Nuanced. - 119. Julian Peterson: Human Creativity, Artificial Intelligence & The Essay App

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

Discover the transformative power of the Essay App with its founder Julian Peterson in this Bigger Than Me Podcast episode. Uncover the tool's innovative features designed to enhance writing skills and critical thinking. Julian's guidance takes us through the app's conception, inspired by his renowned father, Dr. Jordan Peterson, and emphasizes the importance of human input in the creative process. Explore the art of clear articulation, writing aesthetics, and the intriguing parallels between writing and music. Gain valuable essay tips and insights into challenging preconceptions. Learn how to harness the Essay App's potential for a captivating journey through the world of words and ideas with Julian Peterson.Julian Peterson is a musician, software developer, entrepreneur, and founder of Essay App.Send us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

This is the bigger-than-me podcast. Here's your host, Aaron. Critical thinking is something we hear a lot about. With apps like ChatGPT, we're outsourcing a lot of our writing responsibilities to artificial intelligence, AI models that are doing the work for us. But they cannot create original thoughts or ideas. That's where you come in. My guest today is the founder of Essay app, a tool that allows you to go through and develop your understanding, iterate through, edit your

ideas and come up with new innovative concepts. This is a tool that I believe is really important as we're talking about AI and what its role is going to be. I think it's going to become more and more important that we think critically and understand issues deeply and that's exactly what this app does. My guest today is Julian Peterson. Julian Peterson, what a pleasure it is to be with you today. Would you mind introducing yourself for people who may not have heard of you before? Yeah, for sure. Well, my name is Julian Peterson. I'm a software developer, musician. I found an app called essay app, which is a writing platform. It helps people strategically organize their thoughts and iterate on their ideas without the help of AI at the moment in an effort to

help people improve their own thoughts and get the ability to communicate themselves to a to a higher level. So that's pretty much what I'm up to. Can I first ask about essay? When did this dawn? When did this idea come onto your radar, something you might be passionate about as well? Yeah, so quite a long time ago now, I guess. Basically, the way it all started was I was I was working on an online education platform with my dad. My dad is Jordan Peterson. And we were working on a really complicated idea that was kind of, I'll give you the bare bones idea, but it was basically we were building an indexing platform

that was trying to organize a high-quality educational material from the internet and give kind of each category of information a classroom-like setting where the educational resources that existed could be consumed, and then people could have conversations about them. So that was kind of the basic idea, and we were trying to tag the whole internet, with categories and doing all sorts of stuff like that.

But a few things went wrong with that idea. It was, first of all, it was very complicated, obviously. And second of all, Google introduced a really similar feature, not long after we started development where they were tagging YouTube videos by category and starting to index things in a similar way. And we just kind of felt like we were starting to compete in an area where we couldn't compete very effectively.

And so we decided to think a little smaller and more niche. And my dad had this writing guide that was very popular at the time. I looked on his website, which was, this was probably 2018, I guess, or maybe 2019. And at the time, I was responsible for building his website and keeping it up to date and stuff. And so I looked at the document, which we had made freely available on his website, and it had been downloaded 150,000 times without having been advertised at all or linked to. So this is just people kind of finding it on their own

and like in a sub-menu in the navigation bar. So we thought, wow, that's, you know, pretty high number. This probably means that there's information in here that people are interested in and the idea that there's kind of a way of, a structured way of writing that we could perhaps simplify and turn into a piece of software. And so that was kind of where we got the idea to narrow it down.

And then we started building that in 2019. And we're trying to figure out exactly how to build it because the way the writing guide is kind of framed. It's kind of a, I don't know, 10-part document where it kind of walks people through the act of choosing a topic that's meaningful for them to discover and write about. all the way down to, like, fine edits. And so it's kind of a step-by-step process there.

But, and, you know, the really obvious way of building that was kind of in a step-by-step-step-way. So, you know, we'd get people to do each kind of part of the essay guide one at a time. And that was how we first started thinking about it. But then I wanted to make it into a more versatile tool that wasn't purely defined by the process outlined in that guide. and rather informed by it and able to kind of impart the wisdom that was contained in that guide, but also kind of appeal to a broader set of writing styles and a broader set of people. And so we ended up building basically a word processor and attempted to build the guide into the word processor so that people could very easily follow that guide and kind of follow the philosophy that was outlined in it,

but it wasn't as rigid as sort of a step-by-step process. So that was kind of where the idea came about to turn it into what it currently is and what it's also in the process of becoming. You mentioned that your father is Jordan Peterson. I'm from an indigenous community. And one thing that's very important in our communities is this idea of seven generations. To look back seven generations to the past, learn from them, understand the trials and tribulations they went to, and then to build upon their legacy for future generations. And I think you're in such a unique circumstance because you're able to build upon your father's legacy, things that he's learned over many years of his life.

