & went full-time thinking I needed to go full-time
00:26:01 ◼ ► to have the—you know, the chicken and the egg problem was that you need to go full-time first
00:26:08 ◼ ► to produce the work and then the audience will grow. And if I kept waiting forever with Daring
00:26:15 ◼ ► Fireball as a side project, I wasn't going to get there. What am I waiting for? And the fear of
00:26:21 ◼ ► failure was mortifying, absolutely enough to completely seize me up. But on the other hand,
00:26:37 ◼ ► possibly happen?" It's probably my wife. But if it doesn't work out financially, you lose nothing,
00:26:44 ◼ ► right? And if anything, if I just spend a year and a bunch of savings doing even more writing
00:26:59 ◼ ► I'd be better known than I was before, right? But anyway, my membership system, my idea was—so
00:27:07 ◼ ► anybody who bought a t-shirt got a membership and if you didn't want a t-shirt, you could just pay
00:27:13 ◼ ► $19 a year and become a member. And the exclusive perk, because I did have the idea even back then,
00:27:22 ◼ ► there had to be something, right? There's got to be—even if you think and most of the people say,
00:27:28 ◼ ► "I just love Daring Fireball. I would love to just support you." I just want to give you the thing.
00:27:37 ◼ ► gives a shit about the tote bags or the umbrellas. But it pushes people over the edge. They're like,
00:27:44 ◼ ► "Well, I might as well get it now. I'll get the tote bag. I've been meaning to give money to
00:27:53 ◼ ► Full content RSS feeds were—this sounds very old, although I guess it still is an issue.
00:28:06 ◼ ► It seems like most of the RSS feeds I read now, though, are all from independent blogs,
00:28:11 ◼ ► right? Just people. And so, of course, they have the full content because they're not trying to
00:28:16 ◼ ► hoard it behind some kind of publications gateway. But it was a huge thing because everybody in the
00:28:38 ◼ ► you'd know who wrote it, you'd get the summary. And then if you wanted to read the full article,
00:28:43 ◼ ► you had to double-click or whatever the action was in your feed reader of choice to go to the
00:28:49 ◼ ► Ars Technica website because the website is where they had the ads, and the ads are how they made
00:28:56 ◼ ► the money. So, it wasn't like they were ripping anybody off. It was clear why they were doing it.
00:29:07 ◼ ► give away the articles in the RSS. So, I guess I forget if I only had excerpts. I forget what
00:29:15 ◼ ► I had before. But I wanted to—I knew people wanted to read full articles from Daring Fireball
00:29:21 ◼ ► in the RSS reader, and I wanted to make people happy. But I was already trying—the nascent days
00:29:32 ◼ ► And so, I thought, "Well, I'll do this thing, and you pay $19, and then you'll get your own
00:29:37 ◼ ► little private URL, and you can read the full content." And it did pretty well. I mean,
00:29:41 ◼ ► it absolutely—the membership thing absolutely helped me in that first year when I went full
00:29:57 ◼ ► early 2006, I went full time, made the big announcement, asked people for their support.
00:30:02 ◼ ► And we had, I forget how many, tens of thousands of dollars in savings that we had sort of,
00:30:08 ◼ ► you know, "Okay, this is what we can live off while we try to get this thing into black."
00:30:12 ◼ ► And it was like an airplane slowly approaching the ground, but then starting to pull up,
00:30:18 ◼ ► you know, like by summer, it was like the monthly revenue was getting closer. It's like,
00:30:29 ◼ ► until the point later in the year. But by the end of the year, it was break-even month to month,
00:30:47 ◼ ► I guess so, because, you know, I mean, my big fear would be that if it hadn't worked, and I had to
00:30:52 ◼ ► take a full time job somewhere, you know, that either A, the job would, by some aspect of it,
00:31:08 ◼ ► writer at Macworld or something like that, or in theory, there's some role of the dice over the last
00:31:16 ◼ ► 20 years where I wind up working at Apple, right? I mean, it could have happened at some point, and
00:31:24 ◼ ► the earlier years were probably more likely. But obviously, you know, I don't know if you've ever
00:31:30 ◼ ► noticed this, but most people who work at Apple don't write a personal blog, where they espouse
00:31:36 ◼ ► strong opinions about Apple and its products and competitors, and etc. Would I have had to shudder
00:31:44 ◼ ► during Fireball? I doubt it. But I mean, you know, some kind of announcement like, "Hey, I've taken
00:31:48 ◼ ► a job at Apple, and we're moving to Cupertino, and you know, blah, blah, blah," would have
00:31:54 ◼ ► disappointed me greatly, to say the least. Well, and you go ahead, right? I mean, that's kind of
00:31:59 ◼ ► what's the biggest thing that's at stake in a lot of these cases. Well, and the other thing to me
00:32:03 ◼ ► is that I've never been successful working for somebody else. I forget the longest I've ever had
00:32:31 ◼ ► and I'm going to spend my time on, you know, time I should be spending on work, I would be spending
00:32:36 ◼ ► writing stuff for during Fireball, because I just feel compelled to do it. And so what I
00:32:40 ◼ ► desperately needed to do is figure out a way to make that work financially. Right. Well,
00:32:45 ◼ ► that was always my, I'm right there with you. You know, my whole thing was always, when I run out of
00:32:50 ◼ ► independent stuff that I absolutely need to do, then I'll go think about getting a job.
00:32:56 ◼ ► That was, that was, and it's not like I had a trust fund. I, you know, I came from this little
00:33:05 ◼ ► airplane engine factory town where I'm one of like 10 people who made it out of that town
00:33:10 ◼ ► from a high school class. And it was more just, you know, living in Japan is such a huge life
00:33:18 ◼ ► hack. I think that people have this misconstrued sense of the cost of living in Japan. Actually,
00:33:24 ◼ ► living in Tokyo in my 20s was the only way I was able to do all the work I did and make as little
00:33:32 ◼ ► money as I did. I was, you know, in my, for most of my 20s, I was making about $20,000 a year,
00:33:37 ◼ ► max, like cobbling that together through certain projects and whatever. And my whole thing was like,
00:33:43 ◼ ► as soon as I ran out of, I need to make this, I need to make this, I need to make this,
00:33:49 ◼ ► then I'll go find a job somewhere else. But that impulse to work on these other projects was so
00:34:02 ◼ ► do you wake up in the morning and like, is, you know, are you doing the thing you want to do
00:34:07 ◼ ► that day? You know, every day you ask, is this what I want to be doing? Is this what I want?
00:34:10 ◼ ► And I just, every day I woke up and I had a thing that I must do. And that was, you know, I tried to
00:34:24 ◼ ► for most of my 20s, my yearly, this is going to sound insane, but my yearly, like base cost
00:34:37 ◼ ► If I had $10,000 coming in for the year, I would not, I could have a roof over my head and I could
00:34:44 ◼ ► be eating decently well. And I could be, you know, working on all the projects that I wanted to work
00:34:49 ◼ ► on because like, you know, like you said, a lot of web stuff, there's no, there's no cost to it.
00:34:54 ◼ ► You know, the servers were, were relatively cheap. I did have a Rackspace server at one point,
00:35:07 ◼ ► Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. But it was, you know, that was, I needed that to do certain,
00:35:39 ◼ ► it's pretty, that was always just there. You know, you can kind of build as an, as an individual
00:35:45 ◼ ► creator. I'd say the last 20 years have probably been one of the most miraculous, incredible
00:35:50 ◼ ► moments in history in terms of what one person can do and the, and the amount of exposure they
00:36:00 ◼ ► Well, I, I've, I was thinking about that rereading your essays on, on the system you've built for
00:36:07 ◼ ► running special projects and how it is, it's, it's a longer list of components than, okay,
00:36:16 ◼ ► get a shared hosting account and install movable type or WordPress or remember gray matter, you
00:36:22 ◼ ► know, find a blogging package, unzip it, type something into a config file, and then you just
00:36:31 ◼ ► start banging away on CSS and HTML templates and that's it. There's more components, but it's also
00:36:39 ◼ ► very clearly something, you know, you, I, you and I are similar in a way that we're technically
00:36:47 ◼ ► adept enough that we can do a lot of this on our own. You know, like I'm, I'm much more of a writer
00:36:53 ◼ ► than anything else, but I have a computer science degree and that was, that was a huge, huge boon.
00:36:58 ◼ ► And, you know, and there's a reason why a lot of the people whose site, you know, like Kotki,
00:37:04 ◼ ► who's still going strong, but also, you know, was a web developer. Heather Armstrong at deuce.com
00:37:12 ◼ ► was a web developer and could build her own website. You know, being able to build your
00:37:17 ◼ ► own website was not necessarily required, but you either needed to do it yourself or have somebody
00:37:32 ◼ ► the recommended way. You know, it's like my way I would, you know, I think I say that most of my,
00:37:38 ◼ ► my writeups, I'm like, look, I'm going to show you how I do it and do not do this. Like, this is the
00:37:44 ◼ ► anti-pattern unless, I mean, I also have a computer science degree and, you know, unless you really,
00:37:51 ◼ ► really like this stuff. And for me, you know, like I like I wrote about in Wired the other day,
00:37:55 ◼ ► you know, there is something really healing and palliative about this kind of work for me,
00:38:01 ◼ ► that has a deep connection to my childhood. And, you know, it's like kind of this safe space
00:38:05 ◼ ► server work. And so like, I am not turned off by it. But you could basically, I think, fire up like
00:38:11 ◼ ► a ghost instance, you know, shared, you know, like a hosted ghost instance, and you basically have
00:38:16 ◼ ► everything you need. It does the memberships, it does the newsletters, it does the blog, you have
00:38:20 ◼ ► control over the design if you want, but you don't have to mess with it. And you have complete
00:38:25 ◼ ► ownership of the whole stack, and requires a relatively little technical sort of input.
00:38:33 ◼ ► And so I think, you know, that's, that's, that's pretty great. But yeah, definitely the my,
00:38:44 ◼ ► You protest too much. We're from, we're from this era, you know, I feel like this is a great
00:38:51 ◼ ► example of just carrying forward your baggage, you know, throughout your entire life. Like we
00:38:56 ◼ ► carry all this psychic baggage with us and all this, you know, the physical baggage of like,
00:39:01 ◼ ► injuries and stuff. And like, one of the things that definitely I think I'm carrying forward is
00:39:05 ◼ ► like this need, this technical obsession baggage where I'm like, oh, if it's not, if it doesn't
00:39:10 ◼ ► have 400 moving parts that I have to compile something in the in the terminal that it's not
00:39:18 ◼ ► that's how I justify it. All right, let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor. It's our
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00:40:35 ◼ ► for you. flatfile.io. So you mentioned the piece you just wrote, I think a couple days ago in Wired.
00:40:45 ◼ ► It just came out yesterday. Yeah. Well, I started it three years ago, but it came out yesterday.
00:40:50 ◼ ► This is so amazing that it came out right before you were on the show because this is how I think
00:40:54 ◼ ► about it too. And I've been writing less code than I did when I was younger. And it's like,
00:41:11 ◼ ► something on my weird Moonman to-do system, to bubble it up to, okay, here's the thing I'm
00:41:20 ◼ ► actually going to spend this afternoon on, to be a programming project as opposed to writing
00:41:27 ◼ ► something or reading something. It's gotten lower. And I've made an effort in recent months to do a
00:41:37 ◼ ► little more of that. There's nothing, I don't really have a lot that's visible. And if there's
00:41:41 ◼ ► anything I need to do going forward the rest of this year differently, it's to actually write
00:41:47 ◼ ► about more of them. Daring Fireball used to have a lot more posts. Every once in a while,
00:41:52 ◼ ► I get stuck reading old posts on Daring Fireball. And I'm like, "Hey, this was pretty good back then."
00:41:56 ◼ ► But just explaining how I made a little thing that does a thing. And I've started making more
00:42:04 ◼ ► little things, but I haven't taken the time to actually write them up. But the mental aspect of
00:42:11 ◼ ► it that you mentioned is so true for me. I find it to be therapeutic. And depending on my mood,
00:42:20 ◼ ► almost necessary. And it's interesting, I can't, I should be able to, right? Because this is what
00:42:29 ◼ ► I do. I talk about this stuff and I write about this stuff. And I consider myself both a writer
00:42:34 ◼ ► and a programmer. So I should be able to express myself more clearly about how I see the difference
00:42:49 ◼ ► some kind of computer program to run on my server or something like that. There are similar parts
00:42:56 ◼ ► to it, but there's something fundamentally more satisfying about programming. It's like, I feel
00:43:05 ◼ ► more compelled to do prose writing, but it's the programming that is, "Hey, this is neat." And
00:43:12 ◼ ► there's a thing you mentioned in it that once you get a piece of code running, it doesn't just feel
00:43:16 ◼ ► like you made something. It feels like you've made something that has a bit of life to it.
00:43:49 ◼ ► So, okay, let's back up. Let's back up. So part of it is I just want to work with editors because
00:43:54 ◼ ► I want to get better at writing. So that's like, that's, I would say, 90, that's 70% of it. So it's
00:44:00 ◼ ► just, I want to get better at writing and just writing on my own and writing for my newsletters
00:44:05 ◼ ► or blogs or whatever. I can, you know, that activates a certain muscle of just doing the work.
00:44:11 ◼ ► But if you go to the gym, you can go to the gym, you know, five times a week for 10 years,
00:44:18 ◼ ► and you could be doing, you could just have stupid habits that you're stuck doing. And so I find like
00:44:24 ◼ ► working with an editor is kind of like hiring a personal trainer or whatever. And working with a
00:44:28 ◼ ► great editor is just such a joy. And I know that working with the right editor will elevate the
00:44:36 ◼ ► quality of a piece far higher than I could get it on my own. And so, you know, I was working on a
00:44:43 ◼ ► novel for years. And part of that process was applying for fellowships and applying for workshops.