I'm just curious, what does building upon this legacy mean to you? Oh, yeah, it's a very meaningful part of it. It's great because, you know, he was able to teach a lot of people to write when he was a university professor. And it was one of the things that was very motivating for him about being a university professor was teaching a small subset of people, admittedly. how to write if they were interested in really kind of solidifying that process and also improving their ability to think through that writing process. And so I share the interest in writing and the interest in clear thinking. And so it was a really, it was a very meaningful place for me to be able to step in and attempt to iterate on his ideas and kind of make them available

to a larger audience and make them more accessible and hopefully even approve upon them in in some ways so yeah definitely a meaningful part you're an individual who understands how to write music understands how to write code and understands how to write generally i'm also wondering about this idea that you're able to bring this together and start to build an app around it the challenge i think so many face is you have the writing guide i was given writing writing writing guides throughout my university life, but to transition to take the words and turn them into an interface that people are actually able to utilize and have a connection with where it actually helps you apply the principle that you're given is a real challenge. What was that like?

Well, it's definitely the hardest part of, well, no, I mean, there's a lot of hard parts of writing a word processor. Dealing with texts technically is very, very hard just because it's, you know, the English language, well, we work in lots of different languages, but it's very difficult to parse it and do the things that we try to do in the app. But, yeah, actually turning a writing guide into software, well, it's something that isn't done very often. There's only a few apps out there that offer kind of structured writing environments that try to kind of not force you, but help you write a specific way. And so that's been a big challenge because people come in without a lot of knowledge or perhaps a lot of knowledge.

And either way, there's a unique set of challenges, right? Like for someone who has, who's been writing for a long time, we wanted to offer a set of tools that allowed them to keep their good habits, but also perhaps make them quicker or perhaps introduce some other good habits into their style. And then we also wanted to appeal to beginner writers who didn't have good habits, didn't have good editing habits, didn't understand how to structure, section, structure paragraphs, iterate on sentences, that sort of kind of basic editing skills. And we wanted to give them an environment that basically forced them to develop these good

writing habits. So very challenging. I'd say that the design of the app is always something that we're spending a ton of time trying to get rights and reimagine. And so that's what's also been the most exciting part of it, because it's very, very fun to try to turn very abstract ideas into an actual tool set that people can use. And part of the reason why I find that it's a very fun project for everyone who's working on it.

There's a lot of complex problems to solve there. Do you find that you're able to apply the information that you've learned through writing music, writing code, that you're taking some of those ideas? Or do you feel like it's pretty specific just to writing essays and that you're not able to use those other writing techniques that you've developed? Well, I mean, certainly music to a certain extent. We haven't actually built some of the tools that I imagine it could be really useful for, for music or poetry or that sort of more strictly creative writing.

But certainly one of the tools that is really good for it that I've used personally for writing lyrics is our rewrite tool, which allows you to see all your sentences broken down and listed vertically, and then you can click one and then create iterations of it and see them in the context of the greater work. And for writing lyrics or writing poetry, it's really, really useful because you can play with different rhymes and different ideas without losing anything that you've done in the past. And so I've used that for lyrics, and it's very good. And so, yeah, I would say that my perspective for writing more creatively, let's say, or poetry or music, has definitely come in handy when I'm thinking about our users and what they might be doing,

because I do have experience writing essays, writing music. Code is so different when it comes to, well, where you write it even, that I would say it doesn't explicitly enter my mind when I think of what our users are doing, but certainly I'm sure there's implicit things that are happening while I'm thinking about the interface that my experience as developer lens well, too. The problem that I see, at least from going to school through university, I think your dad was actually one of the first people that made me really realize why write. And it's actually

shocking to me that you can go for such a long period of time through your educational journey and never wonder why you're putting your pen to paper or writing something down, that when you're given an assignment, you're just checking the box. And there's such an error in that once you understand the value of writing. There's such an error in looking to somebody else to tell you your essay is good, your article is good, it's bad, it needs these improvements, to wait for somebody else to cross something out, to say, like, you are able to do that. And the gift that you can have in your own life is to problem solve yourself and become kind of the person who steers the direction and goes, I don't like what I did there. I could have done this better.

And I think it's unfortunate that we don't do that. Can you help us identify this problem early on of people not understanding why they write. Yeah, I mean, definitely that's a huge problem. I think you kind of hit the nail on the head with that, you know, people are, people usually they're taught to write by given, by being given a topic to write about, right? And that's, you know, you can kind of create a problem right off the bat there. Like, sure, that can work sometimes. But, you know, you need to be, you need to be very motivated to truly make an impact in your

own thinking while you're writing right you need to be motivated to solve the problem and and so it's really important that you have chosen that problem right or or at least that it's speaking to you in some meaningful way um and so that's that's kind of step one in terms of understanding writing as an internal exercise right as an exercise of self-improvement and self-understanding and well and that sort of thing so i would say people often start off on the wrong foot entirely uh and And then, and then, you know, even further on, yeah, you're always graded by teachers, sometimes teachers that aren't, you know, thinking about the ideas. They're usually thinking about grammar, they're thinking about structure, which are obviously

important things. But in terms of motivating someone to want to write, which, you know, is kind of like motivating someone to want to think or to want to understand things in great detail, you know, it's much more important to get the basics right, which is, you know, explore something that's worth exploring and, you know, make sure that by the time you're finished with the project, your understanding is much deeper than it was at the beginning. I'm trying to think of that classroom setting and what the motives of the students are. And again, I think Jordan Peterson did a good job of laying out, like, why are you in this

classroom today? What are you doing here? What is your long-term goal? so that you can see why you put an effort into these things, because I think you did a good job. I was watching the tutorial video, and in some of the writing, if you pause it and read it, it says, you're going to have a problem writing. You're going to try and put 10,000 things on the front end, like do the dishes, clean your house, take the dog for a walk, do all these things before you want to sit down, because thinking is hard.