00:44:51 ◼ ► I was at, I did the Iowa Writers' Workshop program. They have like a two-month intensive summer
00:44:57 ◼ ► edition of the Fiction Writers' Workshop there. And, you know, going out there and doing that,
00:45:04 ◼ ► these were all things to basically force myself to work with people who have spent a lot of time
00:45:11 ◼ ► thinking about this, these kinds of writing, in that case, the writing fiction, and in the case
00:45:16 ◼ ► of working with editors at Wired or The Atlantic, you know, doing this sort of nonfiction, this,
00:45:23 ◼ ► you know, 1000 to 1500 word, or 800 to 1500 word nonfiction stuff for a publication like Wired or
00:45:29 ◼ ► The Atlantic. So a big part of it is just, if I write something that I'm kind of excited about,
00:45:35 ◼ ► that I feel like, you know, hits on, like a quote unquote, sort of truth that I haven't seen
00:45:42 ◼ ► articulated clearly, recently, you know, a lot of these things are kind of like have been done
00:45:47 ◼ ► before written about 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there's something recent hasn't come
00:45:51 ◼ ► up that's kind of hit on the same notes. And I feel like, okay, yeah, there's something interesting
00:45:55 ◼ ► going on here that I feel is like, is very true for me. And I would like this idea to have the
00:46:11 ◼ ► readership than anything I'm ever going to cobble together. So that's the other 30%. So it's 70%
00:46:16 ◼ ► working with a great editor to make me better, and to learn how to think about writing better
00:46:23 ◼ ► stories, and to elevate the story itself. And then the 30% is just the platform. And then
00:46:30 ◼ ► somewhere in there, there's the payment component, which is less important now because I have the
00:46:35 ◼ ► membership program, but is nice, like, Wired actually pays pretty well, like, I got paid
00:46:40 ◼ ► decently for that piece. And so that's, that's, you know, altogether, that's kind of, that's
00:46:46 ◼ ► how I end up deciding to put things in certain publications. And so when I, like I said, I wrote
00:46:52 ◼ ► this, I started writing this three years ago, and I wrote it for one of my newsletters, the Roden
00:46:58 ◼ ► newsletter. And a lot of times at the end of that Roden newsletter, I'll have like a big essay or
00:47:02 ◼ ► I'll put, I kind of, I don't go into it thinking I'm going to write an essay, I have this, this
00:47:07 ◼ ► topic I want to kind of play with. And it turns into an essay often. And I was thinking about
00:47:13 ◼ ► server work, working on, I'd done all this server stuff, I moved off of one of my, one of those old
00:47:18 ◼ ► Rackspace servers. And I found the process of that move to be so healing, and really important to be
00:47:25 ◼ ► at that moment. And, and I started writing about that. And I got that Roden essay done. And I
00:47:31 ◼ ► thought, you know, there's something more here. I don't want to just put this in the newsletter,
00:47:36 ◼ ► and then have that be done. I want to think about a different place for this. And I'd like to work
00:47:44 ◼ ► with an editor on this. And so that was kind of why I held it back. But, but sometimes I'll put
00:47:50 ◼ ► stuff in the newsletter. And it just takes off like crazy, like the, like the, my fast software
00:47:56 ◼ ► is the best software essay was originally in a newsletter. And then that had such an immediate
00:48:04 ◼ ► visceral reach from just the newsletter, I gave it its own, I ripped it out of the newsletter,
00:48:10 ◼ ► I cleaned it up a bit, gave it its own URL on my, on my homepage under the essays header. And
00:48:17 ◼ ► that thing had crazy reach. So sometimes you like, you can have massive reach if you're an
00:48:21 ◼ ► independent writer. But I find it so difficult to tell what is going to have, what's going to
00:48:27 ◼ ► sort of strike that chord. And, and so I find a good way to kind of, if you have a piece that
00:48:33 ◼ ► you really want to get out in the world, to a bigger audience than going with The Atlantic
00:48:43 ◼ ► Ben Thompson and I have talked about the fact that neither, neither of us has an editor. And yeah,
00:48:48 ◼ ► it's not that I'm opposed, but I'm certainly not going to hire one for Daring Firewall. Right?
00:48:56 ◼ ► I mean, I don't know why I even laugh at that. I could, you know, it is an interesting skill,
00:49:02 ◼ ► I think. And I'm not even saying, I'm not trying to say like my writing could not be improved
00:49:08 ◼ ► through editing. But like for a couple of years, I was writing back page columns for Mac world a
00:49:17 ◼ ► couple of times a year, which is an interesting experience. And, and when I first started doing
00:49:24 ◼ ► it, the money was very meaningful to me. And it's a similar thing. Mac world paid very well
00:49:30 ◼ ► for a back page column. And, and it was important. It was fascinating because my dad was incredibly
00:49:38 ◼ ► impressed. It's like, I think he finally understood what I do. Because he could, he could go and buy a
00:49:45 ◼ ► copy of Mac world and open it up to the back page. And there's my picture and my, my byline,
00:49:51 ◼ ► you know, in print. But my time writing the Mac world columns, I don't recall ever once having
00:50:01 ◼ ► one really seriously improved through editing. Not, and I, I, I'm sure that there are people
00:50:08 ◼ ► who worked at Mac world who are listening to this. I don't mean to slag on their editors at all.
00:50:25 ◼ ► yeah. And a few times when my, my columns were changed, it was for the worse because they were
00:50:34 ◼ ► edited slightly for space. And I felt like I already had no needless words to omit, you know,
00:50:43 ◼ ► and that the point was lost. Right. Well, I, you know, it is, it is, I think finding great editors
00:50:52 ◼ ► is critical, you know, and I think that's, that's why when I, when I say I'm pitching to Wired or
00:50:58 ◼ ► whatever, I'm really pitching to specific people. And I'm only, I only want to work with this person
00:51:03 ◼ ► or that person, you know, and that's, that's because I know that they're gonna, they're gonna
00:51:07 ◼ ► elevate it. But even with my book last year, you know, Kisa by Kisa, I worked with, I actually had,
00:51:15 ◼ ► I had two, two editors, really. One was sort of a technical copy focused editor that definitely
00:51:28 ◼ ► made it better. There were just all these inconsistencies and stuff. And then I had another
00:51:32 ◼ ► editor who was, was, was sort of on a bigger picture level. And these are super talented
00:51:38 ◼ ► people and super accomplished people. And they absolutely made that manuscript better, you know,
00:51:46 ◼ ► like, and a lot, a lot of it for me is just having the conversations, you know, there's this like
00:51:50 ◼ ► old adage of like, how do you, how do you help a physicist do, you know, work at the blackboard?
00:51:55 ◼ ► It's like, buy him a dog, you know, just give him someone to talk to. That's all, that's all you
00:52:00 ◼ ► need a lot of times is just someone to articulate like, what did you do today? What are you doing
00:52:05 ◼ ► in this paragraph? Now Skaard, the guy who wrote the My Struggles, mega, you know, auto novel,
00:52:13 ◼ ► you know, I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He's, I think he's Norwegian. He wrote like,
00:52:21 ◼ ► like, I think like 90% of all Norwegian people have read his novels. But he wrote this two,
00:52:26 ◼ ► 3000 page kind of pseudo autobiographical fiction thing. And part of that process for him writing
00:52:34 ◼ ► was that at the end of every day, every day, he would write and then he would call his editor and
00:52:40 ◼ ► he would read to the editor everything he wrote that day. Just as a way of like, am I crazy? Is
00:52:46 ◼ ► this shit? You know, it's like, is it does this make sense? You know, it just I think like that
00:52:52 ◼ ► sounding board for certain writers can be so powerful. And, and so that's for me, that's
00:52:59 ◼ ► definitely kind of like what where I'm reaching for when I'm when I'm reaching to work with an
00:53:05 ◼ ► editor. That said, I have had essays turn, they turn very into very different things because I
00:53:14 ◼ ► was young and I and I was nervous. And I was publishing with a big name brand publication and
00:53:21 ◼ ► I was afraid to push back. And I've had things go out that I'm actually somewhat embarrassed by
00:53:26 ◼ ► because the message was changed so dramatically from what I originally intended to write to what
00:53:39 ◼ ► editors. And it's made me more aware of what you should fight for when you're working with someone
00:53:46 ◼ ► and not to be afraid to fight for that because, you know, the worst thing that can happen is that
00:53:50 ◼ ► you have this, this message that's been kind of perverted by the editorial process. Because the
00:53:56 ◼ ► publication can sometimes have an image for where they want the piece to go, for whatever reason.
00:54:01 ◼ ► And, you know, that may, if that's not aligned with what you want, then definitely pull out,
00:54:05 ◼ ► you know, if talking to young writers out there who may end up working with editors, like,
00:54:10 ◼ ► you know, own, make sure you know where you want that thing to go and, and fight for it,
00:54:15 ◼ ► fight for fight for that core. On a sentence by sentence level, you might have to give up some
00:54:20 ◼ ► things. But like, if the core message is being perverted, definitely pull back. And you know,
00:54:25 ◼ ► in some cases, maybe even just pull the piece if it's not going to go where you want it to go.
00:54:28 ◼ ► My problem, my other problem with the Macworld backpage column was that I'm fundamentally
00:54:37 ◼ ► too selfish about Daring Fireball. And the pieces I see, and this is where I think I see the
00:54:45 ◼ ► difference, like this, your column here, that you just published in Wired has a different feel to it
00:54:52 ◼ ► than your special projects writing, right? Your special projects writing is more intimate.
00:54:59 ◼ ► And you've got a voice that is sort of knowing, because you know, you're writing for this audience
00:55:07 ◼ ► of people who already know who you are, as opposed to the giant megaphone of Wired, where you're
00:55:12 ◼ ► writing for an audience where I'll bet most of the people who've already read it had never heard of
00:55:17 ◼ ► you before or don't recall hearing, you know, right, right. My problem with the Macworld backpage
00:55:23 ◼ ► is that they were just, they were the same things that I write for Daring Fireball, except when I
00:55:29 ◼ ► wrote for the back page, they had to be exactly 700 words or whatever nine, I think it was like,
00:55:34 ◼ ► 900 words. And if I had a 600 word idea, well, I had to figure out a way to pad it. And if I had
00:55:41 ◼ ► a 1200 word idea, I had to figure out a way to cut it. And I was very frustrated by that. And,
00:56:00 ◼ ► used to write. That's where Steven Levy used to write in the 80s. And there I was, you know,
00:56:07 ◼ ► this is what I wanted to do when I started writing about this stuff is be on the back page of
00:56:10 ◼ ► Macworld. And then as soon as I got there, I, I wanted to not be there anymore. Well, when,
00:56:16 ◼ ► when were you, when were you doing the Macworld stuff? 2006 to 2008. I want to say, do you,
00:56:21 ◼ ► do you feel like that had a, like a marked effect on your profile? Like, do you think that that
00:56:27 ◼ ► brought in a bunch of Daring Fireball? Yeah, it certainly didn't hurt. You know, I think,
00:56:31 ◼ ► I think I did just the right amount of it. I don't want to complain too much, but, but the fundamental
00:56:35 ◼ ► tension I felt was that when I did a back page column that I didn't feel came out right. And,
00:56:41 ◼ ► and that, that hard length limit is not a good skill that I have. And, and by, by exercising
00:56:51 ◼ ► my writing muscles, writing at Daring Fireball, I wasn't building that muscle, right? Like writing
00:56:57 ◼ ► to a set back page column length, you know, I, those muscles have atrophied for me. Um, so if I
00:57:05 ◼ ► had, I turned in a bad column, I felt terribly guilty about it. Just terrible because it's like,
00:57:10 ◼ ► this is, I just knew that this wasn't the best work that I could do. And here I, here I am
00:57:31 ◼ ► Right, right. Cause you're not, yeah, you're not, you're not building the foundation of your,
00:57:35 ◼ ► your castle or whatever, you know, you're giving, you're giving that brick to someone else.
00:57:40 ◼ ► Yeah, no, that's, I think that's a very universal feeling for a lot of people who do independent
00:57:47 ◼ ► work and then, uh, you know, go off to, to either work in a company or work at a publication.
00:57:52 ◼ ► And that's what, you know, part of what's been interesting about the sub stack thing is like,
00:57:55 ◼ ► basically people building up inside of a big, a big publication, the cache and the name value,
00:58:04 ◼ ► their brand inside of a pub, and then taking that brand value and monetizing it, you know,
00:58:11 ◼ ► basically going in reverse. And, uh, I think that's really fascinating. You know, I think in
00:58:17 ◼ ► some ways it's really smart. Um, and in other ways, I think a lot of people will find out that
00:58:32 ◼ ► Right. No, no, no question about it. I wonder how long it'll last for some people, you know?
00:58:39 ◼ ► I know, uh, so, uh, you know, Andrew Sullivan has as a big, big high name sub stack now. And he,
00:58:49 ◼ ► he came from the world of magazine editing, but then had his personal blog for a number of years,
00:58:56 ◼ ► during the Bush administration. And, you know, I think he's been pretty clear that he effectively
00:59:00 ◼ ► burned out on it. Um, and I just wonder, you know, what's the difference going to be this time.
00:59:06 ◼ ► And, and he's enormously prolific. I mean, you know, uh, his weekly newsletter, it's like,
00:59:16 ◼ ► Right. No, well, there's a couple of newsletter writers that I just kind of want to, I want to
00:59:22 ◼ ► like pull them aside and go, you don't have to write this much. It's just, it's too much.
00:59:27 ◼ ► Sometimes, sometimes, uh, I don't know about you, but my newsletter folder in my inbox,
00:59:37 ◼ ► we'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
00:59:46 ◼ ► the, by the prolific nature of some of these, some of these writers. And like, I think it really
00:59:51 ◼ ► does bring up sustainability issues, like psychic sustainability issues. Cause it's like, you can
00:59:58 ◼ ► burn out for sure. Um, and I, you know, if you build up a certain momentum and you feel like you,
01:00:04 ◼ ► your readers have an expectation, I think that's, that's where the burnout happens is like,
01:00:08 ◼ ► you're writing these 5,000 word giant newsletters a couple of times a week. And, uh, you know,
01:00:14 ◼ ► you want to take a break, but you're worried everyone's going to freak out. But the reality is,
01:00:17 ◼ ► is that no one's going to freak out and everyone's going to be like, Hey, take a break.
01:00:21 ◼ ► That's fine. Um, but we can kind of back ourselves into these weird psychic corners and,
01:00:29 ◼ ► All right. Let me take another break here and thank our next friends, our good friends at
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01:02:34 ◼ ► You know, software that I think anytime your software, basically fast software allows you
01:02:42 ◼ ► to maintain a slow flow state. So you can, anytime software slows down and, and this is not just,
01:02:51 ◼ ► you know, whatever, if you're doing ML processing or whatever, doing a big database chunk,
01:02:56 ◼ ► you know, whatever dump or whatever, that's going to take time. Sure. If you're rendering frames or
01:03:00 ◼ ► that's going to take time, I'm not talking about that space of software. I'm talking about kind of
01:03:04 ◼ ► interface components. I'm talking about keyboard accessibility. I'm talking about just the speed at
01:03:10 ◼ ► which the software moves with you. So if that, you know, bicycle for the mind metaphor that Jobs is,
01:03:16 ◼ ► you know, there's always referenced. If, if you take that, uh, as kind of the base for this,
01:03:21 ◼ ► it's like you want the bike to just be really beautifully tuned and you want the gears to change
01:03:27 ◼ ► when you change the gears immediately. You don't want the derailleur to get stuck. You don't want
01:03:32 ◼ ► the brakes to squeal. You just want the thing to feel like a beautifully engineered, well-oiled
01:03:38 ◼ ► machine. And, and fastness, I think is a core part of that. So it's like as, as if you want to move
01:03:43 ◼ ► between, you know, this window and that window, if you want to carry a piece of data from this window
01:03:48 ◼ ► to that window, if you want to select something, if you want to fix something, if you want to
01:03:53 ◼ ► manipulate something, it all should happen instantaneously. I think at the speed at which
01:03:58 ◼ ► you want to want to do that action, that's kind of the base of it. I sometimes think back to, uh,
01:04:04 ◼ ► my days doing print graphic design and learning QuarkXPress at the Drexel student newspaper
01:04:40 ◼ ► you know, fell out of relevancy and Adobe sort of backed the wrong horse there. And then they,
01:04:46 ◼ ► you know, InDesign felt right at home to somebody who knew Quark. And it was, you know,
01:04:54 ◼ ► I think it was unofficially code named the Quark killer at Adobe. Um, but I think back to like
01:05:01 ◼ ► the mid nineties and how it, at the student newspaper and, you know, we had old computers
01:05:07 ◼ ► too, old Macs, you know, the whole place, uh, more or less spent its entire budget on buying new,
01:05:16 ◼ ► new Macs every couple of years just to keep the thing running. Um, it, it, Quark was so,
01:05:22 ◼ ► and I know people used to complain about Quark the company, but Quark, the, you know, and that
01:05:28 ◼ ► they're, they're, they apparently were run by relatively unpleasant people and that they had
01:05:33 ◼ ► onerous licensing terms and, um, but man, the app was so lean and mean and fast and it made things,
01:05:43 ◼ ► anything that could be fast was fast and precise, very precise. And it, and, uh, I still remember
01:05:53 ◼ ► keyboard shortcuts. And I remember that like, if you were like, if you selected an item on the
01:05:58 ◼ ► pace board and we're using the arrow keys to nudge it around, I think it defaulted to like hundreds
01:06:03 ◼ ► of an inch. And if you wanted to make it thousands of an inch, you just held down the option key,
01:06:07 ◼ ► why you use the arrows and just little things like that. And then if there was something else
01:06:12 ◼ ► that was similar, like you'd have to, you know, you'd wanted more precise nudging, guess what?
01:06:22 ◼ ► it was so fast on those old computers. Imagine how fast it could be today. And yet so much of
01:06:29 ◼ ► our software doesn't have that, that feel and it doesn't have that precision. And one of the things
01:06:36 ◼ ► I know you and I have been convincing behind the scenes before we come on, but talking about
01:06:49 ◼ ► I don't know what the answer is, but I know that Apple didn't find it yet, which to the question
01:06:56 ◼ ► of how do you precisely select text on a tech, on a touch screen. It is incredible how often I'm
01:07:02 ◼ ► trying to select text across lines and can't quite get the start and end exactly where I want it.
01:07:15 ◼ ► about it. Yeah. Yeah, no, I've been thinking about this quite a bit over the last couple
01:07:22 ◼ ► of days. Cause I figured we'd, we'd, we'd, we'd dig into this world and, and I think like what's
01:07:26 ◼ ► for me, the answer to iPad OS is the MacBook M1. I just, that's it. I've, I've, I've really
01:07:36 ◼ ► been thinking a lot about the miracle that is Mac OS, how actually iOS feels like what you'd expect
01:07:48 ◼ ► software or operating systems to work like in, in a certain way. And in a way iOS is really
01:07:54 ◼ ► the sensible operating system. It is everything about it is totally sensible. Everything is
01:08:00 ◼ ► sandboxed. Everything is locked down. There's walls everywhere. You're kind of on a, on an iPhone.
01:08:05 ◼ ► I think it's on a, on a, or on a phone size device. I think it is one of the most perfect
01:08:12 ◼ ► instantiations of an OS out there. You know, it's like where you're just doing single tasks.
01:08:16 ◼ ► You're not really moving data between things. You're not trying to do anything that's too
01:08:21 ◼ ► complicated. You're just, you know, it's like an in and out kind of device. You're not theoretically,
01:08:25 ◼ ► I know we all live with these things attached to our faces now, but theoretically, you know,
01:08:30 ◼ ► the use case for, for a mobile phone or a mobile phone sized internet device is to go in and get a
01:08:38 ◼ ► little bit of information, you know, pay for something or whatever, and then get out, you
01:08:43 ◼ ► know, it's meant to be in and out. And I think iOS is superb. It is so good. It is, you know,
01:08:49 ◼ ► easy to set up very little vectors for attacks. You know, you're not gonna, you don't have to run
01:08:56 ◼ ► antivirus software. You don't have to worry about what you're installing. You know, it's like in a
01:08:59 ◼ ► lot of ways it's incredible. And then the problem was putting it on the iPad and then giving the
01:09:06 ◼ ► iPad such an amazing screen. It's such an amazing processor in that 2018 iPad Pro and being like,
01:09:15 ◼ ► here you go. Here's a, here's a Ferrari engine. But we've strapped it to, you know, the Homer
01:09:21 ◼ ► Simpson car. You're just like, I can't, I can't use this thing. I can't, you know, I can't maximize
01:09:28 ◼ ► the power of this engine except for in like very weird ways where it's like a single task of like,
01:09:35 ◼ ► okay, I can render this video really quickly. But the process of like, importing the video from my
01:09:40 ◼ ► high end camera is onerous and impossible. There's no file system that I can access, you know, it's
01:09:46 ◼ ► just like all these, all these things that kind of got in the way of really maximizing the value of
01:09:52 ◼ ► what was on offer. But I would say you can't, it's really difficult to balance out that incredible
01:10:00 ◼ ► simplicity of the iPhone experience, and really the kind of like tuned perfection of that use case
01:10:07 ◼ ► for general computing. And so anyway, that the tension for me with with iPad was always that.
01:10:14 ◼ ► And then at the same time, you know, 2018, we were deep in the quagmire hell of the Intel MacBook,
01:10:30 ◼ ► The keyboard was the worst part, because that was self inflicted on Apple's part, right?
01:10:40 ◼ ► they're struggling, you know, the one that everybody wanted, the retina MacBook Air was
01:10:45 ◼ ► years late. And you know, it was because Intel didn't have chips that would let Apple make the
01:10:52 ◼ ► Mac, retina MacBook Air that they wanted to make. Yeah, well, I think, and that people wanted to buy,
01:10:59 ◼ ► right? Yeah, no, in hindsight, the 2016 MacBook Pro is probably the worst computer Apple's ever
01:11:07 ◼ ► released, like bar none. It's just, and maybe in the 90s or the 80s, that I like, my history is a
01:11:15 ◼ ► little fuzzy back then we couldn't, we couldn't afford Apple computers when I was a kid. So I was
01:11:20 ◼ ► never paying attention to. So we were always like, if we had anything, it was I remember there's a
01:11:25 ◼ ► period of Apple clones that existed. Oh, Scully. Yeah, what were they called? I forget what they
01:11:29 ◼ ► were called. And they even had, but that was, they stole like ROMs out of discarded Apple IIs to like,
01:11:47 ◼ ► they were crazy. They never really took off. No, but I mean, anyway, so I buy Apple history back
01:11:53 ◼ ► there is extremely fuzzy, but I started with like the late, like whatever was released in 1999, the
01:12:01 ◼ ► power book that was in 1999. That was my first real Mac. And I would say of all of the computers
01:12:08 ◼ ► I've owned, yeah, the 2016 MacBook Pro, the keyboard didn't work. It broke on me multiple
01:12:13 ◼ ► times. The USB C ports were bad. I don't know if you remember, but like USB plugs just wouldn't stay
01:12:21 ◼ ► in. They didn't have, they didn't have the clicking mechanism. They didn't have like that docking
01:12:25 ◼ ► mechanism that everything seems to have now where they have these really secure connections. Anyway,
01:12:29 ◼ ► just, and the battery would last 12 seconds. It was just truly horrible. So I think it was
01:12:35 ◼ ► all of those things together. And then you have this beautiful, super capable iPad and you're
01:12:40 ◼ ► just like, Oh, I want this to be my main computer, but I can't do anything on it. And there was
01:12:47 ◼ ► a sort of stretch there. I know we've reiterated a lot since the M1s came out and talking about Apple's
01:12:54 ◼ ► sort of, you know, that summit that they had me and Panzorino and Inafrid come out for,
01:13:07 ◼ ► But it was a depressing number of years because Apple doesn't explain itself. And so they're not
01:13:15 ◼ ► going to say, look, the reason we're still selling a $999 MacBook Air without a retina to screen,
01:13:23 ◼ ► all of these years after the iPad and iPhone have gone retina and non-retina just looks so
01:13:30 ◼ ► bad, even though it's, you know, a more expensive product, you know, that you could, you know,
01:13:36 ◼ ► configure a MacBook Air for 1500 bucks. And yet it was still not retina, looked really dated.
01:13:43 ◼ ► Tim Cook gave an interview at one point where he said, and people really latched onto it,
01:13:48 ◼ ► but he said something like that he does 80% of his work on an iPad. It created the perception
01:13:54 ◼ ► that the Mac was on its way out. Right. And, you know, I never believed it, but I was worried
01:14:02 ◼ ► about it. Right. Like I would not have bet on it, but I also understand why people who would have
01:14:08 ◼ ► bet on it were thinking it. They weren't crazy. Right. The MacBook Air really, their most popular,
01:14:15 ◼ ► single most popular Mac ever made by far the MacBook Air. Somebody, people who've worked in
01:14:23 ◼ ► Apple stores have told me, you have no idea how many people like by what margin MacBook Air's,
01:14:33 ◼ ► I would bet that it is though. Cause I, I think most people, if they're going to buy an M1,
01:14:43 ◼ ► And I don't think they see the value in the more expensive 13 inch MacBook Pro. I love it.
01:14:49 ◼ ► I'm on, I'm on, I'm on a MacBook Air right now. It's, you know, I, I think that it's so
01:14:55 ◼ ► incredibly popular and yet they, they seemingly abandoned it. Right. And they, and they weren't
01:15:02 ◼ ► going to explain why they weren't going to say, look, we know that this is outdated. We have big
01:15:07 ◼ ► plans, but we can't build. I mean, and part of it isn't, is just Apple being Apple. And part of it
01:15:13 ◼ ► is that no professional company is going to throw Intel under the bus. You know, that's just not how
01:15:18 ◼ ► you do business, you know? Right. But at the same time, they're not going to do what other companies
01:15:23 ◼ ► do and cut prices and say, well, okay, the MacBook Air is getting old, but how about this? We'll sell
01:15:29 ◼ ► it for $650 because it's three years. This ridiculous computer is three years old because
01:15:35 ◼ ► Apple likes to maintain their price points so that when they do come out with a new one,
01:15:40 ◼ ► it's not like, oh, the new retina MacBook Air jerked the price up 50% because they had cut
01:15:46 ◼ ► the price on the old one. Right. So Apple, you know, and, and the, how can I forget the trash can
01:15:52 ◼ ► Mac Pro, which had, which languished for even longer. Right. And it was ridiculously expensive.
01:16:12 ◼ ► me and you, you just feel like the Mac or Mac OS is the OS where it's the bicycle for your mind.