It's not an easy thing. And we like to think that we're always thinking all the time, but often we're just kind of going with the flow of the day and checking boxes and getting things done, we're not actually critically reflecting on what our positions are, whether or not the evidence supports it, reading articles going, is the methodology correct, what do I like about this study, what are the problems with it, how do I elaborate on this issue? And again, the scientific method is hard for people to say that it's an easy thing to do, to take something you want to believe in, to take a position that you might prefer and actually go through and understand how it's wrong

is not something people look forward to. We want to reinforce our understandings. And so this whole idea of developing this seems so unique because it puts some of those issues at the front of mind. It gives people the grace to understand this isn't always going to be easy, that you're not always going to want to sit down and write. And I think that you put a lot of grace into the concept. So people, when they're taking these early steps,

it's not as intimidating when you're maybe switching over from a Microsoft Word over to the essay app. Yeah, well, that was something we really wanted to emphasize. is that the hard part is the ideas, or it should be the hard part, right? The hard part is, first of all, choosing the right idea to explore and then, you know, doing an in-depth exploration. The hard part shouldn't be the structuring of the ideas and grammar and all the kind of fine detail. That's hard insofar as it takes a long time and it's an iterative process and, you know, you need to spend a lot of time doing those things. But the most meaningful part of it,

needs to be the way that you start, the way that you start, the questions that you're asking, and the way that you explore those through the act of writing. And yeah, with Asse, we've really tried to, especially with the rewrite tool, kind of hammer home in the process built into the software, that's iterating on your ideas and looking at every detail of the writing and investigating it and making sure that it, you know, is that it's supporting the overall question and analysis properly. We've really tried to build that into software and make it front of mind for people. And I think that that's pretty unique in a writing environment that's offered.

Because, well, a lot of the word processors, I guess, that we're competing against, they're so broad in what they're trying to do, right? like Microsoft Word or Google Docs or, you know, even some of the smaller ones, they're all offering a pretty broad interface for whatever kind of writing. But we're really trying to offer an interface for serious writing, like writing that is investigative or that has been, you know, edited to the finest detail. So that's really that, I guess, the target user base that we're trying to appeal to is people who are really trying to take their ideas seriously.

If I'm being honest, it took me two years to really understand what a thesis was, what a good question is to start a good essay or write a good article. Can you describe, in your opinion, what makes a good question? When people are starting to take this first step of using the app, how do they think about the question portion?

Yeah, that's a great question. And it's an extremely hard part, for sure. That's partly why we don't even have a tool for it in the app right now. We just have an interface that, and a story that we try to tell people when they start using it to ask them to do that. But, yeah, I mean, there's a couple things. One, it has to be something that you are somewhat familiar with, so there's a level of interest,

but that you don't know the answer to you. So certainly it has to be outside of your comfort zone. And so you want to choose something that is a legitimate problem for you. It's like an area of your life or an area of. reality that's that you know you don't understand properly or perhaps it doesn't make sense to you or perhaps there's a political issue about at the moment and it's, you know, contentious in the society. And you want to pick something like that where there's a real problem to be answered and

you're not 100% sure what the answer is. That's a great place to start. And that's really all there is to it. And you want to make sure that it's, that it's a, that it's a. an answerable question, right? So there needs to be resources out there that you could read or that you could watch or listen to or whatever it is that will greater inform your ability to answer that question. And then you're really all set. It seems like universities attempt this. I remember getting given an option, a list of directions or topics that I could write about. And the goal is to

choose one that grips you, that engages you and makes you ponder or wonder. And it seems like one you should maybe avoid having a position already developed. And if you do have one, that you're prepared to challenge that preconception. And I think sometimes professors do a good job of reminding you to have like one paragraph that supports the position and then one position that like acknowledges the flaws in the position. And that that's how you should go into it. Don't go into it with a final understanding and be prepared to engage in the research process. When you're thinking about this, how much research do you think people should be giving approximately before they start putting words to paper?

Well, I don't think there's a how much answer there, but really, I guess, well, you want to read enough and broadly enough that you feel that you have something to offer for the question. I mean, it's, you know, you have to, you can always read more, I guess, is the answer. But you have to read enough that you feel prepared to offer something of value to contribute to answering that question. And so normally, depending on the length of the text, that would be, you know, five or six articles and maybe a couple books. And ideally, like you said, some things that perhaps contradicts each other or offer a variety

of opinion so that you can come to your own conclusion, right? Because obviously if you read a whole bunch of things that say the same thing, then you won't be drawing any conclusions. You'll just be spouting someone else's conclusions. One of the other pieces I think was really valuable that you also laid out is that this isn't just for university students. This is a tool that you can use to understand things in the deeper way. This is a tool that helps you think. And I think of, again, thinking is something that's hard work when you're actually doing it properly. And it takes time to research to understand something, but this could be an email to your boss requesting a raise and how are you going to frame that properly? This can be answering a political question