01:16:22 ◼ ► And 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
01:16:30 ◼ ► used the analogy of like feeling like you're pedaling uphill versus pedaling downhill to
01:16:35 ◼ ► extend the bicycle for the mind thing. And the problem with that metaphor is that usually when
01:16:41 ◼ ► you say something's going downhill, it means it's bad. Right. But that's not what I mean. I mean,
01:16:48 ◼ ► it's good. It feels like the bike is propelling itself and you don't even have to, you don't even
01:16:52 ◼ ► realize, you know, you're just, all you have to do is steer and you don't have to exert any force to
01:16:58 ◼ ► make the bike go down. Whereas when, you know, I used to have for, I had a six month internship
01:17:04 ◼ ► right outside Philadelphia and at the, there's a huge hill. I had to ride my bike up every morning
01:17:10 ◼ ► and it was a internship over the summer. And there were times where I've, they were always,
01:17:16 ◼ ► never, it was never an issue. I had my own office, but there were times where I would just be drenched
01:17:21 ◼ ► with sweat, but then on the way home, I got to go downhill and it's sort of the way you want it,
01:17:27 ◼ ► right? It's better to work hard to get to work. And then when the day's over and you get to go
01:17:31 ◼ ► home and have fun, you just go flying down the hill at 40 miles an hour. I have that feeling
01:17:38 ◼ ► about Mac OS and it was worrisome to me when it felt like, you know, maybe they're not committed
01:17:46 ◼ ► to it. And now we have these M1 Macs and to me, the best overall version of Mac OS in quite a
01:17:54 ◼ ► while. Maybe it was like Catalina was so buggy for me for most of the year. And I think in hindsight,
01:18:03 ◼ ► it might be because they had to pull or chose to pull engineers to work on Big Sur so that
01:18:10 ◼ ► Big Sur would be ready for the M1, you know, Apple Silicon. And so maybe being the release right
01:18:17 ◼ ► before a processor transition was sort of a bad roll of the dice for Catalina. I was just going
01:18:23 ◼ ► to say this, but just this paucity of engineers issue at Apple always strikes me as insane,
01:18:29 ◼ ► you know, that there's this limited number, this very, very limited number of engineers,
01:18:33 ◼ ► and they have to be kind of moved between big projects. But yeah, I mean, but maybe that was
01:18:39 ◼ ► the case with Catalina, like just all the heavy hitters were off somewhere else getting this thing
01:18:45 ◼ ► ready for the M1. Well, it does sound like that, right? How can you be the richest company in the
01:18:49 ◼ ► world and be starved for engineers? But on the other hand, there is the mythical man month,
01:18:53 ◼ ► right? And that I think Apple very consistently has always understood, at least from the next
01:19:01 ◼ ► reunification onward, you know, under Steve Jobs' leadership, that the mythical man month is real,
01:19:10 ◼ ► and that you've got to keep teams, however many thousands of engineers they have, they get broken
01:19:15 ◼ ► up into relatively small teams. I know a bunch of people who work at Apple, but most of the people,
01:19:20 ◼ ► almost everybody I know at Apple is effectively on a small team. And I think that's sort of the
01:19:34 ◼ ► feeling like Apple is letting the macOS world sort of like dissolve, you know, in all sorts of
01:19:45 ◼ ► different ways. And the MacBooks themselves were just not good machines, not reliable machines.
01:19:49 ◼ ► And then Catalina being truly, for me too, really unreliable OS, you know, that just felt
01:19:56 ◼ ► unpolished, which is not something you want your operating system to feel like. It's like,
01:20:03 ◼ ► you want that foundation to be as strong as possible if you're working on all these big
01:20:07 ◼ ► projects. And you know, you're essentially your life force is connected with this operating system.
01:20:22 ◼ ► has just really made me feel good. I just feel, I don't know about you, but I just feel like,
01:20:29 ◼ ► yes. And, you know, the corollary of that too is like, I just don't worry now about iPadOS.
01:20:43 ◼ ► this operating system is, I think, the aberration, right? So it's like, if you think about what
01:20:48 ◼ ► happened to get to this point of this, like, and I really think macOS is a beautiful combination of
01:20:54 ◼ ► usability and power. And, you know, even some of the system security stuff they've added,
01:21:01 ◼ ► doesn't really irk me as much as it irks other folks. But like, I think some of it is useful.
01:21:07 ◼ ► But like, the fact that Next had to happen, right, so Steve getting kicked out of Apple had to happen,
01:21:20 ◼ ► user seats in the world. And then that being, you know, the foundation for macOS, OS X, or
01:21:28 ◼ ► Apple. Another thing that had to happen in there is Apple needed to, for us to get from there to
01:21:50 ◼ ► Copeland, maybe you weren't using a Mac in the mid 90s, but Jason Sennell and I have talked about it,
01:21:55 ◼ ► was that they, you know, they had these next generation, several of them, it's not worth
01:21:59 ◼ ► going into the details. But it was always like Yoda talking to Luke Skywalker, always your eyes
01:22:05 ◼ ► on the future, you know, and they were, Apple was always talking about operating systems that they
01:22:11 ◼ ► planned to come out in three or four years, like crazy by today's standards. Like what, how can you
01:22:16 ◼ ► be talking about an operating system years in advance, while the one you're selling today is
01:22:21 ◼ ► technically falling apart, and in by by then modern standards. But the, it seemed at the time
01:22:29 ◼ ► that the worst thing that could happen would be for this Apple's next generation operating system
01:22:34 ◼ ► to fall apart, just flame out. But I think in hindsight, the really worst thing that could
01:22:40 ◼ ► have happened would have been if it had just been sort of like, kind of good enough, right? And it
01:22:46 ◼ ► would have, you know, then they wouldn't have had to buy next, we probably would have been left with
01:22:50 ◼ ► something far less elegant and durable, right, that we'd still be talking about in the year 2021,
01:23:03 ◼ ► You know, sometimes it's better to fail completely than to sort of half-ass your way through it.
01:23:07 ◼ ► Yeah, well, and I mean, look at the thing that they're able to pick up and run with. I mean,
01:23:13 ◼ ► the fact that that this massive consumer-focused facing OS has a BSD core to it, the fact that
01:23:21 ◼ ► there's a terminal that you can drop into and kind of install and compile and run pretty much
01:23:26 ◼ ► any piece of software you can find in the world, like, I'm so grateful for this flexibility.
01:23:34 ◼ ► And then on top of it, being able to kind of do a certain level of scripting, and, you know, I find
01:23:41 ◼ ► it to be a pleasurable universe to live in, you know, and this is a universe I live in for, you
01:23:47 ◼ ► know, sometimes 10, 15 hours a day. And I think it's, this is why, in that like fast software,
01:23:54 ◼ ► the best software, SA, like I have this kind of passionate/crazy obsession with this stuff, is that
01:24:03 ◼ ► this is a fundamental tool for most humans. Like, this is the main tool for most of us living today
01:24:11 ◼ ► who are doing a certain kind of work out there in the world. And like, to not expect the best
01:24:17 ◼ ► version of that tool is crazy. It's like tantamount to like, being like, "Oh, hey, I'm going to use
01:24:24 ◼ ► that. I'm a carpenter, and the hammer I'm going to use, like, sometimes the handles is going to,
01:24:29 ◼ ► is just going to fold in on itself. It's going to break the handles. We don't, we just don't know
01:24:32 ◼ ► how to make a good handle. And so I'm going to be hammering some nails and like, I don't know,
01:24:36 ◼ ► one out of every five hammers, like the thing's just going to kind of fall apart, and I got to
01:24:39 ◼ ► put a new handle on it. And that's just, that's just the hammers we got to live with. That's the
01:24:42 ◼ ► hammer. It's like, no, that's insane. Like, figure out how to make a good hammer. Like, that's crazy.
01:24:47 ◼ ► You would never as a carpenter accept that. And so I feel similarly, the problem with software and
01:24:59 ◼ ► articulate what it is that doesn't feel right about the tool. And so when I write essays like that,
01:25:04 ◼ ► I'm just trying to give, like engineers and folks working in companies the fodder to be like, "Look,
01:25:11 ◼ ► this is what, this is what I want us to aim for," you know, and I've had a lot of CEOs and, and
01:25:19 ◼ ► independent software developers write to me and say, "Thank you for that. We've used this as like
01:25:23 ◼ ► a, as a blueprint to kind of like, to think about features and to think about optimizations." And,
01:25:28 ◼ ► you know, I think, like Patrick Collison's, you know, spoken to me about it, and, you know,
01:25:33 ◼ ► I think that's, it's kind of a philosophy internally that Stripe had been operating under,
01:25:39 ◼ ► you know, this, this idea of fast quickness and, you know, the API fastness and API smartness.
01:25:44 ◼ ► And, you know, I think their company is a great example of doing that well, leads to success,
01:25:52 ◼ ► you know, and like we were talking about earlier about these abstract things that you invest in,
01:25:55 ◼ ► like, well, if I, if I invest in making it fast, because what you're talking about when you're
01:25:59 ◼ ► talking about speed in software is effectively infrastructure and infrastructure, like I talk
01:26:04 ◼ ► about in that, that wired essay is something that a lot of people have a difficult time
01:26:12 ◼ ► but you have to believe it's almost like a theology of, of, of software here is that you
01:26:18 ◼ ► have to believe that the investment in this stuff is going to lead you to some sort of,
01:26:23 ◼ ► you know, afterlife heaven, you know, in, in, in just pleasure ability and joy that is being spread
01:26:29 ◼ ► to, you know, the, whatever potentially millions or billions of users of your software out in the
01:26:33 ◼ ► world. I think that's really, there's almost like an ethical component to it because so many people
01:26:38 ◼ ► are affected by these decisions and that to give those people a smooth, beautiful tool is just,
01:26:50 ◼ ► I know that, and it's hard to peg the exact, what's the anniversary we should celebrate from
01:26:56 ◼ ► Mac OS X. And I think the one that just passed a couple of weeks ago, where it's 20 years to
01:27:02 ◼ ► when the first version shipped to customers in boxes for $129, here's where you go to buy it.
01:27:15 ◼ ► I that's as good of one as any. And I, this is one of those pieces where I started and it just never,
01:27:22 ◼ ► it wasn't, it just wasn't coming out right. And I don't know why. But there is something
01:27:35 ◼ ► where would we be? We've got one OS that really works for me mentally. That's it. And if it wasn't
01:27:41 ◼ ► for Mac OS X, I don't know what I would do. I really don't. I mean, there's only so long you
01:27:48 ◼ ► could hold on to the old version and what, Windows? My son has a gaming PC, so I've gotten a taste of
01:27:56 ◼ ► modern Windows. And it is, I see why people like it. And my son likes his PC and I get the whole
01:28:03 ◼ ► gaming thing. But it is such a collection of technical debt and user interface cruft that
01:28:14 ◼ ► it is kind of interesting that these two OSs that are seen as rivals, but they really are.
01:28:22 ◼ ► There's a very different fundamental philosophy to what an operating system for users should do
01:28:29 ◼ ► that Microsoft and Apple embody. And it's kind of interesting that the two that have decades,
01:28:36 ◼ ► you know, that are truly, I mean, who would have thought? I mean, and like 25 years ago,
01:28:42 ◼ ► would you ever thought we're still using Macs and Windows? It, you know, it didn't, that wasn't how
01:28:47 ◼ ► computers worked in the 80s, in the early 90s. It was like, new things came and went, and operating
01:28:54 ◼ ► systems died out and were replaced, you know, and the idea that you could have these operating
01:29:00 ◼ ► systems that are here for decades, many decades, you know, it had never been done before. So I
01:29:08 ◼ ► don't know that we knew it could be done. But when you look at Mac OS X today, you look at Big Sur,
01:29:14 ◼ ► it is very hard for me to find a lot of spots in the OS where you would say, well, if they were
01:29:19 ◼ ► going to do it all over again, it, they wouldn't have all this crap here. This, you know, system
01:29:26 ◼ ► preferences is the one area a couple people have talked about, like that's the system preferences
01:29:31 ◼ ► feels a little dated, especially the way that there's these little tiny boxes where you enter
01:29:36 ◼ ► a bunch of things, and the window isn't resizable. And it, like you were talking about some of the
01:29:43 ◼ ► new security features, I think they've done a good job of finding a middle ground of annoying us
01:29:49 ◼ ► versus protecting us. The problem to me is the information architecture, that it's sort of
01:29:54 ◼ ► hierarchical information that isn't presented in a hierarchical way, and it's hard to just see it all
01:29:59 ◼ ► at once. And it's very strange to me that the iPhone has a better and more logical preferences
01:30:07 ◼ ► app than the Mac. Sure, yeah. When it's the one that you're supposed to fiddle with less, right?
01:30:15 ◼ ► Right. Yeah, well, I mean, I think, you know, in to what you were saying about us having still the
01:30:22 ◼ ► same OS as we had 25 years ago, that's what makes iOS so impressive is that it came out of nowhere
01:30:30 ◼ ► and it's now, is it the most used OS in the world? No, Android's got to be the most used.
01:30:45 ◼ ► you probably have a billion Android listeners. No, I don't. I don't think I do. No, you should see.
01:30:50 ◼ ► I think you'd be shocked. I recently disabled, a couple of weeks ago, I disabled Google Analytics.
01:30:59 ◼ ► I actually don't even have, I don't have analytics on Darren Faribault at the moment. I guess I,
01:31:04 ◼ ► that's, no, I don't even, I just, just give it, because you know what, here's what was,
01:31:15 ◼ ► but I was stuck choosing what to try to replace it with. And none of, you know, there's Plausible
01:31:26 ◼ ► but I couldn't make a decision between them. And I was like, well, you know what, in the meantime,
01:31:30 ◼ ► why don't I just shut off Google Analytics? Because then I can, you know, I could get the
01:31:35 ◼ ► little privacy thing up in the Safari toolbar to stop giving me a less than sterling grain.