and trying to understand why something irks you so much or you hear something and you go, because personally for me, land acknowledgments are not something I support. And so I think about why do I get so frustrated when I hear them? Why does my blood start to boil and going through the process to understand where I'm coming from and figure out what's going on? And a lot of those things are going to be somewhat unconscious and you have to pull them into the conscious mind and then start to write about it. So you understand more deeply what your position is and why. Right, exactly. Especially when something that's happening, let's say, in politics, for in society, is legitimately bothering you, right? Like enough to elicit an emotional response, then that's

a perfect opportunity to, well, to write in some way, journal or write an essay because obviously when you're responding emotionally to something, it's, well, it's hard on you, first of all. And second of all, you're likely to say things that maybe aren't as well thought through as they need to be if you do come, you know, find yourself in a position where you need to defend your position or attack someone else's position

or, you know, have a conversation of some kind. It's best to be, you know, as well prepared as you possibly can be, especially for topics where they elicit an emotional response. That's such a good point, because so often the things that engage us and captivate us are the very things that bring out that initial emotional reaction. And then you need to give the space in order to develop your perspective. And I think you do such a good job of making this point that writing can make you powerful, influential. It can be the thing in a healthy, flourishing society that gives you a clear voice on why you deserve the raise,

why this new amendment to some law is an issue, why this bylaw doesn't work, why things, your apartment building should be modified. It gives you the tools to clearly articulate yourself. And sometimes we slack on that side of our life. When we're frustrated or annoyed, that's when we just react, send the email and don't think it through. And it's such an error because I think you develop self-respect when you send off something that's a high-quality email. When you write to somebody or articulate yourself clearly, you can almost rest back on that and go, even if the person doesn't agree with me, even if the person misunderstands or doesn't take me correctly on what I was trying to say, I said it to the best of my ability. And there's a sense of pride in that.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's really all you can do, right? And, you know, for the problem of asking for a raise, you know, you can deserve a raise as, you know, all sorts of people deserve raises that don't end up with them. But partly it's because it's very difficult as a boss to choose who to give a raise to, and it's really, really useful as an employee to do the hard work and decide exactly how much you'd like and why. And then, you know, all the person, it's, you know, it's like a rule of sale, right? Like sales, that is, like you have to sell yourself. You've got to make sure that the person who's buying you or buying your time and, you know, knows exactly what they're getting and why they should, why they should pay what they should

give and make it as easy as they can as you can to make them accept your proposal. And so it's the same, you know, with, yeah, with raises or arguing a position in a debate, right? You're, you know, the more information that you give that's solid and in your direction, the more likely it is that the person's going to be forced to agree with you. The bedrock of the app is this idea that the ideas within it are key and that you need to figure out a way to articulate that maybe you're a savant and you have this deep understanding of something. But if you can't say it, if people can't understand what you're talking about, If it's all jargon and it's not clear, then it's not of use to people. It's never going to be read or understood or valued.

And so that seems like the bedrock of the app. And it's something that almost, as you kind of described, most processors completely ignore this piece of the puzzle. They basically say, we're going to fix your grammar. We're going to modify the words on how you did it. We're going to change your sentence a little bit here or recommend a change. But we're not even going to touch the most important part, which is the ideas within the document. Can you just talk about how that drives out the rest? Yeah, absolutely.

And I guess, well, there's a variety of, we have four tools that we have outline, which is very straightforward. It's just you can create outline sections and then your paragraphs end up within them and you can easily restructure kind of the big pieces of your work. And then we have rewrite, which is something that tackles this issue head on. How do you actually improve upon the ideas within a paper or within a paper? then a piece of work. And, you know, there's a variety of ways of doing that. Obviously, reading is the big initial one. But once you have your draft, right, once you've written something,

how do you actually make sure that the piece has value in every little part of it, right? So you don't have any unnecessary sentences. You don't have any filler. Everything is attempting to contribute to the final piece. And we found that it's a lot easier to do that. the smaller the piece that you're looking at is, right? And so if you break it down into sentences, then you can look at it as if it's its own thing. It's like, does this idea hold merit on its own? Right. And you can look at your sentence and say, well, you know, it does in some ways, but maybe I could change it like this. And it's a playful tool, right? So one of the things about editing in a regular word processor is you make an edit and then it's there. It's in the

context of the work already. You can undo it, sure, and then you can go back and forth between things. But kind of written into the philosophy of the rewrite tool is that you should play with every single idea that you're presenting in your piece of work. And so you should create variations of anything. You should look at them in context. You can just keep them for later. But it's really important, even at the level of the sentence, to have that freedom to try to express your idea in many, many different ways, without the pressure of saying, okay, well, I'm definitely improving it here, right? You might, you know, you might create five iterations and four of them are terrible, but by creating those five iterations, you ended up with the right one, right?

And then also, it's way easier to compare things than to remember whether it's an improved sentence or not. And so that's the other, I guess, cool feature of this tool is that you can see all your variations laid out vertically, and you can actually look at them and say, well, you know, if I'm looking at all five of these at the same time, it's really obvious that this is the strongest one. And that has two pieces of value. One, it makes it easier to improve a piece of writing, but two, you get really good at editing. Because editing, you know, being a good editor is, well, at least half of being a good writer. It's probably more like 80 or 90 percent of being a good writer, but it's a lot of it. And that's a really, really great way of becoming a good editor,

is getting better and better at recognizing the good sentence in the list of five or ten good sentences. And why? Why is it better? Right. And so this tool really allows you to easily practice that at the same time as iterating your ideas and making them better. There's that deep idea of like comparison, that having two ideas kind of contrast each other allows you to see more clearly which one's stronger, which one you like more. And it's so clear when you say that that you can't really do that with Microsoft Word in a clean, clear way. You can't do that with Google Docs, unless you're just breaking up all of everything into some long list. It doesn't come across as clearly. Yeah, you can do it. It's just really inconvenient. Yeah,

compared to me. Exactly. So I'm also wondering about why we get so stuck on the, I would say, the garnishings. And it's not that they're not important. It's not that grammar is an important or style or the ability to use like strong words that that are kind of stylish. But why do we get so stuck on that? And why do we so avoid this deep thinking, this challenging part that really does differentiate the wheat from the chaff and show you as a strong thinker? Well, I mean, I think the biggest reason is that it's just really hard, right?

it's it's much, much easier to identify poor grammar than identify a poor idea. When it, you know, when it comes down to the details, like, obviously it's pretty easy to identify a really bad idea versus a really good one, right, or a really bad sentence or or thesis statement, let's say, versus a, you know, a decent one. But, but, and so that's, that's the most of the reason is that it takes an editor or it takes someone who knows how to write or knows the idea even better than you to determine and whether you've presented it well, right? You need a good reader for that.

And, you know, that's part of the reason why most of the, you know, AI-based tools, let's say, or even what the reason why teachers edit in that way, right? Like, is because to identify the ideas, you have to understand the topic and understand, or at least understand how an argument should be structured. And so at minimum, you need to have that requirement as a reader. And so one of the ways we've tried to tackle that, and it's imperfect, right? Because, you know, like a lot of great writing texts like the elements of style or Stephen King's own writing, they say, you know, you need to write to someone, right?

And you need to have a reader in mind. But our app hopefully makes easier for you to be your own reader, right? And so it's easier for you to be your own editor if you're given multiple content. contexts in which to consume your writing. And so that's kind of the idea that we're going off of. So which is why we have your main text on the one side and then like other variations of your text in the other hand, broken down in different ways. Because it's easier when you switch contexts in that way and switch the way you're looking at the work to be your own editor and to be your own reader more effectively. So, yeah.

So there's the outline section. Then there's the rewrite section. Can you tell us about the next section? Yeah, so the next section is called Reorder. And it's actually a section that we're in the process of building a much cooler version of. But as it stands right now, what it does is it allows you to basically really quickly restructure the sentences within a paragraph. And so that is really useful because it's a lot easier to follow the progression of a paragraph when it's not just a block of text on your screen, especially when you've written it relatively recently. You know, one of the things that is suggested to a lot of people that write is to give, you know, yourself a few days or even up to like a week or so between

doing the creative production of the work and then you come back to and edit it because you'll have fresh eyes and you can look at it differently. And that's still something that certainly is a good recommendation. But one of the ways that we make it easier for people to look at their work with fresh eyes is by splitting it into its sentences and letting you look at the ideas one by one and then try to reframe it by moving them around. It's a drag-and-drop tool. And so that's reorder. And one of the ways we're improving it is right now in the app, you can only do one

sentence at a time and you can only move sentences. And so our next iteration of it, you'll be able to select as many as you want and then move them as a block. So you'll be able to kind of construct completely new paragraphs from the writing that you've already done. And you'll also be able to move your headings and outline topics around very easily in that as well. So that's going to be a big improvement for that, I think. What becomes so clear is that you can write a bad essay because you can use the wrong words, the wrong sentences, and put them in the wrong paragraphs and have nothing be clear. Can you describe from your perspective what makes a good essay?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, you need to introduce the topic right off the bat and, you know, give it a little bit of background. And then each paragraph should answer a portion of the question, right? And so it needs to be, it needs to have direction. And so you need to approach a small amount of the section, supporting it with, or of the questions, supporting it with research in every paragraph. And then, you know, and then your conclusion has to, to bring that together in a meaningful way. And so that's, and you want to make sure that all the paragraphs are connected to each other in a reasonable way. So it tells somewhat of a story and that every paragraph is supported by either a reference or at least an internal reference,

something that you've thought through in a clear way. If I'm not mistaken, a lot of this came about, because this all sounds like grueling work. This sounds really challenging for average people. But as a reference case, would you say that maps of meaning is a good reference of what this looks like, completely played out where every sentence was modified to the degree in which you're describing? Yeah, I think to a certain extent it is because, you know, it's, well, it's such a complicated piece of writing that in order to get the meaning across properly, it did require a huge amount of iteration,

huge amount of restructuring. And so I think that the more complicated the idea, the more editing it needs, and the more structuring it needs, I think that if my dad was to write it again, I mean, I guess he's already said that he'd have a very hard time doing it better. But, of course, his later books did take some of those

ideas and distill them into more digestible pieces, I guess. And so I think that's perhaps one critique that he would give from his first book, Maps and Meaning himself, is that it is very difficult. And so that's, well, it's for a particular reader to try to try to read that and understand it. And so, yeah, you can only make something as digestible as it can be. Some ideas are complicated and require a lot of investigation. and thought to really understand that's actually was going to be one of my questions i think of some

authors are prolific they write book after book after book on this topic that topic that topic but i find something admirable about the idea that you actually know with this book that somebody actually put in time they didn't have a ghostwriter they didn't kind of glance at some articles and then decide to write a book on it they there's effort that went into it and i don't know about you but i feel like looking at really intelligent people, there's something intimidating about it. There's something uncomfortable about the idea that maybe we don't know as much as them. Maybe we don't understand things the way we think we do. That may be around certain people, you're a very small fish in comparison when you're talking about ideas

and understanding things deeply. And I think sometimes that intimidates us, but I think we need to be reminded of it. That idea of being all inspired by somebody's understanding of something can return us to that state of like, wow, that's something to look up to, that's something to work towards, is actually understanding something at that level. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that it's, of course, better to be inspired than intimidated, ideally. Right.