01:31:43 ◼ ► And I thought, here's what I thought, that'll force me to choose. And then it turned, it turns
01:31:49 ◼ ► out, I turned it off and it's like, you know what, you don't need to know how many people are coming
01:31:53 ◼ ► to your website. You don't. All these, all these things that, yeah, again, this is like the, you
01:31:59 ◼ ► know, technical debt that you carry forward, right? It's like, we have this, you know, we put
01:32:04 ◼ ► analytics on websites 20 years ago, and so we kind of keep doing it. And for me, I took Google
01:32:10 ◼ ► Analytics off my site too, a couple months ago. And I think the most, the only real like tension
01:32:17 ◼ ► I felt was, oh my God, I have like 18 years of unbroken data in the system. Like, do I really
01:32:24 ◼ ► want to break, do I want to break that stretch? Like that's, but I've literally never looked at
01:32:29 ◼ ► the historical, I've never been like, oh, I need to go look at what happened in, you know, 2009,
01:32:34 ◼ ► July 8th, you know, on my website. So I, I think that speaks in general to like an over emphasis on
01:32:42 ◼ ► archives. Like I'm a really big fan of deleting tweets. I have an auto tweet, the leader thing
01:32:49 ◼ ► going on. And I think also like for Twitter, this idea that all tweets should last forever was a
01:32:55 ◼ ► flawed philosophy to start the service with. I just don't, it doesn't make sense. Like, I'm just
01:33:01 ◼ ► sorry. What most of us are saying on Twitter, honestly, can just disappear forever and the world
01:33:06 ◼ ► will not be worse for it. Like I've, as I've gotten older, I've kind of embraced this, this
01:33:12 ◼ ► idea that not everything has to be archived. Like, I think that was a very old school web 1.0 idea
01:33:18 ◼ ► that like nothing can be deleted. Everything should be archived. You should have all your
01:33:22 ◼ ► old email from 1997. I have never searched for an email older than like a couple of weeks. I mean,
01:33:33 ◼ ► I don't say never, but you know, effectively, it's, it's my party trick. You know, I'll be
01:33:38 ◼ ► with an old friend and I have, I have my Gmail has my email from, from 1999 and it, I imported
01:33:45 ◼ ► it all a long time ago. And, uh, uh, it's a party trick I have with old friends where I'm like,
01:33:51 ◼ ► let's find the first time we contacted each other and I can just search and there it is. And I can
01:33:56 ◼ ► see the first email that we sent to each other. And that is actually kind of neat to think about
01:34:01 ◼ ► the Genesis of a, of a friendship or relationship and be able to pinpoint the very first moment of
01:34:06 ◼ ► contact. But yeah, aside from that, it's kind of pointless. So what do you do for the automatic
01:34:10 ◼ ► Twitter deleting? What do you have? Did you write your own script? Do you use a service?
01:34:15 ◼ ► Yeah, no, uh, well, Robin Sloan wrote a script. I mean, Robin Sloan's a really interesting example
01:34:21 ◼ ► of a, a writer who also is very technically minded and very technically capable. And, uh, so he had,
01:34:29 ◼ ► he had a, he has a Ruby script that just eats, eats your tweets. You can set, you know, how long
01:34:35 ◼ ► you want to look back from. So I have everything over, over a week old being deleted and you can
01:34:40 ◼ ► set a kind of like a, there's an array of tweet IDs to save. So I have a few that are saved. Um,
01:34:54 ◼ ► Just does it. Goodbye. Uh, I probably should do that. I don't know. I, I did. There's that, that,
01:35:04 ◼ ► the pack rat in my back of my head wants to keep them. And there were the, in those early years of
01:35:11 ◼ ► Twitter, you remember favored, favored, I don't even know how you pronounce it. It was Dean
01:35:16 ◼ ► Dean's little thing where it would collect, you know, like the most, I forget. I think he
01:35:23 ◼ ► purposely never explained the algorithm because he didn't want it to be gained, but effectively,
01:35:29 ◼ ► in a certain social circle, it was just the best jokes of the day. And it was like, this is all,
01:35:36 ◼ ► this is all we did on Twitter is just crack dumb jokes and favorite the ones that we thought were
01:35:42 ◼ ► funny. And then you could just check in on five or every day and see like the best of them. And,
01:35:48 ◼ ► you know, and that whole circle of people is how I got to know Merlin, man. It's how I got to know,
01:35:54 ◼ ► I might've known Merlin through the Mac circles, but like Adam Lissigore and so many people came
01:36:01 ◼ ► out of that. And it's like, you know, I had some good jokes. I remember one, here's one of my
01:36:07 ◼ ► favorites from that era. I don't know what year it was, but the whole, this is the whole, this is the
01:36:10 ◼ ► whole tweet. You don't, you don't want to know what I would do for a Klondike bar. Do you remember
01:36:19 ◼ ► that ad campaign? It was, Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm not saying that's a great joke. I should probably stick
01:36:27 ◼ ► to tech, but for me, I felt like a good joke and I just, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. But I
01:36:34 ◼ ► also don't want to go back. How would you even, how would I even find the tweet ID to protect it?
01:36:38 ◼ ► But, but I, it, it, it makes me sick every time I see stories though, about people who like the,
01:36:47 ◼ ► the woman who got the job as the editor of Teen Vogue and she's only 27 or 28. And it's like,
01:36:53 ◼ ► she's clearly had a, you know, our career was going places. She was become the new editor in
01:36:58 ◼ ► chief at Teen Vogue. And somebody found a bunch of tweets she wrote when she was a freshman in
01:37:03 ◼ ► college, 19. And they were bad tweets. They were bad tweets, bad tweets. She apologized profusely
01:37:11 ◼ ► for them, but it wasn't enough. And she wound up losing the job. And it's like, you know what,
01:37:17 ◼ ► when she wrote those tweets as a 19 year old, she was not thinking of them as something that was
01:37:23 ◼ ► anything other than ephemeral. You know, that there is something weird about Twitter where it
01:37:30 ◼ ► feels ephemeral and it is not, right? By default. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, even if, even if you're
01:37:37 ◼ ► deleting your tweets, I think somewhere they're being sucked up. But like for me, I mean,
01:37:42 ◼ ► there was my, uh, Ku Klux Klan period of Twitter, early Twitter, where I was just supporting Ku
01:37:48 ◼ ► Klux Klan stuff. No, no, no. I, thankfully I didn't have a weird period of like using Twitter
01:37:55 ◼ ► as a, as a kind of like a racist soapbox or anything like that. But like for me, it's more
01:38:00 ◼ ► just the weight. Like, like there's, there is a rat pack, a pack rat sort of element to it. And
01:38:08 ◼ ► in general, I'm trying to get rid of stuff, physical or digital in my life. Like, I'm just
01:38:12 ◼ ► trying to like, like I'm constantly selling things. Like I, I, I, I hate buying new, I like
01:38:20 ◼ ► love buying new tools. Like I just got a new printer. Um, but I got it for a very specific
01:38:24 ◼ ► purpose. And like, you know, the, the, the tension of buying the thing, getting the thing
01:38:28 ◼ ► is now forcing me to like really use it. And I'm like, okay, I have to justify the fact that I
01:38:31 ◼ ► brought this new object into my life, but I'm constantly selling stuff off. Um, you know, that
01:38:37 ◼ ► if I, if I don't use it, it's like, it's gone. And Japan actually has a really amazing kind of eBay,
01:38:42 ◼ ► um, like tool that handles all of the shipping and everything is anonymized. So you don't know where
01:38:48 ◼ ► it's being shipped to and they don't know who you are. And it's wonderful. And like the, you know,
01:38:52 ◼ ► they act as like a escrow service. And so it's, it's super great. You can just sell high value
01:38:58 ◼ ► stuff. I like, I don't sell my, um, my old Mac books to the Apple store. I put it on the service
01:39:04 ◼ ► cause I can get 50, 50% more and they sell within a day. Like it's just instant boom sold. And, um,
01:39:11 ◼ ► so I'm constantly getting rid of stuff physically and I just find digitally as well. Like what,
01:39:17 ◼ ► what is the value of me holding onto these things? And so what I did before I started doing the tweet
01:39:22 ◼ ► delete thing is I just, I downloaded my archive and I have all of my original stuff on my hard
01:39:28 ◼ ► drive. And if I really, really, really need that, um, it's there, but, uh, I don't know,
01:39:34 ◼ ► it just feels like having that out in the open brought no value to me. And I even think like
01:39:41 ◼ ► there's this argument of like, well, what if people like quote your tweets and an article or link to
01:39:45 ◼ ► it or embed it? It's like, well, whatever, I don't know. Like, is the world going to end if three of
01:39:49 ◼ ► my tweets that were quoted in some article like aren't, aren't there anymore? Like people will
01:39:53 ◼ ► figure it out. They'll get the context like, you know, do a screenshot of the tweet if you,
01:39:57 ◼ ► if you really want to include it in something like, I think there are ways around it. And, uh,
01:40:03 ◼ ► uh, you know, to, to sort of make stuff that you want to reference a little more solid. But the
01:40:09 ◼ ► thing that's really surprised me is I get emails all the time and messages all the time. Like, hey,
01:40:13 ◼ ► that thing you tweeted two weeks ago, where did that go? Like, um, which is shocking that people
01:40:19 ◼ ► use Twitter or seem to use Twitter as this, like as these pointers, like they book, I don't know if
01:40:24 ◼ ► they're bookmarking the tweets to come back to or what is definitely something I don't do. I, you
01:40:30 ◼ ► know, if I see a tweet that has something I like, it goes into things. It's like, okay, what's the
01:40:34 ◼ ► link? Okay. It goes into things. I can set a reminder for me to come back to this in a week.
01:40:39 ◼ ► You know, it's like, I don't rely on the original tweet object to be the canonical reference for
01:40:45 ◼ ► that thing that I'm interested in. Um, but anyway, but Google analytics, similar sort of thing. I
01:40:51 ◼ ► feel, I feel so much lighter getting rid of that crap and plausible is great. I have really enjoyed
01:40:58 ◼ ► plausible. And the only thing I use analytics for is to see if there's a, um, some kind of incoming
01:41:10 ◼ ► It's just a way for me to keep track of like, if, if, uh, a big site has sent me traffic,
01:41:19 ◼ ► Oh yeah. I got the, got the, the Gruber, the Gruber led light that goes, I knocked a website
01:41:28 ◼ ► offline a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a while. And again, I don't think it's because
01:41:33 ◼ ► the amount of traffic that comes from a link from me is decreased. It's just the server
01:41:39 ◼ ► infrastructure has gotten more and more Bulletproof and you know, WordPress sites are cached, have
01:41:45 ◼ ► caching on by default. And I mean, that was always the nine out of 10 times where if I linked to
01:41:49 ◼ ► something and the website went down, it was cause it was a default, the old WordPress without
01:41:55 ◼ ► caching. Uh, yep. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I don't know. All right. Well, and cloud flare today too. I
01:42:03 ◼ ► have everything I, I have up there is behind cloud flare. So it's just, that's another kind
01:42:09 ◼ ► of miracle service. Like it's, it's so cheap. I don't understand how it can be so cheap. I
01:42:14 ◼ ► really don't. I don't either. It's incredible. It's so cheap. And, uh, you know, digital ocean
01:42:21 ◼ ► too, like the quality of server you get at digital ocean for the price you pay is amazing to me.
01:42:27 ◼ ► I love it. I love, I'm a huge digital ocean fan. Um, it's just been wonderful working on their,
01:42:34 ◼ ► you know, their service. They're, uh, you know, spinning up their service. I have a digital ocean
01:42:38 ◼ ► server that all it is, is it's a, it's a wire guard, um, uh, VPN for me. That's it. You know,
01:42:45 ◼ ► and it's like, it's cheaper, it's cheaper to buy the digital ocean server, have it auto update,
01:43:06 ◼ ► All right. Let me take, let me take one last break here and thank our third and final sponsor.
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01:45:53 ◼ ► InDesign for layout. Yeah. I was, I was a Quark person too. When I was a university, I learned
01:45:59 ◼ ► on Quark, this is like 2000, 2001. And, uh, it was, it was really fast. It was really good. I
01:46:07 ◼ ► think the thing that Quark did badly was font rendering. There was something about, I remember
01:46:14 ◼ ► InDesign when InDesign came out, it just, I know what you're talking about. It was the open type
01:46:18 ◼ ► support open types of that was it? Yes. And that was, that was infuriating. It was infuriating
01:46:26 ◼ ► that Quark is like such a fundamental bit of digital typography that Quark dropped the ball
01:46:31 ◼ ► on. And I think that was what pushed me to InDesign. And I remember using the InDesign beta
01:46:35 ◼ ► and just, and I remember the literature is and all the other open types stuff just working and being
01:46:40 ◼ ► like, okay, well, I guess I got to use this thing now. I remember it's, I remember an InDesigner
01:46:44 ◼ ► ever since. I remember talking to Dean Allen about it and, and it basically, he was like, look,
01:46:48 ◼ ► you're going to have a whole laundry list of things you liked better about Quark than InDesign,
01:46:54 ◼ ► but InDesign does open type, right? Open type makes the old pre-open type postscript fonts
01:46:59 ◼ ► look like junk. And therefore you need to use InDesign because there's too many, there's too
01:47:04 ◼ ► many good features in there. And it was a very strange, I don't know if it was technical debt.
01:47:09 ◼ ► I don't know what happened. The other thing about Quark, Quark made bad design a little too easy.
01:47:17 ◼ ► I mean, the one thing that Quark did that you could never forgive them. And once you know
01:47:24 ◼ ► that designers in the nineties were doing this with everything, you can't, you couldn't unsee it.
01:47:29 ◼ ► But I guess most of the flyers and stuff people made are long gone, but you could select a range
01:47:34 ◼ ► of text and then just with one little click, set it to be like 90% width to make it, you know,
01:47:41 ◼ ► like to fake a slightly skinnier font, or if it like didn't quite fill the space set, set it to
01:47:47 ◼ ► 110% or 150%. And so people would like, if you wanted like a, like a tall, skinny sans serif,
01:47:56 ◼ ► it was so trivially easy to just use like Helvetica and just make it skinny. But if you
01:48:03 ◼ ► know anything about typography, it was, you know, you know, it was optically squished and was a
01:48:08 ◼ ► crime against typographic. So InDesign for layout, what about? InDesign for layout. Yeah, InDesign
01:48:18 ◼ ► for layout. I tried, I looked at Affinity Publisher and I think Affinity Publisher, I really like
01:48:30 ◼ ► I actually don't use it for much because I don't do, I use Lightroom for my photo editing and my
01:48:37 ◼ ► catalog editing. So I keep all my, my serious photos in Lightroom classic. Or Lightroom CC
01:48:44 ◼ ► is lacking a few features that to me make it unusable as a professional. And so I'm still
01:48:54 ◼ ► are in Lightroom classic. And the fact that it's called Lightroom classic is a little bit
01:49:03 ◼ ► And so I'm in Lightroom classic for organizing my library and for doing photo, 90% of my photo
01:49:17 ◼ ► in different sizes. I just find it's exported to be really fast. I just find Photoshop to have
01:49:23 ◼ ► gotten so slow over the last decade. And a lot of it's, like if you do the web exporter dialogue,
01:49:33 ◼ ► it comes up and it like loads a webpage or something. I don't know. It's just all so slow.
01:49:37 ◼ ► It's very bad. It's very, very bad. Affinity, super fast, super easy. I love supporting
01:49:43 ◼ ► independent software companies. You buy it once, you don't think about it again, yada, yada, yada.
01:49:47 ◼ ► And so I tried Publisher, but it just didn't, the problem is that if you're working with
01:49:53 ◼ ► real printers, like big printers, is that they want InDesign files. For them, it's easy to work
01:49:59 ◼ ► with InDesign files and they may want to do things like check your, is all of your type properly set
01:50:07 ◼ ► in K? Or did you accidentally set it as an RGB value? And so they want to double check all these
01:50:14 ◼ ► things. And so having InDesign makes it a little bit easier to interface with these printers out in
01:50:18 ◼ ► the world. So that's kind of why I'm still in there. I'm not using, honestly, I think InDesign
01:50:23 ◼ ► from 20 years ago, whatever the feature set was, was enough for me. I don't do anything that
01:50:28 ◼ ► InDesign I think has added in the last 10 years. So anyway, that's that. And for writing, I use
01:50:38 ◼ ► Ulysses to do a lot of drafting of essays. And the reason I started using Ulysses was because A,
01:50:46 ◼ ► it let me use Dropbox as my folder. So I like having my files on my local hard drive and I
01:50:53 ◼ ► like that Dropbox then syncs, you know, in the background. And I actually have a NAS now that
01:50:58 ◼ ► is pulling down a full Dropbox archive onto the NAS. And so it's, it, I feel like it's backed up
01:51:03 ◼ ► there as well. But the reason I liked Ulysses was a lot of other of those like minimalist text
01:51:10 ◼ ► editors back, I don't know when I started using it eight years ago, seven years ago, they didn't
01:51:17 ◼ ► allow Dropbox. A lot of them were iCloud based or you couldn't, you couldn't, this is a real
01:51:25 ◼ ► critical thing is like you'd have, you can have a folder in Ulysses where you can manually sort the
01:51:29 ◼ ► files in the folder. So you don't have to have them sorted by date or by title. And for me,
01:51:33 ◼ ► being able to move files around. So treating a folder like a table of contents was really
01:51:48 ◼ ► but that's the idea behind real outlining software where, by which I mean, not like when you're in
01:51:55 ◼ ► Apple notes and just type a dash and you're, you're typing in a thing that looks like an outline,
01:52:02 ◼ ► but an outline where you can take any heading and just drag it up and down to reorganize it.
01:52:15 ◼ ► like if you select a number of files that are next to each other, it like just creates one document
01:52:20 ◼ ► with all that in it. So you can kind of, you can, I mean, you can just feel like you're working,
01:52:40 ◼ ► you can write essentially CSS for the PDF exports. And so you can do really beautiful typographically
01:52:48 ◼ ► good looking exports in Ulysses. And I love using that to basically put out the drafts,
01:52:52 ◼ ► print out drafts. So I can do checks and stuff on the pieces. And so there's a huge Ulysses kind of
01:52:59 ◼ ► element to the editing process. And then depending on the length of the thing or how, what stage I'm
01:53:08 ◼ ► at, sometimes I'll bring it into Google Docs to work with editors. I find actually Google Docs
01:53:14 ◼ ► is by far the best shared editing space in terms of writing notes in the margins, making suggestions,
01:53:22 ◼ ► you know, okaying or rejecting suggestions, having conversations. It's just Google Docs has a lot of
01:53:28 ◼ ► issues and Google Drive is one of the worst pieces of software. Like I don't understand how Google
01:53:34 ◼ ► Drive is so difficult to use. It's to be beautifully complicated. I can never find what
01:53:41 ◼ ► I'm looking for in Google Drive. Like there's some philosophy of engineering that's happened there
01:53:47 ◼ ► about how it's going to show you, what it's going to show you and how it's thinking about hierarchies
01:53:52 ◼ ► that just doesn't make sense to, I think, a normal user. And I had this thread on Twitter that's
01:53:56 ◼ ► probably been deleted about Google Drive and like just hundreds of people chiming in being like,
01:54:02 ◼ ► yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's so tough to use. But Google Docs, the trick with using it is
01:54:07 ◼ ► to just put links to Docs in a text file and don't even touch Google Drive. And so, but Google Docs
01:54:14 ◼ ► is, it really is, it's a great piece of software. And Google Docs actually does one thing
01:54:17 ◼ ► in the fast software, best software philosophy that I wish I could do on Mac OS and it drives me
01:54:24 ◼ ► crazy. And if anyone listening out there can program a shortcut, I have looked into this and
01:54:30 ◼ ► I have not been able to figure out a solution to this problem. But in Google Docs, if you have a
01:54:35 ◼ ► spelling, a misspelled word and you have the cursor on the word, you can tab into the spell
01:54:42 ◼ ► correction options and hit enter and then it's, you never have to take your fingers off the
01:54:46 ◼ ► keyboard. You don't have to use the trackpad. You don't have to right click on anything and select
01:54:51 ◼ ► the corrected word. You can just inline right there super quickly select the correct spelling.
01:54:58 ◼ ► So like things like that, I really love about it. But mainly the collaborative component is the
01:55:04 ◼ ► super power. Do you know about the F5 shortcut? This isn't going to solve your problem with
01:55:07 ◼ ► misspelling. But do you know that in TextEdit or any, any cocoa app, you can start typing a word
01:55:15 ◼ ► and if you hit F5, you get auto completion based on the dictionary. So I remapped that keyboard
01:55:24 ◼ ► shortcut because the F5 is very hard to type. And if you have, you know, and you have to turn off
01:55:30 ◼ ► to get it by default, you have to turn off the magic, you know, keyboard brightness or whatever
01:55:42 ◼ ► how you get F5. So I, I've remapped it to control return. And so because I pinky for control,
01:55:49 ◼ ► right hand for return, and then it's, it's this universal auto complete. But I know, but that's,
01:55:57 ◼ ► I, I know exactly what you're talking about, though, right? So you've got the insertion
01:56:02 ◼ ► point on the red underlined word. And you're like, just give me the list. Don't, don't switch modes.
01:56:10 ◼ ► Yeah, I've got to go to the trackpad. I've got a right click. I've got to it. And the thing is,
01:56:17 ◼ ► the hit areas are so small, right? It's like, Oh, I've got to select just the right word. It's,
01:56:21 ◼ ► it's, it's, it's exhausting. It's just weird. And Google anyway, Google Docs has a really nice
01:56:26 ◼ ► solution for it that I would love. How do you invoke it? So you just, you hit the tab key.
01:56:31 ◼ ► Is that what you do? I think so. I'm pretty sure I was testing it the other day. And I think
01:56:43 ◼ ► into that into that pop up. And seems to work pretty well. I don't know. It, it, it's, it's
01:56:51 ◼ ► an elegant, seems like an elegant solution, pretty obvious solution. But I haven't seen any other
01:56:56 ◼ ► text editor do it. And it kind of drives me nuts. And even the command, semi colon, I know that's
01:57:02 ◼ ► kind of like the universal spell checker, invoker. Even that, you know, it's like, you'd think that
01:57:07 ◼ ► if you're doing that it would, it would move, you know, cause it's like, right now I'm doing it in
01:57:16 ◼ ► but you'd think it would select it and then show you here are the, here are the options,
01:57:20 ◼ ► you know, and also giving you the option to please learn the spelling, which is a great thing to be
01:57:25 ◼ ► able to just do from the keyboard. That's another one of those aspects of Mac OS X where maybe
01:57:29 ◼ ► there's a little bit of cruft in that user interface. Like the system-wide spelling checker
01:57:43 ◼ ► the, the interface, but it's like the same basic, Hey, it's like a floating panel and everything's
01:57:52 ◼ ► the, everything's really small, right? Like it, it's just the fun, you know, and just because they
01:57:58 ◼ ► haven't resized anything from 2001, 2002, when pixel for pixel, that was actually a reasonably
01:58:06 ◼ ► sized spelling checker panel. I bet it's from, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. I bet Next had that command
01:58:14 ◼ ► semicolon. It's such a weird command, right? Command semicolon. I bet that's from Next. It's
01:58:20 ◼ ► a holdover. Yeah. Anyway, anyway, you know, it's like people forget that actually Next, the text
01:58:33 ◼ ► you know, like that. If you right click on something and want to make it a link and say,
01:58:36 ◼ ► you know, that's all from Next. That's, that's 30 years old. That's a 30 year old interaction.
01:58:42 ◼ ► You know what? I was editing the shared document that we have for this episode of the show and I
01:58:49 ◼ ► was doing it on my iPad today and I thought, you know, this is something I should remember and
01:58:53 ◼ ► bring it up when I'm talking to Craig. Like on the Mac, I know how to make something a link.
01:58:59 ◼ ► I right click on it or go to the edit menu and there's edit link and then you get a thing. I
01:59:05 ◼ ► know the shortcut. Isn't it command K? My fingers want it to be command K. You hit command K,
01:59:10 ◼ ► you paste in the URL and now you have a link. And how do you do that on, on iPad OS or iOS?
01:59:24 ◼ ► I don't know. There is something, sometimes I started thinking about things like that and how
01:59:29 ◼ ► nice it is that it was so consistent. It is still so consistent across multiple applications and
01:59:38 ◼ ► that the way you do it in text edit is the same way you do it in Apple notes. It's the same way
01:59:42 ◼ ► you do it in Apple mail. It's, it works in text view in Safari, you know, and that the text view
01:59:49 ◼ ► in Safari, even though it's a web browser inherits all of these things from cocoa for the spelling
01:59:55 ◼ ► checker and stuff like that and the right click menu. And that even in Safari, you can have this
02:00:00 ◼ ► text field and get the standard control click menu. I think this point of like, how do you
02:00:07 ◼ ► make something a link is it perfectly embodies the iOS, you know, philosophy, which is that you
02:00:14 ◼ ► weren't going to use this thing when I was was made the idea that people be, you know, copying
02:00:18 ◼ ► and pasting links between the there's no, there wasn't even copy and paste, but like bringing
02:00:22 ◼ ► links between apps, you know, it's just like, that wasn't, that wasn't the use case. So I think it
02:00:28 ◼ ► speaks to like, there's a fundamental core of an operating system that gets made at the start. And
02:00:34 ◼ ► there's a fundamental set of decisions, philosophical decisions about how the OS should
02:00:38 ◼ ► function. And you can't change those over time, for better or for worse. And, you know, like this
02:00:45 ◼ ► Mac OS link thing is 30 years old from, you know, from next. And iOS just didn't, you know, didn't
02:00:52 ◼ ► have that philosophy in the in the beginning. So now, it's like, we're trying to bolt these things
02:00:55 ◼ ► on or Apple's trying to bolt these things on like on iPad OS, and it just feels non native, you know,
02:01:01 ◼ ► it just another thing for me, like on, on the iPad, iPad OS is the keyboard buffer doesn't exist
02:01:08 ◼ ► between apps. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. And it's so like your command tabbing,
02:01:12 ◼ ► and you start typing. Yeah. And you think that the app, you know, you're going from notes to messages,
02:01:19 ◼ ► and you just start typing, and then you've lost like the first two words, because they just didn't
02:01:25 ◼ ► show up. Exactly. I know that it's though those sorts of things. It's just like, okay, this wasn't
02:01:31 ◼ ► made for these sorts of interactions. That's what it says to me. And you just have to you have to
02:01:38 ◼ ► accept that it's not going to die. I don't think it's ever going to change. iPad OS will not will
02:01:42 ◼ ► not get a keyboard buffer anytime soon. They did fix a bug that was driving me nuts about two years
02:01:47 ◼ ► ago where the spotlight search didn't it like your first couple of characters in a spotlight search.
02:01:55 ◼ ► Right. Always got lost for me. I do command space, start typing. And it doesn't matter how many times
02:02:00 ◼ ► I got burned by it. I would do it again. Because whenever I'm thinking, oh, I should search
02:02:09 ◼ ► oh, this is going to eat my first few characters. And I brought it up to somebody at Apple, I filed
02:02:14 ◼ ► a radar, I had a thing. And then they were like, they took a look at it. And they were like, huh,
02:02:19 ◼ ► you're right. Yeah, that does that for me too. Huh. And then it got it got fixed in like a point
02:02:24 ◼ ► upgrade to you know, like iPad OS 12.7. But it's like, how did that happen? How did how did more
02:02:30 ◼ ► people inside Apple not not not be driven by this? Well, well, and also, here's another aspect of
02:02:37 ◼ ► that. Why are those first characters so important for search? That that always it always shocks me
02:02:45 ◼ ► how if you if you miss that first character, and this happens when you're on like the little
02:02:49 ◼ ► keyboard or something on an iPhone, spotlight often will not be able to find like if you're
02:02:59 ◼ ► or if I search for egg mod instead of I missed the car. And it's like, how does that not find
02:03:06 ◼ ► you anyway? It should it to me, there's a there's a kind of brokenness with search in general that
02:03:14 ◼ ► over emphasizes that first character that I don't know to me that it feels like it should be fixed.
02:03:20 ◼ ► I feel like Alford on, you know, on the Mac, on Mac, maybe is a little is a little more forgiving.