And, you know, people become very able to communicate complex ideas by doing the work, by reading, you know, everything there is to read about a topic and then exploring those topics through writing or through conversation. And, and, yeah, I mean, I think ideally it's inspirational, which is why, you know, why you read complicated books and why you read books by great authors is hopefully, I mean, you know, partly just because the ideas are thought provoking or the story is beautiful or whatever it is. But it's also, hopefully, to be inspired to do great things yourself. Is there something you've learned through creating this app and this journey? Is there something you've seen and understood differently through the process? Yeah, I mean, I've learned a huge amount through developing it.

We've been working on it, I guess, for almost five years. And I've been a part of pretty much every level of it from kind of forming the business itself to being very involved in the designs and then programming a lot of it as well. So from a just, I guess, in a non-philosophical sense, I've learned a lot of technical things while building us and how to manage a team and how to structure business and those things. So those have been extremely useful things to learn. And yeah, I mean, those are really the things, I guess, that I have learned and that I've continuing to learn. And that there's a reason that a lot of people don't build new text editors. And WordPress, there's a lot of detail in working with text and still making it usable.

There's definitely a reason why Microsoft Word is just a single page of text with, you know, that's there's a reason they built it that way. User feedback. What have you heard from people experiencing it? And has that at all surprised you? Yeah, I mean, we've got a ton of feedback. We've asked for a lot of feedback because it is still a beta platform. And so we're trying to improve it in all sorts of ways.

So we're always in contact with people using it and trying to understand. I mean, things that have surprised me. A lot of ministers use it, which has been surprising. And so that's pretty funny. But I guess one of the reasons for that, I think, is that they write a weekly essay. And so there's actually not that many people other than students who write, weekly essays and it happens that ministers are that group of people. So that's been pretty funny. Sorry, ministers of like Canada? Oh no, sorry. I mean like like like like priests or or you know

people or people in religious settings who are writing sermons or or whatever. So they we have quite a few people all over the world using it in that setting. And that's been quite interesting because that was unexpected. We kind of built it for, well, with our primary audience being students, but I think that since we don't have some of the features that make it easy to integrate into institutions, we ended up with a very broad range of writers in doing a lot of different things, journalists and priests and people writing emails or a lot of creative work or journaling. So that's been an interesting way to develop it because we, had to develop it in kind of the way that I wanted to, which was for the interested writer,

right, for someone who's interested in developing their own ideas, but not necessarily in the context of an institution or not by necessity anyway. Can you contrast chat GPT with essay? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, well, most of the AI tools are content generation or manipulation tools, right? Right? And so the whole idea is, well, it's an intelligence. And so it's doing the idea generation for you. And that can be extremely useful in limited circumstances. But one of the things it's not useful for is improving your ability as a creative person. Right. And so I would say that's the main, I guess, difference between using something like chat, GPT,

for essay is we put the onus of the creative production on the writer and we think that's pretty much the most important part is developing those ideas and thinking about them but in the same way I mean if you use those AI tools in a particular way they can help that process it's not that they can't

you know to use chat GPT well, you know, it's quite good at developing, at writing code, right? That's one of the things that people are using for a lot. But in order to use it to write code well, you have to understand the code. And so, you know, it'll write it for you and it'll improve that. It'll make the easy parts, I guess, easier, which is the actual syntax and the writing. But in terms of whether it does the thing that it's supposed to do, as a user of chat chbt, you still have to know how it works and how it does it and so um and you know in that in that way it it's really good for people who already know what they're doing right for someone who doesn't for a real

for a true beginner in any creative area you know you're not going to ask chat gpt to write a screenplay and but if you've never read a good screenplay the thing that chat gpt creates isn't going to be any good like it's just not but maybe you could get it to create something good if you, you know, knew the right questions to ask and knew the way to ask it to rewrite certain things. And I feel like you could use it in that way, but you kind of already have to be an expert, you know, because it's a response tool. So you have to ask the right questions. I do notice that a lot of people in university right now are using it. I would say, again, more out of fear that they, we haven't, we say like, oh, you should have

self-respect, which I don't think you get unless you, as you're kind of, describing put in that initial work until you develop yourself and understand things you shouldn't be confident in your writing abilities you're not a good writer when you're graduating high school that is a learned journey and it's it's tragic in a way that people are using it in that way because they don't get to see what their true potential is but for people who are willing to use the essay app and put in the effort you're going to see long-term dividend returns in your life because you're going to be far better off, the people are going to want to hire you. You're going to be more thoughtful.