02:03:29 ◼ ► There's, I mean, it's just fuzzy search. There's like, there's algorithms right out there that are
02:03:33 ◼ ► very easy to just bolt onto any search field. And you get that that capability to get really
02:03:43 ◼ ► Like, um, F Z F. Do you know that that little application for the term? I don't think so.
02:03:47 ◼ ► F Z F? No. It's this crazy. It's this crazy search tool that allows you to basically do
02:03:55 ◼ ► like infinite, infinitely deep searches on your computer based on, you know, super fuzzy search
02:04:03 ◼ ► terms. So you can do CD and you can type like test and then you do you invoke it by by I think
02:04:14 ◼ ► And basically it auto completes, you know, in all of the subdirectories, anything that has the word
02:04:19 ◼ ► test in it, and then you can just, you can select the directory you want to go to. But like, you
02:04:24 ◼ ► don't have to, you can, anyway, you can, you can type a series of words that, you know, will kind
02:04:28 ◼ ► of get you six directories deep to the place you want to go. Um, and then invoke F Z F. And anyway,
02:04:34 ◼ ► it's a very fast way to move. And it just, it speaks to the power of like, if you know how to
02:04:39 ◼ ► use and expect fuzzy search to work properly, it's so empowering. It's like truly bicycle for the
02:04:44 ◼ ► minds. It's like, you've just amplified your ability to kind of traverse directories or move
02:04:48 ◼ ► through your OS, you know, five times faster. It's just one of those kinds of like really cool,
02:04:53 ◼ ► magic tools. Um, but, but yeah, it would be nice if, if, uh, we could correct words from the
02:05:01 ◼ ► keyboard. That's all I'm saying. All right. Last but not least. So is that everything for
02:05:19 ◼ ► Yeah, that's, that's, that's the crux of it. And, um, yeah, I don't, I've tried to use things like
02:05:29 ◼ ► Scrivener and I just find, I just find it's, it's an app that doesn't work the way I want to work.
02:05:34 ◼ ► It's a little, a little bit too, too onerous, a little bit too finicky. Um, yeah, I think that's,
02:05:39 ◼ ► that's, that's the core. So Kisa by Kisa, am I pronouncing it right? Because I, I probably would
02:05:45 ◼ ► have said Kisa by Kisa. Uh, your first run was, uh, uh, as we had done the home stretch here,
02:06:04 ◼ ► like two, basically like two days. Yeah. It, and you know, and again, I don't think it's,
02:06:12 ◼ ► it's not self-effacing. You're not fake modesty. It just sounds like that's a lot of copies of a
02:06:17 ◼ ► $95 book to sell that quickly. Yeah. It's insane. It's insane. That's why I only made a thousand
02:06:25 ◼ ► of them because I thought, I thought, well, there's no way I'm going to sell a thousand of
02:06:30 ◼ ► these. My expectation like, and I'm truly, I'm not like feigning false modesty here. Like my
02:06:35 ◼ ► expectation was I'll make a thousand of these and then it'll take three years to sell them all. That
02:06:40 ◼ ► was what I expected. Keep them in a warehouse as they slowly go out. It, this is a hard thing to
02:06:45 ◼ ► talk about on a podcast. It is a lovely book. How, what is the, the name of this cover style?
02:06:53 ◼ ► Because it is, it looks like a hard bound book. It kind of feels like a hard bound book,
02:07:00 ◼ ► but it actually has a little bit of flex to it that a true cardboard hard bound book doesn't have.
02:07:14 ◼ ► um, flex, flex binding, flex bound, but it's all it is. You're just taking the, um, the boards of
02:07:20 ◼ ► a hardcover book, uh, that are normally thicker and you're just sort of, you know, choosing
02:07:26 ◼ ► thinner boards that aren't the, you know, it's, it's kind of between a paperback and a hardcover.
02:07:30 ◼ ► Um, but, uh, I think it's like, I think we ended up at like 0.7 millimeters or something like that
02:07:36 ◼ ► was the final, we did a bunch of tests to find, uh, one that had the right feel. And then what
02:07:41 ◼ ► happens is when you, when you cover them in cloth, um, it gives it this extra durability. So the
02:07:49 ◼ ► thing that drives me nuts about hardcover books is just, they feel a little bit violent in the hand
02:07:53 ◼ ► because it's like, this is so hard and like either corners are kind of digging into your, into your,
02:07:57 ◼ ► into your palm or whatever. And I really love, um, you know, the book of the field of paperbacks,
02:08:04 ◼ ► but I understand that the perception of a paperback as being a cheaper thing is real. And for, you
02:08:10 ◼ ► know, for good reason, because they do, they don't last as long. The binding's a little bit different,
02:08:14 ◼ ► but like on this book, we're doing a hardcover binding and we're doing, uh, you know, hardcover
02:08:19 ◼ ► style cloth wrap on the covers, but we're using, um, you know, boards that are, are closer to
02:08:28 ◼ ► paperback boards. But you know, what you end up with is this, what I feel like is like the perfect,
02:08:32 ◼ ► the perfect match of tactility and protection. So the book is, is very protected. It's not going to
02:08:38 ◼ ► get damaged really. I mean, you can scuff up the, the, the cloth or whatever, but it's not going to
02:08:43 ◼ ► rip on you like a paperback would. Um, and yet when you hold it, the hope is that it feels like
02:08:50 ◼ ► intimate and kind of nice to hold. It's just comfortable, you know, and pleasurable to have
02:08:53 ◼ ► in the hand. And, uh, I actually saw this binding for the first time 20 years ago on this, um, this
02:09:00 ◼ ► book called Rome City Secrets that was published, uh, as this little guy, this thick little guy to
02:09:06 ◼ ► Rome and it used the same kind of binding. And I've just always been spellbound by, I just thought,
02:09:11 ◼ ► oh, this is it. This is the, this is the most amazing binding. I love this. And, uh, I've been
02:09:15 ◼ ► trying to use it for a while. And finally with this book, I had enough latitude of being able to
02:09:21 ◼ ► do what I wanted to do and do and run tests. And, um, uh, we were able to kind of dial this
02:09:26 ◼ ► in into a place that I think feels really, feels really good. So yeah, that's part. And, and some
02:09:31 ◼ ► people have written in and been like, you know, um, I thought this was a hardcover book, you know,
02:09:36 ◼ ► uh, some, I think a couple of people have been upset because they thought they, they, they
02:09:41 ◼ ► expected a hardcover because they like, oh, I didn't realize this was a paperback, you know,
02:09:45 ◼ ► why is it $95? Well, literally the only thing different between this and, uh, and, and, uh,
02:09:52 ◼ ► and a quote unquote real hardcover is like about half a millimeter of board. That's about it. Um,
02:09:57 ◼ ► otherwise this is, this is definitely trust me, the costs of producing this thing are hardcover
02:10:02 ◼ ► costs and the durability of this thing is going to be hardcover durability. So don't worry about it.
02:10:07 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt But, so the first, the first edition sold out thousand copies now, though people can
02:10:21 ◼ ► is stamped, numbered, uh, and signed. And so that was what made it limited. And the second edition
02:10:28 ◼ ► is also limited. We did 1200 copies and the second edition, I think there's about 200 left. Um, and,
02:10:51 ◼ ► you must have a bunch of Tashin books, right? There's the best Tashin is this company that
02:10:57 ◼ ► makes the world's greatest coffee table books. And some of them are insanely expensive. Um,
02:11:05 ◼ ► and I've got a couple of the Kubrick ones and my 2001, I got copied nine 99, which I thought was,
02:11:12 ◼ ► I 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
02:11:17 ◼ ► of numbers that you can read into it. I don't want to be one of these, you know, it means something,
02:11:21 ◼ ► but I don't know. I thought that was pretty cool. So the other recent project project you've had
02:11:28 ◼ ► is a short film. Is this the first short film you've done since you've been doing special
02:11:57 ◼ ► Kisa by Kisa that you've, you know, gone on these extended journeys in Japan to experience pizza
02:12:06 ◼ ► toast, which really does look delicious. I, it really does. It looks so good and coffee.
02:12:16 ◼ ► And it's like, I don't know what more do you need for sustenance? But this, this short film,
02:12:22 ◼ ► I'm not just saying it because you're on the show and you're a pal. It is beautiful. But did you do
02:12:27 ◼ ► all of it yourself? I mean, did you, you shot it, you lit it. It is just, and it's just,
02:12:39 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt Yeah. Yeah. I had to, so, so the, a little bit of background on it is one of the
02:12:46 ◼ ► things I've kind of codified, I guess, like when I was writing up the, the year in review in January
02:12:53 ◼ ► this year, um, was that, is that I, all of the work I do is essentially to make books. So
02:12:59 ◼ ► everything is pointing towards books and every project sub project I do has to be either in
02:13:04 ◼ ► support of the books or adding some other element to the book or amplifying the book. And so like,
02:13:11 ◼ ► I just find for me that that is, that is the most meaningful and simplest way to organize all of my
02:13:20 ◼ ► creative work. Everything is aiming towards producing books. And so all of the walks I was
02:13:25 ◼ ► doing, and I'm still doing these, you know, for listeners who don't know, I spend about
02:13:32 ◼ ► two to six months out of the year walking across Japan. I'm about to go off on another big walk in
02:13:38 ◼ ► May, actually, it'll be another six or 700 kilometers. I just did one in November that was
02:13:43 ◼ ► 700 kilometers. And so from these walks, I'm producing books and Kisa by Kisa was kind of
02:13:49 ◼ ► the first book from these walks. And so I also last year, because of by dint of pandemic, I just
02:13:56 ◼ ► started getting more into video, doing the live streams and playing with cameras and thinking
02:14:01 ◼ ► about video just because we couldn't go anywhere. And so that just made me really look at the video
02:14:08 ◼ ► world once again, which I hadn't taken a peek at in a long time, and realize like, the true
02:14:13 ◼ ► advancements in photography right now are in videography, like it's a Renaissance moment for
02:14:19 ◼ ► anyone who wants to do film. It's crazy how amazing and how quickly consumer pro cameras are
02:14:26 ◼ ► advancing. And so it was sort of a confluence of all these things of like, going to these Kisa,
02:14:32 ◼ ► these Kisa Ten, these Kisa is a Japanese style, old cafe. These are cafes that were mainly started in
02:14:39 ◼ ► say the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. And they're mainly run by people who are just about to retire. And so
02:14:45 ◼ ► they're all kind of just about to disappear. The numbers are dropping precipitously. So I would,
02:14:50 ◼ ► in these walks across Japan, I, you know, the one organizing principle anywhere you go in the
02:14:55 ◼ ► country, it may, they may be do have different foods or do, you know, a local specialty or,
02:15:00 ◼ ► or whatever. But the one thing that is consistent is the presence of Kisa and barber shops, you got
02:15:06 ◼ ► those everywhere. Lots of barber shops, lots of Kisa. And so I would just start going to these
02:15:12 ◼ ► Kisa on these walks, I'd see them and just the stories and they, to me felt like they embodied
02:15:19 ◼ ► really this cultural touchstone that was easy to overlook as a Japanese person, because you just
02:15:26 ◼ ► kind of, you see them as inevitable and also as kind of throwaway things, whatever, it's a Kisa.
02:15:30 ◼ ► But really, they're sort of community centers, a lot of Japan is depopulating in the countryside.
02:15:37 ◼ ► And so the Kisa are these de facto community centers. And so you go to them, and they're just
02:15:41 ◼ ► full of these octogenarians. And they're all like kind of, you know, chatting and farmers catching
02:15:45 ◼ ► up and stuff like that. And so, to me, they became these really interesting and important cultural
02:15:50 ◼ ► hubs. And pizza toast just happens to be kind of the food that they're, that's one of their staples.
02:15:59 ◼ ► they didn't have full kitchens. And so to make pizza toast, all you need is a little toaster oven.
02:16:05 ◼ ► And so it's a, it's an easy to make food that's kind of fun and sort of riffs off of, you know,
02:16:11 ◼ ► Western food, but can be done, you know, very easily, you know, with next to nothing in terms
02:16:16 ◼ ► of ingredients. And so that's sort of the kind of the history there of pizza toast in the context of
02:16:22 ◼ ► Japanese society. And so this, I'd done this book on Kisa-ten, on Kisa, and I'd been doing all this
02:16:31 ◼ ► video work. And when I put up my Craig's starter, because when I launched that Kisa book, I kind of,
02:16:39 ◼ ► I was looking at Kickstarter and I realized like, the value that Kickstarter provided for the cut
02:16:45 ◼ ► they took, I just kind of didn't exist there for me anymore. I have my audience, I didn't feel like
02:16:49 ◼ ► Kickstarter was going to drive more audience to buy the thing. So I was looking at Shopify,
02:16:54 ◼ ► and I realized I could basically clone Kickstarter on Shopify using templates. And I spent a couple
02:17:01 ◼ ► of weeks and I just made my own Kickstarter. And I was able to, you know, the benefit is you can
02:17:05 ◼ ► design it all in any way you want. Kickstarter, you're stuck with their templates, I could make
02:17:10 ◼ ► my tiers however I wanted. One big benefit is I could offer discount codes, which Kickstarter
02:17:15 ◼ ► doesn't let you do. You can't offer discount codes to anyone. And so all of these kind of these--
02:17:28 ◼ ► the full membership in discounts every year to every member, at least. Like if you pay 100 bucks
02:17:35 ◼ ► for the membership and you are interested in my work, and you want to buy my books or whatever,
02:17:39 ◼ ► you will get that $100 back absolutely within the year through if you choose to take advantage of
02:17:46 ◼ ► the discounts that I offer. So members got $50 off on the book. I feel like that's a pretty
02:17:52 ◼ ► pretty powerful incentive. So the membership there to me feels like basically it's everyone's making
02:17:58 ◼ ► an investment. It's like micro seed capital for me to be able to do these projects. And then once
02:18:03 ◼ ► I can get the project done, I want to return that capital. Plus, they get the hopefully psychically
02:18:10 ◼ ► positive return of this new piece of culture being in the world. So it's kind of a way of amplifying
02:18:19 ◼ ► Craigstarter, you make these goals. You're like, "Well, man, if we sell 500 books, I'll do this."
02:18:24 ◼ ► And one of the goals I made was if we sold 750 books during the pre-sale campaign, I would make
02:18:30 ◼ ► a pizza toast YouTube show. And I was like, I'm definitely not going to sell 750 books.
02:18:39 ◼ ► And so I'm definitely not going to have to make a pizza toast YouTube show. And sure enough,
02:18:43 ◼ ► we sold 750 books in a day. So that made me go, "Okay, all right, let me look at this video world
02:18:50 ◼ ► again." And I started getting into cameras to document the production process of the book.
02:18:55 ◼ ► And just a few things led to another. And I just thought, "Okay, for this pizza toast show,
02:19:03 ◼ ► quote unquote pizza toast show, why don't I do a vignette, a little profile of one of the cafes
02:19:10 ◼ ► that I went to?" And it can be this kind of anthropological archetype or archive of this
02:19:17 ◼ ► thing that is going to disappear. This cafe that I shot will be gone in 10 years. I'm almost 100%
02:19:24 ◼ ► certain. It doesn't have 10 years left in it. And so to kind of have a 4K archival quality
02:19:31 ◼ ► video of this moment, I felt like that was a really nice bonus thing to the book. And it
02:19:44 ◼ ► Tom Bilyeu: And you talk about making a short film like this as being book-like in concept,
02:19:50 ◼ ► because it has a beginning and an end, right? Here's the thing, you can hold it. Here's the
02:19:54 ◼ ► whole thing. You can just hit play, start to finish, it gets to the end, and you're done.
02:20:00 ◼ ► You've enjoyed the movie. That's the one thing that to me is a little weird. It's a little
02:20:07 ◼ ► incongruous to see it on YouTube, where YouTube is this. And I'm more pro-YouTube. I mean,
02:20:17 ◼ ► I've started putting my live talk shows on YouTube. I mean, I'm never going to be a YouTuber.
02:20:24 ◼ ► But the thing that I find so unsettling, and I feel like you and I have sort of touched on this,
02:20:38 ◼ ► collectively are starting to come to grips with. And I think that that might be one of the things
02:20:43 ◼ ► that's driving people back to things like newsletters and subscription sites. And I can
02:20:49 ◼ ► subscribe to Mattie Iglesias' Slow, Boring, and a new one comes in, and I can hit the space bar a
02:20:56 ◼ ► couple times to read it. And then I get to the bottom, and it's done. Right? And then I'm caught
02:21:03 ◼ ► up. You can catch up on Daring Fireball, right? When you just start looking for new posts, scroll
02:21:10 ◼ ► until you hit one that you remember seeing before, and then you know you're caught up. And you can
02:21:14 ◼ ► close the tab and come back tomorrow or the next day, and there'll be new posts waiting for you.
02:21:20 ◼ ► I think that the endless scroll of Twitter and Instagram and YouTube has a psychological weight.
02:21:30 ◼ ► And your little movie stands so athwart of that, right? It's effectively a silent film. I mean,
02:22:14 ◼ ► Pour over, and then there's also this siphon method where—do you know this thing where it's like a—it
02:22:46 ◼ ► Well, believe me, if I could not have it on YouTube, I would prefer to put it somewhere else.
02:22:53 ◼ ► I thought about this, and I looked around, and the reality is that if you want to host 4K
02:22:59 ◼ ► video somewhere, it's tough to do. And I just don't really like Vimeo. I just find Vimeo,
02:23:10 ◼ ► YouTube, for all of its flaws, it has the best scaling algorithms, the best delivery algorithms,
02:23:19 ◼ ► the best in-the-moment resizing, rescaling algorithms. So it's very bandwidth-aware and
02:23:26 ◼ ► friendly. It goes from really crappy connections to fiber connections, and it kind of handles it
02:23:32 ◼ ► all flawlessly. All of that, I think, is really important, and I don't see that present in any
02:23:38 ◼ ► other consumer video platform that can host a 4K video. Also, I looked at the cost of doing it on
02:23:48 ◼ ► my own, and it's crazy. It's so expensive. That thing I uploaded is a couple gigs. That's like
02:23:56 ◼ ► a two or three gig video. And if you have, last I looked, it had like 15,000 views or whatever,
02:24:08 ◼ ► I looked at Cloudflare video hosting, I looked at all sorts of things, and just the economics of it
02:24:14 ◼ ► were crazy. It's hard to understand how Google makes it work with YouTube, to be honest. And
02:24:18 ◼ ► it's another one of those things that we've wound up with where there's one and only one YouTube,
02:24:25 ◼ ► and there's nothing else that's even vaguely like YouTube. And when it works, it is the
02:24:30 ◼ ► most amazing thing. I forget what I've just was searching for a commercial the other day.
02:24:38 ◼ ► Oh, the Casio G-Shock watch, because there's a rumor that Apple's going to make a rubbery,
02:24:46 ◼ ► rugged version of Apple Watch, and I wanted to look up the hockey puck version of the initial
02:24:53 ◼ ► Casio. And of course they had it. Of course they did. And it was the first thing that came up.
02:24:57 ◼ ► I just took a guess at the year. I was like, "Casio 1983 G-Shock ad, first hit." There it was.
02:25:06 ◼ ► And that is amazing when you think about it. Because in 1983, that ad was on TV every day,
02:25:14 ◼ ► and I saw it every day. And then by 1993, I certainly remembered it, but I would have had
02:25:19 ◼ ► 0% chance of finding a copy of it. 0.00. I mean, I wouldn't even know where to go. What? Call the
02:25:27 ◼ ► Casio US headquarters and see if they'll send me a copy on VHS of an ad from 10 years ago?
02:25:36 ◼ ► Right. Yeah. It is weird. It's an incredible archive. It really is. And yeah, and how does
02:25:45 ◼ ► Google... I'd love to know the economics on it, like what their expenses are for all of that
02:25:51 ◼ ► bandwidth, what they really are. But I think just the advertising, they make a lot of money
02:25:57 ◼ ► advertising on YouTube. So my goal is if I get... I have to get to 4,000 hours viewed on my channel
02:26:11 ◼ ► Google can still automatically put an ad on my stuff, even without me being able to say yes or
02:26:18 ◼ ► no. So I have not turned on monetization for any of my videos. But if you cross a threshold,
02:26:23 ◼ ► you're allowed to say, "Never, ever, ever put an ad on my stuff." And so I'm hoping that we get
02:26:33 ◼ ► It's a little weird that you have to do it that way, but I guess it's sort of an anti-fraud type
02:26:38 ◼ ► thing, to keep a spammer from just creating an endless series of new channels just to keep
02:26:45 ◼ ► putting their ads on. But what exactly their game would be to not have ads, I'm not quite sure. But
02:26:58 ◼ ► But no, but back to your question about the production of the video, it was like, "Yeah,
02:27:05 ◼ ► it was just me. I brought a backpack with 20 kilograms of photo equipment in it, a few lenses,
02:27:11 ◼ ► a light, a tripod, and that was it." The hardest part was convincing the guy in the video to let
02:27:21 ◼ ► me shoot him. These old Kisa guys, they can't see any of the value in what they're doing.
02:27:26 ◼ ► They can't imagine why anyone would want to watch them do this. And I think an element of him was,
02:27:47 ◼ ► I know this is weird, but actually you make really beautiful, strangely interesting pizza toast."
02:28:00 ◼ ► Yeah, he's been doing the cafe for 45 years. And for the first two years before he opened,
02:28:08 ◼ ► he worked at this hotel in Yokohama. And I guess one of the guys at the hotel in Yokohama who ran
02:28:13 ◼ ► this fancy cafe would cut the toast in that way a little bit. So what he's doing, he's scoring it,
02:28:26 ◼ ► he scores the rest of it so that when it comes out of the toaster, he's able to evenly split it into
02:28:31 ◼ ► three fingers, essentially. And then the reason why he cuts the crust down is that he has customers
02:28:37 ◼ ► who don't like crust. And so if the crust is cut almost off, but not entirely, you can peel it off
02:28:44 ◼ ► if you don't like it. But if you want to keep it, because it's been separated from the body of the
02:28:49 ◼ ► bread, it actually collects an extra char. So it creates this nice mouthfeel, and you get this
02:28:57 ◼ ► crunch from this crust that you wouldn't otherwise get. So that's the cutting philosophy.
02:29:02 ◼ ► It's a lovely, lovely movie. I know we have to wrap it up. But the other thing we were talking
02:29:07 ◼ ► about, we've slagged on some of Apple's software, but you were talking about getting to know Final
02:29:13 ◼ ► Cut Pro and talking that you found it to be a revelation in terms of being good software.
02:29:21 ◼ ► Oh, it's incredible. Have we slacked on it? I feel like we've said we've been very laudatory
02:29:28 ◼ ► of Mac OS. And we've said the old 2016 MacBook Pros were horrible, which I think anyone would
02:29:36 ◼ ► agree with that. And the DNA of iOS is not to be super fluid, to have that fluency. I think that's
02:29:46 ◼ ► a fair criticism. But Final Cut Pro X is amazing. I love it. I'm entranced. It's some of the best
02:30:04 ◼ ► I think they got rid of it because they got rid of the X in Mac OS X too. I don't know. Maybe.
02:30:11 ◼ ► But I don't use it because I haven't made a video. But when I did, I mean, I have my little goofy
02:30:20 ◼ ► video where I show people how to take AirPods out of a case the right way. Even as a total punter,
02:30:29 ◼ ► for lack of a better word, you could see that this is a great Mac app. It's not just a video editor.
02:30:37 ◼ ► It is the video editor that the Mac deserves. And I guess it's polarizing in some ways because some
02:30:44 ◼ ► people, if you don't like that Mac likeness of it, you're not going to like it. It's not Adobe
02:30:53 ◼ ► Premiere. But it also makes me wonder what and when Apple decides to make their Pro Tools group
02:31:02 ◼ ► is such an interesting group. Logic is still a huge deal. But then they got rid of Aperture.
02:31:08 ◼ ► What the thinking is there is very strange to me. And as Adobe moves Lightroom in this way that you
02:31:17 ◼ ► mentioned before, where they seem to be pushing people towards the cloud version of Lightroom,
02:31:23 ◼ ► and away from the classic one, which is more of a Mac style way of working, not in the cloud,
02:31:28 ◼ ► but here, I want it on my Mac. That Aperture decision just stands out to me as very hard to
02:31:37 ◼ ► explain. Yeah, well, I mean, I think it was, there's probably a moment in Apple where they're
02:31:45 ◼ ► like, we're going all in on photos, we're going from iPhotos to photos, we're going to make photos
02:31:50 ◼ ► super powerful. We want everyone to be, you know, we just want this to be the place that you put all
02:31:54 ◼ ► of your, you know, pro or amateur, whatever. It all goes in here. And I think that was just a flawed
02:32:00 ◼ ► philosophy. Anyway, thank you so much for your time. So let's tell people where they can find
02:32:08 ◼ ► out more stuff. So we'll put a link to copious show notes. This is great. The show, you've done
02:32:14 ◼ ► most of the work for me. But we will link. Well, we did talk about most of it. We did. We did pretty
02:32:20 ◼ ► good. This is actually for me, this is probably about as close as I ever stick to show notes.
02:32:25 ◼ ► I promised to put a link to the movie on YouTube. Your website for special projects is just at
02:32:35 ◼ ► craigmod.com. And your tweets where people can hurry up and read them before you delete them are
02:32:42 ◼ ► on twitter.com/atcraigmod. No, just craigmod. Oh, just guess right. You don't put the ad in on
02:32:50 ◼ ► Twitter. Anyway, I will also thank our sponsors for this episode. We had flat file where you can
02:32:59 ◼ ► go and get your spreadsheets imported. We have Squarespace, the all in one web hosting solution,
02:33:06 ◼ ► and Mack Weldon where you can buy fresh underwear, socks, hoodies, and more. Anything else you wanted
02:33:27 ◼ ► his stuff, but I don't want to be a member," the best thing to do is check out the books. I just
02:33:33 ◼ ► feel like I'm really proud of the book work. So I'd say go there and investigate that. But if you
02:33:45 ◼ ► if you went to the website and you looked at your website pages for the book and you're thinking,
02:34:00 ◼ ► You know, there's just something—I don't know how better to say it. The book has the exact vibe that
02:34:13 ◼ ► Typographically gorgeous as well, but of course. Thank you. I had Frank Camaro's help on that.
02:34:27 ◼ ► you know, I talked to a bunch of agents and publishers in New York about doing a similar
02:34:36 ◼ ► and then you can do kind of this," because the book is a little experimental. But, you know,
02:34:41 ◼ ► doing it on my own, one of the issues with "vanity publishing" is that you often don't get to work
02:34:47 ◼ ► with these high-level amazing people that you can sometimes work with if you go to a big publisher.
02:34:52 ◼ ► But I've built up such a great group of friends who are talented beyond me and 100x group of friends
02:35:01 ◼ ► that I'm able to call on. You know, the typography, we did big sweeps with Frank Camaro. Rob Giampietro
02:35:09 ◼ ► chimed in, gave me some feedback. I was able to work with Gray318, one of the best cover designers
02:35:15 ◼ ► in the world, to do a bunch of feedback on the production of the book. And then the editors I
02:35:19 ◼ ► worked with are two of the best editors that I know, you know, in their industry, in their
02:35:26 ◼ ► worlds. They're top of the top. So I think that's also kind of a weird quirk is that I don't think
02:35:32 ◼ ► I could have made—I'm so satisfied with where this book landed that I couldn't have landed in