And so I think, like, how many people are true intellectuals, truly can have deep thoughts and nuanced perspectives on issues? It's not everybody. And so you're going to put yourself in that minority group of people who are able to, if you don't understand something, research it and understand it and write about it and develop a perspective. And if you do, it's going to be rock solid where you, in moments of pressure and moments of stress, you're going to be able to back yourself up. And one thing I often say to professors

who are worried about chat GPT taking over is ask them to explain what they wrote about. Because you're going to see the truth come out almost immediately. And what a gift that would be to people who use essay because they will understand. And I think we forget what real like intellectual capabilities are when you're able to take some idea about watermelons and apply it to street signs and stuff. Like we don't, how things? things connect isn't always clear and how they work together is through the original process of creativity and bringing nuanced ideas together. And that's something that word processors and typical universities are really skipping out on. So the way to differentiate yourself is to

actually think things through. And I think it's such a gift that there's a product available where people can do this and start to understand things in a deeper way. Yeah, well, I hope so. And it does, well, that's certainly what we're attempting. I think we'll see the return of the oral examination in universities in the relatively near future to try to solve that problem. That was actually one of the, I went to University of King's College in Halifax, and they do oral examinations in their foundation year program, and it's an extremely effective way to identify whether someone has done the work, right? You just ask them to talk about it. Was that intimidating? Was that easier? Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. No, it's harder than writing.

well it's very similar to writing right unless you have a really unless you have you know fear of public speaking or or you kind of get dear in the headlights when your approach to actually talk about something if you've written about it in detail then you're not going to have a lot of trouble talking about it right those those things are are deeply connected um so yeah the oral exams that that we did were extremely intimidated especially if you hadn't done the work. Which, you know, in a way they should be, right? Like, you know, you want to, if you truly understand something, you know, except for, you know, people who really suffer from getting high levels of anxiety in stressful scenarios and then they can't think. But if you really understand something, you should be able to perform under pressure and understand and explain the thing well.

So I think that, you know, universities that actually want to teach people things and have them prove that they know them will have to inevitably return to doing oral examinations to produce meaningful representations of the people's knowledge. How can people get access to the essay app? How do people utilize that? How do they connect? Yeah, so you can go to essay.com, and it's a 14-day free trial, and then you can either sign up on a monthly or yearly subscription.

And it's that straightforward. We offer a tutorial when you first sign up that kind of explains the philosophy behind the program and how to use the various tools. So, yeah, you just go to s.a.d. app. And it's not a mobile app. So you have to go on a laptop or a tablet or a desktop computer to use it for now, mostly because it's in its early stages. And we understood how to build it properly on a large screen. and we still are working on how to put it on smaller and smaller screens and have it be

have it have the same effect or the same uh offer the same tools so uh so yeah essay dot out a few more questions thank you again for being willing to do this one is just just around your knowledge base around music do you see how do you look at writing in comparison to music i'm sure that you can see like a musical piece without hearing it and see that it might look good or look aesthetically pleasing, is it the same for writing? Because it's something that I also don't think we do a good job of. Certainly through my law school career, using nice words or aesthetically pleasing words, was not the care of anyone.

It was to make it as short and concise as possible. So is this something you see? Yeah, I think that aesthetic beauty in writing is very important. in, I mean, probably least so in legal text. But, but, you know, even in essay writing, having using, I wouldn't say using beautiful words is, is usually the way that you can accomplish that, right? Like, you have to be a very skilled linguist to use complicated words effectively, right? You have to truly understand them.

So usually the way to make something beautiful, if you're, an amateur or even a reasonably decent writer is to use the words that you understand best to communicate the ideas that you're trying to convey and then and then use other ways of increasing the level of beauty in the text right like making the sentences very in length appropriately so that it's not boring to read and and doing that sort of thing but i would say that you know, the way you listen to music and the way you read, there's

some parallels. There's music certainly you react to it more emotionally, I guess. It's easier to react to emotionally. It's easier to understand as a human being than writing, because writing

is, well, normally requires you to ponder in order to decide whether it's beautiful or not. Whereas music, just hits you. Certainly with poetry, there's more overlap, I would say. And if you, you know, take the poetry out of the, out of the music, then it has that overlap for sure. The other test case that I was thinking of as I was preparing for this is, and it might be outside of the norm, because so many people might not see themselves as intellectuals, but comedians do exactly

what you're describing really eloquently, conservation of words, nuanced ideas, different, different perspectives. I've heard Joe Rogan talk about this whole idea of unique perspectives and trying to step outside the norm and figure out different ways to say things. This is a process that comedians go through fairly regularly. And I was just wondering if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's very interesting because, yeah, comedians, iterates constantly, right? That, you know, comedians, their whole thing is going to different clubs, trying out different jokes and seeing what lambs, you know, they use the audience to iterate, right? And so

that's a, there's a lot of parallels there and it's, well, it's a great way, it's a great, I guess example of how iteration of ideas produces such a great effect, right? Is, you know, when you watch a comedy special on Netflix, every joke has been iterated upon hundreds of times

by those comedians until it hits just right. And so there's definitely a huge parallel. And that's a great example of how iterating one of your ideas makes them hit way harder. Yes, and how not taking yourself too seriously,

because this can sound, again, intimidating for some, but some of the funniest people you may think of actually go through this process. It just looks somewhat different. Right. Iteration actually isn't hard. It's only hard if you need to make it better every time. Right?

If that's a requirement of your iteration, then it's really, really hard. But if all you're trying to do is make it different, then it's actually not that hard, right? And that's one of the things that we try to make apparent in an essay is that iteration isn't necessarily linear improvement, right? It's actually using creativity and playfulness to produce, right? And to create variation and to experiment.

And then you can use, you know, then you can use, you know, your discerning eye to determine whether it's better or worse or funny or less funny or whatever it is. But we're really trying to focus on the distinction between creative production and discernment because it's really, really hard to do both those things at the same time. And usually the more iteration that you can do, you know, to a certain point within reason, the better the outcome is going to be. That's a big challenge I think people face is they want to write the essay and edit it at the same time. and you're using two different parts of your brain to try and accomplish that.

The other piece that I think of with this is the idea of rewriting, like, YouTube, titles, like that whole process and trying to figure out what's going to attract attention or be interesting. It reminds me, because I send out a lot of what I'm going to make the YouTube title out to Friends first, and I give them four or five different options and see what they're going to be most engaged with. And it sort of reminded me of Cora about that idea of getting upvoted and downvoted on what is actually working. Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting idea. And it's something that we'd eventually like to build into essay, actually, is the ability to share something like a rewritten sentence, right?

So that's because obviously, well, having a good group of editors is extremely important when you're trying to produce something of quality. And so that's the same thing when we're building our marketing sites or when we put out videos on Instagram and stuff, the captions, you like to run them by as many smart people as you can. And not just smart people. You want to run by people who are interested in the types of things that you're trying to purvey and attract. So yeah, yeah, that's something we'd like to do

is be able to share a set of rewrites with someone else and get their feedback or get them to select one and have that impact your decision. I think that'd be interesting. I love the idea that you embrace the iterative process and that that's exactly what this essay app allows people to do is to go on that journey and to commit to improving themselves over time because you're not going to get that essay right the first time. It's going to be a process and each one's going to get better and better. And that's an opportunity for personal growth and development, which I think is so inspiring.

Julian, this has been such a pleasure to sit down with you today. I specifically got this shirt that says cognitive liberty because it talks about mental processes and having control over it. And I think that's exactly what you're working on with this app. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's perfect. Yeah, it was a real pleasure talking to you. Thanks for the invitation. Thank you again for being willing to do this. Please go check out the essay app. I highly recommend it. I'm already using it to start to work on my substack articles and trying to improve my own writing and understand what makes me engaged in writing so that I can start to use that. I think having other things that inspire you and seeing what you like about other

people's writing helps you understand how to improve your own. So thank you for building this out and thank you for sharing your journey today. Well, thank you. All right. Tim, how did we do? That's fantastic. I really enjoyed it. I have a 20-year-old son in university and his first year was entirely about essays, and to Aaron's point, I don't know if he particularly knew why he was writing it. And in this era of chat, DPP, it's just, even as I'm editing it, did you really write this? And so forth. So I think I'm going to definitely introduce this tool to him. Oh, well, that'd be great. That'd be great. Well, let me know if it's helpful at all. That's, that'd be, well, it's always interesting to hear. Yeah. I think your video, your two-minute,

three minute video where it's you and your dad I think that that is a brilliant trailer of the benefits of it well thank you yeah man that's uh I'm pretty happy with the way that one turned out we're working we worked with this production crew in Boston to make that and they are they are awesome super talented group of people and so it came together really well now that little video yeah I listened I watched it first in Abbotsford um oh yeah when Jordan was here and man the the chills that people were getting watching it because it was so so engaging. The music, I think, in the background was just perfect, and it just kind of had everybody, like, really excited. So it was a great trailer for the evening.

Oh, great. I'm glad to hear that. When we were deciding whether or not it was appropriate to put in front of a, you know, a lecture that people have paid for it, we weren't sure that it was going to be. But I've seen, I've been at a few of the shows where they played it. And yet, it seems to do very well and be a good warm up for the evening. Yes, and you playing music, I think, would help as well. too. Well, yeah, that was pretty fun. Hopefully I'll do that again. I almost came to Abbotsford. Well, thanks again for being willing to do this. It takes such a pleasure. My pleasure. Very nice to meet you. And, yeah, thanks very much for the invitation. Nice to

meet you, Tim. You bet. One last side note is, as Aaron has guests come on, I'm always, oh, good, we've got a good lighting and background and so forth. And I'm going, wow, that's a really good chroma key for a virtual background. And then the more I looked at it, I realized, well, no, I can see, like, a sweater. It's not as perfect as necessarily. They wouldn't have dishes in a picture. Like, you know, and I realize, oh, this is his actual place. It's a real background. Yeah, yeah. That is really impressive, though, because we've seen some people use those, what are they called? The background? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's much better to, if you can get away with but it's much better to have a real background.

For sure. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if I like, I love the fridge growing out of my shoulder, but it could be worse. It's a nice fridge. Yeah, it's all right.

Yeah. And I got a white boy that makes it feel like I'm doing stuff. Yes. Yes, you have a very well-designed background. Good, good. I wouldn't use my kitchen. Oh, well, this is our office, so it's not a, yeah, our actual kitchen wouldn't be quite as well put together.

Thank you.